If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women (4 page)

Opened on 22 March 1933, Dachau was the first Nazi concentration camp. Over the next weeks and months Hitler’s police sought out every communist or suspected communist and brought them here to be crushed. Social democrats were rounded up too, along with trade unionists and any other ‘enemy of the state’.

Some held here, particularly amongst the communists, were Jews, but in the first years of Nazi rule Jews were not locked up in significant numbers; those held in the early concentration camps were imprisoned, like the rest, for resistance to Hitler, not simply for their race. The sole aim of Hitler’s concentration camps in the early days was to crush all internal German opposition; only once this had been done would other objectives be pursued. The crushing was a task assigned to the man most fit for the job: Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, and soon also to become chief of police, including the Gestapo.

Heinrich Luitpold Himmler was an unlikely police chief, physically slight and podgy, his face chinless and pallid, gold-rimmed spectacles perched on his sharp nose. Born on 7 October 1900, the second of three boys, he was the son of Gebhard Himmler, an assistant head teacher at a school near Munich. Evenings in the family’s comfortable Munich apartment were spent helping Himmler senior with his stamp collection or listening to tales of the heroic exploits of their soldier grandfather, while their adored mother, a devout Catholic, sewed in the corner.

The young Heinrich excelled at school, but he was known as a swot and was often bullied; in the gym he could barely reach the parallel bars, so instructors forced him instead to perform torturous knee bends, as peers looked on and jeered. Years later, at male concentration camps, Himmler introduced a torture whereby prisoners were chained together in a circle and forced to jump up and down doing knee bends until they collapsed, only to be kicked to their feet until they fell down for good.

On leaving school Himmler’s dream was to be commissioned in the military, but although he served briefly as a cadet, ill health and poor eyesight ruled him out of the officer class. He studied agriculture and bred chickens instead, and became absorbed by another romantic dream, a return to the
Heimat
– the German homeland – passing his spare time walking in his beloved Alps, often with his mother, or studying astrology and genealogy,
while making notes in his diary of every trivial detail of his daily life. ‘Thoughts and worries chase themselves in my head,’ he complained.

By his late teens, Himmler was berating himself for his inadequacies, social and sexual.
‘I’m a wretched prattler,’
he wrote, and when it came to sex: ‘I’m controlling myself with an iron bit.’ By the 1920s he had joined Munich’s all-male Thule Society, which debated the roots of Aryan supremacy and the threat of the Jews. He was welcomed too into Munich’s far-right paramilitary units. ‘It is so nice to be in uniform again,’ he wrote. In National Socialist (Nazi) Party ranks people began to say of him: ‘Heinrich will fix things.’ His organisational skills and attention to detail were second to none and he proved adept at anticipating Hitler’s wishes. It helped, Himmler discovered, to be ‘as crafty as a fox’.

In 1928 he married a nurse called Margarete Boden, seven years his senior. They had a daughter, Gudrun. Himmler’s professional fortunes moved on too, and in 1929 he was made head of the SS (
Schutzstaffel
), the paramilitary squad first formed as Hitler’s personal bodyguard. By the time Hitler came to power in 1933 Himmler had transformed the SS into an elite force. One of its tasks was to run the new concentration camps.

Hitler proposed the use of concentration camps as places to intern and then crush his opposition, taking as a model the concentration camps used for mass internment by the British during the South African War of 1899–1902. The style of the Nazi camps, however, would be set by Himmler, who personally identified the site for the prototype at Dachau. He also selected the Dachau commandant, Theodor Eicke, who became head of the ‘Death’s Head’ units, as the SS concentration-camp guard squads were called – they wore a skull and crossbones badge on their caps to denote loyalty to death. Himmler charged Eicke with devising a blueprint for terrorising all ‘enemies of the state’.

At Dachau Eicke did just that, creating a school for SS men who called him ‘Papa Eicke’ and whom he ‘hardened’ before they were sent off to other camps. Hardening meant the men should learn never to show weakness to the enemy and should only
‘show their teeth’
– in other words, they should hate. Amongst Eicke’s early recruits was Max Koegel, the future commandant of Ravensbrück, who came to Dachau looking for work after a short spell in jail for embezzlement.

