by Sarah Helm
Evacuation transports were the new way to kill. Trains were crisscrossing, circling and doubling back between the ever-fewer camps and subcamps as yet out of reach of the Allies. Isabelle Donner had reached Ravensbrück by cattle truck from Budapest in December 1944 and was sent west by open rail wagon to a work camp at Dachau in February 1945. ‘The train was bombed and two wagons had their tops blown off—there were many dead.’ The group was taken off the train and marched north, and came under attack from the air, but they marched on west, away from the Soviet front. Helen Gaweda, a Pole, had marched from Auschwitz to Ravensbrück in December 1944, and was trucked out to the Malchow subcamp north of Ravensbrück in February 1945. In April 1945 she was evacuated south by train to Leipzig, and then again on foot, ahead of the advancing US and Russian troops.
Krystyna Dąbrówska, the seventeen-year-old from Warsaw, was evacuated from a subcamp near Hamburg as the British advanced and put on a train south to Leipzig. She sat on an open cattle truck, next to a wagon crammed with ammunition.
As the Allied planes were flying over we looked up and we thought our friends will see us in these open wagons—the American pilots won’t drop their bombs on us, but they did and our train was bombed as well as the ammunition train. There were so many dead nobody could count them. I remember seeing women still conscious with no legs. There was nothing anyone could do. We tried to run away but were brought back and marched back to another train.
Rosza Nagy, her younger sister Marianne and their mother Margit had marched almost all the way from Budapest to Ravensbrück in October 1944 and stayed together at the camp until January 1945, when the two girls were sent to a subcamp at Chemnitz, near the Czech border, leaving their mother behind.
‘When Mother saw us go she didn’t cry,’ said Rosza. ‘She just said: “Stay together, girls, and you’ll be all right.” ’ In mid-April, as the Russians approached from the east and the Americans from the west, they were put in closed cattle wagons bound for Mauthausen, a journey that took them directly between the Russian and American fronts.
‘It was quite dark in the wagon and we had no food. We sat packed together, sixty to a wagon, like this’—Rosza folded her knees up to her chest.
It was completely dark all the time but I held my sister’s hand. Mother had told us never to let go of each other’s hands. Then people gave up, and they started to die. So we tried to pile them up in one corner of the wagon. We could hear the cannons while we went along. We thought this was probably Dresden they were bombing, as we must have been close. We didn’t know if it was the Russians or not.
After a few days many more people started to give up, and Rosza tried to urge her fellow passengers to hold on.
I said we are going to stay alive. We are soon going to be free. I tried to talk to them to give them strength. But they didn’t want to live any more. My sister gave up. She was only twenty and she was not as strong as me. I was sporty and went cycling and played tennis. My sister was a cellist and had a beautiful voice, but on the train she lost her strength.
After a week in the darkness of the wagon, the train started to pass through Czechoslovakia. Then it slowed and pulled to a stop. The doors were thrown open.
There were people outside wanting to help. It was the Czech Red Cross but we couldn’t get out. Eventually we crawled out on hands and knees, as we couldn’t stand, and we crawled onto a field of grass so we ate the grass. In the wagon behind us were the dead people and they took them out.
It was wonderful for a moment because we could breathe. And the sunlight was so bright it dazzled us. It was wonderful to see the light. When they opened the door it was like a miracle.
The women were ordered back in and the train moved on for another week. On arrival at Mauthausen more than half the passengers were dead. The living were herded into a tent. Rosza’s sister Marianne died at Mauthausen two days later.
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At Ravensbrück they all knew the final act was coming. On 12 April the Siemens women had been confined to their barracks. Two days later the Ravensbrück plant was emptied, the last prisoners marched to the main camp ready for evacuation, and all Siemens equipment loaded on barges and sent away out of the line of fire.
Some in the camp still hoped the Americans would reach Berlin—and therefore perhaps Ravensbrück—first. They weren’t to know that on 15 April Eisenhower had told his stunned commanders at the Elbe bridgeheads to stand fast. Contrary to all expectations, the Supreme Allied Commander had decided to allow Stalin’s forces alone to take Berlin.
