Ravensbruck
Page 97
When the Swedes protested: See FO telegrams, FO 371/48047.
‘prepared to bury the hatchet…’: Kersten, Memoirs.
‘these gentlemen’: Masur report, 23 April 1945, Central Zionist Archives, Jerusalem.
‘very tired and weary’: Bernadotte, The Fall of the Curtain.
Chapter 40: White Buses
‘at the last minute’: KV 2/98.
‘…liquidate them all’: Ibid.
On entering Suhren’s office: Dreams. What happened next and when is not always clear; the sequence of events reported here is pieced together from accounts of Swedish drivers cited in Persson, Escape from the Third Reich, Fritz Göring’s report to MI5 (TNA KV 2/98) and testimony of prisoners including Buchmann, Vaillant-Couturier and Nedvedova, as well as ICRC delegates and those leaving on buses.
He could not get close: The delegate, Albert de Cocatrix, eventually reached the camp and gave a surreal description of its last days as he was shown around by Suhren, who pulled the wool over his eyes with consummate ease. ‘Before I left the camp I thought of asking Suhren to show me the gas chamber and crematorium. I didn’t do it…’. Report on visit to Ravensbrück between 20 and 23 April 1945 (precise date unclear), AICRC, G 44/13-0.02.
The Red Cross is coming: Diary of Jean Bommezijn de Rochement, IWM 06/25/1.
‘Die Engländerin!…’: Wynne, No Drums, No Trumpets.
This sounds too good: IWM 06/25/1.
‘ghostlike men’: Les Françaises à Ravensbrück.
and suddenly we are machine-gunned: In his report on the attacks (and the second on the Wismar road) the Swedish mission leader Sven Frykman said they followed reconnaissance flights by the aircraft and both were ‘entirely intentional, the planes probably British’. Frykman called for ‘energetic protests’ to be sent to the British, Americans and French. Cited in Persson, Escape from the Third Reich.
After a further Swedish protest: FO 371/48047. On 1 May Mallet wrote to the Swedes expressing ‘regret’ at the attacks ‘claimed’ to be British, and reminding the Swedes of warnings previously issued (i.e., that safe passage could not be guaranteed). Letter to C. Günther, 1 May 1945, SRA/UDA, HP 1619.
So I looked: Cited in Tillion, Ravensbrück.
‘We were suddenly told…’: Lund.
‘we took everybody we could…’: Persson, Escape from the Third Reich.
‘We were placed…’: Lund.
‘all Jewish women…’: Lund.
Maisie handed over: Renault, La grande misère.
sent for Mary Lindell: Wynne, No Drums, No Trumpets.
Sven Frykman: Sven Frykman’s role in identifying and collecting up the British prisoners who would otherwise have been left behind is also set out by British diplomats’ reports in FCO 371/50982.
I just remember: Author interview.
I believe that: WO 235/308.
Chapter 41: Liberation
‘Everything is on fire…’: Grossman, A Writer at War.
‘I could hear them…’: WO 235/318.
The Russians were a few miles: Author interview.
‘All around…’: Maurel, Ravensbrück.
They were not bad people: Author interview.
In Fürstenberg we walked: Author interview.
‘Girls, let’s kill a pig and eat’: Author interview.
‘Our submachine gunners…’: Mednikov, Dolya Bessmertiya.
After fighting all the way: ‘A la guerre comme à la guerre’, interview with Michael Ivanovich Stakhanov, now a retired colonel, by journalist Natalia Eryomenkova in Russkaya Gazeta no. 17/2005.
‘I remember celebrating…’: Author interview.
There were many: Author interview.
Then a major: Author interview.
They allocated a house: Author interview.
‘handsome men’: Dreams.
Suddenly we were walking: Author interview.
‘A big burly fellow…’: Maurel, Ravensbrück.
I remember we were burying: Author interview.
Yes, everything happened: Author interview. Odette’s flight with Suhren is described in Tickell, Odette, and in her May 1946 statement (WO 235/318).
We began to wonder: Author interview.
Epilogue
‘I don’t want to burn…’: Mant report, WO 309/416. Seeing the arrivals, an American diplomat sent a cable to Washington describing women ‘in appalling condition…starved and beaten. Still 5000 left at Ravensbrück and refugees believe Germans will exterminate them en masse when the camp is threatened. Many lives would be saved if camp could be taken by surprise attack.?’ Cable 1621 from S. Johnson in Stockholm to Secretary of State Washington, DC, received 1 May 1945, NARA.