Born in the south Bavarian mountain town of Füssen, famous for lute making and for Gothic castles, Koegel was the son of a mountain shepherd. Orphaned at the age of twelve, he spent his early years shepherding on the Alps before seeking other work in Munich, where he fell in with far-right ‘
völkische
’ societies and joined the Nazi Party in 1932. ‘Papa Eicke’ quickly found a use for Koegel, now thirty-eight, his hardness already deeply chiselled.

At Dachau Koegel mixed with other SS men like Rudolf Höss, another early recruit, who went on to become commandant of Auschwitz and who also played a role at Ravensbrück. Höss would later remember his Dachau days with affection, talking of an entire cadre of SS men who learned to ‘love’ Eicke and never forgot his rules, ‘which stayed fast and became part of their flesh and blood’.

Such was Eicke’s success that several more camps were soon set up on the Dachau model. But in these early days neither Eicke, Himmler, nor anyone else had contemplated a concentration camp for women; women opponents to Hitler were not taken seriously enough to be viewed as a threat.

In Hitler’s purges thousands of women were certainly rounded up. Many had found liberation during the Weimar years – trade unionists, doctors, lecturers, journalists. Often they were communists or wives of communists. On arrest they were ill-treated but these women were not taken to Dachau-style camps, nor was any thought given to opening women’s sections in the male camps. Instead, they were put in women’s prisons, or converted workhouses where regimes were harsh but not intolerable.

Many of the women political prisoners were taken to Moringen, a converted workhouse near Hanover. The 150 women here in 1935 slept in unlocked dormitories and the guards ran errands for them to buy knitting wool. In the prison hall sewing machines clattered. A table of ‘notables’ sat apart from the rest, among them the grander members of the Reichstag and the wives of manufacturers.

Nevertheless, as Himmler had calculated, women could be tortured in different ways from men; the simple fact that husbands had been killed and children taken away – usually to Nazi foster homes – was for most women pain enough. Censorship ruled out appealing for help.

Barbara Fürbringer, hearing that her husband, a communist Reichstag member, had been tortured to death at Dachau and her children had been taken to a Nazi foster home, tried to alert
her sister
in America:

Dear Sister
,

Unfortunately we are in a bad way. Theodor, my dear husband, died suddenly in Dachau four months ago. Our three children have been put in the state welfare home in Munich. I am in the women’s camp at Moringen. I no longer have a penny to my name
.

The censor rejected the letter so she wrote again:

Dear Sister
,

Unfortunately things are not going exactly as we might wish. Theodor, my dear husband, died four months ago. Our three children live in Munich, 27 Brenner Strasse, I live in Moringen, near Hanover, 32 Breite Strasse. I would be grateful to you if you could send me a small sum of money
.

Himmler also calculated that as long as the crushing of men was terrible enough, everyone else would soon acquiesce. And this proved largely true, as Lina Haag, arrested just weeks after her husband and locked in another prison, would soon observe. ‘Did nobody see where we were heading? Did nobody see through the shameless demagogy of the articles of Goebbels? I could see it even through the thick walls of the prison; yet more and more people outside were toeing the line.’

By 1936 not only was the political opposition entirely eliminated, but humanitarian bodies and the German churches were all toeing the line. The German Red Cross movement had been co-opted to the Nazi cause; at its meetings the Red Cross banner was waved alongside the swastika, while the guardians of the Geneva Conventions, the International Committee of the Red Cross, had inspected Himmler’s camps – or, at least, the show blocks – and given their stamp of approval. Western capitals took the view that Nazi concentration camps and prisons were an internal German affair and not a concern of theirs. In the mid-1930s most Western leaders still believed that the greatest threat to world peace was posed by communism, not by Nazi Germany.

Despite the lack of meaningful opposition, at home or abroad, however, the Führer watched public opinion carefully in the early days of his rule. In a speech at an SS training centre in 1937 he said: ‘
I always know
that I must never make a single step that I may have to take back. You have to have a nose to sniff out the situation, to ask: “Now what can I get away with and what can’t I get away with?”’

