The Scourge of the Swastika

by Lord Russell of Liverpool

  It is impossible to give more than a rough sketch of this girl’s activities at Ravensbrück. She came to the camp on the first day of the war and remained there until the end. She had been trained in her duties by the notorious Irma Grese of Belsen and had proved a ready pupil. For over five years she struck terror into the hearts of thousands of wretches in her power, and when she was hanged in Hamelin prison in 1947 it was a better fate than she deserved.

  In charge of the ‘mad women’ was Carmen Mory. This woman, though herself a Swiss subject, became a willing tool of the Germans and whilst a prisoner at Ravensbrück accepted the position of Blockälteste and, working under the Commandant, was responsible for great cruelties and persistent ill-treatment of other prisoners over whom she was placed in authority.

  Mory was, unlike the German members of the female camp staff, a woman of education. Born in Berne in 1905 she was educated in Switzerland, France, Holland, and England. Later she attended a course in journalism at Munich University and became a free-lance journalist in Switzerland and England. Born of Protestant parents, she was later converted to Roman Catholicism.

  In November 1938 she was arrested in France and tried in 1940 for espionage in connection with the Maginot Line. The Military Tribunal which tried her sentenced her to death, but she received a pardon three months later.

  On 7th June, as the Germans were approaching Paris, she was set free but was captured by the Germans near Tours on 24th June and taken back to Paris. Her case was referred to RSHA in Berlin from whom instructions were received for her arrest. After being confined in the French prisons of Cherche-Midi and Fresnes, she was taken to Germany in August 1940 and whilst in custody in the Alexanderplatz prison was interrogated by the Gestapo. Eventually, on the instructions of Heydrich, she was released but subsequently re-arrested on suspicion of espionage against Germany and sent to Ravensbrück in February 1941.

  This third-rate Mata Hari soon ingratiated herself with her captors and became Blockälteste, in which appointment, as one of the witnesses at her trial said, ‘she behaved like a real SS’. She even had opportunity to practise her old trade as she was, during part of the time she was in the camp, one of Ramdohr’s stool-pigeons.

  For some months she was in charge of Block 10 where was situated the room in which the ‘mad women’ were confined. Also in Block 10 was a room occupied by TB patients. Mory appointed a German criminal as prisoner in charge of those patients and he used to beat them and steal from them. Mory herself habitually beat her charges. One such, a Polish woman, was beaten by Mory, who also threw buckets of cold water in her face and over her body when she was stark naked. This woman was charming and generally liked. She also sang well and it was for this reason and no other that Mory ill-treated her. She died the following day.

  The Belgian women in the camp called Mory ‘The Monster’. She used to drag sick women, half-dead, out of their beds in Block 10, have them pulled into the washhouse, dumped on the cold stones, and have buckets of cold water poured over them saying, ‘Now you will be clean.’

  Violette Le Coq, by whom the pen-and-ink illustrations in this book were drawn, was a lieutenant in La France Combattante, one of the organizations in the French resistance movement. Before the war she had been a hospital nurse. She was arrested on 20th August, 1942, and in October 1943 arrived at Ravensbrück as a Nacht und Nebel prisoner. A few months after her arrival Mile Le Coq was taken by Mory to help in Block 10.

  At the Ravensbrück Trial Mile Le Coq described in her evidence an incident which occurred one night in Block 10.

  One night we were awakened by shouting which came from the room where the insane prisoners were housed. Carmen Mory, a student of medicine, a French nurse, and myself got up and went to the room to see what was happening. We opened the door and we saw two women fighting with each other. One of these was apparently a Russian. Mory took one of the leather belts which were always hanging there and started belabouring both the women. She sent the medical student to get some ampoules, and then gave both the women injections. The following morning I returned to the room where I saw five women lying dead, including the two whom Mory had injected the night before.

  Mory remained at Ravensbrück until the end of the war, when she was released with many others and eventually made her way to the British Zone where she found employment with a British Army Field Security unit near Hamburg where she was finally arrested as a war criminal on the 5th October 1945.

