Ravensbrück: Life and Death in Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women

by Sarah Helm

For washing, everyone was given a toothbrush, tooth mug, nugget of soap and small towel. Any item lost would incur ‘a report’ to the Oberaufseherin. Each woman was allocated a tiny shelf to keep her items on; anything misplaced meant ‘a report’.

Worst of all were the rules of the Appell, the roll call. At 5 a.m. a siren woke the camp, and prisoners were marched outside their blocks to line up in ranks of five, hands by their sides, standing erect in military fashion while the count took place. Even in these early days it took as long as half an hour to get the numbers right, and at 5 a.m. a cold wind blew off the Schwedtsee, cutting through cotton clothes. ‘Achtung! Achtung! Hands by your sides, ranks of fives.’ Langefeld sometimes took Appell in person, but usually left the job to her deputy, Emma Zimmer, who had also come from Lichtenburg.

Effektenkammer,

In the Revier, the sickbay, each prisoner underwent a vaginal examination and if any woman had syphilis, as Agnes Petry did, it was noted on her file. Any woman found to be pregnant was taken away to have her baby at a nearby hospital in Templin. The baby would be sent for adoption, and the woman brought back.

The Strafblock prisoners were forced to work longer hours, on the worst gangs, with no days off. Punishments such as straitjackets and water dousing were used.

Langefeld herself would claim later that when she first arrived at Ravensbrück she still believed her role was to ‘re-educate prostitutes’. The truth was that she couldn’t refuse such a promotion, especially when it came from the Reichsführer SS himself. She was now the most important woman in Himmler’s camp empire. And the living conditions alone were so attractive that it was very hard to walk away.

The siting of SS accommodation, away from the camp itself, in a pleasant natural setting, was a common feature of all camps. The intention was to encourage the SS staff to feel content in their home environment. At Ravensbrück the men had their own SS sports field, while the women could go boating on the lake in summer, or picnicking in the woods.

game and called it Abdecken – ‘roof falling’. Afterwards, the prisoner, bruised and suffocating, was pulled out by friends.

Prisoners known as Blockovas had been put in charge of blocks and ordered to enforce discipline.

With full-scale war now imminent, Hitler opened a new front in the racial war, ordering the roundup of 3000 Austrian Sinti and Roma, most of whom had lived in Burgenland for generations. Women and men were dragged from their beds, and hauled away with no warning, then the sexes were separated.

local thugs, posing as police,

Many were raped ‘by the village SS’, as they called Hitler’s local stooges.

Bund Deutscher Mädel (League of German Girls), the female wing of the Hitler Youth.

they must henceforth ‘treat orders as sacrosanct and even those that appear most hard and severe must be implemented without hesitation’.

From now on the job of SS camp staff was to ‘protect the homeland against all internal enemies’ – the fight to suppress those in the camps was as important for the future of the Reich as the fight at the front.

the men serving in the camps should show an inflexible harshness towards the prisoners. Only the SS were capable of protecting the National Socialist state from all internal danger. Other organisations lacked the necessary toughness.’

‘The more there are rivalries, the more battles between the prisoners, the easier it is to control the camp. Divide and rule – that is the principle not only of high politics but also in a concentration camp.’

Prügelstrafe, a method used in male camps. This ‘official’ beating meant strapping a prisoner, stomach down, over a wooden horse, or Bock, and giving them twenty-five lashes on the buttocks with an oxhide whip. Such punishment could only be authorised by Himmler himself, and to date he had refused to permit it.

by January 1940 the first extermination of lives not worth living had begun – not in the concentration camps, but in German sanatoria, and in the name of euthanasia.

First, a special office inside Hitler’s own Chancellery was set up to run the ‘euthanasia’ programme, code-named T4 after the address of the office itself, situated at Berlin’s Tiergartenstrasse 4. Killing centres were set up inside existing hospitals and sanatoria – five in Germany, one in annexed Austria – and a ‘commission’ of doctors, all sworn to secrecy, would diagnose the incurably ill and the insane.

‘Limited company for the transport of invalids in the Public Interest’ was established to manage bus transport, while hospital staff in the sanatoria were taught how to send out lying

After some discussion amongst top doctors, a proposal to use carbon monoxide gas was agreed.

These terms were not invented by the Nazis: other expressions such as ‘empty human husks’ and ‘ballast lives’ had been common in the science of eugenics in Germany and many other countries, notably the United States, since the nineteenth century.

The head doctor, Walter Sonntag, refused to treat Jews.

It was Himmler who in 1937 had introduced the concept of Lebensborn (‘Source of Life’) homes – institutions where SS officers could procreate outside marriage with selected Aryan women, in order to produce a constant supply of perfect Aryan children. In 1940 he passed a procreation order urging German soldiers to procreate outside marriage in order to produce as many children as possible, to resupply the gene pool. This need not be done secretly, he proclaimed.

A new concentration camp at Oswiecim – in German, Auschwitz – in southern Poland had been opened to hold Polish resisters. And the country’s two million Jews were being driven from their homes and forced into ghettos or reservations in parts of annexed Poland – or the Greater Reich – called ‘the general government’.

It was now more than a year since Hitler’s T4 ‘euthanasia’ programme had been launched, and in that time more than 35,000 German men, women and children seen as a drain on the nation’s resources had been killed by carbon monoxide pumped into gas chambers hidden in German sanatoria. In Poland the T4 techniques had also been adapted to kill the country’s mentally and physically handicapped, murdered in specially adapted mobile gassing trucks.

