If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women (22 page)

In the summer of 1941 Gerda Weyand and Walter Sonntag were married. This gained Sonntag a higher status within the SS, and the couple moved into a well-appointed centrally heated villa, on the grassy slope above the lake. By now the SS enclave, attractively landscaped, was an idyllic spot to raise a family. The married couples were able to leave their offspring at a kindergarten on the lake shore, cared for by Jehovah’s Witnesses, while they went off to work at the camp, just a few minutes’ stroll away. Older children were educated at the local school in Fürstenberg.

The Sonntags, like other SS families, had their own domestic servants, selected from amongst reliable prisoners. They chose Hanna Sturm as their home help. Gerda wrote to Walter some time later ‘
I have never been happier
than I was at Ravensbrück’, but Hanna Sturm said later that she often saw Sonntag beat Gerda. Sometimes he would drink so heavily that he would forget that Hanna was standing by, while he lashed out at his new wife.

An insight into the Sonntags’ life at Ravensbrück is provided by Walter Sonntag himself, in letters he wrote to Gerda after leaving the camp in December 1941. By this time Max Koegel, who loathed Sonntag, had managed to have him removed; he was sent to the front at Leningrad. However the Sonntags had refused to give up their SS villa, despite Koegel’s efforts to evict them. Gerda Weyand, pregnant with their first child, had stayed on at Ravensbrück to give birth.

In his letters sent from Leningrad, Walter Sonntag often dwelled on his life at Ravensbrück. He addressed his wife as ‘Podgy’ and asked about the villa, the furniture, his car and the chickens: ‘My dear good Podgy … make sure everything is in order. Is the car in the garage? Are the windows boarded up? How will you organise the dog, the chickens and the dovecote?’ He asks if she has had a receipt for 200 marks’ worth of wine he bought from the local wine merchant.

The letters show Sonntag bitter and angry at the treatment he received before leaving, particularly over the appointment of a new woman doctor, Herta Oberheuser, which he took as a deliberate snub to him. ‘Dear Gerda, you won’t believe how often I think of you, and it worries me when I imagine you being there without me, completely at the mercy of the furious
Oberheuser and her entourage.’ He urges Gerda not to work too hard because ‘nobody will thank you. Don’t waste your time working for that pack of bastards,’ by which he means the SS staff.

In one letter he is angry that Gerda is being treated on a par with other SS wives and even the female guards. ‘Always bear in mind their degree of education,’ he writes. ‘Dear Podgy, we are miles above this crowd. When Koegel and others put you on the same level as the female guards in view of their education and their wives’ background, don’t be surprised.’ As time passes, these letters take on a menacing tone. He asks his wife why she hasn’t written – ‘Is it too much to have to write to me?’ And what about getting him a coat for the Leningrad winter? Has his wine bill been paid?

Some time in the middle of 1941 Dr Sonntag started killing. Whether Gerda Weyand knew her husband was murdering people in cold blood is not clear, but Doris Maase, on night duty at the
Revier
, witnessed him entering the building carrying a syringe. When he was injecting a patient for medical reasons he would ask for her assistance. On these occasions he did not. ‘
We heard him enter
a room and the next morning we found a corpse in that room.’

By the summer of 1941 the death toll of Ravensbrück prisoners – exhausted by slave labour, weakened by disease, beaten, or frozen to death – was rising steadily. Now, for the first time, planned executions were taking place. Sonntag was injecting a lethal substance, probably petrol or phenol. Once again there is no evidence that he was acting under direct orders, but it seems most likely that he was, and that they came from Himmler.

During the spring of 1941, Himmler had moved fast with his plans to extend the euthanasia programme to the concentration camps. His request to the T4 head, Philipp Bouhler, for use of his staff and facilities to kill off useless mouths had been readily agreed. As early as April 1941 male prisoners at Sachsenhausen were being selected for gassing, and plans being laid to include other camps in the programme. In the meantime, doctors in Himmler’s other camps were receiving instructions to start killing useless mouths – the insane and incurably ill – by the use of injections.

Another prisoner who witnessed the injections was Bertha Teege, the communist, who, as ‘camp runner’, had the chance to see more than most.

