If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women (24 page)

Over the summer, however, protests broke out again among the public, and the gassings paused. It was a new gassing centre in a mental institution at Hadamar, near Limburg, that revived the unrest. It lay inside a converted Franciscan priory, and gas chambers had been installed in one of the wings, but once again the cover-up had gone wrong. In June 1941 the bishop of Limburg wrote:

Several times a week
buses arrive in Hadamar with a considerable number of victims. Schoolchildren of the vicinity know this vehicle and say: ‘Here comes the murder box again.’ Or the children call each other names and say: ‘You’re crazy, you’ll be sent to the baking oven at Hadamar.’ You hear old folks say: ‘Don’t send me to a state hospital. When the feeble-minded have been finished off the next useless eaters whose turn will come are the old people.’

It had also been impossible to disguise the large number of urns suddenly piling up at crematoriums all over Germany. Shocked relatives learned that a loved one, usually a patient in a mental hospital, had unexpectedly died; it had not been possible to preserve the body due to the risk of infection, so the body had been burned. In many cases urns reached the wrong family, and some received two urns. Most horrifying, especially to Catholics, was to know that their loved ones had been cremated at all.

During the spring and summer of 1941 a form of silent protest began across Germany. Families placed identical condolence notices in the newspapers, expressing their disbelief at the ‘incomprehensible’ news they had received of a loved one’s sudden death. Lawyers acting for families of patients still in asylums said families were ‘being made fools of’ by the ‘monstrous programme’ and by the ‘flimsy camouflage’ used to cover things up. Those responsible had ‘lost a sense of the difference between right and wrong’, wrote another Catholic priest.

On 3 August 1941 came the most serious protest yet. Count Clemens August Graf von Galen, bishop of Münster, took to the pulpit to condemn the murders: an ‘unproductive life’ was no reason to kill. By this time articles about the killings and the cover-up had begun to appear in the foreign press, most notably the
New York Times
.

The protest had come at an awkward time for Hitler. On 2 June 1941 German forces had marched into Russia and the Führer’s attention was focused on Stalin’s Red Army. Domestic unrest was therefore a distraction. Nevertheless, not wishing to provoke wider protest just as his more ambitious killing projects were maturing, Hitler said in August that he would stop the domestic euthanasia killings. Public protest quickly subsided and he could concentrate on the overarching task: defeating Stalin and annihilating Russia’s three million Jews.

Himmler’s own SS murder squads, the SS
Einsatzgruppen
, Special Action Groups, sent in behind the German forces, were given the task of launching the murder of Russia’s Jews, and over the summer the Reichsführer went out to the captured Russian lands to supervise. The main method used was mass shooting. At first Himmler’s orders were to shoot only the men – perhaps he felt that his killer squads were not yet sufficiently ‘hardened’ or ‘
accustomed to their own
atrocities’, as one biographer put it, to shoot women and children. By the end of July, however, Himmler’s orders were that Russian-Jewish women and children must also be shot.

On a visit to Minsk on 15 August the Reichsführer asked to observe a mass shooting. He stood by a trench and watched groups of Jews and partisans – men and women – shot, then fall forward into a ditch in front of him. One soldier said later: ‘After the first salvo Himmler came and looked
personally into the ditch, remarking that there was still someone alive. He said to me: “Lieutenant, shoot that one.” Himmler stood beside me while I did it.’

If Himmler had ever had any reservations about including women in his new gassing plans for concentration camp prisoners within Germany proper (the ‘old Reich’), after Minsk he had none. In the early autumn of 1941 he authorised the resumption of selections at concentration camps under the new 14f13 killing plan, and Ravensbrück was to be included.

The ‘stop’ order on the euthanasia murders that Hitler put out in the summer was never what it seemed. The killing of handicapped German adults in the sanatoria gas chambers was largely halted, but only to appease the Church, and ‘euthanasia’ went on at other institutions by other means, usually lethal injection. Children were poisoned or starved.

Meanwhile, Himmler was able to take up spare capacity in the T4 sanatorium gas chambers and use it for useless mouths from his camps. By November 1941 Dr Mennecke, the T4 doctor who selected the first 14f13 prisoners at Sachsenhausen, had received new orders to proceed to Ravensbrück. He arrived at the camp amid great secrecy, but we know that the date was 19 November 1941, because it is the date of his first letter to his wife, sent from Fürstenberg. He’d travelled by train, there were fleas in his hotel bed, the walk to the camp was a long one, and it was foggy.

Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Mennecke, the son of a stonecutter, was born near Hanover in 1904. At the outbreak of the First World War he was ten, and waved goodbye to his father, who even at forty-two was called up to the front. Three years later Friedrich saw his father return home, severely wounded and badly shell-shocked. Disabled and broken, he died at fifty, leaving an impoverished wife and two children.

On finishing school Friedrich was unable to go on to university, instead taking work as a commercial traveller. Only later, with help from other relatives, did he pursue his medical ambitions. A second-rate student, but a committed Nazi, he specialised in psychiatry and in 1939 became director of Eichberg State Mental Hospital, where he met and married Eva Wehlan, a medical technician ten years his junior. In February 1940, during the launch of the T4 euthanasia programme, he was asked to attend a conference in Berlin. He and ten to twelve other doctors were required to select ‘lives not worth living’ in mental asylums. As all the others ‘unhesitatingly agreed’ to do the work, so too did Mennecke.

When in 1941 the T4 work was extended to include the concentration camps, with its new code 14f13, his skills were called on again. There is reason to believe that for Ravensbrück secrecy was particularly tight, perhaps
because Himmler still feared that gassing women on German soil might be a step too far and would need special camouflage. Not only was Mennecke himself instructed never to mention that he was working at Ravensbrück, but the name of the camp was even omitted from SS paperwork relating to the new 14f13 programme.

An official Nazi document dated 10 December 1941, one of the few 14f13 papers to survive, contains instructions to SS commandants about how and when selections for gassings are to proceed. It is addressed to the commandants at Dachau, Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, Mauthausen, Auschwitz, Flossenbürg, Gross-Rosen, Neuengamme and Niederhagen. The letter states that ‘
medical commissioners will shortly
visit the above-named camps for the purpose of examining prisoners’; further visits would take place during the first half of January 1942.

The letter goes on to give detailed information about how camp doctors should carry out preselections ahead of the medical commission’s visit. A specimen form is enclosed ‘to be completed at this stage’.

The omission of Ravensbrück from the list of camps addressed is doubly extraordinary given that by this date one visit by ‘medical commissioners’ had already taken place there, and another was about to begin. It must therefore be assumed that for secrecy’s sake, the information and the enclosure were passed to Max Koegel by hand at an earlier date, by one of the camp inspectorate staff. This intense secrecy caused confusion at Ravensbrück, and obscured the true course of events after the war. Even today many details of this early phase of the Nazi genocide would be undocumented, had it not been for the fact that Dr Friedrich Mennecke recorded in minute detail what happened in letters – sometimes two a day – written to his wife.

Mennecke’s first letter from Ravensbrück (addressed ‘Fürstenberg in Mecklenburg, Wednesday November 19th 1941, 7h 15 p.m.’) sets the tone. As if actually talking to Eva – and he will be talking to her, literally, any moment – he starts:

My dearest Mummy!

I just arranged for the phone conversation, I wonder: will it be happening soon? I’ll tell you everything on the phone, but at least for the sake of completeness, I write you this letter as well. I ordered roast venison for dinner, but will now first drink a toast to you. Cheers! There is such heavy fog today, you can’t see for a hundred metres. The Tommies won’t be able to attack in this weather
.

He recounts his day, which started in Berlin at Tiergartenstrasse 4, where he had breakfast with the bosses, including Doctors Paul Nitsche and Werner
Heyde, ‘who were very, very friendly’ and ‘send you their greetings’. Nitsche and Heyde also briefed Mennecke on future plans, telling him that he’d be going to Buchenwald after Ravensbrück, and after that he was booked for Gross-Rosen, a men’s concentration camp further east. ‘This will take about fourteen days, because in a KZ you can finish 70–80 a day,’ he tells Eva, referring to the remarkable speed with which gassing victims could be selected at the camps, as compared with the hospitals and asylums where he has worked before.

Mennecke set off to start his work in Ravensbrück. Before he caught his train he ate bratwurst, ‘50 grams meat’ (a reference to meal vouchers), with potatoes and cabbage. At Fürstenberg he went first to his hotel, then to the camp.

