If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women (104 page)

Most guards talked not of revenge but of how they were going to get home. Rucksacks were the most wanted items in the camp, and the guards were willing to pay prisoners – who’d been making their own – in bread or potatoes to get their hands on one. They were also keen to bargain for a share of the prisoners’ Red Cross parcels. The food in the staff canteen had been thin pickings of late, and now in the second and third weeks of April thousands of bulging five-kilo food parcels started arriving at the camp from the Canadian Red Cross, full of chocolate and jams, sausage and tinned meat. The parcels were designated for the French, the Jews and the Poles.

But whereas the SS had always felt at liberty to rifle prisoners’ parcels, this seemed no longer to apply. Suhren was suddenly checking receipts, and a negotiation began between prisoners and SS about how the parcel contents should be divided up. The Poles, for example, were told that as long as they signed a receipt saying they had received their parcel, they could each receive one fifth – or else they’d get nothing at all. They debated the offer, and after several hours turned it down. Meanwhile the rabbits were offered an entire five-kilo parcel each, but only because Suhren was trying to buy them off. When they heard their compatriots were being cheated the rabbits refused the parcels entirely. ‘
So that’s what thanks
I get for making sure the rabbits get their parcels,’ Suhren was heard to say. Nevertheless the contents of the parcels found their way to some prisoners. ‘We even stole back the cigarettes the SS had stolen from the parcels, so everyone was walking down the Lagerstrasse busily puffing away,’ said Zofia Sokulska.

On 14 April Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier noted in her diary a conversation in which the
Oberschwester
reprimanded a nurse for stealing butter and chocolate from a prisoner parcel. The next day she noted that Dorothea Binz had shown concern for a Jewish prisoner. The chief guard had asked a Stubova why it was that the Jewish woman looked so pale and sick. ‘The Stubova replied that the women had recently come back from the Youth Camp and now worked every day in the sand, to which Binz replied: “
But that’s a scandal
, to make a woman work in a state like that; she must rest in her block.”’ ‘What a difference the advancing front can make,’ observed Marie-Claude.

Trucks were still returning from subcamps with exhausted prisoners and bodies to be burned. Now rumours spread that charges had been placed all
around the camp. Explosions could already be heard nearby as the SS blew up its installations in the area. Numbers on the Lagerstrasse were fast thinning out. On 15 April Gemma La Guardia Gluck was called to see Fritz Suhren and told she was being freed. On 19 April a group of fifty prisoners – mostly Germans – were rounded up to be shot. Hermine Salvini, the prisoner secretary, filled in the forms and remembers that they were mostly German criminals and asocials, as well as Russians. ‘
One was a woman
with typhus who was brought from the
Revier
and carried on a stretcher. Most of those prisoners had been in the camp for many years.’

A few days later, Hermine herself and 500 privileged German prisoners were marched to the gates and set free. Grete Buber-Neumann was amongst them. Before she left, Grete gave a note to her friend Germaine Tillion, containing a list of dead prisoners, and she asked Germaine to give the list to the Allies if she got out. As Germaine and her friend Anise were both NN, they had not been allowed to go with the 299 French women who left for Switzerland. Nevertheless Grete had hopes that they would get out; she had heard from contacts in the offices that more Red Cross buses were on their way. There was also talk in the offices that a young German officer had entered the camp and an argument had broken out with the commandant in front of the other guards.

The officer seen arguing with Suhren was Franz Göring, Walter Schellenberg’s man. Göring was one of only four people in Himmler’s circle who on the night of 21 April had learned of a third secret meeting between Count Bernadotte and Himmler, during which Himmler agreed to release thousands more Ravensbrück women to the Swedish Red Cross. Straight after the meeting Göring was told to tell Suhren to start organising the releases, but when Göring arrived at the camp, Suhren refused.

The latest meeting between Himmler and Bernadotte had come about after renewed diplomatic contacts between Swedish officials and Himmler’s aides. Outwardly Himmler had continued to display absolute loyalty to Hitler, but those around him were hoping that in these last days he would finally break his bond. With this in mind, Schellenberg had been desperately trying to keep channels open to the West, telling the Swedes once again that the Reichsführer SS would soon be ready to negotiate a separate peace. Schellenberg also kept the Swedes interested by hints of further concessions on prisoners.

