by Sarah Helm
At that moment the guard, Erich, came into the sewing room and read out Zofia’s number and told her to go out. Zofia stood up on trembling legs and looked at me piteously, and with a sad smile, threw the little mirror on the table and went up to the guard. As she was going out she forgot to take off the cotton slippers that belonged to the sewing room, for which the guard kicked her on the legs.
Grażyna also knew what was to happen. The night before, friends had got word from contacts in the Schreibstube that she might be called at morning roll call. Grażyna herself was on the night shift, so when she was sleeping, her Lublin friend Janina Iwańska went through her clothes and hiding places searching for scraps of paper on which her poems were written, so if she was searched she would be ‘clean’—and also to save the poems. Two days earlier she had written her ‘Sunflower’ poem; it was the ‘scream of unbearable longing we all felt’, said Wanda Wojtasik.
Grażyna had had a premonition, said Wanda. ‘She had been telling her friends that she was soon to die.’ Wanda recalls that most of the girls ‘refused to believe the worst—but not Grażyna’.
‘Why Grażyna?’ I asked.
‘Grażyna was different. She always thought she was about to die. She was one of those who had very little will to live.’
What is most puzzling, perhaps, about the 18 April summons is why the camp’s old-timers—the Poles and others who had seen it all before—didn’t appear to know what would happen. And if they did—as they surely must have—why they didn’t say.
By this time all camp veterans, especially those working in the offices, knew that Sondertransport and Sonderbehandlung were Nazi euphemisms for killing. At least five Polish women had been executed at the camp already, and as the veterans knew, by identical procedures. In each of these cases a special courier had arrived by Berlin the day before to deliver the order for execution into the hands of the commandant. And in each case, elaborate camouflage was used to make the women think they were to be freed, or sent to another camp.
Perhaps these veteran Poles were protecting the younger women from what they knew for fear of frightening them. They may simply not have known what to say, as there was nothing they could do. In any case, well before 18 April all the signs that a mass execution was about to happen must have been there for the old hands to see. So large were the numbers this time that a special execution squad had been formed, among them Artur Conrad. In the SS canteen Conrad had even been boasting he’d get extra food.
In case of any lingering doubt, a special courier arrived from Berlin the day before to deliver the execution order to the commandant with a list of fifteen names. As Maria Adamska, the Polish office worker, herself admitted, from now on any suggestion that the girls were going to another camp was an ‘elaborate charade’. But it was one that the whole camp was forced to watch, and in which several prisoners played a part.
The Effektenkammer women’s part was to collect the girls’ clothes, so that everyone could pretend they were going home, and yet there was no order to return their luggage, as would happen if they were really going home. The women in the kitchen were ordered to make food for the journey home, but the tiny amounts they prepared wouldn’t do for a journey; they were sent to the bunker instead.
The bunker chief Dorothea Binz, along with her prisoner assistants—three Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Polish dancer Ojcumiła Falkowska—were waiting at the bunker entrance to receive the women. Ojcumiła, who had worked until recently in the SS canteen, had been sent to the bunker for smuggling bread, but instead of being locked up had been hired by Binz as her interpreter. Ojcumiła said later that as soon as she set eyes on her Polish comrades at the bunker door she knew what was going to happen to them. ‘I knew they were going to be shot when they appeared in civilian clothes without luggage.’
But even Ojcumiła resisted giving any warning to the girls, probably because she was strictly watched by Binz, but also because she too wouldn’t have known what to say. Instead, she played her part in the charade by following Binz’s instructions, showing the women to their cells and giving them a lunch of the usual soup.
Then the ‘formalities’ began, as Ojcumiła put it. Binz checked the women’s identities and read the death sentence, Ojcumiła translated. ‘After lunch a lorry came and I and the Jehovah’s Witnesses had to load the lorries with the right number of coffins.’ Ojcumiła explained that at this time there was still one coffin per person but, to economise, later there would be two bodies per coffin.
