Ravensbruck

by Sarah Helm

  These scenes recurred on most nights. Neeltje Epker watched when the first Dutch group was taken, their numbers shouted at random.

  They were women we all knew from The Hague, Brabant, Friesland. They couldn’t even take their bit of bread with them. We saw them appear naked on the square where they had handed over their shirts, dresses, knickers and shoes. In the afternoon with loud shouting and beating with straps the SS people forced them onto open trucks for their last journey. I still remember the faces of some of them—Mrs Dessauvagie, Mrs Zandstra, the two Gorter sisters, Mrs Storm and Mrs Grinsveen. And one was able to shout out to us and ask their families to be told what had happened and she said to tell the world that they had ‘no regrets for having committed what the Germans called a crime’.

  On another night the German woman Gisela Krüger watched as a young Russian, Halina Tschernitschenko, was taken. ‘She limped from a fracture and refused to go. So the SS-man beat her with his strap until finally she was thrown into the truck and taken away.’ Romana Szweda saw a Polish girl with an amputated arm and leg taken away. ‘Neudeck seized the girl by the head and threw her into the truck. Rapp and Koehler were always there to make sure the victims were packed in and to make sure that Dr Vera had correctly scribbled the right numbers on all the arms.’

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  Dr Vera’s real name was Vera Salvequart, twenty-six years old, the daughter of a Czech mother and a German father. She was another of Schwarzhuber’s choices. Having reached Ravensbrück in December 1944, Salvequart spent her first three weeks in the freezing squalor of the tent. Treite, on the lookout for prisoner doctors and nurses, found she had some medical training from Prague University and sent her as a nurse to the typhus block, where about 1500 women were dying. Then Schwarzhuber spotted her and sent her to the Youth Camp with Dora Revier and one other nurse. He left her there alone when the others returned to the main camp.

  Salvequart’s personal history bore some similarity to Carmen Mory’s. Before coming to Ravensbrück, she had several aliases and may have been a spy as well as a prostitute; at various times she was wanted by police in France, Denmark, Poland and Austria. For Schwarzhuber’s ends, her greatest assets were probably her ready smile and apparently gentle manner: with these she could win the victims’ trust.

  According to Salvequart, she didn’t want the Youth Camp job, but fellow prisoners said she was happy to do it, especially as Schwarzhuber sent her a Red Cross parcel every week and let her wander into the nearby men’s camp. Salvequart also claimed that from the start Koehler and Rapp watched her, and told her not to talk about what she saw ‘or I’d be shot’.

  As the only medic left in the Youth Camp, ‘Dr Vera’ at first lived alone on one side of the Revier, until a few other helpers joined her. The Youth Camp Revier was just another plain wooden block, divided into two. There was a washroom of sorts, and a shed called an ambulance room. The other side, known as the day room, was empty. Her duties in the early days of the killing programme were straight forward: she had to fill out the death cards for all those who died and count the bodies. On one occasion the numbers didn’t add up and she had to count them all over again.

  Dr Vera also handled the formality of contacting, where possible, next of kin, and informing them that they could receive the ashes of the dead in return for a fee. She took all gold crowns and fillings from the corpses, using special pliers, and handed them to Koehler and Rapp. These jobs took much of her time, as from the start about thirty to forty women were dying a day at the Youth Camp, just from starvation, cold and disease. Then the gassing began, and she went to the gymnasium in the evenings to write the prisoners’ numbers in indelible ink on their arms and check them off on the lists before the lorry took them away.

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  Back at the main camp, Suhren—still striving to meet Himmler’s target—said the killing was still not going fast enough. Mass shootings by Moll and his men were proceeding, but they couldn’t speed up. With only limited capacity inside the gas chamber, new ways were now found to boost the killing.

  The sequence over the next weeks is not always clear, but at some point in late January or early February 1945 Schwarzhuber issued a starvation order: all prisoners at the Youth Camp, already on a starvation diet, were to be put on half-rations. This led to a new outbreak of diarrhoea and dysentery, forcing up the death rate from about forty to sixty a day. At about this time, the day room in the Revier became a starvation room where prisoners close to dying were locked up and denied all food and water. The guards crammed some seventy to eighty women into it, with a single latrine bucket. They had to lie on the floor, and at intervals Koehler and Rapp made notes, to monitor how long it took to die. Salvequart brought Oberschwester Marschall to visit one day with ‘her friend’, the Dutch prisoner Ragna Fischer. Vera said she took the chance to ask if she could leave, but Marschall told her she’d be shot if she asked again. ‘She said this is a concentration camp, not a sanatorium.’

