The Scourge of the Swastika

by Lord Russell of Liverpool

  It was in that year, 1942, that a change in concentration camp policy came about owing to German reverses and losses in Russia. Until then the policy laid down by Himmler was one of death by extermination of the unwanted inmates of these camps. Subsequently this was radically altered due to the rising shortage of labour, and it became one of the preservation of life at the barest subsistence level possible so as to extract from the inmates the maximum amount of labour at the minimum expense while they remained alive.

  At Neuengamme after 1942 only the ailing who were unfit were actively encouraged to die. The remainder, during the brief period they remained fit for work, were suffered to live.

  In all, over 90,000 people passed through Neuengamme, of whom some 40,000 died; 3,000 from bona fide natural causes and 37,000 from natural causes brought about by unnatural conditions and unparalleled callousness. Of the total number of inmates in the Neuengamme Ring during the last twelve months of the war ninety per cent were Allied nationals imported into Germany as slave labour, and ten per cent Germans of whom half were habitual criminals in minor positions of authority in the camp.

  The main camp at Neuengamme was a depot from which the fitter people were selected to be sent to satellite camps, where they endured physical and mental hardships even more barbarous than in the main camp, and where a fair estimate of life was two months.

  The Commandant, Max Pauly, a man of ruthless and domineering temperament was feared by all. Like all his subordinates, he was a member of the SS; like all, save the two doctors, he was plebeian in origin. Anton Thumann, his Deputy, was in charge of all the prisoners’ compounds and consequently of the welfare, if such a word can be used, of all the inmates. He was a conspicuously brutal scoundrel and directly responsible for many murders. Willy Dreimann, Thumann’s second-in-command, a lesser figure but not a lesser scoundrel, often acted as camp executioner. Under these men were the various Compound Commanders each of whom had drastic plenary powers over a thousand inmates.

  Finally there were the two doctors, Alfred Trzebinski and his assistant Bruno Kitt. The former arrived at the camp in the autumn of 1943, the latter in January 1945. Kitt was in every sense a lesser man than Trzebinski; less intelligent, less clear sighted, less aware of evil done though not a lesser evil-doer, less honest and less refined. He, unlike his senior, descended to striking his patients.

  These two men were alone responsible for the health of some 14,000 inmates. They were expected to salvage those patients from whom more work might be obtained; to take ‘appropriate measures’ in respect of those too ill to be fit for future work. Trzebinski and Kitt fulfilled all expectations.

  In the autumn of 1942 Bahr, the medical orderly, on the instructions of Trzebinski’s predecessor, herded 197 Russian prisoners of war into a cell, assisted by Dreimann, and pumped Cyclon B gas into it. All the Russians died, and were then dragged out, placed in trucks and taken away. The inmates were all paraded to witness this macabre scene and made to sing a song of which the first line was: ‘Welcome sweet troubadour, let us be gay and joyful.’

  Early in 1945 eighty Dutchmen were admitted to the main camp. Twenty soon died of general debility. The remaining sixty were hanged secretly without trial. Half these were sick men at the time of their execution. Thumann and Dreimann were the hangmen and they received an extra liquor ration for their labours.

  In February the same year, twenty French and Russian Jewish children, between the ages of five and twelve confined in the main camp at Neuengamme, were selected by the infamous Dr Heissmeyer of Berlin as experimental material in the so-called interests of medical research. Heissmeyer made frequent visits to the camp and injected these poor children with T.B. bacteria. During the period in which these experiments were being carried out the children were given sweets and toys. Many of them became gravely ill.

  In April the Allies were rapidly approaching Neuengamme and orders were issued by SS General Pohl, at the request of Dr Heissmeyer, that the children should be taken to Bullenhausendamm satellite camp to be executed so that all evidence of the experiments would be destroyed.

  The children were duly moved to Bullenhausendamm by Dr Trzebinski together with four ‘nurses’ (in fact two French and two Dutch doctors, themselves to be executed) and six Russians. Later the same evening twenty-four other Russians arrived. A man named Jauch who was in charge of Bullenhausendamm Camp met the party at the gate. He appeared to know the purport of Dr Trzebinski’s visit and accompanied him to the cellar with the prisoners. The adults were taken away and hanged in another room.

  In the cellar, waiting for them to arrive, was Johann Frahm. The children were at once undressed and Trzebinski, moved by a sudden humane impulse, injected them, happily never aware of their fate, with morphia so that they should be unconscious when they were hanged. Frahm then placed ropes round their necks and, in his own words, ‘like pictures they were hanged on hooks on the walls’.

  RAVENSBRÜCK

  In Mecklenburg, some fifty miles north of Berlin is a group of lakes surrounded by swampy land. Near one of these, Lake Fürstenberg, a new concentration camp was established shortly after the outbreak of war in 1939. It was known as Ravensbrück concentration camp and consisted of a main and auxiliary camps. The main camp contained only women and from the time of its inception until it was overrun by the Red Army in its advance westward, over 123,000 women were interned there. A large number were French nationals and it is from them that it derived the name which it so richly deserved and by which it is generally known, ‘L’ Enfer des Femmes’.1

  Some of these women were prisoners of war, Russian Red Cross nurses captured on the field of battle, but the majority were civilians, either members of a resistance movement, or slave workers who had been deported from their homes to work in Germany and whose productive output had proved insufficient. All these were interned without previous trial and ninety per cent were Allied nationals.

