Ravensbruck

by Sarah Helm

  The ‘stop’ order on the euthanasia murders that Hitler put out in the summer was never what it seemed. The killing of handicapped German adults in the sanatoria gas chambers was largely halted, but only to appease the Church, and ‘euthanasia’ went on at other institutions by other means, usually lethal injection. Children were poisoned or starved.

  Meanwhile, Himmler was able to take up spare capacity in the T4 sanatorium gas chambers and use it for useless mouths from his camps. By November 1941 Dr Mennecke, the T4 doctor who selected the first 14f13 prisoners at Sachsenhausen, had received new orders to proceed to Ravensbrück. He arrived at the camp amid great secrecy, but we know that the date was 19 November 1941, because it is the date of his first letter to his wife, sent from Fürstenberg. He’d travelled by train, there were fleas in his hotel bed, the walk to the camp was a long one, and it was foggy.

  Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Mennecke, the son of a stonecutter, was born near Hanover in 1904. At the outbreak of the First World War he was ten, and waved goodbye to his father, who even at forty-two was called up to the front. Three years later Friedrich saw his father return home, severely wounded and badly shell-shocked. Disabled and broken, he died at fifty, leaving an impoverished wife and two children.

  On finishing school Friedrich was unable to go on to university, instead taking work as a commercial traveller. Only later, with help from other relatives, did he pursue his medical ambitions. A second-rate student, but a committed Nazi, he specialised in psychiatry and in 1939 became director of Eichberg State Mental Hospital, where he met and married Eva Wehlan, a medical technician ten years his junior. In February 1940, during the launch of the T4 euthanasia programme, he was asked to attend a conference in Berlin. He and ten to twelve other doctors were required to select ‘lives not worth living’ in mental asylums. As all the others ‘unhesitatingly agreed’ to do the work, so too did Mennecke.

  When in 1941 the T4 work was extended to include the concentration camps, with its new code 14f13, his skills were called on again. There is reason to believe that for Ravensbrück secrecy was particularly tight, perhaps because Himmler still feared that gassing women on German soil might be a step too far and would need special camouflage. Not only was Mennecke himself instructed never to mention that he was working at Ravensbrück, but the name of the camp was even omitted from SS paperwork relating to the new 14f13 programme.

  An official Nazi document dated 10 December 1941, one of the few 14f13 papers to survive, contains instructions to SS commandants about how and when selections for gassings are to proceed. It is addressed to the commandants at Dachau, Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, Mauthausen, Auschwitz, Flossenbürg, Gross-Rosen, Neuengamme and Niederhagen. The letter states that ‘medical commissioners will shortly visit the above-named camps for the purpose of examining prisoners’; further visits would take place during the first half of January 1942.

  The letter goes on to give detailed information about how camp doctors should carry out preselections ahead of the medical commission’s visit. A specimen form is enclosed ‘to be completed at this stage’.

  The omission of Ravensbrück from the list of camps addressed is doubly extraordinary given that by this date one visit by ‘medical commissioners’ had already taken place there, and another was about to begin. It must therefore be assumed that for secrecy’s sake, the information and the enclosure were passed to Max Koegel by hand at an earlier date, by one of the camp inspectorate staff. This intense secrecy caused confusion at Ravensbrück, and obscured the true course of events after the war. Even today many details of this early phase of the Nazi genocide would be undocumented, had it not been for the fact that Dr Friedrich Mennecke recorded in minute detail what happened in letters—sometimes two a day—written to his wife.

  —

  Mennecke’s first letter from Ravensbrück (addressed ‘Fürstenberg in Mecklenburg, Wednesday November 19th 1941, 7h 15 p.m.’) sets the tone. As if actually talking to Eva—and he will be talking to her, literally, any moment—he starts:

  My dearest Mummy!

  I just arranged for the phone conversation, I wonder: will it be happening soon? I’ll tell you everything on the phone, but at least for the sake of completeness, I write you this letter as well. I ordered roast venison for dinner, but will now first drink a toast to you. Cheers! There is such heavy fog today, you can’t see for a hundred metres. The Tommies won’t be able to attack in this weather.

