by Sarah Helm
‘We were accused of helping the fascists liquidate people,’ wrote Maria. ‘I was accused of having injected people with lethal doses of pentothal [an anaesthetic] and of having infected prisoners’ legs with bacteria. Of giving women in the bathroom precious stones to hide in their vaginas.’ For these crimes the tribunal sentenced the women to twenty-five years in a Siberian camp. The trial took sixteen months, and while the women waited the verdict one of them, Lena Malachova, hanged herself in her cell.
Maria then named three of the accusers, all of them comrades from the camp: doctors and nurses. The first of their group arrested—Valentina Chechko—was the first accuser. Under interrogation Chechko ‘started accusing herself and us of having liquidated people’.
Two fellow nurses, Vera Bobkova and Belolipe Tskaya, also testified against them: ‘They came several times to Simferopol as witnesses.’
Maria said she had spoken out against the charges in court: ‘I told Chechko she would have to live with the consequences of making the daughter of Malachova an orphan. For that I had four weeks in solitary confinement. In December 1950 I was taken to a camp near Lake Taischet in the Irkutsk region.’
Red Army survivors today say they know of no good reason why the accusers should have betrayed their comrades who had been so courageous in the camp. Chechko ‘lost her head’ under interrogation. Bobkova was frightened into making false accusations and was under pressure from her husband to say whatever the SMERSh wanted. There is no doubt that many Soviets were jealous of their women doctors and nurses who were deemed to have special privileges in the camp. Antonina’s post-war correspondents occasionally give their views. Tatyana Pignatti wrote of her admiration for Maria Klyugman whom she saw ‘at the operating table in the burning fires of Cernigov’, but she added that in the camp some girls had suspected Klyugman of giving a fatal injection to one of their comrades who was dying from typhus, apparently to release her from the pain. The accusation was not true, wrote Pignatti; the injection was done by an SS nurse—‘but it is so hard to get clear of the mud’. In the camp Klyugman did nothing wrong, ‘but the girls didn’t like her for her pride’.
As for Lyusya Malygina, she and Vera Bobkova had been the best of friends in the camp, ‘but Vera was a witness at the trial and Malygina was convicted’.
Pignatti could make no sense of it, saying to Antonina: ‘You must have seen how a storm brings all the dirt to the shore. Life clears away these people as the sea clears away the dirt.’
* * *
*1 In evidence, Ramdohr said later that Milena Jesenska had come to him and revealed the crimes of Rosenthal and Quernheim including lethal injections and abortions. ‘On searching the sickbay, I myself discovered a human embryo in alcohol which, according to Quernheim’s statement, was her own.’ It was a result of Ramdohr’s investigation that Rosenthal was dismissed and Quernheim put in the bunker.
*2 The spy in the hospital was the Swiss prisoner Carmen Mory, who had by this time been transferred from the main camp—where she had been Blockova of Block 10—to spend the last months of the war as one of Ramdohr’s spies at Barth.
Chapter 20
Black Transport
The ‘glamorous’ woman who appeared at Ravensbrück to visit the Norwegian prisoner Sylvia Salvesen in the late summer of 1943 was a Norwegian student called Wanda Hjort. Blonde, blue-eyed and just twenty-one, Wanda had been visiting Norwegian prisoners at the male concentration camp of Sachsenhausen, near Berlin, for nearly a year. The prisoners there knew her as ‘the potato-cake girl’ because she brought them, home-cooked by her mother, in her backpack.
The idea of a foreigner, especially from an enemy nation, turning up at the gates of a concentration camp to visit prisoners seems beyond belief. No German civilian dared go near, and the International Committee of the Red Cross was banned. The only visitors were German dignitaries, and even they were not allowed past the show block. And the story grows all the more extraordinary in that Wanda was herself a prisoner of the Nazis: she was living in Germany along with her family under a rare form of house arrest.
Wanda’s unusual status came about as a result of her father’s arrest in Norway three years earlier. After German forces invaded and then occupied the country in April 1940, Johan Hjort, an eminent Norwegian lawyer, attacked the legal basis of the occupation. At the time, thousands of Norwegian resisters were being rounded up and sent to concentration camps, but Hjort was taken instead to a German prison from which he was soon released and placed under house arrest.
