Ravensbruck

by Sarah Helm

  With the prospect of a new front opening up to the east, Himmler was also thinking about how Ravensbrück and other camps could better use their resources to support the war effort. In the early days hard labour had largely been used as a means of torture and discipline, but the war looked set to last longer than expected, and prisoner labour was being more usefully deployed.

  The related question of what to do with those prisoners who could not work was also very much on Himmler’s mind. It was now more than a year since Hitler’s T4 ‘euthanasia’ programme had been launched, and in that time more than 35,000 German men, women and children seen as a drain on the nation’s resources had been killed by carbon monoxide pumped into gas chambers hidden in German sanatoria. In Poland the T4 techniques had also been adapted to kill the country’s mentally and physically handicapped, murdered in specially adapted mobile gassing trucks.

  The Reichsführer had no authority over the T4 euthanasia programme, but he was always consulted on the operations. Just weeks before his visit to Ravensbrück, Himmler personally intervened when a crisis erupted at Grafeneck Castle, southwest of Stuttgart, one of the T4 gassing centres.

  In December 1939 the castle’s old coach house was converted into a gas chamber, and over the next twelve months 10,000 mentally and physically ill men and women were bussed to Grafeneck to be murdered. However, later in 1940 buses belonging to the ‘Limited Company for the Transport of Invalids in the Public Interest’ began to attract attention, and a local judge reported serious unrest. ‘For several weeks gossip has been circulating in the villages around Grafeneck that things cannot be right at the castle,’ he wrote. ‘Patients arrive but they are never seen again, nor can they be visited, and equally suspicious is the frequently visible smoke.’

  In November a local aristocrat and ardent Nazi, Else von Löwis, wrote a letter to party chiefs, asking them to tell Hitler that the killings were taxing the loyalty of the local population. She presumed the Führer didn’t know of the killings, as no law had been passed authorising them. ‘The power over life and death must be legally regulated,’ she said. The murders were leaving a ‘dreadful impression’ on the local population. People were asking: ‘Where will this lead us and what will be its limits?’

  Else von Löwis’s letter reached Himmler, who intervened at once. The letter touched a nerve, because it confirmed the risks of carrying out mass murder of citizens near to where ordinary Germans lived and were bound to take notice.

  Himmler instructed that Grafeneck be ‘immediately deactivated’ in order to quell the unrest. ‘The process must be faulty if it has become as public as it appears,’ he asserted. Plainly, it was the fact that the killing had become public that was faulty, not the killing itself: soon after Grafeneck was closed two new killing centres opened in Germany, but under better disguise. And not only was the T4 ‘euthanasia’ programme itself to be expanded, Himmler now planned to co-opt its gassing methods. Soon after the Grafeneck episode he wrote to the T4 chief, Philipp Bouhler, also head of Hitler’s Chancellery, asking him ‘whether and how the personnel and the facilities of T4 can be utilised for the concentration camps’.

  Entering Ravensbrück’s freshly scrubbed Revier for his talks with Dr Sonntag, Himmler would have seen for himself the growing need for a clear-out of useless mouths. The small wards were packed with pallid faces and the corridor lined with enfeebled naked women awaiting treatment. However, the new gassing plans were probably too premature—and too secret—to discuss as yet with a mere camp doctor. Instead, Himmler raised with Dr Sonntag the more urgent matter of gonorrhoea.

  A few weeks earlier Himmler had instructed his chief surgeon, Ernst Grawitz, to order Sonntag to start experiments on Ravensbrück prostitutes to find a cure for gonorrhoea, and he was eager to hear the results. Himmler had long been fascinated by medical experimentation, and the outbreak of war had given his interest new purpose—to increase the life expectancy of German forces. Where better to carry out the experiments than on human guinea pigs in the concentration camps? At the male camp of Sachsenhausen mustard-gas tests had been carried out on prisoners to find a way to cure soldiers poisoned at the front, and at Dachau prisoners were being starved of oxygen to find out at what altitude a pilot would die.

