Ravensbruck

by Sarah Helm

  So thankful was Grete to the woman who helped her that she remembered her in her memoir. She was called Else Krug. And because she helped Grete, and later befriended her, Else Krug became one of the very few prostitutes in Ravensbrück to be given a name.

  Unknown to Grete, a newcomer to Ravensbrück, Else was already a well-known figure around the camp; she had arrived with the first transport from Lichtenburg and was one of the first black triangles to be given a Kapo job, running the work gang in the kitchen supplies cellar—a job she had so far held on to, despite the communist coup. As a prisoner of some standing in the block, therefore, Else had a place at the top table in the day room at mealtimes, sitting next to the Blockova. It was here that she and Grete had a chance to chat, and get to know each other.

  Else would often hark back to her past, talking of life as a prostitute in Düsseldorf, always with a twinkle in her eye. Her speciality had been sado-masochism, which she described in vivid detail. Some days she would turn to Grete and begin—‘What about a little nature study?’—and she would reminisce. ‘Up to then I had considered myself a fairly enlightened person,’ Grete recalled, ‘and I’d read a certain amount of scientific literature on the subject, but Else’s stories of the requests she met with in the course of her profession and how she complied with them made my hair stand on end.’

  Yet Grete came to admire Else. ‘She told her stories in a dry, matter-of-fact way, and there was a certain professional pride in her attitude. She knew what she was and she insisted she was good at what she did.’ Else never ‘whined’ or claimed as others did that they were going to reform when they got out. Instead she would muse: ‘A few more years of camp and I’ll find it hard to earn 300 marks in a night. Ah well, I’ll have to invent something special to make up for it.’

  Grete also learned that Else was very good at managing her kitchen work gang, and took a pride in it. Work on the gang was highly sought after, as the opportunities to smuggle out extra carrots, potatoes and turnips, and sometimes canned food and jam, were considerable—as too were the risks of being caught, or denounced by a political prisoner trying to muscle in. Probably the main reason Else Krug’s operation had not yet been damaged, despite Hanna Sturm’s smear campaign against asocials, was precisely because she kept her team—all fellow asocials—on a tight rein, making sure that the pickings were fairly shared. Else had become a mother to her kitchen gang, winning their loyalty, observed Grete.

  In all their talks, however, Grete never seems to have learned anything about Else’s background, or about her own mother, though Grete often heard about others.

  Once a month, like all prisoners, the asocials could write a letter, and one of the Blockova’s jobs was to pre-censor the mail, so they got to read all the letters. Those to mothers were the most heartrending. One wrote: ‘Dear Mother, I know I’ve been a great shame to you but do write me just a word. I’m so unhappy. When I come out I will make a fresh start; really I will. Send me a mark.’ Sometimes on a Saturday, when mail arrived, there would be an unexpected answer for one of them ‘as some mother’s heart had been touched, and the tears would flow in streams, but by Sunday all remorse had been forgotten and the insults would start flying again.’

  In most cases, however, the women never heard back, either because their letters never reached their destinations or because the family had disowned them. Some women never wrote at all, perhaps because they had lost touch with their families long ago and never had the courage to tell them what they’d become, or where they were, which seems to have been the story in Else’s case. We know from other sources that Lina Krug, Else’s mother, had no idea where her daughter was.

  Families of the asocial prisoners are as impossible to trace as the women themselves. Often they had no fixed address, or were themselves behind bars. After the war, if the missing women did not return, such families tended to stay silent. They may have guessed where their loved ones had been sent, but they saw no purpose in trying to make their voices heard; families received no help or compensation either.

  Else’s mother, however, did make her voice heard. After the war she appealed to the German survivors’ body, the communist-run Vereinigung der Verfolgten des Naziregimes (VVN: Organisation for the Victims of Fascism), saying that she sought news of her daughter. Lina Krug seems to have had no idea that her daughter might have been a prostitute, or why she had been arrested. She simply asked the VVN for any information they might have. The letter also set out something of Else’s family background, revealing a life story that was quite different to the asocial stereotype as found in the Nazi police files.