Hjort had powerful relatives inside Germany. Most influential was his sister’s husband, a man called Rudiger von der Golz, who was Joseph Goebbels’s lawyer. When Hjort was jailed, his brother-in-law struck a deal: Johan Hjort was allowed to live under house arrest, provided his family lived with him. The idea was almost certainly dreamt up by Himmler himself. Through his studies of ancient Germanic customs, the Reichsführer had discovered the practice of Sippenhaft, whereby Germanic tribes made all clan members answer for the crimes of any one of them.
Wanda, charismatic and exceptionally strong-willed, was furious at the news that she was to be imprisoned—albeit only under house arrest—in Nazi Germany. At the time of her father’s arrest she was already working with the resistance, visiting captured Norwegians held in the Nazi camp of Grini, on the mountain slopes outside Oslo. She refused to go to Germany at first, but concern for her father caused her to change her mind, and with her mother, younger brother and sister Wanda went to live at a small estate near Potsdam, called Gross Kreutz. Once in Germany she set about looking for ways to continue her work with prisoners and began to trace the whereabouts of Norwegians held in concentration camps.
Despite the house arrest, and a Gestapo guard, the Hjorts lived with a degree of freedom. As long as she didn’t roam too far, Wanda could take suburban trains. One Friday morning, accompanied by her younger brother, also blue-eyed and blonde, she set off for the closest camp, Sachsenhausen. On reaching the gates, fair curls spilling out under a scarf, she approached a sentry and said in her best school German that she’d like to leave her parcels for the Norwegian prisoners.
‘The sentry was young like me. He looked at me suspiciously and asked me to fill in a form, saying he’d have to ask his boss, but then he gave me a smile and I smiled back.’ The sentry asked Wanda where she was from and she said Gross Kreutz, the name of the estate, which he seemed to hear as Rote Kreutz, or Red Cross. Unaware of any rules saying such visits weren’t allowed, the guard permitted her to leave the packages. She asked if she could return the following week to collect the boxes, and the guards said yes, as they had no rules against that either. From then on Wanda Hjort appeared each Friday at the Sachsenhausen gates.
At each visit she saw abuse heaped on terrorised, skeletal men. They were obviously starving. If there was one thing that must be done for them, she decided, it was to make sure that somehow they received proper Red Cross food parcels.
The Nazis had recently made an apparent concession to the International Red Cross on the question of parcels for prisoners in concentration camps. Himmler agreed in early 1943 that Red Cross food parcels could, in theory, be sent to certain categories of prisoner. The ICRC had even set up a ‘parcels service’, as had the national Swedish, Norwegian and Danish Red Cross societies. However, by the SS rules, the Red Cross were required to have the name, number and camp of each recipient, which had to be printed on the parcels, or else they would not be given out. Furthermore, the recipient must sign a receipt. In a tiny number of cases the Red Cross had these details—perhaps because families had passed them on—but only Himmler’s SS knew who was in which camp, and requests for such information were always refused by Ernst Grawitz, head of the Nazi German Red Cross. That made the ‘parcels service’ almost meaningless from the start.
Wanda Hjort, however, saw a way to make it work. She set about tracing as many Norwegian inmates as she could, in order to build up a database of names and addresses. Word of her vi
sits spread among the Norwegian prisoners in Sachsenhausen, who found ways to smuggle information to her, leaving names and addresses under stones, or whispering in Norwegian as she passed by the wire.
She then began making contact with the prisoners’ families in Norway. The Hjort family was barred from posting letters, and everything was censored, but when Wanda experimented by taking letters to the local post office near Gross Kreutz and asking to post them to Norway, she found the postmistress had no instructions to refuse and they went in the ordinary mail. Soon a flood of letters came back, not only from the families she had contacted, but from others who had heard of her work and were desperate for news of missing men and women; their names were now added to her database.
