If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women (56 page)

In any event, Sylvia and other prisoner staff, sleeping in the
Revier
, were often woken by the screams that came from the room, which was at the side of the mortuary; it had a stone floor and was without beds or bedding. Another prisoner doctor, a German woman called Dr Curt – ‘a pitiless brute’ – was responsible for the women and when the screaming broke out would go in and sedate them. On one such night Dr Curt called on Sylvia to help.

‘
Armed with a broom
handle, she went off,’ said Sylvia, who asked her what she was going to do with the broom handle but was told to shut up. Dr Curt was back a few moments later, saying ‘The lunatics have run wild’, and she asked Sylvia and another prisoner nurse to go back into the room with her.

We opened the door and I shall never forget the sight that met my eyes. Six women – if they can be called women – were fighting hand to hand. There were two mattresses full of excrement and dishes of old food on the floor. The women were practically skeletons, wearing only dirty vests with sores and bruises all over their bodies. A lovely young girl, a Russian peasant, with fair plaits, sat terrified in a corner screaming. It was her howls that had woken us. She sat there like a fair, hysterical Madonna.

Sylvia had seen the girl before, because Dr Curt had thrown her in there two days earlier, insisting that she was insane. In fact, she had tried to kill herself with a knife in the bathhouse soon after arrival, and had first been sent to the ordinary
Revier
. There she had started singing in bed one night, so Dr Curt threw her into ‘this unbearable hole’.

Seeing the Russian girl again, screaming in that horrible little room, sent Dr Curt wild, and she attacked her with the broom handle until blood flowed from her nose and mouth. I tried to get hold of the broom handle but was given such a bang on my neck I almost fainted. Eventually Dr Curt got hold of the Russian girl and pushed in the syringe. She rushed out, and tried to slam the door in my face. I think she meant to lock me in with the lunatics.

It was the offer of SS payments in return for their work that finally convinced Lyuba Konnikova that she, for one, could no longer tolerate the camp hospital. In the second half of 1943 the SS began offering a few Pfennings to the hospital prisoner staff to encourage them to work harder. Already the French and Poles were refusing the payments, and when the Red Army doctors learned that
they were to be bribed
too, Lyuba stormed out of the
Revier
saying she would refuse to take it.

The Red Army doctors had always been uneasy about their hospital work. Although they took some comfort in the fact that they were not making enemy munitions, it was clear that their skills were being exploited to keep the enemy’s munitions workers alive and now they were being paid to do it. Most other Red Army doctors and nurses then also refused the bribes, and Yevgenia Lazarevna supported them, saying: ‘
Girls, we must show
the fascists we can’t be bought by their marks.’

When news of the Soviet refusal reached Ramdohr, he ordered that they be punished, and the punishment he chose was to send them to subcamps and force them to make German arms. Lyuba Konnikova was the first to be sent, but on reaching the subcamp of Genthin, where women helped make ammunition, Lyuba refused to do it. She was kept in a dark cell for two weeks and then brought back to Ravensbrück, where she was beaten on the
Bock
and tortured by Ramdohr, but still she refused to work on munitions, so she was shut in the
Strafblock
.

Yevgenia Lazarevna Klemm was told the news by her contacts and informed the Soviet women at their Sunday meeting in the block. Several of the women remembered what she said:

Today we have learned
that our friend Lyuba has received twenty-five lashes. Never before have prisoners of war, doctors above all, been ordered to work in war factories, working against their own country, forced to work towards the death of their brothers. Today they have given this punishment to a Soviet doctor, a prisoner, who courageously refused to make arms for the enemy. Our Lyuba, our comrade.

Klemm then proposed that the block send a letter to Lyuba, to be smuggled into the
Strafblock
, along with a poem composed for her by the poet Alexandra Sokova. There was quiet applause.

Chapter 19

Breaking the Circle

F
rom the moment he arrived at Ravensbrück, Ludwig Ramdohr had developed his
own style of terror
. The camp Gestapo officer liked to work alone, and had little to do with other members of the SS. Though nominally an SS officer, he rarely wore the uniform, preferring a dark flannel suit. He interrogated prisoners in his office and any torture that he wished to carry out was done there, perhaps after the regular SS beating, which happened in the bunker nearby.

Ramdohr’s job was to make people talk. He carried a leather strap, made to his own specifications, which he used to thrash women across the face. He also forced prisoners to lie stomach down on a table, then with the woman’s head hanging over one edge, he would grab her hair and plunge her head into a bucket of water until she nearly drowned, repeating the action several times.

If a woman still refused to talk he might have her fold her hands while pencils were inserted between the fingers. Then he would press down on her hands so hard that the fingers broke, if she didn’t pass out first. He kept his favourite torture devices under lock and key, including a coffin with closing ventilation holes and claws – metal teeth of some kind – that penetrated the body.

More often though he simply used his leather whip, and if she still remained silent he resorted to beating the woman with his bare hands and thrashing her head against his office wall. Ojcumiła Falkowska, the Polish dancer, said even
Binz looked shocked
on one occasion at the amount of blood on Ramdohr’s walls, saying such beatings were not authorised by the commandant. Ramdohr didn’t care what the commandant thought; he was answerable only to his Gestapo bosses in Berlin. In fact Ramdohr was
loathed almost as much by other SS as by the prisoners: when first appointed to Ravensbrück he was told to uncover corruption amongst the staff, particularly the wholesale looting in the fur workshop. Ramdohr also claimed credit for exposing the ‘appalling conditions’, as he put it, in the
Revier
.
^*

Ludwig Ramdohr had not always been a committed National Socialist. Born in 1909 in the central German city of Kassel, he first joined the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) rather than the Nazi Party, and his career began with a regular police investigation unit, not Himmler’s SS elite.

