If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women (29 page)

The place of death provided was always Ravensbrück. The date would vary but was always in the future – in other words, several weeks after the women had been taken away. Emmy Handke said it was
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prisoners themselves who filled in the bogus cause of death. She recalled that staff had been busy for weeks filling in the actual certificates. ‘There were four different reasons for possible death: heart weakness; infected lungs; heart circulation problem, or it could be written: “all medical efforts to save the person were in vain”. Prisoners who had to fill in the certificates were allowed to choose which illness they wanted the woman to die of.’

The prisoner secretaries also prepared letters to be sent to next of kin, notifying them of the death and giving the false reasons, the false date and the false place of death. They also told the next of kin they could receive their loved one’s ashes back in an urn in return for a small payment; it had not been possible to see the body for fear of infection.

The following weeks brought several more
Sondertransporte
. Maria Adamska said they left every fourth day until the end of March, but some said they went on till May. The best estimate is that there were ten in all, each taking around 160 women – a total of some 1600 killed. After the first ones, it grew harder to predict who might come next – there seemed to be little pattern. Nanda Herbermann says ‘all sorts’ were taken in the end. Nearly all had been doing forced labour until the day they left. Most would have lived for another twenty years:

The people taken were not only sick with tuberculosis or prostitutes infected with syphilis. No, there were also healthy people amongst them, people who, perhaps due to the unbearable existence in the camp, had suffered an attack of nerves or a heart attack brought on by all the torment. There were others who had worked alongside the rest of us for years but were just not particularly robust.

At two or three in the morning the command went out to report for transport, and the screaming began. ‘People who had previously suspected nothing now suddenly learned with horrifying certainty what awaited them – this screaming will ring in my ears today. And the way they were loaded up! Insults like “you rotten pigs” or “infected rabble” were shouted at them as their last farewell.’

It was probably some time in March that Olga’s turn came: her close comrade Maria Wiedmaier was sure that Olga left on the third transport. In any event we know it wasn’t before 19 February, because on this day – five days
after her birthday – she wrote a letter to Ligia and Leocadia, and enclosed one for Carlos as well.

The letter to Leocadia, her mother-in-law, and to Carlos’s sister Ligia began by thanking them for a birthday greetings telegram that arrived on 14 February. Then Olga reveals her desperation as she raises the question of her emigration again. She must have known that all emigration was now halted, but she pleads: ‘Regarding my emigration leave no stone unturned, for I know from other examples that despite the general situation it is still possible.’ She asks them to pass an enclosed letter on to Carlos; it was to be her last.

My darling Karli
,

I just received your letter of October 12th. I admire how you are progressing in German and am really touched by your efforts. Recently our correspondence has suffered again, and also it was not possible for me to write. But we both know that our closeness cannot be weakened by external difficulties
.

At the moment I take pleasure in the days getting longer, hoping that the winter will be over soon. You can take my word for it, never before have January and February been as long as this time. It must now be scorching hot where you are. Are you very thin? What about grey hair? What are you reading? Letters are the one bright spot for me, only they have been coming less and less in recent months. I have read the description of Anita’s third birthday [on 27 November] over and over again. How strange, though, that in my dreams she keeps appearing as the baby that I knew, not as the big girl that is growing up there in Mexico. We would have had so much to discuss about how to raise her … As always, embracing you with all my love, with all my heart
,

Your Olga
.

It was Maria Wiedmaier who learned from Bertha Teege that Olga was on the list and went to tell her, but Olga had already guessed.

When I met Olga ten minutes later she instantly knew what was going on. She was composed, and tried to calm me down. She spoke of Carlos, of the party, of Anita. I tried to convince her that she was not going to die, that she would see Carlos and Anita again. At last I understood that it was best if I just listened to what she had to say. I had to promise her I would take care of Anita. She had a little photo of Anita that she took with her.

