If This Is A Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women

by Sarah Helm

The place of death provided was always Ravensbrück. The date would vary but was always in the future – in other words, several weeks after the women had been taken away.

The prisoner secretaries also prepared letters to be sent to next of kin, notifying them of the death and giving the false reasons, the false date and the false place of death. They also told the next of kin they could receive their loved one’s ashes back in an urn in return for a small payment;

Ravensbrück officials often had no idea who to inform about asocials, as the addresses of relatives were usually unknown. If they were Jews, the entire family would probably by now have been deported. But the rule said next of kin must be notified, so letters and personal effects were sent to local police forces, who were told to pass them on.

It was almost certainly Himmler himself who ordered SS officials never to use the secret 14f13 code on any Ravensbrück correspondence; given the particular sensitivity over gassing women, the Reichsführer wanted secrecy increased.

By early summer the screams in the night ceased, as the transports came to a halt, but the prisoners were still none the wiser about where or how the women were killed. Throughout the rest of the war, many in Ravensbrück continued to believe the rumours that the transportees of 1942 had been killed in a hospital or sanatorium at Buch, near Berlin.

When Hitler reorganised his euthanasia programme after the Church protests in the summer of 1941, two gassing centres closed, but two new ones soon opened. One of these was located in a former sanatorium in Bernburg, a pretty German town south of Berlin, on the banks of the River Saale. During the war there had been no cause for the Ravensbrück prisoners to think of Bernburg, or any other ‘euthanasia’ centre, as a possible destination; afterwards, when the story of the T4 programme began to emerge in the Nuremberg medical trials and elsewhere, the connection was made. Evidence came out that in 1940 Bernburg’s sanatorium was fitted with a gas chamber, disguised as a shower room. In this room, which measured 14 square metres, more than 8000 people were gassed. Adjoining the gas chamber was a crematorium with two ovens, a dissecting room and a mortuary.

The victims arrived in big grey buses, but sometimes they came by train. Nurses led them to a room where they were asked to undress and examined; any with unusual physical or mental features were marked on the back with a red cross. In groups of up to 100, the victims were led to the shower room. Here they waited for water to come out, but instead gas poured out of the showerheads and they died, usually after a long and painful struggle. Once dead, the bodies with the red crosses were dissected in the mortuary.

The group, mostly members of the ‘VVN’ (Victims of Fascism)

A glance at a map showed that Dessau was the stop before Bernburg, so the VVN women wrote to the mayor’s office in Bernburg to ask for any evidence that prisoners from Ravensbrück had been gassed there too. The office replied that all documents relating to the gassing had been destroyed before the end of the war.

Over time the Ravensbrück survivors learned more about Bernburg. In another trial, one of the Bernburg doctors revealed that women were gassed there as well as men. ‘When the female prisoners arrived they were already undressed,’ he said. ‘From our room we took them directly to what was called the shower room, where they were put to sleep with carbon monoxide.’

Guards were forbidden to ask such questions, but Pietsch persisted. ‘I learned that the new camp was the camp of Bernsdorf in the region of the Halle. They gassed people there.’

the VVN survivors’ organisation asking

The Warsaw–Lublin women were given numbers from 7521 to 7935.

Goldstücke as a category. The guards had another name for them: Schmuckstücke, by which they meant useless, dirty ‘pieces’.* In fact these prisoners were simply the poorest of the poor in the camp. Denise Dufournier, a French prisoner who arrived in 1944, described the Schmuckstücke as ‘the most wretched, dirty, and ragged’. Always holding out empty mess tins, ‘they resembled the poor of every country in the world’.

By the winter of 1941 everyone in Ravensbrück knew that babies were being aborted in the Revier. The rules were that babies must not be born here. In the early days those arriving pregnant were so few that they were simply sent off to give birth in a hospital at Templin, a nearby town. Two years later, however, the number of pregnant women had multiplied, due almost entirely to the arrival in Germany of thousands of Polish slave labourers.

On 3 March 1942 Heinrich Himmler paid another visit to Ravensbrück.

So it was in order to recruit women guards for Auschwitz in time for the first Jewish arrivals that Himmler visited Ravensbrück on 3 March 1942. He told Koegel that he expected him to supply the entire corps of guards for the new Auschwitz women’s section.

They had to be ready by 26 March, just three weeks’ time, so that they were in position by the time the Slovakian transport was due to arrive.

as nobody at Auschwitz had any experience of guarding women, 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 th...

In the early hours of 26 March she set off again by train, this time taking with her 1000 prisoners to work as Kapos and a small troop of women guards. 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. Margot Drechsel took a leading role in the round-ups for the Bernburg gas chambers and Elfriede Vollrath, a Fürstenberg woman, was known as a beater, as was twenty-three-year-old Elisabeth Volkenrath.

