Ravensbruck

by Sarah Helm

  They said they’d taken part in a protest. They told me they’d met with POWs and given everyone’s names, which the POWs had promised to send on to London, so London would know where we were. They were pleased to be leaving to another subcamp. They’d been lucky with the first one and they hoped they’d be lucky again.

  * * *

  * This was Robert Benoist, the SOE agent who was arrested with Denise in France. Benoist was taken to Buchenwald where he was executed in October, a few weeks after Denise had arrived at Ravensbrück. Also executed at Buchenwald in October were the other eight French section SOE men who had travelled on the same train as the SOE women.

  Chapter 28

  Overtures

  If anyone in London had picked up messages sent by the French POWs on behalf of the three SOE women, it would have been Vera Atkins, the SOE desk officer who helped train them and saw them off to France. But after the women disappeared, the SOE signals room in London’s Baker Street remained silent.

  Soon after Paris was liberated, Vera Atkins travelled over to France by naval gunship, to begin the hunt for the missing. She visited French jails where once the women had been, and saw scratches on cell walls—‘Vive la France’—and calendars with dates crossed off, but no trace of where they’d gone. Only in one case was there a lead. Cicely Lefort’s husband received a note from her in the summer of 1944 giving an address: ‘Konz Lager, Ravensbrück, Fürstenberg, Mecklenburg’. Vera had heard talk of Ravensbrück, but when she asked the War Office in London what they knew of the camp, they replied: ‘Ravensbrück camp as such is comparatively unknown to us and we have no record of any British civilian internees being in Brandenburg now.’

  Had War Office officials wished to learn more about Ravensbrück they need only have walked around the corner, where on 4 October 1944, in a Westminster meeting room, a group of women’s leaders were hearing a report, ‘delivered to this country by hand’ and listed under urgent business, on every aspect of the camp. The Liaison Committee of Women’s International Organisations, representing women lawyers, peace-makers, nurses, doctors and others, heard about the medical atrocities—‘the pus is collected in sealed vessels’—and about the perpetrators—‘two professors from Berlin and a camp doctor who is a woman’. They learned about the executions and the torture: ‘Women are confined to a dark cell for 42 days and beaten with a metal rod.’

  A Polish lawyer, Barbara Grabińska, presented the report but did not reveal who it was who had brought it to the country. It may have been Aka Kołodziejczak, a Polish-American prisoner released in December 1943. Born in the United States, Aka was with her family in Bydgoszcz, Poland, when war broke out and was arrested trying to flee. Her release was probably part of a prisoner exchange, secured through contacts of Aka’s father, before the war a businessman in Poland and the US. When she left, Aka promised her comrades to tell the world about the camp, and in early autumn 1944 she passed through London on her way to the United States.

  After reading the report, the Women’s Liaison Committee sent a telegram to the International Committee of the Red Cross expressing their horror at what they’d learned of Ravensbrück and calling on the ICRC to ‘give all possible protection to the women imprisoned there’. The ICRC replied that it had no access to the camp and could not intervene; its rules forbade it even to publicise the women’s appeal.

  It was now two years since the ICRC chose to stay silent about atrocities in the Nazi camps. It was also two years since the Allied leaders had spoken out forcefully against the ‘barbarous extermination’ in the Joint Declaration of December 1942, yet those words had not been followed by action to protect the victims. The Allied response had of course been to prepare to defeat Hitler militarily, but it had taken two years to put armies back on the Continent and in that time nearly a million Jews had been gassed at Auschwitz alone and hundreds of thousands of others exterminated.

  Greater knowledge of the horror had not made intervention on behalf of prisoners more likely. Throughout 1944 the evidence had become more terrible and more incontrovertible. Advancing across Poland and Ukraine, the Soviets had overrun death camps and found the gas chambers. At Majdanek they found thousands of half-burned bodies and mountains of human hair and shoes. Over the spring and summer of 1944 Adolf Eichmann began the roundup and gassing of Hungary’s Jews, which was monitored by Jewish organisations, by Swedish envoys and by the foreign press, and reports sent to Allied capitals. Editors at SWIT, the clandestine radio station, received graphic new reports about Auschwitz, but managers banned their broadcast because ‘The information is so terrible it won’t be believed.’ Churchill believed it, calling the extermination ‘probably the greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world’. Jewish organisations now advocated bombing the Auschwitz gas chambers as the only way to halt the nightmare, an idea which Churchill considered but which Washington opposed on the grounds that nothing should distract from the prime objective: winning the military war.

