Sarah Helm

by Life in Secrets: Vera Atkins;the Missing Agents of WWII

  The witnesses, waiting to be called, largely former women prisoners, were from France, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Norway, Austria, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Switzerland, Germany, and Britain. In the centre of the courtroom was a table for the interpreters and shorthand writer. The press bench was on one side, and the prosecution bench on the other. Vera sat just behind Stewart and da Cunha. Her presence attracted the interest of the journalists opposite, but they were not told her name. Vera at the trial was later described by Tickell as “a smooth, utterly impersonal figure in WAAF uniform.” There was little or no heating in court. Vera wore her thickest uniform, and two of the defendants, Carmen Mory and Vera Salvequart, wore fur coats.

  Stephen Stewart proceeded to give the court an overview of the evidence. Ravensbrück camp, he said, was built in 1939 for six thousand prisoners, but the population had reached forty thousand by January 1945. In those years 120,000 women had passed through the camp, of whom 92,000 had died. The first women to be brought to the camp were Germans and Austrians; then followed Czechs, Dutch, Poles, Danes, and French; and soon Russians began to arrive en masse. Many prominent women passed through the camp, including Geneviève de Gaulle, General de Gaulle's niece, who had worked with the French resistance. There were writers, doctors, scientists, artists, mothers, peasants, Gypsies, and prostitutes. There were many women who had never been identified at all. And all the prisoners were divided into categories; among them were political prisoners, Jews, and “asocials,” who included lesbians, prostitutes, and Gypsies. The staff were drawn from numerous other concentration camps, but Ravensbrück was primarily known as a training camp for SS women guards. Himmler visited the camp often.

  Stewart went on to outline the way the inmates lived, sleeping 250 to a hut, three to a bed, lining up for hours a day in the freezing cold for parades, feeding on watery soup and boiled potatoes and shuffling through stinking excreta in the most primitive of sanitary huts. Those fit enough were forced to carry out backbreaking labour in quarries, factories, or fields, while others took jobs in the camp itself as prisoner-guards. Stewart outlined how they died, often at night in bed, simply of starvation or ill health or of one of many epidemics. The living lay alongside a corpse, even if it was in the same bed, until morning, when a barrow would come round the blocks collecting bodies to burn in the crematorium.

  If a woman died at work, her body would also be wheeled off in a barrow to the crematorium. Many died in the punishment block, which consisted of seventy-eight cells, each 2 metres wide by 2.5 metres long, where prisoners were locked for days and taken out from time to time for “punishment”—whipping or beating on naked buttocks. Most passed out after ten strokes and many died, but a doctor was on hand to take the pulse of the victims, and if they revived, they were given the full twenty-five-stroke punishment.

  Prisoners died also during or after medical experiments in Block 17 or during abortions or sterilisation. Many prisoners lost their minds and were held in a special block for “lunatics”—Block 10—where the defendant Carmen Mory strapped and shackled them until, as she had testified in one statement, “foam came from the ears and nose.”

  In the early days those selected for extermination—by reason of age or ill health—were shot or hanged and their bodies thrown into the crematorium, although sometimes they were transported to Auschwitz. In the autumn of 1944 a gas chamber was built in which seventeen hundred women were murdered in the single month of November. Between January and April 1945 the killings were accelerated, and 6,993 women, girls, and children—the majority Jews—were gassed.

  Witnesses were then invited by the court to tell their own stories. First to speak was Sylvia Salvesen, wife of the physician to the Norwegian king and a prominent figure in the Norwegian resistance, who told the court what had happened to her from the moment she entered the gates.

