by Sarah Helm
The reason the Allies cut short their trials was clear: the Cold War was under way, Germany was about to split in two and the new priority was to help West Germany rebuild so it could join in the fight against the communists. Most notable amongst the perpetrators let off the hook were German industrialists. Whatever their complicity with the Nazi horror, or their profits from slave labour, these companies were needed to help the West fight the Cold War. Not a single member of the Siemens board, or the Ravensbrück Siemens staff, was ever charged with war crimes at Ravensbrück or anywhere else where they used slave labour.*1 The only known legal action against a Siemens employee was a de-Nazification case launched in 1946 by the British in Berlin against Wolf-Dietrich von Witzleben, the head of personnel, when he was cleared of past crimes and continuing Nazi links. The case was reopened in 1948 after communist witnesses brought new accusations against Siemens and von Witzleben. In 1949, as the Soviet blockade of Berlin intensified, the accusations were again thrown out—obviously in part because the communists’ motives were not trusted—and the case shut down.
As the trials ended, and the transcripts were locked away in London for thirty years, Allied prosecutors exhorted historians to pick up where they had left off, to make sense of the Nazi crimes. But history soon forgot Ravensbrück.
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Survivors found that nobody back home wanted to hear about the camp; there were many reasons. In London, the Special Operations Executive was wound up amid evidence of bungling and betrayal, which had contributed to the capture of the SOE women taken to Ravensbrück. To close the scandal down, SOE veterans were told never to speak of their wartime work again, which meant no talk of the camps.
Those British women who had volunteered for resistance work while in France found no interest in their stories either. The governess Mary O’Shaughnessy, who had survived the Youth Camp, hoped to write a book about what she’d witnessed, but was told by a friend in Fleet Street that the British public would not want to read it.
Returning to her home in Stavanger, on Norway’s west coast, Nelly Langholm tried to tell her family and friends about her experiences, ‘but my sister took me aside and told me not to talk like that again as people thought I’d gone mad’.
For the French, there was a particular taboo about the atrocities committed on the women. Many were asked if they had been raped. Most had not, but they were treated as if they had been collectively violated nonetheless, and felt ashamed. ‘I was a young girl before the war, I wasn’t married and I was supposed to be pure. I couldn’t explain what it had been like so I said nothing. It was easier that way. We weren’t proud of what we’d been through,’ said Christiane de Cuverville.
Denise Dufournier went to Switzerland to convalesce and wrote her memoir while events were fresh in her mind, and Germaine Tillion began work on her first Ravensbrück history, but most of their compatriots stayed silent. Some French women found it easier to make up stories about what happened, knowing that people simply wouldn’t believe the truth. Loulou Le Porz, however, had to tell the truth in her first few weeks back in Paris because she was given the task of providing information to families looking for missing loved ones.
A French doctor came to Loulou one day, looking for his sister. ‘She died in Block 10—a woman of about sixty. She had told me how she hid British airmen in her house but her brother didn’t even know why she had been arrested. So I told him the full story. He was a typical old-fashioned type, standing there in a stiff suit with a melon [bowler] hat. As I talked I saw that straight away there were tears in his eyes.’
In post-war France trying to come to terms with its own collaboration with the Nazis, the stories of the real resisters—and those who returned from the camps could prove it better than most—were often unwelcome. Moreover, the French resistance was considered an entirely male affair. ‘These men who had done nothing strutted on the streets with their medals,’ scoffed Loulou. On her return to Paris Michèle Agniel could barely stand, and as a result was given a permit to jump the ration queues. ‘But when I did a man complained, so I said I had just come back from a concentration camp. He said, “Mais quand même, they know how to queue in concentration camps, don’t they?” I hit him.’
Back in Bordeaux, Loulou Le Porz returned to her work as a doctor, and decided to respect ‘her dead’ in the camp by keeping her memories to herself. ‘I’d watched my friends die so courageously amidst the vermin and the filth that I couldn’t talk about them now with those who wouldn’t understand.’
