Ravensbruck

by Sarah Helm

  Since the beginning of April, as their work diminished, the Sonderkommando—the eleven men who worked on the gassing and burning gang—had been gradually brought into the bunker cells, where they remained locked up until the last of the gassings was carried out. The precise date of the final gassing at Ravensbrück is not known, but Adolf Winkelmann told the Hamburg court that he had gone on selecting for gassing until 24 or 25 April.

  Winkelmann’s evidence on the dates ties in with the testimony of several prisoners, and is consistent also with what Mina Lepadies, a Jehovah’s Witness, revealed about the murder of the Sonderkommando men in her statement for the 1946 Hamburg trial. Their killing, she said, took place on 25 April, and she described what happened.

  Mina worked in the bunker under Margarete Mewes, the chief bunker guard, whom she helped by cleaning and serving the prisoners’ coffee and food. The first Mina knew of anything amiss was when the men were put two to a cell. Then the coffee pot disappeared. ‘I looked all over for it, and when I couldn’t find it I got another. Mewes came with the missing pot and told me to give them their coffee.’

  At first, Mina suspected nothing, but some of the men would not drink, so she grew suspicious and stopped taking the coffee round. Mewes took it instead, and those who drank it died. At ten in the morning their bodies were removed. At midday an SS man came with the soup and told Mina to serve it to the men still left alive. She refused, so he served it himself. Two men, those in cell 47, refused to drink the soup, but two in another cell drank it and by evening they too were dead. That evening Mina was told to serve the soup to the remaining two in cell 47.

  So I looked at the two men in cell 47 and asked if they wanted to eat. They both said: ‘Yes, if it’s you who’s serving it.’ They were very nervous and said that they were going to be executed anyhow. Next morning their cell was empty. Everything had been taken away. There was a hammer on the table and a bloodstain, which someone had tried to cover over with soil, but the bench was covered with bloodstains too, and so were the walls.

  Mina was ordered to scrub the cells.

  It was also on 25 April that the biggest convoy yet, with twenty Swedish White Buses, finally made it to Ravensbrück to collect more prisoners. Its Swedish mission leader, Åke Svensson, predicted that this would be the last time the buses got through, as conditions on the road were already almost impassable. The buses were fired on again as they approached. At Torgau, 200 miles to the south, Russian and American forces linked up that day, cutting Germany in two.

  For the prisoners the day began with an Appell for all remaining French and Belgians, and the Poles were brought out in groups, mothers and babies first. ‘We were suddenly told to bring our dressed babies onto the camp square,’ said Stefania Wodzynska, who carried her baby girl Wanda, two months old. The women were told they were going to Sweden and they saw the Swedish Red Cross vehicles already waiting beyond the gates.

  Stasia Tkaczyk was here too, carrying Waldmar, who was just twelve days old. Stasia, aged eighteen, like many of the mothers, had arrived at the camp the previous September after the Warsaw Uprising. Back then, knowing that she was already two months pregnant, she decided to save herself and her baby by concealing her pregnancy. She was sent to the Königsberg subcamp, where she worked on the frozen airstrip. In February, six months pregnant but still undetected, she joined the death march back to Ravensbrück. She was selected to work in a munitions factory near Berlin, twelve hours a day on a diet of cabbage soup, and sleeping in a cellar as the bombs dropped. In March she passed out at work and was sent to Ravensbrück again, where Czech nurses cared for her in the Revier. On 13 April, Waldmar was born. He was very sick, and now Stasia stood with him in her arms, wrapped in rags, waiting for the buses.

  Svensson, the transport leader, recalled that as the day wore on the selections for the buses got more and more confused, and negotiations for places out of hand, so that in the end ‘we took everybody we could without asking’. The biggest argument was over the rabbits. Suhren had not obeyed his orders to shoot them, but when the Swede asked him to hand them over he refused. At least three managed to smuggle themselves on board, including the Lublin lawyer Zofia Sokulska.

