by Sarah Helm
Hedwig was goading Zimmer. When Zimmer opened her door, Hedwig was waiting with a lavatory bucket that she emptied onto her face. Zimmer screamed: ‘Judensau !’ (Jewish pig). Hedwig mimicked: ‘Judensau, Judensau.’ Sometimes Hedwig ran from her cell out into the open space of the punishment block, at which Margot Kaiser would chase her and catch her.
Hanna had by now used her scissors to make tiny holes in her cell wall, so she could see through into the cells either side. Then one day Zimmer threw Hanna’s door open and shoved Hedwig Apfel inside. Hedwig giggled and was obviously scared by the darkness. When she realised Hanna was in the cell she asked Hanna to dance. Hanna suggested singing instead. Hedwig began to sing: ‘For you because you are one of us.’ And now Hanna thought: ‘Perhaps she isn’t mad after all.’ Hedwig said: ‘I’m only acting as if I’m mad. Die Alte [‘the old woman’—Zimmer] is afraid of me ever since I emptied the bucket into her face. Next time, I’ll spit in her face and you’ll see how she’ll run.’
From this moment on Apfel and Sturm became firm friends, which was not to Zimmer’s liking; she took Hedwig away and Hanna was left alone. Hedwig was even moved away from her cell, which was taken by another woman whom Hanna also tried to befriend.
Knocking on the wall she asked: ‘Who are you?’
‘I’m Susi, and you?’
‘I’m Hanna.’
The next day Hanna learned that Susi was the Austrian communist Susi Benesch. Susi was very sick, with boils all over her body. She couldn’t lie down or sit, and at night she walked around all the time, so that nobody in the entire cell block could sleep. One morning Zimmer took Susi out of the cell for the day and sent her out to work, apparently thinking if she tired her out carrying stones she’d sleep better at night. When Susi returned in the evening she told Hanna: ‘It is hard carrying stones. But at least I have seen the sun and I have been with people.’ The next day Susi did not return. Hanna had nobody to talk to again and she started to lose track of time. But she did hear others moving around and sometimes talking and screaming.
One of the prisoners Hanna heard moving around must have been Marianne Wachstein, the woman who had arrived in her nightgown from Vienna. Like Hanna, Marianne left a detailed account of her time in the wooden cell block and much of their experience matched, though the circumstances in which they gave their testimony were very different.
Hanna was not able to tell her story until after the war, but Marianne wrote an uncensored account of what she’d seen just six months after it happened. In February 1940 Marianne was unexpectedly freed, to give evidence in Vienna at the trial of her husband, a Jewish businessman accused of corruption by a Nazi court. She wrote her report in the first weeks after she was freed, while recuperating in a Viennese hospital. Her account is therefore unique, as it is virtually contemporaneous. ‘The camp of Ravensbrück near Fürstenberg is a slave labour camp,’ she began.
The work that we have to do there (I myself had bad nerves and could not work for that reason) is pushing rollers by using two ropes and a handle. And this handle the women have to grip and pull. They have to carry sand in wooden boxes, working in the sun, nine hours a day. Three times a day and twice on Saturdays there is so-called roll call. The camp has to line up before the barracks and stand still, soldier-like, with hands on the body until the camp has been counted by the Frau Oberaufseherin [Langefeld]. The camp has 17 barracks. One of the barracks is for Jews.
Marianne then talks of her arrival in Ravensbrück and recounts what happened to her in the wooden cell. There was no light at all. The guard, Zimmer, came in and yelled at her: ‘Now you will starve and you will not get out of here.’ Marianne replied: ‘If God wills it, I will die here.’ At this Zimmer took her to the hallway and told Marianne to undress, down to her shirt. ‘I was put in a straitjacket. My hands were so tightly clasped they swelled up. They took me by the throat and threw me back in the cell, and due to the straitjacket I passed out and had a screaming fit.’