One person Loulou did talk about, however, was Anne Spoerry (‘Claude’), the Swiss-French doctor who had been ‘bewitched’ by Carmen Mory and helped beat and kill the ‘lunatics’ in Block 10. Spoerry had refused to attend the Hamburg trial, and a deal was done for her to be tried in Switzerland instead, where she was cleared. After the Swiss trial, Loulou, Violette Lecoq and other French women were determined she shouldn’t practise medicine in France and secured a ban. Spoerry left for Kenya, where she lived and worked as a flying doctor, devoting the rest of her life to the poor and needy, seeking redemption and trying to forget her past.
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Yevgenia Klemm could never forget her past. As soon as she arrived back in Odessa she tried to rebuild her life. Her flat had been taken from her, but a fellow teacher gave her lodgings and she secured her old job, teaching how to teach history at the Odessa College.
Harassment by SMERSh soon began again. In March 1946 six Ravensbrück women were found guilty by a court in Leningrad of collaborating with ‘the fascists’ and were sent into exile in Siberia. After this all survivors lived in terror. Stella Kugelman, aged five at the end of the war, was taken by her last camp mother, Aunt Olympiada, to an orphanage outside Moscow. Aunt Olympiada never came back. ‘Nobody came to see me because they didn’t want to advertise they’d been in the camp, and nobody wanted to adopt me as I was too thin and yellow,’ says Stella. ‘In the orphanage we were taught not to laugh or cry and to be as quiet as possible and nothing would happen, so that’s what I did.’
The terror reached its zenith in 1949, when the Simferopol doctors’ trial took place, as a result of which the three Ravensbrück doctors, Lyusya Malygina, Maria Klyugman and Anna Fedchenko were found guilty of collaborating with the SS and sent to Siberian camps.
Klemm was often interrogated during this investigation but not accused. Then in the early 1950s Stalin’s campaign against ‘cosmopolitans’—foreigners and Jews—began and rumours spread around the Odessa College that Klemm must be a spy as she had been in the West during the war. As a result, her teaching work was cut back. Friends spoke later of ‘wicked and unfair accusations made against Klemm’ by comrades who ‘worked for the organs’—for ‘SMERSh’.
In March 1953 Stalin died and the atmosphere began to ease, but inside the Odessa College harassment of Klemm intensified, and in early September, on the eve of a new term, she received news that she would no longer be able to teach at all. The following morning—3 September 1953—Yevgenia was found dead. She had hanged herself in the small kitchen of her friend’s flat. In a suicide note she said that she had taken her life because she was not allowed to teach any more and nobody had bothered to tell her why.
‘All my life I have worked honestly, with all my soul and energy. And to this day I do not know what I have done wrong…Was it because I was taken prisoner by the fascists in Sevastopol and spent nearly three years in a death camp? Am I really such a criminal that I am not worth talking to? I cannot live any longer.’ For many years Klemm’s suicide could not be spoken of; most of her comrades never learned that she had died. Her body was buried in an unmarked grave.
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Although their case was the most extreme, the Russians were not the only survivors to be terrorised into silence after the war. Amongst many others, now living behind the Iron Curtain, the Czechs were constrained in what they could say about Ravensbrück; they certainly couldn’t talk of their dear friend Milena Jesenska. Reviled as a traitor
to communism, Milena’s courage in opposing the Nazis before her capture and spirited resilience in the camp were obliterated from her country’s history.
Three years after the war the site of the camp itself, now in the German Democratic Republic (DDR), lay abandoned; piles of human ashes lay beside a mass grave outside the crematorium. A Soviet tank regiment then moved into the main compound, destroying the remaining barracks and flattening the site.
A group of former German prisoners—‘mothers for peace’—led moves to create a memorial to honour the memory of the dead, but the political reality of the Cold War meant that only the communist resisters were remembered: like the other camps in the DDR—Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen—Ravensbrück soon became an official communist shrine. The centrepiece of the memorial was the statue called Tragende, inspired by Olga Benario and said to represent ‘a strong woman, with knowledge, who helped her weaker comrades’. It was a monument to ‘our heroines who fought’; in other words, the communist ideal of womanhood. The fact that Olga was also a Jew, and was murdered because she was Jewish, was not mentioned. Non-communist prisoners—as well as Gypsies, asocials and other Jews—were also largely ignored by the East German camp history.
