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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Sarah Helm
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November 7 - November 20, 2021
In the final days, every prisoner’s file was burned in the crematorium or on bonfires, along with the bodies. The ashes were thrown in the lake.
the first Ravensbrück war crimes trials, which opened in Hamburg in 1946.
Evidence was hard to access. Transcripts of the Hamburg trials were classified ‘secret’ and closed for thirty years.
A book about Irma Grese, one of the early Ravensbrück guards, was titled The Beautiful Beast.
section opened at Auschwitz – and later at other male camps – and Ravensbrück provided and trained the women guards. Later in the war several senior SS men from Auschwitz were sent to work at Ravensbrück. Prisoners were also sent back and forth between the two camps.
The biggest and most monstrous were those constructed in 1942, under the terms of the Final Solution.
Johanna Langefeld, the former head guard at Ravensbrück.”
27 February 1933, as Hitler was still struggling to underpin his party’s power, the German parliament, the Reichstag, was set on fire. Communists were blamed, although many suspected the blaze was started by Nazi thugs as a pretext to terrorise every political opponent in the country. Hitler at once enforced a catch-all edict called ‘preventative detention’ which meant that anyone could be arrested for ‘treason’ and locked up indefinitely.
Rudolf Höss, another early recruit, who went on to become commandant of Auschwitz
Olga Benario. The leggy girl from Munich
From Hamburg docks, Olga was taken to Berlin’s Barnimstrasse jail, where she gave birth to a girl, Anita,
In 1938 scores of prostitutes arrived.
It soon turned out, however, that the raid of 30 July
Asoziale’, ‘asocial’,
The raids on Düsseldorf brothels were repeated across Germany throughout 1938, as the Nazi purge against its own unwanted underclasses entered a new stage. A programme called ‘Aktion Arbeitsscheu Reich’ (Action Against the Workshy) had been launched, targeting all those considered social outcasts. Largely unnoticed by the outside world, and unreported within Germany, more than 20,000 so-called ‘asocials’ – ‘vagabonds, prostitutes, work-shy, beggars and thieves’ – were rounded up and earmarked for concentration camps. In mid-1938 war was still a year away, but Germany’s war against its own
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In 1937 thousands of ‘habitual criminals’ were sent to concentration camps, with no legal process. Hitler authorised the measures, but the instigator of the crackdown was his police chief and head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler. It was also Himmler who in 1938 called for all ‘asocials’ to be locked in concentration camps.
By bringing these degenerates inside his camps he had begun to secure a central role for himself in the Führer’s most ambitious experiment, which aimed to cleanse the German gene pool. Moreover the new prisoners would provide a ready pool of labour for rebuilding the Reich.
As the number of German political prisoners decreased, social rejects would pour in to replace them. Among those swept up for the first time, there were bound to be as many women – prostitutes, petty criminals, down-and-outs – as men. A
Some time in 1938 he called his advisers together to discuss a possible site. A proposal was made, probably by Himmler’s friend Gruppenführer Oswald Pohl, a senior SS administrator, that the new camp be built in the Mecklenburg lake district, close to a village called Ravensbrück.
Himmler therefore ordered male prisoners from the concentration camp of Sachsenhausen, on the edge of Berlin, to start building at Ravensbrück as soon as possible. Meanwhile the male concentration camp at Lichtenburg, near Torgau, which was already half empty, was to be cleared and the rest of the men there taken to the new men’s camp of Buchenwald, opened in July 1937. Women earmarked for the new women’s camp could be held at Lichtenburg while Ravensbrück was built.
Arriving now at Lichtenburg was Gertrud Kröffges, a woman Langefeld probably even remembered from the workhouse. Kröffges had first been imprisoned at Brauweiler for failing to keep up payments to support her children. Now she had been sent on to Lichtenburg because she was ‘incapable of improvement’, as her police report noted, and because ‘due to her immoral and asocial way of life, the Volksgemeinschaft [the racially pure community] must be protected from her’. Even
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.
From now on each arrival was given a number in sequence, so it would always be clear to guards and other prisoners alike, simply from a prisoner’s number, who had been longest in the camp and who had just arrived.
The first prisoner to be given a ‘pure’ Ravensbrück number (i.e. she was not transferred from Lichtenburg) was a thirty-seven-year-old German teacher arrested for communist resistance, called Clara Rupp. She arrived on 25 May and had the number 1415.
On Sundays prisoners also read letters from home and wrote back. A letter was allowed once a month, and in these pre-war days as long as no mention was made of politics or the camp the women could still write at length.
German survivors’ body, the communist-run Vereinigung der Verfolgten des Naziregimes (VVN: Organisation for the Victims of Fascism),
At the camp inspectorate the code ‘14f’ was used to denote prisoners who died in the camps. Under subdivisions ‘14f14’ meant executions and ‘14f8’ suicides. The new ‘14f13’ denoted death by gassing. The adapted 14f13 programme had been launched in spring with a trial run at the male camp of Sachsenhausen, right next to Himmler’s Oranienburg inspectorate.
In the early autumn of 1941 he authorised the resumption of selections at concentration camps under the new 14f13 killing plan, and Ravensbrück was to be included.
