If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women (34 page)

Just as important for a smooth administration, Langefeld had managed the growing ranks of female guards with success, and kept them happy. An
efficient group of prisoners, mostly Germans, Czechs and Poles, were helping to run the camp.

In the spring of 1942, Langefeld even hit on the idea of setting up a hair salon for the staff, which made her popular with all. The German-Czech prisoner Edith Sparmann was amongst the very first to hear of it. One day on the Lagerstrasse, prisoners were asked if any had trained in hairdressing. Edith, then working in the
Effektenkammer
, said she had, and was ordered to the chief guard’s office.

At first I didn’t
understand, so they told me they were setting up a hairdressing salon at the camp, so that the guards wouldn’t have to go into Fürstenberg each time. I said they’d need brushes and scissors and curlers and curling tongs and driers. They asked me to work there. I remember it became pretty well known on the Lagerstrasse that this was happening, and prisoners from my block said to me: ‘So you’ve got yourself a big career.’

The salon was constructed in an old workshop on the other side of the camp wall from the bathhouse, where new arrivals had their hair shaved. Three prisoners worked there all day. There was plenty of work, as most guards had an appointment at least every two weeks. ‘They liked to come to the camp salon’, said Edith, ‘because it was cheaper than the one in town – and just as good. The Olympia roll was all the fashion at the time’ – she lifted her hand to her forehead in a flourish. ‘It was a single roll swept back from the crown.’

Edith got to know the guards well because they came so often. She remembered Dorothea Binz, though Binz was not one of her regulars. And she remembered Maria Mandl:

Everyone knew who Binz and Mandl were. When they ran the bunker they preferred to beat people themselves rather than have someone else do it.

Binz used to scream at people, but in the salon she didn’t shout at us. She was just like a normal client in a hairdressing salon. She didn’t really talk to us prisoners, only to say what she wanted doing – Binz had an Olympia roll too, but longer than the others. Shoulder length. She was very blonde. She was naturally blonde. Many dyed their hair but Binz didn’t need to.

And she would chat to other clients there at the same time. She’d ask what shift they were on or what they were doing in the evening. To us they were like normal clients too.

I asked Edith what sort of hairstyle Johanna Langefeld preferred, but she said that neither Langefeld nor her deputy Edith Zimmer ever came to the salon. She didn’t have her hair done – it was just pulled back in ‘a messy bun’, said Edith.

On
3 March 1942
Heinrich Himmler paid another visit to Ravensbrück. His desk diary states that he arrived at 11 in the morning and stayed for three hours. His main purpose that day was to talk to Koegel about a problem that had cropped up at Auschwitz.

Following the Wannsee meeting six weeks earlier, plans to start exterminating the Jews had advanced quickly. Death camps were being opened at Belzec, Treblinka and Sobibor, all in central Poland. A new department (IVB4: Jewish Affairs – Evacuation Affairs) of the Reich Security Head Office (RSHA), under the direction of Adolf Eichmann, was organising the exterminations and was about to send its first ‘official’ Jewish transport to Auschwitz. Twenty thousand Jews from Slovakia were due to arrive in only three weeks’ time.

On the face of things Ravensbrück was not involved in such arrangements. The camp was not designated as a Jewish killing centre, or death camp, and in any case, under the new plans, any Jews arriving at Ravensbrück in the future would themselves be moved on to Auschwitz.

However, at this late hour two facts had been drawn to Himmler’s attention. First, that among the Slovakian transport bound for Auschwitz were 7000 women. Second, that Auschwitz was not equipped to accommodate women. The camp had only ever held men, until now mostly fighters in the Polish resistance, or Soviet prisoners of war. Clearly there was no room for the 7000 Slovakian women Jews at Ravensbrück, and, in any case, Jews were no longer permitted on German soil.

At the last minute, therefore, Himmler ordered Rudolf Höss, the Auschwitz commandant, to evacuate an area of his camp used for Soviet prisoners of war, of whom few remained after mass executions, and set it aside for the arriving Jewish women. The area was divided from the men’s section by a wall and electrified fence.

It is perhaps surprising that Himmler should go to the trouble of separating women from men at Auschwitz, given that under the new Wannsee plans all Jews were in future to be exterminated by gas. But not all of those arriving were to be gassed on the spot. Auschwitz was to play a dual role in the Final Solution: slave labour as well as extermination. Jews would be spared the gas chamber as long as they were deemed fit for work.

