Ravensbruck

by Sarah Helm

  ‘I had been at Uckermark three or four days before Rapp told me that the women we were selecting were gassed in the Ravensbrück crematorium. Rapp told me that when on account of the small number of victims [selected on a particular day] it did not pay to gas them, the women were simply shot in the crematorium.’ On those occasions, said Neudeck, ‘I myself and the other guards could hear the shooting. On the whole, however, most of the prisoners were killed by gassing.’

  In her usual candid manner, Neudeck told the court that Mittwerda was ‘an invention of Schwarzhuber, so that the prisoners would not know that they were to be gassed’. She could not tell the court what happened inside the gas chamber because she wasn’t allowed to get close, which seems to have angered her. But Schwarzhuber himself gave an unusually detailed description in a statement at the trial. Although he minimised numbers his testimony was broadly correct. He said:

  The gas chamber itself was about 9 metres by 4.5 and could contain about 150 people. It was about five metres from the crematorium. The prisoners had to get undressed in a shelter situated three metres from the gas chamber, from where they were led into the chamber via a small room. I was present at a gassing. They pushed 150 women at one time into the gas chamber. Hauptscharführer Moll ordered them to get undressed and told them that we were going to treat them for lice. One prisoner carried a gas mask and went on top of the roof and threw a box of gas down through the opening, which he closed very quickly. I heard the moaning and the crying. After about two to three minutes there was silence in the room. I didn’t know if the women were dead or stunned. I wasn’t there when they opened the doors.

  Chapter 34

  Hiding

  Once things at the Uckermark Youth Camp were running smoothly, the SS made little effort to prevent news of the horror reaching the main camp. Runners came and went between Ravensbrück and the Youth Camp, passing messages and carrying lists of the dead or of those selected for extermination. Bloodied clothes from the mass shootings piled up all the time at the Effektenkammer. The Jehovah’s Witnesses, always willing to run errands, acquired a stash of cod liver oil and delivered it to the Revier at Uckermark. They returned with stories of white powder and poisoning.

  The SS required Blockovas at the Youth Camp to pass on the numbers counted at each Appell to the main camp secretaries, who then matched the figures with their own records. By the middle of February, with selections increasing, as many as 1500 women had already been gassed. ‘When we checked up on the death figures we realised with disgust what was going on there,’ said Hermine Salvini, the Austrian prisoner now in charge of collating camp numbers. Prisoners in the slum blocks, which backed up against the interior wall on the south side of the main camp, could hear the trucks pull up outside the crematorium, which was just the other side. At first the prisoners wondered why the engines were left running for so long, then someone said it was to cover the screams from the gas chamber.

  The bunker, just over the wall from the crematorium, was by now often engulfed in stinking smoke that billowed into the cells. A prisoner cleaning the bunker told Geneviève de Gaulle one day that the bodies had been packed too tightly in one of the ovens and the chimney had caught fire. Walter Schenk, the crematorium boss—a fire brigade man before the war—gave a further explanation for the blaze. In order to burn the ever-increasing pile of bodies the temperature had been turned up, and as a result, on the night of 25 February the crematorium roof was set alight.

  Schenk said it was impossible to say how many were burned at this time because he was responsible solely for burning the bodies during the day and these were not those who were gassed. ‘The bodies of the gassed were burnt at night. They were burnt by the Auschwitz gang. I had to requisition the coke for burning. In February 1945 the consumption went up.’

  The plan to hide what was going on from the Siemens women by moving their barracks out to the plant had failed as well. The women enjoyed their clean new accommodation: food at the Siemens kitchen was better, the plant had its own doctor and sickbay, and everyone was delighted that they didn’t have to march to and fro each day. However, as the plant was perched on a hill, it was bound to give prisoners a view of what happened below. Without even leaving the plant, everyone could hear the noise of trucks moving back and forth along muddy tracks. And those who cared to peer through the trees—leafless in winter—could see the little wooden watchtowers of the Youth Camp in the distance, and watch the trucks, loaded with half-naked women, heading towards the gas chamber.

