by Sarah Helm
Unlike the earlier phases of extermination, however, this final killing had no ‘goal’ because the creation of a master race had been abandoned. The prisoners of Ravensbrück therefore—old, young, of many different nationalities, non-Jew and Jew, with nothing to unite them except that they were women—were killed just to make more room. Then they were killed because their legs weren’t good enough to join the death march. In reality these final gassings happened because the exterminators couldn’t stop. This was no marginal atrocity; it was where the Nazi horror ended—with the mass murder of women in the most bestial fashion with no cover of ideology, however obscene, for no reason at all.
As I left the clearing the rain was coming down heavily. I passed the wire-mesh figures again. Had Ravensbrück stayed so stubbornly ‘in the margins’ of the story because of some kind of collective guilt about the victims—sisters, mothers, daughters, wives—abandoned here, the world unable to offer any help? Or perhaps the facts are just too horrible to contemplate—too painful. There is certainly testimony from Uckermark that I had found too troubling to report.
Is it best to leave these ghosts alone? It is certainly difficult to know how to remember such a place, but a clearer sign through the woods would at least help those who wish to come here to find the way.
Walking back to the main camp I entered the compound through the rear gate—the same gate through which the Youth Camp women left, and through which some, in the very last weeks, returned. By March 1945 the last extermination was extended to the whole of Ravensbrück. Across what is today just a vast empty space dotted by linden trees, the Nazis gave vent to their ‘inexorable desire to kill’, as Rudolf Höss put it, for several more weeks.
Parked in the trees while the murders reached a climax were Red Cross buses. What better image can there be of the world’s impotence in the face of the slaughter carried out in Hitler’s camps than these buses patiently waiting until the gassing was over before the rescue began? And yet Bernadotte’s mission was the only major prisoner rescue of the war.
By mid-April 1945 the Allies were closing in fast on Berlin; the Americans had uncovered Buchenwald and the British had found Belsen. There could now be no doubt about the horror in the camps, and that horror was still unfolding in several places not yet liberated, including Ravensbrück, where women were being lined up for gassing. Political and military realities, however, meant no change of strategy was considered that might protect the remaining camps in the last weeks of the war.
Negotiating with Himmler over the camps had never been an option either. Churchill’s edict of ‘no truck with Himmler’ ensured that the Allies never compromised their objective, which was to win the military war, crushing the Nazis and all they represented. Even offering safe passage to Bernadotte’s White Buses was a compromise too far for the Allies and was refused.
And yet it is impossible not to follow the story of the White Bus rescue without cheering them on, in the knowledge that with Bernadotte’s mission under way at last someone was putting prisoners’ lives first. Bernadotte certainly had to compromise in order to carry out his rescue, which was done on Himmler’s terms. Not only was he obliged by Himmler to wait for the killing to subside at Ravensbrück, he was unable to rescue Jews until the last days. Had he not compromised, however, Bernadotte would not have got 17,000 prisoners out. He received little thanks. After the war he was still accused of failing to rescue enough Jews, though he eventually saved at least 7000. In 1947 Bernadotte was chosen to be the United Nations mediator in the Arab-Israeli war. On 17 September 1948 he was assassinated in Jerusalem by the Zionist militant group the Stern Gang.
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In later years survivors wanted more than anything for their accounts of Ravensbrück to be heard and believed. They knew that if the next generations did not know the facts, they would never learn the lessons.
Antonina Nikiforova spent the proceeds of her first book on buying a small dacha near Leningrad and retreated there in order to write more. ‘My impressions of the camp were so strong, I could only quieten them by writing books,’ she wrote in a letter to another survivor.
Others decided to talk after decades of silence. Some spoke to me of things never mentioned before—sometimes they were surprising.
Nelly Langholm, the Norwegian from Stavanger, revealed the secret of her arrest. When the Germans occupied Norway in 1940 Nelly, a schoolgirl, came home one wet evening to find a German officer playing the piano in her house. ‘He said, “Now begins the Grimm’s fairy tale.” He said his name was Wolfgang Grimm and he had come to see me. I didn’t know why and he wouldn’t say. But he talked to me and he was so lovely and sweet and played the piano. And he came back the next day. And the next day. And I fell in love with him.’
Soon afterwards Nelly’s uncle was blown up by a German bomb and a cousin was captured. ‘Eventually I realised that it could not be and I wrote to him and said don’t come to my house any more because you are the enemy and I can’t see you any more. And then the next day the Gestapo came to my house and arrested me. They told me they had read the letter in which I said I was an enemy of Germany. I didn’t know if he had handed the letter into the Gestapo or if it was just the censor.’
