If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women (26 page)

The Lotte Henschel story later had a further twist. According to Lotte herself, it was probably Gerda Sonntag, Sonntag’s wife, who was really decisive in saving her life. Lotte had worked in the
Revier
when Gerda Weyand was still employed as an SS doctor, before she married Walter Sonntag. At that time Gerda was considered decent and had been friendly with Lotte.

After the war Gerda, like her husband, faced war crimes charges, particularly in relation to the death transports, and in her defence denied all knowledge of them. Lotte gave evidence against Gerda, even though she’d saved her. The fact that Gerda had helped take her off the selection list, said Lotte, was evidence that she knew the truth about the transports. Furthermore, ‘If she [Gerda Weyand/Sonntag] had really objected to the crime she would not just have saved me, she would have saved the others’ – a reference to the other two communists with TB who were to have been released, Tilde Klose and Lina Bertram. ‘And she would have left the camp and left her husband. But she didn’t. She stayed there and supported him.’

Lotte Henschel’s case is not the only evidence that the Blockovas knew – or had good reason to know – that selection for the lists meant death. Even more damning is the testimony of prisoner secretaries, responsible for the death registers and other paperwork. The highly educated Polish countess Maria Adamska was valued enough by the authorities to be given the post of secretary in the camp’s political office, which was responsible for registering all camp deaths.

Until the end of 1941 there had been no need for the camp to have its own registry. Deaths were recorded in the tiny public registry at Ravensbrück village hall. 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.

Another secretary, an Austrian inmate called Hermine Salvini, produced even more evidence of what was coming. Hermine, who worked in the camp’s ‘welfare department’, dealt with the prisoners’ correspondence with next of kin. At the time the lists were compiled she was asked to draw up hundreds of forms giving false reasons for cause of death. According to Rosa Jochmann, Hermine told the other Blockovas what she had been told to do. ‘She told us that in the offices they had been told to make 1500 copies of a form with the following words: “You are herewith informed that ‘blank’ has died at Ravensbrück as a result of a blood clot.”’

Rosa was one of those who said later that she knew from the start that Koegel was lying about the sanatorium, and she discussed what to do with others. ‘We understood that the situation was very serious. I talked about it with my political friends and we decided not to select anyone.’ Though she doesn’t say who the ‘political friends’ were it seems probable that Rosa would have talked it over with Käthe Leichter, just as she talked over everything else. After all, it was her old friend from Vienna, with whom she’d fought so many campaigns for women’s rights, who had first told Rosa to take the job of Blockova, as she could ‘do some good’, even as an arm of the SS. To Käthe, called already to parade before the ‘medical committee’, the situation two years on must have looked very different. Rosa went to Langefeld and told her she wouldn’t select. ‘Langefeld said nothing,’ said Rosa. ‘She seemed to understand.’

Bertha Teege and Luise Mauer also made statements after the war claiming to have refused the orders, though of all the group, the testimony of the two
Lagerälteste
is perhaps the most contradictory. In one statement Luise explained that she and Bertha ‘were instructed to register all prisoners unable to work’, which implies that their job was to supplement the lists supplied by the Blockovas with their own selections. Luise says in a further statement that she and Bertha were ‘relieved of the duty and that Langefeld agreed they would not be punished if they refused’.

On another occasion, however, Luise gives a more ambiguous account. She says that she and Bertha first consulted with the other Blockovas and went to Langefeld to ask to be released from the duty. This time, says Luise, ‘Frau Langefeld was angered by our refusal and threatened to punish us unless we got on with it.’

Bertha Teege says nothing on the subject of making lists, but she says elsewhere that she was looking forward to being released from the camp in January, when Himmler was expected to make a further visit. Teege’s predecessor as
Lagerälteste
had been released a year earlier, and she had taken the job expecting to be released ‘just as Babette Widmann was’. In any event, the lists were certainly made, whether by the Kapos, the guards, or probably both, but by Christmas there was still no sign of Mennecke.

Christmas 1941 was remembered for the bitter wind that howled around the camp, and an exceptionally hard frost, but there was no snow. During the Christmas Eve night shift in the sewing shop the guard on duty allowed each national group to sing a carol, and the Germans started with ‘Stille Nacht’. At first the Poles refused to join in, then they changed their minds and sang, but as they reached the words ‘
Take my hand
, O Christ child’, tears broke their song and they had to stop.