  Treite also visited, but according to Vera he ran away when she showed him the starvation room. At his trial, Treite confirmed that at the Youth Camp, ‘women were put on half-rations and made to stand for five to six hours a day in the open air. This was clearly meant to kill large numbers of the prisoners.’ He estimated that fifty a day died in this fashion.

  As the starvation order was applied at the Youth Camp, so Dr Trommer introduced mass poisoning as another means to kill, but according to Salvequart’s testimony it was Koehler and Rapp who administered the poison and not her. She said the first time the poisoning happened was just after a group of new prisoners had arrived from the main camp. At 3 p.m., ‘when the annihilation transport arrived as usual’, Rapp abruptly ordered Vera not to cross off the names but to wait. She recalled: ‘They made the women line up along the Revier corridor and then Koehler walked along, saying, “This woman is too weak, this woman is useless,” as if they were looking for someone who still had some strength.’

  The two men picked out a tall Polish woman called Irena Szyjkowska, who was suffering from ‘dropsy’, swollen legs, a fairly mild condition. Koehler and Rapp sent Irena, the wife of a Polish general, into the Revier washroom and gave the admissions list back to Vera to continue her checking. Koehler next went to the ambulance room to fetch a mug and a spoon. ‘I saw him take a spoon of white powder and return to the washroom.’ After a few minutes, they called Vera into the washroom. Irena lay on her back as Koehler knelt on her knees and held her hands. The men ordered Vera to squeeze Irena’s nose, while they tried to force her mouth open. Vera said she refused and ran away, as Irena shouted: ‘Why are you trying to murder me?’ The prisoners standing outside the block heard Irena cry out.

  Vera claimed she went to Neudeck to report the event and to ask again to be transferred, but Neudeck said there was nothing to be done. Salvequart returned to the washroom, where Rapp ordered her to watch Irena and report what she observed. ‘It was about ten at night and I went to look after her. She spoke to me and told me that her husband was in a camp in Germany and asked me to tell her son, the editor of a Swiss newspaper, about the way she died.’

  All night long Irena suffered convulsions and couldn’t breathe. ‘Foam came out of her mouth and ears. She died after about three hours. I was alone with her all this time. The only help I could give her was a camomile tea.’ Vera said Rapp came in the morning and took the body away. Koehler put most of the rest of the poison in his private drug store, amounting to about 35 grams. ‘I kept part of it to commit suicide, as I’d been told I would not leave the camp alive.’

  Salvequart argued at her trial that whenever she complained about what happened she was punished, for example ‘by being made to take out gold teeth without gloves’. She also denied getting parcels from Schwarzhuber, saying she only spoke to him three times, ‘the first time to complain about a rat plague in the mortuary, but he didn’t help’.

  She protested that she was suspected of poisoning prisoners because she was the only individual s
een entering and leaving the Revier and because she wore a doctor’s white coat. She said she understood why nobody trusted her ‘because I lived where people were killed…But I never told anyone I was a doctor. I said I only studied medicine for one year. There are no eyewitnesses that I killed people.’

  Gisela Krüger, the German prisoner whose leg Treite amputated, was one of many eyewitnesses who did see Vera kill people. Gisela kept a diary in which she described events at the Revier quite differently from Salvequart. According to her, she and twenty-five to forty other invalids were taken straight to the Youth Camp Revier on arrival early in February. Soon afterwards, Suhren appeared and commented: ‘Good burning material for the crematorium. We can save on wood.’

  On 7 February Gisela noted: ‘There is little to eat and no medicine, but Vera has a powder, possibly for diarrhoea—but those who take “the powder” sleep and never wake up. I am very worried. I have pain down my right side but don’t say anything because of “the powder”.’ On 8 February, Gisela wrote: ‘All amputees have to go on a transport. My God where to? I had an argument with the SS man Rapp. I am on the list of amputees.’ Gisela says the SS man then took her off the list of amputees, perhaps because he was a bit ‘simple’ or because Vera asked him to. ‘Vera stood by me,’ says Gisela.

