by Sarah Helm
Treite’s demeanour was as much to do with his family background as his professional training. For an SS man, he had an unusual family tree: when asked to trace his roots for the SS genealogical record, an English branch showed up. His upbringing was also unusual: raised a Salvationist, he marched from his earliest days with the army of God.
It was Percy’s German grandfather, a devout Baptist called Carl Treite, who forged the family’s English ties. In the 1890s, living in northern Germany, Carl fell in love with a young Englishwoman, Louisa Foot, from Southampton, whom he met while she was staying in Germany as a children’s governess. As Carl would later say, ‘God then led me across to England’, where they married, and the couple settled in Lewisham, in south-east London, and came under the influence of William Booth, founder of the quasi-military Salvation Army. Booth wore a uniform to preach to the poor outside the Blind Beggar pub, and soon Carl Treite was also urging London’s down-and-outs to ‘suffer for the Lord’.
Eager to take the message back to his homeland, Carl and Louisa, now with three small children, including Percival senior, returned to Germany, where Carl’s sermons on the virtues of discipline and the sins of alcohol were at first reviled. By the time he died, however, the Salvation Army had branches in many German cities, and Percival Treite senior settled in Kiel, where he became a Lieutenant Colonel and founded the German Salvation Army’s first brass band. The young Percy and his sister Lily marched with the band and followed every tenet of the faith, which, before Hitler, included pacifism and a belief in the sanctity of human life.
By the mid-1930s Percy’s mother and his sister had left Nazi Germany to live in Switzerland, where an uncle founded another Salvation Army mission, but with a medical career in mind Percy stayed behind in Berlin. Having joined the Nazi Party and the SS—admittedly belatedly—he went on to specialise in gynaecology at the University of Berlin. A first-class surgeon—he had ‘good hands’—Treite then travelled widely, studying under eminent professors, spending time in Prague and in Bern. By 1943 he was close to securing a professorship in medicine in Berlin, but before he could complete his practical surgical experience in order to qualify, he was ordered to take up a post at Ravensbrück. The appointment was a setback in his career, but he took up his job with enthusiasm and reorganised the Revier.
Treite immediately established an infectious diseases block for typhus, scarlet fever and diphtheria, as well as a block for skin diseases and one for dysentery. He even requested a pathology lab and mortuary to be built under the main Revier block, arguing that it was important to know the causes of death. A system of bandaging stations out in the blocks was an attempt to curb the growing problem of swelling legs and boils and to reduce the queues at the main Revier.
To rationalise the use of hospital beds, Treite set up a system of Bettkarten, bed cards. Those lining up to see a doctor might be given a Bettkarte for a number of days. At the end of every bed hung a temperature chart with arrows pointing up or down so it was clear when the patient was well enough to go back to work. A system of pink cards was another innovation: women too old or frail to carry out hard labour could apply for a pink card, which allowed them to work in their block. The system formalised the status of ‘knitters’ already permitted to work in their blocks, and also fulfilled Himmler’s latest instruction that instead of being killed, bedridden prisoners be found useful work.
Within a few weeks of Treite’s arrival the Revier had been transformed. A new Oberschwester (head nurse) called Elisabeth Marschall took charge, and the team of camp nurses, dressed in brown uniforms and white scarves, were told to smarten up. Treite ordered that all the nurses be taught basic hand-washing techniques and wear a thermometer on a string round their neck.
Even Milena Jesenska, in the Revier office, was impressed. Treite befriended Milena from the start; recognising the name, he discovered that her father was the same Professor Jan Jesensky under whom he had studied oral surgery at the University of Prague. Soon Treite was treating Milena too, who fell so sick in the summer of 1943 that she was sure she was going to die. ‘After her illness she examined her face in the sickbay mirror and announced that she looked just like the little sick monkey belonging to the organ grinder who used to pitch his cart outside her house in Prague,’ said Grete Buber-Neumann, who since her return from the bunker had again shared a mattress with Milena in Block 1.
In August Milena’s Czech friends gave her a magnificent birthday party in one of their blocks, ‘as if they too thought it would be her last’. A table in the Blockova’s room was laden with presents. ‘All those who loved her were there—the Czech dancers, writers, and musicians—and they had made gifts such as little handkerchiefs embroidered with prisoners’ numbers and tiny hearts made of cloth bearing the name Milena. Already very weak, Milena was moved to tears.’
