If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women (21 page)

It was one of the many anomalies of the Nazi system that concentration camps should have had such an institution as a hospital at all. Everything
about the camps seemed designed to cripple the inmates’ health and ultimately to kill one way or another, not to treat or to cure. And yet if fit young prisoners were to be used as slave labourers, it made sense to treat them for day-to-day illnesses. Moreover, the Nazis were terrified of contagious disease spreading from the overcrowded, undernourished prisoners in the camps into the population at large. One of the chief functions of the hospitals, therefore, was to prevent killer plagues breaking out.

When Sonntag started work at Ravensbrück the
Revier
still showed traces of a normal hospital. Housed in an ordinary barracks, the sickbay had a ‘ward’ with sixty beds, to which the very sick were admitted. Temperatures were monitored and anyone whose fever dropped below 39 was sent back to work. It had a fully equipped operating theatre, as well as a pharmacy, radiography equipment and a pathology lab. Rules on hygiene were enforced, with bed linen changed regularly. There were daily ‘surgeries’ when in theory any prisoner could line up to see a doctor. The two female doctors, Dr Jansen and Dr Gerda Weyand, had both trained at reputable medical schools. Under them was a qualified nursing sister, Lisbeth Krzok, ‘Schwester Lisa’, and several other
Schwestern
who wore the brown uniforms of the Reich nursing sisterhood.

There was nothing normal in the daily array of injuries and ailments afflicting the women who lined up every morning, five abreast, outside the hospital entrance, complaining of dog bites, gashes from beatings and frostbite. Nor was there anything normal about the way that Schwester Lisa, known as the hospital
Schreck
, screamed at prisoners to be silent, made them strip, and lashed out at them as they waited in line. Dr Jansen would sit for hours with a mug of coffee, chatting, until her surgery time was over and the patients were sent away untreated. But the other female doctor, Gerda Weyand, showed more patience with the prisoners, more humanity. She asked them about their symptoms, examined them and never hit or abused.

The very presence of the prisoner staff lent a certain air of normality to the
Revier
too. As elsewhere in the camp, prisoners had been co-opted to help, and now they virtually ran the administration of the
Revier
. At a table in the corridor sat prisoner nurses with bandages, ointments and medicines. Surrounded by jostling inmates, they did their best to treat boils, eczema and cuts. The prisoner doctor Doris Maase, who slept at the hospital at night, answered cries long after others had gone.

And in the records office sat a woman with thick red hair and bright eyes. Stuck on the wall beside her was a picture of a sunflower, torn from a magazine left lying around by an SS doctor. Recently arrived from Prague, Milena Jesenska was a journalist, and had once been the lover of Franz Kafka. Now she filed the results of swabs taken from asocial prisoners, as part of Sonntag’s test programme. Here too was Erika Buchmann, tall, blonde and blue-eyed.
Once a secretary for a Reichstag communist, Erika was now a
Revier
secretary, typing up long lists of the sick delivered each morning by block leaders.

These women – Maase, Buchmann, Jesenska – had to stay clean to work in the hospital, so they were housed in a privileged block and could change their clothes more often than ordinary prisoners. Like other prisoner staff they wore special armbands – in the case of
Revier
workers, yellow – that allowed them to move freely in the camp. This freedom, and their ability to help some prisoners, allowed them to feel a little normal. With Dr Sonntag’s arrival, however, nothing could be normal again.

On his first day they all watched as he passed down the line of waiting women, kicking the weakest with his boots, or lashing out with his stick at any cries of pain. He made one woman undress and kicked her in the stomach. What horrified the women was not only his brutality, it was the smile on his face.

That Sonntag was a sadist none of the prisoners who worked with him at the hospital had any doubt. It was an
‘extreme pleasure’
for Sonntag to extract otherwise healthy teeth. Women would come with an infected tooth; he would take out instead a perfectly healthy molar. ‘These extractions were performed without anaesthetic. The terrible screams could be heard all over the hospital. When he came out of the theatre he was beaming with satisfaction,’ recalled Erika Buchmann.

