by Sarah Helm
By the middle of April, as Soviet columns rolled on west, terrified refugees passed through Fürstenberg, recounting what they’d seen, so by the end of the month, most of the town’s people had fled too.
In Ravensbrück all SS wives and families had been evacuated. Many SS men were permanently drunk and talking openly of the need to head towards the relative safety of American lines, or better still, to vanish. Most had already packed civilian clothes and decided on a civilian identity. Suhren, however, was vacillating about when to give the evacuation order. With several thousand prisoners still in the camp, the commandant was left at a loss.
The Führer’s clear instructions had been to evacuate them all, and kill any who couldn’t walk. No prisoners were to fall into enemy hands. But with links to Berlin severed and Hitler holed up in his bunker, Suhren had no new orders. His own superiors—Höss, Glücks, Himmler himself—were fleeing the advancing fronts and could no longer be contacted. As commandant of one of the few camps still not overrun, he was on his own. The fate of the last remaining Ravensbrück women lay in his hands.
The Swedish White Buses had already taken most of the west European prisoners and many Poles and Jewish women. That left the Russians, Germans, Austrians and East Europeans, amongst them still a large number of Jews. Many of these prisoners predicted that Suhren would order a massacre. Others believed the camp was mined, or that they really would be marched to the Baltic coast—the only escape route—put on boats and drowned. As for those too weak to walk, Suhren had threatened many times to shoot anyone unable to join the evacuation.
On 27 April came news that forces of Rokossovsky’s Second Belorussian Front had taken Prenzlau, fifty miles to the east. The German army now blew up fuel depots and military bases around Fürstenberg, ready for the final retreat. Suhren’s men started setting fire to workshops at the back of the compound while Suhren and Binz were seen ‘black with soot and sweat’ frantically burning more papers. Hans Pflaum cycled around the camp, selecting more women to exterminate. ‘Pflaum hunted down the weak and sick prisoners from their blocks and then shot them on the Lagerstrasse,’ said Zdenka Nedvedova.
Other last-minute killings went on. A German prisoner, Anni Sinderman, recalled a group of evacuees brought in just before the end. ‘They were lying on the floor in the bathhouse whimpering and whining.’ These women were not seen again, says Anni. Possibly they were killed in the gas van, or simply shot. Odette Sansom, still held as a hostage in her bunker cell, saw live prisoners driven into the crematorium. ‘I could hear them screaming and struggling and I heard the oven doors being opened and shut. Then I didn’t see the women any more.’
On the question of the final massacre, Suhren could not decide how far to go. Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier noted in her diary that orders were ‘changing every two hours’. One minute the SS announced that all those incapable of marching would be killed and the camp swept clean before the Russians arrived. The next minute Suhren was issuing instructions that the sick could stay and the rest would march.
As Pflaum was shooting women outside, Dr Treite called the prisoner doctors to his office. He asked who would stay behind after the evacuation to care for the sick until the Russians arrived. Several women told Treite they would remain, including the prominent communists Zdenka Nedvedova, Antonina Nikiforova and Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier.
And even if Suhren had intended to kill all the old and sick, how would he have destroyed the bodies in time? The Führer had also ordered that all evidence be eradicated before the enemy arrived, but the crematorium couldn’t burn bodies fast enough, as the Austrian prisoner secretary Friederike Kierdorf discovered when she saw inside.
Friederike was still working in the Schreibstube, filling in details on prisoners’ cards, until the very last minute.
But then suddenly we were told to put the cards down and burn the lot. We were told the office was to be destroyed and we had to take all the last dossiers in trunks to the crematorium for burning. Inside the crematorium there were three ovens, which we now saw for the first time. But as we stood there with the trunks the men working the ovens told us: ‘We can’t burn paper because we’re burning people.’ One of them told us: ‘We burn sixteen thin ones or four fat ones in one oven.’ So we had to carry the documents away again and burn them in sandpits.
Friederike says she didn’t see the burning of the Schreibstube, but the office building wasn’t there when she went back again after the war.
