Ravensbruck

by Sarah Helm

  Throughout the winter more ‘insane’ women were brought in to the experiment wards. One of these women—a Czech—cried out so loud one day that the Polish rabbit Stanisława Czajkowska, just returning from an operation, awoke from her anaesthetic asking: ‘What is happening? What is happening?’ The Czech woman’s cries spoke of ‘untold despair, pain and revolt’, she remembered later.

  Someone then told the Poles that the Czech woman had been brought to Ravensbrück from a Czech village called Lidice, which had been razed to the ground by the Germans. The rabbits found a way to communicate with the Czech woman and learned from her that during the assault on Lidice, her home was burned to the ground with all her children inside. The children had called to their mother to help them but the Germans refused to allow her to go to them.

  Hearing this, the rabbits were overwhelmed with pity and tried to befriend the woman. They had no idea at the time how much they and the Czech mother had in common. The destruction of her village and killing of her family, along with their own mutilation at the hands of SS doctors, were both the direct result of Reinhard Heydrich’s death.

  * * *

  * Murder by lethal injection was commonplace in all concentration camps and was still widely used to kill lives not worth living in German sanatoria under the so-called euthanasia programme.

  Chapter 15

  Healing

  The last thing Stefania Łotocka remembered, before she was first anaesthetised, was the sight of copper-coloured leaves blowing past the infirmary window. Waking fully many weeks later, she saw snowflakes settling on the same pane. It was early December and she was starting to recover. The rabbits’ ward seemed peaceful for the first time since it began. Even Krysia, the bespectacled schoolgirl, had stopped weeping.

  Krysia was one of the last group of Lublin prisoners called up for the bacteria operations; afterwards there were no screams, only weeping. Stefania, in the next bed, listened to Krysia night after night. The teenager grew delirious and her leg swelled up so much it seemed it might burst any minute. Even then she didn’t scream, but wept, ‘like a little child who had been wronged, calling to her mother to save her,’ said Stefania. ‘I took hold of her hand, hanging limply from the bed and kissed it. And to my surprise Krysia stopped weeping.’

  The experiments were not over. A few women were still undergoing repeat surgery. But rarely were new Polish rabbits called up, and those done with had now been abandoned ‘like forgotten war wounded’. Left to nurse themselves, they carefully squeezed the pus out, picking out foreign bodies like so much flotsam and jetsam—broken china, a strip of felt, pieces of glass, splinters of wood.

  They helped each other too. When Izabela Rek choked and turned blue in the face, her friends prised open her mouth with a fork and yanked out her tongue. And the Poles in the camp outside had now set up an aid committee; each rabbit was assigned a Polish ‘mother’ to look after her. Usually the ‘mother’ worked in the kitchen or canteen and had access to extra rations that were smuggled into the Revier.

  The women noticed their young skin was healing; severed flesh fastened by plaster was drawing together of its own accord. In mid-December Eugenia Mikulska’s appetite came back. Someone tapped at the window and passed her a bowl of buttermilk, which she gulped down. ‘It was like a small miracle,’ and she dared to think that the worst was over. Irena Krawczyk discovered she could stand on her operated leg—‘a moment of joy for my ward companions and for me—it was one of the biggest experiences of my life’.

  The women even talked about how they’d manage the train home to Poland on crutches. Others said they’d be lucky to reach their block, never mind Poland. The block seemed a world away from the Revier. Whenever anyone opened a window, an icy blast blew through, and they all strained to breathe the air, ‘like an elixir’.

  Izabela Rek began to dream of getting back to her block. ‘It’ll be like going home,’ she said. They all understood what she meant, although they also knew about the terrible things still going on out there. Executions had never stopped.

  One of the women close to the Revier window saw a girl bashing at the doors of the Effektenkammer and screaming for her mother. That morning Kazimiera Pobiedzińska’s mother had been called nach vorne and sent to the store to collect her clothes. The teenager learned what had happened and rushed to the Effektenkammer, but her mother had already been shot. There were rumours that Johanna Langefeld—recently returned to the camp—had tried to help.

