If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women (36 page)

‘Towards the evening the gentlemen arrived in their cars, a retinue of curious hangers-on behind them,’ recalled Bertha Teege. ‘Himmler gave a brief glance at the parading prisoners, had the naked women presented to him, before spending the bulk of his time here watching the floggings.’ At the end he issued an order that in future the lashings should no longer be given by a guard but by a prisoner, as was done at Ravensbrück. ‘Sad to say, a few brutalised whores – there is no other name for these females – volunteered with great enthusiasm,’ said Teege.

Himmler and his retinue then approached the lines of prisoners, and Langefeld came forward to propose the release of her women. According to Teege and Mauer, Himmler addressed the candidates for release individually, asking them why they were in detention. Mauer explained that she was
a communist, and her husband had once been a member of the state parliament for the German Communist Party.

Himmler asked: ‘Are you still a communist?’, to which Mauer answered yes. ‘What are your views on National Socialism?’ Mauer replied that she had been in prison for so long she had few positive opinions. Himmler told her that she should become acquainted with National Socialist rule, and would be released after a one-year trial, working as a cook for the SS. Others were released on similar terms, though Bertha Teege was freed quicker.

Questioned by Himmler, Teege pledged to ‘endeavour to fit in as a citizen’ and was told she could go home to her family in Berlin straight away, under police supervision. ‘He shook our hands and left.’ A few days later she was accompanied by a guard to the gate. She ran without stopping to the train station.

Johanna Langefeld’s account of that day includes a further exchange with Himmler. The exchange is telling, both for the light it sheds on Langefeld and her priorities, and also because it illuminates the peculiar workings of Himmler’s mind.

Their exchange concerned the question of her authority in the camp. Her growing concern, it seems, was the manner in which the SS was manipulating the female Kapos she had brought with her from Ravensbrück, and using them against her. To illustrate the point, Langefeld explained that she had recently adjudicated on a disciplinary matter involving a Jewish prisoner called
Gorlitz
, brought before her on a charge of stealing apples. When Langefeld looked into the matter it had become clear to her that one of her women Kapos, an asocial, had told Gorlitz to steal the apple while at work. Langefeld cleared the Jewish woman and punished the Kapo, but the Kapo complained to Hans Aumeier, who in turn accused Langefeld of protecting a
Judenweib
, Jewish woman. This interference was unacceptable, said Langefeld.

Himmler promised to look into the matter, then walked off along the line of prisoners, stopping in front of a tall blonde German asocial to ask her: ‘How come such a beautiful woman as you can be an asocial? Why didn’t you marry, have a family and get children?’ Aumeier now interrupted, saying this was ‘the bitch’ involved in the incident just discussed with Langefeld. Himmler looked at Aumeier and hissed at him: ‘How dare you call a woman such an ugly swear word?’

According to Höss, however, Himmler did not let the matter of the women’s section lie there. Before he left the camp he gave specific orders that the women Kapos be given more power, not less, thereby further undermining Langefeld’s authority in the women’s section. In Höss’s opinion, these women Kapos were ‘truly repulsive creatures’ who ‘far surpassed their male
equivalents in toughness, squalor, vindictiveness and depravity’. Himmler apparently agreed, and told Höss to make better use of them. Höss says Himmler observed the ‘green’ and ‘black’ women – presumably during the floggings – and seeing their ‘desire to vent evil over other prisoners’, he decided that these women were ‘particularly well suited to act as Kapos over the Jewish women’.

With his tour of the camp now complete, Himmler sped away from Auschwitz, never to return.

Chapter 12

Sewing

A
s the new enlarged gas chambers started to function at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Helmut Kuhn, a Fürstenberg joiner, was still making coffins for Ravensbrück’s dead. A horse-drawn hearse driven by Herr Wendland, of the Wendland Trucking Company, carried the coffins across town to the Fürstenberg crematorium. In each coffin was a metal tag, with the name and number of the dead prisoner inscribed on it.

