Ravensbruck

by Sarah Helm

  Many women later confirmed what Karolina said on the timing of the destruction of the main gas chamber. According to Zdenka Nedvedova a group of women from Lidice were the last prisoners to be gassed there. They went to their deaths singing the Czech national anthem. ‘After the gas chamber was destroyed and the place flattened, came the visit of the International Red Cross,’ said Zdenka. Hanna Sturm, the Austrian carpenter, who had helped convert the shed into a gas chamber in the first place, helped dismantle it.

  Suhren now knew the killing could not be finished in time. By the second week of April the Americans had reached the Elbe, seventy-seven miles west of Berlin, while the Red Army under Marshal Zhukov were massing at the Oder, ready to attack the capital from the east. On Zhukov’s right flank General Rokossovsky’s forces had taken Danzig and were marching west, so Suhren had perhaps a week or two to remove the evidence of extermination before Rokossovsky reached his camp.

  The gassing, however—though reduced—hadn’t stopped. From now on it was done in these green or black vehicles, which could be taken away when the order for evacuation came. Meanwhile, the process of clearing up accelerated. More trees were planted, more blocks painted, and pits were dug where bodies were burned because the three furnaces (and the two in Fürstenberg) could not burn them fast enough.

  At the end of March and into April the clearance was done most urgently at the Youth Camp. Since the Uckermark Youth Camp first started operating as a death camp, at least 6000 women had been sent there, most of whom had been exterminated by the start of April. Arrivals had already slowed down. According to Vera Salvequart, the Youth Camp nurse, the last annihilation transport was brought here in early April. She remembers it because a Russian girl escaped, and everyone had to wait until Koehler found her. He brought her before the others and beat her to death with a piece of timber.

  Selections for gassing at the Youth Camp continued, as did starvation and poisoning, but as killing was taking too long, more and more remaining prisoners were sent off to subcamps or marched back to the Ravensbrück main camp. As Neeltje Epker saw it: ‘The enemy was fast approaching and they could not complete their plan.’

  Many of the French at the Youth Camp had been returned to Ravensbrück over the Easter weekend. A few days later the Youth Camp guards had a bonfire of documents and logbooks. Polish prisoners in one block were told to destroy their bunks, ‘which we did with enthusiasm,’ said Natalia Chodkiewicz. A selection was then held and Natalia, with 200 others, was marched back to Ravensbrück. ‘I stood with my eyes closed and hoped today that the black staff of the chief guard would choose me,’ said the Polish woman Janina Habich. ‘But at the end of the selection I was returned to Ravensbrück.’

  Mary O’Shaughnessy still expected daily to be chosen. ‘By this time we thought we were all going mad. All we did was wait on parade—or rather wait for orders to die.’ Another mass selection was held, and the women chosen taken to be gassed, or possibly shot. But Mary O’Shaughnessy was selected to return to the main camp. In the end her false arm had proved irrelevant to her selection for life or death, as all that the selectors were interested in was the state of the women’s legs.

  As Mary lined up to walk back, Ruth Neudeck passed by and struck her across the mouth with her silver-handled riding crop. ‘There was no reason. Two of my teeth had already been knocked out.’ With a group of about 200 she headed back through the woods towards Ravensbrück, still bleeding from her mouth.

  Numbers at the Youth Camp now rapidly thinned out and prisoners from the male camp were sent in to clear up more of the evidence. They burned rotting bodies and turned the starvation room in the Revier back into a normal day room.

  Before Auschwitz was evacuated in January 1945, the SS had gone round shooting any Kapos who might have evidence of what had happened. All of the Sonderkommando—those prisoners who had worked in the Auschwitz gas chambers and the crematorium—were to be executed. Just before their execution, the Auschwitz Sonderkommando had revolted. Though the revolt was put down, several men had escaped. Presumably to forestall any similar rebellion here, the eleven men who had worked in the Ravensbrück crematorium and gas chamber were taken to the camp bunker in early April and locked up. Also in early April, Vera Salvequart, the Youth Camp nurse, learned that she was to be shot.

  Salvequart said later that it was Rapp who told her first that she would ‘never get out alive’. It was probably after this that her behaviour changed. She was almost certainly under instructions to poison all those who remained in the Revier. Instead she was kind to them and tried to save some of them.