December 1939 the castle’s old coach house was converted into a gas chamber, and over the next twelve months 10,000 mentally and physically ill men and women were bussed to Grafeneck to be murdered. However, later in 1940 buses belonging to the ‘Limited Company for the Transport of Invalids in the Public Interest’ began to attract attention, and a local judge reported serious unrest. ‘For several weeks gossip has been circulating in the villages around Grafeneck that things cannot be right at the castle,’ he wrote. ‘Patients arrive but they are never seen again, nor can they be visited, and equally suspicious is the frequently visible smoke.’

Plainly, it was the fact that the killing had become public that was faulty, not the killing itself: soon after Grafeneck was closed two new killing centres opened in Germany, but under better disguise. And not only was the T4 ‘euthanasia’ programme itself to be expanded, Himmler now planned to co-opt its gassing methods. Soon after the Grafeneck episode he wrote to the T4 chief, Philipp Bouhler, also head of Hitler’s Chancellery, asking him ‘whether and how the personnel and the facilities of T4 can be utilised for the concentration camps’.

Himmler had long been fascinated by medical experimentation, and the outbreak of war had given his interest new purpose – to increase the life expectancy of German forces. Where better to carry out the experiments than on human guinea pigs in the concentration camps? At the male camp of Sachsenhausen mustard-gas tests had been carried out on prisoners to find a way to cure soldiers poisoned at the front, and at Dachau prisoners were being starved of oxygen to find out at what altitude a pilot would die.

The percentage of German doctors applying to join the SS was the largest of any single profession.

That Sonntag was a sadist none of the prisoners who worked with him at the hospital had any doubt. It was an ‘extreme pleasure’ for Sonntag to extract otherwise healthy teeth. Women would come with an infected tooth; he would take out instead a perfectly healthy molar. ‘These extractions were performed without anaesthetic. The terrible screams could be heard all over the hospital. When he came out of the theatre he was beaming with satisfaction,’ recalled Erika Buchmann.

Sonntag enjoyed nothing more than the chance to declare a woman fit for flogging.

Just as Walter Sonntag liked to cause pain, so he could not stand to see others show kindness towards the sick or suffering.

Some time in the middle of 1941 Dr Sonntag started killing.

the girl was injected with petrol.’

‘one day the day will come when we’ll kill everyone’.

the SS used the tattooed skin of murdered prisoners to make bookmarks, wallets and other emblems.

Tragende, the statue which looks out over the Ravensbrück lake.

Friedrich Mennecke, a T4 psychiatrist, wrote each day to his wife Eva, telling her about his work at Sachsenhausen. He was staying at the Eilers Hotel in Oranienburg, in a ‘big and pleasant room’, while his colleagues from Tiergartenstrasse 4 commuted to the suburb each day on the Berlin S-Bahn. His work was ‘very, very interesting’ and he enjoyed afternoon coffee and cake with the commandant. After four days Mennecke and colleagues had ‘processed’ between 250 and 400 prisoners.

Schoolchildren of the vicinity know this vehicle and say: ‘Here comes the murder box again.’ Or the children call each other names and say: ‘You’re crazy, you’ll be sent to the baking oven at Hadamar.’ You hear old folks say: ‘Don’t send me to a state hospital. When the feeble-minded have been finished off the next useless eaters whose turn will come are the old people.’

Most horrifying, especially to Catholics, was to know that their loved ones had been cremated at all.

The ‘stop’ order on the euthanasia murders that Hitler put out in the summer was never what it seemed. The killing of handicapped German adults in the sanatoria gas chambers was largely halted, but only to appease the Church, and ‘euthanasia’ went on at other institutions by other means, usually lethal injection. Children were poisoned or starved.

‘Koegel told us,’ said Rosa, ‘that we had to point out all the women who were sick or couldn’t work, because they were going to be sent to a sanatorium. He nodded his head towards the bunker and said: “If you fail to do this you’ll end up there, and you know what that means.” ’

selection for the lists meant death.

At the time the lists were compiled she was asked to draw up hundreds of forms giving false reasons for cause of death. According to Rosa Jochmann, Hermine told the other Blockovas what she had been told to do. ‘She told us that in the offices they had been told to make 1500 copies of a form with the following words: “You are herewith informed that ‘blank’ has died at Ravensbrück as a result of a blood clot.” ’

It was probably the Soviet counterattack just outside Moscow in the autumn of 1941 that finally prompted Hitler to formalise his ideas on how to murder Europe’s Jews. In the first days of the war, it had been thought possible that the Jews could be removed to Madagascar or elsewhere in Africa, but this had long since been ruled out, and now that the Soviets were fighting back, Hitler’s hopes of herding the Jews east into seized Russian lands had also fallen away.

‘a transport of “candidates for death” [Todeskandidaten]’,

When Hitler’s blitzkrieg against Poland began on 1 September 1939 it swiftly became clear that Hitler was set not just on military victory but on killing Poland as an entity and absorbing it into Germany. Behind the tanks came SS Death’s Head units, under orders to sweep up, by stripping Poland of all possible leadership, as well as burying its history and cultural identity. In every town, city and village that lay in the path of German armies, schools, universities and town halls were closed and often burned, while teachers, priests, doctors, community elders were rounded up, tortured and shot.

dreaming of the day when the Führer would make Germany proud and great again.