Ravensbruck

by Sarah Helm

  In early July more transports of French women arrived, and not all their news was good: there was fierce fighting in Normandy and the Americans and British were failing to break through. News from the eastern front was mixed too. In the sewing shop there was graphic evidence of slaughter in Poland, with several prisoners reporting that severed German fingers, or even whole hands, were found inside the sleeves of soldiers’ jackets brought in for repair and recycling.

  A Hungarian Jewish woman also appeared at Ravensbrück reporting that Hitler was beginning an entire new extermination drive, rounding up all Hungary’s Jews. The woman, Gemma La Guardia Gluck, had been captured in Budapest, where her name had come to the attention of Adolf Eichmann, the man in charge of the Jewish exterminations. Eichmann identified Gemma as the sister of Fiorello La Guardia, the mayor of New York.

  Brother and sister were both born in New York, the children of Italian immigrants, but Gemma had married a Hungarian Jew, Hermann Gluck, and in the 1930s went to live in Budapest. In 1934 Fiorello La Guardia was elected New York’s mayor, warning in one of his first speeches that Hitler’s intention was to annihilate the Jews. Ten years later Fiorello’s sister, aged sixty-three, was spared annihilation because she shared his name.

  Learning of her capture, Himmler at once sent orders that Gemma be treated as a hostage, and on arrival at Ravensbrück she was allocated to Block 2, one of the most privileged barracks, where she didn’t have to work and where she had her own mattress. In nearly all other blocks prisoners were by now sleeping three to a mattress and bunks were pushed so close together that the women had to walk over dozens of bodies before finding a gap to squeeze down. Bunks were also crammed in all the day rooms, so there was nowhere to eat or talk.

  In August more women started turning up from Auschwitz and in greater numbers—usually young Jewish women, spared the gas chambers for slave labour. One August transport from Auschwitz also brought fifty French women, the only survivors of a group of 250 non-Jewish women who had been sent from Paris to Auschwitz eighteen months earlier. Among the group was a prominent French communist called Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier, who gave the most compelling account of Auschwitz yet.

  Her vantage point was unique. In the 1930s Marie-Claude had worked as a photojournalist for the French newspaper L’Humanité, and was one of the very first journalists to report on Hitler’s camps, secretly taking photographs of prisoners through the wire at Dachau and Sachsenhausen. When war broke out she was arrested for her work on underground communist publications, and found herself a prisoner in Auschwitz. So valuable was Marie-Claude’s testimony considered after the war that she was called to give evidence at Nuremberg.

  On arrival at Ravensbrück she told the French how their compatriots who had travelled with her to Auschwitz had first been spared the gas chambers, as they were not Jews, but many had weakened fast and were soon being killed instead as ‘useless mouths’. First they were deprived of food and water and then, if starving didn’t kill them fast enough, they were gassed. Soon Ravensbrück was awash with stories of the Auschwitz horror, and some saw familiar patterns, predicting that before the end, similar atrocities would be enacted here.

  It was not only the women who came from Auschwitz, or other eastern camps, who had premonitions of things to come. Louise (Loulou) Le Porz, a doctor from Bordeaux, arrived at Ravensbrück in June, having travelled via the men’s camp of Neue Bremm, a Gestapo punishment camp. Here her transport was held over for some days, and during this time the women were often marched past the men’s camp, where—deliberately it seemed—they were given the chance to observe the brutality meted out to male prisoners. Among other tortures, the men were shackled to one another naked, and made to jump up and down going round and round a ring while guards whipped them, until they were bloodied all over and dropped. Then they were beaten again, and made to jump some more, until by the end several were dead.

  Loulou would say later that she never forgot the shock of Neue Bremm, and that because of what she saw there she always had a dread of what the future might yet hold for those at Ravensbrück.

  Soon after arrival, Loulou’s group was lined up on the Appellplatz for a selection; that day, factory managers from Leipzig were choosing slave labourers. Loulou’s cousin Françoise Couëron, who was arrested with her in Bordeaux, was standing at her side when a man in a white coat appeared and asked if any present were doctors. Loulou did not at first raise her hand—she didn’t want to be separated from Françoise, and Leipzig was bound to be better than this. Nor did she like the look of the doctor. ‘But I thought, even so, perhaps I could help in some way. So I raised my hand.’

