If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women (25 page)

Each woman was ordered to strip and walk past him naked. Emmy learned later that he had asked some of them questions: ‘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.

Soon there was a new alarm: prisoners observed that the names of those called out were no longer confined to women on Sonntag’s lists. Healthy women from the Jewish blocks were asked to parade before the commission, among them Käthe Leichter and Olga Benario. Sonntag had never shown an interest in such women. Käthe reported back to Rosa Jochmann:

She said a lot of Jewish women from Block 11 had to stand naked along a 500-metre line before the doctors. But the doctors didn’t really look at them. And there was one doctor who came up to Käthe and said to her: ‘Frau Dr Leichter, what is your qualification?’ and she answered: ‘Philosophy and political economics.’ And the answer from the doctor was: ‘You will need your philosophy.’

Jehovah’s Witnesses came next. Some were taken to the bathhouse straight from beatings on the
Bock
. The commission also started examining women with suspected lung disease from the camp hospital; the Berlin doctors told them they were ‘going away for treatment’. To the horror of the communist group, Lotte Henschel, Tilde Klose and Lina Bertram were told to parade – the same three comrades who had been promised release on the grounds that they had TB. Everyone who was sick seemed at risk of selection.

Clara Rupp, who was working in the
Revier
by that time, was so terrified that she couldn’t sleep. ‘We noticed that anyone sent to the hospital for anything at all was suddenly diagnosed with some genetic disease or perhaps tuberculosis.’ Usually this was a fabrication. ‘In order to get rid of as many people from the camp as possible the authorities raised the number of sick people by any means. We understood at once that this was a fraud, and warned our comrades not to go to the
Revier
.’

Some of the SS nurses seemed to understand too. One said to Clara: ‘“When these transports get rolling the camp will be empty soon.” We asked her what she meant and she replied: “I can’t tell you the truth but I don’t want to lie to you.”’

The asocials sensed a new horror. No longer were black triangles being listed because they had syphilis or gonorrhoea; the selections were being used as a means of random punishment too. For example, those who had agreed
to do beating for Max Koegel were spared selection by the commission, but Else Krug, the Düsseldorf prostitute who had refused Koegel’s order to beat Jehovah’s Witnesses, was now called up. As she paraded naked before Friedrich Mennecke, Koegel’s warning – ‘You’ll have cause to remember me’ – must have rung in Else’s ears.

The first that Mennecke knew of the expanded selection criteria was when, much to his annoyance, his T4 colleague Schmalenbach turned up to muscle in on the job after all. Worse still, he brought another T4 colleague, a Dr Meyer, their presence explained by the new instructions they brought: the number of prisoners to be selected was now 2000 – more than six times Mennecke’s original target of 320. Even Mennecke was taken aback by the new quota, telling Eva: ‘We will have more to do here than was foreseen: about 2000 forms!’

His surprise – astonishment, even – is telling; 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.

From the moment he arrived, the numbers Mennecke was told to target had begun to rise, at first from 259 to 328 – almost certainly on Himmler’s own orders. Calculating that – like his murdering soldiers in Russia – Mennecke would by now be ‘accustomed to his own atrocities’, Himmler then upped the figure to 2000.

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?’

Nevertheless, Mennecke buckled down. He and Schmalenbach and Meyer were quick to get on with the work, starting a competition to see who could fill the most ‘sheets’. Mennecke told Eva, the other two ‘finished only twenty-two forms by 11 a.m. while I myself had done 56 by noon’. At least they could save time by simply waving the Jewish ‘pats’ through. Here too there were new instructions. Not only had the target been raised, but the three doctors had orders from Berlin not to bother with examinations of Jewish prisoners, as Mennecke confirmed at his post-war trial.

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. The court sentenced Mennecke to hang, but he died in his cell. His wife had visited him two days earlier, and it was widely held that she passed her ‘Fritz Pa’ the means to kill himself.

The night before Mennecke left Ravensbrück for his next assignment at Buchenwald he took the time to dine with Dr Sonntag’s wife, Gerda. He wrote to Eva that evening telling her they had enjoyed beef cabbage and potatoes in the officers’ mess. This was followed by a dinner of meat, bread and tea and lastly two pieces of cake in the market café, before bed. Reminding Eva that he was leaving the next day, he said it was up to the camp staff themselves to find the outstanding 1500 ‘pats’. It had not been possible for him to complete the job, not least because Berlin had called Schmalenbach and Meyer away again before the work was done.

The forms already signed by Mennecke had been sent back to Berlin with his notes. Attached were photographs of each prisoner, with scribbled remarks on the back, as if to remind him who was who. A handful of these photographs survived, and the scribbles suggest, contrary to the impression of his letters, that sometimes he did take an interest in the ‘pats’. On one photograph he noted: ‘Anna Sara Jewish, Czech, Marxist functionary, has a ferocious hatred of Germany, had relations with the English ambassador.’ On another: ‘Charlotte Sara born in Breslau, divorced, Jewish, Catholic, nurse, tried to disguise Jewish origins and wears a Catholic cross.’

After the medical commission left Ravensbrück, the prisoners faced other fears. In November 1941 three more Poles were shot, a mother and her two daughters, and four more Polish executions followed in early December. The shots rang out across the camp and soon afterwards the bloodied clothes appeared in the
Effektenkammer
.