Wanda also sought out other Scandinavians operating covertly in Germany, including a group of Norwegian pastors working with Norwegian seamen in the port of Hamburg. She gave them the names and numbers she had collected and they passed them to the Norwegian Red Cross, which was now able to send parcels to the prisoners.
All this time Wanda was learning from her contacts at Sachsenhausen of other camps, unknown outside Germany, where other Norwegian nationals had been sent. Ravensbrück kept cropping up, but the women’s camp was not on the suburban lines and by early 1943 the railway tracks around Berlin were often bombed so it was hard for her to reach.
In the summer of 1943 Wanda received a letter from Norway asking if she had come across ‘Aunt Sylvia’. The letter was signed Uncle Harald. It had passed through the censor. At first she was unsure who Uncle Harald might be, but after she spoke to her parents it became clear that he was the Norwegian doctor Harald Salvesen, whose wife, Sylvia, was in Ravensbrück. There was a distant family connection, as the professor’s brother was married to one of Wanda’s many aunts, but Wanda had never met Sylvia or Uncle Harald.
Now she had a new reason to reach Ravensbrück, and resolved to take Sylvia a package. The railway line had reopened. The journey was still risky and long, but Wanda reached Fürstenberg station. She made her way on foot to Ravensbrück, through flurries of snow and icy wind from the Havel River. Near the gates came a now familiar sight: stooping figures in striped clothes, bare feet inside wooden clogs. Knowing that they were women gave Wanda a particular shock. Some were pulling huge road-rollers as guards cracked whips. Others were labouring in fields.
Wanda approached a sentry at the gate, but this was not Sachsenhausen: there were no smiles, and although the package for Sylvia was accepted, Wanda was quickly sent away. But she had to return, and the only way would be to approach her Gestapo minder and say she wished to visit her aunt. She knew it was quite likely that the request would go to Himmler himself, which was hazardous: not only would he probably refuse, but the request itself might draw attention to all her secret work. On the other hand, if it would take her into the women’s camp, Wanda was willing to pull strings, even the Reichsführer’s.
She had requested a favour of Himmler before. Soon after arriving in Germany she had felt so miserable she wrote directly to him asking for permission to be sent home. She received a reply, couched in the politest terms, saying she could return if she agreed to renounce all political activity, but Wanda could not accept and stayed on in Germany. The request to visit her aunt in Ravensbrück, however, was granted.
‘Die Salvesen, nach vorn, aber schnell ’—‘Salvesen, out front, be quick’—was the first Sylvia knew of her visitor. She was given soap and told to wash, then ushered into a room near the commandant’s office. A guard told her to speak in German and not to say a word about conditions in the camp. Before her in the room stood a group of SS officers, and a pretty, well-dressed young woman in civilian clothes.
As Sylvia eyed the SS men, warily expecting their commands, the woman turned towards her. ‘I was looking into a pair of smiling blue eyes, and a young voice said in Norwegian, “Good morning, Aunt Sylvia”,’ at which the guards repeated that they must speak only in German.
Wanda’s main fear was that Sylvia would suspect some sort of trap and deny all knowledge of her. After all, they had never met. She continued, ‘Mother sends her love,’ and saw Sylvia look puzzled, so she explained: ‘Mother has just heard from Aunt Ellen. She’s been to see Uncle Harald, and they’re all well at home.’
The mention of these names led Sylvia to realise that Wanda must be the daughter of Johan Hjort, who was a distant relative. She had heard before her own arrest that he had been put under house arrest in Germany. Seeing that Sylvia didn’t remember her name, and this would look odd to their German minders, Wanda said: ‘My name is Wanda. It’s such a long time since you saw me, Aunt Sylvia, that perhaps you’ve forgotten my name.’
‘Yes, you’ve changed a lot,’ replied Sylvia, who now began to grasp how imperative it was that she convey a sense of what was happening in the camp. Wanda helped by saying: ‘Mother told me to ask whether you needed anything we could send you.’ Sylvia looked nervously at the Germans and said: ‘I don’t know if it would be allowed, but perhaps a pair of pyjamas and some underclothes.’ Wanda explained a little of her own circumstances. When she asked her ‘aunt’ if she was sleeping well, Sylvia said yes, ‘considering I sleep with between four or five hundred other women’. Here the guard said: ‘Nothing about the camp.’
