by Sarah Helm
Certain top officials in Stockholm scoffed at the idea of sending ‘a pretty caravan of Swedes’ into war-torn Germany, and on paper the ideas were so ambitious they must have seemed fanciful. However, new soundings from Kersten about Himmler’s state of mind, and intelligence about the situation on the ground, gave Stockholm reason to believe the plan might work.
The key to rescuing the prisoners would be knowing precisely who and where they were; this called for detailed knowledge about the location of camps and the names and nationalities of people in them—information that only the Swedes possessed, due in large part to the work of Wanda Hjort and the Gross Kreutz group.
In recent months Wanda, with Bjørn Heger, the young Norwegian doctor, and other cell members, had risked their lives criss-crossing bombed-out Germany and securing all details they could about prisoners. Using information from Wanda’s Norwegian contacts inside Sachsenhausen, linking up with a network of Danish and Norwegian pastors, and building links with the German communist resistance cells, the group had by January 1945 assembled an impressive database on the camps. They had also secured medicines from the Danish Red Cross, which they had managed to deliver to certain camps, using trusted intermediaries. The Swedish legation in Berlin was providing backup: Wanda and Bjørn Heger used a delegation car and the Gross Kreutz intelligence reached Stockholm via the Swedish diplomatic bag.
All this time the group had been appealing to Stockholm to implement their rescue plans, because there was no time to lose. In one report back to Sweden they passed on specific intelligence about the imminent annihilation of the camps. This new intelligence was based in part on a visit to a concentration camp by Wanda and her father, Johan Hjort, when they heard directly from an SS informer that the commandant planned to liquidate the camp ‘to the very last detail’ as soon as the Allies were close. The report didn’t name the camp, but we know that Wanda Hjort and her father had visited Ravensbrück in December, and had been in touch with the SS doctor there, Franz Lucas, and with Sylvia Salvesen.
However invaluable the Gross Kreutz cell’s intelligence, the Swedes could do nothing without Himmler’s say-so. By January Kersten was assuring Stockholm that the Reichsführer was receptive, particularly if an intermediary was appointed whom Himmler could trust.
Count Folke Bernadotte was one obvious choice. Though some in Stockholm considered him too lightweight, he had strong German ties and an innate diplomatic charm. Furthermore, Himmler would be impressed by Bernadotte’s royal blood and would know of his close connections with the Allies—the count had an American wife and had recently met Eisenhower in Paris. Bernadotte was certainly ready and eager to take on the role.
On 16 February Bernadotte flew into Berlin, where barricades were being erected, people lined up at food queues, and death and destruction increased every day. With the help of the Swedish ambassador he sought a meeting with Himmler. He waited three days, seeing other top Nazis first, before he was told that Himmler would see him. The venue chosen was Karl Gebhardt’s SS clinic at Hohenlychen, sixty miles north of Berlin and five miles north of Ravensbrück.
Hohenlychen had long been one of Himmler’s favoured locations for secret meetings and talks. His old friend Karl Gebhardt was entirely trustworthy and the clinic was both convenient for Berlin and secluded.
Bernadotte was driven out to the clinic on 20 February. Under the ornate portico of the main sanatorium building, Gebhardt was waiting to greet him. As they awaited Himmler, Gebhardt told Bernadotte that the clinic was packed with German children waiting to have amputations after being wounded by Allied bombs.
Suddenly Himmler was before him: ‘in green Waffen-SS uniform without any decorations and wearing horn-rimmed spectacles’ he looked ‘the typically unimportant official’, except for his ‘well-shaped, delicate hands, which were carefully manicured’.
Bernadotte listened to Himmler for two and a half hours as he spoke of his loyalty to the Führer and of the ‘chivalry’ of British and French forces. The military situation was ‘grave, very grave, but not hopeless’. Himmler told Bernadotte that he could never go against the Führer, and the Führer was against releasing prisoners. Himmler complained about his ‘bad press’ in Sweden. The two shared jokes. Bernadotte presented Himmler with a seventeenth-century Swedish work on Scandinavian runic inscriptions, which ‘touched’ Himmler greatly.
