Ravensbruck

by Sarah Helm

  At the camp Sonntag married his fellow camp doctor Gerda Weyand and they had a child, Heidi. Clara,*3 Heidi’s daughter, was born in 1966. She was five when she first sensed the taboo about her grandfather; her parents talked of how he had worked at the camp and afterwards was put in prison, but it had been a case of mistaken identity. ‘I couldn’t find out any more. At school we learned about Belsen, Dachau and the death camps, but not much about Ravensbrück. And the teaching didn’t relate to real life. Teachers had to be careful what they said. They knew that parents or grandparents might have been involved.’ The mystery about her grandfather made Clara unhappy. She developed a face rash, which she says worsened as the sense of taboo intensified. Clara’s grandmother, Gerda, was still alive, but kept a distance from her own daughter, telling her nothing. ‘So my mother was brought up with all these losses and tried to make a nice world for herself saying her father wasn’t such a bad guy.’

  As a teenager Clara started her own research but did not know where to turn. ‘I went to the Bundesarchiv but they told me I had to get permission to read anything. It isn’t easy to find things out if you don’t know how. I looked in books but Ravensbrück wasn’t in the index.’

  —

  The end of the Cold War brought change for Ravensbrück. A West German director moved in to run the memorial site and plans were made to abolish the communist exhibits. Debate began about how the site should be preserved: as a cemetery, a crime scene or as a place of education and academic study? Changes came slowly; the Russians did not move out until 1994, and until then nobody could visit. But in 1995, the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation, survivors were invited back and many were able to come from the West for the first time. For those who had buried memories of the camp for so long, the return brought the deepest pain.

  As Loulou Le Porz walked around the compound, she saw in her mind bodies piled up in the Block 10 washroom and spilling out of the mortuary. The speeches and the chattering crowd that had gathered for the memorial event presented a ridiculous backdrop to these visions of the dead and Loulou was pleased to get away. Michèle Agniel looked around and could not imagine this person—her younger self—who once had been here. ‘It was as if it was someone else.’

  After German reunification in 1990 small sums of compensation were at last paid to survivors in the East, which encouraged women who had never done so before to talk about the camp, and archives in Russia and Eastern Bloc countries were opened for the first time, revealing new evidence. A flurry of new material came to light in the West too—letters of a former SS man hidden in a chimney stack; diaries of mothers, never read before. Scholarly research on all the camps multiplied.

  In America a new immigration computer helped US war crimes hunters trace Elfriede Huth, the former dog-handler at the camp who had entered the US illegally in 1959. Huth had lived in California, where she married a Jewish man called Fred Rinkel, whose parents had died at Auschwitz. Elfriede was extradited back to Germany, but there was little chance of a trial. Of the estimated 3500 women guards who passed through Ravensbrück only a fraction have ever come under investigation in the German courts, which don’t even keep a record of the numbers they have charged. It is probably less than twenty-five, with even fewer convicted. I tracked Elfriede down to a well-appointed old people’s home in Willich, near Düsseldorf, hoping to talk to her about the camp. Her name was on a buzzer. ‘Forget it. There is nothing to say. Forget it,’ she barked down the intercom.

  The end of the Cold War made it possible for Dr Sonntag’s granddaughter Clara to visit the camp. ‘I worried the staff would point a finger at me accusingly saying, Why didn’t you come earlier or something, but in fact they were very nice.’ Clara found out a lot about her grandfather and the camp, and noticed her face rash clear. But she needed to know more and made her way to London to read the trial testimony at the National Archives. She stayed in a bed and breakfast a long way from the archives. ‘It sounds crazy but I was frightened someone might put two and two together and realise who I was.’

  I asked Clara what it was she was trying to find out. She had always been puzzled by the stories of her grandfather’s drunkenness. ‘They said he rode his bicycle around the surgery table. Sometimes you think it can’t be true. Blood is thicker than water—you know—and I had always had this feeling that there was something of him in me. So I was looking for excuses for him, I suppose. I mean, did his drinking mean he had a conscience? Was he an arsehole or a drunk? Then, reading all that stuff, I knew it was true.’

