Ravensbruck

by Sarah Helm

  A group of French Red Cross nurses were here, a teacher from Normandy, a librarian from the Quartier Latin, and an eminent grey-haired art historian called Emilie Tillion. She had been arrested with her ethnologist daughter, Germaine, who had been taken off to Germany the previous October, though Emilie had no idea where she had gone.

  Some on the platform had been warned of the risks they ran before embarking on resistance work. Cicely Lefort, a British SOE woman who landed in France by moonlight in a small Lysander plane, was told by her bosses back in Baker Street that she’d be shot if arrested. Most, however, knew little of the risks, and several, caught up in random Gestapo sweeps, had no idea why they were even here.

  When the train locomotive arrived it pulled wagons, not carriages, and on the wagon doors were written the words: ‘Men 40, horses 8’. Sixty women were loaded into each truck. A guard put a tin pot in the middle, then slammed the doors shut, locking each wagon with a bar and a lead seal fixed on top. Denise, Christiane and Suzanne, squashed together at one end of a wagon, heard Geneviève de Gaulle and her group strike up in song—‘Ce n’est qu’un au revoir mes frères’—and then everyone sang the Marseillaise. Through chinks in the door they glimpsed railwaymen on the tracks and threw farewell notes. Cicely Lefort scribbled her husband’s address in Brittany—he was a French doctor—with a note saying: ‘Leaving for Germany. C’.

  As the train moved towards the German border, it pulled up from time to time and soldiers opened doors to empty buckets. The women were thirsty, and struggled in the darkness with hands, arms and legs that were jolted and jarred. The smell grew nauseating. Over the border a German officer with a riding whip ordered everyone out. Denise observed that he ‘didn’t dare meet our glance for fear of seeing our confidence in our certain victory’.

  Soup was offered at the next stop and soldiers shouted ‘Arbeit, Arbeit’ and laughed, and the women laughed too. ‘We still thought we were heading for Silesia to work, then we turned north so we thought, no it can’t be that,’ said Christiane.

  Two more days, then at 2 a.m. on 3 February someone shouted: ‘We’ve arrived.’ As they tumbled out half dazed, the women stared at the guards and the dogs in utter disbelief. The French women’s description of their arrival has a different tone to many other prisoners’. Though they were shocked by the brutality, what they remember most today is their inability to believe what they saw. ‘The reality was so brutal and so hard we could hardly grasp it,’ said Denise Dufournier. Some survivors said later they genuinely thought they had been brought here by mistake. Others say they simply refused to see what was in front of them. ‘There was a healthy smell of resin and the air felt salty on the lips,’ said Denise. ‘Just to breathe the Baltic sea air was good,’ said Michèle Agniel.

  The women recall being ‘half in a dream’ as they trudged to the camp gates, and many stumbled and fell. ‘Our bundles so carefully prepared but too hastily packed hampered us a lot,’ said Denise. At the gates they passed ‘without transition from pitch darkness into a blinding light’. Then someone said: ‘Oh we’ve arrived at a concentration camp.’ Others said: ‘No! Are you mad? It can’t be true.’

  ‘Inside the gates we saw this “stupeur des visages” [stupefied faces]. It was obviously a place of death. We had a sense of entering an abattoir. Really it was like that. But we never thought we were going to stay here,’ said Anise Girard. ‘You see,’ said Christiane de Cuverville, ‘we were “jeunes filles bien élevées”—well brought-up young ladies—and we thought, this cannot be for us. It is a mistake. Someone will come along soon and take us on somewhere else.’

  Walking on inside the camp they saw strange half-starved creatures like figures from the Middle Ages, carrying vats, and so now they began to think they’d all gone mad. ‘Eat your food, they’ll take everything from you,’ said a figure darting forward.

  In the bath they were stripped. ‘And then the young ladies had to stand “nues devant leur mère”. It was the worst. In those days the humiliation for French girls to be naked in front of their mothers was something terrible.’ As heads were shaved the guards ransacked bags for eau de cologne. ‘They searched us with toothbrushes between our legs,’ said Amanda Staessart, a Belgian who was there with her mother.

