Ravensbruck

by Sarah Helm

  It was Anise Girard who first drew attention to the little-known testimony of Walter Jahn, the electrician from Dresden and prisoner in Ravensbrück men’s camp, who testified at the trial of Oswald Pohl that he had designed a concrete gas chamber for Ravensbrück, but the construction was delayed. Jahn’s design was quite different from the makeshift wooden gas chamber that we know was used. His chamber, he said, commissioned by Schwarzhuber and Höss, was sited near the north wall, disguised as the Neue Wäscherei—the new washroom. Jahn said it was even inspected by Höss, Suhren and Pohl at the end of February, and again in March, and he implied that it did function.

  ‘I did the electrical equipment myself, including the signalling side,’ said Jahn. The entrance looked quite harmless, ‘like a waiting room’, but inside were two ‘bathing rooms’ with about thirty spray heads. In the middle was an exhaust with fan-extraction. The extractors cleared the poisoned air. Victims were taken out and thrown into a grave and their belongings removed by truck.

  Since it came to light, Jahn’s testimony has always caused controversy, as no sign of such a gas chamber has ever been discovered and survivors didn’t mention such a building, leading to speculation that either Jahn was lying or his gas chamber was never used. It remains possible though that the camouflage was so effective that the building was not identified as a gas chamber. The site has never been excavated for signs of such a structure, nor has digging been done to find the mass graves that Jahn spoke of. Thus Jahn’s testimony cannot be ruled out. And even if his gas chamber was never used, it could have been part of a plan to gas far more extensively at Ravensbrück than has hitherto been supposed.

  The truth about Jahn’s gas chamber will probably never be known. But we do have overwhelming evidence about other gassings at the camp. Particularly in the final weeks, scores of prisoners saw a mobile gas chamber—described as a gas van, a gassing truck and even a gassing railway carriage—partly concealed in the woods. Some prisoners said there was more than one gassing vehicle.

  Karolina Lanckorońska spoke of a motor bus. It arrived in late March and was stationed in the woods close to the camp. ‘The motor bus was painted green; the windows were painted and the wheels were quite close to one another.’

  In a report to London, based on interviews with the survivors straight after the liberation, a British diplomat said the women he interrogated spoke of ‘two gas chambers’—one of them ‘a converted train wagon, brought in from Auschwitz’. Countless Polish survivors spoke of ‘gas vans’ and ‘gas lorries’. Irena Dragan’s account of bandaged women gassed in a lorry at the Youth Camp was one of the most vivid. Other prisoners at the Youth Camp talked of hearing ‘the continual drone of the vehicle engines at night…and a desperate crying’. The prisoner secretary Erna Cassens, a German communist, said she heard that a gas van was used when the gas chamber wasn’t working well. ‘It became known that women were loaded onto railway wagons on a spur in the woods. In the sealed wagons gas was introduced. After a certain time the wagons were opened and the bodies of prisoners unloaded and taken to the crematorium.’

  Mary O’Shaughnessy believed the gas van was ‘a railway wagon parked on a siding somewhere in the woods’. Immediately after the liberation, the Polish radiologist Mlada Tauforova described finding such a railway wagon in the woods, and she made a report on it to the Soviet authorities. Maria Apfelkammer described seeing inside ‘a gas wagon, in the shape of a long bus’. Hanna Sturm, the Austrian carpenter, was ordered to dismantle one of the gas trucks. She said later that she didn’t have time and it fell into Russian hands. Zdenka Nedvedova also saw the gassing trucks after the SS had gone: ‘We found abandoned vehicles near the Youth Camp—something like removal vans—that had a mechanism allowing exhaust gases to be pumped inside.’

  There are other reasons to believe that gassing trucks were used; for one thing, the expertise was here. The transport chief, Josef Bertl, had learned how to gas Jews in trucks while based in Lublin in the first days of the war. Among the new SS chiefs who arrived at Ravensbrück in the winter of 1944–5 was Albert Sauer, who had also used gassing trucks in Poland. Suhren was commandant of Sachsenhausen when experiments in the use of mobile gassing trucks were carried out there. All these men knew each other from previous postings and would almost certainly have pooled ideas on how to kill, especially as in March and April the numbers dying were still not high enough. Fritz Suhren told a colleague that he’d received direct orders from the Führer ‘to liquidate the entire camp’.

