by Sarah Helm
Attached to one end of the Strafblock, a few makeshift isolation cells were constructed out of wood. The Berlin Gestapo had requested such cells be built for holding prisoners who were still under interrogation, though other women were soon locked in solitary confinement too, among them Marianne Wachstein, the Austrian who had arrived in her nightgown. She was locked up after refusing to sign a document relating to her arrest and protesting that her human rights were being violated.
As Marianne later explained, she refused to sign because she had no idea why she was here; twenty-four hours earlier she had been snatched unconscious from a prison cell in Vienna where she’d been locked up for ‘insulting’ the Führer. ‘Next I remember waking up in a train wagon in my nightclothes. I pinched myself because I thought I was dreaming; it was no dream, it was the truth.’
A guard on the train first told her she was being taken to a mental asylum. ‘That made me happy.’ Then the train passed Salzburg ‘and I realised I had been abducted to Germany. I was very upset, and couldn’t stand or walk.’ A guard screamed at her and began hitting her over the head. ‘I started to vomit. He grabbed me, pulled me up and threw me on a bench and slammed the door.’ Before she knew it, Marianne was being marched into Ravensbrück and forced to sign a document that they wouldn’t let her read. ‘So I said God will avenge me and the communists will have their revenge against what the Nazis have done.’
It was at this point that Marianne was taken to the commandant and given forty-two days of ‘aggravated arrest’, the maximum term under the Strafblock rules, which ran to several pages. For those sentenced to solitary confinement, ‘plain arrest’ permitted a prisoner to have a mattress and a blanket in her cell, and a small amount of light; coffee and bread were given once a day and a hot meal once every four days. Prisoners sentenced to ‘aggravated arrest’ received the same rations, but were locked in a dark cell with no mattress and no blanket, just a bucket and nothing more.
Koegel decided on all Strafblock cases without consulting Langefeld, though her deputy, Emma Zimmer, who ran the block, kept the Oberaufseherin closely informed. According to Ilse Gostynski, some guards were so obviously unhappy about conditions in the early days that they were dismissed. Among those who came from Lichtenburg was one, ‘a lesbian, very decent towards the prisoners but often drunk’, who was dismissed for being ‘too kind’. Three more left ‘because they couldn’t stand it any more’.
Langefeld herself would claim later that when she first arrived at Ravensbrück she still believed her role was to ‘re-educate prostitutes’. The truth was that she couldn’t refuse such a promotion, especially when it came from the Reichsführer SS himself. She was now the most important woman in Himmler’s camp empire. And the living conditions alone were so attractive that it was very hard to walk away.
On viewing their living quarters, Langefeld and all her guards must have been pleasantly surprised. Several of these women were widows or divorcees and, like Langefeld, had transferred here from Lichtenburg, after working for years in prisons and workhouses. A middle-aged woman called Ella Pietsch, trained as a workhouse guard, had nowhere else to go, and nor had Jane Bernigau, who had previously worked in orphanages. Both applied for the job at Ravensbrück because of the salary and security.
Others were factory workers thrown out of work. Ottilie Lotz got the job by chance. After her husband died, Lotz had moved to Lichtenburg to be close to her daughter; she had found work as a clerk in the fortress and was promoted to guard.
These women staff were quartered in smart pitched-roof villas amidst the pine trees looking over the lake. Just a hundred yards or so outside the camp walls, they were convenient for the camp, but far enough away to allow a sense of separation after work. Many of these villas were still being constructed, and prisoners were labouring all around—heaving bricks up from barges moored on the lake—but some of the buildings were complete. The interiors were fitted out in style. Rooms led off a central staircase, and each had pretty curtains and new upholstery. Two women shared a room, and each had her own wardrobe and chest of drawers.
The chief guard’s apartment was larger than others, and she was allowed to bring Herbert, now aged eleven, to live with her; he would attend the local school. Mothers were promised free places at the staff kindergarten, which would open soon—several single mothers were bringing their children with them.
