If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women (35 page)

Teege and Mauer’s descriptions of the women’s section are echoed by the Auschwitz commandant himself, Rudolf Höss. In his memoir, written while awaiting execution, he devotes several pages to the women’s section, which appears to have fascinated him, almost more than any other part of the camp. Conditions there were atrocious, he says, and far worse than in the men’s camp, due largely to extreme overcrowding in the female blocks. From the start the prisoners there had been ‘
piled high to the ceiling
’. The meagre sanitary facilities were soon overwhelmed and women relieved themselves wherever they could. A prisoner sent on an errand from the men’s camp reported that conditions in the women’s blocks ‘passed all imagination and everything was black with lice’. Women were dying of typhus or killing themselves first.

According to Teege and Mauer, conditions on the women’s labour gangs were also worse than anything they had seen at Ravensbrück. Male doghandlers guarded the workers, and SS men patrolled on horseback with sub-machine guns. Escapers were shot and the officers put in reports ‘to impress the commandant and get a day off in Katowice’. Bertha Teege knew this, as her job was to file the reports. Often the workers got nothing at all to eat, as the bread was mouldy and the excuse given by the ‘bandit SS guards’ was that it was ‘booty from France’, and all they had.

The women of the first Slovakian transport were sent out to work demolishing bombed houses in the area. ‘They were supposed to raze them to the
ground,’ Bertha recalled, ‘hitting walls with long and very heavy iron rods.’ There were many injuries and deaths and the returning gangs were a terrible sight, with women coming back bitten, beaten, and often carrying bodies of their dead.

Teege and Mauer found out ‘little by little’ about the ‘facilities and methods’ used here, and understood that the SS had deliberately created these conditions in order to ensure that the women housed in the camp would die. ‘You never got rid of the horror,’ wrote Bertha, ‘and in addition there was the constant prospect that you yourself might become one of the victims one day.’

Höss, by contrast, blamed the horror of the women’s camp on the prisoners themselves. ‘When the women had reached the bottom they would let themselves go completely,’ he said. ‘They would then stumble about like ghosts without any will of their own, and had to be pushed everywhere by the others, until the day came when they quietly passed away.’

Höss wishes us to believe that to him these ‘stumbling female corpses’ were ‘a terrible sight’. There was nothing he could do about it, he said, and blamed staff shortages and Langefeld herself: ‘To have put these swarming ant heaps into proper order would have required more than a few female supervisors allotted me from Ravensbrück. The chief female supervisor of the period, Frau Langefeld, was in no way capable of coping with the situation.’

However, as Teege and Mauer were also fast beginning to see, those women who didn’t do as the SS wanted by passing away were murdered outright. Shootings had occurred from time to time at Ravensbrück, but such killing – always out of sight – was usually done singly, and bore no relation to the mass murder that was practised here, as Luise learned when a friend invited her to look through a spyhole punched in a barracks wall. Here she saw fifteen to eighteen women lying dead, some holding children in their arms. The SS were firing at the dead and the living indiscriminately.

According to Bertha Teege the Auschwitz prisoners had no idea about the gassing. This was plausible, because at this early stage of the slaughter the camp had just one gas chamber which had barely been used and was half hidden underground, with grass growing on top. When killings happened nobody was supposed to be around, but Bertha Teege went to investigate one day and heard screaming.

After about two weeks in the camp, Luise Mauer was called to Langefeld’s office and instructed to make all prisoners ‘vanish’ from the Lagerstrasse. She did as she was told, and on returning to the office found only her friend Bertha still there. Everyone else, including the SS, had left. Half an hour later about 300 women, children and men, young and old, healthy and sick, some walking on crutches, approached down the Lagerstrasse, flanked by SS men
with dogs. They drove the prisoners into a tunnel, a sort of subterranean passage leading into what looked like a giant silo with ventilation shafts. Two SS men in gas masks emptied cans into the shafts. The air filled with dreadful yelling and screaming, the children’s most prolonged, and subsiding into whimpering. After fifteen minutes all was silence. ‘We knew that 300 people had just been killed,’ said Luise Mauer. The killing she had witnessed was probably the first mass gassing at Auschwitz.

