Ravensbruck

by Sarah Helm

  The Auschwitz women arrived at Ravensbrück in different groups over several days towards the end of January 1945. Walter Schenk, the crematorium chief, recalled there were so many dead amongst them that the furnaces couldn’t cope so the Fürstenberg crematorium was used to burn the corpses as well. More transports kept coming.

  ‘Half-frozen dead-on-their-feet women’ fell out of the trucks, said Lydia of her trainload. There were untold numbers of dead, taken straight off for burning. At the gates the guards made what Lydia and Aniko thought at first was going to be a selection. Instead, ‘a small ugly woman at a control table, whose cheeks and lips were red with lipstick, just directed them on through’. Lydia said: ‘We kept guessing, would they gas us or shoot us?’ The sisters feared Aniko’s wound was now so septic that she would certainly be taken away for killing. ‘I want to go to Mother,’ she whimpered.

  The guards sent almost all the women to the tent at first, to crouch in the mud. Allegra was soon allocated a barracks and grabbed a plank ‘bed’ of four narrow boards, sensing ‘if I had to sit in the mud one moment more I’d die’. The bread came round, she looked away for a split second and a girl snatched one of the boards. ‘I began to hit this girl, pulling the board and screaming at her: “I’m not going to die.” Berry…screamed at me, “You’re killing her,” and I said again: “I’m not going to die.” ’

  Alina Brewda was among those new arrivals forced to sleep out in the snow. Zdenka Nedvedova, the camp’s Czech doctor, who had arrived from Auschwitz herself six months earlier, came to look at the death-marchers:

  Everything was white with snow when they poured in—thousands of them; so many that the guards couldn’t sort them out or separate them from other prisoners who went in among them and asked what had happened and looked for missing friends. They told of their terrible journey and how they’d left Auschwitz burning behind them. When we went to bed they were still out there and when we woke up they were still there too—halos of frost around their faces.

  Lydia and Aniko were ‘shovelled’ into the tent, where Lydia tried to protect Aniko’s septic hand as the soup was distributed to the surging crowd. A ladle splashed soup into the bowl tied on a string around Lydia’s waist, and the two girls shared it.

  Aniko now seemed close to death from her abscess, and the guards and Kapos shunned her because of the stink from the wound. Someone sent her to the Revier, where she was operated on and came back with a clean bandage, but the tent was so filthy that they soon grew lice-infested, ‘like at Birkenau’.

  After several days, when they thought they’d been abandoned to die, Lydia and Aniko were suddenly called to be registered. They weren’t worried that this meant selection, as in that case surely the SS would have selected them at the gates. Lydia was made to stand on a measuring device. ‘Why were they curious suddenly to know my height?’ Then the girls received their new camp numbers on a slip of white cloth: 99626 for Lydia and 99627 for Aniko.

  Soon after, the SS sent Aniko and Lydia to ‘a place in the woods called the Jugendlager, Youth Camp’ and set them to work filling straw mattresses. ‘There was something odd about this Youth Camp that we couldn’t grasp,’ said Lydia.

  Some little women in grey were hurrying about in silence. Who were they and what was their business? And as we were not severely guarded, I opened a door, out of curiosity. A large room was crammed with old women sitting on the floor. I asked where they came from and one of them said Budapest. I looked around, horrified, thinking of my grandmother, whom I’d left in Budapest. I hurried out and opened the nearby door. It was a very small room containing several naked corpses.

  Lydia and Aniko stayed only a few days at the Youth Camp, where they received an extra bowl of soup each day. Years later Lydia learned that they had filled straw mattresses for Ravensbrück’s new extermination camp.

  Chapter 33

  Youth Camp

  As Lydia Vago watched women die at the Uckermark Youth Camp, Cicely Lefort and Mary Young were hearing rumours that the new camp was a far better place to go, with a well-equipped sickbay and good treatment. Some even called it a sanatorium. Sylvia Salvesen, the Norwegian Revier worker, and others said they’d heard such talk before; any change at Ravensbrück had always been for the worse. Then a new rumour started; the slum blocks heard that at the new camp they wouldn’t even have to work or to stand for morning Appell. In the middle of January, with temperatures dropping to minus 30, women were now volunteering to go.