  The presence in Ravensbrück of scores of infected prostitutes offered a chance to explore curing syphilis and gonorrhoea. On Himmler’s instructions, soldiers were being encouraged to use brothels while at the front. Regular sex, he believed, would increase their motivation to fight, especially if they could be protected from VD. But now he was angered to learn from Sonntag that the experiments had not even started yet. Grawitz had apparently failed to pass on the order to Sonntag, either because he had forgotten or perhaps because he didn’t trust unqualified camp doctors like Sonntag to do the job properly.

  Sonntag’s main training was as a dentist and his medical qualifications were limited, but Himmler thought highly of him, as it was he who had carried out the mustard-gas experiments at Sachsenhausen. Sonntag had not hesitated to apply lethal bacteria to the skin of healthy prisoners, inducing monstrous swellings and causing excruciating pain. The Reichsführer SS therefore instructed Sonntag to start the gonorrhoea tests at Ravensbrück without further delay.

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  A tall man in immaculate black uniform, the skull of the SS Totenkopf (Death’s Head) division on his cap, Dr Walter Sonntag struck quite a figure as he strode down the Lagerstrasse to the camp hospital, a bamboo cane tucked into one long leather boot. Prisoners recalled his aquiline nose, angular features and large ears. They also recalled his unusual strength: any woman struck by him invariably collapsed and fell to the ground.

  The son of a postmaster, Walter Sonntag was born in 1907 in the town of Metz, in what was then German Lothringen and is now French Lorraine. Coming from such a contested border region—Lorraine had been fought over by Germany and France for centuries—Sonntag’s nationalism was fired at an early age. At the outbreak of the First World War the villages he knew were the scene of renewed carnage. Under the terms of the Versailles settlement that followed, the Sonntags, like thousands of other humiliated Germans, were evicted and forced to start new lives. His father found work on the land, and Walter spent his young years playing with animals. By the time he left school he was drawn to the Nazi Party and decided to better himself by training as a dentist.

  Though Sonntag first chose dentistry as a career, he later switched to medicine, attracted no doubt by the prominent role doctors were being given in fighting Hitler’s new racial war. He quickly joined the Nazi Party, and along with hundreds of fellow medical students enrolled in the SS. The percentage of German doctors applying to join the SS was the largest of any single profession.

  National Socialist ethics of racial cleansing were by the mid-1930s at the core of the medical curriculum. Nazi doctors were required to cure the ‘whole’ of the German race, not simply to focus on the individual. And in order to treat public health, doctors were required to eliminate the racially subhuman or the genetically impure, enabling the German gene pool to cleanse itself and thrive.

  Walter Sonntag began a thesis in 1939 on ‘social medicine’ in which he compared the Führer’s ideas to those advocated by the Spartans, or by the scientists of medieval times who would have killed off lepers had religious scruple not intervened. He also set out his views on sterilisation, stating: ‘Reproduction by the genetically ill and asocial elements of a people will inevitably lead to the deterioration of the whole nation. Sterilising undesirables and eliminating them as far as possible is therefore a humanitarian project that offers protection to the more worthy parts of society.’ His own earlier Catholicism clearly no longer restrained Sonntag, and nor did the fact that his sister Hedwig had developed multiple sclerosis, a chronic genetic disorder that she feared was a punishment from God for marrying a Protestant.

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  It was one of the many anomalies of the Nazi system that concentration camps should have had such an
institution as a hospital at all. Everything about the camps seemed designed to cripple the inmates’ health and ultimately to kill one way or another, not to treat or to cure. And yet if fit young prisoners were to be used as slave labourers, it made sense to treat them for day-to-day illnesses. Moreover, the Nazis were terrified of contagious disease spreading from the overcrowded, undernourished prisoners in the camps into the population at large. One of the chief functions of the hospitals, therefore, was to prevent killer plagues breaking out.

  When Sonntag started work at Ravensbrück the Revier still showed traces of a normal hospital. Housed in an ordinary barracks, the sickbay had a ‘ward’ with sixty beds, to which the very sick were admitted. Temperatures were monitored and anyone whose fever dropped below 39 was sent back to work. It had a fully equipped operating theatre, as well as a pharmacy, radiography equipment and a pathology lab. Rules on hygiene were enforced, with bed linen changed regularly. There were daily ‘surgeries’ when in theory any prisoner could line up to see a doctor. The two female doctors, Dr Jansen and Dr Gerda Weyand, had both trained at reputable medical schools. Under them was a qualified nursing sister, Lisbeth Krzok, ‘Schwester Lisa’, and several other Schwestern who wore the brown uniforms of the Reich nursing sisterhood.