  ‘When the first warm rays of the sun appeared Vera told sick people that they could go outside into the sun, and she arranged for the TB patients to be carried out,’ said Irène Ottelard. ‘She even went for walks with the patients, without the SS guards.’ Many prisoners appreciated Vera’s ‘kindness’, and on her birthday—12 April—they gave her presents. By now Salvequart had a number of prisoners helping her in various ways; a Frau Schaper was her dressmaker.

  ‘She invited people into her room and gave them bread and honey from her parcels,’ said Irène—but this time there was no white powder in the sandwiches. In desperation, Gisela Krüger told Salvequart one day, ‘If this fear and hunger doesn’t stop soon, it’s best to take the powder,’ but Salvequart refused to kill her, saying: ‘You can still have it, but you love life.’ According to Gisela, Frau Schaper was to have been given the powder before the end, but she hadn’t finished making Vera’s clothes, so she was spared.

  Salvequart also saved prisoners from death by swapping names on the death list. ‘I must say that the behaviour of Vera Salvequart was a paradox,’ said Irène. ‘She did save some women, but she killed a large number too.’ To save someone, she would replace the intended victim’s name with the name of someone who had already died. Later she would claim she saved scores of women in this way, but Gisela Krüger said it was more like four or five.

  Salvequart’s own descriptions of her last days in the Youth Camp came in three rambling depositions made in 1946 before an assiduous British war crimes hunter called Charles Kaiser. An Austrian Jew who had parachuted behind the lines for SOE, Kaiser was renowned for getting his subjects to talk. Salvequart told him that towards the end, pregnant women were brought to the Youth Camp Revier to give birth. The women were mostly Jewish prisoners and their babies were killed by Rapp. Vera tried to save them, she said, by hiding them in the washroom. Some she adopted for herself and tried to raise, including ‘the child of a Jewess called Weinert—a boy—which I brought up secretly’.

  She received food for the baby from a prisoner in the male camp called Franz Eigenbrodt. Salvequart had struck up a friendship with Eigenbrodt when he came with one of the work gangs to carry out repairs. The existence of the baby became known in the male camp, and other male prisoners smuggled milk for the child. ‘But Neudeck took the child away from me and threw it on the food wagon like a parcel of cloth. The wagon was dirty with spilt food. She also said to me: “A little Jew will be a very big Jew one day.” ’ Salvequart told Kaiser that after this, she tried to poison Neudeck. The chief guard came to her complaining of a headache, and so she gave her the white powder, but Neudeck took too little to kill her.

  After the killing of the Weinert baby all the babies born in Vera’s Revier were taken away by Koehler, Rapp’s colleague. Salvequart said she knew her days were numbered by then, as Rapp was following her around, saying that the Oberschwester suspected her of tampering with the death lists.

  On one occasion, she said, a list of 180 women had been selected to go on a work transport to Belsen, but as the train lines were destroyed they were to be shot in the head instead. She took the chance to switch several names on the list with prisoners who were already dead, and as a result was called before Oberschwester Marschall and Dr Trommer to explain herself. They suspected Salvequart of keeping the original lists, which had their signatures on and would therefore incriminate the
m, so they ordered her to hand over the originals. It was at this point that she overheard Trommer saying, ‘This woman mustn’t fall into enemy hands,’ and decided to escape.

  A further horror strengthened her resolve. According to Salvequart a group of fourteen Polish nuns arrived at the Youth Camp in the final days. One of them was a Mother Superior called Isabella Mozynska. Salvequart told Kaiser that she remembered the name because the Mother Superior had asked for some tablets for her nuns, who were suffering from diarrhoea. Vera gave them the tablets and told them not to come to the Revier again, it was too dangerous. The Mother Superior thanked her and gave her a medallion, saying: ‘May God protect you.’ Vera told Kaiser that she had put the medallion on a necklace, which he could look at, if he liked, as it was in the personal effects safe of the Hamburg prison.

  Next day when she was in one of the Revier rooms, sorting out gold teeth, Rapp and Koehler came in drunk.

