by Sarah Helm
The most appalling evidence of all had started pouring into the ICRC’s headquarters since the Final Solution agreed at Wannsee in January 1942. Reports from the World Jewish Congress, the Polish underground and other resistance movements, diplomats, escapees, churches, the press and national Red Cross societies painted a graphic picture of genocide. So overwhelming was the latest evidence, particularly from Poland, that the Allied leadership—hitherto sceptical about Jewish claims—had decided to make a joint declaration stating there was no longer any doubt that Hitler had begun exterminating Europe’s Jews, which was ‘cold blooded’ and ‘bestial’. A similar declaration by the ICRC, protectors of the Geneva Conventions, could have given strong, independent moral authority to the Allied protest, giving courage to others—even in Germany—to speak out.
At a crisis meeting held in November 1942 the Geneva Committee had a historic opportunity to issue such a declaration. On the table was a motion to make an unprecedented public appeal, revealing to the world what it knew, and calling for a halt. Those in favour argued that the most fundamental principles of humanity were being violated. Margaret Frick-Cramer, a lawyer and the first-ever woman member of the Committee, declared that not to speak out would be cowardly. Others, however, repeated arguments that had paralysed the Red Cross Committee from the start.
Carl Burckhardt, who had written fawningly to Hitler in 1936 and was now the Committee’s de facto president, given the illness of president Max Huber, argued that ‘work behind the scenes’ and ‘a few judicious letters’ would achieve more than public appeals. After a long debate, the proposal for a public appeal was dropped. Only Margaret Frick-Cramer remained in favour, declaring that by its silence the Committee was ‘abandoning the moral and spiritual values on which it had been founded’. She warned that doing nothing at this juncture would be a ‘negative act’ and would threaten the very existence of the ICRC.
Nevertheless, the policy of silence was agreed, as anyone who appealed to the body from now on was soon to learn.
When Wanda—an uninvited visitor—first knocked on the door of the ICRC’s elegant Wannsee villa, she was determined that they should hear what she had to say, and felt sure that once they knew, they would act to stop the horror. She was asked to take a seat and wait, and eventually shown up sweeping stairs into a large room.
They were all sitting round—all men in dark suits and all looking up towards me—staring. I said I was Norwegian and had been in touch with prisoners in the concentration camps. I noticed they were all quite young. They seemed to listen carefully. When I had finished talking they were silent for a moment or two.
The silence presumably meant that the men in suits were lost for words. Even the most senior among them, a delegate called Roland Marti, had failed to gain access to a single concentration camp, never mind to hand out food as this young woman had. And some of the places Wanda told them about, they had never heard of. She had even found out about a camp called Natzweiler, in Alsace, its existence so secret that it wasn’t listed on Nazi documents, but she knew about it from prisoners at Sachsenhausen. Natzweiler had the designation NN—Nacht und Nebel, Night and Fog—which meant that all the prisoners there were intended to disappear.
Then Roland Marti spoke. ‘He told me that they knew about the problems of the camps and were in touch with the Norwegian representative in Geneva. He said they were interested in any information I had, but they couldn’t make it public and didn’t want to know anything about how I had acquired it.’
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Poignant though Wanda Hjort’s appeal to the Red Cross men was, an even more startling appeal, also from a young woman, had reached the Red Cross’s Geneva offices that same summer. This appeal had been written inside the camp of Ravensbrück itself and secretly smuggled out.
It was now eight months since Krysia Czyż and her fellow rabbits had embarked on their own campaign to tell the world about the crimes at Ravensbrück, and their methods had since grown more sophisticated. The rabbits knew that the information was reaching their families in Lublin because the secret signals came back—a blue ribbon, or a scratch on a tin—but could never be sure that it had been possible to send the information on, as they hoped, to those in London and Geneva who had power to raise the alarm.
Even long after the war it remained difficult to establish exactly how much intelligence information, signalled by the Polish underground to London about all concentration camps, had reached its destination. When the communists took power in Poland in 1945 much of the wartime underground material was destroyed, and thousands of Polish resisters rounded up and arrested.