  There was nothing normal in the daily array of injuries and ailments afflicting the women who lined up every morning, five abreast, outside the hospital entrance, complaining of dog bites, gashes from beatings and frostbite. Nor was there anything normal about the way that Schwester Lisa, known as the hospital Schreck, screamed at prisoners to be silent, made them strip, and lashed out at them as they waited in line. Dr Jansen would sit for hours with a mug of coffee, chatting, until her surgery time was over and the patients were sent away untreated. But the other female doctor, Gerda Weyand, showed more patience with the prisoners, more humanity. She asked them about their symptoms, examined them and never hit or abused.

  The very presence of the prisoner staff lent a certain air of normality to the Revier too. As elsewhere in the camp, prisoners had been co-opted to help, and now they virtually ran the administration of the Revier. At a table in the corridor sat prisoner nurses with bandages, ointments and medicines. Surrounded by jostling inmates, they did their best to treat boils, eczema and cuts. The prisoner doctor Doris Maase, who slept at the hospital at night, answered cries long after others had gone.

  And in the records office sat a woman with thick red hair and bright eyes. Stuck on the wall beside her was a picture of a sunflower, torn from a magazine left lying around by an SS doctor. Recently arrived from Prague, Milena Jesenska was a journalist, and had once been the lover of Franz Kafka. Now she filed the results of swabs taken from asocial prisoners, as part of Sonntag’s test programme. Here too was Erika Buchmann, tall, blonde and blue-eyed. Once a secretary for a Reichstag communist, Erika was now a Revier secretary, typing up long lists of the sick delivered each morning by block leaders.

  These women—Maase, Buchmann, Jesenska—had to stay clean to work in the hospital, so they were housed in a privileged block and could change their clothes more often than ordinary prisoners. Like other prisoner staff they wore special armbands—in the case of Revier workers, yellow—that allowed them to move freely in the camp. This freedom, and their ability to help some prisoners, allowed them to feel a little normal. With Dr Sonntag’s arrival, however, nothing could be normal again.

  On his first day they all watched as he passed down the line of waiting women, kicking the weakest with his boots, or lashing out with his stick at any cries of pain. He made one woman undress and kicked her in the stomach. What horrified the women was not only his brutality, it was the smile on his face.

  That Sonntag was a sadist none of the prisoners who worked with him at the hospital had any doubt. It was an ‘extreme pleasure’ for Sonntag to extract otherwise healthy teeth. Women would come with an infected tooth; he would take out instead a perfectly healthy molar. ‘These extractions were performed without anaesthetic. The terrible screams could be heard all over the hospital. When he came out of the theatre he was beaming with satisfaction,’ recalled Erika Buchmann.

  After the war Erika testified about all manner of Ravensbrück atrocities, but none of what she witnessed later was described with the pinpoint clarity with which she recalled Sonntag’s treatment of an exhausted woman who came to him with frostbite in the winter of 1940:

  He stood in front of the woman with a bamboo stick in his hands. He hit the woman with the stick in the wounds caused by the frostbite. He tore the bandages away with his stick because at that time bandages were already made of paper. He poked around with his cane in the open, bleeding, matter-filled wounds. It gave him a special pleasure.

  Sonntag enjoyed nothing more than the chance to declare a woman fit for flogging. One of the camp doctor’s duties was to rule on whether a prisoner sentenced to twenty-five lashes on the Bock was physically strong enough to survive. The rules stated that women with high fever or acute disease should not be flogged at all, but Sonntag always sent them to the Bock. He would order the flogging stopped only if the woman passed out, and he would feel her pulse and signal that flogging should resume as soon as her pulse revived. He was always in a particularly good mood when he came from the cells where the beating took place.