  * * *

  In December 2013 I went back to Ravensbrück. Fürstenberg seemed just the same, sullen, with its back turned to the camp across the lake. The town had paid dearly for its ties to the women’s concentration camp. The Red Army ransacked homes and raped women as it passed through in 1945, then when the DDR came into being locals were forced to become communists and worship at the camp’s new communist shrine. When the Russians left the town the locals sought permission to build a supermarket on the site. The request was turned down.

  In the woods by the lake the sun was burning the frost off the trees. There had been changes at the site: a new exhibition had been set up, and beside the lake a visitor centre. Ravensbrück now receives 150,000 visitors a year, though its brother camp of Sachsenhausen, closer to Berlin, gets far more—and more money as a result. ‘We were always on the margins of the story,’ says Insa Eschebach, director of the memorial site.

  There have been many excuses for marginalising this camp: it was smaller scale than many others; it didn’t fit easily into the central narrative; camp documents had been destroyed; it was hidden behind the Iron Curtain; the prisoners were only women. And yet it is precisely because this was a camp for women that Ravensbrück should have shaken the conscience of the world. Other camps showed what mankind was capable of doing to man. The Jewish death camps showed what mankind was capable of doing to an entire race. Ravensbrück showed what mankind was capable of doing to women. The nature and scale of atrocity done here to women had never been seen before. Ravensbrück should never have had to fight ‘on the margins’ for a voice: it was—and is—a story in its own right.

  The Nazis committed atrocities against women in many other places too: more than half the Jews killed in the death camps were women, and towards the end of the war women were held at several other camps. But just as Auschwitz was the capital of the crime against Jews, so Ravensbrück was the capital of the crime against women. Deep in our collective memory, throughout literature of every period and every country, atrocities against women have always horrified. By treating the crime that happened here as marginal, history commits a further crime against the Ravensbrück women, and against the female sex.

  At the memorial site today the story is told more fully than before. In the new exhibition, chapters largely left out when communists had control of the story—the asocials, the prostitutes, the Gypsies, the Jews—are now included, while the chapter extolling the communist heroines has been toned down—perhaps too far. Cold War rhetoric is certainly out of place in the twenty-first century, but the German women who stood up to Hitler—many of them communists—were indeed ‘fighters against fascism’ and should be recognised as such. I was glad to see Tragende was still standing. Her foot raised as she seems to step out over the lake, Olga Benario deserves her place as a ‘strong woman who helped her weaker comrades’.

  I wandered towards the crematorium. More ashes have recently been found in a mass grave nearby. Plans to plant a thousand roses on top of the grave are held up by a dispute about whether this will desecrate the remains.

  A new academic study of surviving lists and figures has revised the estimate of numbers killed at Ravensbrück, slashing the figure of 90,000 set at the Hamburg trials, and agreed by most camp historians since, to a precise 28,000. The British calculations were too crude and took no account of releases over the years, or of women released from subcamps, says the study. But these new calculations should be treate
d with caution too. Digging rather than academic analysis might produce more truth—it would certainly produce more ashes, more mass graves.

  The whole site is a cemetery, the lake itself a grave. The real number killed here can never be known. Many of the victims—particularly in the last months—were not even registered on camp lists. No attempt has been made to find out the truth of gassings in lorries and buses in the final weeks, or to excavate around the site of the second gas chamber, camouflaged as the Neue Wäscherei.

  In fact, re-examining the figures exposes just how little of the horror is known, even today. Are those sent away on ‘black transports’ for gassing to be counted? If so, how many were there? Nobody knows. Counting deaths at subcamps complicates the story further. Are all the murdered babies included in the revised figure of 28,000? How many were killed in the final evacuations, when prisoners were piled on trains in the sure knowledge they’d be bombed by the Allies? The women killed on the death marches are not included—neither those marched out of Ravensbrück itself nor those marched from the multiple subcamps. Those killed in the White Buses, hit by Allied fire, remain uncounted—nobody knows how many there were.