  Just before reaching the base of the Siemens hill the trucks swung round towards the main camp walls to stop outside the gas chamber and the crematorium, which were only about 300 yards away. ‘I often stood and counted the vehicles loaded with bodies; they went one after the other, always following the same route,’ recalled the Austrian-Czech Anni Vavak. ‘We told the guards in the Siemens camp, who were concealing these facts from the civilian workers, and their hair stood on end with fear.’

  Yvonne Useldinger, a Luxembourger, who started work at Siemens in January 1945, kept a diary. On 29 February she noted: ‘Extermination transport to Uckermark went by our camp. The sun shone warmly.’ Siemens women were also picking up news of selections from their contacts in the main camp, where prisoners were better informed by the day. The Polish woman Irena Dragan even volunteered to run an errand to the Youth Camp in order to see for herself.

  —

  Irena was a Polish student from Warsaw. After four years at Ravensbrück, including sessions in the bunker, she was ‘campwise’ and hard to shock. The wearer of a 7000 number, she had what she called ‘honorary Verfüg’ status, which meant she could play truant from the casual work roll-call almost without anyone caring, particularly during the chaotic final months of the war.

  ‘Sometimes I pretended to be a night-shift worker,’ she recalled. ‘I didn’t care about anything because I thought I was bound to die.’

  One day in early March 1945 as Irena was sitting in her block, a Kapo came and asked for volunteers to go with a cart to fetch blankets from the Youth Camp. Irena stuck up her hand. A walk through the woods brought her to the gates, and the first thing she saw was a group of women standing in front of the blocks. ‘They were shivering with cold and there were mounds of blankets lying next to them on the ground that had been taken away three weeks earlier. They were not allowed to touch them, and slept without any blankets.’

  Irena started talking to the women, who asked her how much prisoners at the main camp were getting to eat. ‘They yelled that they were hungry. They started giving me scraps of paper with the names of people they knew in the main camp, to help them. On one piece of paper someone had written that she wanted bread because she was hungry, but there was no name.’

  Irena went to find a Polish Blockova who she knew was working at the Youth Camp. The Blockova told her that most of the women who had arrived in the first transports were already dead. Those still in her charge were almost naked and she had no clothes to give them. ‘So she clothed them in paper and straw taken from the mattresses. I saw a woman dressed like that who reminded me of a fish caught in a net.’

  As Irena chatted with her friend, Neudeck appeared, and a hush came down. ‘She was smiling and holding a cane in her hand with a bent nickel tip, and she came up to the women standing in front of the block and started pointing at them.’ The Blockova asked why she was selecting women now, as it wasn’t the usual time.

  Neudeck said they were going to knit, and had them stand under the tree where one dead woman was lying already, looking more like a lump than a woman…in the distance, other corpses, almost naked, were visible.

  While Neudeck was choosing, some women tried to smile at her and Neudeck said to them ‘Why are you smiling at me?’ and made them stand under the tree with the others.

  As Irena loaded the blankets onto carts she saw another Polish woman she knew who was working here at the Youth Camp, and spoke to her. ‘She told me that during the night there’d b
een an air raid and she had gone out behind the kitchen to try to find some potato peelings to eat. She saw lorries there and crouched down to watch as SS men got out and entered the Revier block. She saw young girls with bandaged feet and heads being brought out.’

  This acquaintance explained that the girls were prisoners from subcamps who had been badly injured in bombing raids and were now useless for work. Their factory managers had sent the girls back to Ravensbrück to be killed. They had almost certainly not been registered in the main camp, and were being killed right here in a specially adapted truck, made for gassing. The Poles knew about these gassing trucks, which the Nazis used widely across Poland during the first years of the occupation. Irena’s acquaintance described how they worked here at the Youth Camp.