After trying to convey a little more with hints and looks, Sylvia bent down to fix her wooden clogs and whispered, ‘It’s really terrible here,’ but she didn’t know if Wanda heard. As Sylvia left she was horrified to see Ludwig Ramdohr standing behind her, ‘devouring’ Wanda with his eyes. ‘Perhaps she seemed to me younger, purer and more lovely than she really was—but to me she had come as a messenger from a world I had almost forgotten, like a ray of hope in the darkness.’ Then Wanda was shown out and was gone, leaving a parcel with bread and real butter. ‘Never have I tasted anything so delicious,’ recalled Sylvia.
What she learned from Sylvia had been scanty, but Wanda had made a vital contact inside Ravensbrück and soon found out more of other camps. As her own knowledge grew, however, so did her frustration that the world seemed to be ignoring what was happening in the camps. Speaking in her Oslo apartment, she explained:
Nobody who saw what I saw would have been able to ignore it. Each time I went I felt guilty about how little I could do. There was I, well fed and well clothed, watching this terrible suffering. I thought that anybody who actually saw this would surely feel the same. And it was because of that guilt that I kept going back. I am still haunted by what I saw today. And I still feel guilty today.
The only reason I got away with what I did was because I was young and naïve and nobody took me seriously. But then I also realised that because of this I had a responsibility to try and find out everything I could and tell the world.
In the autumn of 1943 Wanda decided to seek help from the Berlin delegation of the International Committee of the Red Cross. Taking the train, she found the committee’s delegation to be housed in a luxurious villa situated in the prosperous suburb of Wannsee.
I rang the bell, quite nervous, thinking they wouldn’t listen to me. But I had to tell them what I’d seen with my own eyes. The Red Cross would have to intervene. That was what I had to say, because it was the truth. In my innocence I felt sure they couldn’t possibly know how terrible it was, or they’d be trying to help and telling the world themselves.
From the earliest days of Nazi rule the Geneva-based International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), guardians of the Geneva Conventions, had been unwilling to act against atrocities in the Nazi concentration camps and opposed even to telling the world what it knew. Members who inspected some of the camps before war broke out were duped into judging conditions as acceptable; others appeared to encourage Hitler in his wider work. Carl-Jacob Burckhardt, one of the most prominent committee members, and an eminent professor of history, visited the early camps and was also invited on a tour of projects across the Reich. After it he wrote personally to Hitler thanking him for his ‘magnificent hospitality’
and saying how impressed he was with ‘the joyous spirit of cooperation’ and ‘social thoughtfulness’ he had encountered. He signed the letter: ‘Your deeply devoted, deeply respectful, deeply grateful Carl Burckhardt’.
Later, as evidence of atrocity mounted, the twenty-three-member committee—all of them from Geneva’s oldest and wealthiest families, philanthropists and mostly Protestants—opted for ‘quiet diplomacy’ which took the form of ingratiating letters to Ernst Grawitz.
The hands-off policy remained in place throughout the euthanasia gassings, the growing Jewish persecution, the roundup of asocials, Gypsies and homosexuals, and the founding of a women’s concentration camp.
Once war broke out the ICRC took the narrow legal view that assisting civilians held in concentration camps—or death camps—was not within its mandate which was to assist uniformed prisoners of war. There were to be no Red Cross parcels for concentration camp prisoners and nor was there much attempt to inspect. Any proposal to do so was rejected out of hand by Berlin.
What was indisputably within the ICRC’s mandate, however, and enshrined at successive meetings of the entire Red Cross movement, was the duty to ‘protest against horrors of war’ and do all in its power ‘to mitigate murderous aspects’. In other words, even where it felt unable to act, the Committee was empowered, indeed mandated, to at least speak out. On this, by any view, it had failed, its failure all the more shocking given how much it knew by then. As the world’s chief humanitarian body, with contacts on the ground and in every capital, the ICRC had received more evidence of the unfolding catastrophe than any other single organisation.