Maria said it was on a Monday that Olga left, at two in the morning as always. Bertha Teege and ‘some of the comrades’ went with the group from the Jewish block to the bathhouse. ‘Olga promised: “If it comes to the point where they’re going to kill us, I’ll fight back.”’

Olga too had promised to hide a note in her clothes. A few days later the truck came back, and Olga’s last letter was found. It said: ‘The last town was Dessau. They make us undress. Not badly treated. Goodbye.’ Four weeks later a list appeared in the
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of those ‘Transferred to another camp’, and Olga’s name was on it. ‘This was the last thing I ever heard of her.’

By April there was already more concrete proof of death. Several of the women’s families had by now received the notices from the camp with the lies about place and cause of death, and several had taken delivery of what they were told were their loved ones’ ashes. Some of these relatives wrote to other family members, also in the camp – a sister perhaps, or a cousin – who had not been selected, stating that they’d received the ashes of the deceased and asking for more information.

Urns were even sent as far as Vienna. In late March, Käthe Leichter’s ‘Aunt Lenzi’ – who had always acted as go-between for letters between Käthe in the camp and her husband and two boys in New York – had received a letter from the camp authorities with news of Käthe’s death. The short note informed Lenzi that Käthe had died on 17 March, and with the note came an urn that held her ashes. Aunt Lenzi wrote to a family friend, also in New York, asking them to break the news to Otto and the boys, as the news was better given in person. Aunt Lenzi herself was shattered. She wrote to her cousin:

All our hopes
, and all the happiness of our lives sink into the grave with our beloved Käthe. Now I have to perform the last task of burying the urn with her remains. How different this end is from the one I had imagined – of being reunited with good Katherl. Her last letters were always full of unselfish love and worries for our well-being. Now this voice has been silenced for ever.

Aunt Lenzi added that she hadn’t been told how Käthe died, but would pass the information on when it came. What came were of course the usual lies – Käthe had died ‘of heart failure’; the place of death was Ravensbrück. Franz Leichter remembers that when he and his brother and father were first told the news they believed the story of the heart failure for some time, knowing no better.

Countless others – relatives of imprisoned communists, Catholics, Jehovah’s Witnesses, prostitutes, down-and-outs, Jews and non-Jews – all over Germany were also receiving letters about the death of an imprisoned loved one along with urns full of fake ashes. Rosa Menzer died of ‘cancer of the uterus’, her family were told. Ilse Lipmann died of ‘a stroke’.

Ravensbrück officials often had no idea who to inform about asocials, as
the addresses of relatives were usually unknown. If they were Jews, the entire family would probably by now have been deported. But the rule said next of kin must be notified, so letters and personal effects were sent to local police forces, who were told to pass them on. A Jewish woman called Sara Henni Stern’s personal effects consisted of a few coppers. When the local police couldn’t find a relative, they were advised to claim it for the German Reich. Julius ten Brink, who had been pleading for the release of his sister Mathilde for three years, received an urn with a package of possessions, listed as ‘one coat, one pair stockings, one vest; three pairs pants’.

While all the official letters sent to bereaved families during the 14f13 charade were grotesque, the letter sent to the family of
Herta ‘Sara’
Cohen stands out for historical reasons too. Herta Cohen was the Jewish woman arrested in 1940 for having sex with a Düsseldorf policeman and infecting his German blood. She was among those loaded into lorries to be gassed in the spring of 1942. A few weeks later the Düsseldorf police received a letter signed by the Ravensbrück commandant, Max Koegel. The police were to find Herta’s sister, inform her of Herta’s death ‘from a stroke’, and tell her that if she wanted her sister’s ashes she should first establish that there was space in the local cemetery. The family should then send a letter confirming the space, along with the correct fee. If the letter hadn’t arrived at Ravensbrück within ten days the urn would be disposed of.

While this bureaucratic sham adds yet more tragic detail to the story, it is another part of the Cohen letter which gives it historical importance. The letter signed by Koegel about Herta Cohen’s case provides what may be the only documentary proof that the Ravensbrück transports were part of the 14f13 gassing programme.