  The main camp was designed to accommodate 6,000. From 1944 onwards there were never less than 12,000 interned there and in January 1945 there were 36,000. At least 50,000 perished there and many thousands more doubtless met their death elsewhere on transfer to other camps. Apart from those who were murdered, the main reasons for this terrible death rate were undernourishment, overwork, exposure, overcrowding, complete lack of sanitation, and systematic brutal ill-treatment by the camp staff.

  The whole treatment of the inmates by the members of the camp staff from the Commandant down to the SS guards aimed at deteriorating the prisoners’ condition, both physically and mentally. It was thus poignantly described by one of the prisoners herself:

  The whole system in this camp had but one purpose and that was to destroy our humanity and our human conscience; the weaker individuals fell into the very bottom of moral and physical existence; all the lower bestial instincts developed while the better instincts were stifled and had no chance to show themselves. Even the stronger ones who have come out of the camp alive are marked with unnatural characteristics which will never be erased: they have lost all faith in goodness and justice.

  One of the inmates was a Norwegian, very well known in her own country. Her presence in the camp was solely due to the fact of her being one of the King of Norway’s friends. The British had made a raid on the coast of Norway taking back with them not only about two hundred young Norwegian volunteers but some Nazi prisoners and Quislings. A few days later an announcement was made over the radio that the Germans were to take as hostages twenty of the King’s best friends. Fru Salvesen was one of them. She was arrested, then released, and eight months later was rearrested, kept in prison in Norway for eleven months, and taken from there to the prison in Alexanderplatz in Berlin whence after five days she was removed to Ravensbrück.

  When she arrived at the camp she was received in the usual way and taken after a few hours to a large room which she learned later was called the bathroom. There were no baths in it, merely holes in the ceiling through which water flowed. This is her desc
ription of what then took place:

  We had to wait naked for two hours before the water came. Remember, we had been eighteen days on the road and were longing for a wash, but there were four to each shower and the water only flowed for about four minutes. We had a tiny piece of soap and what they called a towel, but it was little bigger than a handkerchief…. Then something happened which gave us the biggest shock, the first big shock in Ravensbrück. There entered two men dressed in uniform. We later heard that one was a doctor and the other a dentist. We were then lined up in rows and still naked had to walk past them, but they merely examined our teeth and our hands. I am afraid we felt ashamed because we had not yet learned that the shame was not ours but theirs.

  The food was scarcely enough to keep the prisoners alive and certainly insufficient to keep them in a fit state for work. The quantity varied; being particularly inadequate from 1942 onwards. The prisoners were so starved that they ate raw potato peelings and bits of cabbage which they found lying on the ground near the cookhouse and this is understandable when the daily menu was a bowl of ersatz coffee in the morning, a soup made of potatoes or cabbage at midday, and the same in the evening with a little bread.

  This was, of course, known to the Commandant but nothing was ever done to improve the conditions. Indeed, the camp staff stole for themselves and their families large quantities of food belonging to the prisoners and when their guards also robbed them of the Red Cross parcels that arrived from time to time, they made the prisoners sign receipts for the parcels under threat of death.

  Nor was this all. The camp staff delighted in tormenting the half-starved prisoners by throwing them pieces of bread which had gone mouldy in the stores. To watch these living skeletons fighting like wild beasts for such morsels was an entertainment which never failed to amuse the SS. It was upon a diet such as this that the inmates were expected not merely to exist, but to work ten or eleven hours a day. Work went on day and night with a double shift of about eleven hours each. Reveille was at 5.30 a.m. and roll call at 7 a.m. This generally lasted about two hours during which all the inmates had to stand to attention in the open and in all weathers both winter and summer. The working parties were then formed and marched away. When the shift was over, another roll-call took place.

  The work was hard and the workers driven on relentlessly with blows and kicks. Spinning, weaving, loading and unloading, digging, road mending; at such work were these women kept, and threatened and beaten every time they stopped for breath.

  The lack of sanitation was in itself enough to cause a heavy death rate. In the words of one of the inmates herself:

  Vermin were very much in evidence; the huts were so lousy that sometimes lice could be found in the soup. The sewer and water systems had both broken down and the camp looked like a huge farmyard consisting of one big dungheap.

  Underwear and clothing were seldom if ever changed, and if we got a change of underclothes they were always lousy and not infrequently still stained with blood and discharge. We had no socks and wore only wooden shoes. We slept on dirty paillasses covered with excrement and we had one blanket between three to cover us. There were insufficient soup bowls and we used to eat out of tins which we found on the rubbish heap.

  It was upon such people that Fru Salvesen gazed as she left the ‘bathhouse’ and got her first glimpse of the camp itself; and when she gave evidence at the Ravensbrück trial in Hamburg in 1946 she thus described her impressions:

  This for me was like looking at a picture of Hell—not because I saw anything terrible happen but because I then saw, for the first time in my life, human beings whom I could not distinguish whether they were men or women. Their hair was shaved and they looked thin, filthy, and unhappy. But that was not what struck me most; it was the expression of their eyes. They had what I can only describe as ‘dead eyes’.