Further up the slope, amidst the trees, stood the grander SS officers’ villas, surrounded by large gardens. Koegel’s villa, where he lived with his wife, Marga, was fitted with parquet floors, and an elegant carved staircase. Around the house hung antlers and other hunting trophies; antlers also hung above the porch outside.
The siting of SS accommodation, away from the camp itself, in a pleasant natural setting, was a common feature of all camps. The intention was to encourage the SS staff to feel content in their home environment. At Ravensbrück the men had their own SS sports field, while the women could go boating on the lake in summer, or picnicking in the woods.
For the younger women it was not only the pay and conditions that drew them: the prospect of meeting a handsome SS officer was another lure; while for those who were lesbians—a significant minority—Ravensbrück offered special opportunities to meet other women, particularly at a time when lesbianism, like all homosexuality, was reviled. The new recruits were also pleased to find a well-stocked staff canteen, and the pretty town of Fürstenberg had a cinema, several bars, and a hair salon, offering the latest permanent wave. Within a short time of arriving the women sent postcards to their families and friends writing about their new jobs with pride. Several former women guards kept photograph albums and diaries of their time at Ravensbrück containing pictures of their ‘luxurious’ apartment furnishings.
The dog-handlers, who had a special status, took pictures of themselves standing with their dogs. Gertrud Rabenstein, the woman known at Lichtenburg as ‘Iron Gustav’, took pictures of herself with Britta, her German shepherd, standing just outside the walls. Rabenstein was divorced and had lost custody of her son. She put an album together to show him something of her life at the camp. The dogs had been trained to attack people with prisoner clothes, she said. Next to the pictures of Gertrud with Britta are happy scenes of mother and son on holiday.
At Rabenstein’s post-war trial, her son was called to give evidence about his mother and said her motto was: ‘Be hard. Be hard. To be hard is good. Do not be sentimental.’ He said she used to tell him a story about how she once saw a blacksmith beating metal and watched it grow hard. ‘This was good.’
The guards soon settled in and Langefeld assigned their tasks. Several were put in charge of a block while others were to guard outside work parties. Langefeld briefed them all on their behaviour; for example, folding arms or sitting down in front of prisoners was forbidden, and gossiping a sackable offence. Guards could only visit male quarters with Langefeld’s permission.
On broader questions regarding treatment of prisoners, however, it was quickly evident that many guards—particularly those on outside work gangs—were following Koegel’s lead, not hers. From her office Langefeld could see the women brought in daily from the sandpit with bleeding legs and arms. And even from her apartment she could hear the women’s screams.
—
Edith Fraede let her dog snarl and snap at the women somewhere between the gates of the camp and the sandpit—or Sandgrube, as it was known. If a terrified prisoner dropped her shovel, Fraede would kick her on the ground or pick up the shovel and hit her across the back with it. Fraede was about thirty years old, big and blonde. Rabenstein, however, usually waited until the work was underway before she lashed out, but by then Britta would already be straining on his leash.
In the early days the dog-handlers couldn’t control their animals. They were new to the job and in the spring and summer it was always hard as the dogs were often on heat. So if a prisoner fell or made a dash for the lake to get a drink, the dogs would pull so hard that the g
uards simply let them off the leash.
At this time the sandpit lay just outside the camp walls, near the lake, and close to the site where the SS houses were being built.
As soon as the gangs reached the pit they had to line up and start shovelling. By nine, the sun was already beating down and sweat rolled down their backs. They had to fill a shovel from one pile and drop the sand on another, until all the sand had been moved. Then they shovelled it back again, as guards shouted, ‘Schnell, schnell, lazy bitches.’ Another gang threw the sand one or two metres up a hill. ‘Full shovels, full shovels. Filthy cows. Scum. Bitch. Filthy cows.’ The shovels were too short or too long, or bent and broken.