  The letter states that Elisabeth (Else) was born on 3 March 1900 in Merzig, Saarland, the tiny German state bordering France, and the family lived in the nearby town of Neudorf-Altenkessel. Else’s father, Jacob Krug, was a master tailor, a respected figure in his community.

  At some time in the 1920s she left home to live in Düsseldorf. Lina doesn’t explain when or why Else left, but we know from other records that Jacob Krug died young, so Else may have gone to find work when the family lost its breadwinner. In the 1920s, as unemployment rose, young women flocked to the cities to work for wealthy families as domestics.

  Why Else fell into prostitution is unclear, but probably, like so many others, she simply needed money. She was hardly going to tell her mother what she was doing, which was probably why the two lost touch. When she became a prostitute is also hard to pinpoint, but we do know—thanks to further remnants of Nazi documents—that by 1938 she was working at a brothel in Düsseldorf. The address was 10 Corneliusstrasse, then in the heart of the town’s red-light district.

  As well as the personal files on prostitutes, a number of police logbooks were also pulled from the rubble of German cities, and among them is the daily logbook for 1938 kept by Düsseldorf police. The well-thumbed volume lists every raid on every Düsseldorf brothel carried out that year. The raids happened monthly, and each time about twenty-five regulars were logged in the book and then sent home.

  The same addresses and the same names crop up again and again. An address at 10 Corneliusstrasse was often raided. Some of the prostitutes were brought in with a husband, who was often a pimp. Most had a few personal effects—a few Pfennigs and a hat, which they left at the desk and signed for when they were booked in. One of the regulars from 10 Corneliusstrasse also brought a bag, and this was Else Krug.

  On the night of 30 July 1938 the brothel at 10 Corneliusstrasse was raided again, but this time the usual suspects were not sent home. They had been arrested under Himmler’s new ‘asocials’ law, one of the very first mass arrests of its kind, which meant they were soon to be sent to Ravensbrück. Before she left the police station, Else Krug signed for her bag in her usual firm, clear hand.

  —

  By her second year in Ravensbrück Else must have been out of touch with her mother for at least four years, probably many more. Then she lost any chance to write home even had she wanted to. One by one—thanks to the red triangles’ takeover—the remaining asocial Kapos were ousted from their posts, and when eventually Else’s smuggling was betrayed, she too lost her job in the kitchen cellar. She was punished with a term in the Strafblock, heaving bricks and unpacking coal barges, but it didn’t break her, says Grete, who sometimes snatched a word with her friend through the Strafblock wire.

  ‘Grete,’ said Else once, ‘they think they can get me down with work, but they’re wrong; I’m tough, I can get through it better than any of them.’

  The brutality in the Strafblock was worse than it had ever been. A new guard, Gertrud Schreiter, a baker’s daughter from Cologne, beat with a leather belt. She ‘became savage’, said the women, and prisoners said later they could recognise the Strafblock prisoners because the brutality ‘turned them into beasts’ too—‘the last remains of any softness vanished from their faces and their posture’.

  Towards the end of 1940 Koegel decided to make use of the beasts by ordering them to carry out the thr
ashings on the Bock. So frequent were the thrashings by now that Dorothea Binz and Maria Mandl were overworked, and they needed help. If they agreed, the Strafblock women were given extra food and sent back to their ordinary blocks. There was no shortage of volunteers. Nor was there a shortage of hands ready to beat the trapeze artiste Katharina Waitz after she had escaped for the third time.

  Following her two earlier attempts, Katharina had been imprisoned in the Strafblock for many months, then some time in 1941 she found a way out again. So breathtaking was her escape this time that many prisoners later recounted how she did it. Under cover of darkness, without alerting guards or dogs, she slipped out of the Strafblock and reached the SS canteen. She climbed on top of the building and, using a pillow and blanket to protect herself from the current, she scaled the electric fence and jumped down to the ground on the other side. Using all her high-wire skills she clambered over the five rows of barbed wire and up the four-metre-high wall, also using the pillow and blanket to get over the barbed wire at the top. Katharina then leapt to freedom, but by morning the guards had found the blanket in the barbed wire and the pillow on the roof of the canteen.

  The prisoners who remembered how Katharina got away also recalled how she was brought back. While she was being hunted, the whole camp was made to stand in punishment, but it was the Strafblock she had escaped from that was punished most severely. These women were forced to keep standing, without food, until Katharina was found.

