If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women (20 page)

For now the easier summer prompted pleasant thoughts of Anita. ‘Give her lots of sport. In her abilities and character, does she take after me or her father?’

There was even hope of release again, signalled by reference to a money transfer. The recent releases of the Jewish prisoners Ida Hirschkron and Marianne Wachstein may have revived her optimism.

Soon after writing this, however, Olga was shut in the bunker for her part in staging the Block 11 play. The absence of a letter between July and November 1940 suggests that she and the five others were locked up until winter came back, and it was to be a cold one: guards found prisoners’ bodies frozen to the bunker floors. Olga’s November letter to Carlos – still in his Brazilian jail – hints at her incarceration. ‘Here are a few lines as a sign of life for you … when one has passed so much time it ought to be possible to survive a little more.’

When Olga emerged from the bunker she found many changes. Workshops were being constructed. There were 1000 more prisoners and two new barracks. The Poles were the biggest group, and asserting new authority.

Dismissed as Blockova, Olga was sent to the brick-throwing gang. Barges
loaded with bricks for the new buildings moored each day on the Schwedtsee. Women would form a human chain, throwing bricks along the line until the load was cleared. Olga’s hands were hardened, but others’ softer palms tore to shreds, then froze numb as frostbite set in. Some might get a paper bandage or a dab of iodine at the
Revier
, but not the Jews. The head doctor, Walter Sonntag, refused to treat Jews.

In December Olga heard again from Carlos, and Leocadia enclosed a photograph of Anita. ‘The little sweetie is already completely different from the baby I knew,’ she wrote back. ‘I have been following events through the newspaper as best I can.’ She urged him again not to lose hope. ‘As for me, I am steeling myself to get to the end of winter.’

That Olga had seen a newspaper meant she was at least back in touch with comrades in other blocks. The events no doubt included Hitler’s seizure of France, Belgium and the Netherlands. In the pages of the
Völkischer Beobachter
she would have read the Nazi propaganda claiming that Britain really was about to sue for peace. Hitler had even signed pacts with Japan and Italy.

But how long would Hitler’s all-important pact with Stalin last? To Olga and her communist comrades this was the biggest question of all. The women told themselves that Stalin’s purpose would soon become clear. Olga now updated her miniature atlas, showing where the fronts had moved, and she began to fashion her own miniature camp newspaper using tiny scraps of paper.

The Reichsführer’s desk diary for 14 January 1941 stated: ‘
Himmler left Berlin
at 10.30 hours and spent the day and night in Ravensbrück.’ A year after his first visit Himmler was heading out again to the frozen Mecklenburg forest, and this time he was spending the night. Most probably he spent it not at Ravensbrück itself, but five miles down the road at a small forest estate called Brückenthin that he had acquired and where he had installed his mistress, Hedwig Potthast. Aged twenty-seven, she had been his secretary since 1936, and in 1940, as relations with his wife Marga deteriorated, the couple became lovers. He called her
‘Häschen’
– ‘Bunny’.

That Himmler should take a mistress was entirely in keeping with his views on extramarital relationships. It was Himmler who in 1937 had introduced the concept of
Lebensborn
(‘Source of Life’) homes – institutions where SS officers could procreate outside marriage with selected Aryan women, in order to produce a constant supply of perfect Aryan children. In 1940 he passed a procreation order urging German soldiers to procreate outside marriage in order to produce as many children as possible, to resupply the gene pool. This need not be done secretly, he proclaimed.

His own procreation was a different matter. Perhaps for Häschen’s sake – he seems to have had a genuine affection for her – he made sure their encounters were discreet, choosing as a love-nest a simple forester’s house on the edge of this tiny village.
^*
Although Brückenthin was secluded, however, it was also convenient. Just five miles from Ravensbrück, Himmler could always combine a visit to Häschen with a visit to the camp, using the latter as cover. Just across the lake lay the village of Comthurey, where Himmler’s chicken-breeder friend Oswald Pohl had his estate; Pohl’s wife offered to keep an eye on Häschen. Five miles further on lay the village of Hohenlychen, with its famous SS medical clinic. Top officers and Nazi politicians were often to be found there, receiving treatment from Professor Karl Gebhardt, who was only too willing to help out his old friend Himmler by watching out for his lover down the road.