  After the shower they were taken to a temporary block for the rest of the night, crammed in with ‘strange half-starved creatures’, and some of the women were so terrified by the skeletons that they shouted to the guards to ‘keep these monsters away’ while others offered the skeletons their last bits of food. French prisoners who had arrived a few months earlier got word that friends or relatives were amongst the new group and tried to get messages to them. Germaine Tillion, who had arrived in October, heard that her mother, Emilie, was here.

  At daybreak a woman with a vat of beet soup appeared, but the French women refused to believe the food was really for them either. One shouted: ‘Come on, we can’t eat this, let’s eat our own and have a picnic,’ so they made a picnic, sitting on their kitbags out in the snow, eating the left-over cheese and bread from their bags. They looked around to see who’d dare stop them, but so amazed were the guards and camp police that nobody did. Prisoners passing by whispered ‘Französinnen’ and stared.

  Inside their quarantine block, the French still refused to believe that anything was real, and told each other they’d be out of there as soon as the authorities learned their mistake. Meanwhile, the women told stories and recited poems and played their guessing game about the end of the war. They made up names for the ‘Aufseherinnen’—or ‘officerines’, as the French called the guards. ‘We’ll live if we don’t eat the soup,’ said Christiane, who already had stomach cramps from the raw swede. Someone looked out of a window and saw prisoners kneeling sharing out a bit of bread, and what looked like women dressed as men walking on the path. The Blockova called them ‘les Jules’.

  And if the mood was down, it only took one of them to say, ‘Girls, I dreamt of shoes last night, which must mean we’ll be returning soon,’ and in a flash the rumour would go round that they’d be out by Bastille Day, and everyone would cheer and laugh.

  ‘Yes we always tried to laugh,’ says Christiane. ‘You see, because we couldn’t believe, it helped to laugh. I remember when my hair was shaved and someone said: “Mais dis donc, hey, Christiane—it suits you,” ’ and she laughs. ‘The other groups were far more serious. The Poles were very serious. I remember the day soon after we arrived and the Polish Blockova was ordering us to clean up because Himmler was coming to inspect. But we French refused to budge. So she was very angry and she said: “Himmler is coming and the whole camp trembles but you French just laugh.” ’

  —

  The inspection by Himmler that made the French laugh is not noted in his official diary, but the German prisoner Klara Tanke remembers the Reichsführer’s visit some time in the early months of 1944 because he ordered her release ‘after four years, six months and fourteen days in the camp’. He was looking for women to work in his Berlin office, which had lost staff in the recent bombings. Klara recalled: ‘He picked out eight big blonde women and I was one.’

  The timing of Himmler’s inspection almost certainly coincided with another visit to Häschen, who was expecting a second child. He was much in need of a break from the pressures of the war, particularly on the Russian front. According to Felix Kersten, his masseur, the Reichsführer’s health had not been good since January. After a treatment session, Kersten noted on 15 January 1944 that Himmler was ‘depressed in mind as well as in health’. From Kersten’s account, he was most depressed about matters of propagation—both animal and vegetable—which were not working out as he had once hoped.

  Despite the mass killing, Russia’s population was still growing at the rate of three million a year. It was ‘like the hydra in the Greek myth. If you cut off its head, seven more grow in its place.’ Furthermore, Himmler complained, the Russians had developed a new breed of corn that could withstand extreme cold,
and this had enabled them to reclaim more land to the north and to grow more corn for feeding their troops.

  It was not only the broad strategic issues of propagation, according to Kersten, that were troubling Himmler; more localised breeding questions were on his mind. For example, too few SS officers were marrying and producing children. The Reichsführer SS had also requested a report on how best to produce boys rather than girls. If Germany’s women spent too much time in bomb shelters there would be little procreation at all, he told Kersten.