  Vera appears to have stood by Gisela because Gisela offered help with the paperwork. Salvequart had other helpers and ‘favourites’ who assisted in various ways, such as making clothes for her. Gisela said that Vera was obviously overloaded with work, ‘so I wrote the death lists out for her. Just in the Revier we had about 150 to 180 patients, with 50 dead each day. Vera went from block to block to find new victims. I have seen myself that gold rings from fingers and gold crowns from mouths were taken.’

  Over the days Gisela described how the Revier filled up with prisoners. Now, while the lorries removed the prisoners from ordinary blocks, the Revier patients died by injection, or the powder administered by Vera and the two SS men. Mrs Rissel, the frostbitten German from Wiesbaden, received two doses of the powder from Vera. Another recipient was the Hungarian who lost a foot on the march from Budapest. She had suffered badly from the pain in her unbandaged foot. ‘Now blood comes from her mouth and nose but she has left all this behind her,’ wrote Gisela.

  Women who refused Vera’s powder were often beaten until their mouths opened and ‘she shoved it in’. At other times she ‘took care of them with lethal injections’. Koehler and Rapp shot two who refused the powder three times.

  Gisela also described how Frau Thüringer, the German mother who had lost three sons at the front, cried out to some Siemens plant civilians whom she saw passing the Youth Camp as she went to the latrine ditch. ‘Help us, help us, we will be killed here,’ she pleaded. The Siemens men went on their way and the next day Frau Thüringer was dead, murdered in a corridor near the latrine. ‘She was recognised by her long pigtailed hair.’ Next day brought a letter for Frau Thüringer from her husband, who wrote ‘the war will end soon and all will be well again’.

  Sometimes mothers and daughters were murdered together. Gisela recalled one invalid mother in the Revier with her seventeen-year-old daughter, who was deaf and could not communicate. Vera gave both of them the powder. The mother died quite fast. The daughter lasted forty-eight hours and was given another dose. Still she lived on. Salvequart then gave her a lethal jab direct into the heart, saying, within Gisela’s earshot: ‘This one gets on my nerves.’

  Another of Vera’s ‘favourites’ was a French prisoner called Irène Ottelard. Irène was so disabled that when selected for the Youth Camp in early February she was pulled through the muddy wood track on a cart with sixteen other sick prisoners. ‘It took a long time to get there,’ she told the Hamburg court, ‘because the road was very bad and it was raining and very cold.’ On arrival, Irène was put in an ordinary block where ‘most inmates had dysentery so could not move at all and were just going to die. They were left there without being attended to in the slightest way.’

  Irène was transferred to the Revier with some thirty other prisoners. She slept in a bed with her friend Madame Gabianuit and recalled the Revier had a washroom ‘with a nice china basin’. But when she entered the washroom she saw three or four women lying there on the floor. ‘They were quite naked and were moaning and groaning. I think they were Polish. I could only hear “water” but that was all.’ Later Irène heard that Salvequart had injected the women. ‘I saw her walk to the washroom with a syringe. I saw her give out some sort of white powder.’

  Irène testified at Hamburg that Salvequart would tell women they needed the white powder to regain their strength, as they were going ‘on a convoy’. ‘The great majority who took it slept and snored, and by about three or four o’clock in the morning they were dead. Even my friend Madame Gabianuit took the white powder and I saw her dead at my side.’ Irène’s friend Madame Ridondelli suffered very badly from dysentery and was told if she dirtied her bed once more she would be given an injection. She could not help soiling the bed another time. ‘Later I heard her calling out, “Irène, they’ve killed me,” and I never saw this lady again.’

  Many other prisoners, particularly those working as Kapos, runners or clerks, saw Dr Vera killing. Lotte Sonntag, the Austrian camp runner, said Salvequart told her that fifty lethal injections were given each day. She then showed Lotte the powder. When word spread that the white powder meant death, Salvequart found new ways to entice prisoners to take the poison. A former Auschwitz prisoner, Gerda Backasch, described an unknown woman staff member giving her a slice of bread with butter and honey one morning. Amazed, Gerda offered half to a friend. At that moment Salvequart, who was outside the block, knocked on the window and warned Gerda not to eat it, as it was poisonous.