Although Häschen was on Himmler’s mind, however, the January visit to Ravensbrück was important to him. He had matters to discuss at the camp, and wished in particular to meet with Walter Sonntag, the senior SS doctor. Snow had even been brushed from the ornamental garden outside Dr Sonntag’s office; the
Revier
had been scrubbed from top to bottom and the entire camp smelt of wet wood.

Since his last visit Himmler’s priorities had moved on. Poland had been crushed and was being reshaped in order to create the Führer’s promised German utopia. A new concentration camp at Oswiecim – in German, Auschwitz – in southern Poland had been opened to hold Polish resisters. And the country’s two million Jews were being driven from their homes and forced into ghettos or reservations in parts of annexed Poland – or the Greater Reich – called ‘the general government’.

As yet no official solution had been proposed – except perhaps in private – as to what to do next with the Jews. As Hitler was now making plans to invade the Soviet Union – the entire Russian land mass might fall into German hands – one idea was to push the Jews out to the very edge of the continent and leave them there. Such a solution, however, posed its own problems: the Jews would somehow have to be rendered barren, or else they would never be destroyed. Not surprisingly, therefore, one of the subjects on Himmler’s mind in early 1941 was mass sterilisation. He had been in discussion with his favoured doctors as to whether such experiments should be conducted here at Ravensbrück.

With the prospect of a new front opening up to the east, Himmler was also thinking about how Ravensbrück and other camps could better use their
resources to support the war effort. In the early days hard labour had largely been used as a means of torture and discipline, but the war looked set to last longer than expected, and prisoner labour was being more usefully deployed.

The related question of what to do with those prisoners who could not work was also very much on Himmler’s mind. It was now more than a year since Hitler’s T4 ‘euthanasia’ programme had been launched, and in that time more than 35,000 German men, women and children seen as a drain on the nation’s resources had been killed by carbon monoxide pumped into gas chambers hidden in German sanatoria. In Poland the T4 techniques had also been adapted to kill the country’s mentally and physically handicapped, murdered in specially adapted mobile gassing trucks.

The Reichsführer had no authority over the T4 euthanasia programme, but he was always consulted on the operations. Just weeks before his visit to Ravensbrück, Himmler personally intervened when a crisis erupted at Grafeneck Castle, south-west of Stuttgart, one of the T4 gassing centres.

In December 1939 the castle’s old coach house was converted into a gas chamber, and over the next twelve months 10,000 mentally and physically ill men and women were bussed to Grafeneck to be murdered. However, later in 1940 buses belonging to the ‘Limited Company for the Transport of Invalids in the Public Interest’ began to attract attention, and a local judge reported serious unrest.
‘For several weeks
gossip has been circulating in the villages around Grafeneck that things cannot be right at the castle,’ he wrote. ‘Patients arrive but they are never seen again, nor can they be visited, and equally suspicious is the frequently visible smoke.’

In November a local aristocrat and ardent Nazi, Else von Löwis, wrote a letter to party chiefs, asking them to tell Hitler that the killings were taxing the loyalty of the local population. She presumed the Führer didn’t know of the killings, as no law had been passed authorising them.
‘The power over
life and death must be legally regulated,’ she said. The murders were leaving a ‘dreadful impression’ on the local population. People were asking: ‘Where will this lead us and what will be its limits?’

Else von Löwis’s letter reached Himmler, who intervened at once. The letter touched a nerve, because it confirmed the risks of carrying out mass murder of citizens near to where ordinary Germans lived and were bound to take notice.

Himmler instructed that Grafeneck be ‘immediately deactivated’ in order to quell the unrest. ‘The process must be faulty if it has become as public as it appears,’ he asserted. Plainly, it was the fact that the killing had become public that was faulty, not the killing itself: soon after Grafeneck was closed two new killing centres opened in Germany, but under better disguise. And not only was the T4 ‘euthanasia’ programme itself to be expanded, Himmler
now planned to co-opt its gassing methods. Soon after the Grafeneck episode he wrote to the T4 chief, Philipp Bouhler, also head of Hitler’s Chancellery, asking him ‘
whether and how
the personnel and the facilities of T4 can be utilised for the concentration camps’.

