Escape from Paris

by Stephen Harding

  But Yvette and the other arrivals from Paris soon realized that there were prisoners in Ravensbrück who were subject to even more horrific abuse, though not as punishment for perceived infractions of camp rules. Relatively healthy teenaged girls and young women, most of them Polish, were purposely maimed and crippled in ghastly and macabre medical experiments carried out by SS doctors, ostensibly to help the Germans better understand and treat combat wounds suffered by their troops. The unfortunate victims were subjected to a range of horrific “tests”—all of which were conducted while the women were awake and fully conscious. Some had their leg bones shattered or their calf muscles or nerves torn out, with the resultant wounds being intentionally infected with bacteria or foreign objects. Others had limbs crudely amputated, still others were exposed to toxic chemicals, and several were shot at point-blank range and left untreated to see how long it would take for them to bleed out. With pity and affection Yvette and her fellow French prisoners referred to the experiment subjects as “lapins” (rabbits), because the Germans treated them as nothing more than human laboratory animals.4

  Yvette and her mother assumed that they would remain in Ravensbrück until they died or were liberated, but on September 18 they were among five hundred French prisoners chosen for transfer to the Buchenwald Aussenkommando (“external detachment”) called Arbeitslager (labor camp) Torgau.5 In preparation for the relocation, the women were allowed to shower and were given clean uniforms bearing new individual numbers—31903 for Yvette and 31904 for Denise. On the morning of the nineteenth the entire group marched to the train station in Fürstenberg, where the women were packed aboard waiting railcars. A three-day, 120-mile journey brought them to the station at Torgau, some 120 miles south of Ravensbrück, in Saxony. After disembarking from the freight cars on the afternoon of the twenty-first the women were marched through the town, where they were amazed to find hundreds of French prisoners of war. The men called to them from the barred upper windows of buildings and from small barbed-wire enclosures that dotted the town.6 The chance to speak to their countrymen, however briefly, cheered the women prisoners immensely, as did the first sight of their new home.

  Set in a small forest clearing a half-hour walk outside the town, Arbeitslager Torgau looked more like a commercial factory than a Nazi prison. Though circled by tall fences, the facility consisted of many stucco buildings separated by concrete walkways lined with bushes and small areas of well-tended lawn. The new arrivals were struck by how pleasant the surroundings seemed in comparison to those they’d left behind at Ravensbrück, an impression that was further enhanced when the women were ushered into their quarters. As Virginia d’Albert-Lake later wrote:

  There were three small dormitories and one large one. The floors were of cement; the bunks had three tiers; there were steam heat radiators; the straw mattresses and pillows were new, and everything was clean. There were two washrooms, down the center of which ran two troughs and a water pipe, with spouts at regular intervals. Outhouses were the only non-modern feature.… What a change from Ravensbrück! It looked as if we were going to be treated like human beings! We lined up for our blankets and were given two apiece—clean wool ones. Each of us had her own bed! That same evening food arrived, which included good fresh bread, not the black sawdust of Ravensbrück. There was sauerkraut soup too, and a piece of sausage for each of us.7

  The women’s initially positive impression of Torgau changed abruptly the following morning, however. After roll call on Sunday the twenty-second they were marched to a large factory-like building, where it quickly became obvious that the Arbeitslager was, in fact, an army munitions plant. The women were immediately put to work retrieving spent copper shell casings from huge basins of acid, a process intended to make the casings reusable. Workers had to wear heavy protective aprons made of thick rubber, and the acid basins produced fumes that made breathing difficult.

  But it was not the working conditions that ultimately incensed the French prisoners to the point of revolt. Within an hour of arriving in the work hall dozens of women—including Yvette, Denise, and Virginia d’Albert-Lake—simply took off their aprons, dropped them on the floor, and announced to their startled German overseers that as résistants they were soldiers of France and they refused to help produce tools of war for the enemy.8 An SS adjutant’s threat to send back to Ravensbrück anyone who refused to work sparked an intense debate among the prisoners:

  Many of the women changed their decision at this threat, while those who were willing to take the risk were scornful of their comrades’ cowardice. What a morning that was! There was no semblance of order.… Women were lecturing and arguing, fighting and weeping. Leaders were making up lists, drawing up petitions. It was all madness; everyone was caught up in the wild excitement and nervous intensity of the situation.… We all suffered that day. Friends, enemies. We were torn between courage and fear, idealism and realism, pride and shame.9

  The Germans, for their part, seemed temporarily uncertain how to respond to the revolt. The French women were ultimately sent back to their dormitories, where most spent the night wondering what the morning would bring. To their surprise and relief, what sunrise did not bring was firing squads. At the dawn roll call the camp commandant announced that two hundred of the prisoners would be required to work in the munitions halls, but the others would be divided between food preparation in the facility’s several kitchens and agricultural work outside the fences. Anyone who refused to do labor of any kind, he announced ominously, would immediately be returned to Ravensbrück. For reasons known only to themselves, the requisite number of women decided that the munitions work was their best option. Yvette and Denise, on the other hand, stuck firmly to their refusal to help the German war effort, instead opting for agricultural work.10

  Their decision kept them out of the munitions hall, but it also guaranteed long days of backbreaking labor. The fields that surrounded the camp not only provided food for the prisoners, the guards, and the guards’ families, they also fed the several hundred German civilian workers—mostly women—assigned to other aspects of the ammunition-production process. Yvette, Denise, and the other agricultural workers therefore spent eleven hours a day in the fields, tending to and harvesting crops planted earlier in the season. As August turned to September increasingly cold weather and frequent rain added to the physical challenges of the work, though the “field women” were at least able to supplement their increasingly meager diet with fresh vegetables.