The Lagerführer [commandant] came with an employee of the political department and the head of the bunker, and with my assistance as interpreter, a final check of identity was made. The Lagerführer all the time held all the papers he had firmly in his hand. From where I stood I could see papers for every prisoner, sometimes with photographs.
Throughout the afternoon the women were kept in their cell, while the rest of the camp continued the usual routines. At 4 p.m. coffee arrived for the prisoners, but before they received it Dorothea Binz went into an outer room alone and prepared some sort of potion. Ojcumiła saw her through a door as she mixed it in the coffee.
Ojcumiła was given the job of serving the girls the spiked coffee and was told to encourage them to drink. ‘I tried to find out what the liquid was. It was transparent and had no smell. I couldn’t read the label on the bottle.’ On a later occasion, when Binz mixed the dose for another group, Ojcumiła plucked up the courage to ask what it was. ‘Since Binz trusted me by now, she said it was a tranquilliser. She told me that before they used the tranquilliser prisoners had shouted slogans and protests as they faced the execution squad.’
Once the coffee was drunk, things moved like clockwork. At 5 p.m. a police van drove up. The convicted, as Ojcumiła described them, were drowsy by now and had to be led to the van. Here Ojcumiła’s account concludes, as she and the three Jehovah’s Witnesses were locked in a cell and could see no more. But when she emerged from the cell, she did see the women’s coats, handbags and shoes, which had been left behind. ‘So my conclusion was that they were taken away with bare feet.’
This fact was certainly borne out by other witnesses. Although the SS had tried hard to hide the women during the day some prisoners caught a glimpse as they were led away. According to Grete Buber-Neumann, shortly before evening roll call, orders went out for the Lagerstrasse to be completely cleared. All the prisoners were ordered back to their blocks, with doors closed, and no one allowed by the windows. But women working in the hospital and the kitchen observed the Polish women being led out from the bunker and across the camp square, barefoot and in dresses, ‘like medieval penitents’.
Then, as they left the camp gates, some of the women ‘turned and waved cheerfully, in the hope that some of their friends could see them’. Wanda Wojtasik, who was also in a position to see, did not recall the waving but did see Pola Chrostowska, Grażyna’s sister, look back towards the blocks: ‘Pola pointed a finger up to the sky.’
The actual place of death was kept secret, though there are clues. The guard Ella Pietsch, working in the headquarters building, remembered that as she was chatting at the end of her shift with her friend, another guard, Grete Hofbauer, ‘a truck carrying prisoners together with SS guards in steel helmets and carrying rifles went by the window’. The truck went along by the lake. ‘Hofbauer said that the prisoners were going to be shot.’
At his trial, one of the SS officers, Heinrich Peters, said he was ordered to assemble a squad of men for an execution about this time, and recalled that the women were taken to the spot in a closed car. Peters said the women were tied to a stake and shot. He drew a sketch showing a sandy area in the woods outside the wall towards the rear of the camp.
In any event the shooting was within earshot of the camp. We know this because we know what happened in the finale of the ‘charade’, as Maria Adamska described it. In fact, Maria herself tells us what happened next.
Although the Lagerstrasse had been cleared while the wo
men were led away, shortly after the evening siren the prisoners were ordered onto it again for evening roll call. ‘At 6 p.m. roll call the prisoners heard a volley of shots. Then nine single revolver shots rang out.’
Grete Buber-Neumann confirmed the sequence of events. ‘We stood there in our thousands and waited as usual. Everything was silent. And suddenly, from the other side of the wall, sounded a rattle of shots, followed, a second or two later, by several single shots.’
Grete, who was standing with the German political prisoners, was in a position to observe the Polish prisoners. ‘Opposite us stood the women of the Polish block, their lips moving in silent prayer. The camp walls caught the evening sun as usual, and a host of crows settled down again on the roof of the Kommandantur.’
* * *
*1 Some German prisoners were reportedly paid one Reichsmark a day for their work in the sewing sheds: enough to pay for a little fish paste or perhaps some shrimps, which by then was just about all that was for sale in the prisoner shop.
