If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women (3 page)

Next to the bathhouse, under the same roof, was the camp kitchen, which
glistened with huge steel pots and kettles. The next building was the prisoners’ clothes store, or
Effektenkammer
, where large brown paper bags were piled on a table, and then came the
Wäscherei
, laundry, with its six centrifugal washing machines – Langefeld would have liked more.

Nearby an aviary was being constructed. Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, which ran the concentration camps and much else in Nazi Germany, wanted his camps to be self-sufficient as far as possible. There was to be a rabbit hutch, chicken coop and vegetable garden, as well as an orchard and flower garden. Gooseberry bushes, dug up from the Lichtenburg gardens and transported in the trucks, were already being replanted here. The contents of the Lichtenburg latrines had been brought to Ravensbrück too, to be spread as fertiliser. Himmler also required his camps to pool resources. As Ravensbrück had no baking ovens of its own, bread was to be brought here daily from Sachsenhausen, the men’s camp, fifty miles to the south.

The
Oberaufseherin
strode on down the Lagerstrasse, which started at the far side of the Appellplatz and led towards the back of the camp. The living blocks were laid out, end-on to the Lagerstrasse, in perfect formation so that the windows of one block looked out onto the back wall of the next. They were to be the prisoners’ living quarters, eight on each side of the ‘street’. Red flowers – salvias – had been planted outside the first block; linden tree saplings stood at regular intervals in between the rest.

As in all concentration camps, the grid layout was used at Ravensbrück mainly to ensure that prisoners could always be seen, which meant
fewer guards
. A complement of thirty women guards were assigned here and a troop of twelve SS men, all under overall command of Sturmbannführer Max Koegel.

Johanna Langefeld believed she could run a women’s concentration camp better than any man, and certainly better than Max Koegel, whose methods she despised. Himmler, however, was clear that Ravensbrück should be run, in general, on the same lines as the men’s camps, which meant Langefeld and her women guards must be answerable to an SS commandant.

On paper neither she nor any of her guards had any official standing. The women were not merely subordinate to the men, they had no badge or rank and were merely SS ‘auxiliaries’. Most of them were unarmed, though some guarding outside work parties carried a pistol and many had dogs. Himmler believed that women were more frightened than men of dogs.

Nevertheless, Koegel’s authority here would not be absolute. He was only commandant-designate for now, and he had been refused certain powers. For example there was to be no camp prison or ‘bunker’ in which to lock up troublemakers, as there was at every male camp. Nor was he to have authority for ‘official’ beatings. Angered by these omissions, he wrote to his SS superiors requesting greater powers to punish prisoners, but his request was refused.

Langefeld, however, who believed in drill and discipline rather than beating, was content with the arrangements, especially as she had secured significant concessions on day-to-day management. It had been written into the camp’s comprehensive rule book, the
Lagerordnung
, that the chief woman guard would advise the Schutzhaftlagerführer (deputy commandant) on
‘feminine matters’
, though what these were was not defined.

Stepping inside one of the accommodation barracks, Langefeld looked around. Like so much else here, the sleeping arrangements were new to her; instead of shared cells, or dormitories, as she was used to, more than 150 women were to sleep in each block. Their interiors were identically set out, with two large sleeping rooms – A and B – on either side of a washing area, with a row of twelve basins and twelve lavatories, as well as a communal day room where the women would eat.

The sleeping areas were filled with scores of three-tiered bunks, made of wooden planks. Every prisoner had a mattress filled with wood shavings and a pillow, as well as a sheet and a blue and white check blanket folded at the foot of the bed.

The value of drill and discipline had been instilled in Langefeld from her earliest years. The daughter of a blacksmith, she was born Johanna May, in the Ruhr town of Kupferdreh, in March 1900. She and her older sister were raised as strict Lutherans; their parents drummed into them the importance of thrift, obedience and daily prayer. Like any good Protestant girl Johanna already knew that her role in life would be that of dutiful wife and mother: ‘
Kinder, Küche, Kirche
’
–
children, kitchen, church – was a familiar creed in the May family home. Yet from her childhood Johanna yearned for more. Her parents also talked to her of Germany’s past. After church on Sundays they would hark back to the humiliation of the French occupation of their beloved Ruhr under Napoleon and the family would kneel and pray for God’s help in making Germany great again. She idolised her namesake, Johanna Prohaska, a heroine of the liberation wars, who had disguised herself as a man to fight the French.

