If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women (113 page)

Dorothea Binz – last seen fleeing Malchow subcamp on a bicycle – was soon picked up, and after some months was taken to a small British prison in the woods near Minden. Approaching the jail, Binz collapsed in fear and had to be carried in. Perhaps she had heard about the fate of her Ravensbrück colleague Irma Grese, a graduate of Auschwitz and Belsen as well as Ravensbrück, who had recently been hanged. Grese uttered one last word to the British hangman, Albert Pierrepoint: ‘
Schnell
.’ Inside the British prison Binz was given some knitting to settle her down.

By the autumn of 1945 the world’s attention was focused on Nuremberg, where the Allies were trying the major Nazi war criminals: Göring, von Ribbentrop, Hess, Speer and the like. These were ‘the grand conspirators’, said Robert H. Jackson, the United States chief prosecutor, ‘men of station and rank who did not soil their own hands with blood, but who knew how to use lesser folk as their tools’. The purpose of the military tribunals at Nuremberg was to expose how the Nazi conspiracy evolved. The ‘grand plan’ was carried out, in Jackson’s words, by ‘achieving one goal then setting out to achieve a more ambitious one’.

As the twenty-four men ‘of station and rank’ were led from the Nuremberg dock, sixteen ‘lesser folk’, seven women and nine men, filed in to the dock of No.
1 War Crimes Court in Hamburg. It was 5 December 1946 and the women’s camp of Ravensbrück was about to come under its own spotlight in the first of six cases prepared by British investigators. Located as it was in the Russian sector of occupied Germany, Ravensbrück should have been tried by the Russians, but Moscow showed no interest. As the British had special knowledge, largely due to Vera Atkins’s search for SOE women, Britain took on the trial.

The backdrop – rubble-strewn streets and bomb craters – was reminiscent of Nuremberg, but the atmosphere at Hamburg was entirely different: less grandiose, more intimate, more feminine.

The female defendants, including three Kapos, were the first to enter the dock; then the men shuffled in and began animated conversations with their lawyers. Each prisoner wore a black number on a white card around his or her neck. Absent were both commandants: Max Koegel had hanged himself with a strip of blanket. Fritz Suhren had escaped from his cell just days before the trial. Others too had disappeared. Nevertheless, those in the dock were representative of the crimes, especially as Johann Schwarzhuber, the gassing specialist trained at Auschwitz, had latterly fallen into British hands. The accused certainly all had a great deal of blood on their hands, though these ‘lesser folk’ did not look like mass murderers.

It would be another fifteen years before the America writer Hannah Arendt coined the phrase ‘the banality of evil’ in her account of the 1961 trial in Jerusalem of Adolf Eichmann, but a writer called Jerrard Tickell, sitting on the Hamburg press bench, identified the same phenomenon here. The women guards in the dock ‘
might have stepped out
of a bread queue in any German city,’ he wrote.

Binz had even taken the trouble to perm her hair for the occasion. Elisabeth Marschall ‘sat bolt upright as if upholstered in granite stays’, said Tickell. More noticeable were the Kapos: Carmen Mory, the Block 10 Blockova, wore a grimace and a red fox fur; Vera Salvequart – ‘Dr Vera’, the Youth Camp ‘nurse’ – had a look of ‘lazy carnality’ and also wore a fur coat,
acquired – it was said – by selling gold teeth
, which she kept in the back of a car given to her by American servicemen while on the run.

The men looked ordinary too. Only Percival Treite stood out; he would have looked ‘more at home in a Harley Street consulting room’, said Tickell, probably a studied pose to underline his English roots.

But it was precisely the ordinariness of the Hamburg defendants that made this drama so shocking. At Nuremberg the court heard about the motivations of the ‘grand conspirators’ but here they learned about local girls called Binz and Bösel who came to work at Ravensbrück then did as they were told.

Asked why she had committed her crimes, Grete Bösel replied: ‘I behaved
decently but then after two weeks I changed and accepted the methods that were generally used.’ When Dorothea Binz was asked why she didn’t tell anyone about the atrocities she witnessed, she responded by saying: ‘There was no point as everyone knew.’ Aged nineteen when she started work at the camp, Dorothea was a blank slate. She learned about life during her six years as a guard at Ravensbrück; the world of the camp seemed – to her – normal.