  —

  In other European capitals, however, ideas for helping prisoners were being discussed. A few weeks after Vera Atkins had been in Paris searching for her missing agents, the vice president of the Swedish Red Cross flew into the French capital. Count Folke Bernadotte of Wisborg, grandson of King Oscar II, the last monarch to reign over both Norway and Sweden, had failed as a businessman but shown a flair for humanitarian work, most notably in successfully negotiating with the Germans for the release of captured Allied airmen.

  So pleased were the Americans that Bernadotte was invited to Paris in October 1944 to meet the busiest and most powerful man on the planet, General Dwight D. Eisenhower. Just five weeks after Allied forces had liberated Paris, the atmosphere at Eisenhower’s HQ at Versailles was buzzing and full of good cheer, according to Bernadotte. Eisenhower displayed immense confidence in the gargantuan task that lay ahead as his armies prepared to take back Germany. Bernadotte observed, however, that the general’s war plans took no account of the fate of prisoners, a matter that Sweden was now actively discussing.

  After visiting Eisenhower, Bernadotte went to see an old friend, Raoul Nordling, the Swedish consul in Paris, to discuss Swedish prisoner rescue plans. Nordling’s attempts to halt French deportations ahead of the liberation had been widely applauded in Paris, and he continued to take an interest in the deportees.

  Whereas in Britain and the US, prisoners were still a distant concern, France had lost many thousands of its citizens to the concentration camps. In October French newspapers ran interviews with a woman released from Ravensbrück in an exchange. She said women were dying of starvation on a diet of soup and cabbage. Bodies burned day and night in a crematorium. ‘Pretty flowers are planted around the blocks to fool the world.’

  French families, silenced under Nazi occupation, were now clamouring for information, and through his private network Bernard Dufournier had a breakthrough, learning in October that Denise was in Ravensbrück. A Spanish diplomat in Berlin was sending her a parcel, telling Bernard: ‘In my experience the more desired articles are a tooth brush, toothpaste, soap, chocolate, Ovaltine and condensed milk plus vitamins.’

  General de Gaulle’s niece, Geneviève, had disappeared, and now his brother, Geneviève’s father Xavier, French consul-general in Geneva, joined thousands of French who were appealing for information to the ICRC in Geneva. Inquiries from further afield were mounting too. In Brixton, south London, Violette Szabo’s father, a cab-driver, had requested news of Violette from the War Office, who told him nothing, so he wrote to the British Red Cross, who passed his inquiry on to Geneva.

  Virginia Lake’s mother, Eleanor Roush, wrote to the US secretary of state, Cordell Hull, saying that Virginia had disappeared in France while doing ‘valuable work for the Allies’, and she hoped her case would get ‘priority attention’. She added: ‘Virginia is a gentile which might be in her favour in view of German standards.’ Mrs Roush’s inquiry was also referred to the ICRC. But to all these
questions Geneva gave the same stock answer: the Committee had no access to the camps and couldn’t intervene.

  The Swedes, however, were taking a different view. When they met in Paris in October 1944, Folke Bernadotte and Raoul Nordling discussed not only how Sweden might be able to intervene, but also how it might send a task force into Germany to rescue prisoners from the camps.

  —

  Sweden’s role in any last-minute humanitarian intervention was to some degree self-serving. Neutral from the start of the war, Sweden had found by 1944 that neutrality was not a comfortable cloak to wear. Allied victory was by then a virtual certainty, and the extent of German war crimes was increasingly being laid bare. Acting fast to help prisoners was one way in which Stockholm could begin to answer charges of having failed to play its part in ridding the world of Hitler and his Nazi machine. It might also build bridges with its neighbours. Both Norway and Denmark had been invaded and occupied by Nazi forces, suffering terrible losses, and many in those countries saw their larger neighbour’s neutrality as betrayal. Norway in particular had lost thousands to the concentration camps, and Norwegian diplomats were now placing heavy pressure on Stockholm to find a way of getting those prisoners out before even worse atrocities came.

