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

by Sarah Helm

As a result of her decision two weeks earlier to halt the execution of the crippled women, Johanna Langefeld had been dismissed. Himmler himself had approved the decision.

Stalin himself who instilled the terror. When Soviet survivors returned to the motherland after years of suffering in German camps, Stalin proved true to his word and treated his own soldiers as traitors simply because they had been captured and hadn’t fought to the death. This also affected many of the 800,000 Soviet women who had volunteered or been mobilised to work in intelligence units, as signallers or as doctors and nurses. The very fact that they had been in a foreign country and mixed with foreigners – albeit foreign prisoners – meant they were contaminated by fascism.

both Hitler and Stalin in equal measure made a mockery of ‘rules of war’, whether signed or not signed. Germany had signed the Geneva and Hague conventions, but German forces slaughtered an estimated 3.5 million captured Soviet troops.

Despite attempts to conceal the Red Army’s arrival, prisoners on night duty in the offices saw everything and spread the word next day about how the Soviets entered the camp moving as one, with heads held high.

‘camp police’ – the Lagerpolizei (LAPO) – made up of inmates, armed with whips and truncheons.

And it was not only prisoners who were impressed. Johanna Langefeld, still in her post when the Red Army arrived, was overheard admiring their ‘discipline’ and said the behaviour in the bathhouse of the commandant and his men was ‘contemptible’. Langefeld also said the women were clearly controlled by a high-ranking leader, but as far as we know neither she nor any SS officer ever found out who that ‘leader’ was, or learned that she had no rank at all.

Lagerspitzel (camp spies).

By the end of the summer of 1943 Ravensbrück had spawned twenty more subcamps and the Appellplatz was regularly transformed into a slave labour market.

The idea of Himmler trying to improve the health of his prisoners seems on the face of things absurd. At Auschwitz new crematoria with extra gas chambers had been opened at Birkenau, the camp’s extermination plant. By the end of April, the new Ravensbrück crematorium was in use; the sight of the chimney rising over the camp’s south wall was clear evidence that an increase in killing was about to start.

the rise both in killing and in working was consistent; the rules were simply clearer than before. As long as prisoners were fit for work they were to be kept alive. As soon as they were useless they must die, so as not to waste resources on feeding and housing them. The principle did not apply to the death camps – Sobibor, Treblinka, Belzec – whose sole purpose was the killing of Jews. Yet such was the need for slave labour by 1943 that more and more of the Jews sent to Auschwitz were also being diverted from the gas chambers and put to work if deemed useful enough.

Keeping more prisoners alive obviously meant more doctors, and as SS medics were increasingly being sent off to the front, it made sense to use qualified prisoners instead, which explains why the Red Army medics were suddenly called

The new beating procedures would all have been approved by Himmler. In evidence later the camp staff all said that Himmler insisted on approving every individual beating and the manner in which it was done. A document unearthed in the papers of the SS Administration Headquarters by war crimes investigators in 1945, entitled ‘Flogging of Female Prisoners’, showed this to be the case. It confirmed a verbal order issued by Himmler in July 1942 stating that ‘orders for punishing female prisoners should be reported to him for approval’. The orders ‘must be numbered in red pencil in the right hand top corner consecutively’. In order ‘to save time’ Himmler also wanted the names and numbers of each woman to be flogged printed on a separate list, so he could notify his approval of the flogging by referring just to a number. In 1942 the flogging was to be done ‘with strokes to follow quickly after each other with a single-lash leather whip, the strokes being counted. Undressing and baring of certain parts of the body is strictly forbidden.’ From the evidence of Maria Klyugman in the Revier and countless flogging victims, by 1943 Himmler had updated the procedures, ordering that the beating should be done on bare buttocks.

Lyusya Malygina, a gynaecologist, had the job of assisting with abortions carried out on the Bettpolitischen and of examining the women selected to work in brothels at the male camps. Before they left she checked them for syphilis and was told to improve their appearance, by dyeing their hair and disguising their sores.

One day Treite told Zdenka to collect cockroaches, found scuttling around the Revier, which she had to boil up and then feed the juices three times a day to patients suffering from swollen legs. The experiment was pointless and dangerous, and when Treite wasn’t looking Zdenka would pour the liquid away and serve up water instead.

