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

by Sarah Helm

One of the camp’s most important rules had always been that birth was banned. At first, women found to be pregnant were sent elsewhere to have their babies, which were taken from them to be raised in Nazi children’s homes. Later, when numbers of pregnancies rose, abortions were carried out. Any baby born alive was murdered. At the same time everything was done to prevent any chance that the women sent to concentration camps might reproduce.

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 He devised a method whereby the baby’s food was not suddenly withdrawn, but rations were slowly reduced.

Sister Helen, the SS nurse, insisted that a window be left wide open, even in the winter. Hanna Wasilczenko, the mother of Witold Grzegorz, was horrified when she heard that the babies were left alone at night, so she stole the Kinderzimmer key – apparently with Zdenka’s help – and broke in one night to see her baby boy. ‘It was a dreadful sight. At first it was quite dark but when I managed to turn on a light I saw vermin of all sorts jumping on the beds and inside the noses and ears of the babies. Most of the babies were naked because their blankets had come off. They were crying of hunger and cold, and covered in sores.’

In these conditions the babies lived for a few days or perhaps a month. Vitold Georg lived for sixteen days before dying of pneumonia. After thirty days, the first 100 babies born were all dead. ‘They died without crying. They were simply

Castle Hartheim was one of the first euthanasia gassing centres, opened in 1939, and had remained operational as a gassing centre until 1944.*

For the most part, the deaths at Castle Hartheim remained anonymous, as nearly all German records about the castle were destroyed, as well as the camp records about the transports.

By July 1944, 430,000 of Hungary’s 750,000 Jews had already been rounded up and sent to Auschwitz, where all but 100,000 were gassed.

On Himmler’s instruction, Walter Schellenberg, his intelligence chief, agreed a deal in January with a Swiss politician and Nazi sympathiser, Jean-Marie Musy, by which every other month 1200 Jews of an estimated 600,000 still alive in Nazi camps would be transferred to Switzerland in return for 5 million Swiss francs for each transport.

The troops raped and then raped again. ‘An educated German is explaining in broken Russian that his wife has already been raped by ten men today,’ wrote Grossman. A breast-feeding mother spoke of being raped in a barn. ‘Her relatives came and asked her attackers to let her have a break, because the hungry baby was crying the whole time.’ The Soviet troops did not only rape German women. They raped Poles, French and even Soviet women who fell in the frontiviki’s path. These victims were usually young slave labourers, brought here to work in German farms and factories.

1500 women in the camp who were too sick to move, many of whom were close to death. Twenty-two women found at the back of Block 32 were ‘barely more than human remains’,

The original estimate of 90,000 dead was almost certainly too high. A figure of between 40,000 and 50,000 – depending on which deaths are included – is probably as close as it is possible to get to the truth. But does the precise number of dead really matter? Survivors think names are more important than numbers.