When Marianne woke up a man in uniform was pushing her. It was Koegel’s deputy Egon Zill, who thumped her on the nose and on the feet while Zimmer pulled her hair. Helpless to protect herself, as she was still in the straitjacket, she passed out again with the pain and woke to find she was lying in her own excrement, the straitjacket removed. She spent that night in her cell, in a nightshirt, teeth chattering.
The next day she was given a blanket, and the third day a sack of straw and another blanket, but she had no food for three days. Next, Marianne was told she was being sentenced to a further three weeks’ arrest ‘for screaming in the cell and lying in her own excrement’.
Like Hanna Sturm, Marianne was introduced to Hedwig Apfel. And like Hanna, she was forced to share a cell with Hedwig as a punishment. Unlike Hanna, however, Marianne had no doubt that Hedwig Apfel was insane. When Zimmer came to their door Apfel threw her water at her and spat onto the door and onto the sack of straw. ‘She has diarrhoea and does not clean herself at all. She spits into her hands and rubs it into her own face.’
There was a bunk bed in the cell and Apfel slept at the top. At night she came and sat on Marianne’s bed, but Marianne had no wish to make friends and told her to go away. So Apfel ripped Marianne’s blankets and tore her bed to pieces. ‘And she talks all night, swearing at God. Hands and arms and legs as thin as a spider.’
Because of the noise the guards dared not enter the cell. On the third day, the ‘mad’ Apfel sat on her top bunk, tipped her coffee over Marianne’s head and threw things and yelled at her. Zimmer opened the cell door but still didn’t dare come in. Eventually Zimmer sent Margot Kaiser into the cell, and Marianne was taken out, and locked up on her own again, before being released and sent back to her block.
In early September, long after Marianne Wachstein had left the cell block, Hanna was still there, locked up alone in the dark, and with no hope of release. She had lost all track of time, but she still peered through the holes into the neighbouring cells to see if anyone was there. One of the cells looked quite comfortable compared with hers; it had a bed with a blanket and a stool, but it was still empty. A little time later—she didn’t know how long—Hanna heard someone talking in the cell and recognised the voice. It was Olga Benario.
—
As both Leocadia and Olga had feared in the last days of August, Olga’s Mexican visa had got stuck in the post—in fact it hadn’t got past New York. On 1 September German forces marched into Poland and war broke out, removing any chance of Olga leaving Germany. On 8 September the Gestapo took her back to Ravensbrück.
Olga was considered less of a threat now (for reasons not explained), and the conditions of her confinement were not as strict as before; she had regular food and was able to receive mail, which included an envelope from the Mexican consulate in Hamburg, sending on a copy of the visa, which they had by now received. As Olga well knew, however, it was too late—and in any case copies were not good enough.
Writing under new and stricter wartime censorship rules, Olga wrote to Leocadia and Ligia on 13 September:
My dears!
I am back in Ravensbrück camp. Received entry permit to Mexico from the Mexican consulate, Hamburg, but am afraid that I won’t be able to make use of it. However, I know that you will continue to do everything possible for me. Pass the enclosed letter on to Carlos and please write more details about Anita.
Lots of love, kiss my little child for me.
Yours Olga.
As soon as she could Hanna made herself known to Olga by whispering through one of the tiny holes she had made in the wall. Olga was amazed to find her friend next door, saying she’d heard about the arrest of the Tolstoy reading group when she first came back to the camp.
Hanna said she was being starved, so Olga offered to share her food, and they managed to enlarge the hole in the wall so that Olga could give Hanna bread—just as Hanna had got food to Olga when she was being starved a few months earlier. ‘You need some warm food, but how can we do it?’ wondered O
lga. ‘The best thing would be if you bring your mouth up to the hole and I will feed you. In the morning I’ll give you the bread, right after Zimmer has brought the coffee.’
Olga then told Hanna she had news for her, but they had to talk quickly before ‘die Alte’ came back. The news was that war had broken out. Sitting in her solitary cell, Hanna had no idea, so Olga passed on all she’d learned in Berlin. Soon everyone in the cell block knew, because Zimmer was ‘celebrating and boasting to the prisoners about the “glorious” news of Nazi conquests which are happening every day in the war’.