At his joiner’s shop Herr Kuhn made all sorts of things for the camp. Today his son Erich still lives above the old workshop across the lake. ‘Not only coffins. We made doors, shelves, bunks. I used to go with my father to measure up and install.’ Erich Kuhn says he didn’t see much. ‘Everybody was concerned with themselves in those days. We just did the job and left.’ But he remembers seeing prisoners walking through town. ‘I once heard that people from town spat at the prisoners, but I didn’t believe it. Most people looked quickly away.’

An old order book lies on the table and he leafs through the pages reading: ‘SS … Order for doors … 301 Reichsmarks. We did a good job. Some doors are still standing today.’ But the coffin work tailed off in the middle of the war because the camp built its own crematorium. Only the
Prominente
, important prisoners, had coffins from then on, he says. ‘They didn’t bother with the rest.’

From its first beginnings, Ravensbrück had evolved in a home-grown kind of way. As the only women’s camp, it was less bound by central directives than male camps. Perhaps because it was smaller, and more peripheral – at least to start with – Ravensbrück developed stronger local ties.

In 1942 the camp’s links with its local community were evident on many fronts. Prisoners were working on local farms, picking beets or potatoes, while others were hired out in small numbers to workshops in town, under locally negotiated contracts. Watching from his Fürstenberg schoolroom, Wolfgang Stegemann saw the women march by in their grey stripes. There were children of guards and of SS officers in his class as well. ‘They all walked down from the camp in a group. We didn’t talk much to them. We were jealous as they got better food.’

Wolfgang’s father had a laundry in town, where twenty prisoners worked, washing clothes – military clothes and prisoners’ clothes. ‘My father sometimes smuggled a piece of bread into the clothes. I didn’t understand how it could be done but I didn’t ask questions. Nobody did.’

The straw shoes made by the prisoners were sold locally. And for a while the
Kunstgewerbe
, the prisoners’ art workshop,
sold toys
for local schools. Even Himmler sometimes took an interest. On one visit he stopped and watched the women at work, much admiring an ornamental chariot carved out of wood. Guards came later and packed it away, and everyone knew it was going to the Reichsführer SS.

It was through the guards and their families that the camp developed the strongest
local links
. By the summer of 1942 the demand for new women guards was growing, not only because Ravensbrück itself was expanding but because the camp was now training guards to work in the women’s section at Auschwitz too.

Recruitment reached out far afield, but locals still applied – girls like Irma Grese, a dairyman’s daughter from a nearby village. Grese, a troubled nineteen-year-old whose mother had committed suicide when she was twelve, had hoped to work as a nurse but settled on camp work instead. The attractions were obvious – the uniform, the free accommodation – and new perks were now being offered, including an on-site hair salon and free tickets to the cinema in Fürstenberg.

The guards themselves were the best advertisement for the job. Dressed in their mouse-grey jackets, culotte-style skirts, caps and leather boots, they walked along Fürstenberg’s high street, the envy of local girls. From January 1940 they wore eagle patches on their left sleeves and caps to show they were employees of the Reich. Dog-handlers walked about showing off their large German Shepherd dogs too.

‘I think it was the uniform that attracted them most,’ says Ilse Wiernick, the daughter of a Fürstenberg schoolteacher. Her family had relatives in Himmelpfort, a local village. ‘There was one guard from Himmelpfort and I remember one day she came back in uniform to visit and the villagers all adored her and told her how beautiful she looked.’

By now many had formed relationships with SS officers, and there had been several pregnancies. One of the female guards gave birth to a baby boy in the camp, Ilse remembers, but she didn’t marry and wasn’t allowed to keep her baby; he was sent away to be raised by her sister.

The camp was very close so any changes across the lake were bound to be quickly picked up in Fürstenberg. In the summer of 1942 the Dachau-based textile giant Texled opened vast new workshops on the site, and the town’s small sewing factories were closed, so trade was lost. Officials from Siemens, the electronics company, had taken rooms at the Fürstenberg Hotel and were said to be planning a factory at the camp, though what that meant for the town, nobody knew.

Meanwhile,
Herr Wendland’s work
was expanding; his horse-drawn hearse was making more and more journeys. By the middle of the year he had purchased a motor-drawn vehicle to take the load, and Herr Kuhn’s order book for coffins was full too – the new demand not unconnected to the sound of shots that rang out through the woods in the early evening. An hour or so later an SS man called Artur Conrad came with friends to drink in a town centre bar. He boasted of his expertise: the
Genickschuss
– a shot from a 7.65 mm pistol to the base of the head, followed if necessary by a shot to heart.

