Ravensbruck

by Sarah Helm

  Selma van de Perre (née Velleman, and known in the camp as Margareta van der Kuit),*1 a Dutch prisoner who arrived at Siemens the following year, said many women at the plant had nervous breakdowns. ‘It was one of the dreadful things—the madness. I have often seen it—it started like this’—and she made her eyes flicker and twitch. ‘Then the strange laughing started.’

  One of those afflicted was a young Dutch woman called Jacqueline van der Aa, who arrived with her mother Bramine. Mother and daughter came from a high-class family; they had been arrested for helping the Dutch resistance, said Selma. ‘They were perfectly all right when they arrived. Jacqueline was beautiful, with gorgeous long hair, but she was shaved—the only one of our group. She cried and cried.’ A few months after starting at Siemens, Bramine died of typhus after drinking the water out of one of the taps at the plant. Then Jacqueline began to show signs of nerves. ‘I noticed it was often those from good families who couldn’t cope. They weren’t used to the conditions,’ said Selma, who remembered many other cases including a woman called Benno Hoenicke. ‘She was a solicitor in the ministry of food before the war. I remember she stole my bread one day. Then she started twitching. It was a phenomenon. I could always see the beginning of it.’

  I asked what happened to them. ‘Oh, the guards noticed quite quickly and they were sent back to the camp and killed.’

  As Selma observed, the killing of the ‘mad’, and of other ‘useless mouths’, had never halted. Lethal injection had continued in the Revier. After the big transports which took women to their deaths at Bernburg in early 1942, smaller selections were held from time to time; trucks came in the night and took away up to fifty women for gassing, probably at Auschwitz.

  Details of these smaller death transports, which became know as black transports—or Himmelfahrt (‘heaven-bound’) transports—are sparse, but Gerhard Schiedlausky, the camp doctor, revealed at the Hamburg trial a little of how they worked. The black transports were disguised as ‘euthanasia’ under the same 14f13 order that governed the Bernburg gassings. The camp doctors gave a medical report on those selected, he said, and the prisoners themselves were required to take an intelligence test to see if they were ‘mad’ or not.

  —

  In the spring and summer of 1943 more and more important men in civilian clothes appeared on the Ravensbrück Appellplatz. These were Meister from Heinkel, Daimler-Benz and other arms manufacturers, come to select workers. Learning of the success of the Siemens operation—and encouraged by Himmler—they too were hiring slave labour for their munitions factories. Unlike Siemens, however, most of these industrialists were loath to site their factories so close to a concentration camp; they built them at ‘satellite’ camps or ‘subcamps’ located some distance from Ravensbrück, though drawing their workers from the mother camp.

  The Polish student Maria Bielicka was chosen to work at the first Ravensbrück satellite camp of all. In March she was called out with scores of others to stand on the Appellplatz as Meister walked up and down staring at them. Then, with about fifty others, she was taken 400 miles south to Neurolau, near Karlsbad in Bohemia, where the women made bowls for soldiers in a porcelain factory. Soon Siemens had built a subcamp at Neurolau too, and Maria was making parts for Messerschmitt aircraft. ‘It was very hard. I remember losing skin, as we had to put parts into scalding ovens.’

  The departure for Neurolau caused a stir throughout the main camp. Krysia mentioned it in a secret letter home that said: ‘On March 25th several dozen Polish women were sent to Karlsbad, a china factory.’ In the same letter she reported: ‘On April 30th five more Poles were shot.’ She also asked for a French dictionary, as a large group of French had arrived.

  Among the French group were Micheline Maurel, a literature teacher from Toulon, and Denise Tourtay, a student from Grenoble, both captured in random sweeps to catch resisters. As soon as their group was out of quarantine they too were made to stand on the Ravensbrück Appellplatz as the Meister looked them over. Then they waited eleven hours with no food, until doctors arrived to examine their hands and feet, for reasons they didn’t understand.