Before the workshops were torched too, the SS were determined to lay hands on any loot. They snatched rolls of cloth just before the flames reached them. Friederike was astonished when a senior SS man thrust a roll of luxury red cloth into her arms. ‘He said it was better I had it than it fell into Russian hands. I think he felt protective towards me. He said he had a daughter like me—I was very young.’ The ‘protective’ SS officer then handed her civilian clothes and told her to join the first convoy of SS and guards who on the evening of 27 April prepared to leave the camp. Suhren had made up his mind.
‘The SS had horses and carts that they stole from the farmers, and one of the officers put me in a cart,’ said Friederike. ‘There were about eight to ten carts and the SS luggage went in the first one.’ She felt scared to be with the SS. ‘Everyone was loaded up with stolen goods—much of it jewellery. They asked me why I didn’t have jewellery on me. They couldn’t understand why I hadn’t taken any.’
As the convoy left, Suhren drove past them, shouting: ‘Get to Malchow as quick as you can.’ Suhren had chosen the subcamp of Malchow, about seventy kilometres northwest, because it would not be overrun for a few days and probably lay in the path of the Americans—or so he thought.
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In the small hours of Saturday 28 April the main exodus from Ravensbrück began. The day before, at half-past midnight, Suhren had visited Odette in her bunker cell. ‘He stood at the door and made a gesture with his finger indicating a throat being cut.’ Odette thought her turn for liquidation had come. ‘He told me to get my things ready and be prepared to leave the camp early the next morning.’ At eight in the morning an SS man came and ordered her onto the Lagerstrasse. Suhren appeared and put her into a prison van whose Prominente passengers included an Italian naval commandant, the Lithuanian minister of war, a Polish baron and two French women aristocrats. The group were sent on to Malchow, to wait until Suhren arrived.
All next day the guards massed large groups of prisoners at the gates. The kitchen and office staff marched out before daylight and ordinary prisoners followed. Any who refused were chased down by Pflaum, now using dogs. A French woman found hiding in the attic of a block was beaten to death with a hammer.
When the Austrian teenager Fritzi Jaroslavsky joined one of the columns, she saw Suhren drive past in his car, urging the women on to Malchow. ‘But we hadn’t got very far when Russian planes flew very low over us and we scattered in all directions.’ Fritzi and her group reached a small town where they took cover in an empty house. ‘Then quickly we realised we were free, so we turned and made our way back to Fürstenberg, where we thought we’d be safer.’
Johanna Sultan from Kiel had set off with an earlier group that was also attacked by Russian fighter planes. Everyone dived for cover—guards, dogs and prisoners alike. Now they took cross-country routes, trying to hide from the planes under trees, but the leaves were not out, and the planes attacked again as the women trudged on across vast ploughed fields, hard with frost. Everyone scattered, and apart from a single female guard, all the SS ran off. Then the woman guard fled too and the prisoners were alone. ‘We met up with a Ukrainian peasant in the field who showed us the way to a nearby farm, where a group of French prisoners arrived who had also escaped. We all hid there and waited for the Russians or Americans to arrive.’
Many other SS guards escaped from the Malchow march by hastily changing into civilian clothes and fleeing north. The men hoped to disappear in the refugee flows, or find a way to the Danish border.
Women guards often just made for home. After abandoning the march, Margarete Rabe and a fellow woman guard headed for Margarete’s uncle’s house in the nearby town of Schwerin.
At Ravensbrück, women prisoners were now streaming out of the gates. Maria Apfelkammer left with 300 or 400 prisoners, lined up five abreast. SS numbers were dwindling fast. Most of the guards in the escort were ‘old men with guns out of a museum’, as one prisoner put it. They were members of the Volkssturm, a conscript militia created the previous October. Artur Conrad, the SS executioner, brought up the rear of Apfelkammer’s Malchow column, saying he would drive the women to American lines. ‘After about three hours we had a short rest by the road. Two women sitting on stones said they could no longer go on, so Conrad shot them. Conrad then shot several other stragglers.’
They marched all day, slept in a barn, then marched again. A Czech woman, Stefanie Jokesch, spent the second night in a wood. She didn’t remember shootings but did recall many women who ‘lay down and died’. The third day she fled. ‘But there was nowhere to go. I was in the middle of no-man’s-land so I hid in some trees.’