As sinister rumours spread, some older women pleaded with the young not to take the jobs as guards, says Ilse Wiernick. They tried to persuade Margarete Mewes to give up the job. Mewes, the mother of three, had worked at the camp for nearly three years, but she didn’t listen. ‘When she got home from work she couldn’t look after her children and just lay on the bed.’

Ilse’s own family had a maid called Elli Hartmann who also went to be a guard, ‘and my mother tried to stop her,’ says Ilse. ‘She asked her if she really thought it was the right job for her. But Elli said she could earn more and so she went. I remember she got engaged to an SS officer who left for the front. Elli was a nice person. Her husband came back and they went to live in the West.’

Rumours of what happened at Ravensbrück reached outlying villages too. Dorothea Binz used to return from time to time to see her family in Altglobsow. Her mother was often drunk and had washed her hands of her, but her schoolfriend Ilse Halter remembers her own mother trying one day to persuade Dorothea to reconsider what she was doing. It was one of Dorothea’s days off, and Ilse’s mother, respected in the village, called her to their house. ‘She wanted to find out what really happened at the camp. There were so many stories about the place and my mother wanted to know the truth,’ said Ilse, who was present when Dorothea came.

Dorothea told my mother the rumours were untrue. She said: ‘But Frau Schumann, you must understand that there are criminals and prostitutes in the camp and women who misuse religion. They are not educated.’ My mother made out she was satisfied with what Dorothea said, but I think she was just afraid. My father was not in the party but my mother was more neutral.

It was then I realised that Dorothea was a liar. I looked at her and was astonished how her face had changed since she went to work there. It was harder. Wizened somehow. I often think of that.

For the prisoners, Johanna Langefeld’s departure from Ravensbrück in March signalled the first major change of 1942 – a change for the worse, particularly for the Poles. It was only thanks to Langefeld that the Poles had been given any status at all, and allowing them to take useful jobs around the camp had ‘
reduced the impetus
to interfere on the part of the guards’, as Maria Moldenhawer put it.

Langefeld’s replacement as chief guard was the twenty-three-year-old Austrian Maria Mandl, whose position as chief guard of the bunker went to Dorothea Binz. Mandl loved to ‘interfere’. Her special amusement at roll-call was the hunt for curls. She would stride slowly along the ranks inspecting heads, and if she found a curly lock she would beat the woman around the head or kick her to the ground. Or, depending on her mood, she sent the offender to be shaved and then made her parade in front of others with a placard hanging from her neck: ‘I broke the rules and curled my hair.’

Maria Bielicka saw Mandl kick a Jewish woman to death at roll-call. ‘She had done something wrong and first she was slapped then kicked.’

But a strange thing happened after that. I had a friend who had a job cleaning in the guards’ hostels. One of the senior guards had a piano in her room. One day my friend went in and heard the most beautiful music. The woman who was playing was lost in a world of her own – in ecstasy. It was the same guard who had murdered the Jewish woman a few days earlier.

The appointment at Ravensbrück of a new chief woman guard was however unrelated to the more fundamental changes in the camp regime taking place in the spring of 1942 – changes ordered by the Reichsführer SS himself, that would from now on tie the camp more firmly to the central SS machine. Once again Maria Moldenhawer’s commentary is astute: ‘At this time we got the clear impression that harsh directives were coming from the
central authorities. The camp authorities carried out these orders ruthlessly, in contrast to the home-grown torment we had known up until then.’

The first of these new harsh directives were felt in the camp shortly after Himmler’s March visit. Though the immediate purpose of the visit was almost certainly to agree the allocation of Ravensbrück guards to work at Auschwitz, the Reichsführer’s broader concern at this time was by all means possible to extend the use of concentration-camp slave labour. Following the loss of Stalingrad and other reversals in the East, hopes of an early victory against Stalin were shattered. As war was now sure to continue for some time to come, the need for munitions was urgent, but workers were in short supply.