  It was on this convoy of 25 April that the first large group of Ravensbrück’s Jews were taken. In his meeting with Norbert Masur four days earlier Himmler had made his dramatic offer to release 1000 Ravensbrück Jews, and had then increased the offer over breakfast with Bernadotte a few hours later, when he said that ‘all the women of Ravensbrück’ could leave, which meant Jews and non-Jews.

  The first the Polish Jewish women knew of this was the previous day, when according to the Siemens worker Basia Zajączkowska, an order was issued that all Polish Jews in the camp should come forward. ‘We were placed in the Strafblock. No food was available and no access to toilets. We were viciously beaten at the lineup. We suspected they were going to send us to the crematorium, despite rumours of liberation.’ Erna Solewicz, another Polish Jew, remembered a sudden order given in her block that ‘all Jewish women had to leave the camp’. The Blockova took them nach vorn, where they received a piece of bread and a Red Cross parcel.

  Next day the first of these Jewish groups were taken towards the gates. Guards ‘tore off our marks and numbers,’ said Basia. Exactly how many Jewish women left with Bernadotte’s evacuation transports is impossible to say, but it must have far exceeded the 1000 offered by Himmler. Suhren had told Göring there were ‘3000 Jewesses’ in the camp, which meant there were certainly many more. Statements from other prisoners suggest that as many as half of the women taken on the buses were probably Jews, and far more would follow three days later when Franz Göring—miraculously—would announce that he had managed to requisition a train.

  Meanwhile, during the scramble for bus places the non-Jewish Poles complained of Jewish women taking places assigned for them. ‘The Jewish women stormed the buses, which meant we couldn’t get in,’ complained one. For their part the Jewish women themselves later complained of being ‘bumped off buses’ and having to fight for places. Frieda Zetler, a Polish nurse who had come from the Łódź ghetto and Auschwitz, had been due to travel on one of the earlier buses, but learned later that the bus she had failed to get onto was the one that was bombed. But she made it onto the buses of 25 April instead.

  Even the Jewish women themselves often didn’t know if others were Jews or not. In order to conceal the Jewish releases from Hitler, Himmler had ordered they all be disguised as Poles. And as Basia Zającskowska said, they had to tear off their ‘marks and numbers’ before leaving the camp, so as the women embarked on the buses none of them wore triangles that marked them as Jews or as any other group.

  Nor was any count attempted on arrival in Sweden: nobody wished to proclaim their Jewish origins after what they had been through. As always in the camp, there were countless women who had never avowed their Jewishness for the same reasons. For example, Maria Rundo, the young Pole who survived the Auschwitz death march, got out on the White Buses, as did the Dutch-Jewish woman Margareta van der Kuit, who had disguised her Jewishness since her arrest in 1943.

  When Basia and her Jewish group were finally led out of the camp, each was given a Red Cross parcel. ‘Outside were the White Buses of the Swedish Red Cross. We were free. We could not believe it and tried to make sure by asking the drivers, and even at the last minute the guards shouted at us and called us names.’

  —

  When the last of the twenty buses began to pull away, the names of the British women had still not been called, raising fears that the threat to hold them as hostages was real. Then, at the very last minute, Fritz Suhren had yet another change of mind. The British were suddenly called up, raising hopes that they too might be released.

  Accounts vary of how this came about, but there is little doubt that it was the French prisoner Maisie Renault who first drew the Swedes’ attention to the cases of the British and American women. Maisie had got away on a convoy the previous d
ay, but before leaving she promised her French-American friend Lucienne Dixon, who was left behind, that she would pass on her name to the Swedish drivers, as well as those of other Americans and English, so that they could be collected next time.

  When Maisie handed over her list it was the first the Swedes knew of the presence in Ravensbrück of any British or American women. Maisie had only been able to remember eight names, out of about twenty altogether. When the Swedes returned next day and asked Suhren to produce these eight names, he at first denied they existed. One of the Gestapo liaison officers, a man called Danziger, then pressed Suhren to come clean and hand the women over. It was not Danziger who persuaded Suhren to change his mind, however, but Percival Treite.

  In these last weeks of the war several prisoners had observed Treite as he sought to ingratiate himself with the British prisoners, in the hope, presumably, that they might testify in his favour when the time came.