  ‘They chose us just like we were cows at a cattle market,’ recalled Micheline. ‘They even made us open our mouths to look at our teeth.’ Then it was ‘Schnell, schnell ’ and they were screamed at and beaten into running to the station, where they were piled into cattle trucks and taken to Neubrandenburg, about fifty kilometres to the north—‘a forsaken and forgotten outpost where nobody will ever find us’.

  The introduction of the subcamps was the latest step in Himmler’s plans to transform his camp empire into a hub of arms production. The armaments minister Albert Speer would say later that Himmler was simply trying to grab more power and money—‘to build a state within a state’ by shifting production to his camps. The Reichsführer certainly wanted to get his money’s worth.

  As with Siemens, the cost of renting out slave labour for the satellite camps was carefully calculated between industry and SS. The difference was that with the satellites so distant from the main camp, the companies provided the accommodation and the food, and the cost was deducted from the hire for the prisoners.

  So detailed were the contracts that in a deal agreed between Ravensbrück and the company Filmfabrik Agfa a clause said that the SS would provide the women’s clothes while the company would provide headscarves. Sometimes there was room for flexibility; for example, if a higher output was required, the women were to be provided with better food. And as in the case of Siemens, once a woman was deemed by the managers to be too exhausted, ‘mad’ or sick for work, the contract stated that she was automatically sent back to the main camp and the SS replaced her with someone else.

  The appearance of the Meister on the Appellplatz in the first half of 1943 heralded probably the most significant change in the daily life of the camp since it opened four years earlier. From now on prisoners might be ordered to line up outside at any time and driven off to destinations unknown. Women returning from their daily work gangs to their blocks would find that friends, sisters, mothers and daughters had vanished from the camp, often never heard of again.

  As some prisoners quickly discovered, however, there were advantages in working at the subcamps too.

  —

  For some time the rabbits had been looking for better ways of smuggling their letters out. Since the mass protest of March, Karl Gebhardt’s doctors had switched to experimenting on dogs—the butchered animals were seen being taken to and from the Revier—and the experiments on Polish women seemed to have stopped, ‘whether because of the protests or the publicity given to them, we don’t know’, wrote Krysia. But the women still had a great deal they wished to tell the world, and the space for their invisible writing was limited, especially for Krysia, who had started giving a running commentary on events in the camp, and naming war criminals.

  ‘The hospital is run by Dr Rosenthal, Dr Schiedlausky and a woman Dr Oberheuser,’ she wrote in tiny writing on the back of an envelope in April 1943. ‘It is a place of crime; children born in the camp are killed. People suffering from nervous shock or mental disease are killed by injection—from our transport, Teodozja Szych (7908).’ On another letter she squeezed words around the edge of the envelope: ‘They have built a crematorium outside the walls of the camp, so there will be no proof, like at Katyn.’ This was a reference to the massacre of 20,000 Poles in a forest near Katyn in 1940, which, as it later emerged, was the work not of Germans but Russians.

  From all her letters it is clear that what Krysia feared most of all was the imminent execution of all the rabbits, ‘so there will be no proof’ of the experiments. She urges her family again and again to tell the world, and in May 1943 she proposes a new way to do it: ‘Something that would help protect us is a broadcast on English radio. The only thing to stop them is the disclosure of the secret to the world. We shall keep going until the end for certain, if they want to keep us alive. Sign, pencil in parcel.’

 
; Krysia’s reference to ‘English radio’ shows she knew, by May 1943, that such a broadcast was possible. Almost certainly, the secret letter writers had learned about a clandestine radio station called ‘SWIT’, meaning Dawn, which broadcast from England to the underground in Poland and elsewhere in the world. Dawn Radio was set up in October 1942 by members of the Polish underground who had escaped to England, and was linked to—though separate from—the Polish Service of the BBC. Its purpose was to provide underground cells in Poland, which were mostly cut off from each other, with a means of communicating, as well as giving them a link to the outside world.

  The station gathered news from Poland delivered either by Polish couriers who had got out overland or sent by coded signals via a Polish outstation in Sweden, which then signalled the reports on to the Polish government in exile in London. After passing through British censors, the Dawn Radio scripts were driven to a recording studio at Milton Bryan, near Bletchley Park, the government decoding centre in Buckinghamshire. The SWIT operators then broadcast the reports back to Poland daily. Other world news was also broadcast to keep the Poles in touch with developments in the wider war.

