If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women (43 page)

That doctors and nurses in the camp were reaching for syringes to murder mutilated Polish rabbits was obviously no surprise to prisoners working in the
Revier
. Ever since the days of Dr Sonntag, the use of injections to kill the sick had been commonplace and the new medical team – Schiedlausky, Oberheuser and Rosenthal – thought nothing of murdering a patient by injecting them with phenol, Evipan or even petrol. All had been told this was an efficient means of getting rid of useless lives.
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Nevertheless, it is clear from the rabbits’ observations that in the autumn of 1942 the practice of murder by injection was being stepped up. For one thing, the prisoner nurse Gerda Quernheim now seemed to be authorised to carry out injections and was doing so at will. The Polish radiologist Zofia Mączka thought Quernheim might be killing her victims ‘to liberate them’ from their suffering, although she added: ‘This was the danger – she lost internal control over whom to kill and whom not to kill.’

Other
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staff believed that Quernheim knew exactly who to kill and was deliberately murdering prisoners in partnership with Rolf Rosenthal. In the early days Rosenthal and Quernheim worked together on abortions, and this continued, but by mid-1942 they were spending more of their time killing patients, using lethal injections, which prisoners noticed they seemed to enjoy.

It had become the practice to place prisoners to be injected in a small
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room called the
Stübchen
. The Czech prisoner nurse Hanka Housková recalled walking into the
Stübchen
during the period of the medical experiments:

A little Gypsy girl
lay on the bed. Gerda Quernheim and Dr Rosenthal were bent over her. The child called to me for help and as I came toward her I saw Gerda Quernheim with a syringe in her hand injecting into a vein. Dr Rosenthal held the child’s hand with a piece of rubber tubing. The child wept and struggled. Dr Rosenthal shouted at me to get out, as I would get in their way, or did I want an injection too? After a while I could still hear the child crying, Dr Rosenthal and Gerda Quernheim went back to her, and then came unpleasant giggling.

Afterwards the Gypsy’s body was brought out, with blue spots on her body.

Milena Jesenska was keeping the closest eye on Quernheim and Rosenthal. In order to count the killings she made it her habit to open coffins that were placed each morning in the
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yard. In late 1942 she began to notice bodies of those who had obviously been killed overnight. On these bodies were
‘marks of hypodermic needles
, smashed ribs, bruised faces and suspicious gaps in their teeth’, she told Grete Buber-Neumann. The only prisoner allowed to move about the
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at night was Quernheim, and it soon became apparent that Rosenthal was joining her in there and the two had sex. Then they often murdered a prisoner – ‘not only for the perverse pleasure of it,’ said Milena, but for profit. Milena was convinced that during the day the couple selected their victims – usually those with gold teeth or gold crowns – which were removed before the women were killed, and Rosenthal sold the gold.

Others were also aware that murder by injection had grown commonplace.
‘I often saw Gerda Quernheim with a syringe going into the
Stübchen
,’ said the Czech doctor Bozena Boudova, whose job it was to make up the lethal solutions. Nor was Quernheim the only one who helped the SS doctor with the killings. ‘One knew that not only the doctors were giving the injections, but also prisoner nurses themselves.’

Since the early autumn prisoners noticed another pattern in the injection murders: the victims were often Jews. Hitler had by now ordered that Germany was to be ‘
judenfrei
’ – cleared of Jews – by the end of 1942, and Himmler likewise ordered that each of his camps on German soil must be
judenfrei
. One by one the camps were sending their Jewish prisoners east,
mostly to Auschwitz.

During the Bernburg gassings, which were wound down in early summer 1942, Ravensbrück was largely cleared of Jews, but more had then arrived, rounded up with other incoming groups. Some were foreign – including eighty-two Dutch Jews brought in over the summer months. In the autumn, as the camp prepared for a final Jewish evacuation, orders had obviously been given to doctors to hasten the death of as many Jewish inmates as possible – ahead of the clear-out – in order to save on transport costs. Magdalene Hoffmann, a senior nurse, noticed the Jewish women were put to the hardest labour, such as digging graves: ‘
They were often sick
, with swollen legs, but treatment by SS doctors and SS nurses was forbidden. At this time these Jewish women began to be given a lethal injection of Evipan, and Gerda Quernheim assisted.’ Hoffmann said she herself was ordered by Rosenthal to give injections to all Jewish women suffering from dysentery, and all of them died. In the first days of October the last remaining 522 Ravensbrück Jews were deported to Auschwitz.