And while they were in the camp, it was of paramount importance that the sexes didn’t mix, and possibly spawn more unwanted lives. The separation of the
sexes was also a useful part of the camouflage devised to ensure that arriving Jews would not guess their fate. In Himmler’s view, placing women and men in separate sections would seem to them more normal, more in keeping with a regular slave-labour camp, which was what they’d been told Auschwitz was.

And not only should the Auschwitz women prisoners be separated, but they should be guarded by women. This too would seem more normal, not only for the prisoners but also for the guards. So it was in order to recruit women guards for Auschwitz in time for the first Jewish arrivals that Himmler visited Ravensbrück on 3 March 1942. He told Koegel that he expected him to supply the
entire corps of guards
for the new Auschwitz women’s section. In addition 1000 of his prisoners must work there as Kapos. They had to be ready by
26 March
, just three weeks’ time, so that they were in position by the time the Slovakian transport was due to arrive.

Himmler also told Koegel that as nobody at Auschwitz had any experience of guarding women, the entire administrative responsibility for its new women’s section was to be placed under Ravensbrück’s authority, and the camp would, from now on, train all Auschwitz’s future women guards. Himmler wanted Johanna Langefeld to take charge of the new Auschwitz women’s section: she was the most experienced woman guard he had.

The changes meant huge upheaval at Ravensbrück, but Koegel naturally followed Himmler’s orders. Langefeld was dispatched to Auschwitz to reconnoitre the camp, returning a few days later. In the early hours of 26 March she set off again by train, this time taking with her 1000 prisoners to work as Kapos and a small troop of women guards.

We have little information
about the guards who left for Auschwitz that day, but of the fourteen named later by Langefeld, several were notorious brutes. Margot Drechsel took a leading role in the round-ups for the Bernburg gas chambers and Elfriede Vollrath, a Fürstenberg woman, was known as a beater, as was twenty-three-year-old Elisabeth Volkenrath.

The guards who left for Auschwitz, however, were vastly outnumbered by the 1000 prisoners sent to serve as Kapos. Among them were about fifty Jehovah’s Witnesses and a score of political prisoners, mostly German communists, including Langefeld’s favourites Bertha Teege and Luise Mauer. There were also a very large number of ‘criminals’ and asocials. It is surprising that such a large number of Kapos were thought necessary at the new Auschwitz women’s camp. However, given the shortage of trained women guards a decision had clearly been taken – probably by Himmler himself – to let these already brutalised and desperate Ravensbrück prisoners keep order and do so in any way they chose.

Again, details are scarce about who these women were. There were certainly
several notorious names on the list, including
Philomena Müssgueller
, the Munich brothel-keeper and
Strafblock
terror Kapo, and another hated prostitute called Elfriede Schmidt. However, given the large number, most must have been picked at random. For example Agnes Petry, the penniless Düsseldorf prostitute, caught up with Else Krug in the first ‘
Asoziale
’ roundup of 1938, was among the group.

Else was now dead, transported a few weeks earlier to the Bernburg gas chamber for refusal to beat fellow prisoners. Now Agnes was on her way to Auschwitz to guard other prisoners facing the same death, though neither Agnes, nor any of the others on the train in March 1942, could possibly have known what their new camp would bring.

Apart from the Poles, who knew of the place because relatives had been sent there as resisters, few prisoners in Ravensbrück had heard of Auschwitz in March 1942. Even Langefeld herself appears to have known very little. On return from her visit she told Teege and Mauer that she had seen male prisoners ‘in terrible shape’, but that was all. According to Grete Buber-Neumann, so little-known was Auschwitz at the time that several Ravensbrück women volunteered to go there as Kapos in March 1942 thinking conditions might be better. As the train moved east, passing the ruins of Polish towns, at least one woman changed her mind and managed to escape.

Though little is known about the way the Ravensbrück women were chosen for their work at Auschwitz, we know a great deal about what happened when they arrived, largely thanks to Bertha Teege and Luise Mauer, who both left
vivid accounts
.

