by Sarah Helm
The Revier women certainly enjoyed a certain protection under Treite; after the SS staff had left the Revier for the day the prisoner staff might even find a chance to meet and talk. One such discussion took place in the early autumn of 1943, when according to the Czech communist Synka Suskova, a bitter row broke out involving Milena. ‘The conversation turned to sharing news from the war outside and guessing whether the Americans or the Soviets would reach the camp first, and which country offered people a better future.’ Synka recalled two Poles—non-communists—‘saying they expected freedom from the Americans, while we Czechs saw freedom being given to us by the Soviet Union’.
Pela [one of the Poles] said, ‘For us Poles, Hitler is better than Stalin,’ to which Hanka Housková replied, ‘But that’s incredible,’ and we all agreed and protested. ‘Who annexed Europe and murders and exterminates everywhere he goes? How could you say something like that here, when you can see so clearly what Hitler is?’ Then we started shouting, as we were enraged, when Milena got up and separated us. She was pale, and evidently sickening again. ‘Enough. Stop it,’ she said. ‘If the Oberschwester and the doctors hear there will be trouble.’
And someone else then said: ‘Milena, how can you talk like that? Is that the most important thing?’ Milena said: ‘Here and now it is,’ and she spoke matter-of-factly. Hanka then said to her: ‘Milena, you can’t remain neutral. You must say which side you are on. You can’t stand in the middle.’
‘Oh,’ said Milena, quietly. The older partner, she was trying to calm the young Hanka down. ‘Side? Side? Why do you have to be one or other side of the barricade? No, Hanichka. You don’t understand a thing.’ But Hanka didn’t want to be quietened and ran out into the corridor, shouting: ‘I don’t understand! What is it I don’t understand? It’s you I don’t understand. Milena, I don’t understand you. Who do you belong to? Which side are you on? Tell me. Tell us. Who do you belong to?’
Lyuba Konnikova had always known exactly which side she was on. Whatever changes Treite might have made for the good, Lyuba saw only the mounting horrors; if the Revier had been reorganised to save lives, why were patients in some wards left to die? So crammed were the patients in the dysentery ward that those on the upper level, too sick to move, had to lie in their own excrement until it flowed onto those below.
Lyuba was not the only one to be revolted by what she saw in Treite’s Revier. Maria Klyugman had seen different horrors. As a skilled surgeon she was given dog bites and battered flesh to mend. Women beaten on the Bock were brought in with burst kidneys or haemorrhaging. Treite, however, was never in the Revier to sew up these beaten women because he had attended the beating: like his predecessors, one of his duties was to take the victim’s pulse and tell the SS officer how many more lashes the woman could stand.
During the course of 1943 the manner of the beatings worsened and a new sort of Bock was introduced. Women were put in special rubber pants in case they urinated and told to lie face-down on the table, which was indented like a trough, edged with wooden rods, and had iron stirrups for the legs, placed below knee level. Two inmates, usually green or black triangles, put the woman into the stirrups and fastened a leather belt that went around her shoulder blades. As the beating began they held on to the rubber pants, pulling tight as an SS man or another prisoner beat her with a leather riding whip. Near the end of the beating the woman would always pass out. Then the green triangles would lift her off the contraption and push her through the door where others were waiting their turn, fainting and urinating in terror.
The new beating procedures would all have been approved by Himmler. In evidence later the camp staff all said that Himmler insisted on approving every individual beating and the manner in which it was done. A document unearthed in the papers of the SS Administration Headquarters by war crimes investigators in 1945, entitled ‘Flogging of Female Prisoners’, showed this to be the case. It confirmed a verbal order issued by Himmler in July 1942 stating that ‘orders for punishing female prisoners should be reported to him for approval’. The orders ‘must be numbered in red pencil in the right hand top corner consecutively’. In order ‘to save time’ Himmler also wanted the names and numbers of each woman to be flogged printed on a separate list, so he could notify his approval of the flogging by referring just to a number. In 1942 the flogging was to be done ‘with strokes to follow quickly after each other with a single-lash leather whip, the strokes being counted. Undressing and baring of certain parts of the body is strictly forbidden.’ From the evidence of Maria Klyugman in the Revier and countless flogging victims, by 1943 Himmler had updated the procedures, ordering that the beating should be done on bare buttocks.