By November 1942 the medical experiments had moved into another phase and the horror in the
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deepened further. First, a second round of bacteria experiments was carried out on the Poles. Soon after other nationalities were brought to the experiments ward: random women – Ukrainians, Czechs, Germans – some young and some old. Nurses called these women ‘the lunatics’ but nobody seemed to quite know why they were there. The Poles tried to befriend them.

Amongst the group was a Russian woman who was black all over with frostbite, but she wouldn’t speak. Also brought in was a frail little woman who cringed and trembled violently when anyone even tried to go near her. This woman was Yugoslavian, the rabbits discovered, and they learned that her husband was shot before her eyes.

And there was an old German – a ‘green’ – who it turned out used to be an opera singer.

She must have been a great beauty in her day, they all said. And on a good day she sang an aria or two for the others and handed out her bread. But mostly she was in a bad mood and shouted out loudly: ‘
Hitler kaputt
’ or ‘
Heil Hitler
’ and hid under the bedclothes and laughed.

Later, one by one, the young amongst the so-called ‘lunatics’ were taken away and the word was that they were going for ‘special experiments’. These special operations were carried out by Stumpfegger, assisted sometimes by Fischer, and involved the amputation and removal of entire limbs. The victim was killed outright on the operating table by lethal injection and the limbs packed into operating sheets and taken to Hohelychen for further use.

One of the first ‘special experiment’ victims was
a Ukrainian girl
whose name was Hania.

Hania told the Polish girls she had been brought to Germany as a forced labourer and had been made to stand for hours on a damp cold factory floor, which had inflamed her hip joints and prevented her working, so she had been brought here. She was a strong girl, nevertheless, and refused to be sedated by Rosenthal, fighting him off as the Poles watched on. When he came with his needle she struggled so hard to get away from him that Rosenthal had to call the German nurse, Dora, to help him, but Hania fought them both off.

She held on to the sides of the bed to stop them putting her on the stretcher, and as she levered herself with all her strength to push Rosenthal away, Rosenthal lost his temper and leapt forward hitting Hania in the face as hard as he could and grabbing her hair shouting: ‘Ukraine, Ukraine.’

Still she resisted, so Rosenthal grabbed her by the neck of her nightdress and threw her on the stretcher. The nurse, Dora, had backed away by now, watching in horror, and she turned and ran out.

Hania was now crying and screaming for her mother as she was tied down and wheeled away. Hania never returned. But Dora returned to the ward some time later and told the Lublin girls she was ashamed of being German and didn’t want to work here any more. Dora soon left the camp. Shortly after, a second Ukrainian woman had an entire collarbone removed.

As if the scene at the camp infirmary were not already macabre enough, prisoners now noticed Fischer and other doctors getting into vehicles, carrying whole limbs, barely hidden under blankets, and driving off towards Hohenlychen. A few hours after Hania was taken away, Zofia Mączka, the radiologist, observed Dr Fischer in the Hohenlychen car holding a leg wrapped in a sheet.

Once again, Karl Gebhardt, the chief surgeon, would try to deny at his trial that he had any involvement in these operations, referring at one point to ‘these Ravensbrück prisoners, with whom I am always being reproached,
I don’t know why’. He also claimed that Stumpfegger alone had taken the ‘special experiments’ on, as a follow-up to his splinter operations, and directly on the orders of Himmler. The Reichsführer had heard about research done by a
Russian doctor in Kiev
involving transplanting whole limbs, or pieces of limbs, and wanted Stumpfegger to copy the technique, but Gebhardt claimed to know no more.

As Stumpfegger had committed suicide at the end of the war, and as all his ‘special experiment’ victims were dead, there might have been no knowledge of these cases at all, without the testimony of Zofia Mączka, and other prisoners.

However, Fritz Fischer’s testimony also proved crucial in the trial, as under cross examination he admitted to having taken part in at least one of the ‘special operations’, saying he had opposed the operation ‘on medical and humanitarian grounds’ but was ordered to perform the surgery by Gebhardt, and therefore had no choice.

