Ravensbruck Read online

  Also by Sarah Helm

  A Life in Secrets: Vera Atkins and the Missing Agents of WWII

  Copyright © 2014 by Sarah Helm

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Nan A. Talese / Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. Published in Great Britain as If This Is a Woman by Little, Brown, an imprint of the Little, Brown Book Group, a Hachette UK Company, London.

  www.nanatalese.com

  Doubleday is a registered trademark of Penguin Random House LLC. Nan A. Talese and the colophon are trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Cover design by Emily Mahon

  Front-of-cover image: Release of Concentration Camp Ravensbrück, Germany. March 29, 1945, Gamma-Keystone/Getty Images; spine-of-jacket image: View of Ravensbrück, April 1945. Rue des Archives/The Granger Collection, NYC

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Helm, Sarah.

  Ravensbrück : life and death in Hitler’s concentration camp for women / Sarah Helm. — First United States edition.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-385-52059-1 (hardcover) — ISBN 978-0-385-53911-1 (eBook)

  1. Ravensbrück (Concentration camp). 2. Women concentration camp inmates—Germany—Ravensbrück. 3. Women prisoners—Germany—Ravensbrück. 4. World War, 1939–1945—Prisoners and prisons, German. I. Title.

  D805.5.R38H45 2014

  940.53′1853154—dc23

  2014014974

  eBook ISBN 9780385539111

  v4.1

  a

  To those who refused

  Consider if this is a woman,

  Without hair and without name

  With no more strength to remember,

  Her eyes empty and her womb cold

  Like a frog in winter.

  Meditate that this came about:

  I commend these words to you.

  Primo Levi, ‘If This Is a Man’

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Sarah Helm

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Maps

  Prologue

  Part One

  1. Langefeld

  2. Sandgrube

  3. Blockovas

  4. Himmler Visits

  5. Stalin’s Gift

  6. Else Krug

  7. Doctor Sonntag

  8. Doctor Mennecke

  9. Bernburg

  Part Two

  10. Lublin

  11. Auschwitz

  12. Sewing

  13. Rabbits

  14. Special Experiments

  15. Healing

  Part Three

  16. Red Army

  17. Yevgenia Klemm

  18. Doctor Treite

  19. Breaking the Circle

  20. Black Transport

  Part Four

  21. Vingt-sept Mille

  22. Falling

  23. Hanging On

  24. Reaching Out

  Part Five

  25. Paris and Warsaw

  26. Kinderzimmer

  27. Protest

  28. Overtures

  29. Doctor Loulou

  Part Six

  30. Hungarians

  31. A Children’s Party

  32. Death March

  33. Youth Camp

  34. Hiding

  35. Königsberg

  36. Bernadotte

  37. Emilie

  38. Nelly

  39. Masur

  40. White Buses

  41. Liberation

  Epilogue

  Illustrations

  Acknowledgements

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Picture Credits

  About the Author

  Detail left

  Detail right

  A plan of Ravensbrück by the French artist France Audoul, who was one of the ‘vingt-sept mille’—the largest group of French prisoners, who arrived at the camp on 3 February 1944.

  The plan shows the main compound on the edge of the lake with the gate, the shower and kitchen building, and the Appellplatz. The gas chamber (‘gaz’) and crematorium are also visible. Against the south wall is the SS garden; just beyond it are the Siemenslager and the warehouses where goods stolen from prisoners (‘marchandises volées’) were sorted and stored. The ‘Camp d’Extermination’ at Uckermark is also clearly marked, as are the machine-gun posts to the north. On the shore of the lake are the remains of a small fort (‘fortin’) and the ‘marais’—the sandy shore.

  From Ravensbrück: 150,000 femmes en enfer. 32 croquis et portraits faits au camp 1944–1945, 22 compositions et textes manuscrits de France Audoul.