One hour later Johanna Langefeld appeared at the office looking pale and distraught. She was even more distressed on finding Teege and Mauer there, and asked if they had seen what happened. When they answered yes, Langefeld told them she hadn’t known that people were being killed here. She said: ‘For God’s sake don’t tell anyone what you have seen, or you will be gassed yourselves.’

Almost at once she made a protest to Obergruppenführer Oswald Pohl, head of the SS Economic-Administrative Main Office, who happened to be inspecting the camp soon after the event. Speaking later to US interrogators, she said: ‘
I took the first
opportunity to raise the state of affairs with Lt General Pohl.’ But Langefeld is vague about the nature of the state of affairs that she raised. From her subsequent comments it seems highly unlikely that she mentioned the gassings specifically; more likely she questioned administrative arrangements, and complained that she was not being consulted about decisions that affected the women’s camp.

As chief women’s guard, Langefeld firmly believed that she should have sole authority over the women’s camp, and that male SS officers should stay away. If this principle could have been established, she believed she might have influenced events for the better, as she felt she had done at Ravensbrück. Pohl, however, was ‘not sympathetic’ to her complaints, she said later.

Convinced of her command of the rules, Langefeld made a further protest, this time to HQ in Oranienburg. Her account to the US investigators stated that she asked HQ to confirm that ‘in the SS rules, in matters concerning women, the female chief guard sets the policies’. HQ agreed with her, she said, but the local SS – i.e. Rudolf Höss – overruled the decision, thus further undermining her authority at Auschwitz. As a result she asked to be sent back to Ravensbrück, but the request was refused, and from then on she was engaged in a full-blown power struggle with Höss.

Langefeld refused to take orders from the SS man, Hans Aumeier, whom Höss had placed in charge of her, and Höss himself refused to allow any SS man to take orders from her. Meanwhile, as Höss again describes, conditions in the women’s camp grew worse, particularly as the women guards became increasingly depraved.

The problem, says Höss, was that while at Ravensbrück, these women guards had been ‘thoroughly spoiled’: ‘Everything had been done for them [at Ravensbrück] to persuade them to stay in their jobs at the women’s concentration camp, and by offering extremely good living conditions it was hoped to attract new recruits.’ At Ravensbrück, ‘their work was not particularly onerous as there was no overcrowding yet’, whereas at Auschwitz the guards had to work ‘in the most difficult conditions’. ‘From the very beginning,’ Höss claims, ‘most wanted to run away and return to the quiet comforts and the easy life at Ravensbrück.’ That being so, Langefeld began to lose control of her own guards, who ‘ran hither and thither in all this confusion like a lot of flustered hens’.

In the midst of the chaos, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, who also arrived from Ravensbrück to work as Kapos, went on hunger strike and declared: ‘Hitler and his vassals are the devil’s instruments.’ Several were hanged, but Höss chose some who did not join the protest to work in his villa. He wrote later that these religious German women, whom he nicknamed the ‘bible-bees’, were a welcome change from other prisoners: ‘My wife often said that she herself could not have seen to anything better than they did.’

It wasn’t long, says Höss, before morals collapsed even further. One woman guard ‘sank so low as to become intimate with some of the male prisoners, mostly the “green” male Kapos’. The woman habitually had sex with these Kapos, who in return provided her with jewellery that they stole from the mountain of valuables taken from the arriving Jews.

What Höss does not tell us is that not only were his own SS officers profiting from the same trade, so was he. He was also conducting an affair with an Austrian woman prisoner,
Nora Hodys
, originally from Ravensbrück, who worked in the jewellery depot. She helped him smuggle jewellery out of the camp. An internal SS inquiry was started and then quickly dropped, but not before it emerged that Höss had had a room fixed for him and Hodys to meet in one of the women’s blocks. According to evidence given to the inquiry, Johanna Langefeld made the arrangement, though what she had to say in this regard is not recorded.

Langefeld did, however, confirm that her own ability to influence events in the women’s section was undermined by the more and more dissolute behaviour of her women guards. There is ample evidence of drunken debauchery involving the Ravensbrück guards, particularly in the Auschwitz staff canteen. As Langefeld herself put it later: ‘A large number of the female guards came under the influence of SS men with whom they had entered into close relations.’