Nuremberg had heard about ‘crimes against humanity’, whereas here the judges heard about crimes against women, and these would have a particular power to shock – and to revolt. The prosecution lawyers knew this. The junior counsel John da Cunha, aged twenty-three, who had barely begun his legal training, was physically sick when he first read through the Ravensbrück testimony in preparation for the case. ‘I became hardened after a while – coarsened,’ he told me. ‘One does.’

The male judges, though stiff in their military uniforms, were not yet ‘hardened’, so Stephen Stewart, the chief prosecutor, paced his opening speech. ‘In Mecklenburg, about fifty miles north of Berlin, there is a group of lakes to which the gentry of that once great capital used to go for weekends,’ he said, before moving on to speak of ‘nameless things done to women’s bodies’, as if trying to tone down the special horrors that were to come.

It wasn’t long before the ‘nameless things’ were laid bare, but they were hard to describe to those who hadn’t been there. At Nuremberg the court was assisted by films ‘which turned the stomachs of the world’ and by tons of captured Nazi documents. There were almost no photographs at Hamburg, and few documents other than those the women themselves had smuggled out. So the prosecution produced drawings by the prisoner Violette Lecoq ‘to bring home how Ravensbrück must have appeared’; among them was her pen-and-ink sketch ‘Agonies Juives’, showing five women’s bodies slumped in five barrows as Violette had seen them after they collapsed on their way to the Siemens plant. ‘The intelligence of the judges accepts the evidence but their imagination reels from it,’ commented Tony Somerhough, head of the British war crimes unit.

Germaine Tillion would later criticise the trials on the grounds that it was impossible to try the crimes of the ‘abnormal world’ of concentration camps within the confines of a ‘normal’ court. The two worlds were bound to collide because neither judges nor lawyers could possibly comprehend the unprecedented horror of the camps. Only the accused and witnesses understood the ‘abnormal world’, said Germaine, which made them partners in the sharing of this awful knowledge; the rest of the court was in the dark. For example, nobody in the court could possibly imagine what had happened in the
Idiotenstübchen
(idiots’ room), but Loulou Le Porz, Violette Lecoq and Jacqueline Héreil shared this piece of awful knowledge with Carmen Mory,
whom they accused from the witness stand as the former Blockova glared back with venom and fired off notes to her lawyers accusing the ‘French bitches’ of lying. Treite also knew about the
Idiotstübchen
; he had carried out experiments on the brains of the ‘idiots’ to see what made them ‘mad’, apparently unaware of where the real insanity lay.

Johann Schwarzhuber may have had an inkling. On advice from lawyers, he never took the stand, but he often looked up from the dock and tried to catch the eye of John da Cunha. ‘It was as if he wanted me to know he understood somehow.’

It has often been said that the SS and their underlings found it easy to kill in the death camps in Poland because they didn’t get to know their victims, such was the speed and the industrial scale of the murder. But at Ravensbrück, so much smaller, and in existence for such a long time, they often knew the prisoners well.

So personal was Irène Ottelard’s hatred of Dr Treite that on the witness stand Irène – nearly blind – asked for a guiding hand so she could step down and approach the dock in order to look him in the eye. Treite’s refusal to treat her infected leg had meant she was selected for the Youth Camp, ‘where people laid about and died’. Asked how she survived the Youth Camp, she said: ‘I should think it was my destiny, because it was necessary for some witnesses at least of what happened to return to tell the truth. That is why I am alive.’

As there were at Nuremberg, there were accusations at Hamburg of ‘victors’ justice’: only crimes committed against Allied nationals were examined, which left lasting bitterness among German survivors. Nevertheless, the prosecution here achieved a great deal. Within a short time the court collated the single most important body of evidence about Ravensbrück, and established in the clearest terms the simple fact that everything about the camp was designed to kill. Of the total number who passed through the camp – estimated at that time to have been 123,000 – about 90,000 died, the court heard, though this figure would later be disputed. In the end, said Stewart, the camp became ‘an enormous extermination machine’, the ‘most terrible women’s prison in history’.