It was almost certainly Himmler himself who ordered SS officials never to use the secret 14f13 code on any Ravensbrück correspondence; given the particular sensitivity over gassing women, the Reichsführer wanted secrecy increased. In Herta’s case, however, the precaution was overlooked. Perhaps because the letter was addressed to a police force, it was considered safe to note the code, or perhaps there was simply a slip. For whatever reason, at the top right-hand side of Koegel’s letter, next to the date (13 March 1942), is printed the telltale code ‘14f13’, which signalled to anyone in the know that every word about Herta’s death ‘from a stroke’, so carefully typed out below, was a lie: Herta had been gassed.

By early summer the screams in the night ceased, as the transports came to a halt, but the prisoners were still none the wiser about where or how the women were killed. Throughout the rest of the war, many in Ravensbrück continued to believe the rumours that the transportees of 1942 had been
killed in a hospital or sanatorium at Buch, near Berlin. Even at the first Hamburg trial in 1946 some women spoke of Buch as the place of death. To this day there is much that is not understood about Buch, particularly in relation to Nazi medical experimentation at the hospitals there. It cannot be ruled out that some of the victims were trucked to Buch, either for experimentation or in transit, before being taken on for gassing elsewhere. Soon after the war, however, new evidence emerged about the location of the gassing.

When Hitler reorganised his euthanasia programme after the Church protests in the summer of 1941, two gassing centres closed, but two new ones soon opened. One of these was located in a former sanatorium in Bernburg, a pretty German town south of Berlin, on the banks of the River Saale. During the war there had been no cause for the Ravensbrück prisoners to think of Bernburg, or any other ‘euthanasia’ centre, as a possible destination; afterwards, when the story of the T4 programme began to emerge in the Nuremberg medical trials and elsewhere, the connection was made. Evidence came out that in 1940 Bernburg’s sanatorium was fitted with a gas chamber, disguised as a shower room. In this room, which measured 14 square metres, more than 8000 people were gassed. Adjoining the gas chamber was a crematorium with two ovens, a dissecting room and a mortuary.

The victims arrived in big grey buses, but sometimes they came by train. Nurses led them to a room where they were asked to undress and examined; any with unusual physical or mental features were marked on the back with a red cross. In groups of up to 100, the victims were led to the shower room. Here they waited for water to come out, but instead gas poured out of the showerheads and they died, usually after a long and painful struggle. Once dead, the bodies with the red crosses were dissected in the mortuary.

The evidence showed that the first victims were brought here from nursing homes, but later came prisoners from concentration camps. On hearing this, a group of German Ravensbrück survivors, led by the communist Maria Wiedmaier, decided to investigate further, hoping to find out at last what happened to their comrade Olga Benario and other communists sent on the same transports.

The group, mostly members of the ‘VVN’ (Victims of Fascism) organisation, all recalled the secret messages that their friends had smuggled back, many of which had said: ‘Last stop Dessau’. A glance at a map showed that Dessau was the stop before Bernburg, so the VVN women wrote to the mayor’s office in Bernburg to ask for any evidence that prisoners from Ravensbrück had been gassed there too. The office replied that all documents relating to the gassing had been destroyed before the end of the war. Correspondence found at Gross-Rosen and at Buchenwald detailed transports
sent from those camps to Bernburg, but the Ravensbrück files were all burned.

The man who could have solved the mystery was Irmfried Eberl, director of the Bernburg killing centre at the time of the gassings. Eberl was due to stand trial in 1948 but committed suicide before the case began. He knew his death sentence was assured: following his work at Bernburg, Eberl was the first commandant of Treblinka, the Jewish death camp in East Poland.

Over time the Ravensbrück survivors learned more about Bernburg. In another trial, one of the Bernburg doctors revealed that women were gassed there as well as men. ‘When the female prisoners arrived they were already undressed,’ he said. ‘From our room we took them directly to what was called the shower room, where they were put to sleep with carbon monoxide.’