  For the best advice on mobile gassing, Suhren could go to Sturmbannführer Herbert Lange, who pioneered the technique. Ordered to oversee the murder of Poland’s mentally ill at the start of the war, Lange operated a fleet of three-ton trucks, converted so that up to 100 people could be poisoned at a time as the truck’s carbon monoxide exhaust fumes were fed into a cabin at the back. Lange was later posted to Drögen, the security police headquarters near Ravensbrück. In March 1945 he and Suhren may well have discussed how best to gas women in trucks. Perhaps Lange still had some of his trucks with him at Drögen. The fleet were said to have been returned to Berlin, but this wasn’t far away.

  —

  In her diary for every day of March, Germaine Tillion noted ‘la chasse, la chasse’ (the hunt), and Loulou Le Porz remembers that this was what it was like. ‘It became dangerous to be out on the Lagerstrasse. It was “la chasse à l’homme” [manhunt]. Winkelmann or Pflaum would just appear with a lorry and say Allez hop, and you’d be taken. We certainly went out as little as possible during “la chasse”.’

  After the mass selection of 2 March the rules of la chasse kept on changing. In the first week of March it wasn’t only the women herded into the wired-off death zone who had reason to fear selection. Now lorries drove down the Lagerstrasse, pulled up outside a block where Winkelmann had been selecting, and Neudeck, Koehler and Rapp jumped out to pile his victims straight into their truck. Blockovas and Stubovas were told to help, as was anybody passing by.

  In early March, three of the painting gang, Denise Dufournier, Christiane de Cuverville and Claire Davinroy, passed by Block 11 where a truck was loading women. Seeing the French trio, the guards ordered them to help carry the victims, and they dared not refuse. The terrified women pleaded with the French girls to tell them where the truck was going and all three denied knowing.

  As they stood back and stared in horror at the loaded lorry, the trio became aware of SS eyes lingering on them too. ‘We sensed something unusual,’ Denise said, ‘as if the guards could not resist the idea of grabbing us too.’ Glancing at each other, the three walked rapidly away.

  By the middle of March selections were no longer confined to the sick blocks; they happened in ordinary blocks too, and at any time. A guard might simply turn up outside a block, shout ‘Appell ! ’, and the women had to line up before Winkelmann, sometimes with Schwarzhuber or Pflaum at his side. Selections were even made in the privileged blocks. Sixty-four-year-old Gemma La Guardia Gluck, now grey and frail, was picked out from Block 2, at which she ‘screamed like a child’, crying out: ‘I don’t want to go up the crematorium chimney!’ Hearing her, Gemma’s Blockova reminded Fritz Suhren who Gemma’s brother was, and she was taken off the list.

  Selections took place at the Siemens plant too. Margareta van der Kuit remembers an SS officer coming to the new living barracks:

  Everyone had to stand outside and the officer called out numbers. Those chosen were often older women, whose daughters were also working at the Siemens camp. The daughters were very worried about where their mothers were going, so the officer said they would be taken to somewhere where they would be better off and where they wouldn’t have to work so hard.

  Basia Zajączkowska, the Jewish woman who survived the Kielce ghetto, said: ‘We had a selection once—they sorted out older people who had injured legs and those who were generally well. Those sorted out were sent back [from Siemens] to Ravensbrück to the crematorium.’ A Yugoslav prisoner called Vida Z
avrl said Siemens prisoners had to line up and lift skirts in front of a commission who noted the numbers of those selected. Anyone judged incapable of working was now in danger of gassing, said Yvonne Useldinger, the Luxembourger at Siemens: ‘Grey-haired prisoners began to colour their hair, but when it rained at roll call the colour ran down their faces.’

  —

  As part of the drive to empty the camp, selections for subcamps—those further west, away from the Russian front—were also stepped up. Large numbers were taken to subcamps attached to male concentration camps as well. Between January and March, 2000 Ravensbrück women were transported to Buchenwald subcamps alone, and more went to subcamps of Dachau and Flossenbürg. Pflaum entered the painting gang’s block one day calling everyone out for a transport to Berlin to dig ditches. The painters climbed up into the attic of their block, while others flattened themselves under bunks as the ‘cattle merchant’ raged around the block beating prisoners out of the door. Survivors of the ditch-digging transport returned two weeks later, telling how many had died of exhaustion or had been killed by bombs.