  The original estimate of 90,000 dead was almost certainly too high. A figure of between 40,000 and 50,000—depending on which deaths are included—is probably as close as it is possible to get to the truth. But does the precise number of dead really matter? Survivors think names are more important than numbers. ‘The Germans were always counting us,’ scoffed Loulou Le Porz. ‘Now the academics count us again. Some study us like ants.’ The author of the ‘Memory Book’, Bärbel Schindler-Saefkow, also believes that names matter more than numbers. Her Gedenkbuch now contains 13,161 names, but a lack of funding has stopped her research.

  —

  I walked over to the Siemens camp to see what had changed there, but the path was blocked by barbed wire. Access to information from the company’s Munich headquarters is also still largely blocked.

  When I first approached Siemens for information about its involvement with Ravensbrück I received a glossy brochure about the company’s successes. Later the company’s official history, published in 1998, came through the post. ‘Siemens felt forced to cooperate, however reluctantly, with the regime,’ said the introduction. In 2013 the company announced its archives were open, but the few documents made available on Ravensbrück contained not a single prisoner’s name. When I asked to speak to a Siemens director about how the company today viewed its involvement with the Third Reich, I was told that only the company archivist could speak about the past, so I sent him my questions.

  And yet from the top of the Siemens hill, which I reached via a back route, the company’s past at Ravensbrück is clear for all to see. The skeleton of an old workshop still stands, and in the dip below are the old rail tracks which took parts back and forth. Also clear to see are the wooden trails along which trucks carried women to the gas chamber once they were ‘taken off the lists’ as too weak to work.

  During the British post-war de-Nazification case against the Siemens head of personnel Wolf-Dietrich von Witzleben, claims were made of the ill-treatment of prisoners and that Siemens ‘made gas ovens for the concentration camps’. A British adjudicator noted that the defence statement in the case was ‘rather woolly’, but no evidence was found to support the claims, which were rejected.

  That Siemens staff didn’t know about the existence of the ‘gas ovens’, or that in the latter period their exhausted workers at Ravensbrück were gassed, is impossible to believe, however, especially from the top of the Siemens hill. The crematorium chimney is less than 300 yards away; its stinking smoke blew right over the Siemens plant. By January 1945 the gas chamber stood alongside the crematorium. Anni Vavak, the Austrian-Czech prisoner, described how in the last months of the war she stood there watching trucks loaded with half-naked women driving from the Youth Camp, past the Siemens plant and then heading to the gas chamber. When Anni told the Siemens civilian staff what she saw they ‘winced’. Selma van de Perre and other survivors recall selections for gassing taking place at the Siemens plant itself during the last months.

  When I eventually received a response from the Siemens archivist Dr Frank Wittendorfer, it came in the form of a brief statement which began: ‘During World War Two, German industrial companies were incorporated by the NS dictatorship into the “war economy” system.’ In other words, Siemens was reiterating its long-held argument that it was ‘forced to cooperate’ with Hitler from the start, and therefore, even today, accepts no legal responsibility for its actions. The statement gave details of its compensation payments made over the years, while stressing it had ‘no legal obligation’ to make any such payments. It mentioned the company’s ‘profound regret’, but omitted to give any details about what was regretted.

  These mealy-mouthed words were distasteful and contrasted with responses of other German institutions which, increasingly in recent years, have had the courage to face their past. During the Nazi era a doctorate awarded by Heidelberg University to Käthe Leichter, the Jewish-Austrian sociologist imprisoned in Ravensbrück and gassed at Bernburg, was revoked. When her son Franz Leichter asked for it to be reinstated, the university rector, Dr Stefan Maul, replied describing Käthe’s case as ‘a harrowing testament to our country’s and our university’s shameful past and the many unjustified and unspeakable crimes committed’. The removal of the doctorate by his predecessors was a ‘blatant violation of human rights’, and he added: ‘Today in 2013 we are whether we like it or not the successor of those who committed this injustice, those who let it happen and hushed it up.’ The employment of slave labourers by Siemens was surely a far more shocking violation of human rights, but it was also more costly to rectify, and when in 1993 a Ravensbrück prisoner, Waltraud Blass, sought to use new laws brought in since German reunification in order to secure payment of her lost wages in a Munich court, Siemens refused to accept liability and the case was thrown out. There is evidence, however, that some within Siemens—apart from the archivist—may be ready to look back. At the instigation of the camp’s educational staff and of Siemens’s trade unions, workshops are held at Ravensbrück for Siemens trainees, where they can study the camp ‘in an environment that makes them feel safe about confronting their past’, as the head of the camp education section put it. In December 2013 a Siemens director asked to meet two survivors, including Selma van de Perre, and reportedly spoke of his company’s ‘guilt’. The meeting, however, was held behind closed doors; the expression of guilt, ‘hushed up’. And while groups of employees are helped to ‘feel safe’ as they learn about the past, up at the Siemens plant there is not even a ‘safe’ place for survivors to stand nor a shelter to keep off the rain. There is no rose bed here, no memorial to the Siemens victims. The name Siemens is nowhere to be seen. Before long the remains of the Siemenslager will be entirely overgrown.