  Loulou’s first task in the Revier was to check arrivals from Auschwitz for infectious disease, and on the list she was astonished to see the name Vaillant-Couturier. Marie-Claude’s family were well known in France before the war, not least because one of her uncles was the creator of Babar the Elephant. And she herself had become famous through her photography as ‘the lady with the Rolleiflex’.

  The serious young Catholic doctor Loulou had little obviously in common with the fervent communist intellectual Marie-Claude. But as they crossed paths in the Revier they were able to exchange a few words and quickly understood each other well. Before they had a chance to cement their friendship, however, Loulou had been sent to the Strafblock for lashing out at a guard, who had punched her for being outside during an air raid. The guard also accused Loulou of being ‘too proud’.

  Tall and strong, Loulou was then set to work unloading bricks and coal. ‘I remember a little French girl called Raymonde Sauvage, who had no strength left. So I said hold on to my belt and I’ll pull you, and she did, but it was extraordinary because I felt nothing at all. She had the weight of a soul.’

  —

  As the summer heat beat down ever more intensely, an inexplicable excitement broke out in certain quarters of the camp, particularly among the German political prisoners. It was a sense—nothing more at first—that before the liberating armies arrived, the nightmare might come to a very sudden end.

  The German people were growing restless. Life expectancy on the eastern front was less than three months; almost every family had lost sons, brothers or fathers. Bomb damage was crippling the country, and women and children had been evacuated from Berlin. Food shortages were acute, and women were now being asked to clear away rubble in the cities. In Fürstenberg locals talked openly now of what would happen when the Red Army overran the town, and many were already making plans to move.

  Behind the wire, the concentration camps were not immune from this general sense of panic and unrest. Talk of an implosion of some sort was rife among the guards and the civilian workers. Air-raid sirens blasted out almost every day, and prisoners were assigned to building ditches around the camp.

  Nor was it only the guards who brought news from the German street. Among the new arrivals were many German prisoners—women who had insulted the Führer or complained about the length of the war, or asocials caught in a roundup. From these women, the German political prisoners were able to glean a great deal, and the best-connected amongst them passed on rumours that many in Hitler’s inner circle were restless too.

  In the early summer of 1944 Grete Buber-Neumann received a coded letter from a well-connected relative that there was about to be an attempt on Hitler’s life. Grete was in regular correspondence with a brother-in-law, Bernhard, who had been a concentration-camp prisoner himself in the 1930s, and knew how to beat the censors. Various clues convinced the women that the army was about to strike against Hitler. Bernhard had clearly got wind of the growing reports in military and diplomatic circles that revolt against the Führer was reaching its climax.

  On 20 July 1944 Claus von Stauffenberg walked into a military conference with the Führer at his eastern military headquarters, the Wolfsschanze, or ‘wolf’s lair’, and placed a briefcase containing a bomb under the table, as close as possible to Hitler; but a stout table leg deflected the bo
mb, and Hitler survived, suffering only burns and shock.

  In a little-noticed footnote to the affair, at Hohenlychen Clinic, a few miles up the road from Ravensbrück, a baby called Nanette Dorothea Potthast had been born just before the assassination attempt—an event that has some significance in relation to the plot. Nanette was born to Heinrich Himmler and Hedwig Potthast on 3 June. It is not, however, the date of her birth that is of historical interest, but the date and the place it was registered—20 July, at Hohenlychen—and the fact that the father had to be present. Speculation has always surrounded the whereabouts of Himmler on the morning when Hitler was nearly killed; some have even suggested that his absence from the scene implicated him in the plot. Nanette’s birth certificate provides strong evidence that he was at Hohenlychen on that day, attending the registration of the birth of his child.