  There were other reasons for intervention. Swedish leaders were only too glad to step in where Geneva had failed, and Stockholm was plainly in an excellent position to lead any new initiative. Not only was the Swedish capital a good place for discreet diplomatic contacts, but the Swedes had unique access to information about the concentration camps, provided in large part by the Norwegian intelligence cell started by Wanda Hjort.

  By the summer of 1944 the Hjort family, based at Gross Kreutz, near Potsdam, had extended and refined their intelligence-gathering about Hitler’s camps. Their group had been strengthened by the arrival of a young Norwegian doctor, Bjørn Heger, and by Professor Arup Seip, rector of Oslo University, both of them held in Germany on the same basis of house arrest as Wanda’s father, Johan Hjort. The group had also made contact with the Swedish delegation in Berlin and were sending detailed weekly reports on the camps to Stockholm via the Swedish diplomatic bag.

  Since the Allied landings in the summer of 1944 the Norwegian cell had been picking up reports that Hitler planned to liquidate the camps. Arup Seip, who had contacts with the German underground, learned of preparations for blowing up certain camps before the Allied armies reached Berlin. By early autumn such reports were multiplying and had spurred the Swedes to consider some form of rescue.

  If any form of general rescue was to be achieved, however, Heinrich Himmler, without whose knowledge nothing in the concentration camps could happen, would have to agree. Here Sweden again had good intelligence, this time not about what was going on in Himmler’s camps, but about what was going on in Himmler’s mind.

  Felix Kersten, Himmler’s masseur and confidant, had for some time been living in Stockholm, returning regularly to Germany to treat his master’s ongoing stomach pains. Kersten’s purpose in moving to Stockholm had been in part to put out feelers to the West—via Swedish intermediaries—on Himmler’s behalf. By the second half of 1944 Kersten’s message to the Swedes was clear: Himmler knew the war was lost and was looking for ways to build bridges with Washington and London. Such bridges could only be built, of course, behind the Führer’s back.

  In his memoirs Kersten later claimed that during a treatment session in September 1944 Himmler declared quite suddenly: ‘There has been too much bloodshed.’ Himmler believed, said Kersten, that Churchill and Roosevelt would prefer to reach a deal with Germany, rather than let Stalin into Berlin and open the way for Bolshevism to take over in Europe. Obviously the Führer himself would not tolerate any discussion of defeat, but in these secret overtures Himmler wished to let it be known that in future—should the Führer no longer be in power—he, Himmler, would be in a position to discuss a deal.

  Kersten’s overtures on his master’s behalf were rejected out of hand in Washington and London, which continued to insist on total surrender. Churchill said flatly: ‘No truck with Himmler.’ And yet it was clear to his Swedish interlocutors that Kersten believed his master was serious about getting his message heard, and that in order to show good will Himmler might offer to release some prisoners. The Swedes saw no reason not to exploit such an offer and secure as many releases as they could, even though Himmler’s aim of securing a separate peace was going nowhere. The first sign that Himmler might mean business came in the autumn of 1944 when, via Kersten, he agreed to negotiate the release of Norwegian policemen and students.

  Other more high-profile prisoner releases were also on Himmler’s mind in the autumn of 1944, but these releases were outside the ambit of the Swedish talks. Among these VIPs were three hostages held in Ravensbrück; each woman had a very powerful relative (or so Himmler believed) in either Paris, London or New York.

  —

  Since arriving in the camp with the vingt-sept mille in February 1944, Geneviève de Gaulle had been treated just like every other French prisoner. She lived in the overcrowded slum block, Block 27, and shared a mattress with the British woman Pat Cheramy. Pat said later that for a long time the SS didn’t even know who Geneviève was—or, if they did, they didn’t appear to care. While Germany still occupied France, there was no call to take special notice of the niece of the exiled general, but by the autumn Charles de Gaulle was president in waiting of France, and now his niece was a useful pawn.