He arrived at the camp amid great secrecy, but we know that the date was 19 November 1941, because it is the date of his first letter to his wife, sent from Fürstenberg. He’d travelled by train, there were fleas in his hotel bed, the walk to the camp was a long one, and it was foggy. Friedrich
An official Nazi document dated 10 December 1941, one of the few 14f13 papers to survive, contains instructions to SS commandants about how and when selections for gassings are to proceed. It is addressed to the commandants at Dachau, Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, Mauthausen, Auschwitz, Flossenbürg, Gross-Rosen, Neuengamme and Niederhagen. The letter states that ‘medical commissioners will shortly visit the above-named camps for the purpose of examining prisoners’; further visits would take place during the first half of January 1942.
Dr Friedrich Mennecke
‘This will take about fourteen days, because in a KZ you can finish 70–80 a day,’ he tells Eva, referring to the remarkable speed with which gassing victims could be selected at the camps, as compared with the hospitals and asylums where he has worked before.
On Thursday 21 November, Mennecke starts his first day’s work at Ravensbrück. The same obsessive details pour out to Eva as he writes a timed running commentary: ‘I’m sitting down for lunch of lentil soup with bacon, omelette for dessert.’ In this letter we learn a little more about his work. He has had a meeting with the SS doctor Sonntag and SS Sturmbannführer Koegel, in which ‘it became clear that the number of people in question [i.e. to be killed] needed to be expanded by another sixty or seventy’.
All he has to do is fill in boxes on the forms: ‘The headings on the forms are already typed and I just have to fill in the diagnoses, main symptoms and so on.’
‘For example, to the Jews, he said: “Are you married?” and “Do you have children from this union?” etc.’ Another Schreibstube secretary, Maria Adamska, heard that the women had to parade naked in front of the commission at a distance of perhaps seven yards. There was no real medical examination. According to Emmy the women with syphilis and the prostitutes were in the first group. Others said it was all those with genetic defects and the incurably sick amongst the Jews who went first. All agreed that the first women to be called were those on Sonntag’s lists.
Jehovah’s Witnesses came next.
Everyone who was sick seemed at risk of selection.
after two years as a loyal cog in the T4 machine even Mennecke could see that he was being taken for a ride. Throughout the ‘euthanasia’ gassing programme he had dutifully made his diagnoses of lives not worth living according to the criteria, but those criteria had changed. Not only had he been shifted to select concentration camp prisoners, instead of the handicapped in sanatoria that he was used to, but the guidelines stating which prisoners to choose were now being expanded every few days.
Given that there were 6544 prisoners in the camp at the time, the new target meant that nearly one third of Ravensbrück women were to be ‘mercifully killed’. Mennecke now saw that his diagnoses were a waste of time: the numbers were fixed in Berlin, and this annoyed him. Berlin didn’t care how the ‘sheets’ were chosen, he moaned to Eva. It was ‘chaos’, he complained. ‘Who is in charge in Berlin?’
Charged in 1947 at the Nuremberg Medical Trials, held in Frankfurt, Mennecke gave evidence that was almost as frank as his missives to his wife. He detailed, for example, how in November 1941 he was suddenly instructed to select prisoners on ‘political and racial grounds’ in addition to the ‘medical’ grounds invoked for ‘mercy killing’. From that moment on Jews were not medically examined but just added to the selection list for being Jews.
In October 1941 Hitler had ordered the deportation of all German Jews; trains for the East were leaving from Hamburg and Berlin. Letters to Jewish prisoners talked of whole families disappearing. And with news of the Jewish deportations came the announcement that no more German Jews could emigrate, sponsored or not.
Koegel took the unprecedented step of gathering the Blockovas together to announce what was to happen. Rosa Jochmann described the occasion as ‘an Appell for Blockovas’. It was certainly an unusual event – perhaps unique – and it caused considerable foreboding, which quickly changed to disbelief and horror when the women understood what he was telling them to do. ‘Koegel
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.”’
In December 1941, however, a new registry called ‘Ravensbrück 11’ was created and came under the direct orders of the commandant. Maria Adamska observed later that the registry was created at precisely the time that the order came to produce new lists of sick and disabled.
On 5 January 1942 news that the medical commission was back at Ravensbrück sent a stir through the camp. Fritzi recalls that soon after her arrival people started saying something dreadful was going to happen, ‘but nobody knew what’.
On the evening of Tuesday 3 February, the prisoners stood for Appell, but there was little doubt that the departure of the Sondertransport was imminent. By lights out, many expected it to leave the very next day. When the prisoners had been counted at Appell, the list of names was returned to the office and given to Zimmer as usual, but instead of giving the list to one of the clerks to read out for typing, she read out the names herself.
this is an extermination transport [Vernichtungstransport].”’
Koegel’s orders to the prisoner secretaries that night were simply to write Sondertransport (special transport) or Sonderbehandlung (special treatment) on the files of those who had left; or, in some cases, just ‘transferred to another camp’. The
when the clothes returned, the camp staff could see that it was ‘a transport of “candidates for death” [Todeskandidaten]’,
Now everyone saw that the Sondertransport of 4 February was only the start.