Entering Ravensbrück’s freshly scrubbed
Revier
for his talks with Dr Sonntag, Himmler would have seen for himself the growing need for a clear-out of useless mouths. The small wards were packed with pallid faces and the corridor lined with enfeebled naked women awaiting treatment. However, the new gassing plans were probably too premature – and too secret – to discuss as yet with a mere camp doctor. Instead, Himmler raised with Dr Sonntag the more urgent matter of gonorrhoea.

A few weeks earlier Himmler had
instructed his chief surgeon
, Ernst Grawitz, to order Sonntag to start experiments on Ravensbrück prostitutes to find a cure for gonorrhoea, and he was eager to hear the results. Himmler had long been fascinated by medical experimentation, and the outbreak of war had given his interest new purpose – to increase the life expectancy of German forces. Where better to carry out the experiments than on human guinea pigs in the concentration camps? At the male camp of Sachsenhausen mustard-gas tests had been carried out on prisoners to find a way to cure soldiers poisoned at the front, and at Dachau prisoners were being starved of oxygen to find out at what altitude a pilot would die.

The presence in Ravensbrück of scores of infected prostitutes offered a chance to explore curing syphilis and gonorrhoea. On Himmler’s instructions, soldiers were being encouraged to use brothels while at the front. Regular sex, he believed, would increase their motivation to fight, especially if they could be protected from VD. But now he was angered to learn from Sonntag that the experiments had not even started yet. Grawitz had apparently failed to pass on the order to Sonntag, either because he had forgotten or perhaps because he didn’t trust unqualified camp doctors like Sonntag to do the job properly.

Sonntag’s main training was as a dentist and his medical qualifications were limited, but Himmler thought highly of him, as it was he who had carried out the mustard-gas experiments at Sachsenhausen. Sonntag had not hesitated to apply lethal bacteria to the skin of healthy prisoners, inducing monstrous swellings and causing excruciating pain. The Reichsführer SS therefore instructed Sonntag to start the gonorrhoea tests at Ravensbrück without further delay.

A tall man in immaculate black uniform, the skull of the SS Totenkopf (Death’s Head) division on his cap, Dr Walter Sonntag struck quite a figure as he strode down the Lagerstrasse to the camp hospital, a bamboo
cane tucked into one long leather boot. Prisoners recalled his aquiline nose, angular features and large ears. They also recalled his unusual strength: any woman struck by him invariably collapsed and fell to the ground.

The son of a postmaster, Walter Sonntag was born in 1907 in the town of Metz, in what was then German Lothringen and is now French Lorraine. Coming from such a contested border region – Lorraine had been fought over by Germany and France for centuries – Sonntag’s nationalism was fired at an early age. At the outbreak of the First World War the villages he knew were the scene of renewed carnage. Under the terms of the Versailles settlement that followed, the Sonntags, like thousands of other humiliated Germans, were evicted and forced to start new lives. His father found work on the land, and Walter spent his young years playing with animals. By the time he left school he was drawn to the Nazi Party and decided to better himself by training as a dentist.

Though Sonntag first chose dentistry as a career, he later switched to medicine, attracted no doubt by the prominent role doctors were being given in fighting Hitler’s new racial war. He quickly joined the Nazi Party, and along with hundreds of fellow medical students enrolled in the SS. The percentage of German doctors applying to join the SS was the largest of any single profession.

National Socialist ethics of racial cleansing were by the mid-1930s at the core of the medical curriculum. Nazi doctors were required to cure the ‘whole’ of the German race, not simply to focus on the individual. And in order to treat public health, doctors were required to eliminate the racially subhuman or the genetically impure, enabling the German gene pool to cleanse itself and thrive.

Walter Sonntag began a thesis in 1939 on ‘social medicine’ in which he compared the Führer’s ideas to those advocated by the Spartans, or by the scientists of medieval times who would have killed off lepers had religious scruple not intervened. He also set out his views on sterilisation, stating: ‘
Reproduction by
the genetically ill and asocial elements of a people will inevitably lead to the deterioration of the whole nation. Sterilising undesirables and eliminating them as far as possible is therefore a humanitarian project that offers protection to the more worthy parts of society.’ His own earlier Catholicism clearly no longer restrained Sonntag, and nor did the fact that his sister Hedwig had developed multiple sclerosis, a chronic genetic disorder that she feared was a punishment from God for marrying a Protestant.