  Himmler had almost certainly been alerted to Geneviève’s presence as a result of the inquiry made to the ICRC by her father soon after Paris was liberated. Within days the Reichsführer had ordered Suhren to improve her treatment and smarten her appearance in the event of her release.

  After nine months in the camp, Geneviève had lost half her body weight, and the sight of her standing before him in his office took even Suhren aback. ‘He seemed put out to see me in such a feeble state,’ she remembered later. ‘He asked if I had any complaints about the regime, and the way I had been treated.’ Not wishing to single herself out, Geneviève took the chance to protest on behalf of the whole camp against ‘the abominable manner’ in which the prisoners were treated, and the French in particular.

  ‘My protestations were received with discomfort by the commandant, who gave the following immediate orders by telephone to Aufseherin Binz: to have me transferred to one of the privileged blocks; to give me a job in the office of the Revier; to arrange a medical examination by Dr Treite.’ Despite protesting about being treated with favouritism, Geneviève now found Suhren’s entire staff rushing around after her as if there was no time to lose in improving her health. Better soup was offered straight away, while Treite admitted her to the best hospital block. ‘This was the first time in the camp that I saw sick people treated well.’

  Not until later did Geneviève learn the reason for the hurry. On the day she had been called before Suhren, 3 October 1944, Himmler had offered Geneviève to her uncle, in exchange for a German held in France.

  Just two days after Geneviève was called to see Suhren, Odette Sansom—the SS knew her as Churchill—was also offered better treatment. Odette had been kept in a privileged cell since her arrival in July 1944, but the cell, in the basement of the bunker, was damp and dark. She suffered from painful glands and her hair was falling out in clumps.

  On 5 October a nurse visited Odette in her cell. As in Geneviève’s case there was a sudden urgency to improve her health. She was taken to the Revier, where X-rays showed that she had TB. A few days later Suhren came and told her she was to move into a cell on the ground floor. A specialist doctor would examine her inside the commandant’s headquarters, where she would also receive weekly ultraviolet treatment to stop her hair falling out and infrared rays for her lungs.

  While Geneviève and Odette were being pampered ahead of a possible release, Himmler’s third high-value hostage, Gemma La Guardia Gluck, went on receiving favoured treatment in Block 2. Unlike the othe
r two, however, she did not receive any new attention from the SS in October 1944. Perhaps she was not to be part of any deal. More likely, living in the privileged block, her health had suffered less. In any case, whatever deal Himmler had in mind, nothing materialised and none of the three were released. The women themselves had not expected it. Nor were they under any illusion that their own better treatment might herald any early end to the Ravensbrück nightmare; they could see as well as anyone how conditions were worsening every day.

  While Geneviève was recuperating in the Revier, in October six French comrades were taken from their blocks and shot. A few days before Odette was moved to a better bunker cell, she saw twelve women herded into a cell close by, where they were left with nothing to eat for a week. ‘I saw a Russian girl being carried away from the cell by her comrades; she was nothing but skin and bone.’ Through her new cell window on the ground floor of the bunker, Odette could see the crematorium flame blaze ten feet high from the chimney every night; she could even hear the roar of the fire. ‘There was a considerable amount of black smoke and an unbearable smell. When I had my window open my room filled with black ash.’

  Rumours of hostage releases and possible exchanges certainly gave no new hope to ordinary prisoners, who saw no evidence at all that anyone outside was interested in them or was trying to help. On the contrary, by October 1944 the women in Ravensbrück had never felt more alone. For most, parcels had dwindled, all rations had been cut, and mail had stopped. Winter was approaching and the liberating armies were not even close. The summer’s hopes that the Germans might give up now seemed absurd. Instead, prisoners from Hungary were flooding in, the tent was fuller than ever, the mortuary was being extended, and a new extension to the Siemens plant was under construction, with fresh workers hired for the plant each day and rejects sent back to the main camp in growing numbers.