by Sarah Helm
Chapter 5
Stalin’s Gift
In February 1940 a train from Moscow pulled to a halt on the Soviet side of the Brest-Litovsk Bridge on the Russian–Polish border. Figures climbed down the side of a coach, feet feeling for icy rungs. One by one they jumped the last long gap, thumping down onto snow. Twenty-four passengers in all, including two women, stood staring across the bridge into Poland, wondering what was to happen to them.
The group were Germans, all former communists, released from Stalin’s Gulag and now being handed back by Stalin to Hitler. The bridge they stood on had already given its name to many a treacherous pact, as over the years Germany and Russia had fought over Poland. These men and women were a gift to Hitler, this time as part of the Nazi–Soviet pact.
One of the two women was thirty-nine-year-old Margarete Buber-Neumann, widow of Heinz Neumann, once a leading light of German communism, now dead—a victim of Stalin’s purges.*1 During the 1930s Neumann, like others amongst the German communist elite, spent time in Moscow. Grete, his wife, also a true believer, followed her husband there in 1933. After staying in the famous Hotel Lux, where foreign communists—including Olga Benario—gathered to pay homage at Stalin’s court, the couple left for Spain to start a communist newspaper but instead became entangled in the lethal internecine power games between the German Communist Party and Moscow. Neumann displeased Stalin in ways that he never understood. Like millions of others he was declared an enemy of the people and on return to Moscow was arrested and shot in 1937 after a show trial. A year later Grete was also arrested and sent to hard labour at Karaganda, a Soviet concentration camp in the Kazak Steppe.
Her husband’s execution, and two years in the Gulag, brought Grete low. Before leaving for the border, she and the others spent time in Moscow, where they were restored to a semblance of health in case the Nazis should get the wrong idea about their treatment. But nothing could restore her faith in communism. She returned to her native Germany a bitter woman, disgusted by Stalin and dreading what the return home would bring. The Nazis were certain to punish her for high treason committed during her years as an active communist.
The prisoners were taken off by a German escort and packed into the back of a truck, which headed for the Polish city of Lublin, 170 kilometres southwest, where they were held for a few days in Lublin Castle, in the heart of the old city. Here from the windows Grete could see the marks of the first six months of war. Much of the city had been reduced to rubble, and under the orders of Odilo Globocnik, Himmler’s police chief in Lublin, Jews were being herded past the castle towards an area that would become their ghetto.
Inside the castle prison, Grete heard from fellow prisoners—nuns, students, professors, doctors—of the wider Nazi terror, and she met Polish communists, who still hoped to escape east to Moscow in the belief that this offered salvation. She tried to disabuse them of their faith in Stalin, but as she spoke ‘their faces turned to stone’.
Grete was moved on west to the Gestapo jail in Alexanderplatz, Berlin. Known as ‘the Alex’, it functioned as a clearing house for prisoners bound for concentration camps. Each night the women talked about ‘the KZ’ and when they might be going. On Fridays a list was read out of those being sent the next day. One Friday a Jewish doctor called Jacoby heard her name was on the list. That night she hanged herself from a water cistern, but she was discovered and cut down. The next day she was sent to Ravensbrück.
Here in the Alex Grete met a young German communist called Lotte Henschel, for whom Soviet Russia was still the land of hope. Lotte asked Grete about her experiences there, and when she had heard Grete out, she sat on the mattress beside her and wept. ‘What have we got to live for now?’ she asked.
On Friday 1 August 1940 Grete heard her name called on the KZ list, and the next day she left for Ravensbrück. Fifty women travelled on Grete’s transport, but only two made any impression. One, whom Grete took to be a prostitute, declared she was only going for re-education and would be out in three months. The other was a Jehovah’s Witness, who looked like a schoolteacher and who prayed constantly.
They arrived at Fürstenberg station in the mid-morning. Dogs growled as the women were piled into trucks and taken to Ravensbrück. Grete stared with fascination and dread at the Nazi camp, which she instantly compared with what she had known at Karaganda. The high wire, the guards, the shouting—the Russians had yelled ‘Davai, Davai’ and the Germans shouted ‘Raus, Raus’—were familiar. But as she came closer differences emerged.