  It was not simply that Sonntag enjoyed the prisoners’ suffering; the prisoners evidently disgusted him. He hated them and sometimes even seemed to fear them, making sure patients were kept at a distance from him, which was why, if he examined them at all, he did so with his stick. Yet in among the images of his sadism are other memories of a grotesque and often preposterous figure. He was a lecher and a thief—he stole from prisoners’ food parcels—and he liked to strut and show off with his bamboo stick. And he was often seen drunk, marauding around the camp.

  ‘I remember a woman coming for treatment for a broken finger, smashed when she was unloading bricks, and at that moment Sonntag emerged from the hospital kicking the air. He was drunk,’ said a prisoner called Maria Apfelkammer. He was also drunk when on another occasion he rode his bicycle around the surgery table. Sonntag’s antics infuriated Koegel. As chief doctor, he refused to recognise Koegel’s authority. He considered the SS commandant vulgar and uncouth, along with most of his subordinates. He particularly hated Koegel for barring him from the coveted SS living quarters beside the lake. As Sonntag was single, Koegel insisted he live in digs in Fürstenberg.

  Just as Walter Sonntag liked to cause pain, so he could not stand to see others show kindness towards the sick or suffering. One day he caught a woman called Vera Mahnke as she tried to stuff a piece of bread through the wire to a Jewish friend in the Strafblock. ‘Dr Sonntag was passing and without asking what I was doing he shouted: “You old pig. You piece of shit. You give bread to a Jewess, do you?” and he started beating me with his fists. He kicked and beat me until I passed out.’

  Sonntag held a particular loathing for Jews. From his office window he watched in disgust as the Jewish brick-throwers trudged back through the gates at the end of the day, blackened by dust, pouring with sweat, and dragging wooden clogs. The summer was no kinder to the brick-throwing gang than the winter. All were sunburnt and those who had not long been in the camp were a pitiful sight.

  ‘Their faces and bare arms and legs were an angry red and their hands which hung down at their sides were raw and bleeding,’ recalled Doris Maase.

  Sometimes the brick-throwers’ gang leader would stop at the Revier to ask for bandages, but they knew not to ask if Sonntag was there. And even if bandages were issued, they were never changed, so within days wounds suppurated and crawled with maggots. One day Erika Buchmann saw an old woman crawl into the hospital from such a gang on hands and knees. ‘She was a terrible sight. The bandages hung from her in rags. But Sonntag forbade anyone to help her.’

  On another occasion, Olga Benario was passing. Her hands were torn and bleeding, but instead of cursing or kicking her, to everyone’s aston
ishment Sonntag appeared to feel sorry for her, and offered to help. After two years in the camp, Olga had made an impression on many of the staff, as well as on other prisoners. Perhaps Sonntag had seen her tall dark figure on the Lagerstrasse, talking to Doris Maase. She had clearly caught his eye at some point. ‘Sonntag, the greatest scoundrel, allowed her to wear gloves,’ recalled Maria Wiedmaier.

  Sonntag would also show an interest, and even a grudging respect, for certain prisoners who worked in the Revier. Although Doris Maase was half Jewish, he relied on her for medical expertise. ‘Maase, Maase, where is Maase?’ he would call, as others had called before him. He made Erika Buchmann his personal secretary and would rarely let her out of his sight, so dependent was he on her skills. Nor could he conceal his adoration for the Czech journalist Milena Jesenska, always seeking her attention. One day he offered her what was left of his breakfast, which she declined without thanks. Another day he stopped her in the corridor and tickled her under the chin with his bamboo cane, at which, to his astonishment, Milena grabbed it and flung it down. She related later how Sonntag had stared into her face and seen her anger and loathing. After that he abandoned his overtures, but continued to turn a blind eye when Milena helped prisoners.

  The prisoners who worked for Sonntag certainly acquired a modicum of influence and even power. Maase would smuggle out medicines. Jesenska sometimes switched cards of VD patients to save them from Sonntag’s knife. Buchmann found chances to sign sick patients off the labour gangs. And yet the price they paid for this power to help other prisoners was high: for most of the time they were obliged to help Sonntag. They had to stand holding his syringe, passing surgical instruments, filing notes for Berlin and drawing up his lists.