Sometimes a gang had to pile the sand in a wagon and heave the wagon onto makeshift tracks. The wagon often jumped the tracks and the women would try to stop it tipping, but when it fell it spilled the contents and they’d have to fill it again. As the temperature rose the guards yelled and swore even louder; they’d beat the women on the back again and kick those that passed out.
Other gangs unloaded coke and stones from a barge on the lake. The women heaved sacks on their backs, while up the hill another gang pulled stone rollers to flatten land for road building. There was one giant roller and one smaller one. The handles had ropes attached and the women grabbed a rope and pulled. At least the road-rolling had a point. There was no point in shovelling sand.*2
Soon the prisoners hated the sand. The Jehovah’s Witnesses thought the work was designed especially for them, ‘to make them give up their God’, but many noticed it was the Jews who suffered most: they seemed weaker, and were less used to hardship, others said. By midday the women in the Sandgrube were sunburned on their arms and brows and their mouths were parched. When sand got inside their wooden clogs it burned the soles of their feet and rubbed on blisters. The Sandgrube was soon spotted with blood.
Rabenstein and Britta supervised the unloading gang. Standing up the hill, they watched prisoners heave sacks of coal or stones and pile them into carts at the edge of the lake. The women pushed the carts up the hill to a dump, but to get there they had to cross a makeshift bridge made of planks, and often the older women fell off the planks and into the water. When this happened the guards would yell and kick the fallen woman. One day a woman hit Rabenstein on the head with a hoe to get her own back. She was sent to the Strafblock and not seen again.
Sometimes Rabenstein would select a group of women at random, line them up behind a heap of stones, and kick them with her boots. Or she would tell a prisoner to shovel soil from a massive pile by tunnelling from underneath until the pile started caving in. The prisoner had to keep shovelling till eventually the pile collapsed on her and she was buried alive. Rabenstein considered this a game and called it ‘Abdecken’—‘roof falling’. Afterwards, the prisoner, bruised and suffocating, was pulled out by friends.
Standing on a chair inside her wooden cell, Marianne Wachstein saw a similar ‘game’ enacted outside her window:
I looked out and saw the following: a weak young woman—I later heard her name was Langer, sick with lupus, and with a piece of flesh sewn on her nose—had refused to shovel sand. They hit her hard but she still refused to pick up the shovel. They dragged her, holding her tight, to a well and sprayed her with a strong stream of water wherever it hit her. They put her like that into a heap of sand with only her head uncovered. They threw sand on her head and face. She constantly tried to break loose. This game went on so long that I got down from the small chair several times and sat down.
Wachstein noticed women guards were watching, and one of the commandant’s top men watched too.
—
Hanna Sturm, the Austrian carpenter, soon began to get the measure of the camp. Not all prisoners were sent on outside work gangs; Hanna’s skills—she was a locksmith and a glazier as well as a carpenter—were too valuable to waste on pointless toil, so she was used as a handywoman, which allowed her to snoop inside offices and blocks, and she collected things—an old newspaper, or a knife perhaps—which she smuggled back to her block. Her best early discovery was a dog-eared copy of War and Peace. Goebbels had long ago banned all Tolstoy’s books, along with other seditious works by authors such as Kipling, Hemingway, Remarque and Gide. They were usually either burned or used as lavatory paper, and Hanna had probably picked the book from a latrine’s supply. She hoped to find a chance to read it with her comrades.
Given that every minute of the day was now regimented by blaring sirens and rules, talking to friends was hard. There were no corners, no hidden alleys for prisoners to slip into unseen. Inside the barracks, the women were so tightly packed together, and so carefully watched—always kept constantly on the move—that individual contacts or formation of small groups was virtually impossible, which was precisely the intention of block living.
The doctor Doris Maase loathed the constant company of riffraff, but she phrased her misery carefully in her censored letter home: ‘I wish I could be built so that stupidity and dullness wouldn’t bother me as much, but I just can’t help it. It may sound paradoxical but with time one wishes to be a hermit instead of always being around people.’