The Nazi camp was tiny by comparison. When Grete arrived it stood at about 4000 women; Karaganda alone held 35,000. Her memory of Siberia would always be of winter, the time of year she left it—a vast, grey, freezing encampment, where armies of prisoners, mostly men, toiled on the Kazak Steppe under a steel grey sky.
When Grete reached Ravensbrück it was early August and the German camp was into its second summer; outside the gates the limpid water of the Schwedtsee was lapping against the reeds in a warm summer breeze. Once inside, she noticed to her astonishment beds of bright red flowers; ahead lay a kind of street lined with sixteen wooden blocks, all of them painted, and beside each block stood a small sapling.
The paths near the gate were covered with sand, which was freshly raked in intricate patterns. To the left, near a watchtower, was an aviary. Peacocks stalked slowly around and a parrot squawked. At Karaganda there were no flowers or green lawns, but this was eerier somehow, and for a few moments all was silent.
Yells and shouts broke out again as a column of prisoners came by and Grete saw German camp inmates for the first time: not the shuffling ramshackle figures—men mixed with women—of the Gulag, but women in orderly ranks, each wearing a clean white kerchief bound round her head, with striped dress and dark blue apron. ‘Left, right. Left, right. Heads up. Arms by your side. Line up.’ Their faces were impassive. They all appeared identical. A siren howled. Now women came marching in columns of five from all sides. Some carried spades on shoulders, and what most astonished her was that they were singing ‘silly marching songs’. It was all very Prussian, and Grete knew about Prussian ways, having been brought up in Potsdam.
Further on, she noticed more and more ‘Prussian thoroughness’. The new arrivals’ details were registered, files stamped, dossiers checked and double-checked. Some of the women shouting orders were wearing the same striped clothes and were obviously prisoners. In the Gulag too prisoners had been co-opted to do much of the work. Grete had got used to seeing Russians in those roles—they were called the ‘brigadiers’ and were usually men. To see women, German women, as ‘brigadiers’, shouting orders at other prisoners, ‘some with evident relish’, shocked her.
Even the woman now searching Grete’s head and pubic hair for lice was a prisoner, a Jehovah’s Witness. Meticulously the woman probed, brandishing cutters, but found nothing and Grete was spared the razor. The shower attendants wore white overalls and they too were prisoners.
In the Soviet camp distinctions were made between political and criminal prisoners. Here the inmates were divided into many categories, as Grete discovered when she saw the small coloured triangles. As a political prisoner, she received a red triangle with the number 4208.
After the shower Grete stood before a camp doctor, who slapped his leather-booted calves with a riding whip. Dr Sonntag, a recent arrival, picked Grete out from the line. ‘Why are you here?’ he demanded. ‘Political,’ she said. ‘Bolshevist shrew,’ he snapped. ‘Get back in line.’ Soon Grete was wearing the clothes she had seen the marchers in: striped dress, blue apron, white headscarf. No shoes were worn in the summer and her group walked barefoot over the sharp gravel to Block 16, the reception block. With the other fifty newcomers, Grete waited outside it, rubbing the soles of her feet to dislodge sharp flints.
Beyond the huts she saw the high camp wall and counted five lines of barbed wire. The midday sun reflected off a blackboard with a skull and crossbones painted in yellow. Earlier that day a Gypsy
woman had run into the wire, she heard. ‘You’ll see where later. When they pulled her body away her fingers were torn off and they’re still there.’
A guttural voice yelled names in an accent Grete recognised as Swabian.*2 The woman was Blockova of Grete’s block. She was another political prisoner with a red triangle and a green armband too. Grete found her repulsive; someone said her name was Minna Rupp.
Inside the block rows of women were knitting grey socks. Because of the growing numbers, new arrivals were held separate while their registration was completed, and as they waited they knitted soldiers’ socks. The hut ‘seemed like a palace’ compared with the clay huts in the Gulag. There Grete walked into the steppe when nature called; here there were proper lavatories and basins, as well as furniture—stools, a table and lockers. The new prisoners were each given their mess kit—mug, spoon and bowl—and two woollen blankets, a white sheet and a long, blue and white striped nightdress. They were told the rules about washing, eating and folding.