I was asked one day
to go to the punishment block with the guard, Zimmer. We were told that a prisoner had evacuated her bowels. Zimmer said: ‘
Die Sau muss weg
’ – The swine’s got to go. I was ordered by Zimmer to take the woman to the hospital. There she was put on a bed. Next morning she was dead. I saw her corpse. She was killed by an injection.

One day a young prostitute on Hanna Sturm’s carpentry gang said she could not work any more as ‘her head would burst’. She told Hanna that Sonntag had called her in and taken a vaginal swab, telling her it was for a VD test. He ordered her to turn round, saying ‘Your time has come’, and injected her in her upper thigh. Within hours the woman was dead. ‘I showed the body to a Polish prisoner doctor. It was completely deformed. She said the girl was injected with petrol.’

Sonntag’s behaviour at this time struck several prisoners as ever more sinister, not only because of the murders but because of what he was telling people. It was as if he was bursting with a secret. One prisoner who went to him about this time with an injured foot remembered how ‘in a moment of drunkenness’ he confided to her boastfully that he spent his days signing death certificates, but ‘one day the day will come when we’ll kill everyone’.

On another occasion he ordered his personal secretary Erika Buchmann to go around the blocks and list all of the green and black triangles – the criminals and asocials – who had tattoos. ‘I had to see the tattoos myself and tell him what kind they were – snake head etc. I did this for him on Sundays. I asked him two or three times why he wanted it. He grinned and said: “You can always use nice little pictures.”’

Erika said later that she never told other prisoners at the time about these tattoo lists; the hospital prisoner staff rarely spoke of what they saw. If an informer overheard, they would lose their positions. In any case, they were not equipped to grasp the meaning of what they were witnessing. When Sonntag asked Erika to list the prisoners’ tattoos, it was as if he was dropping a hint of what was to come. But it was not until after the war, during the Buchenwald trial, that she first learned that the SS used the tattooed skin of murdered prisoners to make bookmarks, wallets and other emblems.

By the end of the summer several women on the brick gang had succumbed to Sonntag’s killing spree. Most had collapsed under the strain of shovelling sand or throwing bricks; they were no use for work any more. One day Olga walked back with the brick-throwers carrying in her arms the skeletal body of a woman, so slight that it could have been a child’s. Olga approached the hospital, probably hoping to find Doris Maase, but was confronted instead by Dr Sonntag, who had seen her coming through his office window.

Whatever spark of humanity had once led Sonntag to treat Olga’s hands and give her gloves, the sight of Olga – a Jew – now seeking mercy for the exhausted figure lying in her arms had quite a different effect on Sonntag. Olga’s plea was enough to trigger in him an uncontrollable rage and he burst out of the hospital shouting ‘Jewish pig’ and ‘Jewish bitch’, and lashing out.

He kicked Olga, knocking her and the woman she was carrying to the ground.

According to her friend Maria Wiedmaier, Olga was severely beaten by Sonntag himself. She was taken away by guards and sentenced to another stint in a solitary cell in the bunker. How long she spent in the bunker this time is uncertain, but Maria Wiedmaier said it was several weeks.

Olga’s letters, as usual, provide a clue about the timing of events. Back in May of 1941 she wrote to Carlos: ‘One survives on hope from autumn to spring and then thinks ahead again to the next winter. How long yet? That is the only question that burns in front of you.’ After May, however, there are no more letters to Carlos or to Leocadia until September, which suggests that Sonntag’s assault upon Olga and the fragile woman in her arms happened some time in June. She almost certainly spent that summer in a dark solitary cell in the camp bunker, unable to write or receive any letters and quite alone.

There is no record of who the woman was who Olga had carried to the hospital, or what became of her. But she is remembered today as the skeletal figure lying in Olga’s arms in
Tragende
, the statue which looks out over the Ravensbrück lake.

Chapter 8

Doctor Mennecke

F
or three weeks in the summer of 1941 Ravensbrück seemed enchanted. The guards withdrew and locked the gates behind them. Everything fell quiet. Prisoners could hear birdsong. Bertha Teege, recently promoted to chief Kapo (
Lagerälteste
), said it began when one of the asocials started to drag a leg, unable to move it. Within hours scores more were lame. ‘
The women seemed
to be paralysed,’ Bertha informed Langefeld. As the paralysis spread the SS panicked, fearing polio.