  Given the danger of la chasse many prisoners started trying to get out to a subcamp, expecting to be safer, only to find that the chances of survival at these camps were in some ways worse. Wanda Wojtasik and Krysia Czyż, the Polish rabbits, assumed the numbers of dead prisoners and managed to slip in amongst a column of women heading to the tiny subcamp of Neustadt-Glewe, where they found prisoners starving to death instead of being gassed. Cut off from all sources of supplies, the camp received no rations and the prisoners were fed on soup made of potato peelings. ‘There were no beds, and a floor with a vast number of dead bodies jamming it solid,’ said Wanda.

  At Neubrandenburg Micheline Maurel had been slowly starving for many months. In March she was sick again and back in the Revier. ‘All morning we waited for soup. Near the bunks of the dying those who could still eat lay in ambush.’ SS selections were still made at the subcamps too. At night the trucks arrived, the numbers were read out, women were hoisted onto trucks and taken back to Ravensbrück to be gassed.

  —

  By the end of March the food at Ravensbrück too was running out. Meals were given out at random times and prisoners provided their own security squads to protect the soup gang from attack. Sanitation had largely broken down, walkways were littered with excreta, the washrooms in the sick blocks could hold no more dead bodies, the mortuary was overflowing and the crematorium working to capacity. A new death block was established to hold the excess corpses. Patrolling near by, Julia Barry saw inside the ‘death block’ where bodies were stacked high ‘with eyes out of their sockets’.

  Pflaum, Winkelmann and the posse roamed the camp, selecting people almost at random, but at least in the chaos it became easier to hide. The painting gang hid in the infectious diseases block; lying in a bed with a sick person was the safest of all places to hide.

  By late March everyone seemed to know someone chosen for the Youth Camp or for another transport; mothers, daughters, friends were all trying to get names off lists, or onto a better list, or to find a way to hide. Some time in mid-March Mary Lindell heard that Yvonne Baseden was on a list. She rushed out onto the Lagerstrasse to find that Yvonne was already lining up to be taken away, probably to the Youth Camp. Yvonne stood ‘skinny, hollow-eyes, morose and without hope’, so Mary went to Micky, in Pflaum’s labour office, for help. Mary had smuggled painkillers to Micky in the past; now she called in the favour. ‘What’s her name and number?’ asked Micky, and struck off Yvonne’s name.

  As soon as Yvonne heard she’d been spared she pleaded that her friend, whom today she remembers only as Marguerite, be taken off too. Mary again asked Micky, who ‘with a flick of a pen’ erased Marguerite’s name as well, and told Mary: ‘Quick, get them away. Now it’s your risk.’ Mary hid the two women on a safe ward in the Revier, under Treite’s protection.

  Mary’s relations with Treite were closer every day. She wrote affectionately of him in her memoir, saying how on one occasion, as he treated her for pneumonia, Treite injected her with a serum. ‘I flinched, for everyone knew that injections in Ravensbrück were usually lethal,’ wrote Mary. ‘But Treite bent down and whispered in English: “It’s all right, Queen Mary. The seals are intact.” ’

  —

  Towards the end of the month Violette Lecoq, the Block 10 nurse, noticed that the rules of la chasse had changed again. A truck that came to Block 10 to load up the sick returned empty just minutes later for another load. Next time the truck appeared Violette used a stopwatch, organised from the store, to time the round trip. It took just seven minutes, the time it would take to go to the gas chamber and back, which proved what Violette had suspected: that those chosen for gassing no longer went via the Youth Camp but went straight from their beds to the gas chamber.

  It was ‘bedlam’ in Block 10 towards the end, said Loulou Le Porz, who was spending much of her time trying to move her sick out of Block 10 to avoid being selected. ‘Most of our patients had no mattresses at all, no running water, nothing worked at all. We thought we were in hell. But our strategy was to concern ourselves with our block and our patients. And there were things we could suddenly do as well—things happened that didn’t happen before. I remember getting a whole loaf of bread one day. It was incredible. A lorry came and someone said—do you want bread, just like that.’

  I asked Loulou if she was sure she would survive until the end.

  I didn’t know. For me it had always been obvious we would win the war, but when? We could see they were clearing us all out. We were isolated out there and forgotten by the entire world. People knew nothing about us. They didn’t know where we were.