  One of the most sinister figures in this camp was a young woman named Vera Salvequart. She also had a curious history and first came to the camp as a prisoner.

  At the date of her trial she was only twenty-seven years of age. Born in Czechoslovakia, her mother was a Czech and her father a Sudeten German, and she had trained as a professional nurse in Leipzig.

  During the war she was arrested no less than four times. In 1941 she had been arrested, interrogated, and sent to a Jewish camp in Flossenberg. The reason for her arrest on that occasion was that she had become engaged to a Jew who was wanted by the Gestapo and could not be found. As she refused to tell the Gestapo his whereabouts she was kept in Flossenberg for ten months and then released.

  She was arrested again in May 1942, charged with breaches of the Nuremberg Laws, including ‘relationship’ with Jews, and was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment, being released in April 1944.

  She was rearrested on the 8th of August 1944 and charged with espionage and aiding the enemy, and was tried together with her fiancé and his sister at Dresden. Her fiancé took all the blame and was condemned to death. Salvequart and her prospective sister-in-law were sent temporarily to the concentration camp at Theresienstadt, whence they arrived after a long and devious journey at Ravensbrück on 6th December 1944.

  This young woman, for whom otherwise some sympathy might well be felt, during the few months she remained at Ravensbrück was personally responsible for the death of a large number of her fellow prisoners by poisoning them, though the exact figure is not known. But she has given us a great deal of information about the extermination programme which was carried out at Ravensbrück and in which she later became an active participator.

  When she arrived she was taken to the notorious ‘Tent for the Jews’. There were two thousand women in it, all Jews from Hungary or Czechoslovakia who had previously been interned at Auschwitz and were passed on to Ravensbrück as the Russians advanced through Poland.

  There were no beds, no paillasses, no straw, no floor boards, just the bare earth. On the right of the entrance to the tent a corner was roped off and there were ten old four-gallon drums which were used as lavatories. There were no washing facilities. Dr Treite called it ‘The Tent for Pigs.’

  In this tent were inmates who were suffering from typhus and two or three of them died every night. It was, so she said, the first time Salvequart had ever had to sleep with corpses.

  For a few days Salvequart was kept in quarantine but after that she was put to work with the Jewish squad in what they called the corn cellar. For those who have read some of the earlier chapters of this book the conditions in which the Jewish squad worked will come as no surprise. Their very race was enough to subject them to the hardest and most cruel conditions in the whole camp.

  The women who worked in this corn cellar had to carry to it sacks weighing a hundredweight each from the River Havel. The distance from the river to the corn cellar was 800 metres all uphill, and only two women were allowed to carry each sack. For the first two or three sacks it was possible, but after that fingers became numb with the cold. The frost got under their nails and they could not get a grip. Consequently they dropped the sacks and each time that happened they were beaten by an Aufseherin.

  Salvequart worked for some time with this squad until it was discovered that she was a trained nurse. She was then told that she would be sent to another camp nearby and would find enough work there. It was in this way that at the beginning of February 1945 she found herself in the Jugendlager.


  This small camp, which was only a few kilometres away from the main camp had to be seen to be believed. When Salvequart arrived there it was already overcrowded. There were only five blocks of living huts although there were three thousand inmates. In the so-called hospital there were sixty women suffering from TB and there were practically no drugs because the two SS orderlies, Rapp and Kohler, sold all the medical stores on the black market.

  The day after Salvequart arrived, three hundred women were admitted to the camp together with a nominal roll headed ‘Transfer to Mittelwerde Convalescent Camp’. The nominal roll was checked by Rapp and Salvequart who was instructed to write down the name of some disease against the name of each woman on the roll. The women were then undressed and their prison number written on their left forearm with an indelible pencil. They were then redressed and waited in the corridor until dusk, when they were taken away in lorries. They were told that they were going to be disinfected; in fact they went to the Ravensbrück gas chamber which had recently been erected and was by then in full swing.