Ludwig Ramdohr had developed his own style of terror.

He carried a leather strap, made to his own specifications, which he used to thrash women across the face.

He also forced prisoners to lie stomach down on a table, then with the woman’s head hanging over one edge, he would grab her hair and plunge her head into a bucket of water until she nearly drowned, repeating the action several times. If a woman still refused to talk he might have her fold her hands while pencils were inserted between the fingers. Then he would press down on her hands so hard that the fingers broke, if she didn’t pass out first. He kept his favourite torture devices under lock and key, including a coffin with closing ventilation holes and claws – metal teeth of some kind – that penetrated the body.

Ramdohr’s speciality, however, and surely his most valuable weapon, was his personal network of camp spies.

Maria Mandl, who arrived at Ravensbrück at the start, was appointed chief woman guard at Auschwitz in 1942, taking over from Langefeld, and soon became the most powerful woman in Himmler’s empire. Mandl – the woman overheard by Maria Bielicka in Ravensbrück, ‘lost in a trance’ playing the piano – went on to found the women’s prisoner orchestra at Auschwitz.

we made planes that blew up in the air,’ says Valentina.

It was one of these civilians who taught Valentina to sabotage planes so that they ‘blew up in the air’. He told her he knew how to make a bomber stall in mid-flight by drilling holes in the wings and filling the holes with metal shavings. The wings doubled as fuel tanks, so the shavings would soon clog up the fuel pipes, causing the engine to stall. Valentina then collected metal shavings, found lying around the factory floor, and hid them in a tiny box that she inserted into her vagina until a moment came when she could pass them over to the civilian worker.

Immediately after the war Hermann, like countless other women guards, had escaped arrest and by the 1950s was living safely in East Germany, behind the Iron Curtain. By the early 1960s she must have thought she had got off scot-free, only to be arrested by the Stasi, the East German secret police, who had begun their own Nazi war crimes investigations and trials, fifteen years after the end of the war. Scornful of the paltry number of convictions secured by the West, the East German trials were partly devised to score a Cold War propaganda coup against the ‘fascists’, but also to bring to account some of the thousands of Nazi war criminals who by then were hiding out in the East.

Sippenhaft, whereby Germanic tribes made all clan members answer for the crimes of any one of them.

Since 1942 the removal of useless prisoners for gassing had continued with the ‘black transports’ or Himmelfahrt (‘heaven-bound’) transports in which from time to time lorries had taken away small groups of so-called lunatics as well as other ‘useless’ prisoners, probably to Auschwitz.

Item number eight is headed ‘Vivisection in Ravensbrück’: In the concentration camp for women in Ravensbrück, the Germans are committing new crimes. The women in this camp are being submitted to vivisection experiments and are being operated on like rabbits. The authorities have made lists of all women who had to submit to such operations. It is feared that these records are being kept for the purpose of murdering these women so as to obliterate all traces of their crimes. These fears are substantiated by the fact that the camp is surrounded by trenches and mounted machine guns. At present there are close on 3000 Polish women in the Ravensbrück camp.

For the fate of the women in the concentration camp of Ravensbrück all Germans are responsible: SS officers and doctors of the administration of the camp. The prime responsibility therefore falls on the Commandant of the camp Hauptsturmführer Suhren; his Adjutant, Obersturmführer Bräuning; Kriminalassistent Ramdbehr [sic] and the chief woman guard Binz. All these we are warning solemnly that if any mass murders are committed, or if the vivisection experiments continue, they will be held responsible – they and their families. We have established their identity and we are finding out particulars about their families. May they remember that their days are numbered. We shall find them even if they were to hide under the earth. None of the hired assassins of Ravensbrück will escape justice. We shall wreak such vengeance that future generations will remember it. These crimes shall be avenged with a red-hot iron.