  “When you enter something, you only enter it through a door, and we entered it through a big porch, and we saw that this was in a wall and there was a big fence. Later we learned it was an electric fence. We had to wait a few hours before we were let into what we later learned was called a bath. There was a room about as big as this courtroom, and there were no baths in it, but there were a few openings in the roof, and from these came water; but we had to wait naked at least two hours before any water came. When you think of it, we had been eighteen days on the road and we were longing for water, but we had to be four under every one of these showers, and the water only ran for moments. We got a little bit of soap in our hands and what they would call perhaps a towel, but it was no bigger than a handkerchief. When that was finished, I am sorry to say most of us had lost the small piece of soap because the water came so quickly, and we lost it between the ribs and the floor. Then we had to wait. I do not know how long because time runs so slowly when you are naked for the first time in your life with a lot of unknown people, and then something happened which gave us the biggest shock, the first big shock in Ravensbrück. There entered two men dressed in uniforms. Later we were to hear that one was a doctor and the other a dentist. We were then put in rows, and then, still naked, we had to pass them, and they looked, as far as I can remember, only at our teeth and our hands. I am afraid we had the feeling of shame because we had not yet learned that shame was not ours but theirs. We had a feeling that they were selecting us for something. We were very naive. We thought we should get our dresses again, and we were shown a lump of clothes and we had to grab something—some sort of dress, sort of underwear, stolen from other prisoners. We got some wooden shoes.”

  She went on: “After we left the ‘bath,' we were to stand in rows of five outside the ‘baths' and again had to wait. This was perhaps my first real glimpse of the camp because standing the first few hours there we saw the other prisoners pass. This for me was looking at a picture of Hell. Why should I use that word? Because I had seen pictures by our best artists of how they supposed it would be in Hell. And that was not because I saw anything terrible happen but because I saw for the first time in my life human beings that I could not judge whether they were men or women. Their hair was shaved and they were thin, unhappy, and filthy. But that was not what struck me most. It was the expression of their eyes—they had what I would call ‘dead eyes.' ”

  As witness followed witness, the court learned every detail of the layout of the camp, and every routine of the prisoners' day, and every characteristic of the tormentors in the dock. Dorothea Binz always had her hair well done, the court was told—undercurled and bobbed—and she always carried a whip and had a little English terrier with her. She often observed the beatings in the punishment block, standing hand in hand with her SS lover, Edmund Braenung, another guard.

  They heard too that the Jugendlager, just outside the main perimeter, had been turned into an extermination annexe in January 1945, when the gassings increased. Here up to ten thousand women were packed together in conditions worse even than those in the main camp, so that many died before their day came for extermination. Each prisoner in the Jugendlager had been issued a pink card, which meant they had been selected to die, because they were too ill to work or simply because they had grey hair. A pink card could be handed to a prisoner at any time of day or night. And in the Jugendlager parades were held randomly, so that all the inmates lived in constant fear that they could be selected. Those selected were often stripped in front of the block to see what clothing they had on, then were given back only their dresses before being taken away on a truck in the evening and were not seen again.

  Girls between eight and eighteen were picked out for special “experiments” on their reproductive organs that involved injections into the uterus and Fallopian tubes. The girls were usually Gypsies, and many died of infections.

  As the evidence poured out, occasionally there would be a release of tension—something small might happen that would suddenly make everyone laugh in a manner out of all proportion to the event. But mostly the horror was relentless. At any moment a witness might summon up a ne
w and yet more ghastly image: rats eating the eyes and noses of the dead left lying near the “hospital,” the sight of bleeding dog bites running up a woman's legs.

  From time to time Vera would write a note and pass it forward to Stewart or da Cunha. But mostly she kept quite still. After the day's proceedings she might relax by going to the state opera, revived among the rubble, with the interpreter, Peter Forrest, another Austrian and friend of Vera's. Or she might go for a drive with the deputy judge advocate general, Carl Stirling KC, who had taken a shine to her. In the evening Vera often found the company of Sara Jensen most relaxing. Sara took it upon herself to “shepherd” Vera, while Vera shepherded the witnesses.