  Krysia’s knowledge of ‘English radio’ had almost certainly come from Polish women newly arrived at Ravensbrück. Before their arrest they had listened to broadcasts on SWIT, and passed on what they learned to friends in the camp.

  In a further letter home in July, Krysia also announced that the rabbits had discovered a better means of getting their own information out ‘to the world’. In early summer two of them had been assigned to make a trip once a week to a subcamp about twenty kilometres north of Ravensbrück at Neustrelitz. Their task was to collect special food parcels left at Neustrelitz for SS officers at Ravensbrück, and to bring the food back to the camp. During their visits the women discovered that next to the Neustrelitz subcamp was a prisoner of war camp (Oflag) full of Polish officers. Over the weeks they managed to make contact. The men, who as POWs could post letters via the International Red Cross, offered to post the rabbits’ letters for them, using the Red Cross mail. In the first instance they sent the women’s letters to another POW camp inside Poland, from where their families could arrange to collect them.

  To explain the arrangement, Krysia wrote home on an envelope in the usual way, giving details of how to collect the letters, and saying:

  The boys sent a list of women operated on, those shot, and poems of Grażyna Chrostowska. They are reliable fellows. We owe a lot to these boys. In addition to helping us in the most important thing, sending out letters, they have also procured some Polish books for us. Send news from Poland in notes hidden in toothpaste tubes.

  Over the coming months the boys from the Oflag forwarded several long letters, and the women started receiving letters back, as well as books and much more. Zofia Pociłowska, one of the instigators of the plan, explained how it worked:

  The first time we made contact they saw us and said ‘Are you Polish girls?’ and so then it started. They saw we came to Neustrelitz each Monday and they started leaving things for us in hiding places, like behind the toilets. And we left letters for them and told them everything that was going on and what we needed. I even got a pair of glasses. And yes we got books—wonderful books.

  There was a boy called Eugeniusz Swiderski—Niuś for short. ‘He was the go-between. Sometimes we even met up, but usually we would leave our letters in a jar in a hole behind a toilet, and when we came back there’d be letters for us.’ Zofia then hid the letters inside her clothes and prayed she wouldn’t be searched on re-entering the camp. One day the women found that Niuś had left them the sacrament—little pieces of bread consecrated by a priest.

  I asked Zofia if she wasn’t afraid.

  We weren’t so afraid—we were young. All we were thinking about was we wanted the world to know what was happening to us. Sometimes we even wrote down everything that was happening and buried it in the camp, hoping it would be dug up later. I had a kind of faith and optimism that I wouldn’t be caught, that was why I wasn’t afraid. And I don’t think the guards even suspected for a minute. We told no one we were doing it because of the spies.

  I said I’d heard there was a love affair between Zofia and Niuś, and she laughed. She said she met Niuś years later in Warsaw at a meeting organised by one of the survivors. ‘No, it was not a love affair. People teased me though. We called him Apollo.’

  —

  By the end of the summer of 1943 Ravensbrück had spawned twenty more subcamps and the Appellplatz was regularly transformed into a slave labour market. According to Lotte Silbermann, a waitress in the SS canteen, Fritz Suhren ‘produced a feast’ each time the managers came to the camp.

  Binz and Bräuning and the rest would always be there. Large amounts of food and drink were consumed with lashings of wine, champagne and schnapps. Before the managers started to pick the prisoners they had always been drinking hard in the canteen. We were always afraid on these occasions about them getting drunk and drinking to the brotherhood and eyeing up the waitresses.

  All this time the Red Army women observed the slave market and wondered when they’d be chosen. If they were, they agreed they’d refuse munitions work just as they had at Soest. When a guard entered the Red Army block one day and called out the names of several doctors they feared their turn for the subcamps had come, but the women were told to report to the camp hospital. Instead of working as slaves themselves, they were to work to keep the slaves alive.