  When the inmates became so ill that they could not be beaten to work they were admitted to the camp hospital which was known as the ‘Revier’. It was a hospital in name only; otherwise it differed little from the ordinary huts in which the inmates lived—and died. There were the same rows of beds in tiers, and more often than not, two patients to one bed. The doctor in charge was named Treite, the matron was Oberschwester Marschall, and one of the nurses was Carmen Mory, herself a prisoner, and Swiss by birth.

  Treite, who was half British, went to Ravensbrück, which he described as ‘the best-class of concentration camp’, in September 1943 and remained there until the end of the war. He was the second senior doctor in the camp. At his trial he endeavoured to create the impression that he alone of the entire medical staff adhered to the high standards of an honourable profession; that he was disgusted with all he saw and did what he could to improve the well-being of the inmates. He was, he said, merely ‘a simple camp doctor’ and what could he do against ‘the Commandant, the whole staff, and all those SS officers?’

  Undoubtedly the most skilful doctor in the camp, Treite seems to have shrunk from some of the more unpleasant tasks which fell to him. Nevertheless, the evidence given at his trial clearly showed that he was quite ruthless when it suited him, that he was an important cog in the machinery of extermination in operation in the camp, and that many of the inmates died through his actions.

  In one of the camp blocks was a special room in which lived the women who were supposed to be mad. It was a very small room about five yards by six and at times as many as sixty or seventy women were confined in it. They were half naked having only chemises, no dresses. The room was so overcrowded that there was hardly room to sit, let alone lie down. There was one window, without a pane, and in winter it was icy cold. The women had no blankets nor anything else with which to cover themselves. The sole sanitary arrangements consisted of a bucket in the centre of the floor, which always got upset during the night and by the morning the occupants were smeared with their own excreta.

  Many of this room’s occupants were not even mad. But they were shut in day and night and were unable to go outside for any purpose. They only left it to die.

  Fighting often broke out among them and one morning four were found to have been strangled during the night. The following day, Treite, at the request of Carmen Mory gave orders that the ‘ten maddest women’ should be killed to make room for more.

  He also gave instructions to the nurses that old women who had been admitted to hospital suffering from bad or incurable ulcers should receive no treatment as they were ‘unproductive’, being unable to work. He gave orders that bandages must never be changed more than twice a week. Sick women who were still physically capable of work he would discharge from hospital whatever their clinical condition.

  He ended the lives of some of his patients by administering lethal injections. All positive T.B. patients were sent to the gas chambers. He personally took part in selecting about 800 women to be transferred to Lublin. The selection took place in the extermination room, and Oberschwester Marschall was also present. The poor women passed by them stark naked and were put down haphazardly for the convoy to Lublin irrespective of their age or physical condition. Many, of course, died on the journey.

  One of Treite’s duties as medical officer was to attend the beating of prisoners who had been sentenced by the Commandant for petty crimes. The maximum sentence was three beatings of twenty-five strokes carried out at intervals of four weeks. Present at the beatings were the Commandant or his deputy, the head doctor or his deputy, the head wardress, and the two prisoners who did the actual beating. The victim was strapped on to a block. Treite’s duty was to see that no blood was drawn and that the victim was fit to receive the punishment. Whether the prisoners screamed or not made no difference to the sentence being carried out.

  Treite was also present when inmates were shot. These executions were done near the crematorium. Prisoners were usually killed in batches of fifty and the doctor’s presence was necessary because the victims were not always killed immediately. Describing these ‘executions’ when giving evidence
at his trial Treite said, ‘I must make it quite clear that it was not only sick people who were involved, but as a result of the haphazard method of selection young women fit for work were also shot.’

  Each day fifty prisoners were disposed of by being shot through the back of the neck and then cremated. This procedure began towards the end of 1944 after Himmler had paid one of his routine visits to the camp. The Commandant received orders from the Reichsführer that all inmates who were ill or incapable of marching were to be killed, for the Germans anticipated having to evacuate these camps in face of the ever-approaching Russian armies and they had made plans to remove all evidence of their iniquity by destroying the camp sites and taking the inmates along with them as they retreated westward.

  About this time, the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland having been evacuated for a like reason, two experts in extermination arrived at Ravensbrück; Schwartzhuber, who became Assistant Commandant, and a Dr Winkelmann.

  With their arrival began the organized mass slaughter of all those whom it was considered impracticable to evacuate. Such women were selected on special parades and given pink identity cards. These cards which had previously signified that the holders were exempted from hard labour now became veritable passports to death. After being selected, the women were transferred to the adjoining Jugendlager1 for extermination. Many of these were shown in the camp records, with macabre deception, as having been evacuated to Mittelwerde, a convalescent home in Silesia.

  When the women were paraded for selection they were inspected by one of the camp officials accompanied by a doctor, who used to look at their hair to see whether it was grey, at their legs to see whether they were swollen, and then made them walk past to see whether they had a steady gait.