If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women (64 page)

The gulf between theory and reality was as clear to see at the camp in early 1944 as anywhere else in Himmler’s empire. The Reichsführer had ordered death rates reduced to keep good workers alive, but instead the rates were rising and a new crematorium furnace was being built to cope.

Himmler’s dietary theories were being confounded at every turn. He had recently issued new rulings on nutrition with a view to improving production. Up to 50 per cent of vegetables added to the prisoners’ soup were to be raw, and added shortly before distribution; the amount of food at midday should be one and a quarter to one and a half litres of soup – not clear but pureed. Himmler had also insisted that the prisoners should have time and ‘calm’ to eat, so that digestion could happen properly. However, as was clear from the camp’s emaciated bodies, the raw root vegetables were wreaking havoc, causing scabies and sores. As for the mealtime calm, so crammed were the blocks by now that there was never room to sit. The Siemens workers marched back from the factory for lunch barely had time to eat at all.

Other orders issued by Himmler and designed to improve camp hygiene, and hence production, had also proved futile. Prisoners should have time to wash their hair, supposedly to help prevent lice, but washing of any sort was almost impossible, and anyhow the recycled clothes coming from the gas
chambers invariably had lice already breeding in the hems. Coupons were still on offer as an incentive for good work, to be spent at the prisoner shop, but the shop was empty and the coupons had sparked a protest because prisoners objected to being bribed.

Two further incentives Himmler dreamt up were free tobacco and a visit to a brothel. Neither applied to Ravensbrück: women were banned from using tobacco, and it was women from the camp who provided the incentive in the brothels. In early 1944 he ordered brothels to open at three more men’s camps, with prostitutes as usual supplied by Ravensbrück.

Yet even the standard of the prostitutes was falling, as Himmler had obviously observed because he called for measures to improve their appearance. In the early days, he could rely on Ravensbrück to produce a steady stream of professionals for his camp brothels, not least because German asocials were often brought here straight from working brothels and knew what was required. Nowadays, however, even the German asocials arriving there were of ‘poorer quality’, which was not surprising, as they were often no more than homeless women snatched for loitering on the streets of bombed-out German cities. Himmler therefore ordered that the SS try them out before they were hired.

But far greater problems were looming. For example, what was the camp to do in future with the growing number of women who ceased to be of any use? The last transport of 850 useless mouths had left Ravensbrück on 3 February to be taken to the Majdanek death camp, but Soviet forces were now approaching Majdanek and the death camp was about to be closed down.

And what was Ravensbrück to do about the rising pregnancy rate? It was no easy task to sift out pregnant women before they arrived, and the doctors simply couldn’t abort all the babies, especially as the chief abortionist, Rolf Rosenthal, was now in prison. Rosenthal had been sentenced to eight years after making the prisoner-midwife Gerda Quernheim pregnant – at least twice – and then carrying out abortions to terminate her pregnancies. Himmler had reviewed his plea for clemency, and knew the disturbing details.

In his appeal, Rosenthal tried to explain his relationship with the prisoner Quernheim, saying that while at the camp his marriage had fallen into difficulties, as he and his wife could not bear children. According to Quernheim, whose evidence Himmler also read, the couple became intimate when left alone at night in the operating theatre. On these occasions she would offer him a cup of tea, ‘because he would tell me his wife never cooked dinner and failed to care for him’. Rosenthal, she said, had been particularly kind to her the evening she learned her mother had been injured in a bombing raid.

When Gerda found she was pregnant there was no choice but to abort, and so Rosenthal carried it out. Gerda, however, was upset by the termination. Longing to keep the foetus, she preserved it in alcohol and kept it in a bottle in the Ravensbrück
Revier
. Surely no single image could better symbolise the tragic absurdity of the Nazi attempt to control the process of reproduction, though whether Himmler saw it that way seems doubtful.

Himmler did, however, consider that there were mitigating factors in the case and reduced Rosenthal’s sentence from eight to six years, to be spent in the Dachau police cells. Quernheim was soon sent to Auschwitz to work again as a midwife, but first she spent a term in the Ravensbrück bunker.