Later Grete learned from other inmates about the many more rules enforced by Minna Rupp. Rupp treated a scratch on a prisoner’s mess tin as sabotage, and would report the offender, who might get a thrashing or a spell in the bunker. Women must not smile at each other or shake hands, or they’d be sent outside for ‘standing punishment’.
The Blockova even checked the way the women put on underclothes, in case they had tried to stuff paper inside for warmth. No one must visit the toilet at night and there must be absolute silence at all times. But nothing mattered more to Minna Rupp than making the bed. A crinkle in the blanket meant the whole of Sunday was spent making beds as punishment. Repeat offenders got the Strafblock or the bunker and twenty-five lashes, and Minna Rupp knew the terror of this herself after being sent to the Strafblock for stealing half a carrot. She was later thrashed as well.
Grete’s friends in the newcomers’ block were mostly Poles, resourceful women, many of them teachers. They’d been here some weeks already and had learned a great deal about how to cope. One of them, a music teacher, showed Grete the trick for bed-making. She used a stick to square the mattress off, so that Rupp could not complain. They all loathed Rupp. Until recently only asocials and criminals had held these prisoner posts, but there had recently been a coup, Grete learned, and now communists like Rupp held the jobs too.
As the days passed, Grete watched out for the communists. She probably knew some of them of old and dreaded meeting them. Like the other communists she’d met since leaving Russia, none of them would want to hear what she had to say about Stalin. They wouldn’t like the fact that she’d been brought here from Moscow. They’d be suspicious.
After just a week the showdown came. Grete was sitting knitting socks when a group of prisoners wearing red armlets came into the block and called her name out. One was Minna Rupp. The trio took Grete into the sleeping quarters, where normally no prisoner was allowed in the daytime, and their interrogation began.
‘You were arrested in Moscow? Why?’
Grete realised this was a political interrogation on behalf of the communists in the camp. She answered frankly, telling the story of Stalin’s persecution.
‘All right,’ said Minna Rupp. ‘You’re a Trotskyist, that’s what you are.’ By this, Rupp meant that Grete was a traitor to the true Stalinist cause. From that moment on she was blackballed. Grete had once again been branded an enemy of the people, this time by her former German comrades, now fellow prisoners in a Nazi concentration camp.
—
The communist coup that ousted the green- and the black-triangle prisoners from their Kapo jobs was a major turning point in the early life of the camp. It took place some time in the spring of 1940. Until then the SS practice of selecting asocials and criminals as Kapos had continued; the appointment in November of Olga Benario as Blockova was an exception. Then early in the New Year the political prisoners took a deliberate decision to try to displace the ‘greens’ and ‘blacks’. They had several reasons.
In January 1940 a skeletal figure came hobbling out of the camp bunker and saw sky above her. Hanna Sturm, the Austrian carpenter, and one of the communist stalwarts, had been released after six months in solitary confinement. She had lived in darkness, on starvation rations, and very nearly died.
Back in her block, Hanna was able to relate to her comrades the horror of the bunker, and how she’d been given up for dead. In the freezing winter months she had fallen sick. She couldn’t eat and grew so weak that she just lay on the ground. One day she overheard Zimmer outside the cell door saying, ‘She may as well kick the bucket in there,’ but Hanna ‘didn’t want to do Zimmer that favour’. She forced herself to chew on her bread. Spitting out the solid, she managed to swallow enough of the goo that remained to slowly build up strength.
One Sunday a friendly guard called Lena was on duty. Hanna knew that ‘Lenchen’, as she called her affectionately, was kind because she’d met her once before coming to the bunker. On that occasion the two had gone to repair a window in the commandant’s villa, and Lenchen said to Hanna: ‘See how well the SS live here, and we work hard and earn a pittance.’
Now Lenchen opened Hanna’s cell door and said: ‘Oh, so you’re in here. You’re looking pretty bad, what’s up?’
‘I’m sick, very sick,’ said Hanna.