The gulf between theory and reality was as clear to see at the camp in early 1944 as anywhere else in Himmler’s empire. The Reichsführer had ordered death rates reduced to keep good workers alive, but instead the rates were rising and a new crematorium furnace was being built to cope. Himmler’s dietary theories were being confounded at every turn. He had recently issued new rulings on nutrition with a view to improving production. Up to 50 per cent of vegetables added to the prisoners’ soup were to be raw, and added shortly before distribution; the amount of food at midday should be one and a quarter to one and a half litres of soup – not clear but pureed. Himmler had also insisted that the prisoners should have time and ‘calm’ to eat, so that digestion could happen properly. However, as was clear from the camp’s emaciated bodies, the raw root vegetables were wreaking havoc, causing scabies and sores. As for the mealtime calm, so crammed were the blocks by now that there was never room to sit. The Siemens workers marched back from the factory for lunch barely had time to eat at all. Other orders issued by Himmler and designed to improve camp hygiene, and hence production, had also proved futile. Prisoners should have time to wash their hair, supposedly to help prevent lice, but washing of any sort was almost impossible, and anyhow the recycled clothes coming from the gas chambers invariably had lice already breeding in the hems. Coupons were still on offer as an incentive ...

Helmuth von Moltke,

The worst that von Moltke had done was to try to stir Germany’s conscience by campaigning for non-violent resistance and for implementation of the Geneva Conventions in the camps. He had also leaked information on Nazi war crimes to friends in the British Foreign Office, offering to go to any lengths to assist them, but they rebuffed him, asking for deeds not words.

Hitler passed the so-called ‘Night and Fog’ decree in December 1941, and intended it to terrorise and deter resisters in western European countries. In the first years of Nazi occupation, resistance ringleaders were executed, but Hitler thought that created martyrs. Under the NN decree, dangerous resisters were to be sent to concentration camps instead, and executed in secret, their names and whereabouts never to be made known. In this way, Hitler intended that their families and friends would suffer as well, by living in perpetual uncertainty.

we now know, prostitutes played a vital role in resistance work, particularly with escape lines.

Some grieving mothers adopted orphans in the camp and became their ‘camp mothers’, dressing them up in pretty clothes and jewellery, organised from the store.

The POWs were increasingly used as slave labourers, and often found themselves working alongside concentration-camp prisoners in factories. They therefore gleaned a lot from these prisoners, and passed on what they heard to Red Cross delegates who, under the terms of the Geneva Conventions, regularly visited their camps.

In the space of a few weeks between August and October 1944 more than 12,000 Warsaw women and children would be put on the road to Ravensbrück.

Within days of the first births at Ravensbrück, Treite received orders to stop the offerings of extra milk and porridge from the kitchen, so from then on the feeding mothers received only the usual diet of watery cabbage soup and a slice of bread. Very quickly none had any milk to speak of in their breasts and the babies began to starve.

The deliberate starving of babies was a long-established Nazi technique of killing. Baby starvation was first carried out during the euthanasia killings in 1939, when physically or mentally handicapped babies were deliberately left to die. Hermann Pfannmüller, a Nazi doctor and early exponent of infanticide by starvation, stated in 1939 that starving was a ‘simpler and more natural’ way than poison or injection. He devised a method whereby the baby’s food was not suddenly withdrawn, but rations were slowly reduced. This was the means now practised at Ravensbrück: although the mothers had very little milk, they were encouraged to continue to try to feed, even with just a few drops.

The Ravensbrück satellite network had nearly doubled over the past year. By October 1944 the women’s camp was sending slave labour to as many as thirty-three subcamps scattered over a vast area of Germany.

Since the Allied landings in the summer of 1944 the Norwegian cell had been picking up reports that Hitler planned to liquidate the camps.

Corrie ten Boom,

The October order came from the office of Adolf Eichmann, the man sent to Hungary, after the German invasion six months earlier, to implement this last stage of the Final Solution by rounding up the country’s 750,000 Jews and sending them to Auschwitz. Time was pressing: the Red Army was closing in.

Auschwitz reached the zenith of its power, exterminating 400,000 Hungarians in just two months.

The target of 2000 deaths a month at Ravensbrück demanded by Himmler in October 1944 (‘retrospectively’) was tiny compared with the number gassed at Auschwitz, thought today to have been over a million. The setup here was primitive compared with the sophistication of the Birkenau extermination complex.