  Cicely Lefort and Mary Young appeared outside Sylvia’s window at the Revier. They needed to talk. They had put their names on a list for a new camp, they said. As Sylvia knew, the two were living in one of the most overcrowded blocks. The Norwegian woman had recently befriended them, particularly Mary, who was very frail. Aged sixty-two, her slight frame was bent with exhaustion, her legs were swollen and she was running a high fever.

  Cicely, the SOE woman, once athletic, tall and sinewy, was also now bent and skeletal. Treite had operated on her in the autumn for stomach ulcers and swollen legs, but now she had acute diarrhoea. They’d heard ‘excellent’ reports about the new place; if only they could avoid roll call they might be able to hold out. It would only be weeks now, wouldn’t it? Didn’t Sylvia agree it was a good idea to go? asked Cicely. ‘She blurted all this out in a rush, nervous and excited. Her eyes were terror-stricken and she was nervous of my answer.’

  Sylvia tried to warn them, but they didn’t want to listen, and nor did hundreds of others who also saw the Youth Camp as their only chance to hold on until the liberation. By mid-January General Konstantin Rokossovsky’s second Belorussian Front, advancing through East Prussia, along the Baltic coast, was just 400 miles from Ravensbrück. In the west the Allies had smashed the Wehrmacht’s counterattack in the battle of the Bulge and were driving on towards the Rhine. Nothing scared the women more than the prospect of dying in these last few weeks, before their liberators arrived.

  Inside Ravensbrück signs multiplied that the end was imminent. Someone had set up a secret radio, and news of the Allied advance was shouted out at night between the blocks. Air raids were frequent, the guards on edge, and the Red Army women were walking tall, preparing for the Soviet arrival.

  Rations had been cut again. Some days the soup seemed to be made of nettles or marjoram with hardly a potato. Then yet another rumour started. At the Youth Camp there would be potatoes ‘twice a day’.

  —

  It was no coincidence that just as the Youth Camp myths began to spread, the tall slender figure of Johann Schwarzhuber appeared on the Lagerstrasse. Another redundant Auschwitz man, Schwarzhuber arrived at Ravensbrück early in January to carry out the orders Bräuning had refused to implement.

  In his evidence later Schwarzhuber was confused about names and dates, and sanitised many of the events. Yet his testimony was informative for an SS man: he seemed more ready than his comrades to give a real sense of how things might have happened. For example, a conversation he recounts with Fritz Suhren, in which he received instructions to start gassing, has a strong ring of truth.

  Soon after arriving at the camp, Obersturmführer Schwarzhuber said he and the chief doctor, Richard Trommer, were called to the commandant’s office. ‘Suhren told us that he had received an order from Reichsführer Himmler which stated that all women who were ill or incapable of marching were to be killed.’ Until then the killing was still being done by shooting under the orders of Moll. ‘This method did not seem to be going fast enough for the commandant. He said in my presence: “It isn’t going fast enough, we shall have to use other methods.” ’

  Artur Conrad, head of the camp shooting squad, had been saying the same thing to colleagues in the HQ building. ‘He said: “Women are not dying fast enough. Something must be done about it,” ’ recalled Karla Kampf, an Austrian secretary.

  Treite said later he too had heard that the reason gassing began was that ‘shooting wasn’t going fast enough’. Nobody suggested, however, that the sho
oting should stop—rather, both killing methods were now used. One of the crematorium workers, a male prisoner called Horst Schmidt, recalled that when he first began work at the crematorium at the end of January every evening about fifty women were shot and brought for burning—the same daily rate given by Treite. ‘Occasionally some of the victims were still alive and were shot again before the cremation. Two doctors were present and one removed the gold teeth.’

  Schmidt estimated that at least 600 women were shot from the end of January to the end of February 1945. He didn’t know if the shootings went on past February—he only stayed in the job for two weeks—but recalled another worker coming to him soon after he left the crematorium and saying: ‘Now we have gas.’