Eventually Bernadotte saw an opening and put his proposals for the prisoner rescue. Himmler at first ‘reacted violently’, but Bernadotte was patient and won him round, so that by the end of the meeting the plan for the Swedish task force to collect up Scandinavian prisoners from the camps was agreed. Before Bernadotte left Hohenlychen, Himmler checked that he had a good driver, warning that the roads back to Berlin were dangerous due to tank traps and barricades. Assured about the driver, Himmler replied: ‘Good, otherwise it might happen that the Swedish papers come out with big headlines saying: “War criminal Himmler murders Count Bernadotte”.’
—
The December visit to Ravensbrück by Wanda Hjort and her father, alluded to in their report to Stockholm, was made primarily in order to deliver medicines received from Denmark for Sylvia Salvesen to distribute. Their contact at Ravensbrück was Franz Lucas, the SS doctor, who had learned of their links with Sylvia and signalled his willingness to help.
Lucas’s ‘interest in’ helping prisoners had by now become known throughout the Revier. He had refused to take part in selections for the Youth Camp, and protested over the poisoning by white powder in Block 10. One evening late in January he took Sylvia Salvesen aside in the Revier and offered his hand. ‘Give me the address of your Hjort family. Perhaps I can manage to visit them,’ he said. Astonished, Sylvia sat down and wrote out the address. The next day Lucas came to see her again and told her to write a letter to the Hjorts and he would deliver it. She had ten minutes to do so, he said, as he was leaving for good. Acutely anxious and excited, Sylvia wrote what she could, then hid the note in a box, and as Lucas coughed in the corridor outside she went out and smuggled it into his pocket. Schwester Gerda Schröder was standing there too.
Pretending he had not seen Sylvia, Lucas turned to Gerda, saying: ‘Goodbye, Sister. I’m off. I’m a soldier and I’m going to fight the enemy, but I don’t fight prisoners.’ With this he left the camp for the last time, giving Sylvia a last look, which seemed to say: ‘Depend on me.’
Despite his promise, Lucas failed to deliver the letter in time to help Sylvia or anyone else. He did, however, appear at Gross Kreutz nearly four weeks later—letter in hand—pleading with the Hjorts for refuge as the Red Army approached. Nevertheless, Sylvia very soon had a chance to write a second letter to the Hjorts, and this time Gerda Schröder offered to deliver it.
The prisoners had known Schwester Gerda longer than they had known Franz Lucas, and many not only trusted her, some spoke of her as a friend. She had helped on several occasions, particularly during the recent sterilisation of children, when against SS orders she administered pain relief to the stricken girls. Born in Bad Oeynhausen, where she trained as a nurse, Gerda Schröder worked in a Berlin hospital before being transferred to Ravensbrück in early 1944. When Lucas arrived the couple became lovers, and Gerda might well have encouraged him to help the prisoners. The evidence certainly suggests that they discussed how to help Sylvia by delivering a letter to Gross Kreutz.
It was a few days after Lucas left the camp with the first letter that Gerda proposed to Sylvia that she write another, which she, Gerda, would personally deliver. This time Sylvia had all night to write, but found it hard to know what to say to outsiders who couldn’t possibly understand, especially as the letter might be intercepted. She tried to start at the beginning, describing how the camp had grown and how slave labour had begun, but soon the story of the latest horrors came spilling from her pen. In the hospital:
there are 40 to 60 deaths a day…The camp has typhus, colitis and diphtheria…Prisoners are starving and living skeletons wander everywher
e…1000 prisoners stand daily naked to be selected for work, but they are bound to die in a short time, and if they don’t they are disposed of in a camp whose horror no words can describe.
Sylvia evidently realised, as she wrote, that Wanda needed to know the whereabouts of Norwegian prisoners. Several had been sent to Majdanek and on to Auschwitz, ‘an extermination camp where a million Jews have been driven into the gas chambers…If you can help us, I trust it will be soon.’