Shortly after this Milena told Treite of her illness. According to Grete:
He immediately treated Milena with the greatest civility and examined her and diagnosed an ulcerated kidney, saying he would operate, which he did with the greatest skill, and for a while she regained some strength. She felt confidence in him when he told her that during his student days in Prague he had attended her father’s lectures and he transferred his respect from the father to the daughter.
Under Treite the Revier quickly became the most international place in the camp. The Czech nurse Hanka Housková was taken on as the ‘miracle interpreter’ because she spoke six languages. Soviet doctors worked on several wards, while Czechs ran the pharmacy. The X-ray room had Polish radiographers, and Yugoslavs worked in the pathology lab. On the prisoner staff too were a Belgian midwife and a French nurse. Even the Oberschwester, Marschall, spoke French.
Treite was always scouting for new talent. Sometimes he would walk onto the Appellplatz when a new transport came in and shout for doctors to raise their hands. If a woman impressed him, as happened with Zdenka Nedvedova, he would wait until she was out of quarantine, and then walk over to her block and have her brought to the Revier before her transfer to a subcamp.
Zdenka Nedvedova arrived in August with one of the first groups of prisoners to be transferred to Ravensbrück from Auschwitz in order to work in a new subcamp. The daughter of an eminent Czech musician and philosopher, she too had studied at Prague, where she qualified in child medicine. She was arrested in 1940 for anti-fascist activity and sent to Auschwitz, with her husband, who died there of TB.
Although inmates knew a lot about Auschwitz by now, the appearance of the Auschwitz prisoners on the Ravensbrück Lagerstrasse stirred horror. Many had survived a recent typhus plague, which had devastated the Auschwitz women’s camp. ‘Even the SS guards watched us silently, shaken by our appearance,’ Zdenka said later. ‘We were thin and bald, with enormous frightened, absent eyes.’ For Treite, however, the fact that Zdenka had survived typhus made her a better prospect for his hospital: she would be immune and could work with infected prisoners.
For Zdenka, Ravensbrück came as a pleasant surprise. Above the camp walls, she saw treetops. Inside the camp looked clean. ‘It was very different from the bareness of Auschwitz. I thought: this is not a camp, this is a sanatorium.’ In quarantine the Auschwitz women were astonished by the running cold water and food ‘provided in reasonable quantities’. They were even more astonished to learn that in Ravensbrück old women knitted woollen socks in their blocks, and there was a hairdressing salon and a fashion boutique for the women SS. At first sight, there seemed to be fewer of the horrific medical practices she had seen at Auschwitz—such as sterilisation experiments—happening here.*2
Most incredible of all, to Zdenka, was the camp Revier, and when she saw the prisoner doctors’ accommodation she couldn’t believe her eyes. Treite had not only revamped the hospital itself, he had insisted on the best conditions for the prisoner staff. Hygiene in particular was to be of the highest standard, especially as these women were to work alongside him. Zdenka recalled:
Bedding was regularly was
hed and medicines seemed to be in good supply. I got two sets of underwear and a proper dress, and we could even have a hot shower. And we all looked smart in our dark blue outfits with white mottling and short sleeves, while the SS doctors wore white coats and the sisters, white headscarves. The hospital was heated and we slept on clean camp beds and had a washroom and our own nice dining room and a small garden where we could sunbathe naked in the summer. This was a momentary joy.
Not all the prisoner doctors responded in this way to their luxurious quarters. For some the gulf between their privileges and the misery outside was too much to bear. The revulsion of Lyuba Konnikova at the contrast evidently showed on her young face, as Oberschwester Marschall accused her of insolence, calling her a ‘Bolshevik cow’ and gave her the filthiest work. Refusing even to acknowledge that at just twenty-four years of age Lyuba could be a doctor at all, Marschall told her to mop floors in the dysentery block and empty bedpans, and once she’d done that she had to take the Oberschwester her lunch.