All this Johanna Langefeld told Grete Buber-Neumann, the former prisoner, at whose Frankfurt door she appeared years later, seeking to ‘try to explain her behaviour’. Grete, an inmate of Ravensbrück for four years, was startled by the reappearance in 1957 of her chief former guard; she was also gripped by Langefeld’s account of her ‘odyssey’ and wrote it down.

In 1914, as the First World War broke out, Johanna, then fourteen, cheered with the rest as the young men of Kupferdreh marched off to pursue the dream of making Germany great again, only to find that she and all German women had little part to play. Two years later, when it was clear the war would not end soon, German women were suddenly told to get out to
work in mines, factories and offices; there on the ‘home front’, women had a chance to prove themselves doing the jobs of men, only to be expelled from those same jobs again when the men came home.

Two million Germans did not return from the trenches, but six million did, and Johanna now watched as Kupferdreh’s soldiers came back, many mutilated and all humiliated. Under the terms of surrender, Germany was to pay reparations, which would cripple the economy, fuelling hyperinflation; in 1924 Langefeld’s beloved Ruhr was reoccupied yet again by the French, who ‘stole’ German coal, in punishment for reparations unpaid. Her parents lost their savings and she was penniless and looking for a job. In 1924 she found a husband, a miner called Wilhelm Langefeld, who died two years later of lung disease.

Johanna’s ‘odyssey’ then faltered; she ‘got lost in the years’, wrote Grete. The mid-1920s were a dark period that she could not account for other than to say there was a liaison with another man, which left her pregnant, dependent on Protestant aid groups.

While Langefeld and millions like her struggled, other German women found liberation in the 1920s. With American financial support, the socialistled Weimar Republic stabilised the country and set out on a new liberal path. Women had the vote, and for the first time German women joined political parties, particularly on the left. Inspired by Rosa Luxemburg, leader of the communist Spartacus movement, middle-class girls, Grete Buber-Neumann among them, chopped off their hair, watched plays by Bertolt Brecht and tramped through forests with comrades of the Wandervogel, a communist youth movement, talking of revolution. Meanwhile, across the country working-class women raised money for ‘Red Help’, joined trade unions and stood at factory gates handing out strike leaflets.

In 1922 in Munich, where Adolf Hitler was blaming Germany’s strife on the ‘bloated Jew’, a precocious Jewish girl called Olga Benario
ran away from home
to join a communist cell, disowning her prosperous middle-class parents. She was fourteen. Within months the dark-eyed schoolgirl was leading comrades on walks through the Bavarian Alps, diving into mountain streams, then reading Marx around the campfire and planning Germany’s communist revolution. In 1928 she shot to fame after holding up a Berlin courthouse and snatching a leading German communist to freedom as he faced the guillotine. By 1929 Olga had left Germany for Moscow to train with Stalin’s elite, before heading to Brazil to start a revolution.

Back in the stricken Ruhr valley, Johanna Langefeld was by this time a single mother without a future. The 1929 Wall Street Crash triggered world depression, plunging Germany into a new and deeper economic crisis that threw millions out of work and created widespread unrest. Langefeld’s
deepest fear was that her son, Herbert, would be taken from her if she fell into destitution. Instead of joining the destitute, however, she chose to help them, turning to God. ‘It was religious conviction that drew her to work with the poorest of the poor,’ so she told Grete all those years later at the Frankfurt kitchen table. She found work with the welfare service, teaching house-keeping skills to unemployed women and
‘re-educating prostitutes’.

In 1933, Johanna Langefeld found a
new saviour in Adolf Hitler
. Hitler’s programme for women could not have been clearer: German women were to stay at home, rear as many Aryan children as they were able, and obey their husbands. Women were not fit for public life; most jobs would be barred to women and access to university curtailed.