* * *
*1 According to prisoner secretaries, by the time the camp was liberated five years later some prisoner files contained enough paperwork to cover three square metres.
*2 In contrast, prisoners at Himmler’s new male concentration camps of Mauthausen and Flossenbürg worked in quarries, hacking out granite to rebuild Berlin as Hitler’s new fantasy capital Germania.
*3 The pages of the Fürstenberg church record book covering the war years have been torn out, almost certainly by Märker, in order to cover up his activities.
*4 Today Anita speaks no word of German and has had her mother’s letters translated into Portuguese.
Chapter 3
Blockovas
Doris Maase saw a great deal from her window in the Revier. She watched women guards and SS men enter the staff canteen opposite at lunchtime and then saw them go out ‘as courting couples’ in the evening. In early September 1939, soon after war began, Doris looked out and saw a prisoner run at the electric fence. She was trying to kill herself, but was stopped by a young blonde guard who dragged her to the Strafblock, beating her as she went. Doris learned that the guard’s name was Dorothea Binz: ‘I saw Binz take the skeletal woman away and beat her with a cane on her naked thighs. Such cruelty in one so young and pretty made a lasting impression on me.’
Binz’s appetite for cruelty soon made an impression on everyone in the camp. And yet, until she got the job here, she had been little noticed. The daughter of a forester, Dorothea Binz was one of several local girls who started work over the summer. These recruits were different from the women who arrived with the prisoners five months earlier from Lichtenburg. They had no experience of any other penal institution, and many were so young that they had no meaningful experience of life before Nazi rule. Work at the camp was their first job.
Dorothea had always lived in the woods around Fürstenberg, attending village schools and churches, playing down forest trails, chasing wild pigs, bathing in lakes in the summer, skating on them in winter. The family had moved around the area a great deal, and in the mid-1930s they settled in a village called Altglobsow, a poor hamlet, three miles from Ravensbrück, where villagers scraped a living felling trees or working on the land. As newcomers, the Binz family were viewed as outsiders, especially as Walter Binz’s official post as forester meant they were better off and had a bigger house.
At the age of ten Dorothea and her friends joined the Bund Deutscher Mädel (League of German Girls), the female wing of the Hitler Youth. At school she followed the Nazi curriculum, which taught children to despise Jews and revile society’s outcasts, although there is some evidence that her parents were not so fond of Hitler’s ideas. Walter Binz had not always been in favour with his employers, perhaps due to a reluctance to join the Nazi Party—compulsory for government and state officials. It was also well known that the forester had been before the courts for poaching; he was a drinker too, as was his wife, Rose. The Binz family were not disliked, but people in the village were wary of them, and often heard the shouts and screams that issued from their house. It was not a happy home.
Dorothea had had her own setbacks too: in her early teens she suffered a bout of tuberculosis, not unusual in the damp climate of this low-lying terrain, but Dorothea’s infection was severe and had meant many months in a TB clinic, so she missed out on some of her schooling, leaving with few, if any, qualifications.
Stigmatised as a carrier of TB and barred from many jobs due to the danger of contagion, on leaving school Dorothea went to work as a kitchen maid, so when the prospect arose of working as a guard at the new concentration camp she jumped at the chance. Later as she rose up the ladder, she would laughingly relate to other guards how her father had told her not to take the job, but the chance was too good to turn down: to live away from home, in comfortable quarters, with good pay and a smart uniform. Dorothea had already caught the eyes of the young SS officers, stationed at a nearby training depot, who drank in the Altglobsow village bar. Tall, slim and blonde, with rounded cheeks and upturned nose, she was known as a local beauty.
Other local girls were keen to join up too. Margarete Mewes, the mother of three from Fürstenberg, took a job at the same time as Binz, as did Elisabeth Volkenrath, a farmer’s daughter.