While Maria was kept busy sewing up her patients, Lyusya Malygina, a gynaecologist, had the job of assisting with abortions carried out on the Bettpolitischen and of examining the women selected to work in brothels at the male camps. Before they left she checked them for syphilis and was told to improve their appearance, by dyeing their hair and disguising their sores.
Nor was it only the Russian doctors who recoiled at what they saw in the Revier. Zdenka Nedvedova was increasingly revolted by Treite’s experiments, with which she had to help. One day Treite told Zdenka to collect cockroaches, found scuttling around the Revier, which she had to boil up and then feed the juices three times a day to patients suffering from swollen legs. The experiment was pointless and dangerous, and when Treite wasn’t looking Zdenka would pour the liquid away and serve up water instead.
In another experiment Zdenka had to collect the urine of pregnant women and inject it into another group of pregnant women, but this time Treite caught her cheating. He raged and shouted, and threatened to send her to the bunker with twenty-five lashes, but Zdenka stood her ground, saying that as a student at Charles University she had been trained to have respect for patients. Treite relented, ‘perhaps because he was taken aback by my fearlessness’, she said, though she realised it was more likely that to report her would have disclosed his secret scientific work to the camp authorities. It was clear to Zdenka that Treite’s operations and experiments were mostly done with a view to his professorship at Berlin University and he certainly didn’t want Ramdohr to find out.
The prisoners all knew that Treite was terrified of the Gestapo chief. When Ramdohr demanded narcotics to help with his interrogations, Treite had strongly disapproved—or so he said—but was too great a coward to refuse.
Sylvia Salvesen was also increasingly horrified by Treite’s Revier. Not long after her arrival she saw inside the Idiotenstübchen—or ‘madhouse’. It was perhaps as a result of Himmler’s April order that only the insane should in future be selected for death—or, as he put it, ‘selected in the context of operation 14f13’—that Treite had decided to set aside a special room for the ‘mad’. Perhaps it was also part of Treite’s attempt at reorganisation, given the growing number of ‘idiots’. When, periodically, trucks came secretly to take them away, it was practical to have all the women in one place.
In any event, Sylvia and other prisoner staff, sleeping in the Revier, were often woken by the screams that came from the room, which was at the side of the mortuary; it had a stone floor and was without beds or bedding. Another prisoner doctor, a German woman called Dr Curt—‘a pitiless brute’—was responsible for the women and when the screaming broke out would go in and sedate them. On one such night Dr Curt called on Sylvia to help.
‘Armed with a broom handle, she went off,’ said Sylvia, who asked her what she was going to do with the broom handle but was told to shut up. Dr Curt was back a few moments later, saying: ‘The lunatics have run wild’, and she asked Sylvia and another prisoner nurse to go back into the room with her.
We opened the door and I shall never forget the sight that met my eyes. Six women—if they can be called women—were fighting hand to hand. There were two mattresses full of excrement and dishes of old food on the floor. The women were practically skeletons, wearing only dirty vests with sores
and bruises all over their bodies. A lovely young girl, a Russian peasant, with fair plaits, sat terrified in a corner screaming. It was her howls that had woken us. She sat there like a fair, hysterical Madonna.
Sylvia had seen the girl before, because Dr Curt had thrown her in there two days earlier, insisting that she was insane. In fact, she had tried to kill herself with a knife in the bathhouse soon after arrival, and had first been sent to the ordinary Revier. There she had started singing in bed one night, so Dr Curt threw her into ‘this unbearable hole’.
