The Scourge of the Swastika

by Lord Russell of Liverpool

  In order to avoid selection the older women tried to blacken their hair to make them appear younger. All they could get for this was the soot which they scraped from the kitchen chimneys. It must have been heartbreaking to see these aged skeletons on selection parade trying to march past with the light springy step of a young girl so that they should not be sent off to their death.

  At first, the extermination of those unable to be evacuated was carried out by shooting, and a specialist in shooting people in the nape of the neck was posted to the camp from Berlin. After several hundred had been shot in this manner the Commandant decided that progress was too slow and had a gas chamber built. This was hastily erected in the Jugendlager and in the few weeks which followed prior to the arrival of the Russians, about seven thousand women are estimated to have been gassed.

  The Assistant Commandant, Schwartzhuber, has described the operation of the gas chamber in these words:

  I attended one gassing. 150 women at a time were forced into the gas chamber. Hauptscharführer Moll ordered the women to undress, as they were to be deloused. They were then taken into the gas chamber and the door was locked. A male inmate climbed on to the roof and threw a gas container into the room through a window which he again closed immediately. I could hear groaning and whimpering inside. After two or three minutes all was quiet. Whether the women were dead or just unconscious I could not say as I was not present when the chamber was cleared out.

  Few who reached the Jugendlager ever left it alive. One of those who did was Mary O’Shaughnessy who described the conditions there when giving evidence at the trial of members of the camp staff at the War Grimes Tribunal in Hamburg.

  It was, according to her evidence, a small camp consisting of about ten huts, smaller than those in the main camp. On arrival the women were made to stand about for three or four hours before they were allocated to their ‘rooms’. These ‘rooms’ were just partitioned areas in each hut. There were no beds but the floor was littered with bags filled with straw. Each ‘room’ was so overcrowded that it was impossible for all to lie down at the same time. It was not even possible for all to sit down in comfort. No food was handed, out until 5 p.m. on the day following arrival, nor was there anything for the inmates to drink during the first twenty-four hours of their stay there.

  Miss O’Shaughnessy spent nearly five weeks in the Jugendlager during which time the diet diminished, the number of ‘Appells’ increased and hundreds of women were picked out for gassing. Selection parades during this period were held almost daily. On one of these parades were two French girls who were sisters; only one of them was picked out for the gas chamber but her sister refused to leave her and eventually they went to their death hand-in-hand.

  There was also a crematorium. This was latterly not only used for disposing of dead bodies and there is evidence that some internees were thrown into the ovens whilst still alive.

  One of the inmates of the camp in April 1945 was Odette Sansom1 and she could see the building from the window of her cell. The ovens were working day and night from the latter part of 1944 and Mrs Sansom could hear the doors being opened and shut and people screaming. A full description of this was given in evidence by her at the Ravensbrück trial in answer to questions by the Judge Advocate.

  Q.

  Will you describe as clearly as you can any incident that you saw in which you say some human being was put alive into that crematorium?

  A.

  The last few days of the war I saw people being driven to the crematorium, I could hear them screaming and struggling and I could hear the doors being opened and shut.

  Q.

  I wanted to know whether you were prepared to swear that you had seen somebody being forcibly pushed inside the crematorium so that they were burned to death.

  A.

  I can certainly swear that I have seen people dragged but I cannot swear that I have seen them in the crematorium.

  Q.

  When they were dragged to the crematorium what did you see then? How did it end when they were dragged there?

  A.

  I did not see them any more.

  Q.

  Did they vanish out of your sight?

  A.

  Yes.

  Q.

  Where did they go, so you could not see them?

  A.

  I do not know; probably into the crematorium.

  Q.

  Did they go inside the building?

  A.

  Yes.

  Q.

  Did you see them come out again?

  A.

  Never.

  Q.

  And after they disappeared you heard something, is that it?

  A.

  Yes.

  Q.

  And the sound you heard you thought was the noise of the crematorium being opened and shut?

  A.

  Of that I am sure.

  Ravensbrück concentration camp was staffed on the same pattern as all other concentration camps. The Commandant and the other officers on the camp establishment all belonged to the SS, with the exception of some of the medical staff who were only attached. So did the camp guards.

  The Commandant was Fritz Suhren, the Assistant Commandant Schwartzhuber, and the head of the Labour Department was Pflaum. These three men formed the executive staff. But under them were a number of men and women in subordinate positions who were in day-to-day contact with the inmates and it was they who by their brutality and devilry made the camp a living hell.

  Ramdohr, the head of the so-called Political Department; Binder, the foreman in the tailoring workshop; Dorothea Binz, the head wardress; Skene, an under wardress; Greta Bösel, another wardress and leading assistant to Pflaum in the camp labour office; Margarete Mewes, in charge of the punishment block; Carmen Mory, a former prisoner turned Blockälteste; Vera Salvequart, originally a prisoner, later in charge of the Jugendlager hospital; and Elisabeth Marschall, a nurse by profession and the camp matron.