On the way back to their blocks, the Christmas Eve night workers passed a Christmas tree erected by the guards on the Lagerstrasse; it even had candles. And in the SS houses Hanna Sturm, the Austrian carpenter, was putting up Christmas trees for the officers and their families. That night prisoners passed out tiny gifts to each other. Some had made stars and mangers out of straw. Olga’s Christmas gift to Maria Wiedmaier was her miniature atlas.

Chapter 9

Bernburg

I
n early January 1942 snow fell almost constantly, lying six inches thick on the roofs of the blocks, but the skies cleared on the day that Fritzi Jaroslavsky arrived. She had travelled alone by train from Vienna, with just a single male guard. Fritzi was cheered by the blue skies. Just seventeen, she had spent twelve months in a Gestapo jail for helping her father’s resistance cell.

In the New Year of 1942 more and more foreign resistance prisoners started to arrive at the camp, following a new German drive to root out insurgents in countries seized by the Reich. Fritzi’s father, Eduard Jaroslavsky, a social democrat and factory worker, was one of thousands of Austrians who, three years after the
Anschluss
, were still operating underground. Fritzi took helping for granted. Many friends were doing the same. Her role was ‘
very ordinary
– nothing’. She collected secret messages from a launderette near the office where she worked as a secretary; the launderette served as a ‘letter box’ where messages arrived for her father’s cell. ‘The manageress called me up from time to time and said, “Your washing is ready,” and I knew that a message had come and I was to go and collect it. I’d take it to my father.’

Early in January 1941 the Gestapo arrested the manageress and seized her laundry phone book, with names of the entire cell. Fritzi spent the next year in a Viennese jail. In June 1941 her mother visited her, and broke the news that her father had been guillotined in Berlin. ‘My mother was asked if she wanted his ashes back and told she’d have to pay. She didn’t have the money.’

The guard who accompanied Fritzi on the train from Vienna to Ravensbrück told her he had also accompanied her father when he was taken
for execution. He was nevertheless quite kind to Fritzi, reassuring her that there was nothing to fear where she was going; she would probably work in the fields. At first, the camp seemed no more horrifying than the Gestapo prison. Much to her astonishment, other Austrians were ready to welcome her. They’d known she was coming: prisoners working in the
Schreibstube
had spotted a teleprinter message from Gestapo HQ in Vienna, and the news had been passed to Rosa Jochmann.

The communist network learned of her arrival too – fresh from the Austrian capital, Fritzi was a potential source of information – so Olga Benario herself, with Maria Wiedmaier, came to find her in the admissions block. ‘I was told two important prisoners wished to speak to me,’ said Fritzi, talking in her apartment in Vienna. A youngster in the camp, at eighty-five she remains a youngster today by survivors’ standards. ‘I was told to go outside, as they wanted to talk to me on the Lagerstrasse. I was led out and saw two figures standing by the edge of a block. It was quite possible to talk but we took care nobody could hear. They asked if I had news from Austria.’

Fritzi’s memory of Olga and Maria at work, gathering information, gives a rare glimpse of how these former Soviet intelligence agents – Jew and non-Jew – were working together, still trying to use their skills. ‘They made an impression on me,’ she said. ‘They seemed to know a lot, and it was clear they’d been there a long time. I was in awe of them of course. I was very young.’

‘How did they look?’

‘One of them smiled and told me I had friends here. I think that was Olga. But mostly they wanted to hear what I knew, and it wasn’t much. You see I’d been in prison for twelve months.’

Even so, Fritzi was able to talk of the underground arrests, and of the Jewish deportations from Austria, which she heard about in jail. On the train she’d heard passengers talk about the Allied bombing raids in the Ruhr and the Russian fight-back outside Moscow. ‘And I told them about my father’s work and what had happened to him. It was nice for me. I had the impression they would look after me.’

A few days later, Rosa Jochmann fixed for Fritzi to move to Block 1, sleeping right above Rosa herself. Fritzi knew she was lucky to be out of the admissions block, where there were ‘women of all sorts’, but here in Block 1 she found women who understood each other. They could talk about people at home. ‘It was more like living with friends. It was easy to tell who was who in the camp. Those from other blocks didn’t look as clean or as well fed as us in Block One.’