Felix Kersten, meanwhile, was telling contacts in Stockholm a similar story, and was even boasting that he had won a written assurance from Himmler that he would stop all future evacuations and put a halt to the death marches. Himmler had given Kersten an assurance – so the masseur claimed – that from now on prisoners in the camps would be kept in place
ready for an ‘
orderly evacuation
’ by the Allies. And he went further: Himmler was even ready to help the Jews. Kersten now made an astonishing proposal. He suggested to the Swedes that a meeting be set up between the Reichsführer and a senior Jewish representative to discuss Jewish releases.

Although Kersten claimed later that the idea of a meeting between Himmler and a Jewish representative was his own, the Swedes understood perfectly well that Kersten would not have seriously suggested it without a strong indication from Himmler that he should. It was therefore taken seriously in Stockholm from the start.

Himmler’s motive in all this was, as always, clear: even now, as the Third Reich crumbled, he still clung to the extraordinary hope that the Allies might see him as a man they could deal with, once the Führer had gone. At this eleventh hour Himmler had a great deal to lose, but by making even more concessions, he still fantasised that he had something to gain. He was therefore manoeuvring more desperately than ever to present a reasonable face, even to the extent of offering to negotiate with a representative of the race he had tried to annihilate.

Talk of such overtures had spread fast from Stockholm to Jewish leaders abroad, who were piling ever greater pressure on Sweden to grab what chance it could to get more people out. The route to the south from Switzerland to Ravensbrück was now cut off, which meant the Swiss could not return, so the French were also pressing the Swedes even harder to take action, particularly after the appalling scenes uncovered at Belsen. The descriptions of dead women at Belsen – many of whom had been taken there from Ravensbrück – were some of the most disturbing. A British medical officer had seen ‘The unclothed bodies of women in a pile 60 to 80 yards long, 30 yards wide and four feet high, within sight of children. Gutters were filled with dead. Men had gone to the gutters to die. Thousands were dying of typhus, TB and dysentery.’ Cannibalism was reported too. ‘There was no flesh on the bodies but the liver, kidneys and heart were cut out.’

For the Allied leadership, these latest horrors had caused great shock. At least a million prisoners were thought to be still alive in Hitler’s concentration camps in April 1945, all threatened with massacre in the last days, and most dying the same horrible deaths already exposed at Belsen and Buchenwald. Nevertheless, apart from limited
commando missions
, no serious attempt to rescue or protect remaining prisoners was considered. The risk to Allied soldiers’ lives was too high and, militarily, a rescue was deemed impossible. Eisenhower’s decision not to move his men beyond the Elbe – taken largely to keep US soldiers out of the final battle – meant the camps were out of reach even for airborne operations.

Nor did the Allies, even after Belsen, consider giving assistance to Bernadotte, and were continuing to
refuse safe passage
to the White Buses. The
hands-off approach to Stockholm was due in part to fears that Stalin would suspect a backroom stitch-up if he heard of Allied dealings with the Swedes, but more important was the need to stay focused on winning the war. On his last visit, Bernadotte himself was fired on by Allied planes and had to dive out of his vehicle into a ditch. For the White Buses on the ground the situation was now doubly dangerous, as the Germans had started to camouflage their vehicles with white paint and red crosses. One White Bus had been strafed by a British fighter, killing a Swede and a Dane.
When the Swedes protested
to the Allies the response in London was that the deaths were ‘unfortunate’, but planes flying at 400 miles per hour couldn’t see the Red Cross markings. ‘It is clear the Swedes don’t understand what modern war is like.’

The Swedish government, however, was not deterred. If offers of more prisoners were to materialise out of the mounting chaos, somebody must be in place to take them, and nobody was better equipped than Bernadotte. A two-pronged strategy was therefore agreed in Stockholm: first, to pursue Kersten’s plan for a meeting between Himmler and a Jewish leader, and second, to send Bernadotte back to Germany to track down Himmler in the burning wreckage of Berlin.

According to Bernadotte’s memoir, he left Stockholm on this occasion intending, for the first time since his mission began, to push Himmler for the release of non-Scandinavians, including non-Scandinavian Jews. How exactly the Swedes decided their priorities for Bernadotte’s mission is not clear from their records, or from Bernadotte’s memoir. However, we do know that Jewish organisations, as well as the French and others, had been piling ever greater pressure on the Swedes to widen their remit.