Prisoners known as Blockovas had been put in charge of blocks and ordered to enforce discipline. Sometimes, just before the lights went out, if her Blockova was not close by, Hanna Sturm tapped on the bunk below where her communist friend Käthe Rentmeister lay, and Käthe would alert another comrade, Tilde Klose, who lay below her. The women would exchange words about Hanna’s latest find, or if the Blockova was in a good mood she might even allow a little conversation from time to time.
One or two of these newly empowered Blockovas—mostly wearing green and black triangles—behaved like tyrants from the start; certain names—Kaiser, Knoll and Ratzeweit—were already known amongst the political prisoners from Lichtenburg as trouble. But most of these first arrivals had been in prisons together many years and had learned to get along, whatever their backgrounds. A different-coloured piece of felt on their striped jackets wasn’t going to turn them into enemies overnight.
On Sundays there was some respite. Not everyone had Sundays off work: the Jewish block, Block 11, and the Strafblock prisoners had to labour as usual. There was also a Sunday Appell at midday and cleaning to be done. But in the late afternoon the prisoners all went for an obligatory ‘walk’—a sort of forced recreational stroll along the Lagerstrasse, done to music. The guards in the gatehouse plugged the public address system into German radio and marching songs blared out, which at least meant the women could chat freely, as the minders couldn’t hear.
After the marching it was sometimes possible to lie quietly on a bunk, and to wash clothes and be ‘normal’. There was a Sunday dollop of jam, a square of margarine and a sausage. Prisoners lucky enough to have received money from home could spend it in the camp shop, which was situated inside the staff canteen, and stocked biscuits, toothpaste, and soap. During this ‘free time’ Hanna’s group tried to get together at the back of the block to read their book; one read out loud while another was lookout. They couldn’t believe their luck at finding Tolstoy in a concentration camp.
On Sundays prisoners also read letters from home and wrote back. A letter was allowed once a month, and in these pre-war days as long as no mention was made of politics or the camp the women could still write at length. In her letters home, Doris Maase talked about how she’d been reading books too. Doris was working as a nurse in the Revier, where she also spent the night. It was still possible to receive packages from home, including books, and there was even a camp library of sorts—a collection of approved books, including several copies of Mein Kampf.
‘Today I try to have Sunday,’ wrote Doris to her sister in June 1939. ‘I’m reading Beyond the Woods by [Trygve] Gulbrannssen.’ Doris’s husband, Klaus, was in Buchenwald, so the two wrote censored letters back and forth, reading between each other’s lines. At least, as an inmate of Buchenwald, Klaus would know something of what Doris was going throug
h; of course she could tell him nothing of the brutality she saw.
We know from her later testimony that Doris used to watch through the Revier windows as the work gangs were taken to the gate, led by an SS officer who walked them deliberately through a large pond, so that they’d start work soaking wet.
In June, Olga Benario’s comrade Sabo (Elise Saborowski Ewert), her co-conspirator from her Brazilian days, suddenly buckled and collapsed as she worked in the Sandgrube. Sabo had been raped and tortured in a Brazilian jail, and had never recovered. Fraede kicked her but Sabo could not get up and was eventually brought into the Revier, where Doris was there to help. ‘Maase, where is Maase?’ was the shout heard every day around the bandaging station. ‘There are so many things I can hardly talk about, so much is waiting for you,’ she wrote in a letter to Klaus.
On another Sunday Doris’s letter to her sister enthused about good news from home—‘At first I could not believe that something this pleasant still exists—I almost feel as if I’d been there’—but her attempt to sound cheerful couldn’t hide her fear for her relatives on the outside. Doris’s father, also a doctor, was Jewish and she knew that as war approached, his side of the family would be increasingly at risk; new laws were making any form of normal life in Germany impossible and Doris’s father had been barred from practising. Though her mother was not Jewish—which explains why Doris received better treatment than other Jews in the camp—the pressure on those in ‘mixed marriages’ was increasing, with couples forced to consider separating or emigrating.
