Ravensbruck

by Sarah Helm

  Sometimes an example was made of someone. Lydia Rybalchenko, another of the Red Army women, was taken one day to an underground cellar, dug out under one of the brick barracks. The cellar had room for just two people to stand and was filled with water. Lydia was left standing with water up to her neck for several hours, but still she refused to talk and was pulled out. ‘She told us there were rats swimming near her eyes,’ said Valentina.

  At this time Ramdohr was not only investigating sabotage at Barth; at the subcamp of Genthin a young Red Army woman called Vera Vanchenko, an intelligence officer, had been spoiling bullets meant for German guns. Vera had worked out how to insert the bullet ignition into the cartridge case upside down, and had shown every woman on her shift how to do the same. Once the dud cartridges had been passed to the next room, where the bullet head was pressed on top, it was impossible to see that any sabotage had been carried out. What Vera did not know was that spot checks were to be carried out on the ammunition before it left the plant. The batch chosen for the checks was theirs, and when every one of the bullets failed, Vera was identified as the ringleader and taken back to Ravensbrück for interrogation by Ramdohr.

  According to a prisoner in the next cell, she was taken ten times for interrogation. Each time she refused to give names and each time was returned with more broken bones. The final time every bone in both her hands had been broken. Then Vera Vanchenko was hanged. After the Genthin case an order went out that all saboteurs were to be hanged. Now Yevgenia Klemm sent another note warning the women not to risk their lives.

  At Barth, Ramdohr recruited more spies. Guards were ever harder to recruit, but spies came cheap and were the best defence against sabotage or slack work. A senior official in Albert Speer’s armaments ministry believed there were other ways to make women work. ‘Psychology, this is the secret,’ said Karl Saur. ‘These women…must first understand that there is no hope at all of liberation. Then out of pure boredom and despair they will turn to work.’ At Barth, however, the absence of hope had led thirteen women to attempt escape, and several others died on the wire.

  In Barth it was Blondine’s Spitzel that caused the most despair. It wasn’t long before the guard with ‘big hair’ was appointed to run Ramdohr’s network there. Everyone knew she was recruiting her own informers right inside the blocks, so women felt there was no place they could feel secure. In the Russian block the hated German Blockova Julie Wolk worked for Blondine, which was dangerous, says Valentina, ‘because Wolk watched everything we did. Instruments used for sabotage—bent knives, old screws—now had to be hidden more carefully. No planning could be done inside the block itself.’

  It worked like this, says Valentina. ‘Wolk also began to pick off prisoners as her spies in the block. Everyone knew when this happened because a girl would be called away by Wolk and taken into Blondine’s room. When the girl returned her behaviour would be different. Things had obviously been said that scared her, and from then on she’d keep her distance from us.’ At least five were recruited in this way, including one or two Red Army girls, and there could have been more. ‘But this just made us want to sabotage more.’

  Whenever Ramdohr appeared in person everyone suspected a tip-off from Blondine. Always raging about sabotage, he would assemble the workers and demand that those responsible own up. If nobody confessed he threatened to pick out the ringleaders himself and throw them in the cellar or shoot them there and then. On one occasion nobody confessed and they all stood there expecting one of Blondine’s spies to walk out and pick someone out, but instead a woman called Vera Sintsova, who had nothing to do with the sabotage, stepped forward and confessed to it all. It was suicide, and Ramdohr shot her in front of everyone with a single bullet to the back of the head.

  Soon the prisoners opened up ‘a second front’, says Valentina, who talks as if she was fighting some kind of insurgency behind the lines. The new resistance effort was run from inside the infirmary at Barth, which was quickly filling up with prisoners suffering from diarrhoea, scabies, dysentery and typhus. The Soviet doctors—Maria Klyugman, Tamara Tschajalo and others—had no medicines to use. Young Russians and Ukrainians with TB would convulse with coughing spasms, but all that Klyugman and Tschajalo could do was hold out jam jars as they spat blood. Other prisoners were brought in injured by Allied bombs that had fallen close to the plant.