Nelly said it ‘felt right in a way’ that she was sent to Ravensbrück. ‘I had done this terrible thing and fallen in love with a German and the Germans had killed our family. I thought I should be punished.’
When Nelly was first arrested one of her friends asked her mother why she had let the German into the house in the first place. Nelly’s mother told the friend that he had looked so miserable and cold and wet she couldn’t leave him out there. ‘She was so beautiful, my mother. That was just like her to do that,’ said Nelly.
In the 1960s, on a visit to Berlin, Nelly saw Wolfgang Grimm again. ‘I was walking in the street with a friend and I suddenly saw him. He was standing up stock still like a statue staring at me. I just walked past and said nothing. There was nothing I could say.’
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Listening to the voices of the Ravensbrück women I looked for clues about why this group survived. I could almost hear Maria Bielicka banging her fists on the table as she tried to explain why survival was in the blood of every Polish woman, ‘passed on from mother to daughter’.
Jeannie Rousseau, the French woman who passed on intelligence about the V2 bombs to Churchill, survived because she refused not to. At Torgau she refused to make German arms. At the punishment camp of Königsberg she refused to die on the freezing airfield and escaped back to the main camp, hiding in a typhus truck. When Bernadotte arrived, Jeannie was locked in the Strafblock but refused to be left behind, and persuaded the Blockova to let her out.
‘You can refuse what is happening. Or go along with it. I was in the refusal camp,’ she said.
I asked her how she had the courage.
‘I don’t know. I was young. I thought if I do it, it will work. You simply cannot accept some things. Certain things.’
Many refused in other ways; they refused to accept the annihilation of what they knew, praying, talking, writing, reading, teaching whenever they could—the Polish teachers taught their young students in the camp so well that when they got home they were even awarded their exam certificates. Some ‘refused’ by remaining detached from events, which may have protected them. Natalia Chodkiewicz said: ‘The entire time I was in the camp it was as if I had a double personality. My real self seemed to be observing what was happening to my physical self.’
None would have survived without luck, particularly with their health. None would have survived without friends, ad hoc families, which helped them keep their heads. Such families appear to have formed more readily in the women’s camp than in the men’s camps. Loulou’s ‘family’ was Block 10; sitting in her conservatory, I came to know many of them. Loulou could be very sombre: ‘I find it abominable that we still talk of war. I often think we have learned nothing at all.’ But then suddenly she would brighten as she remember
ed the courage of ‘her sick’ and ‘her dead’.
It helped, said Loulou, that she had a role. ‘As a doctor I was able to help people a little—to live and to die.’ She once gave a young Polish woman a little morphine so she would not be taken away by Winkelmann. ‘I said she is going to die any minute, so he left her. She did die, but not until a few days later. And she died on her mattress with someone at her side. That was important. She wasn’t gassed.’
When she returned from the camp Loulou very nearly entered a convent. ‘One didn’t believe in the goodness of human nature any more. I had to learn it again. And I did.’ She paused. ‘But it took a long time.’
Many women broke down in tears as we talked. There was often laughter. Nobody was bitter. But nor—I think—did many forgive; certainly nobody would forget. At one memorial weekend I met Wanda Wojtasik again. I had first interviewed Wanda, one of the youngest Polish Kaninchen, at her apartment in Kraków. Now she was throwing roses onto the Ravensbrück lake. She told me that one of the SS doctors, Fritz Fischer, had recently contacted her asking for her forgiveness. ‘I told him there was nothing I could forgive him for. He would have to seek forgiveness from God.’
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*1 Two Siemens directors, both SS members, committed suicide in 1945, no doubt because they anticipated war crimes trials. Otto Grade, the Siemens manager at Ravensbrück, disappeared without trace.
*2 The Stasi also kept a file on Grete Buber-Neumann. Her groundbreaking book Under Two Dictators (1948) revealed in greater detail than anyone to date the horrors of Stalin’s Gulag camps and was naturally banned in the East. Even today, the work has not been translated into Russian.
*3 Not her real name: she wishes to remain anonymous.
*4 Gedenkort also made the wire-mesh figures, called Maschas, and placed them at the site.
*5 Germany’s central office for the investigation of Nazi war crimes at Ludwigsberg has also recently ruled that Ravensbrück was ‘not a death camp’. For this reason, the office is no longer investigating crimes committed by guards or SS officers at Ravensbrück; it is only investigating crimes at death camps. Absurdly, this ruling means that none of the crimes connected with the Ravensbrück extermination will be investigated. When Ravensbrück women guards moved on to work at a ‘death camp’, however, their crimes there can be investigated, and the central office is currently investigating alleged crimes committed by a small number of Ravensbrück guards while they were working at Majdanek.