  —

  After just six months as chief guard at the Auschwitz women’s section, Johanna Langefeld returned to Ravensbrück in October 1942, and resumed her old job as Oberaufseherin there. The reason for her transfer is intriguing. At the time of Himmler’s July visit to Auschwitz there had been no question of her leaving. On the contrary, although Langefeld herself had requested a transfer, on the grounds that Höss refused to accept her authority, that request was refused. For his part, Höss had asked Himmler to replace the troublesome Langefeld, but Himmler told him she must stay.

  According to Höss’s memoir, after Himmler’s July visit to Auschwitz the situation in the women’s section went from bad to worse, and this was largely due to the new powers bestowed on the Kapos by Himmler himself. On the day of his July visit, the Reichsführer had specifically ordered that they be encouraged to ‘vent their evil on prisoners’, particularly the Jews. After this, says Höss, as the Auschwitz women’s section expanded, ‘these unscrupulous Kapos took over, setting up a system of prisoners’ self-rule’.

  In the first days of October the Kapos’ brutality came to a head in a manner more atrocious than even Höss or Himmler had envisaged. A small village called Budy, four miles from Auschwitz, had been turned into a subcamp. Here 400 women, many of them French-Jewish intellectuals, teachers and artists, as well as non-Jewish Russians and Ukrainians, lived in a deserted school, and worked to drain a swamp. The women were guarded by scores of the Ravensbrück recruits. Conditions were appalling; each day SS male guards goaded the female Kapos to beat up the Jewish prisoners. One of the Kapos, the former prostitute Elfriede Schmidt, first sent to Ravensbrück in 1939, was having an affair with one of the SS guards and was the ringleader of the ‘beaters’.

  In the first days of October 1942 there was a riot at Budy and a massacre. An SS officer, Pery Broad, described what he saw in notes taken at the scene:

  On the ground behind and beside the school building dozens of maimed and blood-encrusted female corpses are lying helter-skelter, all of them wearing only shabby prisoners’ shirts. Among the dead some half-dead women are writhing. Their moans mingle with the buzzing of huge swarms of flies that circle over sticky pools of blood and smashed skulls, and this produces a peculiar kind of singing that initially baffled those who came on the scene.

  Höss came to inspect. ‘The Budy bloodbath is still before my eyes,’ he wrote. ‘I find it incredible that human beings could ever turn into such beasts. The way the Kapos knocked the French Jewesses about, tearing them to pieces, killing them with axes and throttling them—it was simply gruesome.’ Broad suggested that the massacre was staged by the Kapos to cover up their beatings, which had gone too far. Another possibility was that the women prisoners, believing they had a chance of escape, as they were outside the camp walls, launched a desperate revolt at Budy and their revolt was put down.

  Whatever the cause, the slaughter caused a scandal among the SS. Although by now more than 1000 were dying each week in the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the unplanned killing of 150 women outside the camp gates at Budy was deemed unacceptable within SS ranks because it showed order had broken down, and it had broken down amongst the women. Höss needed scapegoats and six of the women Kapos present at Budy were summarily executed.

  Langefeld may not have been at the camp when the massacre took place; she later claimed she was away recovering from an injury at the time. It is notable, however, that her removal as chief guard at the Auschwitz women’s section, and her return
to Ravensbrück, happened just days after the Budy massacre. According to Danuta Czech, author of the Auschwitz Chronicle, the Budy massacre occurred on 5 October 1942. On 8 October ‘The SS-Oberaufseherin of Auschwitz and Ravensbrück concentration camps were exchanged. Langefeld returned to Ravensbrück after arguments/disagreement with Rudolf Höss, Auschwitz commandant. Maria Mandl came to Auschwitz.’

  Fear of mutiny in the concentration camps ran deep, and Budy may well have finally persuaded Himmler to give in to Höss’s protests that Langefeld was wrong for Auschwitz and should be replaced by a woman more suited to the task. That woman was Maria Mandl, who was already known in Ravensbrück as ‘the beast’.

