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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Sarah Helm
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August 14 - October 4, 2025
Auschwitz was to play a dual role in the Final Solution: slave labour as well as extermination. Jews would be spared the gas chamber as long as they were deemed fit for work.
the entire administrative responsibility for its new women’s section was to be placed under Ravensbrück’s authority, and the camp would, from now on, train all Auschwitz’s future women guards. Himmler wanted Johanna Langefeld to take charge of the new Auschwitz women’s section: she was the most experienced woman guard he had.
We have little information about the guards who left for Auschwitz that day, but of the fourteen named later by Langefeld, several were notorious brutes.
the Slovaks had brought luggage because they had all seen the notices back home telling them they were going for Labour Service for three months and that they should bring clothing, linen and food up to a maximum of 50 kg. ‘In fact,’ she wrote later, ‘everybody brought the best they had and everybody was firmly convinced they would be used for work.’
The Slovak women were stripped, a process the Ravensbrück prisoner guards were familiar with, but the difference here was that none of their possessions were recorded. ‘Our first thought was why are all the prisoners’ possessions jumbled up? Later the women will surely have to get their stuff back.’ Clothes were also thrown on a big pile, and the food they brought set aside. The Slovakians were then made to stand naked ready for the ‘bath’, described by Luise as a tub eight metres wide in which all 1000 women had to take a bath in the same water.
the arrival of the Slovak Jews on 26 March 1942 was the first ‘official’ Jewish transport, sent to Auschwitz by Adolf Eichmann, the man charged with implementing the Final Solution.
the Auschwitz commandant himself, Rudolf Höss.
Escapers were shot and the officers put in reports ‘to impress the commandant and get a day off in Katowice’.
Teege and Mauer found out ‘little by little’ about the ‘facilities and methods’ used here, and understood that the SS had deliberately created these conditions in order to ensure that the women housed in the camp would die. ‘You never got rid of the horror,’ wrote Bertha, ‘and in addition there was the constant prospect that you yourself might become one of the victims one day.’
those women who didn’t do as the SS wanted by passing away were murdered outright.
They drove the prisoners into a tunnel, a sort of subterranean passage leading into what looked like a giant silo with ventilation shafts. Two SS men in gas masks emptied cans into the shafts. The air filled with dreadful yelling and screaming, the children’s most prolonged, and subsiding into whimpering. After fifteen minutes all was silence. ‘We knew that 300 people had just been killed,’ said Luise Mauer. The killing she had witnessed was probably the first mass gassing at Auschwitz.
the Jehovah’s Witnesses, who also arrived from Ravensbrück to work as Kapos, went on hunger strike and declared: ‘Hitler and his vassals are the devil’s instruments.’ Several were hanged, but Höss chose some
we knew now the sanatorium was the gas chamber,’
Perhaps because it was smaller, and more peripheral – at least to start with – Ravensbrück developed stronger local ties.
Its plant at Ravensbrück made Siemens one of the first major German companies to install a factory at a concentration camp, and the first of all German companies to exploit women slave labourers.
to preserve its market dominance it collaborated with Hitler’s Third Reich, securing lucrative arms contracts.
One of these directives, set out in a letter to Pohl, involved establishing brothels at the male camps, in which Ravensbrück women would work as prostitutes. After visiting the quarries at Mauthausen men’s camp, where emaciated prisoners were dying like flies, Himmler had hit upon the idea of reinvigorating the slave labourers with the lure of coupons to visit a brothel. To Himmler’s mind, the availability of sex would ‘encourage the men to work better’.
Stretching down the room were conveyor belts, with lines of women sitting alongside at sewing machines, making uniforms for the Waffen-SS as well as clothes for the camp prisoners.
After Binder was sentenced to death, his wife made an appeal saying it was he who was under pressure, not the prisoners: they kept on trying to sabotage the work.
There had been no point in sabotaging sand shifting, or coal unloading, but damaging the garments to be worn by German soldiers was worth the risk.
it was precisely Binder’s own stupidity that made the sabotage possible. His insistence that the same procedures happened ‘in the same way, on the same day’ applied also to the way he checked finished clothing.
Binder always checked the strength of the sewing, and women got hit on the head and face when it wasn’t strong enough, he never checked the positions of the buttons. So she sewed on her buttons securely, but in positions where they wouldn’t do up.
‘The more damage we did the better we felt, and it helped us survive the horrible days in the camp.’
The most effective sabotage was in the fur workshop, which opened in early 1942.
throughout the life of the camp nobody ever found any logic to explain why some women were called for execution on a particular day while others, who might have expected it, never were.
at this time there was still one coffin per person but, to economise, later there would be two bodies per coffin.
On 9 June a false lead led the investigators to believe that the assassin was hiding in a small village fifteen miles from Prague called Lidice. Ten trucks filled with security police rolled into Lidice and every man in the village was rounded up, lined up against a barn wall and shot. All buildings were set alight and razed to the ground, killing those left inside. Surviving women and children were taken to a nearby sports hall where children were parted from mothers, babies torn from their arms and taken away. A few of the children, deemed to show Aryan features, were sent for adoption by
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By 1942, Himmler had started to see medical experimentation as a key purpose for the concentration camps.