  His hypocrisy sickened most of the British. He had done nothing to prevent Mary O’Shaughnessy being sent to the Youth Camp, nor to prevent the gassings of Cicely Lefort or Mary Young. But while most viewed Treite with disgust, Mary Lindell—his ‘Queen Mary’—was not among them. Mary’s obsequiousness towards Treite, and the salacious rumours about the favours she was granting him, had alienated her from almost all her compatriots by the last days of the war. On the other hand, as Mary would point out, she had won some favours too, in particular where Yvonne Baseden was concerned. Without Treite’s protection, granted at Mary’s request, there can be little doubt that Yvonne, who was dying of TB, would have been gassed.

  When the question of the British releases was put before Suhren, and Treite heard the argument it caused, he saw his chance to intervene, and to do the biggest favour yet for Mary and the British women. He entered Suhren’s office and persuaded the commandant that releasing the British women would serve more purpose than keeping them hostage. Perhaps, he suggested, Mary Lindell might even put a word in for the commandant too. After hearing Treite out, Suhren sent for Mary Lindell. A voice outside the Revier shouted: ‘Die Engländerin Marie, die Engländerin Marie.’ Mary was sitting with Yvonne, who could barely move without coughing blood and weighed just 35 kilos. Hearing her name called, Mary got up to leave. Yvonne tried to stop her, fearing the worst, but Mary wanted to see why she was being called.

  When she reached the Appellplatz, Mary saw Suhren waiting outside to talk to her. The commandant was leaning on a bicycle. His first words to her were ‘Do you trust me?’ to which Mary retorted: ‘As a matter of fact I don’t.’ Suhren told Mary to gather up all the English women and bring them to his office. He told her that ‘Dr Treite had suggested all the English and Americans should be freed.’ Mary put the word out to the British group, and very soon they were assembled beside the Revier, with the understanding that they too were to go on the White Buses.

  According to the accounts of several British survivors, given later, it was only thanks to one of the Swedish leaders, Sven Frykman, that they weren’t all left behind. Frykman spotted their group and asked who they were. On being told they were British and Americans, he collected them himself and put them on the bus.

  Mary Lindell had a slightly different version. She described how as she was marched towards the buses Suhren picked her out. He had apparently changed his mind yet again, and told Mary that she must stay behind after all. Yvonne saw what happened, and said that she would not go if Mary could not go too. ‘Don’t be such a fool, Yvonne,’ said Mary. ‘Go on, for God’s sake, before it’s too late.’ At this point, said Mary, Yvonne walked towards the buses, tears pouring down her cheeks. Treite saw that Mary had been sent back to the camp. He erupted in fury, marched Mary in person to the White Buses, and put her on board himself.

  Yvonne’s memory differs again. She recalls being told by Mary Lindell that she had to leave her bed in the Revier and get herself to the Red Cross bus. ‘She said it was our last chance, we had to try and get out.’ Yvonne walked towards the camp gate and lined up with some others. Too sick to be aware of anything much, she doesn’t remember if the other women were English or not.

  I just remember Mary told me to keep walking towards the buses. That is what I did. So I just attached myself to these people and kept walking and avoided any contact with the guards or anything like that. I remember being very worried that I might be stopped at any minute. I was very afraid of not getting on the bus, but I got on it. And we drove off at great speed. The drivers were very worried about not getting through because the front was now so close. I learned later that I was on the last bus.

  As the twenty White Buses sped away, carrying 934 women, the drivers once again split up as a precaution. Some came under Russian artillery fire, but this time no one was hurt. Red Cross parcels were handed out and nurses tried to tend the sick. They passed two White Buses lying in a ditch, the ones shot up two days before. Somewhere along the route a German ‘spy’ was unveiled on board one of the buses, and on another a baby was born. The baby was nicknamed ‘Per Albin’, after the Swedish prime minister.