While Lyuba’s reaction was understandable, when she reported back to Yevgenia Klemm the older woman urged her not to lose hope. The compromise forced upon the Soviet doctors would bring benefits, said Klemm. Just by working in the Revier they had already saved lives and managed to smuggle medicines out for use in the block. Maria Klyugman had even had the chance to sew up one of the Polish rabbits’ legs, performing an operation under anaesthetic and removing large bone splinters from the wound.
More important, perhaps, was the intelligence the Soviet doctors had gathered and brought back to Klemm. Through the hospital network, Maria Klyugman was now in regular contact with Maria Wiedmaier, the German communist leader, who smuggled her newspapers, and Maria Petrushina, one of the ‘Moscow family’, had secured a job with the plumbing gang, which along with the ‘Sturmkolonne’—as Hanna Sturm’s carpentry gang was now known—was the best informed.
Klemm’s increasing knowledge became the lifeblood of the Soviet block, as Zoya Savel’eva explained:
She could tell us what was happening at the front, and who was about to arrive in the camp. She came to talk to us at night: everyone would clamber around her and she would pull out a whole newspaper as if by magic, and explain the contents to us. Sometimes she read the cards. The girls would run to her and say, ‘Come on, Yevgenia Lazarevna, show us the future,’ and she would laugh and do it.
Did she believe in the cards? I asked.
‘Perhaps. She believed in many things,’ said Zoya. ‘She was not a straightforward person. She believed in God.’
‘But she was a communist?’
‘Yes, that too. But mostly she believed in knowledge. You have to understand that knowledge was everything to us. We knew nothing, but Yevgenia Lazarevna had the knowledge and the belief. She told us we would survive and get back home, and how it would all unfold.’
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And however torn some of the doctors were at having to work for the SS, the prisoners themselves were delighted.
Another change that struck Grete Buber-Neumann when she emerged from the bunker that summer was that the Revier had lost its terrors—largely because prisoner doctors were working there. Though some of the women ‘shamelessly’ favoured the sick of their own nationality or political group, ‘most did their best with great devotion in extraordinarily difficult circumstances,’ said Grete. Inka, a Czech medical student, had treated Grete for an attack of boils. Grete had feared to go to her at first because she was a staunch communist ‘and was bound to consider me the scum of the earth’, but Inka was ‘friendliness itself’ and treated Grete with great care.
‘The conditions she worked in were appalling. She had no proper room and the bandages were piled up all around her as women queued up between the mass of bunks.’ So well did Inka and Grete get along that Grete returned several times, partly to hear Inka’s gossip about the camp communists, and one day Inka told Grete that there was a new communist leader in the camp called Yevgenia, who in Grete’s words ‘gave everyone the party line’. Grete never met Yevgenia Klemm. Had she done so her prejudices might have been dispelled.
—
Of all the prisoner doctors recruited into Treite’s Revier in the summer of 1943, it was Zdenka Nedvedova who became the most popular of all. ‘Zdenka, where is Zdenka?’ was now a familiar cry around the Revier, and it was one that went out on the night when a new French arrival collapsed in her block. The number of French had been rising during the year, and in October Germaine Tillion arrived with a group of fifty women from Paris. Germaine fell sick at once, and could not eat or speak. Her Blockova took her to the Revier, where she waited, slumped on the ground, until a doctor in a white coat, whom she later learned was Percival Treite, came along and nudged her with his foot—not brutally, but to make her get up. ‘And looking at me with a distracted air he said: “Kein Scharlach—raus” [no scarlet fever in here—out],’ and she was sent back to her block.
Germaine’s Blockova made contact with the Czech prisoner doctors, and in the night they took her to Zdenka—‘she had a young, serious face and white hair’—who diagnosed diphtheria. The women exchanged no words, but the Czech doctor treated the French ethnologist—Germaine was a well-known expert on African tribes—with a serum.
Germaine was admitted to the diphtheria ward of the infectious diseases block. Later she would reflect on how lucky she had been to go there at a rare moment when lives could be saved. ‘And one could see the power of small groups of courageous women who were able to save a life of another without even exchanging a word with the person they saved, because they probably didn’t even speak the same language.’