Teege and Mauer admitted that ‘domestic affairs’ in the women’s section were now ‘out of control’. In the clothing store, where Philomena
Müssgueller worked, guards and Kapos ‘lined their own pockets’. As for their own living conditions, there was a ‘lack of everything’, and in their own privileged block there was ‘even a window in the door for male guards to look through’.

At the same time these two political prisoners were increasingly asked to take on the role of women guards. Bertha Teege said this was because the real female guards at Auschwitz were ‘too lazy’ and even refused to stay on for the final roll-call, so she had to take it herself.

Soon it was these two communist prisoners who were called on to preselect for the gas chambers. This was a task they had first been given at Ravensbrück in December. On that occasion they were told the prisoners were going to a sanatorium – a lie they had chosen to believe. At Auschwitz they heard the same lie, and were told that doctors would make final decisions, ‘but we knew now the sanatorium was the gas chamber,’ and both women tell us they refused to make the selections. ‘We were quite frank about it with Langefeld,’ said Teege, who adds that Langefeld understood their reasons and did not report their insubordination. Instead she made sure the real guards did the preselecting.

Teege and Mauer say they began to try to warn the block leaders about the gassing, urging them to persuade those who were sick to pretend they were fit for work, but their efforts rarely succeeded. ‘We ran through the blocks ahead of the doctors and asked the elderly to at least pretend to be working, but all they did was say they were aching all over.’ The dilemma for them both was that they could not tell the prisoners that those chosen were going to the gas chambers – ‘to do so would risk forfeiting our own lives’. Once, Mauer went down with typhus and was nearly sent for gassing herself because the selectors made no exceptions for sick non-Jews.

Another job given to the couple was dealing with camp children. One day a four-year-old boy was handed over to them and they were told to find his mother. They did find his mother, and witnessed a ‘moving reunion’. The following day both mother and child were gassed.

All this time Langefeld, Teege and Mauer developed an ever deeper hatred of the male SS, particularly Hans Aumeier, Höss’s man, who would come over to the women’s camp, drunk and cursing, to harass them and to further damage Langefeld’s authority.

On
18 July 1942
, a very hot day, four months after the Ravensbrück women arrived, Auschwitz was preparing for a visit from Heinrich Himmler. He arrived with a large entourage and demanded a detailed tour of the camp. First he briefed Höss on his decision to accelerate the gassing of Europe’s Jews: from now on, Eichmann’s programme for the transport and extermination
of the Jews would intensify month on month. The death camps at Belzec, Treblinka and Sobibor were already in operation and more gassing centres were planned.

Construction of a vast new complex at Birkenau, two kilometres from the Auschwitz main camp, had just been completed and new gassing equipment installed. Inspecting the Birkenau camp that day, Himmler told Höss he went ‘weak at the knees’. At the same time he told him to step up the gassing there at once – a demonstration of how ‘a man must overcome his weakness to remain hard’, wrote Höss.

Himmler inspected not only the killing facilities but also the slave labour factories, and he agreed with Höss on a new system whereby useful workers would be sorted from the rest: in future prisoners arriving by train would be selected on a ramp immediately on arrival, and sent either to the gas chamber or to the factories.

The July visit was also a chance for Himmler to indulge his special interest in agriculture; he asked to see the Auschwitz cowshed, where he tasted a glass of milk. Then he asked to see the women’s section, which had recently been transferred to Birkenau. This visit was Langefeld’s chance to protest in person to the Reichsführer about the state of women’s affairs in the camp, and she had prepared to present five ‘deserving’ prisoners, brought with her from Ravensbrück, in the hope that he would grant them early release. She was kept waiting, however, while Himmler watched women being flogged. A trestle table had been prepared for the purpose.

According to Bertha Teege, who helped prepare the victims, ten women were lined up for beating before Himmler that day, including five Jehovah’s Witnesses, half starved from their hunger strike, and five Jews of various nationalities, ‘who were well built, mark you’. Seven of these prisoners were eventually flogged, but all were made to wait naked all day, until the moment came.