Nevertheless, many wartime secret signals were salvaged thanks to a decision to preserve Polish underground files in London, and today they are still kept at the Polish Underground Movement Study Trust, based in a terraced house in the London suburb of Ealing. Amid the countless documents lies a file containing coded signals sent to London via Sweden. In this file is a message, dated July 1943, detailing the facts of medical experiments at Ravensbrück.
The most important surviving document is a coded telegram, a terse seven-line summary of Krysia’s long letters. Krysia’s mother, a major in the Polish Home Army (AKA), had evidently sent on the information in her daughter’s letters to the Home Army in Warsaw. From there details were passed to a Polish cell in Sweden, where a Polish signaller, code-named Lawina, tapped out a message for London. The resulting telegram reads: ‘In the concentration camp for women in Ravensbrück, from July 1942 to July 1943 the German doctors, under Professor Gebhardt, were forcibly performing experiments on Polish women, namely surgical operations on legs, muscles and bones, as well as infecting with tuberculosis, tetanus and gas gangrene.’ The message states that there were seventy-seven victims, of whom five had already died.
This single sheet of faded, flimsy paper is testimony to the courage of the Lublin students, whose smuggled letters told the outside world of one of the most shocking Nazi medical atrocities of the war, and disclosed it just weeks after the events. The telegram—probably not the first to have arrived about the rabbits—even named the Nazi responsible for the atrocities: Karl Gebhardt.
The related correspondence, however, shows how ‘the world’ they had hoped to prompt to act instead ignored them. Horrified by the ‘atrocious’ and ‘unthinkable’ practices at Ravensbrück, Polish government officials in London wrote at once to the ICRC in Geneva and to the Vatican, calling on both ‘to intervene against this massacre’. The experiments were ‘not only against the morality of Christian beliefs but against medical ethics, which allows only animals to be used for experimental purposes’. Moreover, the experiments breached the Hague Convention of 1907.
The Polish correspondence then describes Geneva’s response:
Regarding experiments at the concentration camp Ravensbrück, where several hundred Polish women are being held, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has taken steps to induce the International Red Cross to examine the case for intervention, but did not receive a positive result. The ICRC has explained that the German authorities do not allow their representative to visit this type of camp, and insist that such camps are not subject to the rules of the Geneva Convention of 1929.
With that excuse Geneva refused not only to intervene with the Germans, but also to publicise what it had learned, or to take up the matter with Allied governments, or with the new War Crimes Commission that by then was actively gathering evidence in New York.
The Red Cross reaction is doubly shocking given that they were informed not only of the atrocities but of the name of their perpetrator, Karl Gebhardt, a man they knew full well to be a close associate of Ernst Grawitz, president of the German Red Cross, and the most powerful medical figure in the Third Reich. As the Committee must therefore have understood, Grawitz, their main interlocutor in Berlin, and the man refusing them entry to the concentration camps, was also the man who had authorised the medical atrocities described by the Polish telegrams.
—
Within weeks of Krysia’s revelations reaching Geneva, Grawitz authorised new experiments. Throughout the early summer of 1943 the Polish women in Ravensbrück had found reason to hope that they were over, but no one could be sure, and when ten rabbits were suddenly summoned again and told to report for work at a subcamp, everyone recognised a trap. A tip-off had come from friends in the Schreibstube and the women therefore refused to appear.
Dorothea Binz then came in person to the block and ordered the women out, but again they refused. Each in turn spoke out, telling Binz they knew they were to be experimented on again and would refuse to leave the block even if it meant execution.
According to Dziuba Sokulska, the Lublin lawyer who had led the earlier protest and who was named on the list of ten, Binz then ‘gave her word of honour’ that the women were simply being sent on a labour transport and they should go to her office to confirm their details. ‘We decided to go, but on condition that we would run if we saw any threat to take us by force,’ said Dziuba later.