  He recounts his day, which started in Berlin at Tiergartenstrasse 4, where he had breakfast with the bosses, including Doctors Paul Nitsche and Werner Heyde, ‘who were very, very friendly’ and ‘send you their greetings’. Nitsche and Heyde also briefed Mennecke on future plans, telling him that he’d be going to Buchenwald after Ravensbrück, and after that he was booked for Gross-Rosen, a men’s concentration camp further east. ‘This will take about fourteen days, because in a KZ you can finish 70–80 a day,’ he tells Eva, referring to the remarkable speed with which gassing victims could be selected at the camps, as compared with the hospitals and asylums where he has worked before.

  Mennecke set off to start his work in Ravensbrück. Before he caught his train he ate bratwurst, ‘50 grams meat’ (a reference to meal vouchers), with potatoes and cabbage. At Fürstenberg he went first to his hotel, then to the camp.

  On entering the main gate Mennecke was introduced to Koegel, who told him there were only 259 prisoners to examine, which meant ‘only two days for two men’; Mennecke’s colleague Curt Schmalenbach was to join him, though Mennecke was obviously irked at this—‘I can do it all on my own.’ Mennecke tells Eva that if he gets finished by Saturday he’ll go straight to his next stop at Weimar, which means Buchenwald. ‘There seem to be more there,’ he says, meaning more prisoners, ‘so we’ll be working in a threesome.’

  ‘I had coffee with the “Adju” [the adjutant]—in the officers’ mess—and we discussed our work schedule [the selections] and had a beer.’ Koegel recommended that Mennecke change hotels because of the bugs and so he moved to a better one, though in the nearby café ‘there are many disgusting soldiers’.

  Signing off—apparently the phone call had now happened—Mennecke mentions the offensive in the East: ‘Let’s hope we’ll advance quickly. People here reckon the war will be over next summer. Hopefully. You go to bed and sweet dreams, sweet dreams. Most heartfelt kisses, lots, lots, lots, from your faithful Fritz Pa.’

  On Thursday 21 November, Mennecke starts his first day’s work at Ravensbrück. The same obsessive details pour out to Eva as he writes a timed running commentary: ‘I’m sitting down for lunch of lentil soup with bacon, omelette for dessert.’ In this letter we learn a little more about his work. He has had a meeting with the SS doctor Sonntag and SS Sturmbannführer Koegel, in which ‘it became clear that the number of people in question [i.e. to be killed] needed to be expanded by another sixty or seventy’. Sonntag had evidently interpreted the criteria for a useless mouth too narrowly, an error that Mennecke must now put right by increasing the numbers, which is a nuisance—he’ll have to stay on until Monday.

  Nevertheless, Mennecke is happy with how things are going, which is ‘swimmingly’—not least because he doesn’t have to do much at all. Sonntag brings in the ‘pats’ (patients) and briefs him on their behaviour, ‘so it runs flawlessly’. All he has to do is fill in boxes on the forms: ‘The headings on the forms are already typed and I just have to fill in the diagnoses, main symptoms and so on.’ And Mennecke is glad to say that, after a call to Dr Heyde in Berlin, he has seen off Schmalenbach, who won’t be coming after all.

  After lunch came a pleasant walk with Koegel and Sonntag—‘we visited the cattle sheds’—and later he joined Sonntag again for dinner in the officers’ mess, which was three kinds of sausage. Before turning in, he writes: ‘I’ll go for a little walk now, mailing this letter, so that it’s delivered tonight. I hope you’re as well as me. I feel wonderful. Take more heartfelt kisslets from your lordling and embrace your faith
ful Fritz-Pa.’

  As the days pass Mennecke’s letters pile up, along with the ever grosser details of his meals, carousing, free vouchers, travel arrangements, hotel rooms, black market dealings and other minutiae, mixed in with his descriptions of signing women off for death. The reason for these running commentaries may derive from a sense of historic mission. Some of the letters contain phrases like ‘He who writes lives’ or ‘They [the letters] should bear witness to these greatest of all times’. The letters certainly show with what ease he was able to blank the backdrop of the camp from his view: after two years ticking boxes to authorise his ‘mercy killings’, Mennecke was so accustomed to his own atrocities that he could no longer even see the ‘pats’.

  Sometimes he calls them ‘portions’. He certainly never refers to them as women. We know he was capable of insulting women, as in one letter he calls his sister-in-law a Bolshevik because she ‘boozes and whores a lot’, but the ‘pats’ excite no such reaction, and when he has filled in their details they simply become ‘sheets’ to be handed in, on time, to Berlin. Nor does Eva show any interest in the ‘pats’. In her replies to ‘my dear Fritz Pah’, Eva asks ‘how much did you get done today’ or ‘when will you be done with it?’ and chats about her own meals and the mice upstairs.

