If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women (5 page)

Else Krug had been at work as usual when a group of Düsseldorf policemen banged on the door at 10 Corneliusstrasse, shouting to her to open up; it was 2 a.m. on 30 July 1938. Police raids were not unusual and Else had no reason to fear, though of late the raids had been on the increase. Prostitution was legal under Nazi law, but the police could use any excuse; perhaps one of the women evaded her syphilis check, or maybe an officer wanted a lead on a new communist cell on the Düsseldorf docks.

Several Düsseldorf officers knew these women personally. Else Krug was always in demand, either for her own particular services – she dealt in sadomasochism – or for her gossip; she kept her ear to the ground. Else was also popular on the street; she’d always take a girl in if she could, especially if the waif was new in town. Else had arrived on the streets of Düsseldorf like this herself ten years ago – out of work, far from home and without a penny to her name.

It soon turned out, however, that the raid of 30 July was different from any that had gone before in Corneliusstrasse. Terrified clients grabbed what they could and ran out half-dressed into the night. The same night similar raids took place at a nearby address where Agnes Petry was at work. Agnes’s
husband, a local pimp, was rounded up too. After a further sweep through the Bahndamm, the officers had pulled in a total of twenty-four prostitutes, and by six in the morning all were behind bars, with no time given for release.

The treatment of the women at the police station was also different. The desk officer – a Sergeant Peine – knew most of the women as regular overnighters in his cells, and taking out his large black ledger, booked them in painstakingly as usual, noting names, addresses, and personal effects. Under the column headed ‘reason for arrest’, however, Peine carefully printed
‘
Asoziale
’
, ‘asocial’, against each name – a word he had not used there before. And at the end of the column, likewise for the first time, he wrote in red: ‘Transport’.

The raids on Düsseldorf brothels were repeated across Germany throughout 1938, as the Nazi purge against its own unwanted underclasses entered a new stage. A programme called ‘
Aktion Arbeitsscheu Reich
’ (Action Against the Workshy) had been launched, targeting all those considered social outcasts. Largely unnoticed by the outside world, and unreported within Germany, more than 20,000 so-called ‘asocials’ – ‘vagabonds, prostitutes, work-shy, beggars and thieves’ – were rounded up and earmarked for concentration camps.

In mid-1938 war was still a year away, but Germany’s war against its own unwanted had been launched. The Führer let it be known that the country must be ‘pure and strong’ as it prepared for war, so such ‘useless mouths’ were to be removed. From the moment Hitler came to power, mass sterilisation of the mentally ill and social degenerates had already been carried out. In 1936 Gypsies were locked in reservations near big cities. In 1937 thousands of ‘habitual criminals’ were sent to concentration camps, with no legal process. Hitler authorised the measures, but the instigator of the crackdown was his police chief and head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler. It was also Himmler who in 1938 called for all ‘asocials’ to be locked in concentration camps.

The timing was significant. Well before 1937 the camps, established at first to remove political opposition, had begun to empty out. Communists, social democrats and others, rounded up in the first years of Hitler’s rule, had been largely crushed, and most were now sent home, broken men. Himmler, who had opposed these mass releases, saw his empire in danger of decline, and looked for new uses for his camps.

To date nobody had seriously suggested using the concentration camps for anything other than the political opposition, but by filling them with criminals and social outcasts, Himmler could start expanding his empire again. He saw himself as far more than a police chief; his interest in science – in all forms of experimentation that might help breed a perfect Aryan race – was always the main objective. By bringing these degenerates inside his camps he had begun
to secure a central role for himself in the Führer’s most ambitious experiment, which aimed to cleanse the German gene pool. Moreover the new prisoners would provide a ready pool of labour for rebuilding the Reich.

The nature and purpose of the concentration camps would now change. As the number of German political prisoners decreased, social rejects would pour in to replace them. Among those swept up for the first time, there were bound to be as many women – prostitutes, petty criminals, down-and-outs – as men.

A new generation of purpose-built concentration camps was now constructed. And with Moringen and other women’s prisons already overflowing, and costly, Himmler proposed a concentration camp for women. Some time in 1938 he called his advisers together to discuss a possible site. A proposal was made, probably by Himmler’s friend Gruppenführer Oswald Pohl, a senior SS administrator, that the new camp be built in the Mecklenburg lake district, close to a village called Ravensbrück. Pohl knew the area because he had a country estate there.