  —

  I left the Siemens plant and headed across a strip of waste ground towards the Youth Camp. Fog was closing in. Once again it was hard to find the way. A rusty railway track disappeared into the trees. Just beyond it was a clearing with a little shrine made of shells, put up by the Berlin feminist group Gedenkort in memory of the teenage girls imprisoned here before the Youth Camp became a death camp, as well as those who died later.

  Piles of ugly concrete and sheets of zinc stick up out of the ground nearby. Perhaps this was one of the blocks.

  Then, suddenly, six wire-mesh figures appeared out of the trees.*4 Like ghosts they seemed to be tilting forward as if to welcome me. Between February and April 1945 an estimated 6000 women were marched out into these woods from the Ravensbrück main camp. They were told they were coming somewhere where they would be treated better, but instead they were brought here and most were murdered, or taken by truck to the gas chamber and gassed or shot.

  What happened on this forsaken patch of land was Ravensbrück’s most abominable crime. Yet nobody passing by would ever know. The
re is no reason even to pass by; the land, owned by the state of Brandenburg (as is the Siemens site) and not even incorporated into the main Ravensbrück memorial site, is far off the beaten track. Nobody seems to want to lay claim to it, except the feminists of Gedenkort. A shortage of money is given as one reason why the Youth Camp seems to have been forgotten. More important is a dispute over terminology. The camp director proposed that the former Youth Camp be called an extermination camp, but members of the Jewish council of Germany objected, saying only the Jewish death camps, set up under the terms of the Final Solution, can be defined as such.*5 Yet again, nobody can quite think how to tell the Ravensbrück story. There is a reluctance to take what happened here as seriously as other Nazi crimes, so the site lies abandoned ‘on the margins’.

  The SS men who devised the final killing at Ravensbrück would certainly have called it extermination—they were the same exterminators who had murdered the Jews at Auschwitz. They’d be pleased to see how well their secret has been kept: seventy years ago they deliberately tucked this women’s extermination camp away in the woods so nobody would know about it. The exterminators also invented a name for the place, calling it Mittwerda and pretending it was a sanatorium.

  There were certainly differences from earlier exterminations: the scale was smaller, and to save money the killers first tried to kill as many women as possible by starving them, or leaving them to stand almost naked in the snow for hours on end ‘without hair, without name, with no more strength to remember, her eyes empty, her womb cold like a frog in winter’, as Primo Levi wrote when he asked us to ‘Consider If This Is a Woman’. He urged his readers: ‘Meditate that this came about. I commend these words to you. Tell your children.’ Levi wrote about Auschwitz but his message was universal.

  We should certainly ‘meditate’ upon what happened here, and also give this extermination camp for women its rightful name and place in history. At Nuremberg Robert H. Jackson said the Nazi conspiracy ‘set one goal then, having achieved it, moved on to a more ambitious one’. Ravensbrück, which spanned the war years, is a useful prism through which to watch those goals evolve. The camp helped Hitler achieve some early aims: elimination of ‘asocials’, criminals, Gypsies and other useless mouths, including those unable to work; the first such group of women were gassed at Bernburg, an atrocity which the world today knows almost nothing of. The camp played a small part too in the more ‘ambitious goal’—the annihilation of the Jews, not least by providing women guards and Kapos for Auschwitz’s women’s camp. Then, in the final weeks of the war, Ravensbrück moved centre stage, becoming the scene of the last major extermination by gas carried out in the Nazi camps before the end of the war.