At 3 a.m. on 16 April the Soviets’ final thrust towards the capital began with a massive attack on the so-called Gates of Berlin—the Seelow Heights, fifty miles to the east—and such was the extraordinary firepower that the rumbling was heard even at Ravensbrück. That morning, the camp’s selections for the gassing vans continued, and ‘old rats’ still filled in prisoners’ names on transport lists as usual, but two days later, as news came that German resistance at Seelow had collapsed, the Schreibstube staff were told to burn the lists instead.
New orders had come through to destroy the most incriminating evidence of all—the prisoners’ files, and with them all trace of every order that had ever been issued at Ravensbrück. At first the prisoners were ordered to form a human chain stretching from the camp offices to the crematorium, boxes of documents passed from hand to hand and into the furnace.
The guard in charge of the camp library, Irmgard Schröers, burned all the Nazi texts as well. She explained to her assistant, a Polish prisoner: ‘Times have changed and the Germans will have to adjust to other people. You are going to be free and I am going to be locked up. Apparently that is how it must be.’
The Effektenkammer staff had been ordered to clear out evidence too. Prisoners’ valuables—wedding rings, photographs, letters, carefully labelled and stored under lock and key since the earliest days of the camp—were now removed, loaded onto trucks and sent away. Suhren revealed later that the valuables were shipped first to Fortress Doemitz on the River Elbe, but as the Americans advanced they were moved again and ‘stored in the vicinity of a youth hostel’—though whether the valuables ever arrived there, and what became of them, nobody ever knew.
In their blocks, the Red Army women were making preparations for the Soviets to arrive—preparing reports on the camp, drawing maps of the area, anything that might be of use to their Soviet liberators. Irma Dola had a brother fighting with Rokossovsky’s army, who said he’d be there in days and he’d sort the SS out. Antonina Nikiforova was talking about making a film of it all after the war.
Recriminations broke out. The head camp policewoman, Elisabeth Thury, was accused by some of sucking up to the Red Army women now that their victory was assured. Blockovas who had been too close to the SS were carefully watched by other prisoners, and if necessary cut down to size. A new woman guard arrived, called Zetterman. She’d been transferred back to Ravensbrück from Belsen just before the British arrived. Zetterman roamed around Ravensbrück with a revolver, kicking and hitting, and threatening the women that she’d use her Belsen methods on them. The prisoners asked, ‘But what will you do when you lose the war?’, at which she scoffed and said she’d ‘know to shoot herself’ and roamed around and kicked and hit out some more.
Most guards talked not of revenge but of how they were going to get home. Rucksacks were the most wanted items in the camp, and the guards were willing to pay prisoners—who’d been making their own—in bread or potatoes to get their hands on one. They were also keen to bargain for a share of the prisoners’ Red Cross parcels. The food in the staff canteen had been thin pickings of late, and now in the second and third weeks of April thousands of bulging five-kilo food parcels started arriving at the camp from the Canadian Red Cross, full of chocolate and jams, sausage and tinned meat. The parcels were designated for the French, the Jews and the Poles.
But whereas the SS had always felt at liberty to rifle prisoners’ parcels, this seemed no longer to app
ly. Suhren was suddenly checking receipts, and a negotiation began between prisoners and SS about how the parcel contents should be divided up. The Poles, for example, were told that as long as they signed a receipt saying they had received their parcel, they could each receive one fifth—or else they’d get nothing at all. They debated the offer, and after several hours turned it down. Meanwhile the rabbits were offered an entire five-kilo parcel each, but only because Suhren was trying to buy them off. When they heard their compatriots were being cheated, the rabbits refused the parcels entirely. ‘So that’s what thanks I get for making sure the rabbits get their parcels,’ Suhren was heard to say. Nevertheless the contents of the parcels found their way to some prisoners. ‘We even stole back the cigarettes the SS had stolen from the parcels, so everyone was walking down the Lagerstrasse busily puffing away,’ said Zofia Sokulska.