  Rapp left the room and Koehler, who was very drunk, came over and tried to kiss me. I resisted, he…threw me on an examination bed and tried to rape me. I resisted with all my force, and bit and scratched and kicked him with my feet. I kicked him in the abdomen, which must have hurt a lot as he fled into a corner of the room.

  Salvequart escaped from the room and told one of the women guards, Erna Kube, what had happened. Kube was about to take a pile of lice-infested clothes to Ravensbrück for washing, so Salvequart asked her if she would take her too. While this conversation was going on, Rapp had fetched the fourteen nuns and brought them into a disused kitchen near the Revier.

  Suddenly we heard shots. When I was walking away with Kube I was called back by Rapp. He ordered me to bring the teeth pliers into the kitchen. When I entered the kitchen I saw a horrible picture. Some of the nuns were dead and some were severely injured by the shots and in great pain. I still remember the horrible picture of a nun whose eyes were shot out.

  Vera ran out to join the guard, Kube, and the two of them went back to Ravensbrück, where Salvequart hid in a hospital block for two days until someone gave her away to Koehler. ‘I was just lifting a corpse when Koehler came in, so I jumped out a window.’ Prisoners helped her to hide, first in the rabbit hutches and then in Block 19, where the Swiss-American Blockova Ann Seymour Sheridan kept her in the roofspace. Salvequart gave Ann a sample of the white powder to smuggle out and asked her to give it as evidence to the Allies. An analysis of the sample—a cyanide poison—was presented to the Hamburg court.

  Both Koehler and Rapp were now pursuing Salvequart. Koehler found her first and took her back to the Youth Camp. He was worried about the attempted rape. ‘Koehler was terribly afraid that I had reported the matter to Schwarzhuber, as he asked me immediately whether I had seen Schwarzhuber and tried to apologise to me, saying he was drunk.’ Again she escaped Koehler’s clutches, this time by fleeing to the men’s camp. Her friend Eigenbrodt had managed to smuggle some men’s clothes to her through a group of male prisoners who were cleaning drains at the Youth Camp, so Salvequart got out disguised as a drainage worker.

  Asked by Kaiser if she knew what happened to Koehler and Rapp, Salvequart said she’d heard Koehler was hanged by prisoners before the liberation, but she didn’t know about Rapp. Asked what happened over the murdered Polish nuns, Salvequart said she’d heard that Ruth Neudeck ‘dealt with it’.

  Dealing with the murdered nuns must have been one of Neudeck’s final tasks at the Youth Camp, because when the last of the prisoners had been killed, or had returned to the main Ravensbrück camp, the extermination annex was closed. Neudeck was promoted and sent to run the subcamp at Barth. Salvequart continued to hide out in the male camp, disguised as a male prisoner, awaiting the liberation.

  The Uckermark Youth Camp prisoners who started arriving back at Ravensbrück, probably in late March, were greeted as if they’d returned from the hereafter. Some were shepherded into the Revier and cared for by friends. Irène Ottelard, who weighed just 29 kilos on return, wrote later: ‘I would never have believed that I could experience such joy at seeing Ravensbrück again. And when I found myself in the hands of a French woman doctor it was like heaven.’

  Others were not as lucky. Mary O’Shaughnessy was marched straight to the mayhem of the death-zone blocks behind the wire. Conditions were little better than at the Youth Camp, though she was glad to have a blanket. Youth Camp killing methods were being used here too. In early April hundreds of women suffering from dysentery were taken to Block 22, to be locked in for three days and three nights without food or water and with no means of relieving themselves, obviously in the expectation that they’d die. Julia Barry, the British camp policewoman, tried to get inside the death block, as one of the women taken there was her husband’s aunt, who had come from Hungary in December. Mary was not allowed inside, ‘but I did see through a door, bodies piled up on top of another, perhaps as many as thirty. I particularly noticed one corpse of which the eyes were hanging out of the sockets, which I believe was due to rats with which the block was infested.’

  Mary O’Shaughnessy soon found herself facing Winkelmann again. The 1500 sick and dying women in her block were ordered to strip to the waist and run past him. As her false arm was exposed, she thought she was now bound to be selected, but at the last minute she was rescued by her Blockova, Ann Sheridan. Seeing the threat, Ann managed to bring Mary indoors after the count, along with several others, and hide them under a bed at the back of the block. ‘This selection happened three times, and on each occasion I was able to avoid it with the help of Ann Seymour Sheridan,’ said Mary O’Shaughnessy in her post-war testimony.