The operation involved a young male German patient at Hohenlychen who had lost a
shoulder blade
and collarbone due to a tumour, so a plan was devised to give the patient a shoulder blade from one of the Ravensbrück ‘lunatics’ and graft it on, ‘giving him a good chance of survival’.

The shoulder blade was to be taken from a woman’s shoulder, which was not functioning quite normally, due to a previous amputation of the hand. Originally Stumpfegger was to have performed the amputation, but Fischer was called in at the last minute to do so.

The court heard that Fischer amputated the shoulder blade at Ravensbrück, killed the victim with a lethal injection, drove to Hohenlychen with the shoulder blade wrapped in a blanket, and passed it to Gebhardt. Asked by the judge if the limb belonged to a man or a woman, Fischer said he didn’t know: ‘the subject’ had been covered during the operation.

At Hohenlychen, Gebhardt sewed the shoulder blade on to the sick man, helped by Stumpfegger and one other. The man later died. During the course of the trial, the victim’s identity was never established, and the court heard simply that the shoulder blade ‘was removed from an insane female inmate of the camp’.

Throughout the winter more ‘insane’ women were brought in to the experiment wards.
One of these women
– a Czech – cried out so loud one day that the Polish rabbit Stanisława Czajkowska, just returning from an operation, awoke from her anaesthetic asking: ‘What is happening? What is happening?’ The Czech woman’s cries spoke of ‘untold despair, pain and revolt’, she remembered later.

Someone then told the Poles that the Czech woman had been brought to Ravensbrück from a Czech village called Lidice, which had been razed to the
ground by the Germans. The rabbits found a way to communicate with the Czech woman and learned from her that during the assault on Lidice, her home was burned to the ground with all her children inside. The children had called to their mother to help them but the Germans refused to allow her to go to them.

Hearing this, the rabbits were overwhelmed with pity and tried to befriend the woman. They had no idea at the time how much they and the Czech mother had in common. The destruction of her village and killing of her family, along with their own mutilation at the hands of SS doctors, were both the direct result of Reinhard Heydrich’s death.

Chapter 15

Healing

T
he last thing Stefania Łotocka remembered, before she was first anaesthetised, was the sight of copper-coloured leaves blowing past the infirmary window. Waking fully many weeks later, she saw snowflakes settling on the same pane. It was early December and she was starting to recover. The rabbits’ ward seemed peaceful for the first time since it began. Even Krysia, the bespectacled schoolgirl, had stopped weeping.

Krysia was one of the last group of Lublin prisoners called up for the bacteria operations; afterwards there were no screams, only weeping. Stefania, in the next bed, listened to Krysia night after night. The teenager grew delirious and her leg swelled up so much it seemed it might burst any minute. Even then she didn’t scream, but wept, ‘like a little child who had been wronged, calling to her mother to save her,’ said Stefania. ‘I took hold of her hand, hanging limply from the bed and kissed it. And to my surprise Krysia stopped weeping.’

The experiments were not over. A few women were still undergoing repeat surgery. But rarely were new Polish rabbits called up, and those done with had now been abandoned ‘like forgotten war wounded’. Left to nurse themselves, they carefully squeezed the pus out, picking out foreign bodies like so much flotsam and jetsam – broken china, a strip of felt, pieces of glass, splinters of wood.

They helped each other too. When Izabela Rek choked and turned blue in the face, her friends prised open her mouth with a fork and yanked out her tongue. And the Poles in the camp outside had now set up an aid committee; each rabbit was assigned a Polish ‘mother’ to look after her. Usually the ‘mother’ worked in the kitchen or canteen and had access to extra rations that were smuggled into the
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.

The women noticed their young skin was healing; severed flesh fastened by plaster was drawing together of its own accord. In mid-December Eugenia Mikulska’s appetite came back. Someone tapped at the window and passed her a bowl of buttermilk, which she gulped down. ‘It was like a small miracle,’ and she dared to think that the worst was over. Irena Krawczyk discovered she could stand on her operated leg – ‘a moment of joy for my ward companions and for me – it was one of the biggest experiences of my life’.