  Himmler’s comments show how by early 1944 even he had begun to accept—in private, at least—the limitations, perhaps even the madness, of the Nazi project. He had also begun to concede the possibility of defeat, speaking to Kersten of the need to put out feelers to the Americans and British, who ‘would soon realise the danger of Russian predominance on the continent’ and seek a separate peace with Germany. Himmler had even asked Kersten to go to Sweden to seek out possible negotiating partners in Washington and London, and to reward him Himmler had given his loyal masseur his own estate not far from Ravensbrück, as well as a handful of women prisoners—Jehovah’s Witnesses—to work on the estate as slaves.

  Despite these private doubts, however, in public Himmler, like his master, displayed absolute certainty in a German victory. In a series of speeches made to party officials and to his SS generals at Posen over the winter of 1943–4, he glorified the Führer’s achievements, particularly his success in ‘eradicating the plague of Jews’. In this area Himmler claimed that he had, indeed, been able to control propagation. He even explained, in unprecedented detail, why it had been necessary to take the ‘difficult decision’ to kill Jewish women and children as well as the men; it was done, he said, in order to prevent a new generation of avengers:

  We come to the question: how is it with the women and children. I have resolved even here on a completely clear solution. That is to say I do not consider myself justified in eradicating the men—so to speak killing or ordering them killed—and allowing the avengers in the shape of the children to grow up for our sons and grandsons. The difficult decision had to be taken, to cause this Volk to disappear from the earth.

  Yet even as he talked of victory, Himmler was hedging his bets. He had started to gather hostages and hold them in his camps as bargaining chips, ready for when his secret peace negotiations began. Some of those chips were held at Ravensbrück.

  The gulf between theory and reality was as clear to see at the camp in early 1944 as anywhere else in Himmler’s empire. The Reichsführer had ordered death rates reduced to keep good workers alive, but instead the rates were rising and a new crematorium furnace was being built to cope.

  Himmler’s dietary theories were being confounded at every turn. He had recently issued new rulings on nutrition with a view to improving production. Up to 50 per cent of vegetables added to the prisoners’ soup were to be raw, and added shortly before distribution; the amount of food at midday should be one and a quarter to one and a half litres of soup—not clear but pureed. Himmler had also insisted that the prisoners should have time and ‘calm’ to eat, so that digestion could happen properly. However, as was clear from the camp’s emaciated bodies, the raw root vegetables were wreaking havoc, causing scabies and sores. As for the mealtime calm, so crammed were the blocks by now that there was never room to sit. The Siemens workers marched back from the factory for lunch barely had time to eat at all.

  Other orders issued by Himmler and designed to improve camp hygiene, and hence production, had also proved futile. Prisoners should have time to wash their hair, supposedly to help prevent lice, but washing of any sort was almost impossible, and anyhow the recycled clothes coming from the gas chambers invariably had lice already breeding in the hems. Coupons were still on offer as an incentive for good work, to be spent at the prisoner shop, but the shop was empty and the coupons had sparked a protest because prisoners objected to being bribed.

  Two further incentives Himmler dreamt up were free tobacco and a visit to a brothel. Neither applied to Ravensbrück: women were banned from using tobacco, and it was women from the camp who provided the incentive in the brothels. In early 1944 he ordered brothels to open at three more men’s camps, with prostitutes as usual supplied by Ravensbrück.

  Yet even the standard of the prostitutes was falling, as Himmler had obviously observed because he called for measures to improve their appearance. In the early days, he could rely on Ravensbrück to produce a steady stream of professionals for his camp brothels, not least because German asocials were often brought here straight from working brothels and knew what was required. Nowadays, however, even the German asocials arriving there were of ‘poorer quality’, which was not surprising, as they were often no more than homeless women snatched for loitering on the streets of bombed-out German cities. Himmler therefore ordered that the SS try them out before they were hired.

  But far greater problems were looming. For example, what was the camp to do in future with the growing number of women who ceased to be of any use? The last transport of 850 useless mouths had left Ravensbrück on 3 February to be taken to the Majdanek death camp, but Soviet forces were now approaching Majdanek and the death camp was about to be closed down.