Seeing the Russian girl again, screaming in that horrible little room, sent Dr Curt wild, and she attacked her with the broom handle until blood flowed from her nose and mouth. I tried to get hold of the broom handle but was given such a bang on my neck I almost fainted. Eventually Dr Curt got hold of the Russian girl and pushed in the syringe. She rushed out, and tried to slam the door in my face. I think she meant to lock me in with the lunatics.
It was the offer of SS payments in return for their work that finally convinced Lyuba Konnikova that she, for one, could no longer tolerate the camp hospital. In the second half of 1943 the SS began offering a few Pfennings to the hospital prisoner staff to encourage them to work harder. Already the French and Poles were refusing the payments, and when the Red Army doctors learned that they were to be bribed too, Lyuba stormed out of the Revier saying she would refuse to take it.
The Red Army doctors had always been uneasy about their hospital work. Although they took some comfort in the fact that they were not making enemy munitions, it was clear that their skills were being exploited to keep the enemy’s munitions workers alive and now they were being paid to do it. Most other Red Army doctors and nurses then also refused the bribes, and Yevgenia Lazarevna supported them, saying: ‘Girls, we must show the fascists we can’t be bought by their marks.’
When news of the Soviet refusal reached Ramdohr, he ordered that they be punished, and the punishment he chose was to send them to subcamps and force them to make German arms. Lyuba Konnikova was the first to be sent, but on reaching the subcamp of Genthin, where women helped make ammunition, Lyuba refused to do it. She was kept in a dark cell for two weeks and then brought back to Ravensbrück, where she was beaten on the Bock and tortured by Ramdohr, but still she refused to work on munitions, so she was shut in the Strafblock.
Yevgenia Lazarevna Klemm was told the news by her contacts and informed the Soviet women at their Sunday meeting in the block. Several of the women remembered what she said:
Today we have learned that our friend Lyuba has received twenty-five lashes. Never before have prisoners of war, doctors above all, been ordered to work in war factories, working against their own country, forced to work towards the death of their brothers. Today they have given this punishment to a Soviet doctor, a prisoner, who courageously refused to make arms for the enemy. Our Lyuba, our comrade.
Klemm then proposed that the block send a letter to Lyuba, to be smuggled into the Strafblock, along with a poem composed for her by the poet Alexandra Sokova. There was quiet applause.
* * *
*1 Selma was Jewish, and on joining the Dutch resistance took on the name and identity of Margareta van der Kuit, a non-Jewish baby who had died at birth. The number of Jewish prisoners at Ravensbrück who never revealed their true identity cannot be known, but probably runs into the hundreds.
*2 In fact, mass sterilisation experiments had been due to start at Ravensbrück in the summer of 1942. On 10 July 1942 Rudolf Brandt, on behalf of Himmler, wrote an officially secret letter to Carl Clauberg, the sterilisation expert, asking him to go to Ravensbrück ‘to perform sterilisation of Jewesses according to your method’. Clauberg didn’t come, however, choosing to experiment (for the time being) at Auschwitz instead.
Chapter 19
Breaking the Circle
From the moment he arrived at Ravensbrück, Ludwig Ramdohr had developed his own style of terror. The camp Gestapo officer liked to work alone, and had little to do with other members of the SS. Though nominally an SS officer, he rarely wore the uniform, preferring a dark flannel suit. He interrogated prisoners in his office and any torture that he wished to carry out was done there, perhaps after the regular SS beating, which happened in the bunker nearby.
Ramdohr’s job was to make people talk. He carried a leather strap, made to his own specifications, which he used to thrash women across the face. He also forced prisoners to lie stomach down on a table, then with the woman’s head hanging over one edge, he would grab her hair and plunge her head into a bucket of water until she nearly drowned, repeating the action several times.
If a woman still refused to talk he might have her fold her hands while pencils were inserted between the fingers. Then he would press down on her hands so hard that the fingers broke, if she didn’t pass out first. He kept his favourite torture devices under lock and key, including a coffin with closing ventilation holes and claws—metal teeth of some kind—that penetrated the body.