In these last days of April, it was not only the main camp that was disgorging its prisoners; so were all remaining Ravensbrück subcamps, many of which were dotted along this as yet unconquered strip of Germany. Two hundred miles south, Eileen Nearne, the British SOE woman, imprisoned in a subcamp near Leipzig, had fled an evacuation column and was also lurking under trees, wondering how far away the Americans were. Even further south, across the Czech border, Maria Bielicka, evacuated from the Neurolau subcamp, was marching with a column of prisoners over the Sudeten Mountains. They hoped to reach American lines, though she feared it was more likely she would be shot.
The Russians were a few miles away to the east and the Americans a few miles to the west but nobody knew quite where. Many women had already died on the road as they couldn’t go on, and others had been shot. Then they put us in a giant beer warehouse for the night. The SS didn’t know where to go or what to do with us.
At the subcamps the final evacuations were often more chaotic than at Ravensbrück. At Neubrandenburg on 26 April the guards told everyone to stop work as both Allied fronts edged closer. The French sat for two days on their bunks, wagering whether the Americans or Russians would reach them first, while the Russian prisoners pillaged the kitchens. ‘All around our block nibbling could be heard,’ remembered Micheline Maurel. ‘On a nearby bunk a Russian was eating raw spaghetti. She smiled broadly and offered me a handful.’
Then the chief guard fired at women looting flour bags and suddenly it was ‘Raus, raus, schnell!’ and shots came through the window. As the women were rounded up outside, Micheline trod on something soft, a tiny pack of margarine, and picked it up. ‘Night was falling. It was raining and the guns rumbled as the outer gate swung open.’ She clutched her friend Michelle’s arm and told her she couldn’t possibly march. ‘You can. You are going to march,’ said Michelle, and she did, telling herself: ‘Keep walking, don’t stop, don’t look round, don’t speak, don’t think.’
At dawn Micheline took out the margarine and ate it with Michelle. Then they set out again and marched all day. It was raining, the horizon was ablaze and the guard Edith Fraede brought up the rear, riding a truck with a machine gun. That night they slept in a wet barn where several exhausted women died, among them Marthe Mourbel, a professor of philosophy from Angers. She might have lived had she stayed behind: the day after the evacuation a lone Swedish Red Cross ambulance turned up at Neubrandenburg and rescued women left in the sickbay.
Columns of marchers crisscrossed no-man’s-land, exhausted and maddened by thirst and hunger. ‘A mother stopped and began to pull up grass to eat,’ recalled Lise Lesèvre. ‘The daughter sprang from the rows of marchers to help her mother and the guards shot both of them.’ Further back a Red Cross truck had pulled up with food parcels for the same column, and was handing them out even as the shots rang out.
The marchers came across many other gruesome murder scenes. Near Rostock on the Baltic coast, a group of women escaping from a column found a mass of dead men in striped clothing hanging from trees. Along the road to Malchow lay dozens of women’s bodies shot by Conrad and his crew. Women who ran into fields to dig for potatoes were shot, as were a group who raided bread from an SS car. Fritz Suhren shot a prisoner who stooped to pick up a cigarette butt in the road.
Women evacuated from a subcamp near Leipzig were marched into a field where lines of dead men in striped camp clothes lay face down. These were prisoners from a Buchenwald subcamp who had apparently been marched here and then shot en masse. ‘We were forced to walk over the corpses to get to our resting place at the other end of the field,’ one woman recalled. ‘We couldn’t help treading on the bodies.’
A flight of planes flew overhead. Everyone scattered, but the planes tipped their wings and began to circle before gaining height again, ‘and above our heads was a blaze of colour as flags floated down to let us know that our friends had recognised us. Then we were marched off again.’
Despite the terrors of no-man’s-land, with the Allies so close, the chance of escape had never seemed greater. Packed into the beer warehouse in the Sudeten Mountains, Maria Bielicka and her friends decided to take the risk.
We climbed inside the empty beer crates to hide and then we waited. In the morning we could hear the SS shouting ‘Raus raus, schnell schnell ’, and dogs were barking. Then they left, but one man came back with his dog and my ear was squashed against my friend’s chest and I could hear her heart going ‘boom boom’ and I thought, my God, the whole world can hear this, but then he left, leaving us and all the sick behind. We waited several hours and we could hear the sick women calling out for water in every language, water, Wasser, Wasser. There were many and they were dying. Then the SS came back and shot them.