*2 Stephen Stewart was born Stefan Strauss. He fled Austria for England just before the Anschluss.
*3 Chorążnya also organised to sabotage the knitting, splitting thread so holes would appear in soldiers’ gloves and socks. Maria Bielicka described her as ‘like a little mouse. Sitting there. A very strong little mouse. She organised everything.’
*4 Undercover agents working behind the lines for Allied forces—agents of the British SOE (Special Operations Executive) for example—were also sometimes, though not always, sentenced to death, then sent on to camps.
Chapter 13
Rabbits
On the morning of 27 May 1942, SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, Protector of Bohemia and Moravia and head of Hitler’s security police, took a seat in his open-topped Mercedes-Benz and set out for work at Prague Castle. His driver pulled up at a tram stop, where Jozef Gabčik, a member of the Czech resistance working under the direction of the British Special Operations Executive, stepped out in front of the vehicle and tried to open fire, but his gun jammed.
A second assassin, Jan Kubis, threw a bomb at Heydrich’s vehicle, which blasted through the car’s right fender, embedding shrapnel, glass, wire and fibres from the upholstery into Heydrich’s spleen. Rushed to hospital, he received emergency surgery, carried out by local doctors because Himmler’s top surgeon, Karl Gebhardt, flown out especially, had been unable to get there in time to operate. After the surgery, Heydrich’s condition appeared to stabilise but soon deteriorated.
As his temperature soared, gas gangrene infection spread around his wounds, and produced suppurating black swellings. Gebhardt failed to halt the infection, and despite morphine, Heydrich writhed in agony, dying in acute pain on 4 June. The doctor’s report said the cause of death was lesions in vital organs ‘caused by bacteria and possibly by poisons carried into them by bomb splinters…agglomerating and multiplying’.
Heydrich was a key figure. Hitler sought revenge. German forces were already losing ground on the eastern front; now this attack struck at the heart of the Nazi machine, suggesting vulnerability. Mass execution of suspects started all over the protectorate, but Hitler demanded symbolic sacrifice from the Czechs themselves, and called on the local Gestapo to ‘wade in blood’ as they sought Heydrich’s killer.
On 9 June a false lead led the investigators to believe that the assassin was hiding in a small village fifteen miles from Prague called Lidice. Ten trucks filled with security police rolled into Lidice and every man in the village was rounded up, lined up against a barn wall and shot. All buildings were set alight and razed to the ground, killing those left inside. Surviving women and children were taken to a nearby sports hall where children were parted from mothers, babies torn from their arms and taken away. A few of the children, deemed to show Aryan features, were sent for adoption by Germans, but the rest vanished. A few days later, the 195 Lidice women were loaded onto cattle trucks to be transported west, destination unknown.
The rest of the world learned swiftly of the Lidice atrocity, but nobody heard of the other repercussions of the Heydrich killing, which happened behind the walls of Ravensbrück concentration camp, about 500 kilometres north. In the middle of June prisoners there were astonished by the spectacle of an entire village of terrified and dumbfounded peasant women—young girls, grandmothers, mothers, aunts, neighbours, friends—sitting on the Appellplatz in front of the kitchen.
Vera Housková, a Czech political prisoner, remembered:
They were holding on to their small bundles of belongings, which they’d been allowed to take with them—curtains, a pot of lard. They sat there, terrified, looking at us—striped silhouettes in the distance. They had lost everything—their country, their husbands, their village and their children—though they didn’t know the full truth. They didn’t know why this had happened to them or why they were here. They knew nothing. At least we knew why we were here.
Camp guards had been told that these women were complicit in Heydrich’s death and set about brutalising them in the worst possible manner. One of the Lidice women gave birth in the camp hospital soon after arrival. ‘It was a little boy who arrived in good health and his mother heard the baby and saw him enter the world with a happy face,’ said Vera Housková. ‘A few hours later the doctors announced to the mother that the baby was dead and they brutally beat the mother. She was a mother of ten children, eight of which had already died in the tragedy at Lidice.’