Every woman in the camp wondered if she would survive the winter. Those on the outside work gangs found their limbs swollen black with frostbite. In a letter to Carlos in December Olga wrote: ‘I only wish that with the necessary strength of mind and physical condition I will be able to go through the winter that is approaching. The question is only whether this will be my last.’

All news from the front suggested the war was going to go on and on, a prospect that filled everyone with despair. Out east the Red Army was
holding the line at Rostov, Moscow and Stalingrad, and on 7 December America joined the war, following the attack on Pearl Harbor that day by Japan.

The women in the Jewish block already had reason to fear the longer war. 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. For Olga this meant that release to Mexico or anywhere else was now a pipedream.

And yet, despite the despair, the sight of wounded German officers coming back from the front, and the troubled faces of the SS comrades posted to replace them, reminded the prisoners that the tide might at least be turning in the East. Olga still worked on her mini-atlas. Her latest maps showed Stalin pushing the Germans back at Rostov, and at Leningrad. On one page, she had a diagram from a newspaper showing the latest position of forces around Moscow; on the back of the cutting, the death notice for a German soldier was dated 10 December 1941.

Olga’s letters to Carlos at this time were not all pessimistic:

Very often I cannot help laughing when I think of the surprise you will have when you see the woman I have become. But one thing I have learned here is to know the true value of everything that is human, of the heights to which the human soul can raise itself … Do you have any new picture of Anita? She will soon also be able to write to us herself
.

In the same letter, however, Olga admits that the effort of believing in a better future is now often too much for her: she finds herself building ‘castles in the air about our future together’.

By December there was still no news about the fate of those selected by Mennecke, and nothing had been done to choose the extra 1500 prisoners needed for his lists. One reason for the inaction may have been the departure from the camp of Dr Sonntag, who was posted as doctor to the front at Leningrad. In his place came the young woman doctor Herta Oberheuser, presumably too junior for such an important role as selecting for death. But the respite did not last.

A week or so before Christmas the pretence that a camp doctor was necessary to select for the lists was abandoned and Max Koegel was told to produce the names himself. His method was to delegate: he told his Blockovas to do it.

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 told us,’ said 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.”’

Before the commandant stood about twenty women, the camp’s most privileged prisoners, almost all of them beneficiaries of the political takeover of Kapo jobs earlier in the year. They faced an impossible choice. Koegel already had their cooperation, and was evidently confident that with a little subterfuge he could win them over to select for the gas chamber too. Looking on was Johanna Langefeld, with her two trusted
Lagerälteste
, Bertha Teege and Luise Mauer. These two had their own instructions: they were to collect the names from the Blockovas and pass them on to Langefeld, who in turn was told by Koegel that she was in charge.

Precisely how the Blockovas reacted we will never know; survivors among them were the only witnesses, and precisely because they were there, and played a role, they were bound to have to juggle with the truth. Some admitted to handing over names, others rejected the suggestion, and some attempted to justify handing over names on the grounds that it was better they did the selecting than the SS.

Nanda Herbermann, the Catholic writer, and Blockova of the asocials, said she chose ten to twelve sick asocials because she believed at the time that they were truly bound for a sanatorium. Rosemarie von Luenink, a Stubova, said that she and her Blockova refused to select anyone. Minna Rupp, the Swabian communist Blockova who had tormented Grete Buber-Neumann on arrival, also denied handing any prisoners over.

Grete did not deny selecting names – she was Blockova of the Jehovah’s Witnesses at the time – but said she did so on the basis of Koegel’s assurances. ‘An order came down to us to give names of congenital cripples, bed-wetters, amputees, mental defectives and sufferers from asthma and tuberculosis. The SS assured us that they were being transferred to a camp where the work was easier.’ Grete’s statement, however, is uncharacteristically clipped. And it is hard not to wonder why it was, if she really suspected no sinister intentions, that Grete, along with Milena, had been fighting so desperately to have Lotte Henschel taken off the original selection list.

Lotte Henschel was one of the three German communist prisoners who in the early autumn had been promised release because of TB, but who were
subsequently selected by Walter Sonntag. Lotte, whom Grete first met in ‘the Alex’, the Berlin jail, before coming to Ravensbrück, had since grown close to both her and Milena. Milena had befriended Lotte at the
Revier
, where the young German communist also worked, and it was here that Milena observed Lotte falling sick. Knowing at this time that TB patients were being released, Milena devised a ruse to get Lotte out of the camp by swapping Lotte’s sputum sample for one that indicated TB. But the trick had gone horribly wrong, because when Sonntag started compiling the first selection lists he included TB sufferers.

Milena, with Grete’s encouragement, tried in vain to get the decision on Lotte reversed. ‘Milena tortured herself with self-reproach,’ said Grete later. ‘She had more sputum samples made – which of course were negative – and pleaded with Dr Sonntag to have Lotte discharged [from the hospital] given her miraculous recovery.’ Walter Sonntag – just before he was posted to Leningrad – had eventually agreed, and did indeed remove Lotte from the list. ‘Only the fact that Dr Sonntag knew Lotte, who had worked in the
Revier
, saved her from death,’ said Grete, though of course Grete doesn’t tell us whose name was put on the list instead.