  Gradually the doctors found the means to smuggle in medicines by making contacts with civilians and with prisoners of war in nearby camps, and by getting messages to the main camp asking for medicines to be sent with prisoners on the next incoming truck. Trucks were taking prisoners back and forth almost daily now. Managers were always complaining that the infirmary was overflowing and the sick weren’t replaced fast enough. Then Blondine would come into the infirmary and choose the ones to go. ‘This one, this one,’ she would say, and would tell them they were going to a rest camp. Nobody believed her: the word from Ravensbrück was that when the sick got back they were sent off again to be gassed at Auschwitz or some other place. The Red Army doctors tried to smuggle women out of the Revier, or swap women at the last minute, ‘but they knew spies were watching all the time’.

  Valentina’s story had reached a period near the end of the war when the Red Army front was drawing close, planes were flying overhead and the prisoners had more reason for hope than ever. Together she and Lyusya Malygina began to distribute leaflets around the camp telling the prisoners that victory was near. In the final weeks civilians were often more willing to help, she says, by smuggling in paper and pencils for example. ‘We now knew we were going to win, it was just a matter of time.’ Ramdohr soon learned about the leaflets and appeared at the camp again in another rage. No one confessed, though many were close to breaking point.

  Then Zina Avidowa, one of the doctors, could stand no more and ran into the wire. Valentina was taken by surprise. It was so near the end. Zina was thirty-five years old and a mother of three. Her eldest son was in the army. ‘Zina’s patriotism was so strong,’ says Valentina.

  But then she started behaving strangely. One day she just couldn’t work in the hangar any more. She said: ‘My children and family are in Leningrad. I can’t make weapons that will kill them.’

  We had been holding her back. We persuaded her to be calm. We thought she had taken our advice and that she would not kill herself. Then the next day we were standing there and the siren started up and just as everybody started to go to the barracks she ran towards the fence. The fence was seventeen metres from the barracks and was electrified. We were never supposed to go within ten metres of it. We all saw it happen. Everyone was running after her. She shouted back at us…

  Valentina’s voice trails off. ‘Zina Avidowa was not the only one,’ she says.

  Almost every day people were throwing themselves on to the fence because it was so hard for a person to cope with the pressure. Everyone had their breaking point. She had been quite normal. She even shouted goodbye. She was left on the fence all night. We all saw her on the fence at the morning Appell. Still there. Then after we were taken to work, they took the body away.

  I asked Valentina what Yevgenia Lazarevna thought of these suicides. ‘She was against it of course,’ she replied. ‘We discussed it many times before we left. She would say we should never do it in any circumstances. She sent more notes saying suicide shows our weakness to the enemy.’

  The women redoubled their defiance. One day they managed to smuggle in some red fabric and made a red flag, which they hung from a block. This time, when Ramdohr came, he erected gallows in the camp square and strung two nooses up. He picked out Valentina and Lyusya Malygina and took them to the dark cellar where they were locked up with the rats and the water level rising around them.

  ‘We were sitting there I don’t know how long,’ says Valentina, who becomes hard to follow at this point. ‘It was very dark. There were things coming towards us.’ Then she halts and starts talking about other things, about her youth and her patriot
ism, and I have to ask her what happened next, but no answer comes at first. Other prisoners’ accounts describe how when these two were taken away to the cellar the rest were told that no one was to eat until Valentina and Malygina confessed. Everyone saw the gallows being erected and feared the worst.

  Then Valentina starts talking again and says that she and Lyusya were taken from the cellar to the camp infirmary, where they were looked after by their friends Tamara Tschajalo and Maria Klyugman. She doesn’t explain at first what it was that brought about their release, but then she says an American bomb dropped nearby, injuring scores of people. Doctors were needed in the hospital, so she and Lyusya were released and told to help the injured. The gallows with two nooses were removed.

  Valentina’s story becomes confused. She says Lyusya was given an important job in the camp after these events; she was made the top Blockova. I ask Valentina if it is true that Lyusya Malygina became an informer for Blondine, an accusation I had read in post-war papers, found in the Russian archives.

  ‘I never believed that,’ says Valentina. ‘They gave her an important job in the camp and they hoped to get information out of her. But she was a loyal person. Malygina was never a traitor. I knew her as I knew myself. She was a beautiful girl with big dark brown eyes.’