Their train pulled up at Auschwitz around mid-morning on 26 March, with just a few hours to spare before the first transport of female Jews arrived. At first the Ravensbrück women saw nothing to startle them. The landscape around the camp was more desolate than they were used to; instead of Ravensbrück’s woods and lakes, they saw grey, empty plains, pitted with bombed-out villages. And the camp itself was far larger in scale, its brickbuilt blocks starker than the painted wooden barracks they were familiar with. As they entered the gates the women’s section was deserted.

The first order they received – to stand to attention on the Lagerstrasse – was no surprise. In fact they stood for four hours while the woman who had escaped was hunted down, brought before them and flogged.

It was mid-afternoon when the Jewish women eventually
arrived from Poprad
in Slovakia. It happened that just as 999 women had arrived from Ravensbrück, so the first group of Jewish Slovakians numbered 999 too.

‘The Slovak women were well-fed, educated, well-groomed people with extremely extensive luggage,’ recalled Bertha Teege, who was so accustomed
to seeing Jews as the desperate wretches Ravensbrück had made of them, that now she could hardly believe her eyes. She was told that the Slovaks had brought luggage because they had all seen the notices back home telling them they were going for Labour Service for three months and that they should bring clothing, linen and food up to a maximum of 50 kg. ‘In fact,’ she wrote later, ‘everybody brought the best they had and everybody was firmly convinced they would be used for work.’

One of the Jewish women dropped a bag and oranges spilled over the Lagerstrasse. ‘My eyes popped out of my head,’ said Teege, who had not set eyes on an orange for years. She reported the incident to a senior SS man, Hans Aumeier, and was told: ‘Stuff your oranges, arsehole.’

The Slovak women were stripped, a process the Ravensbrück prisoner guards were familiar with, but the difference here was that none of their possessions were recorded. ‘Our first thought was why are all the prisoners’ possessions jumbled up? Later the women will surely have to get their stuff back.’ Clothes were also thrown on a big pile, and the food they brought set aside. The Slovakians were then made to stand naked ready for the ‘bath’, described by Luise as a tub eight metres wide in which all 1000 women had to take a bath in the same water.

The gynaecological examination, brutal enough at Ravensbrück, was performed here by the coarsest of Ravensbrück’s prostitute asocials, who were told to probe not for disease but for hidden jewellery. Some of the Jewish women were as young as fourteen and many were virgins, a fact that delighted the watching SS, who looked on, yelling obscenities. An SS doctor arrived on the scene and said he didn’t believe these young Jews were all virgins and he would find out for himself.

Clothing was handed out, but instead of the clean stripes of Ravensbrück, these Slovakians received torn and filthy lice-infested men’s uniforms, taken from Russians who had occupied their blocks before execution. The women were crammed into the vacated blocks in such numbers that many had no bed, and certainly no bed linen.

Bertha Teege wrote later that she and her friend Luise Mauer were ‘innocent’ about all this – ‘After a few hours in Auschwitz we had no idea what it all meant.’ It would take years before historians established what these events meant: the arrival of the Slovak Jews on 26 March 1942 was the first ‘official’ Jewish transport, sent to Auschwitz by Adolf Eichmann, the man charged with implementing the Final Solution.

And yet, although the German communist prisoners had no idea of this, they seem to have had a sense of being close to the epicentre of some as yet unknown monstrosity. ‘March 26th 1942 – I will never forget the date,’ wrote Bertha Teege later. And though ‘innocent’, these two Ravensbrück prisoners
were not perhaps as innocent as they made out. At Ravensbrück they had been attuned to Nazi methods. Both had witnessed how Jews were treated there, and both had witnessed – and helped Langefeld organise – selections for the 14f13 death transports.

So the women were more used than most to certain signs. In particular they were used to the masquerade put on by the SS to disguise what they were doing. Just two days after the Slovaks’ arrival, Bertha Teege was working in Langefeld’s office when she was handed a box of 700 letters written by the Slovak women to their loved ones at home. All had been given pencil and paper and promised that the letters would be sent. Teege was told to burn the letters in an oven, which she did, under supervision.

Over the next eight days more transports arrived from Slovakia, and in the following weeks more Jews came from Romania, Hungary and Upper Silesia, so that by the end of April there were 6700 prisoners in the new Auschwitz women’s section. This figure was higher than the number in Ravensbrück itself – by April 1942, some 5800 – and as the numbers rose Teege and Mauer observed more signs of their likely fate. Conditions were so appalling that the once well-groomed women were now covered in black lice and marked with scabies boils.