Such attitudes could easily be found in any European country in the 1930s, but Nazi language on women was uniquely toxic; not only did Hitler’s entourage openly scorn the ‘stupid’, ‘inferior’ female sex, they repeatedly demanded ‘separation’ of women from men, as if men didn’t see the point of women at all except as occasional adornments and, of course, as childbearers.
^*
The Jews were not Hitler’s only scapegoats for Germany’s ills: women who had been emancipated during the Weimar years were blamed for taking men’s jobs and corrupting the country’s morals.

Yet Hitler had the power to seduce the millions of German women who yearned for a ‘steel-hardened man’ to restore pride and order to the Reich. Such female admirers, many deeply religious, and all inflamed by Joseph Goebbels’s anti-Semitic propaganda, packed the 1933 Nuremberg victory rally where the American reporter William Shirer mingled with the mob. ‘
Hitler rode into this medieval town at sundown today past solid phalanxes of wildly cheering Nazis
… Tens of thousands of Swastika flags blot out the Gothic beauties of the place …’ Later that night, outside Hitler’s hotel: ‘I was a little shocked at the faces, especially those of the women … They looked up at him as if he were a Messiah …’

That Langefeld cast her vote for Hitler seems almost certain. She longed to put right her country’s humiliation. She also welcomed the new ‘respect for family life’ proclaimed by Hitler. And Langefeld had personal reasons to be thankful to the new regime: for the first time she had a secure job. For women, and particularly unmarried mothers, most career paths were barred, except the one Langefeld had chosen. From the welfare service she had been promoted into the prison service. In 1935 she was promoted again to the post of
Hausmutter
at Brauweiler, a workhouse for prostitutes near Cologne. The job came with a roof over her head and free care for Herbert.

While at Brauweiler, however, it seems that she didn’t take easily to all Nazi methods of helping ‘the poorest of the poor’. In July 1933 the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring was passed, legalising mass sterilisation as a means of eliminating the weak, idle, criminal and insane. The Führer believed that all these degenerates were a drain on the public purse, and were to be removed from the chain of heredity in order to strengthen the
Volksgemeinschaft
, the community of pure-bred Germans. The Brauweiler director, Albert Bosse, declared in 1936 that 95 per cent of his women prisoners were ‘incapable of improvement and must be sterilised for moral reasons and for the purpose of maintaining the health of the Volk’.

In 1937 Bosse dismissed Langefeld. One reason given in the Brauweiler records is theft, but this was almost certainly a cover for her opposition to his methods. The records also show that Langefeld had so far failed to join the Nazi Party, a duty required of all prison staff.

Hitler’s ‘respect’ for family life had never fooled Lina Haag, wife of a communist state parliament member in Württemberg. As soon as she heard on 30 January 1933 on the wireless that Hitler had been made chancellor, she felt sure that the new security police, the Gestapo, would come and take her husband: ‘In our meetings we had warned the country against Hitler. We expected a popular rising, it did not come.’

Then, sure enough, on 31 January Lina and her husband were asleep in bed when at five in the morning the thugs came. The round-up of Reds had begun. ‘Chinstraps, revolvers, truncheons. They stamped on the clean linen with repulsive zest. We were not strangers to them – they knew us and we knew them. They were grown-up men, fellow citizens – neighbours, fathers of families. Ordinary common people. And they looked at us now full of hatred with their cocked pistols.’

Lina’s husband began to dress. Why did he have his coat on so fast, Lina wondered. Was he just going to go without a word?

‘What’s up?’
she asked him.

‘Ah well,’ he said, shrugging his shoulders.

‘He’s a member of the state parliament,’ she shouted at the truncheon-wielding police. They laughed.

‘Do you hear that? Communist, that’s what you are, but now we’re clearing all you vermin out.’

Lina pulled the couple’s screaming child, Katie, aged ten, away from the window as her father was marched away. ‘I thought the people will not long put up with that,’ said Lina.

Four weeks later, on 27 February 1933, as Hitler was still struggling to underpin his party’s power, the German parliament, the Reichstag, was set on fire. Communists were blamed, although many suspected the blaze was
started by Nazi thugs as a pretext to terrorise every political opponent in the country. Hitler at once enforced a catch-all edict called ‘preventative detention’ which meant that anyone could be arrested for ‘treason’ and locked up indefinitely. Just ten miles north of Munich a brand-new camp was about to open to hold the ‘traitors’.