On entering the main gate Mennecke was introduced to Koegel, who told him there were only 259 prisoners to examine, which meant ‘only two days for two men’; Mennecke’s colleague Curt Schmalenbach was to join him, though Mennecke was obviously irked at this – ‘I can do it all on my own.’ Mennecke tells Eva that if he gets finished by Saturday he’ll go straight to his next stop at Weimar, which means Buchenwald. ‘There seem to be more there,’ he says, meaning more prisoners, ‘so we’ll be working in a threesome.’

‘I had coffee with the “Adju” [the adjutant] – in the officers’ mess – and we discussed our work schedule [the selections] and had a beer.’ Koegel recommended that Mennecke change hotels because of the bugs and so he moved to a better one, though in the nearby café ‘there are many disgusting soldiers’.

Signing off – apparently the phone call had now happened – Mennecke mentions the offensive in the East: ‘Let’s hope we’ll advance quickly. People here reckon the war will be over next summer. Hopefully. You go to bed and sweet dreams, sweet dreams. Most heartfelt kisses, lots, lots, lots, from your faithful Fritz Pa.’

On Thursday 21 November, Mennecke starts his first day’s work at Ravensbrück. The same obsessive details pour out to Eva as he writes a timed running commentary: ‘I’m sitting down for lunch of lentil soup with bacon, omelette for dessert.’ In this letter we learn a little more about his work. He has had a meeting with the SS doctor Sonntag and SS Sturmbannführer Koegel, in which ‘it became clear that the number of people in question [i.e. to be killed] needed to be expanded by another sixty or seventy’. Sonntag had evidently interpreted the criteria for a useless mouth too narrowly, an error that Mennecke must now put right by increasing the numbers, which is a nuisance – he’ll have to stay on until Monday.

Nevertheless, Mennecke is happy with how things are going, which is ‘swimmingly’ – not least because he doesn’t have to do much at all. Sonntag
brings in the ‘pats’ (patients) and briefs him on their behaviour, ‘so it runs flawlessly’. All he has to do is fill in boxes on the forms: ‘The headings on the forms are already typed and I just have to fill in the diagnoses, main symptoms and so on.’ And Mennecke is glad to say that, after a call to Dr Heyde in Berlin, he has seen off Schmalenbach, who won’t be coming after all.

After lunch came a pleasant walk with Koegel and Sonntag – ‘we visited the cattle sheds’ – and later he joined Sonntag again for dinner in the officers’ mess, which was three kinds of sausage. Before turning in, he writes: ‘I’ll go for a little walk now, mailing this letter, so that it’s delivered tonight. I hope you’re as well as me. I feel wonderful. Take more heartfelt kisslets from your lordling and embrace your faithful Fritz-Pa.’

As the days pass Mennecke’s letters pile up, along with the ever grosser details of his meals, carousing, free vouchers, travel arrangements, hotel rooms, black market dealings and other minutiae, mixed in with his descriptions of signing women off for death. The reason for these running commentaries may derive from a sense of historic mission. Some of the letters contain phrases like ‘He who writes lives’ or ‘They [the letters] should bear witness to these greatest of all times’. The letters certainly show with what ease he was able to blank the backdrop of the camp from his view: after two years ticking boxes to authorise his ‘mercy killings’, Mennecke was so accustomed to his own atrocities that he could no longer even see the ‘pats’.

Sometimes he calls them ‘portions’. He certainly never refers to them as women. We know he was capable of insulting women, as in one letter he calls his sister-in-law a Bolshevik because she ‘boozes and whores a lot’, but the ‘pats’ excite no such reaction, and when he has filled in their details they simply become ‘sheets’ to be handed in, on time, to Berlin. Nor does Eva show any interest in the ‘pats’. In her replies to ‘my dear Fritz Pah’, Eva asks ‘how much did you get done today’ or ‘when will you be done with it?’ and chats about her own meals and the mice upstairs.

Though Mennecke barely noticed the ‘pats’, the ‘pats’ had been carefully watching Mennecke. On the evening of his arrival, Emmy Handke, in the
Revier
, was asked to produce the files of all patients. ‘
We had to get out
all the personal files of the Jews, the professional criminals, the incurably ill and those with syphilis.’ Over the next few days, groups of these women were taken to the bathhouse, where Dr Mennecke sat holding a pen at a table piled high with forms while Dr Sonntag stood by him.