  The medical staff were Schidlausky, for some time the senior medical officer, Treite, senior assistant to Schidlausky’s successor Trommer, Rosenthal, and the dentist Hellinger.

  Each and every one of these was a working part of the machine of brutality, oppression, terror, and extermination which was Ravensbrück. Each and every one had their allotted duty; each contributed in some small way to the total sum of misery which made up the day-to-day existence of those under their control and in their power.

  It is only by learning of some of their crimes that it is possible to appreciate the magnitude and enormity of the concentration camp system or to realize how, while it lasted and as long as its power went unchallenged, virile peoples could be kept in subjection and brave spirits could be broken.

  Schwartzhuber was a pastmaster in brutality, for he joined the SS in 1933 and could therefore claim twelve years’ service in that criminal organization. Trained at Dachau before the war, he must have been a promising pupil, as between the years 1935 and 1944 he received systematic promotion. Graduating from Dachau he acquired further professional knowledge and experience at other seats of sadistic learning, Sachsenhausen and Auschwitz, from which latter place he arrived at Ravensbrück on 12th January 1945 where he remained, in the appointment of camp leader and second-in-command, until the end. When he took up these appointments the women prisoners numbered about 25,000; when the camp dissolved three and a half months later there were only 12,000 left.

  The mass murder started as soon as he arrived. He went through all the records and parties were sent regularly to the Jugendlager where many executions took place. There was no question of any trial; the victims were either selected by reference to the office files or picked out on parade.

  The order to kill these women came from the SIPO and was countersigned by the commandant Suhren. They were shot in the back of the neck by the expert, Corporal Schultz, outside the crematorium, then taken inside and burned. It is significant that their clothes were burned with t
hem. These women faced death with such fortitude that even Schwartzhuber confessed to having been ‘deeply moved’ when he attended one of the executions.

  Shortly after his arrival at Ravensbrück with the remainder of his prisoners from Auschwitz, the selections for Mittelwerde began, and 3,500 inmates were shown in the camp books as having been ‘transferred to Mittelwerde Convalescent Camp’ during March/April 1945. A glance at the map will show that Mittelwerde was then in a part of Germany already occupied by the Red Army.

  Ramdohr who was chief of the camp ‘political department’ was a criminal police officer by profession and responsible for all interrogations. He was not a member of the SS, but evil communications corrupt good manners, and during the time he held that appointment, which he took up in 1942, he was second to none in brutality.

  A clerk who worked in a room next door to his office frequently heard women’s screams during interrogation. If he did not get the information he wanted he was known to have kept a woman for a week without bed or food in a cold dark cell from which she emerged half mad.

  A Polish woman named Szeweczkova was interrogated by Ramdohr and, as she refused to give her friends away, was sent to the punishment block where she spent twelve days without blankets and without food. On the twelfth day she was taken in front of Ramdohr but as she still refused to talk she was ordered ‘six water douches’.

  This treatment, which had been devised by Ramdohr, consisted of special high-pressure showers of icy cold water from a fire hydrant. These were continued twice a week for three weeks after which Szeweczkova was again interviewed by Ramdohr, but without success. She was then sent again to the punishment block for six weeks, receiving a little coffee and bread each day and cooked food every fourth day. At the end of that time she was brought before the Commandant and as she still refused to speak was dismissed and sent to hospital. By some freak of chance she escaped the Jugendlager and is alive to this day.

  Ramdohr carried out the cruellest physical and mental torture. One woman was so badly beaten that she afterwards tried to commit suicide by opening a vein in her neck and was treated by Treite. He admitted depriving prisoners of food, beating them, giving them narcotic injections, and questioning them under the influence of such drugs. He also used to tie prisoners’ hands behind their backs and make them lie on their stomachs on a table in such a way that their heads protruded over the end of the table where he had placed a chair on which there was a bowl of water: he then gripped the women by the hair and pushed their faces into the water.

  Thus did Ramdohr carry out his interrogations. Such methods were not those of the KRIPO to which he belonged but of the Gestapo of which he was an apt disciple.

  This man, like so many others who have strutted across the stage of German history like frenzied marionettes, was a strange study in psychology. A curious mixture, like so many of his fellows, of sadism and sentimentality, of tenderness and tyranny.

  When he was convicted by a War Crimes Tribunal at Hamburg in 1947 and sentenced to death by hanging, many of his relatives and friends wrote to say that ‘dear kind Ludwig could never do harm to any animal’; that he was a comrade ‘who had delight in nature’; that he was a ‘protector of the poor and oppressed’; that when ‘walking in the country he sometimes gave queer little jumps to avoid crushing a snail or a lizard under his foot’, and that when burying his mother-in-law’s canary he ‘tenderly put the birdie in a small box, covered it with a rose and buried it under a rose bush’.

  It is not easy to reconcile the brutal Ramdohr of Ravensbrück, the terror of the camp, with the ‘dear kind Ludwig’ remembered by his family and his friends.