The SS didn’t find Maria and her friends, who waited a few more hours, hiding inside their crates, then crept back out.
At some subcamps the guards fled before the evacuation began. In Genthin, the prisoners, left alone, took revenge by murdering the civilian factory bosses. ‘I remember seeing two of our civilian factory managers lying dead, still with their white coats on,’ said the Russian prisoner Evdokia Domina.
They were not bad people. Then someone just opened the gates and we walked out. We found a house to stay in and someone gave us a horse, but we didn’t know how to ride this horse so we went on foot and saw places burned and torched. We just thought to head east. We walked into deserted houses and found the bedrooms with beds to sleep in. And it was so nice with these sheets and quilts. We ate the food and never washed the plates, just took another one.
Before long the guards were escaping across no-man’s-land faster than the prisoners. Piles of uniforms lay discarded at the roadside by women guards and the SS as they changed into civilian clothes and fled. Columns of marching prisoners would suddenly look around and find that they were free. Ekatarina Speranskaya was with a group of Russians heading north when one of them shouted: ‘ “Girls! Are you animals? Are you just cattle? There aren’t even any guards left any longer and still you all march.” And we looked around and others shouted: “Hurrah, comrades, we’ve been liberated.” ’
Yet this first ‘freedom’ didn’t yet mean liberation, as many women were to learn. At least one group of prisoners were killed in error by American sniper fire as they moved close to US lines. The Poles feared running into Russian lines. Krystyna Zając was one of the first to encounter Russian soldiers.
Immediately they saw us they chased us. A Russian said he wanted to dance with me. Then they tried to rape us. I fell down. They even tried to get my mother and to rape her. We said we were Poles, not Germans, and we were prisoners, but they didn’t care. Then in the night they killed a mother who was protecting her daughter. Eventually we found a safer place in a German house.
By 29 April the few remaining prisoners at Ravensbrück were increasingly giving the order
s as the Soviet army approached. Treite came once more to the Revier to press Zdenka to leave, but she refused. He then told Zdenka that she was now in charge of all the sick left in the camp, a decision that riled Antonina Nikiforova, who believed that the role should pass to her as the senior Red Army doctor.
Antonina and the other doctors and nurses had counted at least 1500 women in the camp who were too sick to move, many of whom were close to death. Twenty-two women found at the back of Block 32 were ‘barely more than human remains’, wrote Marie-Claude in her diary. ‘We moved them to the Revier but I doubt they’ll live.’ Kamila Janovic, a Polish nurse, said that in the days before the Russians arrived unknown numbers of women died and piles of bodies lay everywhere and were gnawed by rats, but there was no time to bury them.
Electric power had been turned off, so prisoners organised a chain gang to haul pails of water to the Revier blocks. In the kitchen Marta Baranowska, the Polish Red Cross leader, took charge. ‘This morning Binz appeared at the kitchen and asked Marta if there was any food for the guards who had been left behind and had nothing to eat,’ wrote Marie-Claude. ‘Marta told Binz that everything we had was for the sick and Binz would have to go and ask at the SS canteen—how things are changing.’
The guards had enough authority left to order the last of the prisoners to march out of the camp gates, but such was the confusion that several hid at the last minute, including Rosa Thälmann, wife of the former German Communist Party president. German comrades smuggled her out and hid her in a house in Fürstenberg.
This latter group of marchers were mostly Russians, and included all the Red Army women, as well as the children who had been living in their block. Olga Golovina seized the cart used for pulling the soup kettles and used it as a pram to carry small children, dragging it out of the camp gate.
Stella Kugelman, who was five years old when she was evacuated, says today she can’t remember exactly how she and the other children got out. She recalls that the children quickly became separated from the adults, possibly after an air attack. Then a woman she calls ‘Aunt Olympiada’ took care of them. ‘I remember suddenly being outside on a road, and I think Aunt Olympiada just found us there and decided to look after us. I didn’t know her in the camp. She put us back on this cart and pushed us along and later she found some food to feed us.’