  —

  Some time later, after meeting Valentina, I came upon Blondine’s version. Blondine was in fact Ilse Hermann, one of the impressionable, home-sick Agfa factory girls seen arriving at the camp by Lotte Silbermann, the canteen waitress. It was Hermann who asked Lotte to write her marriage ads.

  Immediately after the war Hermann, like countless other women guards, had escaped arrest and by the 1950s was living safely in East Germany, behind the Iron Curtain. By the early 1960s she must have thought she had got off scot-free, only to be arrested by the Stasi, the East German secret police, who had begun their own Nazi war crimes investigations and trials, fifteen years after the end of the war.

  Scornful of the paltry number of convictions secured by the West, the East German trials were partly devised to score a Cold War propaganda coup against the ‘fascists’, but also to bring to account some of the thousands of Nazi war criminals who by then were hiding out in the East.

  After charging Hermann with crimes against humanity, the Stasi inquisitors questioned her about Ramdohr’s Spitzeltätigkeit, spying activities. Fifty pages of interrogation with the Agfa factory girl painted a chilling portrait of how an ordinary young woman was snatched from her job threading film, then won over with chocolates into terrorising women prisoners in a backwater of the Nazi hell called Barth. After hearing Valentina’s account, Blondine’s had a special power to shock, as it mirrored what Valentina had said almost every step of the way.

  It is not clear exactly when Ludwig Ramdohr began to court Hermann’s attention, but probably when she was about to be sacked for bad behaviour at another subcamp. She feared going back to the Agfa factory, and told her Stasi interrogator that Ramdohr was very nice to her. He gave her a cigarette and chocolates, and this surprised her because she’d heard what a brute he was from others.

  When he asked her to spy on the prisoners at Barth she immediately agreed. She was told that the Soviet women needed to be ‘stamped out for causing the war’. Ramdohr’s first concern was about the sabotage going on in the Heinkel factory; he suspected the Red Army women were masterminding it, but he needed proof. Hermann told her interrogators how she went to Barth and quickly recruited helpers—her two roommates, as well as a German communist called Julie Wolk.

  It was simple to pick off informers from amongst these worn-out prisoners. ‘I didn’t have to pay them,’ she said. Likely recruits were invited to Blondine’s room, where Wolk, who spoke Russian, did the talking. Blondine also watched other guards and the SS themselves. ‘I had to keep my eyes open and I had to watch who sat next to who in the canteen.’ She made reports and sent them back to Ramdohr by post. Ramdohr had given Hermann a cover name, which had a capital letter and a number. Everything was to be ‘top-secret’. He would then come down and punish the culprits, though Hermann said she didn’t know how.

  From the reports of his spies, Ramdohr learned that the resistance at Barth was being masterminded in the camp hospital. Maria Klyugman and others were trying to smuggle medicines in, and to swap the numbers of sick prisoners selected to go back to the main camp with the numbers of those already dead. Blondine’s task was to report on this too, based on what her spy in the hospital told her.*2 She knew where these trucks were going because she had the job of selecting the ‘finished’ women. And she knew they were gas-chamber fodder or Belsen fodder, as she put it—‘I knew that the women returning were going for extermination.’

  Hermann’s account shows just how effective the Red Army’s ‘insurgency’ in Barth was becoming. It was certainly worrying Ramdohr, so he told Blondine to recruit more spies. Her interrogators asked her to identify informers, suggesting names such as Klava, Hawa, Shura and Vlaja, but she couldn’t remember them.

  Before long it became clear to Blondine and Ramdohr that the prisoners were getting information about the advancing Soviet front. Somehow they were spreading leaflets giving news of how close the Red Army was. ‘He said the Bolshevik influence was taking over the whole camp.’ Now Blondine secured new informers whom she met ‘in a cinema’, and more chocolates arrived from Ramdohr.

  Hermann’s interrogators reverted again to establishing the identities of her informers. They produced statements for her to read, made by the former Red Army prisoners at Barth, including Maria Klyugman, Tamara Tschajalo and Valentina Samoilova herself. The statements, taken in Moscow and sent on to the East Germans, were intended to help in their investigation, and were included in Blondine’s Stasi file.