On his way back to the gates, Himmler liked to inspect the bunker, which for some months had served not only to punish prisoners but as a useful place for him to hold his secret hostages and other prominent captives who might in the future be of use. In March 1944 the
Prominente
included the mistress of a former French prime minister, an American pilot, a Polish countess and a German cabaret dancer.

The pilot had parachuted from his stricken plane, and having landed nearby, was brought to the camp. Christiane Mabire, an elegant Parisian, had been private secretary to Paul Reynaud, the last French prime minister before the war. The dancer was Isa Vermehren, famous for her cabaret shows for German troops. Isa was arrested for being rude about the Führer, though
it was only when her brother
, a German diplomat, defected to Britain that she was brought to Ravensbrück.
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Most prominent of the
Prominente
was probably Helmuth von Moltke, great-grand-nephew of the Prussian war hero Helmuth von Moltke senior. An Oxford-educated lawyer, and leader of a German resistance group, the ‘Kreisau Circle’, von Moltke junior had long been a thorn in the Führer’s side, though Himmler must have known he was no serious threat. The worst that von Moltke had done was to try to stir Germany’s conscience by campaigning for non-violent resistance and for implementation of the Geneva Conventions in the camps. He had also leaked information on Nazi war crimes to friends in the British Foreign Office, offering to go to any lengths to assist them, but they rebuffed him, asking for deeds not words.

Also held in the bunker was a mysterious British major, Frank Chamier, who refused to give Isa Vermehren his name, identifying himself only as ‘Frank of Upwey 282’, which would turn out to be his home telephone number.

Of the Ravensbrück hostages, the Polish countess Karolina Lanckorońska was of most value to Himmler at this point. A renowned art historian, she had been teaching at the University of Lwów, in Poland, when the Soviets invaded in 1939. Horrified by the murder of several fellow university professors, she at once joined the Polish resistance, first against the Soviets, then against the Germans, until she was captured and sent to Ravensbrück. However, it was not what Karolina had done, but who she knew, that was of interest to Himmler. When she was arrested, not only did the Italian royal family write directly to the Reichsführer SS appealing for her release, but
so, in the strictest secrecy
, did the head of the International Red Cross in Geneva, Carl Burckhardt, a long-time friend of the countess’s, who was even, according to some, the love of his life.

Given the ICRC’s refusal to accept a role in helping the Jews and other camp prisoners, Burckhardt’s appeal for a personal friend was incriminating, and he removed his letters from the ICRC files after the war. Some of Himmler’s replies, however, have survived, and show Burckhardt appealed to the Reichsführer over Karolina at least three times. In the summer of 1942 he wrote asking Himmler where Karolina was being held, to which Himmler replied saying he would find out. In autumn 1942 Burckhardt even asked Himmler for a meeting to discuss her case. This intervention showed special hypocrisy on Burckhardt’s part, given that at precisely that time he was advising his Red Cross colleagues, at their landmark meeting in November 1942, to remain silent about those in the camps.

As a result of Burckhardt’s letters Himmler obviously realised Lanckorońska was a valuable hostage, and from the moment she reached Ravensbrück he made sure she was treated exceptionally well. Her cell was fitted with the best white linen, and decked with fresh flowers. She was to be known in the camp under the pseudonym ‘Frau Lange’, and allowed to order books from the SS library and to roam around the bunker and the garden beneath her cell, chatting to inmates and guards. It was thanks to this last privilege that Karolina, a colourful and controversial character, was later able to give a picture of life in the Ravensbrück bunker.

Amongst the first prisoners she encountered were two clairvoyants who had been punished for predicting the future for SS clients, and in a nearby cell was Gerda Quernheim, who appeared to Karolina to be a ‘gentle and well-mannered girl’ who ‘at the first sight of my food parcels took a great fancy to me and told me absolutely everything she knew’. Quernheim even answered Karolina’s questions about the abortions, admitting that it was a ‘nasty subject’.

Karolina also met two German guards, one of them imprisoned for stealing prisoners’ clothes from the
Effektenkammer
and the other for lesbianism,
which Karolina said was ‘widespread among the German women in the camp’. The same lesbian told Karolina about Ramdohr’s special prisoners, locked up without light or food, and she gossiped about the bunker guard Margarete Mewes, who had three children, ‘each by a different father’, and about Dorothea Binz, ‘the real power in the camp’, but only because she was having an affair with Suhren’s deputy, Bräuning. The two of them were often seen holding hands when prisoners were beaten on the
Bock
, said the woman, adding that the silk underwear hanging out to dry beside the bunker belonged to Binz, who had stolen it from a prisoner, and she knew which prisoner, but would not tell. Another of the bunker guards was ‘built like a Valkyrie’ but was sympathetic and helped Karolina to smuggle food to the dungeon prisoners and to the two clairvoyants.