‘How can I help? In here you’re going to die, that’s for sure.’
Lenchen fetched Hanna food as well as medicine, and the next day she even brought a doctor in to see her—a doctor who was only in the camp a short time. The doctor said Hanna was probably suffering from typhus. Her strength crept back, however, and, suddenly, at the end of January 1940 Koegel came to her cell.
‘Do you want to go back to your block again?’ he demanded.
‘Yes sir,’ responded Hanna.
‘Well out you go. But I’m warning you—I don’t want to hear of you again.’ Hanna’s release delighted her comrades, but the sight of this once strong Austrian now reduced to skin and bone was further evidence of the plight they were all in.
Since Hanna’s confinement many other communist comrades had been brought to breaking point. One had thrown herself on the wire, and the official beatings on the Bock had spread a new despair. A woman called Irma von Strachwich was locked in the bunker for shouting ‘Heil Österreich!’ When she continued to shout, she was given fifty lashes and died. Soon everyone seemed to know a prisoner who’d been thrashed. Ira Berner, another German communist, said: ‘I’ve seen women whose skin was one big bloody mass so that they couldn’t sit down for weeks. Many had damaged kidneys and other injuries.’
It was the ‘unofficial’ beating of the Austrian communist Susi Benesch that caused the deepest shock of all. Rosemarie von Luenink, another German political prisoner, saw what happened:
At that time we had to unload bricks from a ship. Benesch was so weak that she couldn’t carry the stones any more and she collapsed. Rabenstein hauled her up by force, placed the stone on her shoulder again, and then she collapsed for the last time. Rabenstein thereupon lifted up the stone herself and smashed it down on Benesch’s head. Benesch died instantly and we saw how the blood streamed down from her mouth and her tongue hung out.
After Susi’s murder the communists’ morale plunged, and Käthe Rentmeister, one of the old hands, led a move to restore their pride. She called the faithful to her bunk in Block 1 and they discussed what to do. All had served long terms in prison before the camp. They’d cut their teeth in the 1920s at trade union and communist youth meetings, in the corridors of the Reichstag or at Red Help committees. Most had husbands, brothers, fathers in the camps. Käthe Rentmeister’s brother was in Sachsenhausen—he was one of those sent to build Ravensbrück. Maria Wiedmaier was the hardest of all. She’d worked for the secret service of the party and organised strikes in Holland and France. In 1935 the Gestapo told her the man she loved was dead. Maria refused to believe them so they took her to a cemetery and exhumed his corpse for her to see, then locked her
up.
The women agreed that Koegel had all but crushed them and there was no defence against the SS, but they could surely defend themselves against the likes of Margot Kaiser, the Lagerschreck, and her green- and black-triangle criminal Kapos. Each one of those here had at some point been sold out to the SS by one of Kaiser’s ‘bandits’. The red-triangle political women couldn’t even meet without being betrayed by Kaiser, while the asocial and criminal ‘filth’ stole from fellow prisoners and enjoyed privileges denied to the rest.
If the communists could somehow procure these Kapo jobs their lives might improve. It was not impossible, especially as there was reason to believe they might have Johanna Langefeld on their side. Langefeld had recently agreed to the women’s pleas that the political prisoners should all live together, here in Block 1. The Oberaufseherin appeared to approve of the way they kept order, and one or two of their leading figures had won her confidence. Everyone knew that Langefeld was fighting her own war with the SS. She needed new allies, even among the prisoners.
Some argued against doing the work of the fascist SS, but others said that the Jewish block had transformed since Olga Benario had taken the Blockova’s job. The Jewish women held their heads higher now, organised poetry readings, and the Jews were even talking of staging a play.
If the communists didn’t grab some power, others would beat them to it. The Czechs had jobs and Langefeld was even favouring certain Poles. Maria Wiedmaier was in touch with Olga, who was urging them to go ahead; it was their duty, as communists, to survive. Maria said they should try to get jobs not only in the blocks but in the kitchen and the offices so that they could gather information, work undercover. Like Olga, Maria was Moscow-trained and hadn’t forgotten how to infiltrate—she would never forget, as her later Stasi file shows.
