Ravensbruck

by Sarah Helm

  And the more the women talked, the more Milena saw that when ‘it was all over’ the two of them should write their own book. ‘Her idea was for a book on the concentration camps of both dictatorships: millions of human beings reduced to slavery in the name of socialism and in the other in the name of profit and glory of the master race. It would be called: “The Age of Concentration Camps”.’ That conversation took place in 1941, before the Auschwitz gas chambers were built, and before the outside world had any serious inkling of Stalin’s Gulag.

  For Grete, however, Milena was not only a soulmate but also an ally. More than a year since she had arrived from the Gulag, the camp’s communists were still blackballing Grete, and now, by her account, they spurned Milena too for daring to mix with this Trotskyist traitor, Buber-Neumann, who spread lies about the Soviet Union.

  That feelings should run high in the summer of 1941 is no surprise; in June Hitler had finally torn up his pact with Stalin and marched into Russia with massive force—Operation Barbarossa. A wave of optimism now swept over the communist prisoners, convinced that the Red Army would fight back and they would all be freed before long. Milena and Grete were not so sure. According to Grete, their scepticism provoked further attacks from hardliners who called them ‘class enemies’.

  Although certain communist apparatchiks did indeed turn against Milena in the camp, the broader community of Czech prisoners—many like her were writers, or else dancers, musicians, artists, often women she had known for years—loved her for her charm and her courage, whatever their political differences. In October 1941 a Czech resister called Anička Kvapilová, formerly head of the music department of Prague city library, arrived at Ravensbrück. Standing in shock and despair outside the Revier, she looked up and saw a smiling face turned towards her and other horrified newcomers, awaiting their medical examination. As Anička recalled: ‘The woman stopped for a moment on the steps of the Revier block, smiled down at us and said in Czech: “Welcome, girls”.’ Anička hadn’t known Milena in Prague, but knew her reputation and guessed this was she. ‘Her hair was shimmering red. In the midst of all that inhumanity this was the first human thing that happened.’

  During those enchanted weeks in the summer of 1941, other prisoners enjoyed their freedoms too. The political prisoners went for walks and got in touch with Jewish comrades or visited the sick. The communist Jozka Jaburkova wrote a collection of fairy tales for her friend Tilde Klose, who was sick with TB. In the Jewish block, Olga spent time on her mini-atlas.

  As acting chief guard, Bertha Teege allowed the prisoners to take advantage of the quarantine. ‘The Jehovah’s Witnesses got out their illegal bible,’ she recalled, ‘the asocials were singing for all their worth, the professional criminals were bickering, the gypsies were dancing, doing acrobatics, having fights and being friends again in the same breath, and the Poles were visiting each other.’

  The SS were content to let their valued prisoners run the camp. Such was the SS’s confidence in women like Bertha Teege, and other co-opted prisoner staff, that guards simply walked away, in the sure knowledge that things inside would be run efficiently and the camp kept under control. Such a demonstration of trust shows how successful the SS had been to date in delegating the day-to-day running of the camp to prisoners themselves.

  Since the communist takeover the previous year, more and more political women had been co-opted into useful jobs. Prisoners now not only ran the blocks, they staffed the kitchen, served meals in the SS canteen and ran the SS nursery. Others worked in the Effektenkammer and several prisoners worked in the Revier as nurses, midwives and technicians. Nor was it only Germans and Austrians who secured good jobs: Polish medics worked in the Revier radiography room, and Czechs staffed the lab.

  The fastest rise in recruitment had taken place in the camp offices. As prisoner numbers grew, so had the camp bureaucracy, and Koegel needed office staff. Given that typing, shorthand, bookkeeping and filing were women’s work, there were many in Ravensbrück qualified to fill such posts. Women who once typed speeches for male council members or kept the books for a trade union were now typing lists of arrivals or invoicing local farms for prisoners’ services.

  Near the commandant’s headquarters a writers’ office, Schreibstube, was staffed entirely by inmates. If they wished, these workers could use their privileges to good effect: they could tip off Blockovas about names of new arrivals, or warn of forthcoming ration cuts or VIP visits.