While they stood in front of Binz’s office, near the Revier, the women were warned by Polish friends that SS men and guards with dogs were on their way. ‘We could hear motorbikes arriving and dogs barking from the other side of the wall. We started to run along the camp like hunted animals to show all the prisoners what was happening. When we got back to our block we stood still among the others to hide.’
Binz now brought reinforcements. As well as SS officers, she had with her a group of prisoner policewomen, who dragged the ten women to the work office, ‘biting and punching us until they had dragged us as far as the bunker’. The fresh assault on the rabbits, horrifying enough, was made worse by the brutality of these fellow prisoners, working as ‘police’. Of all the women who took SS jobs, this newly formed group was naturally the most despised by ordinary inmates. As the ten rabbits were dragged off and locked in bunker cells, the ‘police’ barricaded prisoners inside Block 15, which had its windows blacked out, without food or electricity. Any who wished to disassociate themselves from the ten could be let out of the stifling block, said Binz, but none did. Even the Czech Blockovas and Stubovas pledged their support, and for four days the block was locked down, surrounded by the prisoner police. ‘Bribed by an extra bowl of Judas soup they carried out their duties with great zeal,’ said Stanisława Młodkowska, one of those locked up.
Inside the bunker one of the threatened ten rabbits, Bogna Bąbińska, had the idea that they should commit suicide in protest against medical experiments, and Dziuba agreed, but others were against and they gave it up. After twenty-four hours the first five in the bunker were taken to another cell and questioned one by one by an SS doctor, one they didn’t recognise. In a bizarre charade, given the previous atrocities, the doctor asked the women if they would agree to a ‘small operation’. All refused, saying they had already been operated on. The SS man then told the women it wasn’t true. Even when they showed him their scars, he continued to deny it, saying the scars were not from operations at all.
Five more SS officers and doctors came in, overpowered the Polish women and held them down as they kicked and screamed, before gagging them and pouring ether on their faces until they passed out. When they woke next day they found their legs, dirty and black from dust and dirt, had been butchered again as they lay there on the cell beds. All were moved to the Revier and locked up on a ward. Helena Piasecka was particularly badly mutilated; a liquid had been injected into the bone marrow so that the leg looked as if it was crumbling. When Helena tried to walk on it some weeks later, the shinbone snapped.
—
Winter was approaching, and once again the killing was stepped up. Whatever orders had been given earlier in the year to kill only the ‘mad’ had been superseded by new commands to save on feeding useless mouths, especially those who wouldn’t last through winter. In Ravensbrück the killing spree was first apparent in the Revier, where lethal injections became common again, ordered by Treite, as Sylvia Salvesen observed when her friend Emma Brundson, a Norwegian Red Cross nurse, was taken ill. She had been suffering from cirrhosis of the liver and Treite had shown sympathy at first, attempting an operation to save her.
Sylvia, still hoping her friend would live, was called one day to the Stübchen to find Emma lying ‘crumpled up in the bed as if someone had struck her brutally’. She was ‘dead but still warm’. Sylvia pulled up the sleeve of Emma’s jacket and found a deep injection with blood and mucus running from it. A prisoner nurse told her she had seen one of the camp nursing staff leaving the Stübchen carrying a hypodermic syringe.
Treite called Sylvia in to see him. ‘Emma is dead, Salvesen,’ he said. ‘It is better that way. Don’t you agree?’ Sylvia had counted twelve women murdered by injection in the Stübchen that day. ‘Emma was the thirteenth.’*
By the end of the year the death rates were rising not only in the Revier but throughout the camp. A woman in the sandpit who could no longer work was shot and killed on the spot. Tuberculosis was rampant; many in the sewing shop were afflicted, but it spread especially fast at the Siemens camp. Prisoners said that the five stretchers kept at Siemens and used to transport sick women from the plant to the main camp were not enough. Richard Mertinkat, a new civilian manager, was shocked by the ‘pitiable’ and ‘lamentable’ state of the women’s health. ‘Siemens could have intervened to insist on better food and decent barracks for the women. But these good gentlemen of Siemens didn’t bother counting the number of dead.’