  It took three days and nights. On the fourth morning she was discovered hiding out in Fürstenberg. The female guards with dogs sent to hunt her down reappeared, with Koegel close behind, pushing Katharina in front of him. She was bitten all over and covered in blood and dirt.

  Doris Maase, observing from the Revier window, watched as Koegel took Katharina to the Strafblock, telling the prisoners, crazed with starvation and anger: ‘There she is. You can do what you want.’ Another witness heard Koegel say: ‘Let’s bring her to the beasts—let our beasts have fun with her,’ and as soon as he handed Katharina over to the Strafblock women ‘the worst of them pushed her into the bathroom, swearing at her, and they beat her to death with chair legs’. Her corpse ‘must have looked terrible’, said Doris Maase, because for the first time in the camp’s history a dead body was taken away by the camp doctor, Dr Sonntag, and his medical orderly, and not by prisoners.

  Not long after Katharina’s death, Koegel organised another mass thrashing, and once again the Strafblock was involved. The Jehovah’s Witnesses working in the rabbit hutches were refusing to collect angora wool, saying it was being used for soldiers’ coats, and therefore amounted to war work. Koegel flew into a rage and ordered scores of the women to be thrashed, but for such multiple flogging he needed extra hands, so he called on volunteers from the Strafblock. Once again, inducements were offered and volunteers came forward, but Koegel needed more.

  Perhaps because of her powerful appearance, or because he noticed her haughty pride, Koegel specifically selected Else Krug as one of the thrashers. Like the others she was offered the chance of release from the Strafblock, but Else said no. Koegel called Else to his office, and Grete got to hear what happened next.

  Koegel was not used to prisoners opposing his orders, so he was furious and shouted at Else, ordering her to obey.

  ‘No, Herr Camp Commandant,’ said Else. ‘I never beat a fellow prisoner.’

  ‘What, you dirty whore? You think you can pick and choose? That’s refusal to obey an order.’ Else shrugged, but was grimly determined. ‘Take the whore away,’ snorted Koegel. ‘You’ll have cause to remember me, I can tell you.’

  * * *

  * According to Maria Bielicka, a Polish prisoner, prostitutes from the asocial blocks sometimes had contacts with men in the small male camp. ‘They knew how to do this. One was caught and was put in the bunker and given twenty-five lashes.’

  Chapter 7

  Doctor Sonntag

  Olga, like all the prisoners, lived in almost constant fear of winter. Only in the earliest weeks of spring was winter absent from her thoughts, but as her letters show, from summer onwards the prospect of the first snows haunted her. ‘For me the life in summer is so much easier and I hope not to spend another winter here,’ she wrote to Leocadia and Ligia in June 1940.

  For now the easier summer prompted pleasant thoughts of Anita. ‘Give her lots of sport. In her abilities and character, does she take after me or her father?’

  There was even hope of release again, signalled by reference to a money transfer. The recent releases of the Jewish prisoners Ida Hirschkron and Marianne Wachstein may have revived her optimism.

  Soon after writing this, however, Olga was shut in the bunker for her part in staging the Block 11 play. The absence of a letter between July and November 1940 suggests that she and the five others were locked up until winter came back, and it was to be a cold one: guards found prisoners’ bodies frozen to the bunker floors. Olga’s November letter to Carlos—still in his Brazilian jail—hints at her incarceration. ‘Here are a few lines as a sign of life for you…when one has passed so much time it ought to be possible to survive a little more.’

  When Olga emerged from the bunker she found many changes. Workshops were being constructed. There were 1000 more prisoners and two new barracks. The Poles were the biggest group, and asserting new authority.

  Dismissed as Blockova, Olga was sent to the brick-throwing gang. Barges loaded with bricks for the new buildings moored each day on the Schwedtsee. Women would form a human chain, throwing bricks along the line until the load was cleared. Olga’s hands were hardened, but others’ softer palms tore to shreds, then froze numb as frostbite set in. Some might get a paper bandage or a dab of iodine at the Revier, but not the Jews. The head doctor, Walter Sonntag, refused to treat Jews.