  These Schreibstube prisoners were highly privileged. Working beside the SS, they were required to wash more often than ordinary inmates, and were better clothed and fed. All such prisoners lived in Block 1, where conditions were better and where many valued prisoner staff—Blockovas, Stubovas, Revier workers and others—also lived. With contacts in the offices, Blockovas were also securing new influence and power, and by the summer of 1941 none carried more authority than Rosa Jochmann, the Austrian trade union leader, now Blockova of Block 1.

  Although Rosa had initially taken some persuading by Käthe Leichter to do the Blockova job, she had come to see the benefits. At this time ‘the whole camp was in the hands of the prisoners’, she said later. Such was Rosa’s sway that when on one occasion a young woman guard ran sneaking to Langefeld with a minor complaint about Block 1, Rosa went to Langefeld and complained about the guard, saying she had overstepped the mark, so it was the guard who was reprimanded. Rosa Jochmann ‘could do no wrong’, according to several prisoners. So successful had she proved at running Block 1 that it was now always chosen as the show block; outside visitors—top Nazis, diplomats from neutral countries, industrialists, members of the German Red Cross or officers of the Wehrmacht—would be shown inside Rosa’s block to see just how civilised a concentration camp really was.

  By the autumn of 1941, however, the camp’s most powerful prisoners were the joint Lagerältesten (chief Kapos) Bertha Teege and Luise Mauer, both German communists. Bertha had held the post since January 1941, but by the summer, such was the workload that the two women were sharing the job. Often seen at Langefeld’s shoulder, or darting down the Lagerstrasse to deliver her messages, the women were invariably remembered later as a double act.

  At first sight the rise to power of Bertha and Luise is hard to explain; nothing in their background marks them out from other ordinary German communist prisoners. Bertha, the daughter of a furniture maker, worked as a bookkeeper before the war, then joined the communist opposition and married a communist member of her local parliament. She was a mother of two. Luise Mauer, a dressmaker, also married a communist politician and worked for the party as a courier. Luise had a daughter. The women’s stories of arrest and imprisonment were also similar to many others’, and on arrival at the camp they made little impression.

  And yet, in Langefeld’s eyes Bertha Teege and Luise Mauer were obvious recruits. Communists could follow orders, and since the ‘coup’ the two had proved reliable workers. Both of these women were able; in their late thirties, both had suffered years of imprisonment and separation from their children before they even reached the camp: their resistance had been thoroughly crushed. Luise Mauer had then been further demoralised in the camp by long stretches on the most gruelling work gangs.

  Entering the camp a year later, Bertha Teege took one look at the punishments meted out to difficult prisoners and made her mind up fast about survival. Soon after arriving, Bertha saw inside the bunker where several bodies were frozen onto the stone cell floors. ‘Hospital workers were called in to “scratch the dead bodies off”,’ she recalled, adding that she then understood: ‘You’d better not show your horror or you are imprisoned yourself.’

  Early in 1941, when the first execution was carried out, Teege was brought in to help, which she readily did. The victim was a Pole called Wanda Maciejewska, sentenced to death for ‘terrorism’ carried out in Poland. The task was to escort Wanda to the location, near the bunker, where the shooting took place. The next job was stripping the corpse, which was taken to the
Fürstenberg crematorium by the camp hearse. Teege carried the dead woman’s bloodied clothes back to the Effektenkammer to be washed and reused.

  By August 1941, such was Langefeld’s confidence in Bertha Teege that when the SS walked out over the polio scare, she handed her the camp keys. Three weeks later it was time to return them. The plague ended as abruptly as it began, caused perhaps by mass hysteria or by a deliberate stunt set up by the asocials to create panic. A new panic was about to break out, and this time the cause would be real.

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  Throughout the early autumn of 1941—Doris Maase said it began in July—Dr Sonntag was drawing up more lists, but nobody knew why. Rumours came from the Schreibstube secretaries that he was acting directly on orders from Berlin. Those selected were mostly the old and the sick. Teege and Mauer led the women to the bathhouse, where they were ordered to strip and parade naked in front of Sonntag. Then they returned to their blocks and more women were called to the bathhouse. Many had syphilis or gonorrhoea. Some from the Jewish block were called. Prisoners with TB were selected too, including the Kapo of the ‘celebrities’ work gang. No one knew who would go next.