  Young girls in bandages were pushed out of the Revier and into the truck by the SS. When the truck was full it was locked. The truck was completely covered. The SS man threw a tin can through the little window by the engine inside and only the clatter of the can hitting something could be heard. It lasted about a minute. There was a deathly silence. There were several trucks like that.

  Irena had to leave the Youth Camp in a rush, as her friend had collected the clothes from the crematorium and was waiting to go. ‘There were so many lice on the clothes that it looked as if someone had shovelled them on.’ Back at Ravensbrück, Irena returned to her block and told everyone what she had seen. Soon the news was all over the camp.

  —

  It was now four months since Himmler’s order to shut down the Auschwitz gas chambers—or, as Höss put it, to ‘discontinue the Jew-exterminations’. With the end of the eastern death camps, however, the use of gas was not entirely ‘discontinued’: by mid-February 1945, at least 1500 women, Jews and non-Jews, had been gassed at Himmler’s newest death camp, right here on German soil.

  That mass murder should continue even now came as no surprise to those who had direct experience of the Nazi machine. In her evidence at Nuremberg, Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier, a prisoner at both Auschwitz and Ravensbrück, described the extermination programme at Ravensbrück as ‘the systematic and implacable urge to use human beings as slaves and to kill them when they could work no more’. Rudolf Höss, the former Auschwitz commandant, spoke of ‘the implacable urge to kill’. As he awaited execution, Höss wrote that this urge was nurtured for so long in the Nazi psyche that it eventually ran of its own volition, impossible to extinguish.

  As far as the women themselves were concerned, the main aim of the killing was to destroy evidence of what had happened here well before the Allies arrived. Some feared they’d all be gassed by then. Others said this was impossible. Having heard rumours of what happened at Stutthof concentration camp, where a few weeks earlier 5000 male and female prisoners had been marched into the Baltic and machine-gunned, some said they’d all be shot out at sea.

  And yet, although this rush to exterminate had plunged the camp into new depths of despair, at the same time, among some prisoners, it brought a surge of courage and of hope. This annihilation left no doubt that the Germans knew the end was very near, so all the more reason to try and hold on. Those with some remnant of strength knew they still had a chance of getting out alive, as long as they could withstand starvation, disease and random brutality.

  It was plain that the SS and the guards knew the war was lost. Grete Buber-Neumann would sometimes prowl into the SS offices before Appell and look at the large-scale map of Europe pinned to the wall. On it were little flags marking the situation at the fronts—no longer according to official German reports, but placed according to news received by listening to enemy broadcasts. ‘During the day we could read on their faces what the news was, and as it grew worse they were correspondingly depressed,’ Grete recalled.

  Discipline continued to crumble. It was even possible to miss Appell if you knew how, and those attending would often stand chatting or reading a newspaper. When an air-raid siren sounded the guards ran straight for cover. ‘Order throughout the camp had completely broken down,’ said Maria Moldenhawer, the Polish military instructor, who almost seemed to miss the old days of strict discipline. Germaine Tillion even found it possible to stage an operetta, which she’d secretly been writing for several months. A spoof of Orpheus in the Underworld, which she said was an attempt to help prisoners ‘resist by laughing’, the operetta was called Le Verfügbar aux enfers [The Verfügbar in the underworld] and was staged secretly at the back of a block. A chorus of Verfügs sang of ‘a model camp with all comforts, water, gas, electricity—above all gas’.

  At Siemens relations with the plant’s civilians began to improve. ‘They sympathised with us more as they were being forced to work as well. They too had no food,’ said the Kielce ghetto survivor Basia Zajączkowska. In general, the guards seemed less present around the main camp and more inclined to let the prisoner Blockovas, the Kapos and the camp police take over. Elisabeth Thury, the Austrian head camp policewoman, became more prominent; Dorothea Binz faded from view.