One of the leading camp communists, Maria Wiedmaier, became head of the officially backed Victims of Fascism (VVN), with power to rule on who should qualify as a true ‘fighter against fascism’ and who should receive help and money.
Mina Rupp, another veteran camp communist, was not one of them. On arrival in the camp Rupp had been sentenced to a thrashing for stealing half a carrot, and when appointed a Blockova turned to thrashing prisoners herself. In 1948 Maria Wiedmaier reported Rupp to the Soviet police for crimes in the camp. She confessed at her trial to selecting prisoners for gassing, and was sentenced to twenty-five years’ forced labour at a prison in Dresden.
By the mid-1950s Wiedmaier and several other ‘mothers for peace’ were working for the East German secret police, the Stasi. In 1956, under the cover name Olga, Wiedmaier was given forty West German marks and sent through the Iron Curtain to ‘observe the mood of the population’ in areas of NATO training.*2
In the 1960s the Stasi rounded up Ravensbrück guards found living in the East and launched their own war crimes trials, during which the accused were often persuaded to invent new horrors, as the Eastern courts sought to show that they had done a better job at trying Nazi crimes than the West. Their position was perhaps understandable; not only had the Allies let the majority of war criminals walk free, but by the early 1950s most of those they had sentenced were out of prison. Herta Oberheuser, the Ravensbrück camp doctor, was even practising medicine again as a children’s doctor in Stocksee, in Schleswig-Holstein.
Siemens’s role at Ravensbrück and other camps remained hidden until the 1960s, when investigators seeking compensation for Jewish claimants unearthed the facts. The company reluctantly paid out small sums into a fund, but accepted no liability, saying it was coerced.
Later trials held by the West German courts had produced few convictions, and pitiful sentences. In 1963 a much-vaunted Auschwitz trial was held at Frankfurt where Franz Lucas, a doctor at Auschwitz as well as at Ravensbrück, faced war crimes charges. Lucas had helped prisoners in Ravensbrück and Loulou Le Porz felt duty bound to testify on his behalf; she remembered in particular how Dr Lucas had brought milk for a pregnant Dutch woman who then died in childbirth in Block 10. However, as the trial exposed details of Lucas’s previous crimes, including his selection of Jews for gassing at Auschwitz, his humanity at Ravensbrück looked more like an attempt to save his skin. Nevertheless, Loulou said she didn’t regret speaking up for Lucas; the help he gave to patients in Block 10 was not in dispute. After Lucas was freed, just four years later he pushed his luck by asking Loulou for a character reference so he could recoup his confiscated possessions. She refused: ‘I said no. That’s enough. This matter of his possessions had nothing to do with me.’
All this time survivors East and West battled to keep memories alive. In 1955 Antonina Nikiforova returned from exile in Siberia, where she had adopted an orphaned boy, and immediately started her research on Ravensbrück all over again by writing to survivors, asking for their memories of the camp and trying to find ways of speaking out.
In 1957 a toothless woman also expressed a need to speak out. Johanna Langefeld knocked on Grete Buber-Neumann’s door in Frankfurt, determined to unburden herself of her story. Before Langefeld reminisced about her earlier life and the camp, however, the former chief guard told Grete about her post-war ‘odyssey’, including her many years hiding in Poland with the help of former prisoners and the Catholic Church.
After being fired from Ravensbrück in 1943 for helping the Polish rabbits, Langefeld was cleared of disciplinary offences by an SS court and sat out the war living with her sister in Munich. In 1946 she was picked up and interrogated by both the British and American war crimes investigators, who then extradited her to Poland to face charges at the Auschwitz trial in Kraków in 1947. Held in a Polish jail, she learned from the prison director that Polish women, former inmates from the camp, knew of her presence in custody and were determined to get her out ‘because of what she had done for Poles in the camp’, she told Grete.