‘a very cheerful lady…’: FO 372/50982.
last transport to Belsen: Yvonne Rudellat, the Prosper circuit woman, died at Belsen a few days after liberation. As many as 15,000 men, women and children died at Belsen in the two weeks after liberation, many of typhoid and starvation. Soon after arriving at Malmö Yvonne Baseden was flown back to Scotland, then took a train to London where Vera Atkins met her at Euston Station. Eileen Nearne, the other SOE woman at Ravensbrück, who in the last days had escaped from an evacuation march near Leipzig, reached American lines and eventually returned home. She died in Torquay in 2010. For the story of the search for missing SOE women, see Sarah Helm, A Life in Secrets: The Story of Vera Atkins and the Lost Agents of SOE (London: Little, Brown, 2005).
‘took part in the selection…’: Chechko, GARF.
‘By this time…’: Author interview and Fyffe’s diaries. I interviewed Angus Fyffe about Vera Atkins at his home in Scotland in 2003. He also read out extracts from his extensive diaries recounting with wry humour how as a young Scottish major he had hunted down war criminals in the rubble of post-war Germany. The diaries are now in the IWM.
‘might have stepped out…’: Tickell, Odette. In a diary kept during the hearing Syliva Salvesen describes Winkelmann ‘sitting with his head in his hands’ and Marshall showing ‘rage and despair’, while Carmen Mory ‘looks insolent and sometimes laughs hysterically’. Salvesen archives, Norges Hjemmefrontmuseet.
acquired—it was said—by selling gold teeth: The extraordinary story of Salvequart’s shenanigans while on the run from war-crimes hunters in the chaos of Allied-occupied Germany (including getting a job with American counterintelligence and blackmailing Nazi suspects—see Atkins papers) is matched only by Carmen Mory’s escapades. Mory was hired by British intelligence and posted as an informer in a UN refugee camp, until a young British investigator called Hugh Trevor-Roper uncovered her true story, describing her as ‘a very undesirable person indeed’. TNA investigation files.
Not a single member: The head of Siemens, Hermann von Siemens, was arrested by the Americans in 1945 and remained in prison until 1948, though his arrest was not connected to his role at Siemens but to his position at Deutsche Bank. He was released without charge.
Anne Spoerry: According to a handwritten note on a page of the Hamburg trial transcript, Hélène Roussel, a French survivor, attended an ‘honour court’ in Paris in 1946, where Spoerry was summarily tried by former Free French. WO 235/317.
‘Nobody came to see me…’: At the age of eighteen Stella left the orphanage and traced her father, who had remarried and was living in Brazil. By this time Antonina Nikiforova had befriended Stella, and Stella married Antonina’s adopted son Arkady. She lived with Arkady at Antonina’s St Petersburg flat, where she still lives today
‘All my life…’: Georg Loonkin papers.
‘fighter against fascism’: Rupp and Wiedmaier, BStU files.
The company reluctantly paid out: Benjamin Ferencz, a former Nuremberg prosecutor, describes his battle to get Siemens to pay up in Less Than Slaves.
pitiful sentences: There were no West German trials between 1949 and 1989 concerning crimes commited by female SS guards in Ravensbrück. A handful of women guards were tried at the Majdanek trial in Dusseldorf between 1975 and 1981.
One, Hermine Braunsteiner, who had been tracked down to New York by the Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, was sentenced to life imprisonment but was freed in 1996 for health reasons. She died in 1999.
question the existence of gas chambers: In 1968, the French historian Olga Wormser-Migot produced a study on the Nazi camps in which she claimed there was no proof that gas chambers existed anywhere on German soil.
‘Forget it…’: See Sarah Helm, ‘The Nazi Guard’s Untold Love Story’, Sunday Times Magazine, 5 August 2007.
almost certainly too high: For details of how the British prosecutors arrived at their figure of 90,000 dead, see the interim report on the Ravensbrück investigation, WO 235/316.
Bibliography
Archives
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Archiv Mahn- und Gedenkstätte Ravensbrück
Archiv Gedenkstätte Buchenwald
Bundesarchiv Berlin
Bundesarchiv Ludwigsberg
Geschichtsarchiv der Zeugen Jehovas
International Tracing Service, Bad Arolsen
Landesarchiv Nordrhein-Westfalen
Siemens Archives, Munich
Staatsarchiv Nürnberg
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Austria
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Switzerland
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United Kingdom
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Imperial War Museum
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France
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Poland
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Russia
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History Library, Moscow
Memorial Library, Moscow
Israel
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Yad Vashem
Netherlands
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Norway
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