Rita Sprengel, a secretary in the Spulerei hall, recalled: ‘Many women had to be struck off the lists as incurable. Many died before they were even struck off the lists—usually of tuberculosis.’ Under the Siemens contract each woman struck off the lists must be replaced with a healthy one, but these were in short supply, and such was the overcrowding that even when new transports of fresh workers were brought in there was nowhere to put them.
Since September 1943 Jews had even started arriving again. Some were of ‘mixed race’, sent on from Auschwitz to work. Others were so-called ‘protected’ Jews—those from countries allied to Germany or from neutral countries that had opposed the gassing of their nationals. By early January huge numbers were expected from France. The need for space grew ever more acute, so the SS took more radical measures to dispose of useless mouths.
Treite announced that no bandages were to be issued to elderly women with leg sores, and no medicine given to those with TB. The camp’s old hands, recalling the gassing transports of early 1942, read the signals and knew that more concerted murder ‘by letting a certain amount out through the chimney’ was almost certainly being planned.
Since 1942 the removal of useless prisoners for gassing had continued with the ‘black transports’ or Himmelfahrt (‘heaven-bound’) transports in which from time to time lorries had taken away small groups of so-called lunatics as well as other ‘useless’ prisoners, probably to Auschwitz.
Block 10’s Blockova, Carmen Mory, knew as early as December 1943 that another far larger black transport was now planned, and she heard that it too was bound for Auschwitz. Mory often had good information, perhaps as an acolyte of Treite’s, but more likely because she had recently become one of Ramdohr’s spies.
Women at the subcamps knew about the plans too. In the Neubrandenburg Revier prisoners were quite openly being selected for death, and in January 1944 Micheline Maurel, the French literature teacher, had a near escape. After eighteen months at Neubrandenburg, Micheline’s health had collapsed and she was admitted to the subcamp’s small Revier, suffering from high fever and suppurating sores. She was pleased to be out of the snow, and soon made friends inside the little sickbay.
In the next bed a young Polish patient called Irenka was recovering from typhoid fever, which had left her paralysed in one leg. Also here was a group of young Russians who wandered from bunk to bunk exchanging recipes, then broke into spasms of coughing and spat blood into jars. A Red Army prisoner doctor teased Micheline about her ‘capita
list toes’ (they’d been pinched by high heels). And even though they didn’t understand French, everyone listened to Micheline’s poems, written on scraps of paper provided by the friendly Blockova, an old hand of such long standing that she carried a number in the 3000s.
Towards the middle of January Micheline saw the Neubrandenburg chief guard enter the Revier followed by the prisoner doctor and the Blockova. ‘She pointed at the sick women saying, “This one, this one, that one.” She looked at me covered with sores and turned away in disgust, but she pointed at Irenka’s bunk and said, “That one,” then she left.’
The Blockova explained to those chosen that they’d be sent to a convalescent camp. ‘You won’t have to work any more.’ A covered truck came that night. ‘The little tubercular Russians, the lame Irenka and quite a number of others were loaded up. The tarpaulin was fastened and the truck departed, skidding a little in the snow.’ Afterwards the Blockova sat on Micheline’s bed and began to cry. ‘Irenka. Poor Irenka.’ Micheline asked why she was sad, as Irenka was going to a better place, to which the Blockova looked at Micheline ‘hopelessly, without replying’.
Back at the main camp attempts were also made by the SS to disguise what was about to happen. According to Carmen Mory, Treite sent for her and told her that her block, the TB block, were all to be sent to a convalescent home, but Mory already knew it was a lie, and that 1000 names were down for the Himmelfahrt transport yet, including women who were fit to work, as well as TB patients, epileptics, women with syphilis and other diseases, many of them ‘anything but incurable’.
With this intelligence, Carmen went to talk to Treite again. ‘I asked him if it was true that this transport was heading for the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Treite told me I was mad. There were no gas chambers in Auschwitz, he said.’