Throughout these weeks arrivals from more and more countries continued to pour in. They included a contingent from Norway, among them the fifty-year-old Sylvia Salvesen, not a doctor herself, but the wife of a well-known Oslo physician. Whereas Zdenka, arriving from Auschwitz, had been pleasantly surprised by her first sight of Ravensbrück not long before, the same scenes horrified Sylvia, arriving from prison in Norway. Giving evidence at the Hamburg trial in December 1946, her account of her first impressions was so vivid she held the court spellbound:
This for me was like looking at a picture of hell. Why should I use this word? Not because I saw anything terrible happen at that time, but because for the first time in my life I saw human beings that I could not judge if they were men or women. Their hair was shaved, they were thin, unhappy and filthy. But that was not what struck me most. It was the look in their eyes. They had what I would call dead eyes.
Sylvia was lining up with other new arrivals for the ‘medical’ when a trolley brushed past bearing a body wrapped in a white sheet. The sheet pulled back and she saw the face of a seventeen-year-old Norwegian who had arrived with her. The girl had died of typhus. This place was like ‘no other hospital on earth’, she thought, resolving to try and do something to help, when a man in a white coat approached, and she found the courage to speak up, asking if she might be given work.
Treite stopped in amazement and said, ‘What impudence,’ but Sylvia said: ‘I am not impudent, I am Norwegian and I am a doctor’s wife. And while I am here I would like to help.’ In this tall, elegant woman, with large blue eyes, grey-white hair and impeccable German, Treite recognised a prisoner of some breeding. He ordered her to report to the Oberschwester, who gave her a job bandaging wounds.
On checking her husband’s credentials, Treite discovered that Dr Harald Salvesen was physician to the ousted King Haakon VII of Norway, and the family had strong connections to the British aristocracy. Furthermore, it soon became apparent that Sylvia had contacts high up in Germany too. A glamorous young woman came to visit her one day accompanied by Gestapo officers; the rumour among the SS guards was that the visitor had been given permission to come by Himmler himself.
Pedigree influenced Treite’s decisions on other appointments. Not long after Sylvia arrived, a Swiss prisoner in the TB block—Block 10—was sent to Treite for diagnosis. Her name was
Carmen Mory, and he asked: ‘Are you the daughter of the Swiss doctor Mory?’ She replied that she was. Treite told Carmen, a journalist, that her father had treated his mother in Switzerland twenty years before, and, seeing that Carmen had worked once for the Manchester Guardian, he mentioned his English connections too. Treite treated Carmen for her sickness and later used his influence to secure her a job as Blockova of Block 10, one of the new Revier blocks.
Even the Russians’ background was of interest. When Antonina Nikiforova, the Red Army pathologist, arrived a few months later Treite was impressed with her dissection skills and asked who had taught her. She had trained in Leningrad, she replied, and when she named her professor, Treite asked: ‘Was he a Jew?’
Treite encouraged this coterie of like-minded intelligent women to gather around him, and he liked them to help with his work. ‘Treite often came into the operating theatre and said he felt like operating,’ said Zdenka. ‘He would observe a woman waiting to give birth, and without any warning he then performed Caesarean sections, and deliveries using high forceps and other instruments.’ He sometimes invited Sylvia Salvesen into the operating theatre just to watch him at work. ‘I thought it might interest you, Sylvia,’ he once said to her.
To the rest of the prisoners, the women who staffed the Revier were an elite. Nelly Langholm, a young Norwegian who arrived at the same time as Sylvia Salvesen, said that the ordinary working-class Norwegians had little to do with those who worked in the Revier. Sylvia, a fellow Norwegian, and friend of the Norwegian king, lived ‘in a high-class part of the camp’ and never went to the Norwegian block.
‘Except one day she came with a big box of chocolates,’ Nelly recalled. ‘I was lying on the third mattress of the bunk and I remember the smell of those chocolates. But she didn’t offer us any.’ I asked why Sylvia would have brought the chocolates if she hadn’t meant to offer them round, at which Nelly scoffed, and said that Sylvia probably ‘just wanted to show us she had got them’. True or not, Nelly’s explanation revealed how the deepest class hatreds could survive in the camp, even within a small national group. ‘I think she got them from some high-up visitor,’ said Nelly, ‘and my friend Margrethe was so angry she went up to her and slapped her face.’