  Himmler would soon have further reason to return to the area. The Reichsführer was put in charge of the investigation into the 20 July plot, and the police operation was based at the SS training centre at Drögen, just five miles from Ravensbrück. The Ravensbrück bunker was even used to hold many of the plotters while they were under interrogation. Prisoners remember a ‘great commotion’ when the culprits were driven into the camp in cars with covered windows.

  Isa Vermehren, the cabaret singer, who had been in the bunker’s privileged cells for nearly nine months, observed the plotters as they awaited their fate. The first she saw was Count Wolf-Heinrich von Helldorf, the Berlin police chief, who had masterminded the expulsion of Berlin’s Jews. So angry was Hitler at von Helldorf’s betrayal that he forced him to watch his co-conspirators hanged before being hanged himself. One day Isa caught sight of him in the little yard outside. ‘He sat on a chair in the sun, more dead than alive, with an expression of endless sadness on his face’.

  Soon wives, sisters and daughters of von Stauffenberg and his relatives were arrested and shot too. More distant female members of the family were brought to Ravensbrück. Towards the end of July, one of Hitler’s senior generals, Franz Halder, arrived at the bunker along with his wife. Though kept in separate cells, the couple were allowed to meet to say ‘good morning’ and ‘good night’.

  During this time Helmuth von Moltke, the other bunker hostage, began to realise that he too was doomed. Though not directly involved in the 20 July plot—he had been held in the bunker since February on unrelated charges of treachery—he knew, nevertheless, that Himmler’s investigation would link him to the conspirators. Discussing his future with Isa, he said he was no revolutionary and was against assassination. ‘He was smart enough to see that a successful assassination wouldn’t have had a better outcome than a failed one,’ Isa recalled. ‘He was of the opinion that Hitler had to destroy his system himself, in order to leave the other National Socialists no arguments for their defence.’

  Von Moltke also told Isa he sympathised with the women prisoners here, but was fearful for their future. ‘Hope is not my métier,’ he said once.

  In the last days of July, Isa was interested to observe ‘the three Hoepner women were brought in—all of them dressed in pure Potsdam style’. General Erich Hoepner, who had led the assault on Moscow as part of Operation Barbarossa, was already under interrogation at Drögen. ‘The aunt told me she found it quite annoying that this had happened just now, when she and her husband had just received confirmation for a three-week reservation at their favourite sanatorium. And now this, just because of her brother.’

  Hoepner’s daughter wondered if there might be a way to deliver a pistol to her father, so he could take his own life. He was tried on 7 and 8 August, after which he too was hanged on a wire noose—another execution that Hitler watched on film.

  After this, the Hoepner aunt was soon released, but the daughter and her mother were sent to the Strafblock for four weeks for further punishment. The mother suffered badly, and next time Isa saw her she was shaved, pale and skinny. ‘Rumour had it that her husband had incriminated her heavily under interrogation.’

  Frau Hoepner, was, however, able to find friends in the Strafblock, among them Loulou Le Porz, the doctor from Bordeaux. By this time Loulou had made firm comrades there, particularly a French woman called Madame Lelong and a Polish countess called Maria Grocholska. Maria spoke impeccable French and German, so when the Hoepners came to the block she was able to interpret as they met on Loulou’s bunk before going to sleep.

  Looking back, says Loulou, it was in the Strafblock that she made her best camarades. In the camp in general there was not so much friendship between nationalities, but in the Strafblock there was, perhaps because the block was closed off from the rest of the camp:

  Outside women sometimes had the mark of education, but they had fallen in amongst the masses. In the Strafblock one could often get to know their names and situate them somehow. I found out that Maria Grocholska was the daughter of a Polish prince. And Madame Lelong’s husband had worked with De Gaulle. Madame Hoepner was adorable too. They were my lice-picking syndicate. They picked the lice out of my hair for me and out of the hems of my clothes. I thought at the time, nobody is ever going to believe this. A countess and two generals’ wives picking my lice.

  One day the Hoepners left the Strafblock and Loulou didn’t know where they went. ‘But it was like that in the camp. You were always uncertain. Someone would tap you on the shoulder and you didn’t know what might happen next.’