  Meanwhile, Walter Schenk, the head of the crematorium gang, had received specific instructions from Schwarzhuber. ‘He said to me: “We are going to start operations.” I said: “What sort?” He said: “You’ll hear about it when we start to gas.” I said I had too much work to do already. He said, don’t be stupid. It won’t affect you. “There will be a team from Auschwitz to gas and burn.” ’

  When he had first realised what ‘other methods’ meant, Schwarzhuber says in his trial statement that he tried to resist. ‘I told the camp commandant that I was glad I had left Auschwitz and that I did not wish to take part in this a second time.’

  —

  The son of a printer from Bavaria, Johann Schwarzhuber had joined the SS at twenty-one. He was schooled in hardness at Dachau, before his graduation to Theresienstadt and Auschwitz. From 1942 he supervised the entire gassing programme at the Birkenau extermination plant.

  High-cheekboned, with hooded eyes, Schwarzhuber was known among the women as ‘a smirking SS lecher’, although he was apparently happily married, with two boys who were often seen running about at Auschwitz. When one of them vanished one day, Schwarzhuber feared that he’d been taken to the gas chamber. From then on his boys wore signs around their necks, saying ‘SS Schwarzhuber’s son’.

  Colleagues said Schwarzhuber was not as hard as other SS officers. He helped run the men’s prisoner orchestra and also got Russian prisoners of war to perform folk dances while his family watched outside the fence. He liked the Gypsies and used to spend time talking to them.

  One SS officer said he’d heard Schwarzhuber tell Rudolf Höss to his face that he had ‘not joined the SS to kill Jews’. Höss doesn’t mention this incident in his 1947 prison memoir, but he does recall that Schwarzhuber was very affected once by the gassing of Auschwitz Gypsies. ‘Schwarzhuber told me that no extermination of the Jews had been so difficult, and he had a particularly hard time of it because he knew a lot of those inmates well and had a good relationship with them.’ Another Auschwitz guard said it was quite common to see Schwarzhuber ‘drunk and weeping’ as inmates were led to the gas chamber.

  However reluctant Schwarzhuber may have been to do the job a second time at Ravensbrück, he must have recognised there were enormous differences between the Auschwitz operation and what was to happen here. The target of 2000 deaths a month at Ravensbrück demanded by Himmler in October 1944 (‘retrospectively’) was tiny compared with the number gassed at Auschwitz, thought today to have been over a million. The setup here was primitive compared with the sophistication of the Birkenau extermination complex.

  At Auschwitz the vast majority of those gassed were Jews. Ravensbrück mostly murdered non-Jews, chosen according to whether a woman was sick or incapable of marching, as Suhren had said. Jews clearly fell into this category, especially as the recent arrival of Auschwitz evacuees and Hungarians had raised their number from an average of one in ten to about one in five of the total population, which in mid-January was about 45,000 strong. But being Jewish was not by this time a reason for selection, as it had been at Auschwitz and the other death camps.

  Indeed the entire context of the gassing at Ravensbrück was new. For the first time Nazi extermination had no stated ideological objective; it was impossible for the SS to persuade themselves or others that what was being done here was to cleanse the gene pool or to further the welfare of the master race. At Ravensbrück killing by gas in the closing months of the war was done to make space and save food, while also reducing the number of prisoners who might fall into enemy hands. Anyone who could march could be evacuated in time; those who could not were to be gassed. Furthermore, the gassing was to be done inside a concentration camp on German soil.

  And because the Ravensbrück extermination programme had different goals, it posed different problems for its overseer. Perhaps the most important problem for Johann Schwarzhuber was how to keep the women calm as the gassing got under way. Himmler and his SS officers had understood that large-scale gassing could only succeed if the victims remained unaware and therefore calm.

  At Auschwitz, calm had been easy to preserve. Most of the Jewish victims, even at the end, knew next to nothing about what was to happen to them. They arrived from the ghettos or from other camps, to be parted at once from those deemed fit to work and marched to the gas chamber with no time to question what was happening.

  At Ravensbrück, however, it would not be easy to isolate those selected for gassing from the rest of the camp. They would not be in convoys delivered by train, as at Auschwitz, but women picked from an existing throng. Furthermore, the Ravensbrück victims could only be gassed in small groups, taking time, because the temporary gas chamber had a limited capacity, so that while those selected awaited their fate, fear could spread.