Rudolf Höss later claimed that he warned Himmler that the
site was too small
: the number of women was bound to increase, especially when war broke out. Others pointed out that the ground was a bog and the camp would take too long to build. Himmler brushed aside the objections. Just fifty miles north of Berlin, it was convenient for inspections, and he often drove out that way to visit Pohl or to drop in on his childhood friend, the famous SS surgeon Karl Gebhardt, who ran the Hohenlychen medical clinic just five miles from Ravensbrück.

Himmler therefore ordered male prisoners from the concentration camp of Sachsenhausen, on the edge of Berlin, to start building at Ravensbrück as soon as possible. Meanwhile the male concentration camp at Lichtenburg, near Torgau, which was already half empty, was to be cleared and the rest of the men there taken to the new men’s camp of Buchenwald, opened in July 1937. Women earmarked for the new women’s camp could be held at Lichtenburg while Ravensbrück was built.

Inside a caged train wagon, Lina Haag had no idea where she was heading. After four years in her prison cell, she and scores of others were told they were going ‘on transport’. Every few hours the train would halt at a station, but the names – Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Mannheim – gave little clue. Lina stared at ‘ordinary people’ on the platforms – a sight she hadn’t seen for years – and the ordinary people stared back ‘at these ghostly figures with hollow eyes and matted hair’. At night the women were taken off and put up in local prisons. Lina was horrified by the women guards. ‘It was inconceivable how in the face of all that misery they could gossip and laugh in the
corridors. Most are pious, but with a peculiar sort of piety. They seem to me to be hiding behind God in disgust at their own meanness.’

Women from the Moringen workhouse joined the train and huddled together in shock. A doctor called
Doris Maase
was brought on at Stuttgart along with a crowd of Düsseldorf prostitutes. Doris, described in her Gestapo file as a ‘red student’, had half a comb, which she lent to Lina. All around the ‘harlots’ and ‘hags’ cackled, although, as Lina admitted to Doris, after four years in a prison, she probably looked like a ‘harlot’ too.

At Lichtenburg the SS were waiting, wearing buckskin gloves and carrying revolvers. Johanna Langefeld was waiting too. After dismissal from Brauweiler workhouse, Langefeld had been rehired by Himmler’s office and offered a promotion as a guard at Lichtenburg. Langefeld would claim later that she only took the job there in the belief that once again she could
fulfil her vocation
to ‘re-educate prostitutes’, which was obviously a lie: she had been offered a promotion, more money and accommodation for herself and her child. In any case, Brauweiler had already shown Langefeld that prostitutes and other outcasts were to be eliminated from society, not re-educated.

Arriving now at Lichtenburg was Helen Krofges, a woman Langefeld probably even remembered from the workhouse. Krofges had first been imprisoned at Brauweiler for failing to keep up payments to support her children. Now she had been sent on to Lichtenburg because she was
‘incapable of improvement’
, as her police report noted, and because ‘due to her immoral and asocial way of life, the
Volksgemeinschaft
[the racially pure community] must be protected from her’.

Even the prison official who registered the women at Lichtenburg could see no sense in locking up such down-and-outs. Agnes Petry, one of the Düsseldorf crew, arrived ‘penniless’, he noted on her registration card. All she carried was a photograph of her husband. The word ‘
Stutze
’ was noted on her file, which meant she was a person ‘dependent on the state’. ‘Could she be sent back?’ he asked in a letter to the Düsseldorf police chief. ‘Has she anyone in the world who would help her?’

Lina Haag had long ago stopped hoping anyone would help any of them. On 12 March 1938 Austria had been annexed, and soon after that Austrian resisters began arriving at the fortress, including a doctor, an opera singer and a carpenter; all had been beaten and abused. ‘If the world was not protesting even against the brutal annexation of foreign territories, was it likely to protest against the whipping of some poor women who had protested against it?’ asked Lina.