  Yvette and Denise had been at Torgau for just over seven weeks when, on October 15, they and about half of the original number of female prisoners sent to the camp were marched to the railway station and loaded aboard waiting freight cars. The women were understandably worried that they were about to be sent back to Ravensbrück, but their actual destination was a small village known as Abteroda, just over fifty miles southwest of Buchenwald.11 Until the 1920s the community had been the home of the Kalischachtanlage Abteroda, a potash salt mine, and it was the extensive network of disused tunnels that made the otherwise unremarkable village strategically important to the German war effort.

  From 1938 onward many of the tunnels had been enlarged and equipped with machinery used in the production of ammunition ranging from rifle and machine-gun cartridges to artillery shells, while other tunnels were used as storage areas. New buildings were constructed above ground to house offices, shops that built the wooden crates used to ship the ammunition, and barracks and orderly rooms for the soldiers who guarded the complex. By early 1944 the Allied bombing raids began seriously impeding the manufacturing of jet engines for the Luftwaffe at the BMW plant in nearby Eisenach and the production facilities were moved underground at several locations, including Abteroda.12 Much of the ammunition-production machinery was moved elsewhere, and work crews from the Organisation Todt—the huge civil and military engineering firm—further expanded and improved the tunnels beneath and around the village and installed the infrastructure required for engine produc
tion. Though BMW provided some administrators and technical staff, the bulk of the labor force comprised concentration camp inmates. Because the Abteroda facility had been designated an Aussenkommando of Buchenwald, that camp’s commandant, SS-Colonel Hermann Pister, was required to provide the necessary workers—preferably females, he was told, because their hands were thought to be better suited to detail work. Having been informed that the women in Torgau’s munitions hall had been so debilitated by exposure to acid that they were essentially useless, Pister simply ordered that roughly half the female prisoners at that camp be sent to Abteroda to work until they died—an SS policy known as Vernichtung durch Arbeit (extermination through labor). The other women were returned directly to Ravensbrück.13

  Yvette, her mother, and the others selected for labor in the engine facility spent four days locked in the unheated freight cars without food or water, and when they finally arrived at the station that served Abteroda it was in the middle of a swirling snowstorm. Still wearing only the thin clothes and wooden clogs they had been issued on arrival at Torgau, the women were packed into the back of open-top troop trucks for the frigid, four-mile journey to the BMW work site. On arrival the newcomers were forced into the 180-foot by 60-foot, two-story building that was to be both their workplace and barracks.

  The structure’s ground floor was almost wholly taken up with rows of crude wooden worktables, all of which had long benches along each side. Atop each table were boxes of small aluminum parts and various bundles of colored wire, items that made it immediately obvious to the new arrivals that they would be expected to work on military items of some sort. When many of the women began muttering that they were résistants and would not aid in the production of war materiel, the SS adjutant standing in the middle of the room blandly informed them that anyone who refused to work would immediately be taken out and shot. Given the stark choice between work or death, the women wisely decided to hold their tongues—at least for the time being.

  The new arrivals were then herded up a narrow flight of stairs to the building’s second floor, which was stacked to the ceiling with tiers of the now familiar crude wooden bunks. At either end of the room were rows of buckets to be used as toilets, and the women were told they were responsible for emptying the containers each evening. Guards then handed out new fabric triangles the prisoners were to sew on in place of the ones issued at Ravensbrück before the transfer to Torgau. Still red to indicate the wearer was a political prisoner and still marked with a large “F,” the triangles bore new numbers—Denise was now 50515 and Yvette 50516.14

  For the next three and a half months the daily schedule for the French prisoners working at Abteroda never varied. After a meager breakfast at dawn the women spent the next eleven hours in the first-floor workshop, with only an equally meager lunch at midday to break up the monotony of assembling small subcomponents for the BMW jet engines. Strands of delicate wire had to be threaded through minute holes in various aluminum stampings, and each completed component had to meet stringent quality-control parameters. If a German inspector found a flaw in any part, the women who’d produced it would be beaten or whipped in front of the others. Such punishment was fairly common when the workers were first learning the process, but as the weeks went on assembly errors ceased being the result of inexperience or inability, and instead resulted from intentional sabotage.