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Aerial view of Fürstenberg and Ravensbrück in the late 1930s, showing the Schwedtsee and the site where the camp was built on the far side of the lake
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The camp wall, photographed from outside shortly after liberation in 1945 by Hanka Housková, a Czech prisoner
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View from the roof of the headquarters building across the camp. This picture, taken in 1940–1, was displayed in the ‘official’ SS photograph album of the camp, which was used for propaganda purposes.
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Himmler entering through the camp gates with his entourage on a visit to Ravensbrück in January 1940. Visible behind him is the camp headquarters building.
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Himmler inspects the women guards, accompanied by Max Koegel. Behind Koegel is SS General Karl Wolff, Himmler’s chief of staff. On the far right of the picture is Johanna Langefeld. To Himmler’s right is the wall of the bathhouse and kitchen block.
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Johanna Langefeld, chief woman guard May 1939–March 1943
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Fritz Suhren, camp commandant July 1942–April 1945
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Max Koegel, camp commandant May 1939–July 1942
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Dorothea Binz, Ravensbrück guard and later chief woman guard. This photograph was taken in the 1930s, its origins unknown.
A guard, Herta, with her dog Greif at the Grüneberg subcamp. On the back of the photograph, she wrote ‘In memory of my wonderful time working at Grüneberg, to my dear parents, your Herta, 24/03/1944. This is my faithful little Greif.’
Studio portrait of Franziska Buchinger, a woman guard, taken in May 1940 by the Fürstenberg photographer A. Rudolph
Camp identity card of the guard Hildegard Schatz
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A pre-war portrait of the German Jewish communist Olga Benario
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Doris Maase, the German doctor and communist, released in 1942, photographed in 1944
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Ilse Gostynski, the German Jewish communist prisoner, photographed in Berlin in the 1920s
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Jozka Jaburkova, the Czech communist and women’s rights campaigner
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Anna Sölzer, arrested in Cologne for prostitution and sent to Ravensbrück as an ‘asocial’
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Käthe Leichter, the Austrian Jewish sociologist, by the Danube canal near Klosterneuburg, where before the war she and her husband Otto spent holidays
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Grete Buber-Neumann, prisoner of Stalin and Hitler, speaking at a rally organised by the European Youth Organisation in Berlin, June 1952
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Herta Cohen, the German Jewish woman imprisoned for having sexual intercourse with a man with German blood
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Wanda Wojtasik (later Półtawska), one of the Lublin ‘rabbits’
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Milena Jesenska, the campaigning Czech journalist and former lover of Franz Kafka
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Krysia Czyż, the Polish ‘rabbit’ and secret letter-writer. The portrait was drawn by fellow Ravensbrück prisoner Grażyna Chrostowska when the two women were first imprisoned in Lublin Castle.
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The sisters Grażyna (seated) and Pola Chrostowska in the countryside near their home town of Lublin, 1930s
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Digging in the sand: a photograph from the SS album
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Marching to work at the Siemens factory. The post-war painting, probably by the German artist Rudolf Lipus, was displayed in the first camp exhibition in 1959, when the memorial site was inaugurated.
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Le Rouleau (‘The roller’) by Felicie Mertens, a Belgian communist prisoner
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The guard Maria Enserer with other guards and SS friends. Enserer wrote ‘A holiday at Hohenlychen’ on the back of the photograph, referring to the nearby lakeside town where the SS medical clinic was based.
The guard Hilde Hulan
The guards (left to right) sisters Maria and Anna Enserer, and Ottilie Kaiser, with their guard dogs Gundo and Castor. The photograph was taken in 1940, and handwritten on the reverse are the words ‘One Sunday morning out in the flowering heather.’
Guards Helene Massar, Marga Löwenberg and one other out rowing on the Schwedtsee
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The Polish ‘rabbit’ Maria Kuśmierczuk showing her deformed leg, which was injected with gas gangrene. The photograph was taken secretly behind a block by fellow Pole Joanna Szydłowska.
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A Christmas card given to Jadwiga Dzido, a ‘rabbit’, by another inmate. The card reads: ‘Jadzienko Bunny, for Christmas I wish that baby Jesus will grant you health and hope that you will get back home.’
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Koperta (envelope) no. 5 is one of the secret letters written in urine by the Polish ‘rabbit’ Krysia Czyż. Here she tells her family in Poland that surviving rabbits are able to rest in the block and knit socks.
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Jadwiga Dzido’s leg is examined by Dr Leo Alexander at the Nuremberg doctors’ trial in December 1946.