On 14 April Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier noted in her diary a conversation in which the Oberschwester reprimanded a nurse for stealing butter and chocolate from a prisoner parcel. The next day she noted that Dorothea Binz had shown concern for a Jewish prisoner. The chief guard had asked a Stubova why it was that the Jewish woman looked so pale and sick. ‘The Stubova replied that the women had recently come back from the Youth Camp and now worked every day in the sand, to which Binz replied: “But that’s a scandal, to make a woman work in a state like that; she must rest in her block.” ’ ‘What a difference the advancing front can make,’ observed Marie-Claude.
Trucks were still returning from subcamps with exhausted prisoners and bodies to be burned. Now rumours spread that charges had been placed all around the camp. Explosions could already be heard nearby as the SS blew up its installations in the area. Numbers on the Lagerstrasse were fast thinning out. On 15 April Gemma La Guardia Gluck was called to see Fritz Suhren and told she was being freed. On 19 April a group of fifty prisoners—mostly Germans—were rounded up to be shot. Hermine Salvini, the prisoner secretary, filled in the forms and remembers that they were mostly German criminals and asocials, as well as Russians. ‘One was a woman with typhus who was brought from the Revier and carried on a stretcher. Most of those prisoners had been in the camp for many years.’
A few days later, Hermine herself and 500 privileged German prisoners were marched to the gates and set free. Grete Buber-Neumann was amongst them. Before she left, Grete gave a note to her friend Germaine Tillion, containing a list of dead prisoners, and she asked Germaine to give the list to the Allies if she got out. As Germaine and her friend Anise were both NN, they had not been allowed to go with the 299 French women who left for Switzerland. Nevertheless Grete had hopes that they would get out; she had heard from contacts in the offices that more Red Cross buses were on their way. There was also talk in the offices that a young German officer had entered the camp and an argument had broken out with the commandant in front of the other guards.
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The officer seen arguing with Suhren was Franz Göring, Walter Schellenberg’s man. Göring was one of only four people in Himmler’s circle who on the night of 21 April had learned of a third secret meeting between Count Bernadotte and Himmler, during which Himmler agreed to release thousands more Ravensbrück women to the Swedish Red Cross. Straight after the meeting Göring was told to tell Suhren to start organising the releases, but when Göring arrived at the camp, Suhren refused.
The latest meeting between Himmler and Bernadotte had come about after renewed diplomatic contacts between Swedish officials and Himmler’s aides. Outwardly Himmler had continued to display absolute loyalty to Hitler, but those around him were hoping that in these last days he would finally break his bond. With this in mind, Schellenberg had been desperately trying to keep channels open to the West, telling the Swedes once again that the Reichsführer SS would soon be ready to negotiate a separate peace. Schellenberg also kept the Swedes interested by hints of further concessions on prisoners.
Felix Kersten, meanwhile, was telling contacts in Stockholm a similar story, and was even boasting that he had won a written assurance from Himmler that he would stop all future evacuations and put a halt to the death marches. Himmler had given Kersten an assurance—so the masseur claimed—that from now on prisoners in the camps would be kept in place ready for an ‘orderly evacuation’ by the Allies. And he went further: Himmler was even ready to help the Jews. Kersten now made an astonishing proposal. He suggested to the Swedes that a meeting be set up between the Reichsführer and a senior Jewish representative to discuss Jewish releases.
Although Kersten claimed later that the idea of a meeting between Himmler and a Jewish representative was his own, the Swedes understood perfectly well that Kersten would not have seriously suggested it without a strong indication from Himmler that he should. It was therefore taken seriously in Stockholm from the start.
Himmler’s motive in all this was, as always, clear: even now, as the Third Reich crumbled, he still clung to the extraordinary hope that the Allies might see him as a man they could deal with, once the Führer had gone. At this eleventh hour Himmler had a great deal to lose, but by making even more concessions, he still fantasised that he had something to gain. He was therefore manoeuvring more desperately than ever to present a reasonable face, even to the extent of offering to negotiate with a representative of the race he had tried to annihilate.