  Then the proceedings would begin again. Towards the end of the prosecution case came perhaps the cruellest evidence of all. In the winter of 1944 the birth of babies was allowed in Ravensbrück. Until then pregnant women underwent forced abortions, normally in the seventh or eighth month, or the babies were strangled at birth and one of the prisoner-nurses then burned them in the boiler room. But in September 1944 the policy changed, and children were born, by then mostly to Polish political prisoners, who were arriving in various stages of pregnancy.

  The first baby to be born was treated “like a prince in the camp,” said the Norwegian Sylvia Salvesen, who had tried to help care for the new-borns. All the women wanted to see this child, and news of the birth went round the blocks in a flash. And for reasons nobody ever understood, others were allowed to be born, and at first mothers were allowed to stay with their babies.

  But soon the mothers were kicked back to slave work or to their dirty blocks, and the babies were left with no milk and bits of rag, and they started to die.

  As Sylvia Salvesen described the first of the babies' deaths, the chief German defence lawyer, Dr. Von Metler, protested that the translator had wrongly stated that a particular group of babies had died because they had turned over and could not breathe, whereas in fact the witness had said that it was because no nurse was present. But as the evidence continued, it became quite clear that babies born in Ravensbrück died simply because they could not live. They were left alone without mothers, milk, or warmth. Of 120 babies born in January and February 1945, 80 died. And then the court heard that in March 130 babies and pregnant women were suddenly taken away to be gassed in a railway wagon.

  As the testimony continued, a witness would from time to time mention one or more of Vera's dead girls—Cicely Lefort, Violette Szabo, Denise Bloch, or Lilian Rolfe. Little of the evidence was new to Vera, and she rarely reacted to what she heard.

  Even so, under questioning from a judge or a lawyer, or in conversation outside the court, a witness would remember something in a way that even Vera had not heard before.

  Sylvia Salvesen had seen Cicely Lefort just before she was gassed and described how, while she was in the main camp, Cicely had become very ill and could not tolerate standing for roll calls so she had volunteered to go to the newly opened Jugendlager, believing there was no roll call there and that conditions were better. But prisoners in the subcamp had to stand for seven hours for roll call, starting at three a.m. Everyone had dysentery. Fifty died each day from exhaustion. At least one hundred women were taken away each day from the Jugendlager and never seen again. So sick was she by then that Cicely was picked out for extermination almost as soon as she reached the Jugendlager.

  Another witness told the court: “The women were put on one side and a few hours later taken away in motor lorries. I was told a few days later they had been taken to the railway siding in the village, put in a van, and gassed.”

  Several witnesses remembered the strength and cheerfulness of Vio-lette. One woman recalled her talking incessantly about “my baby, my baby.” A woman who saw Violette, Lilian, and Denise in the punishment block before they were taken away to be shot described all three as emaciated, dirty, and weak; so weak was Lilian, said the witness, that she had to be carried to the place where she was shot.

  Sitting in court, it was impossible for Vera to overlook even the smallest detail as every word of every witness was meticulously translated over and over again into various languages, in at least three of which Vera was fluent. And the way the story was presented here—from beginning to end—gave Vera a perspective she had not had before. Sitting on the prosecution bench, she was for the first time able to view the fate of her girls in the context of the camp as a whole, which until now she had had little time to consider. For the past year she had been so busy hunting down evidence and trying to understand the technical aspects of the case that when the court proceedings in Hamburg began, she suddenly found she had time to reflect.

  I hoped that in her letters home Vera might at last feel freer to say what she thought now that the case was under way, but they were as bland as always. “Dearest Ma, We were a bit cold at times and also furiously busy with one thing and another. It is really a most interesting case,” she wrote from Hamburg in January 1947, signing off by thanking her mother for a hairbrush she had posted to her.

  “In court I think Vera saw it partly as her job to keep emotions— others' as well as her own—under control,” said John da Cunha. “And at the time, you know, we all adjusted to it. You do, I'm afraid. You get hardened to it. You almost become coarsened by it.”

  Had Vera become hardened?

  “She must have been, of course. But it was so much more difficult for her. She knew many of the victims. It was much more personal for Vera.”