Though little is known about the way the Ravensbrück women were chosen for their work at Auschwitz, we know a great deal about what happened when they arrived, largely thanks to Bertha Teege and Luise Mauer, who both left vivid accounts.

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 outcome was that more and more Ravensbrück women, along with prisoners in all concentration camps, were to be deployed as slave labourers making military equipment, clothes and arms. With this new priority in mind, Himmler had toured the workshops in March and flown into a fury on discovering that the women harnessed to the weaving treadmill were still only working an eight-hour shift. Eleven-hour shifts were introduced, as well as night shifts in the sewing workshops and stringent production quotas.

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.

Within a week of Himmler’s March 1942 visit to the camp, Oswald Pohl, his economic chief, wrote to Siemens promising 6000 women workers from the camp. Work on building the plant was to start in early summer.

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’.

Later it was learned that some of them simply had the words ‘Fanatical patriot, not to be returned to Poland’ written on their files.

‘On March 14th all the women who had had operations gathered before the Oberaufseherin, demanding an explanation as to what grounds there were for performing operations on political prisoners, and whether they were envisaged in special sentences.’ It

Ravensbrück, designed originally for 3000, now held 18,000 women, and more were arriving every day.

Lethal injection had continued in the Revier. After the big transports which took women to their deaths at Bernburg in early 1942, smaller selections were held from time to time; trucks came in the night and took away up to fifty women for gassing, probably at Auschwitz. Details of these smaller death transports, which became know as black transports – or Himmelfahrt (‘heaven-bound’) transports – are sparse, but Gerhard Schiedlausky, the camp doctor, revealed at the Hamburg trial a little of how they worked. The black transports were disguised as ‘euthanasia’ under the same 14f13 order that governed the Bernburg gassings. The camp doctors gave a medical report on those selected, he said, and the prisoners themselves were required to take an intelligence test to see if they were ‘mad’ or not.

The appearance of the Meister on the Appellplatz in the first half of 1943 heralded probably the most significant change in the daily life of the camp since it opened four years earlier. From now on prisoners might be ordered to line up outside at any time and driven off to destinations unknown. Women returning from their daily work gangs to their blocks would find that friends, sisters, mothers and daughters had vanished from the camp, often never heard of again.

Yet 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.

On 27 April 1943 Himmler issued a further instruction calling for a reduction in death rates; in future only the mad should be killed, or, as his order read, ‘… only those suffering from mental illness must be selected by the medical commission in the context of the operation 14f13.

perhaps as a result of Himmler’s April order that only the insane should in future be selected for death – or, as he put it, ‘selected in the context of operation 14f13’ – that Treite had decided to set aside a special room for the ‘mad’. Perhaps it was also part of Treite’s attempt at reorganisation, given the growing number of ‘idiots’. When, periodically, trucks came secretly to take them away, it was practical to have all the women in one place.

As part of their contracts, the factory managers insisted that the SS provide not only healthy workers but reliable ones too.

Nobody believed her: the word from Ravensbrück was that when the sick got back they were sent off again to be gassed at Auschwitz or some other place.

In the concentration camp for women in Ravensbrück, from July 1942 to July 1943 the German doctors, under Professor Gebhardt, were forcibly performing experiments on Polish women, namely surgical operations on legs, muscles and bones, as well as infecting with tuberculosis, tetanus and gas gangrene.’ The message states that there were seventy-seven victims, of whom five had already died.

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. Block

‘She pointed at the sick women saying, “This one, this one, that one.” She looked at me covered with sores and turned away in disgust, but she pointed at Irenka’s bunk and said, “That one,” then she left.’ The Blockova explained to those chosen that they’d be sent to a convalescent camp. ‘You won’t have to work any more.’ A covered truck came that night. ‘The little tubercular Russians, the lame Irenka and quite a number of others were loaded up.

Krysia wrote home on 28 January announcing that ‘Transports of the sick are being organised, their destination is most probably the gas chambers.’

Carl Burckhardt, a long-time friend of the countess’s, who was even, according to some, the love of his life. Given

Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier, a prisoner at both Auschwitz and Ravensbrück, described the extermination programme at Ravensbrück as ‘the systematic and implacable urge to use human beings as slaves and to kill them when they could work no more’.

Not a single member of the Siemens board, or the Ravensbrück Siemens staff, was ever charged with war crimes at Ravensbrück or anywhere else where they used slave labour.*

Grete Buber-Neumann

But just as Auschwitz was the capital of the crime against Jews, so Ravensbrück was the capital of the crime against women. Deep in our collective memory, throughout literature of every period and every country, atrocities against women have always horrified. By treating the crime that happened here as marginal, history commits a further crime against the Ravensbrück women, and against the female sex.

The author of the ‘Memory Book’, Bärbel Schindler-Saefkow, also believes that names matter more than numbers. Her Gedenkbuch now contains 13,161 names, but a lack of funding has stopped her research.