  —

  Back in the camp in October 1942 Langefeld found that much had altered. In her absence Max Koegel had been posted to the death camp at Majdanek and a new SS team had taken over. The new commandant was Fritz Suhren, formerly of Sachsenhausen. A slim, dapper figure—fair and freckled—Suhren, aged thirty-four, was born near Oldenburg in Lower Saxony and had worked as a textile merchant. He was known in the SS as a backroom boy, who liked to do things by the book. A new Gestapo chief called Ludwig Ramdohr had also arrived. His first task at Ravensbrück was to investigate SS corruption, particularly looting in the fur workshops, so he was loathed by prisoners and SS alike. The camp was bigger—swollen by the arrival of slave labourers from the East. Everywhere the compound was being churned up by digging and building, as gangs of male and female prisoners constructed new barracks for the industrial sector at the back and new accommodation barracks near the south wall.

  Most striking for Langefeld must have been the presence just outside the walls of the Siemenslager, as the new Siemens plant was called. In her absence, a state-of-the-art factory, surrounded by electrified barbed wire, had shot up on a tract of high ground about half a mile beyond the south wall. Finished in just ten weeks, the plant had taken a lethal toll on the hundreds of prisoners from men’s camps, many of whom had recently been brought here from Buchenwald especially to construct the Siemenslager. In order to meet the Siemens deadline, they were driven and beaten far past the point of desperation as over the summer they cleared trees, dredged ditches and heaved masonry. The deadline was met, but 300 of the builders were dead, and a further 300, too enfeebled to do more, were sent to Dachau on a sick transport.

  When the first women started work in the barracks on 25 August 1942, Siemens & Halske joined three other major German manufacturers—IG Farben at Auschwitz, Steyr-Daimler-Puch AG at Mauthausen and Heinkel at Sachsenhausen—in using concentration-camp slave labour. So pleased was the company with its new Ravensbrück factory that Rudolf Bingel, the Siemens member of Himmler’s circle of friends, wrote to the Reichsführer SS thanking him warmly. Himmler’s kindness towards Siemens inspired him with ‘particular joy’, wrote Bingel, who promised to render service to Himmler at any time.

  By the time Langefeld was back in October, about 200 women were already employed at Siemens and the sight of the Siemens gang marching out of the camp gates each morning, then turning left towards the Siemens hill, was already familiar to everyone at Ravensbrück. At lunchtime the women marched back again for their soup, before leaving again and returning at the end of the day.

  Most women were thrilled to be offered work at the new plant. After months of hard labour pushing and pulling carts ‘like a horse’, the sight of the bright, clean, heated factory ‘took my breath away’, said Rita Sprengel, a German communist. Inside her Halle, as the factory barracks were called, were row after row of clean tables with shining machines where the women would wind thin copper wire onto spools, sitting on adjustable chairs with a back and armrests. ‘Of course,’ said Rita, ‘the comfort was not created for the sake of the prisoners.’ She understood that without these aids the spool winders would have performed less efficiently, and in any case the wires must be kept at room temperature in order to be pliable enough to wind round the spools. Nevertheless, such comforts were a joy and ‘delayed our end’.

  Furthermore, the discipline at Siemens was at first less harsh. Although there was an SS woman guard on duty inside each Halle, responsibility for keeping order was shared with company managers, most of whom had come from Siemens’s Berlin headquarters and had no direct experience of concentration camps. As a result the women guards felt somewhat restrained and, inside the factory barracks at least, were less ready to beat, although in their frustration some guards would lash out even harder as soon as the women were outside. Waiting with others to march back to the main camp one day, Georgia Tanewa, a nineteen-year-old Bulgarian, tried to read an old newspaper, used to wrap machine parts stacked on a shelf. ‘I forgot for a moment where I was, when a guard suddenly thumped me and smashed in my face.’

  Pleased with the first output figures, Siemens at once took on more women. The young were picked first, as long as they had good eyesight and could pass certain tests. One of the Siemens civilian Meister (foremen), Richard Lombacher, explained the tests to Rita Sprengel as he marched with the women to work.

  He said he used pliers to see if the women could bend thin wire. Or his people would call out a whole block of women and make them hold their hands out. Then the Meister walked along the rows, looked at the prisoners to see if they were young and agile, and checked their hands to make sure they didn’t tremble. They looked for smooth dry skin and lean straight fingers.