  Prologue

  From Berlin’s Tegel airport it takes just over an hour to reach Ravensbrück. The first time I drove there, in February 2006, heavy snow was falling and a lorry had jack-knifed on the Berlin ring road, so it would take longer.

  Heinrich Himmler often drove out to Ravensbrück, even in atrocious weather like this. The head of the SS had friends in the area and would drop in to inspect the camp as he passed by. He rarely left without issuing new orders. Once he ordered more root vegetables to be put in the prisoners’ soup. On another occasion he said the killing wasn’t going fast enough.

  Ravensbrück was the only Nazi concentration camp built for women. The camp took its name from the small village that adjoins the town of Fürstenberg and lies about fifty miles due north of Berlin, off the road to Rostock on Germany’s Baltic coast. Women arriving in the night sometimes thought they were near the coast because they tasted salt on the wind; they also felt sand underfoot. When daylight came they saw that the camp was built on the edge of a lake and surrounded by forest. Himmler liked his camps to be in areas of natural beauty, and preferably hidden from view. Today the camp is still hidden from view; the horrific crimes enacted there and the courage of the victims are largely unknown.

  —

  Ravensbrück opened in May 1939, just under four months before the outbreak of war, and was liberated by the Russians six years later—it was one of the very last camps to be reached by the Allies. In the first year there were fewer than 2000 prisoners, almost all of whom were Germans. Many had been arrested because they opposed Hitler—communists, for example, and Jehovah’s Witnesses, who called Hitler the Antichrist. Others were rounded up simply because the Nazis considered them inferior beings and wanted them removed from society: prostitutes, criminals, down-and-outs and Gypsies. Later, the camp took in thousands of women captured in countries occupied by the Nazis, many of whom had been in the resistance. Children were brought there too. A small proportion of the prisoners—about 10 per cent—were Jewish, but the camp was not formally designated a camp for Jews.

  At its height, Ravensbrück had a population of about 45,000 women; over the six years of its existence around 130,000 women passed through its gates, to be beaten, starved, worked to death, poisoned, executed and gassed. Estimates of the final death toll have ranged from about 30,000 to 90,000; the real figure probably lies somewhere in between, but so few SS documents on the camp survive nobody will ever know for sure. The wholesale destruction of evidence at Ravensbrück is another reason the camp’s story has remained obscured. In the final days, every prisoner’s file was burned in the crematorium or on bonfires, along with the bodies. The ashes were thrown in the lake.

  —

  I first learned of Ravensbrück when writing an earlier book about Vera Atkins, a wartime officer with the British secret service’s Special Operations Executive. Immediately after the war Vera launched a single-handed search for British SOE women who had been parachuted into occupied France to help the resistance, many of whom had gone missing. Vera followed their trails and di
scovered that several had been captured and taken to concentration camps.

  I tried to reconstruct her search, and began with her personal papers, which were filed in brown cardboard boxes and kept by her sister-in-law Phoebe Atkins at her home in Cornwall. The word ‘Ravensbrück’ was written on one of the boxes. Inside were handwritten notes from interviews with survivors and with SS suspects—some of the earliest evidence gathered about the camp. I flicked through the papers. ‘We had to strip naked and were shaved,’ one woman told Vera. There was ‘a column of choking blue smoke’.

  A survivor talked of a camp hospital where ‘syphilis germs were injected into the spinal cord’. Another described seeing women arrive at the camp after a ‘death march’ through the snow from Auschwitz. One of the male SOE agents, imprisoned at Dachau, wrote a note saying he had heard about women from Ravensbrück being forced to work in a Dachau brothel.

  Several of the interviewees mentioned a young woman guard called Binz who had ‘light, bobbed hair’. Another guard had once been a nanny in Wimbledon. Among the prisoners were ‘the cream of Europe’s women’, according to a British investigator; they included General de Gaulle’s niece, a former British women’s golf champion and scores of Polish countesses.