Some were still safe at Ravensbrück, she said. ‘I helped Kirsten Brunvold get a job in the hospital and Solveig Smedsrud is knitting.’ But now more were being sent away on transports. ‘At this very moment I have received information that six Norwegians—Kate Johanssen, Maja Holst, Solveig Smedsrud, Live Carlmark, Singe Enger and Tora Jespersen—have been marked down to be moved.’ Sylvia wrote that she had, just that evening, managed to have four taken off the convoy. ‘I have been round to the two blocks where they are asleep and have spoken to them all. I will try to speak to Dr Treite and beg him to rescind the order.’
But Kate Johanssen and Maja Holst were down to go to Bergen-Belsen:
unless we can stop them at the last moment. There are rumours today that the whole camp is to be evacuated in three weeks’ time and it certainly looks as if anything might happen. Possibly this is the last and only sign of life that I shall be able to give, and if so please give Harald and the children a message from me. Say that I am not at all despairing or depressed. Tell him that the longing for him and the children has been the worst of all to bear. Second has been my longing for freedom, the longing to lead my own life without being a slave to others, and my longing for the forests and streams of Norway. And please deliver my message—which may be my last to my beloved husband, my dear old mother and my beloved children. Thank you for everything. Farewell.
Taking the letter from Sylvia, Gerda said she was leaving the camp the next day and would not return. Dr Trommer had told her she was being posted to the male concentration camp of Mauthausen, but Gerda had refused to go.
At four in the morning Gerda left with the letter and headed for Potsdam and Gross Kreutz. She got as far as the Oranienburg station on the outskirts of Berlin, but was delayed by air-raid warnings. At Potsdam more diversions were announced, and Gerda didn’t reach Gross Kreutz until it was dark. The stationmaster knew nothing of a Norwegian family living in the area, but when Gerda mentioned five fair-haired children he pointed towards their house. In pitch darkness due to air raids, she found the house and knocked at the door. Nobody answered. In her bag was the incriminating letter.
More air-raid sirens sounded and a small girl appeared. Gerda asked if her family was at home. The girl led Gerda down to the cellar, where Mrs Hjort, Wanda’s mother, and Joanna Seip, Arup Seip’s wife, were sitting in the light of a tallow candle. Wanda, her father and the others were all away. Both women were afraid of the German stranger, but Gerda took out Sylvia’s letter and showed them the long list of Norwegian names, and now they grasped the situation.
There was little time to talk, but the women scribbled some words for Gerda to take back with her, and told her to tell Sylvia that help was on its way. They explained that Count Bernadotte of the Swedish Red Cross was coming to Germany to rescue the Scandinavian prisoners.
With the air-raid sirens screaming again, Gerda suggested that Mrs Hjort and Joanna Seip might wish to send a parcel back to Sylvia with her, and they gathered up boots, socks and a bar of soap. Gerda left with the package and headed for Berlin. The two Norwegian women pored over Sylvia’s letter. ‘If you can help us, I trust it will be soon.’
* * *
* Bernard Dufournier got wind of this plan. On 11 January he received a letter from the Swedish mission in Paris, which he had contacted about Denise, saying that the Vice President of the Swedish Red Cross ‘is at this moment very interested in doing something for the women’s camp at Ravensbrück. He wishes to send parcels and send a delegate. I can’t promise anything,’ wrote a Swedish official.
Chapter 37
Emilie
No rescue would come soon enough to stop the Belsen transport. The day after Sylvia wrote her second letter, a train left Ravensbrück carrying 3205 prisoners. Just before the train set out, the Belsen commandant, Josef Kramer, contacted the main camp administration office, saying: ‘By telex of 28.2.45 you’ve told me I must receive a first delivery of 2500 prisoners from Ravensbrück. The reception is impossible. Prisoners are sleeping on the ground and we have an epidemic of typhus which is spreading fast.’ Still the train left.
The purpose of the Belsen transport was to empty Ravensbrück of all young children and babies, mothers and pregnant women. All but a handful of the 400 or 500 children at the Christmas party were sent. Before the transport left, the Kinderzimmer in Block 11 had been extended, with new cots holding row after row of dying babies, so that Zdenka Nedvedova, the Czech child doctor, observing the sight one day, suddenly screamed out in anguish: ‘Poles, where is your God now?’ The block was now cleared.