  In December Olga heard again from Carlos, and Leocadia enclosed a photograph of Anita. ‘The little sweetie is already completely different from the baby I knew,’ she wrote back. ‘I have been following events through the newspaper as best I can.’ She urged him again not to lose hope. ‘As for me, I am steeling myself to get to the end of winter.’

  That Olga had seen a newspaper meant she was at least back in touch with comrades in other blocks. The events no doubt included Hitler’s seizure of France, Belgium and the Netherlands. In the pages of the Völkischer Beobachter she would have read the Nazi propaganda claiming that Britain really was about to sue for peace. Hitler had even signed pacts with Japan and Italy.

  But how long would Hitler’s all-important pact with Stalin last? To Olga and her communist comrades this was the biggest question of all. The women told themselves that Stalin’s purpose would soon become clear. Olga now updated her miniature atlas, showing where the fronts had moved, and she began to fashion her own miniature camp newspaper using tiny scraps of paper.

  —

  The Reichsführer’s desk diary for 14 January 1941 stated: ‘Himmler left Berlin at 10.30 hours and spent the day and night in Ravensbrück.’ A year after his first visit Himmler was heading out again to the frozen Mecklenburg forest, and this time he was spending the night. Most probably he spent it not at Ravensbrück itself, but five miles down the road at a small forest estate called Brückenthin that he had acquired and where he had installed his mistress, Hedwig Potthast. Aged twenty-seven, she had been his secretary since 1936, and in 1940, as relations with his wife Marga deteriorated, the couple became lovers. He called her ‘Häschen’—‘Bunny’.

  That Himmler should take a mistress was entirely in keeping with his views on extramarital relationships. It was Himmler who in 1937 had introduced the concept of Lebensborn (‘Source of Life’) homes—institutions where SS officers could procreate outside marriage with selected Aryan women, in order to produce a constant supply of perfect Aryan children. In 1940 he passed a procreation order urging German soldiers to procreate outside marriage in order to produce as many children as possible, to resupply the gene pool. This need not be done secretl
y, he proclaimed.

  His own procreation was a different matter. Perhaps for Häschen’s sake—he seems to have had a genuine affection for her—he made sure their encounters were discreet, choosing as a love-nest a simple forester’s house on the edge of this tiny village.* Although Brückenthin was secluded, however, it was also convenient. Just five miles from Ravensbrück, Himmler could always combine a visit to Häschen with a visit to the camp, using the latter as cover. Just across the lake lay the village of Comthurey, where Himmler’s chicken-breeder friend Oswald Pohl had his estate; Pohl’s wife offered to keep an eye on Häschen. Five miles further on lay the village of Hohenlychen, with its famous SS medical clinic. Top officers and Nazi politicians were often to be found there, receiving treatment from Professor Karl Gebhardt, who was only too willing to help out his old friend Himmler by watching out for his lover down the road.

  Although Häschen was on Himmler’s mind, however, the January visit to Ravensbrück was important to him. He had matters to discuss at the camp, and wished in particular to meet with Walter Sonntag, the senior SS doctor. Snow had even been brushed from the ornamental garden outside Dr Sonntag’s office; the Revier had been scrubbed from top to bottom and the entire camp smelt of wet wood.

  Since his last visit Himmler’s priorities had moved on. Poland had been crushed and was being reshaped in order to create the Führer’s promised German utopia. A new concentration camp at Oswiecim—in German, Auschwitz—in southern Poland had been opened to hold Polish resisters. And the country’s two million Jews were being driven from their homes and forced into ghettos or reservations in parts of annexed Poland—or the Greater Reich—called ‘the general government’.

  As yet no official solution had been proposed—except perhaps in private—as to what to do next with the Jews. As Hitler was now making plans to invade the Soviet Union—the entire Russian land mass might fall into German hands—one idea was to push the Jews out to the very edge of the continent and leave them there. Such a solution, however, posed its own problems: the Jews would somehow have to be rendered barren, or else they would never be destroyed. Not surprisingly, therefore, one of the subjects on Himmler’s mind in early 1941 was mass sterilisation. He had been in discussion with his favoured doctors as to whether such experiments should be conducted here at Ravensbrück.