  It was not long, however, before Salvequart began to carry out a little extermination on her own. She started giving injections to Polish women who were later seen lying incapable on the floor of the washroom writhing and groaning and calling out for water.

  She also administered a ‘white powder’ to large numbers of women in the camp. How these women used to die has been told by a woman named Ottelard who was in the Jugendlager at that time.

  After they got this white powder the patients went to sleep. Some of them, who I suppose were younger and still had some resistance in their bodies, tried to get up but they were incapable of standing on their feet. The next morning the great majority of those who had taken the powder were still asleep and snoring. They slept until about 4 o’clock in the afternoon when the snoring stopped and they were dead.

  Salvequart denied giving any lethal injections and maintained that she saved hundreds from dying by falsifying the lists of dead and sending in names of certain persons three or four times as having been exterminated.

  There was, indeed, some evidence that she did use her discrimination regarding whom she poisoned and her particular cronies appear to have been spared the fatal dose. She was very friendly with the two SS orderlies and all her friends were housed in one part of the Revier which was reputedly more comfortable than the rest. But two swallows do not make a summer, and for every woman Salvequart refrained from killing there were scores who died by her hand.

  But the last nail in Vera’s coffin was driven in by a Viennese woman, Lotte Sontag, whom Salvequart called to testify in her defence and whom her counsel put into the witness box without any previous consultation. The result was disastrous for Salvequart. The witness Sontag was being questioned in order to bring before the Court evidence that Salvequart had been kind and considerate to the patients of the Jugendlager hospital in general and to Lotte Sontag in particular, and that she lost no opportunity by virtue of the responsible position which she held in the Revier to further the interests of the women in her charge and circumvent the evil intentions of the camp staff.

  ‘Do you remember,’ asked her counsel, ‘that Salvequart obtained boots for you at any time?’ ‘Yes,’ answered Lotte, ‘I remember she got boots for us but at the same time I must say they came from the sick that were poisoned by Vera.’ ‘Is that really what the witness said?’ asked the Judge Advocate. ‘Yes,’ answered the interpreter.

  ‘Did you not feel any scruples about wearing those shoes that had belonged to other people?’ asked Salvequart’s counsel with some indignation.

  ‘We felt terribly sorry for them,’ answered Fräulein Sontag, ‘but there the shoes were and we had none to wear, so we wore them.’

  Fräulein Sontag then went on to tell the Court that Vera Salvequart had told her that she administered the white powder because the prisoners refused to accept it from the SS because they did not trust them, but that as she was herself a prisoner with a kind voice and apparently friendly to them they took the powder thinking they were taking medicine.

  That Salvequart, for what reason it is difficult to say, co-operated with the camp staff in the extermination of the inmates of the Jugendlager is without question.

  Nor was her conduct after her capture by the Allies in April 1945 consistent with her contention that she worked against the SS and on behalf of the prisoners. Although she had been an eyewitness of mass murders and other criminal acts about which she could have made a report to her captors she did not do so, but preferred to cover up her identity by changing her name to Anna Markova, under which pseudonym she was arrested.

  The matron, or Oberschwester, in the women’s camp at Ravensbrück from April 1943 until its liberation in 1945 was Elisabeth Marschall, of whom it was truly said that ‘she had her finger in every filthy pie in the camp’.

  Marschall, though a professional nurse, was a Nazi Party member of fifteen years’ standing and, according to her own story, was posted to Ravensbrück as a punishment for a breach of SS regulations at the hospital of the Hermann Goring works in Brunswick, where she gave food to two French slave workers.

  This woman was a disgrace to her high calling. Whilst matron she was brutal to the patients, refused treatment to the sick, starved little babies, and stole Red Cross parcels.