Mothers were prepared to believe that any change must be better for their infants, and many volunteered for the Belsen transport. Others did too, including the Polish rabbit Maria Cabaj, who smuggled herself on board, thinking she had a better chance of surviving if she got out of Ravensbrück.
The journey to Belsen, 250 miles due west, took seven days. The prisoners were locked into closed cattle wagons, with no food or water and no space to lie. ‘It was clear what was going to happen,’ said Maria. ‘The mothers had no milk to feed their babies and as the days passed they all began to die.’
By the time the train reached Belsen, every baby was dead. The women were unloaded about three kilometres from the camp and made to walk across fields. During the march those who could not walk were shot. As they came to the perimeter fence, the mothers laid the little bodies in a row along the barbed wire; white snow covered them. By morning they were gone. Maria Cabaj remembered:
The despair of their mothers was terrible to see. I was already numb and indifferent. My children were already a part of the past. I couldn’t even remember their faces. Sometimes I used to wonder if I had ever had any children, a home, a family. At Belsen there were gallows with men hanging from them, corpses burning in ditches, and against the wire.
With the Belsen transport the evacuation of Ravensbrück had begun, and with it the cleanup. The Kinderzimmer in Block 11 was scrubbed and painted. ‘The Dutch prisoners said they weren’t in the least surprised,’ said Karolina Lanckorońska. ‘They’d come from a camp in Holland that was evacuated just before the Allies arrived. A few days before they were cleared out, a children’s block had been created, and the walls were hastily decorated with scenes from fairy tales.’
At the beginning of March the tent disappeared, and the occupants too. According to Halina Wasilewska, it contained at least 4000 women just before it came down, though in the end nobody knew how many were in there or how many died, as those consigned there often had no numbers and no recorded identity. When at last the tent Blockovas protested to the SS that there was no way to admit one woman more, another 500 were pushed inside—‘literally—one of the office workers pushed them through the flap with her knee’, said Halina.
Specific images noted by Halina on her record of the tent’s final days included:
The body of an unknown deceased woman lying for 4 days in front of the door to the tent awaiting identification.
A woman with scarlet fever, whose skin was in the final stages of coming off.
Suzi Perekline-Rudolphino, a beautiful healthy eighteen-year-old, who went mad after two days in the tent and was taken to the Revier, where she died.
Once the canvas came down there was just a patch of wasteland and a pile of rubbish. A British aerial reconnaissance plane flew over soon after and photographed the camp. The picture showed an empty space where once the tent had been. Within a few days saplings were planted.
After the Belsen transport and the dismantling
of the tent, the SS turned their attention back to the killing. Now that Dr Lucas was gone, Dr Treite was asked to take over the selections, but he too refused, so a former naval surgeon, Dr Adolf Winkelmann, was enlisted, who had worked at the Gross-Rosen camp overrun not long before by the Russians.
‘Very tall and very fat, carrying a vast stomach, with enormous thick, very large shoulders, a bloated face, light eyes, and a neck that sank into his shoulders in thick flab’ was how Loulou Le Porz described Winkelmann. Most prisoners couldn’t look him in the face, but Loulou studied him and offered a diagnosis: she believed he suffered from a cell disorder known as mastocytosis, producing boils and growths on the skin. ‘I know you should not judge people by their face,’ she said, ‘mais quand même! [all the same!] He had the face of a professional killer. He came to the camp with a gun on his shoulder.’
Winkelmann didn’t even pretend to behave like a doctor. He heaved his bulk through the door of Block 10, accompanied by an SS sister, then sat at a table and demanded to see a temperature chart. ‘But he never looked at it,’ said Loulou.
There was no logic in his choices for death. He selected French women who would easily have lasted out until the liberation. He just decided if he didn’t like the look of someone—no more than that. He was a very stupid man and even put Germans on his first list, a long time after they’d stopped gassing Germans. If any of us protested he would turn and give us a look as if to say we’d be next. He had very small light-coloured eyes. I heard he had two children and lived with his family near the camp.