However, when Langefeld did eventually escape, she did so of her own volition, or so she claimed. It was Christmas Eve 1947 and she had been assigned a task cleaning the prison stairs. Seeing an opportunity, she fled out of the front door into the dark, snowy Kraków streets before being invited to take shelter in a convent. From there, she was taken to safety in another convent in another Polish city.
Much is known today about the role of the Catholic Church in helping Nazi war criminals evade capture, but the story of Johanna Langefeld’s escape has a curious twist: it was former Ravensbrück prisoners who persuaded the Church to help her. Polish survivors today refuse to divulge details, but it was almost certainly they who snatched her from jail and then hid her for the next ten years. In 1957 Langefeld became ‘homesick’, she told Grete, and wished to see her son again, so Langefeld’s Polish protectors smuggled her back through the Iron Curtain. She reached West Germany in 1957, which was when she sought out Grete Buber-Neumann to ‘explain her behaviour’.
After hearing her out, Grete concluded that Langefeld was ‘a broken human being, who is repressed by heavy feelings of guilt’. The two women kept in touch, and Grete once visited Langefeld in Munich, where she lived. ‘She had lost the strength to start her life anew. She told me that she’d like to be in prison, at least for two years, to pay for her crimes.’ Langefeld died in Augsburg in 1975.
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In the post-war years mainstream historians did little to investigate the detailed stories of the camps, preferring to theorise about the Nazi leadership and its coming to power rather than tell what happened on the ground. The camp for women—always low down the SS pecking order—was of no interest to historians at all, particularly as there were no official documents; oral history was distrusted. In the wake of the 1961 Eichmann trial, however, new interest was sparked in the Jewish death camps and writing on the Holocaust began to burgeon. But this in turn seemed to push the Germany-based concentration camps into the background. In the late 1960s certain historians searching for new narratives began to question the existence of gas chambers at Ravensbrück. The Ravensbrück survivors were in despair.
Michèle Agniel was sitting at home in Paris when her mother, who had lost her husband in the war, and had always spoken out about war crimes, walked in and slammed a newspaper down on the desk in front of her. The paper contained an article by one such historian. ‘She said, “Now look. They are saying it never happened. You have no right to be silent any more.” She was right. Many of us felt guilty we hadn’t spoken out earlier. We should have had more courage.’
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By this time, the children of survivors were beginning to ask questions, but most found answers hard to come by. As I talked to survivors, their children
and grandchildren often came to listen; few had ever heard their mothers talk in detail about the war. Many in this second generation had been damaged, perhaps by years of separation when mothers were in the camp, or disturbed in later years by what their mothers had suffered and could not discuss. Maria Wilgat, daughter of Krysia, the secret letter writer, saw her mother erupt in fury when she heard the German language or if she saw red salvia flowers, but Krysia never told her daughter why. I heard of several in the second generation who had taken their own lives. Mina Rupp, the German communist, who confessed before a Soviet court to selecting fellow prisoners for gassing, was pardoned in 1954. Her daughter committed suicide by gassing herself two months before Rupp was freed from prison in Dresden.
Naomi Moscovitch, one of the Jewish children who arrived in the camp in 1943, spoke of a very different family tragedy. She had gone to live in Israel after the war, and when I met her there she talked for many hours about Ravensbrück, describing, most memorably, her recollections of a bomb at the children’s Christmas party in 1944. As I got up to leave we talked about her new life in Israel, and she said it had been hard. She asked me if I knew about the Sbarro Pizzeria suicide bombing. On 9 August 2001 a Palestinian suicide bomber and his female accomplice walked into the Jerusalem pizzeria where Naomi’s daughter, her daughter’s husband and their three children were eating. The entire family were among the dead.
In the early 1980s a young West German schoolgirl was having difficulty finding out about Ravensbrück; it was a place she had heard her parents mention when they were talking about her grandfather Walter Sonntag, one of the first doctors at Ravensbrück and the most sadistic.