  The corpse commando woman, Jozefa Majkowska-Kruszynska, went to take away bodies from the Revier one day and found the corpse of her sister-in-law, Stanisława Pozlotko. Jozefa discovered that Stanisława had been fed the bread and honey that contained the white powder.

  After that I paid attention and ate no bread prepared by others. I also warned my suffering fellow prisoners. Not all of them wanted to believe me. One day we were offered bread and honey, and twelve of the 120 block inmates with me refused to eat it, and only the twelve survived. The others were all poisoned and died.

  When Vera established that we had survived she brought us bread, honey and margarine in their original packaging. She said this was extra rations for the heavy work that we did. I was extremely hungry, especially looking at the food that lay before me. Finally I cut myself a sliver of bread and spread margarine and honey over it. My comrades did the same. Soon afterwards I was sick. I had a fever and my body started shaking. Two of my female comrades who had also eaten the bread had red foam coming from their mouths. The watching prisoners suggested that I drink my own urine. I overcame my aversion and did. After that I repeated this therapy and my stomach was soon quite empty. Someone gave me three cups of milk to drink. My friends who ate the bread died that night.

  As the poisoning continued, selections for gassing mounted and Mary O’Shaughnessy started to live in constant fear of Neudeck’s cane. Given her artificial arm and her pink card, she was convinced she’d soon be selected. After about two weeks, however, it was Cicely Lefort’s number that came up. Clearly her name had appeared on the day’s ‘Mittwerda list’.

  ‘We were standing that day at Appell when two SS men guards came up with a list. Neudeck was present. She spoke to the SS man and he called Cicely out. In Cicely’s case there was no reason for the selection. She had no pink card and no particular disability. Her physical appearance was better than many.’

  Like many other prisoners at the Youth Camp, Mary O’Shaughnessy had understood by now that the lists were drafted largely at random. Neudeck would pick people herself, because she felt like it.

  When the selections began the prisoners didn’t know where the lorries went, but they did hear talk. Guards and Kapos told eac
h other: ‘She won’t feel it soon,’ or ‘She won’t need a blanket where she’s going.’ The Dutch woman Stijntje Tol was walking to the latrine ditch one night when she met a Yugoslav prisoner who worked in the gymnasium. ‘She told me: “Tonight, about 500 were taken.” We spoke in German and I asked where these 500 had gone and she said: “Zur Himmelfahrt [On the heaven trip].” ’ It wasn’t long, however—and certainly well before Cicely Lefort was selected—before everyone knew that heaven was the gas chamber, because the whole camp was talking about it, including the guards.

  During German investigations held in the 1960s and 1970s, these same guards either denied all knowledge, or stuck to the Mittwerda cover to explain their ignorance, or resorted to other lies. At his Hamburg trial, Josef Bertl, the truck driver, said he ‘wasn’t interested’ in what happened to the Youth Camp prisoners and ‘didn’t ask’.

  Ruth Neudeck, however, identified Bertl as the driver, saying he was ordered by Schwarzhuber to have a daily lorry ready for Uckermark, ‘and every day he drove into the camp at 6 p.m.’. Bertl must have known that the transports were going to the gas chamber, said Neudeck, because of what Schwarzhuber told him. ‘I heard Schwarzhuber speaking to him one day, saying: “Bertl, you do know about this gassing, this evening again.” ’

  Neudeck described what happened from her point of view when the truck arrived at the Youth Camp. ‘At first I stood down below to count the prisoners, so that there were not too few or too many. It did actually happen that a daughter wanted to travel with her mother or vice versa.’ Neudeck said that she, Rapp and Koehler usually had to beat the women to get them onto the truck. ‘Rapp and his friend also often stayed at the back of the truck, so that no prisoners would jump off.’

  The truck then drove off towards the main camp, carrying the prisoners, Neudeck and other women guards, and Rapp and Koehler. It turned left towards the crematorium and gas chamber, always halting fifty metres short of the destination. Rapp was friendly with Alfred Cott, the man who ran the crematorium, and he and Cott usually fetched two women each from the truck and led them into the building. Neudeck and her fellow female guards stayed with the truck until the last prisoners had been unloaded. On one of the early trips, she said, Rapp told her what happened next.