  Rather than refusing to work and suffering the extreme consequences such a refusal would certainly trigger, Yvette, Denise, and many of their fellow prisoners decided the best way to aid the Allied war effort was to build flaws into the BMW engines, hopefully causing the power plants to malfunction or even fail catastrophically in operational use. It was a dangerous game to play, for any woman suspected of committing overt sabotage would be summarily executed—and several were. The faults built into the subcomponents had to be significant enough to cause the engine to eventually fail, but small enough to pass muster during the quality-control inspection. The women used different methods, but the most common was to scrape away a tiny bit of outer insulation from two or three adjacent wires within a bundle. The heat and vibration produced by the running engine would hopefully cause the damaged wires to break or arc, either of which could potentially cause the engine to malfunction.15

  Over time, the sabotage effort proved successful enough that a detachment of some twenty SS troops arrived from Buchenwald to carry out an extensive investigation. All the French women were interrogated, the upstairs dormitory was torn apart in a search for engine components the women might have stolen, and already completed parts were disassembled and closely examined for any sign of tampering. Despite these efforts the Germans were unable to determine exactly how the parts were being sabotaged and by whom. Under pressure to resume production, the plant managers restarted the assembly process with double the number of overseers in the workshop. Yet the tighter security at Abteroda did little to decrease the number of engine components that failed under operational conditions and in early February 1944 the camp commander, SS-First Sergeant John, asked officials at Buchenwald to remove all of the surviving 249 French female prisoners on “suspicion of collective resistance.” He requested that they be replaced by other—presumably more obedient—inmates from Ravensbrück, and suggested that the appropriate punishment for the recalcitrant French prisoners would be execution.16

  Buchenwald commandant Pister granted John’s request for new workers, and 125 of the French women left Abteroda aboard railway freight cars on February 12. The remaining 124 individuals were kept at work until the arrival of 125 replacement female prisoners from Ravensbrück, after which the last French women—including Yvette and Denise—left Abteroda by train on February 26.

  While there are some indications that Pister had initially agreed with John’s suggestion that the sabotage of the BMW engines perpetrated by the French workers warranted a summary death sentence, the intervention of another German aircraft company saved the women from immediate execution. That firm, Junkers Flugzeug und Motorenwerke (Aircraft and Motor Works), had established a small production plant in Markkleeberg, a town nestled between two small lakes some four and a half miles due south of Leipzig. The facility’s primary purpose was to produce the Junkers Jumo 004 turbojet engine—the power plant used in the Messerschmitt Me 262 jet fighter and a competitor to BMW’s 003. A designated subcamp of Buchenwald, the Markkleeberg plant’s existing workforce—comprising primarily Hungarian Jewish women—was unable to keep up with production quotas and Junkers desperately needed more slave laborers.

  It is unclear why Pister agreed to send the French women to Markkleeberg. At Abteroda they’d proven themselves to be unreliable workers who found ingenious ways to damage machinery desperately needed for the German war effort, and logic should certainly have indicated they would probably attempt the same sort of sabotage at the Junkers plant. Perhaps by that late point in the war, with the Allies relentlessly advancing on the heart of the Reich from both west and east, the Buchenwald commandant simply didn’t see industrial disruption as all that important an issue. Or, possibly, Pister knew he would soon have to start moving prisoners out of Buchenwald and its major subcamps to prevent advancing Soviet forces from liberating them, and believed that by sending the French women to Markkleeberg he was effectively reducing the number of prisoners he would have to personally deal with. Whatever the reason for his decision, the Buchenwald commandant knew that the women would ultimately suffer the fate the Abteroda commander had suggested for them—Markkleeberg was also a Vernichtung durch Arbeit facility, and the chances that any of the French prisoners would survive their time there were vanishingly slim.17

  Denise and Yvette arrived at the camp on February 26 with the second group of women from Abteroda, and their introduction to the punishing conditions was almost immediate.18 The new arrivals were herded into a warehouse-like building, where they were forced to strip off the rags they had been wearing for months and then issued the thin, one-piece, gray work overalls that
would be their only clothing. The prisoners were assigned to one of two twelve-hour shifts—6:15 A.M. to 6:15 P.M., or vice versa—and from then on their lives were dominated by work, hunger, pain, and disease.19

  The Morins were fortunate to be assigned to the same work shift, which initially saw them doing essentially the same labor they’d performed at Abteroda. Along with hundreds of other women, Yvette and Denise assembled stamped-aluminum subcomponents for the Jumo 004 engine, a task that required each prisoner to do very precise work with a small metal tool. As at the BMW facility, each completed subassembly was quality-control checked by a technician, and if a woman’s work was deemed unacceptable she was beaten. And, also as had happened at Abteroda, many of the French women began finding ways to introduce undetectable flaws into the components, again despite the very real threat that should their sabotage be detected they would almost certainly be executed. That threat ultimately receded for Yvette and Denise, however, for after several weeks in the engine plant mother and daughter were reassigned to the group of prisoners tasked with delivering wheelbarrows full of heating coal from a storage area to the camp’s workshops and offices.20