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A small proportion of the prisoners – about 10 per cent – were Jewish, but the camp was not formally designated a camp for Jews.
When I asked how she survived she said, ‘Because we believed in victory,’ as if this was something I should have known.
While Langefeld and millions like her struggled, other German women found liberation in the 1920s. With American financial support, the socialist-led Weimar Republic stabilised the country and set out on a new liberal path.
The Jews were not Hitler’s only scapegoats for Germany’s ills: women who had been emancipated during the Weimar years were blamed for taking men’s jobs and corrupting the country’s morals.
In July 1933 the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring was passed, legalising mass sterilisation as a means of eliminating the weak, idle, criminal and insane.
Hitler at once enforced a catch-all edict called ‘preventative detention’ which meant that anyone could be arrested for ‘treason’ and locked up indefinitely.
The sole aim of Hitler’s concentration camps in the early days was to crush all internal German opposition;
Hitler proposed the use of concentration camps as places to intern and then crush his opposition, taking as a model the concentration camps used for mass internment by the British during the South African War of 1899–1902.
By 1936 not only was the political opposition entirely eliminated, but humanitarian bodies and the German churches were all toeing the line.
believed that the cleansing of German blood should begin close to nature, and the invigorating forces of the German forests played a central role in the mythology of the Heimat – German soil. Buchenwald – meaning Beech Forest – was sited in a famous wooded area close to Weimar and several other camps were deliberately located in beauty spots.
As the prisoners stepped down several collapsed, and those that stooped to help them were knocked flat themselves by hounds or lashed with a whip. They didn’t know it yet, but it was a camp rule that helping another was an offence.
The well-rehearsed SS routine had served its purpose – causing maximum terror at the moment of arrival. Anyone who had thought of resisting was from now on subdued.
Ravensbrück survivors would remember the trauma of their arrival; all would recall their own silence.
and the selected women’s hair is shaved off close to the scalp. Then another woman comes through. She makes the same women stand with their legs apart and shaves their pubic hair.
The triangle indicated which category the prisoner had been placed in: black for ‘asocials’ – prostitute, beggar, petty criminal, lesbian; green for habitual criminals; red for political prisoners; lilac for Jehovah’s Witnesses; yellow for Jews.
a total figure of 974 prisoners in the camp. Of these, 114 women wore red triangles (political prisoners); 388 Jehovah’s Witnesses wore lilac; 119 wore green (habitual criminals); 240 wore black (asocials); 137 wore yellow (Jews) and some of the categories overlapped.
folding arms or sitting down in front of prisoners was forbidden, and gossiping a sackable offence.
Goebbels had long ago banned all Tolstoy’s books, along with other seditious works by authors such as Kipling, Hemingway, Remarque and Gide. They were usually either burned or used as lavatory paper,
It was still possible to receive packages from home, including books, and there was even a camp library of sorts – a collection of approved books, including several copies of Mein Kampf. ‘Today I try to have Sunday,’ wrote Doris to her sister in June 1939. ‘I’m reading Beyond the Woods by [Trygve] Gulbrannssen.’