  I began to look for dates of birth and addresses in case any of the survivors—or even the guards—might still be alive. Someone had given Vera the address of a Mrs Chatenay, ‘who knows about the sterilisation of children in Block 11’. A Doctor Louise Le Porz had made a very detailed statement saying the camp was built on an estate belonging to Himmler and his private Schloss, or château, was near by. Her address was Mérignac, Gironde, but from her date of birth she was probably dead. A Guernsey woman called Julia Barry lived in Nettlebed in Oxfordshire. Other addresses were impossibly vague. A Russian survivor was thought to be working ‘at the mother and baby unit, Leningrad railway station’.

  Towards the back of the box I found handwritten lists of prisoners, smuggled out by a Polish woman who had taken notes in the camp as well as sketches and maps. ‘The Poles had all the best information,’ the note said. The woman who wrote the list turned out to be long dead, but some of the addresses were in London, and the survivors still living.

  I took the sketches with me on the first drive out to Ravensbrück, hoping they would help me find my way around when I got there. But as the snow thickened I wondered if I’d reach the camp at all.

  Many tried and failed to reach Ravensbrück. Red Cross officials trying to get to the camp in the chaos of the final days of war had to turn back, such was the flow of refugees moving the other way. A few months after the war, when Vera Atkins drove out this way to start her investigation, she was stopped at a Russian checkpoint; the camp was inside the Russian zone of occupation and access by other Allied nationals was restricted. By this time, Vera’s hunt for the missing women had become part of a bigger British investigation into the camp, resulting in the first Ravensbrück war crimes trials, which opened in Hamburg in 1946.

  In the 1950s, as the Cold War began, Ravensbrück fell behind the Iron Curtain, which split survivors—east from west—and broke the history of the camp in two.

  Out of view of the West, the site became a shrine to the camp’s communist heroines, and all over East Germany streets and schools were named after them.

  Meanwhile, in the West, Ravensbrück literally disappeared from view. Western survivors, historians, journalists couldn’t even get near the site. In their own countries the former prisoners struggled to get their stories published. Evidence was hard to access. Transcripts of the Hamburg trials were classified ‘secret’ and closed for thirty years.

  ‘Where was it?’ was one of the most common questions put to me when I began writing about Ravensbrück, along with: ‘Why was there a separate women’s camp? Were the women Jews? Was it a death camp? Was it a slave labour camp? Is anyone still alive?’

  —

  In those countries that lost large numbers in the camp, survivors’ groups tried to keep memories alive. An estimated 8000 French, 1000 Dutch, 18,000 Russians and 40,000 Poles were imprisoned. Yet, for different reasons in each country, the story has been obscured.

  In Britain, which had no more than twenty women in the camp, the ignorance is startling, as it is in the US. The British may know of Dachau, the first concentration camp, and perhaps of Belsen because British troops liberated it and the horror they found there, captured on film, for ever scarred the British consciousness. Otherwise only Auschwitz, synonymous with the gassing of the Jews, has real resonance.

  After reading Vera’s files I looked around to see what had been written on the women’s camp. Mainstream historians—nearly all of them men—had almost nothing to say. Even books written on the camps since the end of the Cold War seemed to describe an entirely masculine world. Then a friend, working in Berlin, leant me a hefty collection of essays mostly by German women academics. In the 1990s, feminist historians had begun a fightback. This book promised to ‘release women from the anonymity that lies behind the word prisoner’. A plethora of further studies had followed as other authors—usually German—carved off sections of Ravensbrück and examined them ‘scientifically’, which seemed to stifle the story. I noticed mention of a ‘Memory Book’, which sounded far more interesting, and tried to contact the author.