  Binder was in charge of one of the workshops and a man of great brutality. A tailor by trade, he entered the SS in 1933 as a volunteer and, like Schwartzhuber, graduated at Dachau. His early training and experience of SS methods must have stood him in good stead whilst employed as foreman in the notorious tailors’ shop in the factory colony at Ravensbrück.

  He beat and kicked the women in his workshop and persecuted them at every turn. He always carried a whip and it was a common sight to see women sittifig there still sewing but bleeding from the blows he had dealt them.

  This is what a Dutch inmate who used to have to work under him has said:

  Binder was very rough and brutal to the women in his workshop. He used to beat us every day and seemed only to calm down when he saw blood. Once I saw him beating a Polish woman in such a way that she had to be taken straight off to hospital. I never saw her again and was told that she had died. If we did not work hard enough to please him he would take away the small pieces of bread we had for the eleven hours’ shift and make us work standing up for hours.

  Sometimes he hit women with a stool and I have seen him drag them along by the hair and beat them up. Undernourished and tired as we were, when he noticed a woman with her head bent down he used to come and take her head and push it against the work-table. He also used to make us take all our clothes off and stand naked; his excuse for that was to ensure that we had not hidden pieces of cloth in our clothing because at, that time we had so little to wear.

  Another young Polish girl who was sent to work in Binder’s workroom had an open sore on her arm from lack of vitamins. Binder objected to her complaining and reporting to hospital. He tore off the bandages saying, ‘You are not sick at all.’

  The girl then fell down and when she had risen he hit her in the face with his fist with all his strength. The blow felled her and he then proceeded to kick her all over.

  Many women had wounds caused by having scissors thrown at them by Binder, and others through being hit in the face with tunics which had metal buttons on them. He was responsible for the deaths of many women by forcing them to work when no longer fit to do so, and making them stand outside in the rain stark naked, often for more than an hour at a time.

  Dorothea Binz was head wardress with the rank of Aufseherin (Supervisor) and was feared by all.

  This young girl was born in 1920 and just before the war had been in service as a kitchen maid. By 1939 she was already tired of household drudgery and through the good offices of a friend was accepted by the SS as a volunteer, on 1st September 1939, when only nineteen-and-a-half, and was immediately sent to the newly-opened concentration camp at Ravensbrück. Much to her disgust she was posted to the camp kitchen, doubtless because of her previous experience.

  But she soon convinced her superiors that she was destined for higher things. Within a few months she had been appointed Aufseherin and it must have been a proud day for Thea Binz when she first donned her field-grey uniform and strutted round the camp in her black top boots, whip in hand.

  A brutal and sadistic creature, from that day she became an integral part of the camp system which crushed the life out of thousands of innocent women; and the female of the species was more brutal than the male.

  She beat, she kicked, she hit all and sundry, day in and day out, sometimes as punishment for petty disciplinary offences, sometimes for no reason at all—merely for ‘Schadenfreude’.1 Sometimes she used a stick, sometimes a whip, sometimes a belt, sometimes the blotter on the desk in her office—anything handy. The whole camp was in terror when she appeared.

  Once, Binz beat a woman until she fell down and then trampled on her: once, outside the camp when she was visiting a working party in the forest, she felled a woman with a pickaxe and continued hitting her with it until, covered with blood, the woman moved no more. Binz then mounted her bicycle and pedalled back to camp.

  She had authority to send people to the punishment block for a minor breach of discipline when she chose not to deal with it by a summary beating. She also carried out the Commandant’s summary awards of twenty-five, fifty, or seventy-five strokes.

  Anyone who was late for ‘Appell’2 she beat, or made them stand to attention for hours, slapping their faces while they stood, and a slap from Binz was no light matter, as one of her victims has testified; ‘It was the same as if
a big man had hit me, for they have studied that kind of thing: if she slapped your face it was so hard that it could be heard two rows farther down.’

  Binz also carried out the ‘water-douche punishment’. Stanislawa Szeweczkova who had been ordered nine douches by Ramdohr because of her lack of co-operation at an interrogation described it thus:

  Binz took me into the douche room. In a corner stood a douche and the water was already turned on; it ran from pipes at various heights and was pumped out at great pressure. After about twelve minutes I fell over and Binz threw a bucket of water in my face. As I tried to hold my hands over my face she opened a door and whistled for her two dogs. One of them bit me in the hand. I then fainted. I assume that I was dragged into my cell as my back was covered with bruises when I came to, and my clothes were lying beside me … from then on I received a douche twice a week from Binz, on Tuesdays and Fridays. Each time I fainted.

  One of Binz’s favourite sports was to ride her bicycle into a group of women who were standing nearby. As they were so weak they were generally knocked down and she then rode over them laughing as she did so. She also delighted in setting her dogs on the inmates. One day she set her dog on a Russian woman, exciting him and urging him on so that he bit the woman continually. One of the woman’s emaciated arms was literally torn off.

  Another entertainment which she found highly diverting was to visit Block 10 and inspect the mad women who were under the care of Carmen Mory. These women were exhibited as an attraction—like the freaks at a circus sideshow—and Binz enjoyed taunting them and making fun of them.