News that Olga Benario, a name from the glory days of communist resistance, was in the fortress gave some women hope. Olga had been brought alone from Berlin in a Gestapo van, and escorted straight down to the Lichtenburg
dungeons. Communist comrades managed to make contact and found her heartbroken at the recent separation from her child. They smuggled messages and tiny gifts to her cell. Recalling Olga’s stunning courtroom snatch in 1928, some dreamt of escape, but Lina Haag said there was
‘no sense’
in attempting anything. ‘The Führer always comes out on top and we are just poor devils – absolutely forsaken, miserable devils …’ Then a Gypsy trapeze artist called Katharina Waitz tried to scale the fortress walls. She was captured and beaten. The Lichtenburg commandant, Max Koegel, liked to beat. Lina recalled that on Easter day he beat three naked women ‘until he could go on no longer’.

On 1 October 1938, the day Hitler’s forces took the Sudetenland, Koegel turned hoses on his prisoners. They had all been ordered to the courtyard to hear the Führer’s victory address, but the Jehovah’s Witnesses refused to descend the steps, so guards forced them down, dragging old women by their hair. As Prussian tunes struck up someone whispered ‘war is coming’ and the fortress suddenly erupted. All the Jehovah’s Witnesses started shouting hysterically before sinking to their knees and praying. The guards thrashed and the mob hit back. Koegel ordered fire hoses to be turned on the praying women, who were knocked flying, flattened, bitten by dogs. Clinging to one another, they nearly drowned,
‘like dripping mice’
, said Marianne Korn, one of the praying women.

Soon after the riot
Himmler visited
the fortress to see that order had been restored. The Reichsführer SS inspected Lichtenburg several times, bringing the head of the Nazi women’s movement, Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, to show off his prisoners to. On his visits he sometimes authorised releases. One day he released Lina Haag, on condition she didn’t speak about her treatment.

Himmler also inspected the women guards. He must have noted that Johanna Langefeld had a certain authority – a knack for quietening prisoners without a fuss – because he marked her down as Ravensbrück’s future chief woman guard.

It was the local children who first suspected something was about to be built on the northern shore of the Schwedtsee – or Lake Schwedt – but when they told their parents they were ordered to say nothing. Until 1938 the children played on a piece of scrubland near the lake where the trees were thinner and the bathing was good. One day they were told the area was out of bounds. Over the next few weeks locals in the town of Fürstenberg – of which the village of Ravensbrück is a small suburb – watched as barges delivered building materials up the River Havel. The children told parents they’d seen men in striped uniforms, who chopped down trees.

Ravensbrück, fifty miles north of Berlin, on the southern edge of the Mecklenburg lake district, was, as Himmler identified in 1938, a good location
for a concentration camp. Rail and water connections were good. Fürstenberg, cradled by three lakes, the Röblinsee, Baalensee and Schwedtsee, sits astride the River Havel, which divides into several channels as it flows through the town.

Another factor that influenced Himmler’s choice was the siting in an area of natural beauty. Himmler believed that the cleansing of German blood should begin close to nature, and the invigorating forces of the German forests played a central role in the mythology of the
Heimat
– German soil. Buchenwald – meaning Beech Forest – was sited in a famous wooded area close to Weimar and several other camps were deliberately located in beauty spots. Just weeks before Ravensbrück was opened a stretch of water here was declared an ‘organic source for the Aryan race’. Fürstenberg had always been popular with nature lovers who came to boat on the lakes, or visit the baroque Palace of Fürstenberg.

In the early 1930s the town was briefly a communist stronghold, and as the Nazis first sought a foothold there were several street battles, but before Hitler became chancellor, opposition had been eradicated. A Nazi mayor was appointed and a Nazi priest, Pastor Märker, took over in the town’s evangelical church. Hitler’s ‘German Christians’, strong in such rural areas, organised nationalist festivities and parades.

By the late 1930s the Jews of Fürstenberg had largely gone. Eva Hamburger, a Jewish hotelier, resisted expulsion, but after the pogrom of ‘Kristallnacht’, the ‘night of broken glass’, of 9/10 November 1938, she too moved out. In Fürstenberg that night the Jewish cemetery was destroyed and Eva Hamburger’s hotel was smashed up. Soon after the local paper reported that the last Jewish property at Number 3 Röbinsee was sold.