  Once back in the main camp, Youth Camp survivors were also hunted by the ‘cattle merchant’, Pflaum, who was determined to send them off to the subcamps, no matter how near death they were. The Dutch midwife Neeltje Epker recorded that twenty-five of the seventy-nine Dutch survivors of the Youth Camp were put on a transport to a subcamp; seventeen were so weak that they died on the journey.

  The roundups had by now assumed ‘a tragicomic’ form, observed Maria Moldenhawer. ‘Pflaum would personally enter blocks and look under beds or climb up onto the highest bunks, while everyone who could would hide, and Winkelmann would come and look at women’s legs.’ Anna Hand, the Austrian camp secretary, saw Pflaum in the labour office at this time and observed that he was now ‘permanently drunk’. She watched him ride through the camp on his bicycle with women scattering as they saw him coming.

  The ordinary SS were seen about far less by now. ‘They weren’t idiots,’ said Violette Lecoq. ‘They knew the end was coming.’ But Pflaum’s ‘special posse’, SS men with revolvers and riding crops, were always present and would surround blocks day or night and take away entire columns of women to a subcamp as they were heading off for work. Whether they got there alive no longer mattered as long as they were sent somewhere to get them out of the camp. Hitler’s orders had been reiterated to Suhren: not one prisoner must fall into Russian hands.

  As the fronts advanced, Suhren’s choice of subcamps to send his women to was dwindling by the day. They fell into an ever-shrinking band as the Red Army moved forward to the east, the British to the northwest and the Americans to the southwest.

  On 15 April Belsen ceased to be an option for Ravensbrück’s evacuees as British forces reached the camp, uncovering unimaginable horror. By this time the Americans were forming bridgeheads across the Elbe and air attacks intensified, so that any prisoners packed off in trucks or trains were almost certain to be hit. Even if women reached a subcamp alive they would starve as food supplies were cut off. The Polish woman Janina Habich, and 150 others, arrived back from the Youth Camp to spend three days digging a trench around Ravensbrück before being loaded onto trucks for a two-day journey, dodging Allied bombs on their way to the salt mines at Berndorf. Here they were set to work 200 metres underground making V2 rocket parts. ‘In those first April days 140 of us women were held here for ten days and given only rotting carrots and turnips to eat.’


  Eva Fejer, the Hungarian teenager, was sent to work in a factory on the southern edge of Berlin. When it was bombed the prisoners were sent to clear up, ‘but we hid in the latrines instead’. Here they overheard the SS discussing whether to blow the whole place up, prisoners and all, but instead they marched them back into Berlin. ‘They put us on the underground and we saw all the names of the stations that we knew from children’s books, and the guards said: “Stay with us or you’ll be spotted.” Some escaped, but I didn’t dare. I thought, if I’ve got this far I’ll not jeopardise it now.’ They were put on a train to Oranienburg, on the northern edge of Berlin, and taken to Sachsenhausen concentration camp.

  We were taken to the baths and led inside stark-naked. I don’t know how long we were left there. I remember a child started screaming and I never saw her again. I sat with my head in my hands, thinking—whatever happens let it happen quickly—and the SS man came and opened the door. He shouted ‘Raus, raus’ and we were loaded into a truck and taken to a proper bath and given a wash. We were loaded into another truck and taken back to Ravensbrück and we saw lots of commotion and bits of furniture being packed and were given Canadian five-kilogram parcels.

  Women were moved out to Malchow, Barth and Torgau, three subcamps that lay furthest from the advancing fronts, but even as the trucks were leaving, prisoners from other camps, newly overrun, were brought back to Ravensbrück. Many recalled the return by truck from Rechlin, the punishment camp 50 kilometres northwest of Ravensbrück. Hermine Salvine, the office secretary, said:

  On the lorry were lying dead bodies, dying and living prisoners all mixed up together. They were unloaded, reloaded and taken out through the gates. This happened late in the evening. All night the crematorium chimney smoked. In the morning when I had to write the daily strength return [prisoner count] I learned that they were all dead.