  —

  In early August uncertainty infected the whole camp. The Poles were waiting desperately for news from Warsaw, where an insurrection was said to have begun, and the French heard news that Paris might be liberated any day, but they couldn’t be sure. Denise Dufournier and her Parisian removal gang—some of whom had meanwhile been transferred to the painting gang—were sent off to yet another block, where the overcrowding was such that they were four to a bed and had to crawl to their mattress on all fours, lying flat on their stomachs to eat their soup.

  At the end of August another big convoy from France arrived and the women spread the word that Paris was liberated at last. The veterans of the vingt-sept mille observed these new French arrivals with fascination. They were cheerful and wore ‘ridiculous dresses they’d concocted somehow’. One even had an Hermès scarf, and another a powder compact that she’d smuggled through the showers.

  ‘It was as if a little of our former life had slipped illegally into the camp. A breath of France,’ said Denise. ‘And we thought—what did our own fate matter if the Tricolour was once again flying over Paris?’

  PART FIVE

  Chapter 25

  Paris and Warsaw

  On 8 August 1944, with American forces just 100 miles west of Paris, three British women were taken from the cells in the city’s Fresnes Prison, put inside a truck and taken to the Gare de l’Est. Violette Szabo, Denise Bloch and Lilian Rolfe were shackled around their ankles and put on a train for Germany. In a separate carriage on the same train, handcuffed two by two, was a group of British men.

  On the station the women and men had recognised each other. All were members of the Special Operations Executive (SOE), and all had parachuted into France to work with the resistance. Violette Szabo saw Harry Peulevé, a British man she had trained with. Denise Bloch saw her circuit leader and her lover, Robert Benoist, a French racing driver. The agents had been captured in the run-up to D-Day and held by the Germans in French jails. They had hoped to be liberated by the Americans, probably in a matter of days. Instead, along with thousands of captured French resisters held in prisons across France, they were snatched away and sent to German concentration camps in the last days before Allied forces recaptured Paris and took back France.

  As the Germans retreated from French soil, the Führer called for all captured French resisters to be sent as slaves to German factories. Daily the exodus gathered speed; in the three weeks after the first D-Day landings 6000 French men and women were taken by train to Germany. The journeys lasted for days, due to Allied bombing of the tracks, an
d took a dreadful toll. A so-called train de la mort, death train, arrived at Buchenwald in July with 530 Frenchmen dead. During long delays, they had suffocated in the heat, or killed each other as they struggled to get out.

  The train carrying Violette Szabo, Denise Bloch and Lilian Rolfe made slow progress to the German border, as bombing caused many stops. During one long halt, Violette appeared at the men’s carriage window, offering water. She crawled down the side of the train, still shackled to Denise Bloch, as the German guards took cover during an air raid. When the train neared the border at Soissons, the stationmaster and French Red Cross nurses tried to persuade the driver to turn back, but were ignored.

  At Saarbrücken, in a transit camp, the women encountered Yvonne Baseden, another SOE woman. Six weeks earlier, in the Jura Mountains, her SOE circuit had received the first daylight drop of arms from a US Flying Fortress and hidden the munitions on a dairy farm behind stacks of giant cheeses. When a German patrol approached, twenty-year-old Yvonne hid there too, but was discovered and arrested. With train lines to Paris out of action, she was put on a train direct from Dijon to Saarbrücken. Among her travelling companions was a French countess who had no idea why she’d been arrested, a group of ‘squabbling communists’ and a ‘bossy’ British woman who wore the uniform of the French Red Cross.

  As these trains left, thousands remained in Paris prisons. Amid fears that the Germans would massacre them all in the final days, resistance leaders called for an insurrection ahead of the Allied liberation. The Swedish consul in Paris, Raoul Nordling, as representative of a neutral country, attempted to negotiate with the Germans for the French jails to be placed under Swedish protection, and he called for a halt to the deportations. By now the city’s electricity was cut off, French train drivers had called a strike, and the Gare de l’Est had been destroyed by an Allied bomb. But the trains continued to leave. German train drivers were called in and the trains left from a suburban station, Gare de Pantin.