All SS camp staff were told to toughen up when war broke out. According to Rudolf Höss, by now an officer at Sachsenhausen, on the day the German forces crossed into Poland, Eicke himself had summoned all senior concentration camp officers to tell them they must henceforth ‘treat orders as sacrosanct and even those that appear most hard and severe must be implemented without hesitation’. Höss recalled Eicke saying: ‘The harsh laws of war now prevailed.’ From now on the job of SS camp staff was to ‘protect the homeland against all internal enemies’—the fight to suppress those in the camps was as important for the future of the Reich as the fight at the front.
‘He, Eicke, therefore demanded the men serving in the camps should show an inflexible harshness towards the prisoners. Only the SS were capable of protecting the National Socialist state from all internal danger. Other organisations lacked the necessary toughness.’
Koegel understood Eicke’s orders well. The Ravensbrück enemy within—just 1607 women on 1 September 1939—was small in number, but Koegel was showing due harshness towards every one of them. More were joining their ranks every day. On 16 September a group of political prisoners were brought in, including Luise Mauer, a courier for the German Communist Party, who had risked her life running secret messages across borders. Luise had little fighting spirit in her after being forced to stand outside the camp gates in the rain for hours, before being stripped, deloused, and shorn in the ‘bath’, and even less after she was sent to the most back-breaking work, shovelling coal from the bottom of barges. These ‘September prisoners’ were then assigned to a special block where they could not infect the camp with their dangerous plotting.
While the communists were crushed, however, it was the handful of Poles—the first real foreign ‘enemies’ to arrive—who were hated most. Within days of crossing into Poland the German forces had set about not only seizing Polish land and property but capturing and killing its ruling classes, including countless women teachers, trade unionists, countesses, community leaders, officers’ wives and journalists.
So ‘filthy’ were these ‘Slavs’ that when they first passed the Ravensbrück gates they were brutally scrubbed ‘clean’ before being sent to the Strafblock and put on brick-throwing work ‘until hands were bloody and raw’, in the words of Maria Moldenhawer, a Polish aristocrat and instructor of ‘military readiness’ in Warsaw girls’ schools.
To whip up ever more hatred, stories were spread that the Poles had cut out the tongues of German soldiers or poisoned their tea. Renee Salska had gouged out the eyes of German children, the guards said, though her only crime was to have taught Polish history in a Poznań school.
The first ‘internal enemies’ to rise up in Ravensbrück, however, were not these Polish newcomers but Koegel’s oldest and most hated enemies of all: the Jehovah’s Witnesses. The same religious women who rioted at Lichtenburg were now refusing his orders to sew bags for the war effort. A sewing workshop for the military had been established at the camp to make use of their skills, but this was war work, they protested, it was against their pacifist principles. This sent the commandant into another blind rage.
It says a lot about
the mindset of Max Koegel that even now the prisoners who riled him most were not the ‘communist whores’, the ‘Slav vermin’ or the ‘Jewish bitches’, but these religious ‘hags’. Every threat had been levelled at them and every cruelty inflicted so as to make them renounce their faith by signing on the dotted line. To break their unity, the women had even been split up among different blocks, but they had immediately begun to try converting others to their faith, so they’d been moved back together again. And as punishment they were given the hated Käthe Knoll as their Blockova, a feared green triangle who was said to have murdered her mother. But still the forms lay stacked and unsigned in Langefeld’s office.
Langefeld herself seemed unperturbed; in most respects these respectable German housewives were model prisoners who caused her no trouble. Perhaps it was precisely because they were ‘model German housewives’ that Koegel found them harder to show his teeth to than the communists, the Jews, the Slavs and the whores—and this is what drove him mad.
Nor was the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ protest insignificant. In the autumn of 1939 they made up more than half of the women in the camp, and Koegel had called for more powers to restrain them, demanding a bigger, more permanent prison building. Now that war had begun, Ravensbrück should be equipped with the same secure cell block as the male camps.
In the autumn of 1939 he finally received permission for the new prison, and male prisoners from Sachsenhausen were brought in to build it, though Koegel saw to it that the Jehovah’s Witnesses helped them. Constructed out of stone on two levels, one sunk deep into the ground, it would have seventy-eight cells, replacing the wooden structure where Hanna Sturm was still incarcerated.