  ‘Did you think they might never find you?’

  We thought we might die there, yes. My patients were dying in my arms. Madame de Lavalette-Montbrun told me she knew she wouldn’t be going back, but she was still smiling. She was a fatalist. We all were by then. Claude Virlogeux was a physics teacher. I saw her pass me by on the back of a cart one day, quite dead. But we tried to help people hold on. On one mattress we had Madame Tedesco, she was well connected in the world of theatre and she got on very well with our camarade Zim. Then Madame Tedesco died of exhaustion in my arms, saying she would do it all again. I told Zim that she could still last out, it wouldn’t be long. And she agreed to let us smuggle her to a safer block. Zim wanted to live so I persuaded her to take the risk.

  By the end of March the camp was ‘like a mysterious planet’, said Denise Dufournier, ‘where the macabre, the ridiculous and the grotesque rubbed shoulders in a fantastic irrational chaos’. Karolina Lanckorońska, watching the crematorium flames shooting higher every night, was reminded of the beginning of the Iliad. She was still giving lectures on Charlemagne and Gothic art as children in Block 27 played a game of selecting for the gas chamber. In the Red Army block the women were making red flags to hang out to welcome their liberators, while the painting gang had been sent to redecorate the maternity block, where, according to Zdenka’s lists, 135 more babies were born in March, of which 130 died.

  Hitherto servile Blockovas turned courageous, and might suddenly decide to save an entire column of prisoners by leading them out of line for the gas chamber, pretending they were a unit needed for work. Meanwhile, all around the camp groups of haunted women—faces never seen before in Ravensbrück, brought in perhaps from subcamps—were seen waiting for something and then being marched off. ‘We sometimes saw passing by our workplace a small group of women we didn’t know,’ recalled Grete Buber-Neumann. ‘Quite terrified, they passed about thirty metres away from us. We supposed they were taken straight to the gas chamber.’

  Anna Stekolnikova, the Muscovite, remembers seeing ‘women standing in a queue waiting to be burned, holding bundles of clothes’. Such was the chaos that by March no attempt was even made to issue these new arrivals with numbers, and any numberless woman was liable to be simply rounded up and sent for gassing. So when the German co
mmunist Änne Saefkow arrived—transferred from a Berlin prison at the end of the month—a communist friend in the Schreibstube gave her the number of a dead woman, 108273. Änne’s was the last number issued in the camp.

  —

  As the Easter weekend approached the weather was warming up. Gypsies sat outside their blocks in the evenings singing, and the painting gang was sent to drag rowing boats out from a shed onto the lake. The guards wanted to go boating over Easter.

  News reaching the prisoners was of a slowdown in the Russian advance, but the Western front was closing fast. ‘We knew that victory was close at hand. We thought perhaps we only had to stand fast for a few days,’ recalled Denise, whose strength was suddenly fading; her civilian boss remarked upon it as he fed her with cooked potatoes.

  Rumours came and went. The camp secretaries had heard that the French were to be exchanged, but at the Youth Camp the only rumour was of a mass selection. The Easter weekend was coming up and the SS wanted a final clear-out. Several prisoners recorded the sequence of events.

  On 28 March—a Wednesday—the Youth Camp prisoners were ordered to line up barefoot. Neudeck and an SS man carried out a selection, examining faces and legs. Those selected were sent to one side. Amongst them was Elise Rivet—otherwise known as Mère Elisabeth de l’Eucharistie, a Mother Superior from Lyon, brought to Ravensbrück for hiding resisters in her convent. The victims were stripped of everything except shirts and loaded on the trucks, their shoes and underwear left lying on the road. At least six women died in the lineup, and were hauled onto the lorries by their legs.

  Two days later, on 30 March, Good Friday, the guards announced another mass selection, this time at the main camp. The women were told to line up with bare legs and torso and then they had to ‘keep jackets on’ but ‘take shoes off’. As they stood for the selection, Russian guns were just audible for the first time in the distance. Winkelmann appeared. When he signalled, the women had to walk rapidly past him as he bent double and peered at their legs. When he raised a hand a prisoner was taken away to a waiting lorry. When a lorry was full it drove off to the Youth Camp. At Block 10 Violette Lecoq was ordered to help load women direct onto a truck, then she was chased onto the truck herself and driven off. At the Youth Camp her name was not on the guards’ list so she was sent back.