  —

  Although prisoner doctors had worked in the Revier from the earliest days, they had not been allowed to work as doctors. Now, however, doctors in concentration camps were in demand, whether prisoners or not. The reason was simple: the urgent need for prisoner labour to build more arms had focused SS minds on the fact that the camps killed inmates simply through atrocious conditions. As the supply of slave labourers from the East was expected to dry up, given the reversal in the war, Himmler had ordered in December 1942 that ‘the mortality rate [in the camps] must absolutely be reduced’. So at the start of 1943 edicts went out to commandants to improve hygiene and build more and better blocks. Not only must camp conditions be improved, but hospitals too, and the number of doctors increased.

  The idea of Himmler trying to improve the health of his prisoners seems on the face of things absurd. At Auschwitz new crematoria with extra gas chambers had been opened at Birkenau, the camp’s extermination plant. By the end of April, the new Ravensbrück crematorium was in use; the sight of the chimney rising over the camp’s south wall was clear evidence that an increase in killing was about to start.

  Yet the rise both in killing and in working was consistent; the rules were simply clearer than before. As long as prisoners were fit for work they were to be kept alive. As soon as they were useless they must die, so as not to waste resources on feeding and housing them. The principle did not apply to the death camps—Sobibor, Treblinka, Belzec—whose sole purpose was the killing of Jews. Yet such was the need for slave labour by 1943 that more and more of the Jews sent to Auschwitz were also being diverted from the gas chambers and put to work if deemed useful enough.

  Doctors were now held directly responsible for keeping more prisoners alive. Richard Glücks, head of Himmler’s camp inspectorate, had even written directly to all SS doctors in early 1943 complaining that far too many were dying—of 136,000 arrivals in the camps the previous year, 70,000 were already dead. ‘With such a high rate of mortality we will never achieve the number of prisoners required [as workers] by the Reichsführer.’ On 27 April 1943 Himmler issued a further instruction calling for a reduction in death rates; in future only the mad should be killed, or, as his order read, ‘…only those suffering from mental illness must be selected by the medical commission in the context of the operation 14f13. All other prisoners unable to work (those with tuberculosis, the bedridden etc) are in principle excluded from this operation. The bedridden must be given work they can do lying down. The Reichsführer’s orde
r must be scrupulously obeyed.’

  Keeping more prisoners alive obviously meant more doctors, and as SS medics were increasingly being sent off to the front, it made sense to use qualified prisoners instead, which explains why the Red Army medics were suddenly called up. But the Red Army doctors in Ravensbrück were not so sure they should take the work; it wasn’t only the Poles who saw the Revier as ‘a place of crime’. Lyuba Konnikova declared that she would refuse. ‘I didn’t want to do it,’ she said later. ‘We knew that in the Revier people were beaten, maimed and killed with injections. We knew that Rosenthal and Schiedlausky kicked people with their boots.’ Yevgenia Klemm told them, however, that there were also good reasons to take the work: they could use their skills to save lives and smuggle out medicines. In the hospital they would make contacts across the camp and gather intelligence.

  And conditions in the hospital were improving rapidly in the summer of 1943. In response to Himmler’s edict more medicines were available and the Revier had expanded from two blocks to six. Soon after the Red Army women started work there, the hated doctors Schiedlausky and Oberheuser left Ravensbrück, and Dr Rosenthal was dismissed and later put on trial, accused of having had sexual relations with the prisoner midwife Gerda Quernheim, on whom he had carried out at least two abortions.

  At the end of August a new doctor arrived at Ravensbrück. It was said he preferred to cure than kill.

  —

  Percival Treite had none of the usual traits of a concentration camp doctor; he wore a white coat instead of an SS uniform and carried a stethoscope rather than a whip or a stick. At thirty-two years of age, he was a fair, slender figure. He didn’t hit or kick his patients and rarely wasted his breath on verbal abuse. Treite even had a correct and businesslike air about him—more suited to the faculty of medicine at Berlin University, where he had just completed his medical studies, than to the Revier of a concentration camp. He also seemed to be interested in practising his skills.