  —

  Though Mennecke barely noticed the ‘pats’, the ‘pats’ had been carefully watching Mennecke. On the evening of his arrival, Emmy Handke, in the Revier, was asked to produce the files of all patients. ‘We had to get out all the personal files of the Jews, the professional criminals, the incurably ill and those with syphilis.’ Over the next few days, groups of these women were taken to the bathhouse, where Dr Mennecke sat holding a pen at a table piled high with forms while Dr Sonntag stood by him.

  Each woman was ordered to strip and walk past him naked. Emmy learned later that he had asked some of them questions: ‘For example, to the Jews, he said: “Are you married?” and “Do you have children from this union?” etc.’ Another Schreibstube secretary, Maria Adamska, heard that the women had to parade naked in front of the commission at a distance of perhaps seven yards. There was no real medical examination.

  According to Emmy the women with syphilis and the prostitutes were in the first group. Others said it was all those with genetic defects and the incurably sick amongst the Jews who went first. All agreed that the first women to be called were those on Sonntag’s lists.

  Soon there was a new alarm: prisoners observed that the names of those called out were no longer confined to women on Sonntag’s lists. Healthy women from the Jewish blocks were asked to parade before the commission, among them Käthe Leichter and Olga Benario. Sonntag had never shown an interest in such women. Käthe reported back to Rosa Jochmann:

  She said a lot of Jewish women from Block 11 had to stand naked along a 500-metre line before the doctors. But the doctors didn’t really look at them. And there was one doctor who came up to Käthe and said to her: ‘Frau Dr Leichter, what is your qualification?’ and she answered: ‘Philosophy and political economics.’ And the answer from the doctor was: ‘You will need your philosophy.’

  Jehovah’s Witnesses came next. Some were taken to the bathhouse straight from beatings on the Bock. The commission also started examining women with suspected lung disease from the camp hospital; the Berlin doctors told them they were ‘going away for treatment’. To the horror of the communist group, Lotte Henschel, Tilde Klose and Lina Bertram were told to parade—the same three comrades who had been promised release on the grounds that they had TB. Everyone who was sick seemed at risk of selection.

  Clara Rupp, who was working in the Revier by that time, was so terrified that she couldn’t sleep. ‘We noticed that anyone sent to the hospital for anything at all was suddenly diagnosed with some genetic disease or perhaps tuberculosis.’ Usually this was a fabrication. ‘In order to get rid of as many people from the camp as possible the authorities raised the number of sick people by any means. We understood at once that this was a fraud, and warned our comrades not to go to the Revier.’

  Some of the SS nurses seemed to understand too. One said to Clara: ‘ “When these transports get rolling the camp will be empty soon.” We asked her what she meant and she replied: “I can’t tell you the truth but I don’t want to lie to you.” ’

  The asocials sensed a new horror. No longer were black triangles being listed because they had syphilis or gonorrhoea; the selections were being used as a means of random punishment too. For example, those who had agreed to do beating for Max Koegel were spared selection by the commission, but Else Krug, the Düsseldorf prostitute who had refused Koegel’s order to beat Jehovah’s Witnesses, was now called up. As she paraded naked before Friedrich Mennecke, Koegel’s warning—‘You’ll have cause to remember me’—must have rung in Else’s ears.

  —

  The first that Mennecke knew of the expanded selection criteria was when, much to his annoyance, his T4 colleague Schmalenbach turned up to muscle in on the job after all. Worse still, he brought another T4 colleague, a Dr Meyer, their presence explained by the new instructions they brought: the number of prisoners to be selected was now 2000—more than six times Mennecke’s original target of 320. Even Mennecke was taken aback by the new quota, telling Eva: ‘We will have more to do here than was foreseen: about 2000 forms!’

  His surprise—astonishment, even—is telling; after two years as a loyal cog in the T4 machine even Mennecke could see that he was being taken for a ride. Throughout the ‘euthanasia’ gassing programme he had dutifully made his diagnoses of lives not worth living according to the criteria, but those criteria had changed. Not only had he been shifted to select concentration camp prisoners, instead of the handicapped in sanatoria that he was used to, but the guidelines stating which prisoners to choose were now being expanded every few days.