Talk of such overtures had spread fast from Stockholm to Jewish leaders abroad, who were piling ever greater pressure on Sweden to grab what chance it could to get more people out. The route to the south from Switzerland to Ravensbrück was now cut off, which meant the Swiss could not return, so the French were also pressing the Swedes even harder to take action, particularly after the appalling scenes uncovered at Belsen. The descriptions of dead women at Belsen—many of whom had been taken there from Ravensbrück—were some of the most disturbing. A British medical officer had seen ‘The unclothed bodies of women in a pile 60 to 80 yards long, 30 yards wide and four feet high, within sight of children. Gutters were filled with dead. Men had gone to the gutters to die. Thousands were dying of typhus, TB and dysentery.’ Cannibalism was reported too. ‘There was no flesh on the bodies but the liver, kidneys and heart were cut out.’
For the Allied leadership, these latest horrors had caused great shock. At least a million prisoners were thought to be still alive in Hitler’s concentration camps in April 1945, all threatened with massacre in the last days, and most dying the same horrible deaths already exposed at Belsen and Buchenwald. Nevertheless, apart from limited commando missions, no serious attempt to rescue or protect remaining prisoners was considered. The risk to Allied soldiers’ lives was too high and, militarily, a rescue was deemed impossible. Eisenhower’s decision not to move his men beyond the Elbe—taken largely to keep US soldiers out of the final battle—meant the camps were out of reach even for airborne operations.
Nor did the Allies, even after Belsen, consider giving assistance to Bernadotte, and were continuing to refuse safe passage to the white buses. The hands-off approach to Stockholm was due in part to fears that Stalin would suspect a backroom stitch-up if he heard of Allied dealings with the Swedes, but more important was the need to stay focused on winning the war. On his last visit, Bernadotte himself was fired on by Allied planes and had to dive out of his vehicle into a ditch. For the White Buses on the ground the situation was now doubly dangerous, as the Germans had started to camouflage their vehicles with white paint and red crosses. One White Bus had been strafed by a British fighter, killing a Swede and a Dane. When the Swedes protested to the Allies, the response in London was that the deaths were ‘unfortunate’, but planes flying at 400 miles per hour couldn’t see the Red Cross markings. ‘It is clear the Swedes don’t understand what modern war is like.’
The Swedish government, however, was not deterred. If offers of more prisoners were to materialise out of the mounting chaos, somebody must be in place to take them, and nobody was better equipped than Bernadotte. A two-pronged strategy was therefore agreed in S
tockholm: first, to pursue Kersten’s plan for a meeting between Himmler and a Jewish leader, and second, to send Bernadotte back to Germany to track down Himmler in the burning wreckage of Berlin.
According to Bernadotte’s memoir, he left Stockholm on this occasion intending, for the first time since his mission began, to push Himmler for the release of non-Scandinavians, including non-Scandinavian Jews. How exactly the Swedes decided their priorities for Bernadotte’s mission is not clear from their records, or from Bernadotte’s memoir. However, we do know that Jewish organisations, as well as the French and others, had been piling ever greater pressure on the Swedes to widen their remit.
Bernadotte was heading into a country in total turmoil, where communications were largely severed and the situation on the ground was changing by the hour. Amid these chaotic events it was clear to him that, whatever his brief, his only realistic objective was to find Himmler in the rubble, then roll the dice as best he could and get as many prisoners out as possible. The Russians were days away from Berlin, and this would surely be his last meeting with the Reichsführer SS.
Flying into the German capital was already almost impossible, so Bernadotte took a night train to Malmö, then the ferry to Copenhagen, and made his way down to the Swedish Red Cross base on the Danish-German border. Here he stopped off for a briefing by leaders of his White Bus mission, and heard that all links with the south of Germany were already cut off. On their last trip south to Theresienstadt, on 15 April, the Swedish buses had rescued 450 Danish Jews, but it was touch and go if they would get back, so fast were the fronts closing in. Now all of the 4200 Scandinavians rescued over the past six weeks were to be transported over the Danish border by an armada of vehicles sent by Denmark ‘Dunkirk-style’, including ninety-four buses, ambulances, motor cycles and trucks, as well as ten ten-ton fish vans.