  Uncertainty was one of the worst things; the smallest changes caused anxiety. Since the invasion of the USSR in June there had been more uncertainties than ever. Rations had dwindled; there were rumours that bread might run out. The canteen shop had next to nothing for sale and the prisoners’ mail was about to stop, or so it was said.

  Overcrowding caused further uncertainty. More prisoners were pouring in—mostly Poles, but also German politicals and asocials—pushing the numbers up towards 7000. And each week women had to move blocks to accommodate them, which tore them from friends. Some were even sharing mattresses. Showers had been cut back to once every four weeks. There was one blanket each, instead of two, and winter was coming.

  The women on Sonntag’s lists were to be released, some said. Releases were certainly occurring: to prevent more ‘plagues’ a number of TB sufferers were told they were to be released, including three communists, Lotte Henschel, Tilde Klose and Lina Bertram. The Revier secretary, Erika Buchmann, was released in the summer, apparently on one of Himmler’s whims. In July Doris Maase walked free.

  Prisoners working in the Effektenkammer, however, knew nothing of any releases relating to Sonntag’s lists, and they would have been the first to hear, because the freed women’s clothes were always collected from storage in advance. On the other hand, to get back your own clothes didn’t guarantee release, as Effektenkammer staff also knew. The Polish resister Wanda Maciejewska, shot in January, had been brought to collect her clothes and told to put them on just before her execution—a charade intended to disguise the imminent killing.

  By the third week of November Dr Sonntag had selected more than 250 names for his lists. On 19 November a man in a suit arrived from Berlin. Nobody knew who he was, but Emmy Handke, a secretary in the Revier, learned he was a psychiatrist. Someone in the Schreibstube heard he’d been booked into a hotel in Fürstenberg.

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  It was nearly nine months since Himmler had written to Philipp Bouhler, head of Hitler’s Chancellery, asking whether he could use the ‘personnel and installations of “T4” for the concentration camps’. The personnel were the German psychiatrists and doctors used to select the disabled for the ‘euthanasia’ killings; the installations were the gas chambers installed in the castle sanatoria for the purpose. Himmler’s interest in using the T4 gas chambers sprang largely from the growing need to free up space in the camps. With the new drive to use prisoners as slave labour for the war industries, there was more need than ever to eliminate prisoners incapable of work—the useless mouths.

  Within weeks of his letter to Bouhler, the Reichsführer had been given the go-ahead to use the T4 resources. However, this new series of gassings was supposed to be directed not out of the T4 offices within the Führer’s Chancellery, but out of Himmler’s own Concentration Camp Inspectorate, located at Oranienburg, on the northern edge of Berlin. Hence a new cover name was invented for the killings: Sonderbehandlung 14f13. Sonderbehandlung—‘special treatment’—was the SS and police euphemism for killing. At the camp inspectorate the code ‘14f’ was used to denote prisoners who died in the camps. Under subdivisions ‘14f14’ meant executions and ‘14f8’ suicides. The new ‘14f13’ denoted death by gassing.

  The adapted 14f13 programme had been launched in spring with a trial run at the male camp of Sachsenhausen, right next to Himmler’s Oranienburg inspectorate. In April 1941, a medical commission arrived there to start selections. Given the leakage of information about the Grafeneck gassings five months earlier, the secrecy surrounding the Sachsenhausen operation was tight, but thanks to letters written by one of the medical commission, certain details have survived.

  Friedrich Mennecke, a T4 psychiatrist, wrote each day to his wife Eva, telling her about his work at Sachsenhausen. He was staying at the Eilers Hotel in Oranienburg, in a ‘big and pleasant room’, while his colleagues from Tiergartenstrasse 4 commuted to the suburb each day on the Berlin S-Bahn. His work was ‘very, very interesting’ and he enjoyed afternoon coffee and cake with the commandant. After four days Mennecke and colleagues had ‘processed’ between 250 and 400 prisoners.