  Siemens also snapped up women with administrative skills, to work as secretaries and bookkeepers. One of the very first prisoners they took on was Grete Buber-Neumann, who was given a top job working for the Siemens plant director himself, Otto Grade. Having started at Siemens as a labourer apprentice at the age of nineteen, Grade, now thirty-eight, had worked his way up the company ladder, to win a major promotion, and pay rise, when he was appointed to run the Ravensbrück plant. Working in Grade’s office, Grete was quickly able to observe the qualities that had won him the job: he was assiduous at calculating to the last Pfennig whether the prisoners were working hard enough to justify their ‘wage’. ‘Each prisoner’s output was carefully measured and payment was by result,’ she recalled.

  Of course, as Grete explained, Siemens did not pay the ‘wage’ to the prisoner, who was paid nothing at all. The money the prisoners might have earned was paid direct to the SS from whom the women were rented as slaves. Under the terms of their contract, Siemens paid the SS about forty Pfennigs for each hour worked. Even so, the company wanted its money’s worth, and it practised a system of incentives. If the prisoner wound more than her quota of spools she received a coupon worth up to one Reichsmark, which could be spent at the camp shop; if she fell below the quota, Grade ordered a guard to box her ears. If that didn’t work, he sent a report to the main camp labour office saying the woman was useless and should be replaced. As a result she was sent back and probably put in the bunker, or given twenty-five lashes, or both, and a new worker would be sent out the next day.

  Any rejected prisoners were noted on Grade’s monthly report, an account of prisoner turnover that was sent to Siemens’s Berlin headquarters. The report would list such a woman as ‘unsuitable’ or ‘sent back by main camp office’. Grade had no qualms about making such reports, said Grete. He was a slave driver and would have been an ornament to the SS. His main motivation in this was his fear of being sent to the front. ‘If he proved to be an efficient manager by keeping output high, Siemens could seek an exemption for him and Grade wouldn’t be called up.’

  By the end of the year Grade was obviously doing a good job, because the Siemens plant was expanding again and from her window in the director’s office Grete was able to observe a gang of male prisoners carrying out the work. So appalling were conditions for the builders that several men tried to escape. ‘In the short period of my work for Grade I heard of five executions “while attempting to escape”, and that was just from one work gang.’

  —

  Grete only worked at Siemens for a short period, because not long after Johanna Lang
efeld came back she demanded that Grete go and work for her instead. Such was the influx of Russians since she’d been away that Langefeld needed a Russian-speaker in her office as well as a good stenographer. Grete was both. Moving into Langefeld’s office, she was in a position to observe the Oberaufseherin more closely than ever; she noticed that after her return from Auschwitz Langefeld was ‘in a bad state’.

  ‘She had all sorts of neurotic habits,’ said Grete. ‘Before she spoke she would always have to clear her throat once or twice, and she was endlessly stroking her dress straight, or shaking a non-existent lock of hair out of her eyes. Sometimes she would stop in the middle of a sentence and stare out of the window for minutes at a time.’

  As chief guard, she was obliged to attend floggings once again, a duty she evidently hated as much as ever.

  What seems to have disturbed Langefeld most on her return, however, were the latest horrors perpetrated by Dr Rosenthal and Gerda Quernheim, which Grete described to her. Grete heard in detail about the growing scandal because every evening Milena Jesenska returned from her office in the Revier to the mattress she shared with Grete in Block 1, and described what she’d seen. On one occasion Milena heard the cry of a newborn baby behind a door, and opened it to find a healthy newborn ‘wriggling between its mother’s legs’. Quernheim was absent from the Revier, and a healthy full-term baby had been born alive—a rare occurrence—but soon the baby’s cries ceased as Quernheim drowned it in a bucket. Then in early December Quernheim herself had become pregnant with Rosenthal’s baby, and Rosenthal had aborted the foetus.

  As the year drew to an end Milena was also ever more convinced that Rosenthal, with Quernheim’s help, was killing prisoners and selling the gold from their fillings. ‘Horror-struck’, Milena pleaded with Grete to tell Langefeld, hoping that she might intervene. Grete ‘screwed up her courage’ and passed on what Milena told her to Langefeld, who screamed at the top of her voice, saying: ‘These SS doctors are just as great criminals as the camp commandant and his men.’