  From the moment he arrived, the numbers Mennecke was told to target had begun to rise, at first from 259 to 328—almost certainly on Himmler’s own orders. Calculating that—like his murdering soldiers in Russia—Mennecke would by now be ‘accustomed to his own atrocities’, Himmler then upped the figure to 2000.

  Given that there were 6544 prisoners in the camp at the time, the new target meant that nearly one third of Ravensbrück women were to be ‘mercifully killed’. Mennecke now saw that his diagnoses were a waste of time: the numbers were fixed in Berlin, and this annoyed him. Berlin didn’t care how the ‘sheets’ were chosen, he moaned to Eva. It was ‘chaos’, he complained. ‘Who is in charge in Berlin?’

  Nevertheless, Mennecke buckled down. He and Schmalenbach and Meyer were quick to get on with the work, starting a competition to see who could fill the most ‘sheets’. Mennecke told Eva the other two ‘finished only twenty-two forms by 11 a.m. while I myself had done 56 by noon’. At least they could save time by simply waving the Jewish ‘pats’ through. Here too there were new instructions. Not only had the target been raised, but the three doctors had orders from Berlin not to bother with examinations of Jewish prisoners, as Mennecke confirmed at his post-war trial.

  Charged in 1947 at the Nuremberg Medical Trials, held in Frankfurt, Mennecke gave evidence that was almost as frank as his missives to his wife. He detailed, for example, how in November 1941 he was suddenly instructed to select prisoners on ‘political and racial grounds’ in addition to the ‘medical’ grounds invoked for ‘mercy killing’. From that moment on Jews were not medically examined but just added to the selection list for being Jews. The court sentenced Mennecke to hang, but he died in his cell. His wife had visited him two days earlier, and it was widely held that she passed her ‘Fritz Pa’ the means to kill himself.

  The night before Mennecke left Ravensbrück for his next assignment at Buchenwald he took the time to dine with Dr Sonntag’s wife, Gerda. He wrote to Eva that evening telling her they had enjoyed beef cabbage and potatoes in the officers’ mess. This was followed by a dinner of meat, bread and tea and lastly two pieces of cake in the market café, b
efore bed. Reminding Eva that he was leaving the next day, he said it was up to the camp staff themselves to find the outstanding 1500 ‘pats’. It had not been possible for him to complete the job, not least because Berlin had called Schmalenbach and Meyer away again before the work was done.

  The forms already signed by Mennecke had been sent back to Berlin with his notes. Attached were photographs of each prisoner, with scribbled remarks on the back, as if to remind him who was who. A handful of these photographs survived, and the scribbles suggest, contrary to the impression of his letters, that sometimes he did take an interest in the ‘pats’. On one photograph he noted: ‘Anna Sara Jewish, Czech, Marxist functionary, has a ferocious hatred of Germany, had relations with the English ambassador.’ On another: ‘Charlotte Sara born in Breslau, divorced, Jewish, Catholic, nurse, tried to disguise Jewish origins and wears a Catholic cross.’

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  After the medical commission left Ravensbrück, the prisoners faced other fears. In November 1941 three more Poles were shot, a mother and her two daughters, and four more Polish executions followed in early December. The shots rang out across the camp and soon afterwards the bloodied clothes appeared in the Effektenkammer.

  Every woman in the camp wondered if she would survive the winter. Those on the outside work gangs found their limbs swollen black with frostbite. In a letter to Carlos in December Olga wrote: ‘I only wish that with the necessary strength of mind and physical condition I will be able to go through the winter that is approaching. The question is only whether this will be my last.’

  All news from the front suggested the war was going to go on and on, a prospect that filled everyone with despair. Out east the Red Army was holding the line at Rostov, Moscow and Stalingrad, and on 7 December America joined the war, following the attack on Pearl Harbor that day by Japan.

  The women in the Jewish block already had reason to fear the longer war. In October 1941 Hitler had ordered the deportation of all German Jews; trains for the East were leaving from Hamburg and Berlin. Letters to Jewish prisoners talked of whole families disappearing. And with news of the Jewish deportations came the announcement that no more German Jews could emigrate, sponsored or not. For Olga this meant that release to Mexico or anywhere else was now a pipe dream.