The hearings also shone light on the courage of the prisoners, not least because much of the evidence the prosecution relied on had been smuggled out of the camp at great risk. At the related Nuremberg medical trials, where Karl Gebhardt and his Hohenlychen team were tried for carrying out medical experiments, the case rested in large part on documents secured in the camp by Zofia Mączka, the Polish radiologist.

But Zofia did more than help convict the guilty. Her most memorable contribution was her impassioned statement aboout the Polish prisoners.
Speaking as if they had emerged victorious from a front-line battle, Zofia said it was ‘their heroism, super-human tenacity and exceptional willpower to survive that were decisive’. The experiments had proved nothing for science, but they had proved something for humanity. ‘The soldiers who have received the Order Virtuti Militari can proudly stand at attention before Maria Kusmierczuk,’ said Zofia. Maria very nearly died when Gebhardt’s doctors infected her with tetanus but fought her way back to life. Gebhardt insisted to the end that the experiments on the Polish rabbits had been dreamt up by Himmler and he was only following orders, but the defence of ‘following orders’ had already been rejected at the main Nuremberg trial. In any case it was clear by now that everyone was following Himmler’s orders – the Reichsführer SS decided on everything that happened in the camps. In case of doubt on this point, the astonishing ‘Order on Flogging’ discovered by the Allies, showing each beating was to be reported direct to the Reichsführer ‘for approval’, gave the proof. Himmler himself, however, never had to answer for his crimes because he swallowed a cyanide capsule shortly after capture.

The Allied Ravensbrück trials continued for two years. In that time Binz, Schwarzhuber, Binder, Ramdohr, Salvequart, Neudeck and Gebhardt were among those executed. When Binz was led to the gallows she gave her pendant to an officer and was reported to have said: ‘I hope you won’t think that we were all evil people.’

Carmen Mory was sentenced to death, at which she fired off more angry letters, this time to the judge – ‘you sly hypocritical British fox’ – then slit her wrist rather than hang. Treite was also sentenced to death. He secured several pleas for clemency, including one from his ‘Queen Mary’ (Mary Lindell) and one from Yvonne Baseden, but all were rejected, at which he too slit his wrists.

By 1948 the Allies had lost their appetite for punishing the Nazis and both the war crimes trials and the process of ‘de-Nazification’ – whereby Nazi supporters were brought to book and denied top jobs – were shut down. There were exceptions. Fritz Suhren was recaptured in 1949 and executed, along with Hans Pflaum, the labour chief, after a further Ravensbrück trial held at Rastatt in France. However, from 1949 the main responsibility for investigating Nazi war crimes was handed to the new German courts.

The reason the Allies cut short their trials was clear: the Cold War was under way, Germany was about to split in two and the new priority was to help West Germany rebuild so it could join in the fight against the communists. Most notable amongst the perpetrators let off the hook were German industrialists. Whatever their complicity with the Nazi horror, or their profits from slave labour, these companies were needed to help the West fight the Cold War.
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.
^*
The only known legal action against a Siemens employee was a de-Nazification case launched in 1946 by the British in Berlin against Wolf-Dietrich von Witzleben, the head of personnel, when he was cleared of past crimes and continuing Nazi links. The case was reopened in 1948 after communist witnesses brought new accusations against Siemens and von Witzleben. In 1949, as the Soviet blockade of Berlin intensified, the accusations were again thrown out – obviously in part because the communists’ motives were not trusted – and the case shut down.

As the trials ended, and the transcripts were locked away in London for thirty years, Allied prosecutors exhorted historians to pick up where they had left off, to make sense of the Nazi crimes. But history soon forgot Ravensbrück.

Survivors found that nobody back home wanted to hear about the camp; there were many reasons. In London, the Special Operations Executive was wound up amid evidence of bungling and betrayal, which had contributed to the capture of the SOE women taken to Ravensbrück. To close the scandal down, SOE veterans were told never to speak of their wartime work again, which meant no talk of the camps.

Those British women who had volunteered for resistance work while in France found no interest in their stories either. The governess Mary O’Shaughnessy, who had survived the Youth Camp, hoped to write a book about what she’d witnessed, but was told by a friend in Fleet Street that the British public would not want to read it.

Returning to her home in Stavanger, on Norway’s west coast, Nelly Langholm tried to tell her family and friends about her experiences, ‘but my sister took me aside and told me not to talk like that again as people thought I’d gone mad’.