Other events linked Ravensbrück to Heydrich’s death. As the manhunt for the assassin intensified, so the doctors who failed to save Heydrich’s life came in for attack. Hitler accused Karl Gebhardt, director of the Hohenlychen SS clinic, of not making use of a new class of drugs, sulphonamides, when treating Heydrich’s septic wound.
For some months, Germans had been suffering unprecedented casualties on the eastern front, where thousands died of gas gangrene caused when wounds pierced by shrapnel and other debris became infected, just as Heydrich’s had. Whether to use new brands of sulphonamides on soldiers, rather than operate immediately at field hospitals, had been debated fiercely by Nazi doctors for many months, especially as the Allies now had a ‘miracle drug’, a newly formulated type of penicillin that was saving their soldiers’ lives.*1
Gebhardt had studied the science on sulphonamides and was convinced that the drug was no penicillin. Now, as he faced accusations from the Führer of failing to save Heydrich’s life, he came under pressure to change his view. It was Himmler who found a way forward. He ordered Gebhardt to carry out experiments that would test the value of sulphonamides in treating gas gangrene once and for all. The experiments were to be held under the auspices of Ernst Grawitz, SS chief physician and president of the German Red Cross, but Gebhardt was to direct them, and Himmler would provide the guinea pigs: young healthy prisoners from his camps.
By 1942, Himmler had started to see medical experimentation as a key purpose for the concentration camps. Here was a chance to use human guinea pigs, and to achieve bold scientific innovation that the conservative medical profession outside the camps would never envision. To this end Himmler had established his own circle of experts—nature healers, industrialists, fringe medical practitioners—united under the guise of an institute called ‘Ahnenerbe’, ‘Ancestral Heritage’, which raised money to support some of the Reichsführer’s more radical medical projects.
Karl Gebhardt had no interest in Ancestral Heritage or its eccentric ideas. His clinic had an international reputation to uphold. Founded in 1902 by the German Red Cross as a sanatorium for child tuberculosis sufferers (among them the young Dorothea Binz) the Hohenlychen clinic grew into a vast and elegant lakeside health spa, which under Gebhardt had been converted into a centre of medical excellence, specialising in sports medicine and innovative surgery. The clinic came into its own during the 1936 Olympic Games, complete with a swimming pool, sports hall and masseurs. Now the clinic treated Germany’s war wounded, and was favoured by top military and SS men.
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Although Gebhardt had no interest in the gas gangrene experiments, he found it hard to refuse Heinrich Himmler. The two men went back a long way; they had grown up together in Munich, where Gebhardt went to school with Heinrich Himmler’s older brother Gebhard. And nobody could refuse a request from the Reichsführer SS, who had soon provided Gebhardt with his first guinea pigs: a group of male prisoners from Sachsenhausen. The men were brought to Ravensbrück for the tests, as the camp was convenient for Hohenlychen. Cuts were made in their leg muscles, small quantities of bacteria inserted to create infection, and then sulphonamide was introduced and the results examined. The tests proved inconclusive, but Himmler wanted more.*2
Gebhardt, and his deputy, Fritz Fischer, would both assert at the Nuremberg doctors’ trial in 1947 that the idea of using women as the next guinea pigs was nothing to do with them. Gebhardt even claimed that he was ill in bed when the decision was taken to use women. The first he knew of it, he said, was when Fischer came to him in a panic and said ‘contrary to his [Gebhardt’s] stipulations and instructions a woman had been presented for the next tests. What should he do?’
Angered by the news, Gebhardt rushed off at once to consult with Himmler, who happened to be ‘visiting some relations in the neighbourhood’. Himmler told Gebhardt that it was he who had decided women should be used, as the experiments so far had been ‘quite harmless’. Furthermore, the women he had personally selected were ideal for the purpose: healthy young Polish girls from Lublin. And he reassured his old friend by telling him that because these girls were under sentence of death they could be offered a reprieve and freed, in return for undergoing the tests. As Gebhardt told the court, he then ‘gave in’ and ordered the experiments to begin upon the Polish women.