  At one point, according to the interrogation transcript, part of Valentina’s evidence was read out to Hermann. She was told that Samoilova had made a statement in which she ‘agreed that she herself was recruited as an “agent provocateur” at Barth and that she, Samoilova, had also suggested recruiting Lyusya Malygina, who was also at Barth. The informers were offered better food in return for their services.’ In this statement, Valentina twice named Lyusya Malygina as one of the Gestapo informers. ‘I believe a Soviet woman…Lyusya Malygina, did work for the Germans,’ said Valentina’s statement, as read out to Blondine.

  These revelations in the Stasi documents were unsettling, especially as they contradicted everything that Samoilova had said about Lyusya Malygina. ‘Malygina was never a traitor, I knew her as I knew myself,’ she had told me. One explanation was that the testimony of the former prisoners was manipulated by the Stasi to support a pre-fixed case. Another was that both Valentina and Lyusya Malygina were so terrorised by Ramdohr, particularly as he erected the gallows, that in the very last weeks of the war, even these two strong spirits had indeed turned informer.

  Further revelations in Hermann’s file gave the story another twist. When the former guard was shown photographs of Lyusya Malygina and asked if she remembered her as an informer, Hermann said that she didn’t remember Malygina at all. She was asked several times whether Malygina was one of those who agreed to collude, but again denied knowing her. However, when shown Valentina’s photograph, Hermann at once volunteered the information that Samoilova herself ‘might have been the prisoner “Valya” ’—one of her informers at Barth.

  In our meeting I had asked Valentina if she was interrogated about collaboration with the fascists after the war, and she told me she was, though she was never charged. ‘They could see I had the scars, so they couldn’t accuse me of being a coward,’ she said. ‘Look: I have only one breast, you can see for yourself. I proved with my blood that I was innocent.’ She pointed to her breast, and the wound she had received at Stalingrad. Then she left the room, and returned carrying a box spilling over with medals, awarded to her by Stalin after the war.

  After reading Hermann’s testimony I contacted Valentina once more and asked how she could ex
plain it. She said again that she recalled being interrogated by Germans in the 1960s but had never spoken against Malygina. The statements were written down in German, which she could not understand, and had therefore been unable to verify.

  All these years later, it is impossible to establish exactly what lay behind the allegations on Blondine’s file. Yet the essence of the Barth story seems clear. On the outer periphery of Himmler’s empire, cut off from Yevgenia Lazarevna Klemm, the Red Army’s circle had fallen apart. At Barth the strongest spirits were broken, many by hunger, disease and despair, others by Ludwig Ramdohr and Blondine.

  But the story did not end there. When Stalin’s secret police set out after the war to accuse Soviet prisoners returning from Nazi camps of ‘collaboration with the fascists’, they probed and blackmailed survivors in every way they could, trying to turn them against one another. In interviews with survivors I came across scores of examples of such intimidation—of friends being pressured into betraying friends and of survivors who had been accused, tried, sent to Siberia and, in at least one case, shot.

  Of these cases the most notorious centred on the so-called doctors’ trial at Simferopol in the Crimea.

  Exactly what evidence first led to the Simferopol charges will probably never be known. Requests to Russian archives for the official trial transcripts remained unanswered. However, thanks to the letter that Maria Klyugman wrote in 1959 to Antonina Nikiforova we have a rare insight into how Stalin’s courts worked and of the tragedies caused.

  Charged at Simferopol with Maria Klyugman were Lyusya Malygina, Anna Fedchenko, Valentina Chechko and Lena Malachova, all Red Army doctors and nurses at the camp. Maria’s letter begins by giving a bare account of her own story.

  ‘I was born in 1910 in Cernigov, then my parents moved to Kiev. I came from a big family. In 1931 I went to the medical institute in Kiev.’ She describes her medical career, her work at the front as a surgeon, her capture and her experience of Ravensbrück, where, along with several others, after some months she worked as a doctor in the Revier at the main camp and at Barth. After the war she worked again in Kiev and Moscow as a doctor, until in 1949 she was arrested by the Interior Ministry and taken to jail in Simferopol to face trial at the Military Tribunal of Tavrich Eskoje.