  And what was Ravensbrück to do about the rising pregnancy rate? It was no easy task to sift out pregnant women before they arrived, and the doctors simply couldn’t abort all the babies, especially as the chief abortionist, Rolf Rosenthal, was now in prison. Rosenthal had been sentenced to eight years after making the prisoner-midwife Gerda Quernheim pregnant—at least twice—and then carrying out abortions to terminate her pregnancies. Himmler had reviewed his plea for clemency, and knew the disturbing details.

  In his appeal, Rosenthal tried to explain his relationship with the prisoner Quernheim, saying that while at the camp his marriage had fallen into difficulties, as he and his wife could not bear children. According to Quernheim, whose evidence Himmler also read, the couple became intimate when left alone at night in the operating theatre. On these occasions she would offer him a cup of tea, ‘because he would tell me his wife never cooked dinner and failed to care for him’. Rosenthal, she said, had been particularly kind to her the evening she learned her mother had been injured in a bombing raid.

  When Gerda found she was pregnant there was no choice but to abort, and so Rosenthal carried it out. Gerda, however, was upset by the termination. Longing to keep the foetus, she preserved it in alcohol and kept it in a bottle in the Ravensbrück Revier. Surely no single image could better symbolise the tragic absurdity of the Nazi attempt to control the process of reproduction, though whether Himmler saw it that way seems doubtful.

  Himmler did, however, consider that there were mitigating factors in the case and reduced Rosenthal’s sentence from eight to six years, to be spent in the Dachau police cells. Quernheim was soon sent to Auschwitz to work again as a midwife, but first she spent a term in the Ravensbrück bunker.

  On his way back to the gates, Himmler liked to inspect the bunker, which for some months had served not only to punish prisoners but as a useful place for him to hold his secret hostages and other prominent captives who might in the future be of use. In March 1944 the Prominente included the mistress of a former French prime minister, an American pilot, a Polish countess and a German cabaret dancer.

  The pilot had parachuted from his stricken plane, and having landed nearby, was brought to the camp. Christiane Mabire, an elegant Parisian, had been private secretary to Paul Reynaud, the last French prime minister before the war. The dancer was Isa Vermehren, famous for her cabaret shows for German troops. Isa was arrested for being rude about the Führer, though it was only when her brother, a German diplomat, defected to Britain that she was brought to Ravensbrück.*1

  Most prominent of the Prominente was probably Helmuth von Moltke, great-grand-nephew of the Prussian war hero Helmuth von Moltke senior. An Oxford-educated lawyer, and leader of a German resistance group, the ‘Kreisau Circle’, von M
oltke junior had long been a thorn in the Führer’s side, though Himmler must have known he was no serious threat. The worst that von Moltke had done was to try to stir Germany’s conscience by campaigning for non-violent resistance and for implementation of the Geneva Conventions in the camps. He had also leaked information on Nazi war crimes to friends in the British Foreign Office, offering to go to any lengths to assist them, but they rebuffed him, asking for deeds not words.

  Also held in the bunker was a mysterious British major, Frank Chamier, who refused to give Isa Vermehren his name, identifying himself only as ‘Frank of Upwey 282’, which would turn out to be his home telephone number.

  Of the Ravensbrück hostages, the Polish countess Karolina Lanckorońska was of most value to Himmler at this point. A renowned art historian, she had been teaching at the University of Lwów, in Poland, when the Soviets invaded in 1939. Horrified by the murder of several fellow university professors, she at once joined the Polish resistance, first against the Soviets, then against the Germans, until she was captured and sent to Ravensbrück. However, it was not what Karolina had done, but who she knew, that was of interest to Himmler. When she was arrested, not only did the Italian royal family write directly to the Reichsführer SS appealing for her release, but so, in the strictest secrecy, did the head of the International Red Cross in Geneva, Carl Burckhardt, a long-time friend of the countess’s. Karolina was even, according to some, the love of his life.