  In 1944 when disinfection of some of the blocks was being carried out Marschall was in charge of the operation. It took place during the night and the women were made to undress and stand naked during the process. Some sort of chemical was poured over their heads and they were given ointment to use on infected parts of the body. When Marschall saw a woman not using the ointment in the proper way she would hit her brutally. According to one woman, ‘We were then led into another block where we stood all night without getting any sleep at all. The following day we were led to the washhouse but before we were allowed to enter we were made to stand outside in the rain for three hours.’

  A few days later the hospital was full of pneumonia and inflammation of the lung cases and owing to the weak condition of the patients and the absence of any effective treatment many died.

  Marschall also took an active part in the selection parades for the Mittelwerde Convalescent Camp convoys, a euphemism for gassing parties, and she also helped with the selection of the 800 women who were sent away to Lublin in November 1944. She, in collaboration with Dr Treite, decided to whom the pink cards should be issued. Marschall had the final say because on one occasion the Norwegian prisoner, who had already been referred to in this chapter as Fru Salvesen, approached Dr Treite to get two Norwegian women struck off the list of one of the ‘death’ transports. Dr Treite told her that he could not decide and she must go and ask the matron. When she was asked to delete the names matron asked ‘What is their work?’ ‘They are knitting,’ answered Fru Salvesen. ‘The knitters all have to go,’ said Marschall. The knitters were, of course, not worth keeping alive. They were old women too weak to do heavy work.

  The conditions in the camp hospital were the responsibility of the matron. They could scarcely have been worse and Marschall did not merely acquiesce in them, she appeared to approve of them. Certainly nothing was done by her to improve them.

  Let Fru Salvesen, who worked in the Revier, describe one of the hospital rooms where most of the patients had deep incised wounds.

  The smell was dreadful because bandages had not been changed for a week. The bandages were only made of paper and most of them came off at the end of one day. As all the wounds were open and festering you can imagine what the bedclothes were like. How often they were changed I cannot remember but they were always dirty. In the isolation block it was ten times worse. I remember once I went in there without permission. The occupants were all lying on the floor which was crowded with sick and dying, so much so that I had to step over them to reach my Norwegian friend for whom I had brought some food. She was in despair and said, ‘This is worse than hell.’ If you arrived in the Revier with typ
hus and you survived and were discharged, you very soon came back with some other disease. Often one only changed rooms because one had changed illnesses.

  Mile Le Coq who, it will be remembered, was a trained nurse and was also employed for a time in the camp hospital, passed through the hospital courtyard one day on her way to the laboratory for anæsthetics when she saw five wheelbarrows each containing pieces of human flesh and a human body. On a closer inspection the bodies turned out to be five Jewesses—the triangle on their dresses indicated that—and each was lying in the barrow on her back, her legs dangling over the side. Mile Le Coq went to the barrows and touched the bodies to see whether they were still alive and whether anything could be done for them. Three were alive. At that moment Marschall came on to the scene and, shouting across the yard, forbade the French girl to do anything to help the women. She returned to her block and brought back two friends to see whether they could not do something for the Jewesses but Marschall reappeared and drove her away. The barrows remained there all night, and by the morning the three survivors were dead.

  During the time she was matron of this camp, Marschall contravened every known canon of humanity and decency. Trained as a nurse, she had risen to a high place in her honourable profession which she so degraded and debased. Disregarding the strict code of her humane calling, she preferred to follow the nauseating principles of her Party and her Führer and did all in her power to further their evil ends.

  Let Fru Salvesen pronounce the final verdict on Elisabeth Marschall.

  As she was a trained nurse I am afraid we all had the picture of Florence Nightingale in our minds: we thought that a nurse was bound to help, sworn to help people irrespective of nationality at any time. What I think hurt my prisoner friends and myself most was to see doctors, sisters, and nurses sink so low and forget their duty.

  The scores of doctors who were employed in concentration camps during the war left a stain upon the honour of the medical profession in Germany which will not be erased for many decades. Utterly unmindful of their Hippocratic oath, these men, generally without the faintest protest, became active participators in the concentration camp system of extermination and collaborated fully with the SS staff to make the camps a living hell.