Bernadotte was heading into a country in total turmoil, where communications were largely severed and the situation on the ground was changing by the hour. Amid these chaotic events it was clear to him that, whatever his brief, his only realistic objective was to find Himmler in the rubble, then roll the dice as best he could and get as many prisoners out as possible. The Russians were days away from Berlin, and this would surely be his last meeting with the Reichsführer SS.

Flying into the German capital was already almost impossible, so Bernadotte took a night train to Malmö, then the ferry to Copenhagen, and made his way down to the Swedish Red Cross base on the Danish–German border. Here he stopped off for a briefing by leaders of his White Bus mission, and heard that all links with the south of Germany were already cut off. On their last trip south to Theresienstadt, on 15 April, the Swedish buses had rescued 450 Danish Jews, but it was touch and go if they would get back, so fast were the fronts closing in. Now all of the 4200 Scandinavians rescued over the past six weeks were to be transported over the Danish border by an
armada of vehicles sent by Denmark ‘Dunkirk-style’, including ninety-four buses, ambulances, motor cycles and trucks, as well as ten ten-ton fish vans.

Once this evacuation was complete the Swedes were planning to pack up and go home, as the possibility of further rescue seemed slim. Even the road east to Ravensbrück would not be open for long.

Bernadotte left at once for Berlin, arriving early on 20 April. There was a lull in the bombing, and as the count was driven to the Swedish legation he found a silent smouldering city. Sheltering in the legation cellars, he made contact with Schellenberg and requested an urgent meeting with Himmler, but Himmler was not to be found. He was in fact at a reception in the Führer’s bunker congratulating Hitler on his birthday, along with Göring and Goebbels and others of the inner circle. Bernadotte waited. There were more air raids. The birthday reception was over, but now Himmler and the others were deep in conference with the Führer, discussing what was to be done when all land routes south were severed, which would happen any hour. Hitler should get out while he still could, said those with him, but still he refused.

Bernadotte, still waiting, received another message from Schellenberg: Himmler would see him that night at Hohenlychen. He took the legation car and headed north. The journey was slow, as refugees fled west and filled the road.

After some two hours Bernadotte passed once again close to Ravensbrück. With the Russian guns now clearly audible, and Katyushas lighting up the sky to the east, it must have occurred to him that the women’s concentration camp was now the most vulnerable of all. He knew that any new concessions to be won from Himmler were likely to centre on Ravensbrück, not least because it was now almost the only camp his White Buses could still reach. Any rescues feasible at Mauthausen or Theresienstadt, both also yet to be overrun, would have to be made by the Swiss, to the south.

But what Bernadotte felt he could achieve, now that he was on his way to see Himmler for the third time, is hard to say: the evidence from Bernadotte himself is contradictory. The fact that during his stopover at the Danish border he had allowed several of his White Bus convoys to start heading home suggests that he did not expect a lot. He said later that he had sensed something significant was coming, but ‘nothing as momentous as what happened’.

At Hohenlychen there was still no Himmler. Instead, Karl Gebhardt again welcomed Bernadotte. The two had dinner, which Bernadotte later described as perfectly convivial, suggesting that even as he wrote (a month after the war) he had no inkling of Gebhardt’s own crimes. After dinner Himmler had still not appeared, so Gebhardt showed Bernadotte around the clinic, which was now packed with wounded soldiers from the eastern front. ‘Professor Gebhardt even invited me to be present as some German soldiers were operated on,’ wrote Bernadotte.

A message then came through that Himmler was even further delayed and would not be there until six in the morning. So with air raids sounding, Bernadotte turned in for the night.

After leaving the Führer’s birthday party, and before seeing Bernadotte at Hohenlychen, Himmler had decided to stop off for another meeting at an estate close to Hohenlychen called Gut Hartzwalde. This was the estate that Himmler had given to Felix Kersten, his masseur. Here Kersten was also waiting to see the Reichsführer and to introduce him to another possible bridge to the Western Allies, a German Jew called Norbert Masur, who was a representative in Sweden of the World Jewish Congress.