  For the drivers this convoy was ‘one long nightmare’ as they threaded through swelling crowds of refugees. But inside the buses the Poles began to sing, as they saw the misery of the Germans, ‘and we cheered and hung little Polish flags up at the windows,’ said Maria Rundo. ‘When the buses slowed down young German boys tried to rip down the flags and shook their fists.’ The buses came up close to German hospital trains—so close that they could talk to the injured soldiers. ‘They asked us for cigarettes and chocolates, which we gave them from our Red Cross parcels. And when we drove through Kiel and saw the terrible destruction it filled us with joy.’

  Yvonne remembers little of the journey through Germany, but she remembers arriving at the Danish border and being greeted by members of the Danish royal family. And it was only when she was safely across the border that she discovered that Mary had managed to get onto one of the buses after all.

  —

  As Treite had hoped, Mary Lindell later spoke up for him at his trial, and submitted a plea for clemency when in February 1947 he was sentenced to hang. Mary was not the only prisoner to plead for Treite’s life. Among the others was Yvonne Baseden herself. Her plea, submitted to the Hamburg judges read:

  I believe that Dr P Treite was mainly responsible for the safe evacuation of the British and American prisoners on the last convoy of the Swedish Red Cross in April 1945. Orders had been given that we were to be kept as hostages and it is only through Dr P Treite and the Lagerführer’s help that we were evacuated with this last convoy. Furthermore, during my stay in the camp from September 1944 to April 1945 I came before Dr P Treite as a patient twice and on both occasions he treated me quite decently. I therefore plead clemency on his behalf.

  When I asked Yvonne how the plea for clemency had come about, she explained that she had still been too weak to attend Treite’s trial in Hamburg in 1946, but while Treite was awaiting execution she had received a letter from Mary asking her to say something to spare him the hangman’s rope.

  ‘Mary certainly believed Treite had saved her own life,’ said Yvonne.

  ‘Do you think he saved your life?’

  ‘I think he made sure I was put on the bus. Otherwise I might not have got out. I was very weak by then.’

  I asked if she believed that Treite should have been granted clemency, as she had requested.

  ‘You see, I didn’t know very much at that time. I had been so ill in the camp. I was grateful to Mary and did as she asked.’

  I wondered how Yvonne felt when she learned that Treite had killed himself. Two weeks after the appeals for clemency were rejected, he cut his wrists and was found dead in his cell.

  Yvonne was silent for a while. ‘I can see now he helped us to save his own skin. But without him I would probably not be here now.’

  * * *

  * Anton Kaindl, commandant of Sachsenhausen, revealed later that his first orders, received on 19 April,
had been to liquidate the camp by embarking all prisoners into barges lying in the western harbour of Berlin and taking them up the canals into the North Sea to be sunk. He refused, and was told to march the prisoners out instead.

  Chapter 41

  Liberation

  ‘Everything is on fire. Looting is in full swing. Women’s screams are heard from open windows,’ wrote the Soviet journalist Vasily Grossman as he observed the Red Army cross the German border and push towards Berlin in the first months of 1945.

  Grossman had travelled with the Red Army forces all the way from Stalingrad. The Soviet columns were an extraordinary sight: a mixture of the modern and the medieval, their tanks with black-helmeted drivers churned forward alongside Cossacks on horseback, Chevrolets carrying mortars, and horses and carts carrying loot and supplies, and even accordion players. Grossman had watched Stalin’s armies roll back Hitler’s forces, liberate destroyed cities and overrun the death camps, exposing their gruesome secrets.

  When the Red Army crossed into Germany, however, the soldiers’ discipline went to pieces. Incited by cries for vengeance, a million drunken frontiviki (frontline troops) began to loot, murder and rape. ‘Horrible things are happening to German women,’ wrote Grossman, who was clearly disgusted by the rape, condoned by many senior officers.

  The troops raped and then raped again. ‘An educated German is explaining in broken Russian that his wife has already been raped by ten men today,’ wrote Grossman. A breast-feeding mother spoke of being raped in a barn. ‘Her relatives came and asked her attackers to let her have a break, because the hungry baby was crying the whole time.’ The Soviet troops did not only rape German women. They raped Poles, French and even Soviet women who fell in the frontiviki’s path. These victims were usually young slave labourers, brought here to work in German farms and factories.