Rosa was able to organise all sorts of things for the prisoners; they even had coal sometimes to burn in their stove. For Fritzi she fixed a job in the
Schreibstube
. ‘I suppose she mothered me in a way. Yes, she always took an interest in the young ones.’ Everyone in Block 1 behaved and nobody stole, although once a woman was caught stealing bread from a cupboard and someone informed a guard. ‘The girl was given twenty-five lashes and sent to the bunker, where she died.’

When they took their black coffee in the morning or their soup in the evening it was Rosa who served it in the day room. ‘She let us talk quietly,’ said Fritzi. ‘About the day’s work, or the news from home.’ Some of the German women had husbands or brothers at the front and some had lost family or friends in the recent bombing.

Fritzi’s table head was Anni Wamser, another German communist, who had the job of dividing the bread and putting it on the prisoners’ shelves. Maria Wiedmaier was on the table too, and so was Rosa’s German friend Cäzilie Helten – Cilli for short. Rosa and Cilli were rarely apart in the camp, said Fritzi, and they lived together openly as a lesbian couple in Vienna after the war.

Through Rosa, Fritzi soon met up with Austrians from other blocks. Frau Lange was the wife of a man who had worked in her father’s underground cell. She was Jewish, though she’d been arrested for resistance. Fritzi would see her on the Lagerstrasse and they talked a little. ‘Everyone was desperate for any news about the outside world, but if anyone asked about my father I’d start to cry.’

A Tyrolean woman, Fini Schneider, about thirty years old and also Jewish, took Fritzi under her wing. Fritzi looks back fondly on the friendships she formed in those first weeks: they were the ‘Austrian family’. She often saw Rosa Jochmann walking nearby with Käthe Leichter, ‘talking intently’.

Himmler visited the camp about this time, which Fritzi remembered because a rumour went around that the Reichsführer offered to release Rosa but Rosa refused to go. ‘We heard she’d told him she was needed in the camp and didn’t want to leave.’ I asked if Fritzi thought that was true.

‘It could be true. But people didn’t like to talk about it.’

Bertha Teege, the
Lagerälteste
, had eagerly awaited Himmler’s January visit, hoping to be released. ‘The political women were nervous, wondering who would be lucky this time,’ she recalled. But the ‘Reichsheini’, as Bertha called Himmler, ‘was in a bad mood’. First he was enraged by an unshaven SS man, then he erupted in a fury about the slow rate of output in the sewing shops. Before he left, Himmler visited Block 1 and engaged in ‘short banter’ with Rosa Jochmann – ‘“Why are you here? You’d better reform” – and that was it, he was gone without releasing anyone.’

There is no mention in Himmler’s diary of the January visit, though a diary note mentions a phone call from Max Koegel: ‘
Tuesday 13 Jan
1942,
at 12 noon, SS-Stubaf [Sturmbannführer] Kögel telephoned Himmler to say the Jehovah’s Witnesses had mutinied again. The women refused to do war work, so given 25 and 50 lashes. Sleep by open windows without mattresses or bedclothes, punished by withdrawal of food.’ This protest marked a new phase of protest by a breakaway group of ‘extreme Jehovahs’, as they became known because they interpreted any task at all as war work. In this case they refused to unload straw: the straw was for the horses, the horses served the Wehrmacht, and the Wehrmacht was fighting the war.

However, the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ protest alone would certainly not have brought Himmler back to Ravensbrück. During the first week of January 1942 he was in Russia again, and on his return to Germany he had much to do. He was involved in the issue of the ‘Final Solution of the Jewish question’, which was to be discussed at an urgent meeting, to be chaired by Reinhard Heydrich, at Wannsee, a Berlin suburb, on 20 January. Heydrich was by then the chief of the Reich Security Head Office (RSHA) and Protector of Bohemia and Moravia.

It was probably the Soviet counter-attack just outside Moscow in the autumn of 1941 that finally prompted Hitler to formalise his ideas on how to murder Europe’s Jews. In the first days of the war, it had been thought possible that the Jews could be removed to Madagascar or elsewhere in Africa, but this had long since been ruled out, and now that the Soviets were fighting back Hitler’s hopes of herding the Jews east into seized Russian lands had also fallen away.