The prisoners weren’t afraid. Legs were swelling due to the new night shifts in the tailor’s shop, said some. Others saw it as hysteria. Max Koegel blamed the doctor’s experiments. He was heard swearing at Sonntag, accusing him of infecting the whole camp.

At one o’clock the next morning Bertha Teege was woken and handed keys to the kitchen and
Strafblock
. The camp was now in quarantine, she learned, and she was in charge – ‘That’s how panic-stricken the authorities were.’ Transports of prisoners in and out were stopped until further notice and inmates confined to barracks. No SS personnel were to enter the compound until the mystery plague was gone.

Over the next few days a curious peace descended. The ‘paralysed’ asocials were put together in a single block, which was cordoned off, and everyone warned to steer clear. One prisoner, however, had no intention of avoiding the afflicted. Milena Jesenska, the hospital clerk who had so brazenly rejected Sonntag’s advances, had befriended many of the sick prisoners when they came to the
Revier
. Now she wanted to help them, and nobody stood in her way.

By the summer of 1941 Milena Jesenska was probably the most charismatic woman
in the camp
. Afflicted by arthritis and kidney disease, at first sight she looked older than her forty-three years, but her spirit was unbowed. Her flame-red hair still grew thick and long and her eyes flashed with the look of someone who had never obeyed a rule. Grete Buber-Neumann said she had a confidence that seemed to protect her from SS blows. Cringing or fear invited blows, but at
Appell
Milena always took her time to line up, angering the duty guard who might move to slap her, but then would catch her eye and back off.

Milena also gathered admirers. ‘In the camp the weak were often attracted by those who radiated strength,’ said Grete, who, though not weak, was emotionally scarred, and was herself drawn to Milena. This enchanted period saw their friendship blossom into affection and – for Grete – into a profound and lasting love.

Each day Grete followed Milena out to the ‘plague block’. They would sit on the step and talk in the August sun. Here Grete heard of Milena’s early years in 1920s Prague, of her well-to-do Czech family – her cultured mother and her father, a professor of oral surgery at Charles University. She learned about a younger Milena, the provocative writer with an anarchic charm who asked her readers in an early piece of journalism: ‘
Have you ever seen
the face of a prisoner behind bars? Freedom lies on the other side of the window. Heaven lies on the other side of the window. On the other side of the door there is only reality.’

By 1922, Milena was mixing with the Czech-born German-Jewish writers drawn to Prague’s café society. She met Franz Kafka, and read his work, which was little known. Their affair began in 1922, the year he started writing
The Castle
, in which a man called K arrives in a village ruled by a sinister bureaucracy that resides in a nearby castle.

It was Kafka’s
The Metamorphosis
, however, that Milena talked of most to Grete; she had translated the novella into Czech. She told Grete the story of Gregor Samsa, the misunderstood commercial traveller, who in Kafka’s story is transformed into a huge beetle and is kept hidden by his family under a bed, as they are ashamed of him. In her version Milena embellished parts, particularly the story of the beetle’s illness, ‘and how, with a wound in his back infected by dirt and mites, he is left to die in miserable loneliness’.

Milena’s affair with Kafka, intense and tortured, couldn’t last. Throughout their time together the novelist was sick with tuberculosis, and in 1924 he died. From then on, Milena threw herself into journalism, and her fight for social justice. Like so many around her, she devoted herself to communism, until in the mid-1930s she became one of the first amongst her peers to pay heed to reports reaching Prague of Stalin’s purges.

By 1937 Milena, now twice married, with a daughter, had thrown away her Communist Party card, though her loathing of fascism was growing stronger every day, as the German invasion loomed. By the time Hitler’s forces marched into the Sudetenland Milena’s anti-fascist writing was so strident that her arrest was inevitable, and along with the majority of Prague’s intelligentsia, she was rounded up by the Gestapo.

In the camp a shared disappointment with Stalin’s dream drew Milena and Grete together, but they had more in common than political disillusion. Grete was enthralled not only by Milena’s exotic past, but also by her manner. Milena had quickly understood that it was Grete, not she, who had the most extraordinary story of all, because at the age of forty-one Grete Buber-Neumann had already been imprisoned by the world’s two most monstrous dictators. Milena, said Grete, was ‘wonderfully skilled at asking questions and was able to flesh out the memory of things I had long forgotten. She was not content to hear about the events, she wanted to see the people I had met on my long march through the Soviet prisons.’