After the war Erika testified about all manner of Ravensbrück atrocities, but none of what she witnessed later was described with the pinpoint clarity with which she recalled Sonntag’s treatment of an exhausted woman who came to him with frostbite in the winter of 1940:

He stood in front of the woman with a bamboo stick in his hands. He hit the woman with the stick in the wounds caused by the frostbite. He tore the bandages away with his stick because at that time bandages were already made of paper. He poked around with his cane in the open, bleeding, matter-filled wounds. It gave him a special pleasure.

Sonntag enjoyed nothing more than the chance to declare a woman fit for flogging. One of the camp doctor’s duties was to rule on whether a prisoner sentenced to twenty-five lashes on the
Bock
was physically strong enough to survive. The rules stated that women with high fever or acute disease should not be flogged at all, but Sonntag always sent them to the
Bock
. He would order the flogging stopped only if the woman passed out, and he would feel her pulse and signal that flogging should resume as soon as her pulse revived. He was always in a particularly good mood when he came from the cells where the beating took place.

It was not simply that Sonntag enjoyed the prisoners’ suffering; the prisoners evidently disgusted him. He hated them and sometimes even seemed to fear them, making sure patients were kept at a distance from him, which was why, if he examined them at all, he did so with his stick. Yet in among the images of his sadism are other memories of a grotesque and often preposterous figure. He was a lecher and a thief – he stole from prisoners’ food parcels – and he liked to strut and show off with his bamboo stick. And he was often seen drunk, marauding around the camp.

‘
I remember a woman
coming for treatment for a broken finger, smashed when she was unloading bricks, and at that moment Sonntag emerged from the hospital kicking the air. He was drunk,’ said a prisoner called Maria Apfelkammer. He was also drunk when on another occasion he rode his bicycle around the surgery table. Sonntag’s antics infuriated Koegel. As chief doctor, he refused to recognise Koegel’s authority. He considered the SS commandant vulgar and uncouth, along with most of his subordinates. He particularly hated Koegel for barring him from the coveted SS living quarters beside the lake. As Sonntag was single, Koegel insisted he live in digs in Fürstenberg.

Just as Walter Sonntag liked to cause pain, so he could not stand to see others show kindness towards the sick or suffering. One day he caught a woman called Vera Mahnke as she tried to stuff a piece of bread through the wire to a Jewish friend in the
Strafblock
. ‘Dr Sonntag was passing and without asking what I was doing he shouted: “
You old pig
. You piece of shit. You give bread to a Jewess do you?” and he started beating me with his fists. He kicked and beat me until I passed out.’

Sonntag held a particular loathing for Jews. From his office window he watched in disgust as the Jewish brick-throwers trudged back through the gates at the end of the day, blackened by dust, pouring with sweat, and dragging wooden clogs. The summer was no kinder to the brick-throwing gang than the winter. All were sunburnt and those who had not long been in the camp were a pitiful sight.

‘Their faces and bare arms and legs were an angry red and their hands which hung down at their sides were raw and bleeding,’ recalled Doris Maase.

Sometimes the brick-throwers’ gang leader would stop at the
Revier
to ask for bandages, but they knew not to ask if Sonntag was there. And even if bandages were issued, they were never changed, so within days wounds suppurated and crawled with maggots. One day Erika Buchmann saw an old woman crawl into the hospital from such a gang on hands and knees. ‘She was a terrible sight. The bandages hung from her in rags. But Sonntag forbade anyone to help her.’

On another occasion, Olga Benario was passing. Her hands were torn and bleeding, but instead of cursing or kicking her, to everyone’s astonishment Sonntag appeared to feel sorry for her, and offered to help. After two years in the camp, Olga had made an impression on many of the staff, as well as on other prisoners. Perhaps Sonntag had seen her tall dark figure on the Lagerstrasse, talking to Doris Maase. She had clearly caught his eye at some point. ‘
Sonntag, the greatest scoundrel
, allowed her to wear gloves,’ recalled Maria Wiedmaier.

Sonntag would also show an interest, and even a grudging respect, for certain prisoners who worked in the
Revier
. Although Doris Maase was half Jewish, he relied on her for medical expertise. ‘Maase, Maase, where is Maase?’ he would call, as others had called before him. He made Erika Buchmann his personal secretary and would rarely let her out of his sight, so dependent was he on her skills. Nor could he conceal his adoration for the Czech journalist Milena Jesenska, always seeking her attention. One day he offered her
what was left of his breakfast
, which she declined without thanks. Another day he stopped her in the corridor and tickled her under the chin with his bamboo cane, at which, to his astonishment, Milena grabbed it and flung it down. She related later how Sonntag had stared into her face and seen her anger and loathing. After that he abandoned his overtures, but continued to turn a blind eye when Milena helped prisoners.