  —

  It was the new SS doctor, Franz Lucas, whose behaviour changed most dramatically in these final months. Like many of the other new SS arrivals, one of his previous postings had been at Auschwitz, and like the others he had been closely involved in the atrocities, including selecting prisoners for the gas chamber. Loulou Le Porz saw no reason to trust Lucas when he first appeared: ‘He wore the same SS uniform, the same cap.’ But Loulou soon noticed that Lucas quickly began to behave differently from the other doctors. ‘He brought us medicines, and he sometimes examined a patient. Treite used to touch them with his boot.’

  One day Lucas examined a young Dutch woman suffering from TB, who was also pregnant. ‘He showed real attention for the little Dutch girl, and when the baby was born he brought milk for the baby too. The poor woman gave birth but died very quickly afterwards and we never even learned her name. And soon afterwards the baby died too.’

  At about the same time that Vera Salvequart was distributing white powder at the Youth Camp, a poisoning experiment was conducted at the main camp in Block 10. Schwester Martha Haake told Loulou and the new Blockova Erika Buchmann to follow her to a part of the block where the critically sick women were lying. Haake told the prisoners she had a special powder that would help them sleep, and asked for volunteers. Loulou knew instinctively that Haake meant to poison the women. She tried to signal not to volunteer, with no success; some women even took a double dose of the powder. Haake then left, asking Loulou to observe their reaction. Half an hour after falling asleep the women began to vomit red mucus. Next morning Loulou and Erika found five women dead. The others were groaning and near to death, with blood pouring out of their mouths, noses and ears.

  Lucas was called, and was angry. Prisoners in the main part of the Revier heard him protesting to Marschall, Trommer and Treite. Later, he told Loulou and Erika that the experiments had been ‘ordered by Berlin’ and he knew nothing about them.

  Sylvia Salvesen had also grown aware of Franz Lucas’s readiness to help. In January Lucas informed Sylvia that her young Norwegian ‘relative’ Wanda Hjort and her father had visited the camp again. They were not permitted to see Sylvia, but left packages of medicines. Lucas passed the medicines to Sylvia, and offered to act as a go-between with the Hjorts.

  More channels of communication were opening between prisoners and the outside world. The Poles received a letter from Aka Kołodziejczak, the friend who had been released in early 1944 and was now in America, and they learned something of what Aka had done to publicise their story in the United States.*

  At last, significant numbers of prisoners were receiving parcels. Denise Dufournier received a parcel from her brother Bernard—the one arranged by his Spanish diplomat friend in Berlin. The same Spaniard used his connections with the German Red Cross to gain access to the camp. One day in January, to her astonishment, Denise was called nach vorn and told she had a visitor. Here was her brother’s friend, who was able to report back to Bernard t
hat she was, at least, alive. The rabbits suddenly started receiving small parcels too, containing sardines and religious ‘blessings’—small emblems—which some believed had come from the Pope in response to their secret letters. In fact, the parcels seem to have come from Catholic missions in neutral Portugal, which had probably learned of the women’s plight from Polish missions who picked up the news on SWIT.

  In early 1945 rumours floated around Ravensbrück that prominent prisoners might be exchanged for German prisoners held in Allied camps. The Schreibstube secretaries saw papers pass across the commandant’s desk. There were whispers that Geneviève de Gaulle and Gemma La Guardia Gluck might soon be freed.

  The signals remained very mixed. Elisabeth Thury, the camp police chief, told Sylvia Salvesen one day that she’d been instructed to compile a list of intelligentsia in the camp who it was supposed would be used as hostages. Nothing seemed to come of the plan. Several days later a group of prominent hostages who had been held in the bunker for some time were taken away to be shot. Among them was Helmuth von Moltke, the German pacifist and leader of the resistance Kreisau Circle.

  Meanwhile, Suhren summoned the Polish countess Karolina Lanckorońska to his office. The commandant inquired after her health, and asked whether she had enough food and clothes. ‘He behaved like a shopkeeper offering his wares,’ she said. ‘I said there was nothing that I needed. At that, he grew impatient and repeated the question. At last I was taken back to my block.’