Quite often Suhren used to pop in and ask if there was anything else the countess wanted, offering to order books for her from the SS library, though Karolina said she preferred Wordsworth and Tacitus to the camp’s Nazi tracts, so the commandant arranged for her to order those in.
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Walking in the small flowerbed outside, Karolina observed the Fürstenberg spire and wondered how it was that her ‘beloved German culture had been so degraded’. Her musings were always spoiled by the smell from the chimney, which the German lesbian later told her came from burning hair.

Out in the garden she chatted about the classics to Christiane Mabire, often watched over by Dorothea Binz, lounging in a nearby deckchair. Lanckorońska’s observations of Binz strike a different tone to almost every other prisoner. To the countess she posed no threat, seeming almost lonely, and adopting a subservient manner towards Himmler’s ‘Frau Lange’. She would chat about this and that, and told the Polish countess one day that she was a cook by profession, lived locally and was twenty-two years old.

Not only did Karolina have no fear of Binz, her dog did not frighten her either. It seemed to Karolina to be a sad and scrawny mongrel, and not the monstrous hound described by other prisoners. It always seemed hungry when Karolina passed, and flung itself at her, sniffing persistently at her pocket in the hope of finding some food. ‘Isn’t it nice to see how much he loves you,’ said Binz one day, with a smile.

We don’t know if Karolina ever met Himmler on his visits, but she describes his ‘bleak eyes, staring down from behind their pince-nez’, from a portrait on the wall in the bunker office. While she was in the bunker, he ordered a box of his prize tomatoes to be sent daily to her cell.

As he left the camp, Himmler would have observed the prisoners assembled for
Appell
. He may well have noticed how international Ravensbrück had recently become – letters stamped on prisoners’ triangles denoted twenty-two countries represented. He must also have noticed a very large number of yellow stars.

Fifteen months earlier, Himmler had boasted to Hitler that Germany and all its concentration camps were
judenfrei
– free of Jews. But theory and practice conflicted again, because lined up on the Ravensbrück Appellplatz were now at least 400 Jews: the mixed-race women from Auschwitz and the ‘
protected
’ Jews – nationals of Germany’s allies or of neutrals – who had been spared the gas chamber, at least for now. The majority of the ‘protected’ Jews were of Hungarian, Romanian and Turkish origin, and had been living in the Netherlands or Belgium. Not only were Jewish women from these countries standing there on the Appellplatz, but so were their children – the very ‘avengers’ whom Himmler claimed in his Posen speech had ‘disappeared’. One of these ‘avengers’ was Stella Kugelman, a four-year-old child with big black eyes.

Stella remembers little of her arrival at the camp, except that it was night, and her mother, Rosa, collapsed as soon as she stepped off the train. Stella also has only fleeting memories of her life in the camp itself. Paradoxically, however, she knows a great deal about her first four years, before she arrived at Ravensbrück, because she has her mother’s diary, in which Rosa described almost every day of Stella’s life from the day she was born until the Gestapo came.

Rosa Kugelman (née Klionski) was Lithuanian, and her husband Louis Kugelman, a Spaniard – both were Jews. Rosa and Louis both lived in London during the 1920s, where they met. Then they moved to Antwerp, where Stella was born one month before the outbreak of war, on 29 July 1939. Eighteen months later the Gestapo came to the door – the first event in her life that Stella remembers. She recalls a car driving up ‘and police telling us to pack our things and go. I remember it was a bright sunny day.’

First the family were taken to a camp in Belgium, where Rosa and Stella were separated from Stella’s father. He was sent to Buchenwald, while they were taken by train to Ravensbrück. Stella thinks she remembers saying to
her mother in the train: ‘Let’s run away.’ Her mother was already very sick with TB and too weak to attempt escape, so she stroked Stella’s long black plaited hair and tried to smile.