The prisoners who worked for Sonntag certainly acquired a modicum of influence and even power. Maase would smuggle out medicines. Jesenska sometimes switched cards of VD patients to save them from Sonntag’s knife. Buchmann found chances to sign sick patients off the labour gangs. And yet the price they paid for this power to help other prisoners was high: for most of the time they were obliged to help Sonntag. They had to stand holding his syringe, passing surgical instruments, filing notes for Berlin and drawing up his lists.

After Himmler’s visit in January 1941, Sonntag began to keep new lists. At first he listed women with gonorrhoea and syphilis, seeking to find a cure. No records exist of how he performed his experiments, but everyone knew they were happening. It was Milena Jesenska’s job to keep the card index of those suffering from venereal disease. Each time a new prisoner arrived with a suspected infection a blood sample was taken and sent off to labs in Berlin. The results came back to Milena for filing, and knowing of Sonntag’s ‘barbarous cures’, as she called them, she tried whenever possible to forge the results or lose them in the system.

Sonntag had also begun to try his hand at sterilisation. By this time several new ideas for mass sterilisation were being put forward to Himmler. One scientist claimed that the sap from a plant called
Caladium seguinum
(elephant
ear) caused sterilisation, and Himmler was so interested in the idea that he set about cultivating the plant in a hothouse, in order to try it on prisoners. Another option explored was to sterilise men and women by exposing them to high doses of X-rays. Himmler placed most faith in the work of Professor Carl Clauberg, who was trying to sterilise women by injecting an irritant into the womb. Himmler had asked Clauberg how long it would take to sterilise 1000 women, and would later suggest he
try it out at Ravensbrück.

In the meantime Sonntag used his own methods – what, once again, we don’t know – but his guinea pigs appear to have been chosen at random. Doris Maase observed that Sonntag could not stand the idea of Polish or Czech prisoners being unable to speak German, so when one of them claimed not to speak German he said ‘She is mad’ and chose her for sterilisation. Hanna Sturm recalled taking two Gypsy children to Sonntag aged between nine and eleven, whom he tried to sterilise. After the operation she took them back to their block. ‘They staggered across the camp road. About one or two days later they were found dead in their bed.’

More and more pregnant women were arriving at Ravensbrück. From the first days Himmler had insisted that no births must take place there, and all pregnant women were taken to an outside hospital to give birth, but the rising intake meant pre-screening was not always effective. As a result it had become necessary to carry out abortions in the
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. With no trained staff available, Schwester Lisa performed the operations, and often cruelly botched them. Schwester Lisa had ‘come under Sonntag’s spell’, as the prisoners said: she seemed to enjoy the cruellest work, and would show off the result to others, as Erika Buchmann recalled:

I remember one day
a particularly beautiful young Gypsy came to theatre for a delivery and we heard that she had died. Sister Lisa demanded that I come and look at what had happened. I refused but Schwester Lisa got hold of my arm and threw me in front of the bed, tore the sheet off the body and I was forced to see what I did not want to see. I believe that a woman cannot do worse towards living or dead than what Schwester Lisa had done. It was sheer sadism. I can see Sister Lisa’s sardonic grin over the horrors I felt.

Schwester Lisa, however, was not alone in falling under Dr Sonntag’s spell. Some months after he arrived, the prisoners noticed that the woman doctor Gerda Weyand started behaving differently. At first Weyand was viewed as decent in her attitude towards the prisoners, and even friendly to some, but after Sonntag’s arrival she grew indifferent to her medical duties and seemed oblivious to the patients’ pain.

Soon it became clear that Sonntag and Weyand had begun a passionate relationship. In the run-up to the Hamburg trial, Weyand wrote to Erika asking her to speak out on her behalf. Erika refused, and reminded Weyand of the atrocities she’d been a party to. ‘Neither could I forget the times in the hospital, in Dr Sonntag’s room, when you were having fun for hours very noisily and regardless that on the other side of the wall were several ill people with fevers, pining for rest.’