  A few weeks later those processed by Mennecke at Sachsenhausen were taken to Sonnenstein, near Dresden, site of another gassing centre, also hidden inside a sanatorium. This was another turning point in the escalating Nazi murder programme: the first time prisoners from a concentration camp were killed with gas. A satisfied Himmler directed his 14f13 staff—and colleagues at T4—to start selecting prisoners at other camps for transport to gassing centres.

  Over the summer, however, protests broke out again among the public, and the gassings paused. It was a new gassing centre in a mental institution at Hadamar, near Limburg, that revived the unrest. It lay inside a converted Franciscan priory, and gas chambers had been installed in one of the wings, but once again the cover-up had gone wrong. In June 1941 the bishop of Limburg wrote:

  Several times a week buses arrive in Hadamar with a considerable number of victims. Schoolchildren of the vicinity know this vehicle and say: ‘Here comes the murder box again.’ Or the children call each other names and say: ‘You’re crazy, you’ll be sent to the baking oven at Hadamar.’ You hear old folks say: ‘Don’t send me to a state hospital. When the feeble-minded have been finished off the next useless eaters whose turn will come are the old people.’

  It had also been impossible to disguise the large number of urns suddenly piling up at crematoriums all over Germany. Shocked relatives learned that a loved one, usually a patient in a mental hospital, had unexpectedly died; it had not been possible to preserve the body due to the risk of infection, so the body had been burned. In many cases urns reached the wrong family, and some received two urns. Most horrifying, especially to Catholics, was to know that their loved ones had been cremated at all.

  During the spring and summer of 1941 a form of silent protest began across Germany. Families placed identical condolence notices in the newspapers, expressing their disbelief at the ‘incomprehensible’ news they had received of a loved one’s sudden death. Lawyers acting for families of patients still in asylums said families were ‘being made fools of’ by the ‘monstrous programme’ and by the ‘flimsy camouflage’ used to cover things up. Those responsible had ‘lost a sense of the difference between right and wrong’, wrote another Catholic priest.

  On 3 August 1941 came the most serious protest yet. Count Clemens August Graf von Galen, bishop of Münster, took to the pulpit to condemn the murders: an ‘unproductive life’ was no reason to kill. By this time articles about the killings and the cover-up had begun to appear in the foreign press, most notably the New York Times.

  The protest had come at an awkward time for Hitler. On 2 June 1941 German forces had marched into Russia and the Führer’s attention was focused on Stalin’s Red Army. Domestic unrest was therefore a distraction
. Nevertheless, not wishing to provoke wider protest just as his more ambitious killing projects were maturing, Hitler said in August that he would stop the domestic euthanasia killings. Public protest quickly subsided and he could concentrate on the overarching task: defeating Stalin and annihilating Russia’s three million Jews.

  Himmler’s own SS murder squads, the SS Einsatzgruppen, Special Action Groups, sent in behind the German forces, were given the task of launching the murder of Russia’s Jews, and over the summer the Reichsführer went out to the captured Russian lands to supervise. The main method used was mass shooting. At first Himmler’s orders were to shoot only the men—perhaps he felt that his killer squads were not yet sufficiently ‘hardened’ or ‘accustomed to their own atrocities’, as one biographer put it, to shoot women and children. By the end of July, however, Himmler’s orders were that Russian-Jewish women and children must also be shot.

  On a visit to Minsk on 15 August the Reichsführer asked to observe a mass shooting. He stood by a trench and watched groups of Jews and partisans—men and women—shot, then fall forward into a ditch in front of him. One soldier said later: ‘After the first salvo Himmler came and looked personally into the ditch, remarking that there was still someone alive. He said to me: “Lieutenant, shoot that one.” Himmler stood beside me while I did it.’

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  If Himmler had ever had any reservations about including women in his new gassing plans for concentration camp prisoners within Germany proper (the ‘old Reich’), after Minsk he had none. In the early autumn of 1941 he authorised the resumption of selections at concentration camps under the new 14f13 killing plan, and Ravensbrück was to be included.