Himmler had established his own circle of experts – nature healers, industrialists, fringe medical practitioners – united under the guise of an institute called ‘Ahnenerbe’, ‘Ancestral Heritage’, which raised money to support some of the Reichsführer’s more radical medical projects.
Hitler backed the experiments on concentration camp prisoners, saying they ‘ought not to remain completely unaffected by the war while German soldiers are being subjected to almost unbearable strain and our native land, women and children, are being engulfed under a rain of incendiary bombs’. *2 Pressure to find a miracle drug increased when the Allies started dropping leaflets over German lines, announcing that their soldiers were being treated with sulphonamides and penicillin.
‘We made fur gloves for the pilots, but our feet were like blocks of ice. They took our shoes away in the spring.’
By late October 1942 Himmler’s enthusiasm for medical experimentation was burgeoning. Instead of cures for battlefield wounds, he was asking Sigmund Rascher, another favoured doctor, to find ways to revive sailors and airmen pulled out of freezing seas. Himmler had been reading about methods used by coastal communities in past centuries to save shipwrecked crews in the Baltic. Country folk often knew excellent remedies, he told Rascher in a letter, such as teas brewed from medicinal herbs.
He urged Rascher to try the same, and told him to use Ravensbrück prostitutes, sent to work in the Dachau brothel, for the ‘human warmth’. At first Rascher rejected the idea, saying that it wouldn’t work, but Himmler insisted and as Rascher was another close friend, and a devotee of the Reichsführer’s Ancestral Heritage projects, he came round.
First, eight male prisoners were placed in a large tank of near-freezing water and left there until they passed out. Each of the men was removed from the tank, unconscious, and placed between two Ravensbrück women lying naked in a spacious bed. The women were told to nestle as close as possible to the moribund man. All three were covered with blankets. The result was that the men quickly revived. Once the subjects regained consciousness they did not lose it again, but ‘very quickly grasped the situation’, as Rascher put it later, and ‘snuggled up to the naked female bodies’.
in four cases the men performed an act of sexual intercourse with the women.’ The chilled men’s temperature rose faster after intercourse. Experiments using only one woman instead of two showed an even faster re-warming, perhaps, according to Rascher, because inhibitions were removed and the woman snuggled closer to the man. In none of the cases was the re-warming of the man any more effective than if they had been placed in a hot bath. And in one of the cases the man had a cerebral haemorrhage and died.
The access to female material for experimentation had tempted Stumpfegger to come and do some tests himself: he wanted to break bones and see if they would grow back together again. Stumpfegger, another Himmler favourite, proposed the experiments to Gebhardt. Gebhardt knew Stumpfegger well – they had worked on the German medical team at the 1936 Berlin Olympics – but he claimed later that he opposed Stumpfegger’s tests on the grounds that such experiments had already been done.
Operations on muscles began at the same time, also at Stumpfegger’s instigation.
The rabbits’ accounts not only detail the butchery they themselves were subjected to but also throw light on other atrocities going on inside the Revier at the same time; in particular their reports reveal how the Ravensbrück doctors were increasingly and habitually using injections to kill.
not only the doctors were giving the injections, but also prisoner nurses themselves.’
By November 1942 the medical experiments had moved into another phase and the horror in the Revier deepened further. First, a second round of bacteria experiments was carried out on the Poles.
As if the scene at the camp infirmary were not already macabre enough, prisoners now noticed Fischer and other doctors getting into vehicles, carrying whole limbs, barely hidden under blankets, and driving off towards Hohenlychen.
Stumpfegger had committed suicide at the end of the war, and as all his ‘special experiment’ victims were dead,
Murder by lethal injection was commonplace in all concentration camps and was still widely used to kill lives not worth living in German sanatoria under the so-called euthanasia programme.
the slaughter caused a scandal among the SS. Although by now more than 1000 were dying each week in the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the unplanned killing of 150 women outside the camp gates at Budy was deemed unacceptable within SS ranks because it showed order had broken down, and it had broken down amongst the women. Höss needed scapegoats and six of the women Kapos present at Budy were summarily executed.
the presence just outside the walls of the Siemenslager, as the new Siemens plant was called.
the discipline at Siemens was at first less harsh. Although there was an SS woman
The money the prisoners might have earned was paid direct to the SS from whom the women were rented as slaves. Under the terms of their contract, Siemens paid the SS about forty Pfennigs for each hour worked. Even so, the company wanted its money’s worth, and it practised a system of incentives. If the prisoner wound more than her quota of spools she received a coupon worth up to one Reichsmark, which could be spent at the camp shop; if she fell below the quota, Grade ordered a guard to box her ears. If that didn’t work, he sent a report to the main camp labour office saying the woman was
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Langefeld was particularly horrified by the rabbits’ plight because they had been lied to by the promise to send them home in return for agreeing to operations; instead the ‘used’ victims were being shot.
one day in early April that the reality of this deception hit Langefeld. On this day, as Grete worked with the Oberaufseherin in her office, a memo came from the Gestapo office asking for ten Poles with numbers between 7000 and 10000 to present themselves nach vorn. Grete saw the memo and knew what it meant, as of course did Langefeld. A messenger fetched the women from their blocks.
After four years as chief guard at the women’s camp, and six months at Auschwitz, Johanna Langefeld had finally chosen between right and wrong, shaken off her indecision and acted to save two Polish prisoners’ lives.