Even the drive against Germany’s Jews proceeded more slowly at first than many in the party wanted. In his first years Hitler passed laws to bar Jews from employment and public life, whipping up hatred and persecution, but it would be some time, he judged, before he could get away with more than that. Himmler had a ‘nose’ to sniff out a situation too.

In November 1936 the Reichsführer SS, who by now was not only head of the SS but also police chief, had to deal with an international storm which erupted over a German woman communist who was brought off a steamer at Hamburg’s docks into the waiting hands of the Gestapo. She was eight months pregnant. This was Olga Benario. The leggy girl from Munich who ran away from home to become a communist was now thirty-five, and about to become a cause célèbre for communists around the globe.

After training in Moscow in the early 1930s, Olga had been chosen for the Comintern (the Communist International organisation) and in 1935 was sent by Stalin to help mastermind a coup against President Getulio Vargas
of Brazil. The leader of the operation was the legendary Brazilian rebel leader Luis Carlos Prestes. The insurrection was intended to bring about a communist revolution in the biggest country in South America, thereby giving Stalin a foothold in the Americas. As a result of a British intelligence tip-off, however, the plot was foiled, Olga was arrested and along with a co-conspirator, Elise Ewert, sent back to Hitler
‘as a gift’
.
^*

From Hamburg docks, Olga was taken to Berlin’s Barminstrasse jail, where she gave birth to a girl, Anita, four weeks later. Communists across the world launched a campaign to free them. The case drew wide attention, largely because the baby’s father was the famous Carlos Prestes, the leader of the failed coup; the couple had fallen in love and married in Brazil. Olga’s own courage, and her dark, willowy beauty, added to the poignancy of the story.

Such bad publicity abroad was unwelcome, especially as it was the year of the Berlin Olympics and so much had been done to clean up the country’s image.
^†
Himmler’s Gestapo chiefs first attempted to
defuse the row
by proposing that the baby be released into the hands of Olga’s Jewish mother, Eugenia Benario, who still lived in Munich, but Eugenia didn’t want the child: she had long ago disowned her communist daughter and now she disowned the baby too. Himmler then gave permission for Prestes’s mother, Leocadia, to take Anita, and in November 1937 the Brazilian grandmother collected the baby from Barminstrasse jail. Olga, now bereft, remained alone in her cell.

Writing to Leocadia, she explained that she had not had time to prepare for the separation: ‘
So you have to excuse
the state of Anita’s things. Did you receive my description of her routine and her weight table? I put the table together as best I could. Are her inner organs all right? What about the bones – her little legs. Perhaps she suffered from the extraordinary circumstances of my pregnancy and her first year in life.’

By 1936 the number of women in Germany’s jails was beginning to rise. Despite the terror, German women continued to operate underground, many now inspired by the outbreak of the Spanish civil war. Amongst those taken to the women’s ‘camp’ of Moringen in the mid-1930s were more women communists and former Reichstag members, as well as individuals
operating in tiny groups or alone, like the disabled graphic artist Gerda Lissack, who designed anti-Nazi leaflets. Ilse Gostynski, a young Jewish woman, who helped print articles attacking the Führer on her printing press, was arrested by mistake. The Gestapo wanted her twin sister Else, but Else was in Oslo, arranging escape routes for Jewish children, so they took Ilse instead.

In 1936 500 German housewives carrying bibles and wearing neat white headscarves arrived at Moringen. The women, Jehovah’s Witnesses, had protested when their husbands were called up for the army. Hitler was the Antichrist they said; God was the ruler on earth, not the Führer. Their husbands, and other male Jehovah’s Witnesses, were taken to Hitler’s newest camp, Buchenwald, where they suffered twenty-five lashes of a leather whip. Himmler knew that even his SS men were not yet hard enough to thrash German housewives, however, so at Moringen the Jehovah’s Witness women simply had their bibles taken away by the prison director, a kindly retired soldier with a limp.

In 1937 the passing of a law against ‘
Rassenschande
’ – literally, ‘race shame’ – which outlawed relationships between Jews and non-Jews, brought a further influx of Jewish women to Moringen. Then in the second half of 1937 the women there noticed a sudden rise in the number of vagrants brought in ‘limping, some wearing supports, many others spitting blood’. In 1938 scores of prostitutes arrived.