  Previous selections at Ravensbrück for the black transports that took prisoners for killing elsewhere had been carried out in relative calm; but these earlier selections were smaller, and targeted to some extent at defined groups—the so-called ‘lunatics’, the acutely sick, Jews—groups that could be split in advance from the rest. Other, ‘ordinary’, prisoners could tell themselves that they were exempt from the black transport selections, and so had nothing to fear. Even at Ravensbrück such selections had been camouflaged, and when preparation was poorly disguised—as in the case of the Majdanek death transport—panic had erupted.

  For all these reasons, Schwarzhuber grasped the need now for very careful camouflage. Hence, before selection had even begun, he had the camp flooded with rumours and lies to make the most vulnerable believe that they were going somewhere better. So easy to fool were these desperate women that Schwarzhuber had soon persuaded hundreds to queue up and volunteer to die.

  Before it all started, however, he needed the staff—men and women he could trust. He could certainly trust the Sonderkommando, the special work gang who would operate the gas chamber itself, because he brought this group of eleven male prisoners with him from Auschwitz. Prisoners said later he brought with him some components of the Auschwitz gas chamber as well.

  To work with his gassing team, he also needed Ravensbrück support, both men and women. At Auschwitz-Birkenau he had tended to employ people who had not long been in the camp, so they were not ‘fixed in their ideas’, and not at all close to the prisoners. This was a tactic he deployed at Ravensbrück too.

  Within days of arriving Schwarzhuber recruited Ruth Neudeck, a woman recommended by Albert Sauer, who according to Schwarzhuber was now deputy commandant. A tall thirty-two-year-old blonde, who had arrived at Ravensbrück just three months previously, Neudeck first worked in the camp’s bookkeeping office, but after a brief illness was posted to Block 27, where she caught Sauer’s eye. He noticed she liked to thrash, and gave her a gift of a silver-handled whip. Loulou Le Porz later described her: ‘Big. Ordinary looking. Vulgar. She held herself straight. I heard she was a widow. No children. Lived with her mother.’

  Neudeck was swiftly promoted to the Strafblock, and after observing her at work, Schwarzhuber conscripted her to his team. To work alongside her he recruited a handful of other women guards, as well as two male SS hospital orderlies—probably also from Auschwitz—called Koehler and Rapp. This group were to be deployed at the new annex, the Youth Camp. Neudeck was
to be the Youth Camp’s chief woman guard.

  —

  When Lydia Vago, the Auschwitz death-marcher, was sent to work at the Youth Camp in mid-January 1945 she found that it was already a place of death. The Hungarians she saw there had obviously been left to die. At this stage the new camp’s purpose had not been worked out; for now it was probably being used as an ad hoc dumping ground for surplus prisoners, brought there and left to die, or else shot. By late January, however, Johann Schwarzhuber had drawn up his extermination plan more thoroughly, and worked out the roles the Youth Camp and its staff would play.

  Given the priority assigned to avoiding panic, not only were rumours and lies circulated about going to a sanatorium, but a plan was devised, most likely by Schwarzhuber, whereby the women to be gassed would not be selected direct from the main camp. Instead, selection would work in stages.

  First, those women who had chosen to go to the ‘sanatorium’ or ‘better camp’, as well as others chosen by the SS, would be put together, perhaps 200 at a time, and assembled in and around blocks at the rear of the compound. This area—where the slum blocks were—was already fenced off, but the cordon was now reinforced and the area would soon be known as the ‘death zone’. Whatever fears the women held here might develop, it would not be possible to communicate with others elsewhere in the camp.

  At a given moment the selected women would be marched out of the death zone via a gate at the bottom right-hand side, and taken the half-mile or so through the woods to the Youth Camp. Here they would be kept for a while. Further such groups would gradually be marched out to join them. Another round of selections would then be carried out at the Youth Camp, and it would be those chosen in this second round who would be taken away for gassing. That would involve a further journey, this time by truck, to the gas chamber near the crematorium, beside the south wall. In a sense, the plan would take the victims full circle, but it would have the benefit of confusing them, while also keeping the selections for gassing out of sight.