  I had also come across a handful of prisoners’ memoirs, mostly from the 1950s and 1960s, hanging around in the back shelves of public libraries, often with sensationalised jackets. The cover for a memoir by a French literature teacher, Micheline Maurel, showed a voluptuous Bond-girl lookalike behind barbed wire. A book about Irma Grese, one of the early Ravensbrück guards, was titled The Beautiful Beast. The language of these memoirs seemed dated and, at first, unreal. One writer talked of ‘lesbians with brutish faces’ and another of the ‘bestiality’ of German prisoners, which ‘gave much food for thought as to the fundamental virtue of the race’. These texts were disorientating; it was as if nobody knew quite how to tell the story. In a preface to one memoir, the French writer François Mauriac wrote that Ravensbrück was ‘an abomination that the world has resolved to forget’. Perhaps I should write about something else. I went to see Yvonne Baseden, the only survivor I was then aware was still living, to ask her view.

  Yvonne was one of Vera Atkins’s SOE women, captured while helping the resistance in France, then sent to Ravensbrück. Yvonne had always willingly talked about her resistance work, but whenever I had broached the subject of Ravensbrück she had said she ‘knew nothing’ and turned away.

  This time I told her I was planning to write a book on the camp, hoping she might say more, but she looked up in horror.

  ‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘You can’t do that.’

  I asked why not. ‘It is too horrible. Couldn’t you write about something else? What are you going to tell your children you are doing?’ she asked.

  Didn’t she think the story should be told? ‘Oh yes. Nobody knows about Ravensbrück at all. Nobody ever wanted to know from the moment we came back.’ She looked out of the window.

  As I left she gave me a small book. It was another memoir, with a particularly monstrous cover, twisted figures in black and white. Yvonne hadn’t read it, she said, pushing it on me. It was as if she wanted it out of her sight.

  When I got home the sinister jacket fell off the book to reveal a plain blue cover. I read it without putting it down. The author was a young French lawyer called Denise Dufournier who had written a simple and moving account of endurance against all odds. The ‘abomination’ was not the only part of the Ravensbrück story that was being forgotten; so was the fight for survival.

  A few days later a French voice spoke out of my answering machine. It was Dr Louise Le Porz (now Liard), the doctor from Mérignac whom I’d assumed was dead. Instead, she was inviting me to stay with her in Bordeaux, where she now lived. I could stay as long as I liked as there was much to talk about. ‘But you’d better hurry. I’m ninety-three years old.’

/>   Soon after this I made contact with Bärbel Shindler-Saefkow, the author of the ‘Memory Book’. Bärbel, the daughter of a German communist prisoner, was compiling a database of the prisoners; she had travelled far afield gathering up lists of names hidden in obscure archives. She sent me the address of Valentina Makarova, a Belorussian partisan, who had survived the Auschwitz death march. Valentina wrote back, suggesting I visit her in Minsk.

  —

  By the time I reached Berlin’s outer suburbs the snow was easing. I passed a sign for Sachsenhausen, the location of the men’s concentration camp, which meant I was heading the right way. Sachsenhausen and Ravensbrück had close contacts. The men’s camp even baked the women’s bread; the loaves were driven out on this road every day. At first each woman got half a loaf each evening. By the end of the war they barely received a slice and the ‘useless mouths’—as the Nazis called those they wanted rid of—received none at all.

  SS officers, guards and prisoners were frequently moved back and forth between the camps as Himmler’s administrators tried to maximise resources. Early in the war a women’s section opened at Auschwitz—and later at other male camps—and Ravensbrück provided and trained the women guards. Later in the war several senior SS men from Auschwitz were sent to work at Ravensbrück. Prisoners were also sent back and forth between the two camps. As a result, although Ravensbrück had a distinctive female character it also shared a common culture with the male camps.

  Himmler’s SS empire was vast: by the middle of the war there were as many as 15,000 Nazi camps, which included temporary labour camps and thousands of subcamps, linked to the main concentration camps, dotted all over Germany and Poland. The biggest and most monstrous were those constructed in 1942, under the terms of the Final Solution. By the end of the war an estimated six million Jews had been exterminated. The facts of the Jewish genocide are today so well known and so overwhelming that many people suppose that Hitler’s extermination programme consisted of the Jewish Holocaust alone.