More often though he simply used his leather whip, and if she still remained silent he resorted to beating the woman with his bare hands and thrashing her head against his office wall. Ojcumiła Falkowska, the Polish dancer, said even Binz looked shocked on one occasion at the amount of blood on Ramdohr’s walls, saying such beatings were not authorised by the commandant. Ramdohr didn’t care what the commandant thought; he was answerable only to his Gestapo bosses in Berlin. In fact Ramdohr was loathed almost as much by other SS as by the prisoners: when first appointed to Ravensbrück he was told to uncover corruption amongst the staff, particularly the wholesale looting in the fur workshop. Ramdohr also claimed credit for exposing the ‘appalling conditions’, as he put it, in the Revier.*1
Ludwig Ramdohr had not always been a committed National Socialist. Born in 1909 in the central German city of Kassel, he first joined the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) rather than the Nazi Party, and his career began with a regular police investigation unit, not Himmler’s SS elite.
As a boy Ludwig had apparently never shown signs of cruelty. Petitioning for clemency after Ramdohr was sentenced to death, his friends and family claimed he was squeamish about causing animals pain. ‘When he buried his mother-in-law’s canary he tenderly put the little bird in a box, covered it with a rose and buried it near a rose bush,’ said a family friend. The judge had no time for such petitions. He had heard evidence that the adult Ramdohr liked to lock defenceless women in underground boxes—especially dungeons filled with water and crawling with rats.
Ramdohr’s speciality, however, and surely his most valuable weapon, was his personal network of camp spies.
Spies had never been hard to recruit. An extra slice of bread, or a better job, and women could be found who would tell Ramdohr anything he wanted—true or not. Those who worked well were given chocolates or other delicacies stolen from the prisoners’ parcels. His favourites might gain a fur coat—especially if they granted him sexual favours too.
Once recruited, the new Lagerspitzel stayed on Ramdohr’s books or faced the torture table herself. One woman was so badly beaten after trying to escape his clutches that she slit her throat, and was saved by Dr Treite. Any women beaten by Ramdohr came under instant suspicion as spies themselves. After the war allegations spilled out about who had worked for him. At his trial he claimed to have created a shadow ‘political movement’ in the camp, to destabilise and trick those movements that already existed, like the communists.
In the second half of 1943 Ramdohr was at the height of his powers. Inside the main camp he claimed to have fifty to eighty spies, and was recruiting in the new subcamps too. The sheer size of the camp meant that Ramdohr’s intelligence was needed as never before, simply to maintain control. Furthermore, as munitions work became more important spies were needed to report on saboteurs.
As part of their contracts, the factory managers insisted that the SS provide not only healthy workers but reliable ones too. Making munitions, they could do far more harm th
an just spoiling soldiers’ clothes: they could tamper with ammunition, botch fuses or fit triggers the wrong way. At the Siemens plant workers had been ruining spools by cutting the fine wires, or misplacing orders for new parts. There were particular fears about women in this regard. ‘It is not easy to control women because they are better deceivers than men, and because when they escape they are better at hiding and finding ways of surviving on their wits undetected,’ said one manager.
Such concerns were exacerbated by the growing lack of good women guards. As the camp expanded, and its satellite network grew, recruitment drives were carried out, but most new female guards were conscripts. ‘They were very young, impressionable, and very poor, and many pleaded to be sent home as soon as they arrived, though mostly they adapted and stayed on,’ recalled Grete Buber-Neumann. According to Lotte Silbermann, the SS canteen waitress, one group, conscripted from the production line at Filmfabrik Agfa in Wolfen, seemed particularly ill-suited to the work.
These recruits arrived with their clothes in a terrible state. They had to wait with us in the canteen while their new uniforms were fetched, and as they waited they often behaved worse than the worst street prostitute. I had to stand and watch while one of these new guards, who was going to be in charge of us, lay on the table and was given the full treatment by an SS officer.