  “Do you think she was feeling emotion?”

  “I am sure she was. I have no doubt at all,” da Cunha said. “One could tell. She was always exhausted by it. I think it all totally drained her. I used to go up to her room at the end of each day to talk over the evidence and prepare for what was coming next. When I went in, she would be sitting at a table with her hair down, holding her hairbrush. It was the only time I saw her with her hair down. And as we talked she would start brushing her hair, and she brushed it over and over again. I always thought it was probably her way of releasing tension.”

  Da Cunha said that when it was all over, the press had clamoured at her door, and he was posted outside her room to keep them away. “She just wanted to be alone at that time. Some on the prosecution side wanted to celebrate; it had been a long, hard trial. But Vera never wanted to celebrate in any way. She certainly showed no sign of feeling any anger towards these people. Like the rest of us, I think she just felt a mixture of disgust and pity.

  “And Schwarzhuber was very important to Vera. He was her most important witness. I remember he said how impressed he had been with the bearing of Vera's girls when they were executed. Perhaps that was some consolation to her.”

  On day thirteen Johann Schwarzhuber, the camp overseer, took the stand. Vera had taken his statement about the deaths of Violette, Lilian, and Denise nine months previously. Had it not been for his capture, she might never have learned of their fate. As on that occasion, Schwarzhuber once again seemed ready to talk and give the court all the information that he could. Unlike other witnesses, he at no stage sought to deny his role in events. He even seemed to try, from time to time, to catch the eye of prosecution lawyers.

  A father of three children, born in Bavaria, Schwarzhuber told the court he was a printer by profession. He said he had worked as an SS guard in Dachau, Sachsenhausen, and Auschwitz before being transferred to Ravensbrück in January 1945. He had a remarkable memory for detail, telling the court that from January to February thirty to thirty-five women died every day, but from February to the middle of March sixty to seventy died each day, purely as a result of illnesses. At the end of February, he said, he had been called to see the commandant, Fritz Suhren, and was told to organise the mass gassing of prisoners because the killing was not going fast enough. He was reluctant to do this: “I had done it at Auschwitz and did not want to do it a second time.”

  The gassing nevertheless went ahead. “I attended one gassing in which 150 women were forced into the gas ch
amber. They were ordered to be undressed as if to be deloused and taken into the gas chamber. Then the door was locked. A male prisoner with a gas mask then climbed onto the roof and threw a gas container into the room through a window, which he closed. I heard groaning and whimpering in the room. After two or three minutes it grew quiet. Whether the women were dead or just senseless I cannot say.”

  Mass killing had become a routine, daily event, but for reasons he was never asked to explain, Schwarzhuber still recalled in detail the particular deaths of Violette Szabo, Lilian Rolfe, and Denise Bloch. After they reached the punishment block in early January, nobody had known what happened to them because they could not be seen or contacted by other prisoners. But Schwarzhuber was able to tell the court—as he had first told Vera, but in more detail now—what happened next. “One evening towards 1900 hours they were called out [of the punishment block] and taken to the courtyard by the crematorium. Camp Commandant Suhren made these arrangements. He read out the order for their shooting in the presence of the chief camp doctor, Dr. Trommer, SS Sergeant Zappe, SS Lance Corporal Schult, SS Corporal Schenk, and the dentist Dr. Hellinger. I myself was present.”

  Schwarzhuber continued: “I accompanied the three women to the crematorium yard. A female camp overseer was also present and sent back when we reached the crematorium. Zappe stood guard over them while they were waiting to be shot.

  “All three were very brave, and I was deeply moved. Suhren was also impressed by the bearing of these women. He was annoyed that the Gestapo did not themselves carry out these shootings.”

  The shooting was done by SS Lance Corporal Schult with a small-calibre gun fired through the back of the neck. “They were brought forward singly by Corporal Schenk. Death was certified by Dr. Trommer. The corpses were removed singly by the internees who were employed in the crematorium and burned. The clothes were burned with the bodies.”