As a boy Ludwig had apparently never shown signs of cruelty. Petitioning for clemency after Ramdohr was sentenced to death, his friends and family claimed he was squeamish about causing animals pain. ‘
When he buried
his mother-in-law’s canary he tenderly put the little bird in a box, covered it with a rose and buried it near a rose bush,’ said a family friend. The judge had no time for such petitions. He had heard evidence that the adult Ramdohr liked to lock defenceless women in underground boxes – especially dungeons filled with water and crawling with rats.

Ramdohr’s speciality, however, and surely his most valuable weapon, was his personal
network of camp spies
.

Spies had never been hard to recruit. An extra slice of bread, or a better job, and women could be found who would tell Ramdohr anything he wanted – true or not. Those who worked well were given chocolates or other delicacies stolen from the prisoners’ parcels. His favourites might gain a fur coat – especially if they granted him sexual favours too.

Once recruited, the new
Lagerspitzel
stayed on Ramdohr’s books or faced the torture table themselves. One woman was so badly beaten after trying to escape his clutches that she slit her throat, and was saved by Dr Treite. Any women beaten by Ramdohr came under instant suspicion as spies themselves. After the war allegations spilled out about who had worked for him. At his trial he claimed to have created a shadow ‘political movement’ in the camp, to destabilise and trick those movements that already existed, like the communists.

In the second half of 1943 Ramdohr was at the height of his powers. Inside the main camp he claimed to have fifty to eighty spies, and was recruiting in the new subcamps too. The sheer size of the camp meant that Ramdohr’s intelligence was needed as never before, simply to maintain control. Furthermore, as munitions work became more important spies were needed to report on saboteurs.

As part of their contracts, the factory managers insisted that the SS provide not only healthy workers but reliable ones too. Making munitions, they could do far more harm than just spoiling soldiers’ clothes: they could tamper with ammunition, botch fuses or fit triggers the wrong way. At the Siemens plant workers had been ruining spools by cutting the fine wires, or misplacing orders for new parts. There were particular fears about women in this regard. ‘
It is not easy to control women
because they are better deceivers than men, and because when they escape they are better at hiding and finding ways of surviving on their wits undetected,’ said one manager.

Such concerns were exacerbated by the growing lack of good women guards. As the camp expanded, and its satellite network grew, recruitment drives were carried out, but most new female guards were conscripts. ‘
They were very young
, impressionable, and very poor, and many pleaded to be sent home as soon as they arrived, though mostly they adapted and stayed on,’ recalled Grete Buber-Neumann. According to Lotte Silbermann, the SS canteen waitress, one group, conscripted from the production line at Filmfabrik Agfa in Wolfen, seemed particularly ill-suited to the work.

These recruits arrived
with their clothes in a terrible state. They had to wait with us in the canteen while their new uniforms were fetched, and as they waited they often behaved worse than the worst street prostitute. I had to stand and watch while one of these new guards, who was going to be in charge of us, lay on the table and was given the full treatment by an SS officer.

Lotte remembered one particular recruit called Ilse Hermann who was interested in nothing but finding a husband and forced her to save the best food in the canteen to serve up to her ‘suitors’ amongst the male staff. Hermann also made Lotte write out marriage ads to put in the papers.

Rudolf Höss, commandant of Auschwitz, whose camp still drew its women guards from Ravensbrück, also noticed a decline. ‘
The original female supervisors
were far and away superior to those we got later,’ he wrote in his memoir, because, in spite of recruiting by Nazi women’s organisations, ‘very few candidates volunteered for concentration camp service’. Instead, the armaments companies to which prisoners were sent to work were obliged in return to provide their own civilian employees as guards.

Needless to say, stated Höss, ‘they didn’t give their best workers’, but after just a few weeks’ training at Ravensbrück they were ‘let loose on the prisoners’. Before long they were thieving, having sex with male prisoners, and ‘an epidemic of lesbianism’ broke out. On outside work parties, where control was difficult, all women supervisors had guard dogs, but they would set them on
prisoners ‘for fun’. These offending guards were thrown in the bunker or punished with twenty-five lashes, just like the prisoners. ‘I have always had the greatest respect for women in general,’ Höss lamented, ‘but in Auschwitz I had to modify my views.’

Höss also complains that Ravensbrück kept the best of the women for itself, though what an Auschwitz commandant meant by ‘best’ is hard to say. At least two Ravensbrück women had done well at Auschwitz. Irma Grese, the farmer’s daughter, trained at Ravensbrück in 1942, was now a chief female overseer at the Birkenau extermination annex. Maria Mandl, who arrived at Ravensbrück at the start, was appointed chief woman guard at Auschwitz in 1942, taking over from Langefeld, and soon became the most powerful woman in Himmler’s empire. Mandl – the woman overheard by Maria Bielicka in Ravensbrück, ‘lost in a trance’ playing the piano – went on to found the
women’s prisoner orchestra at Auschwitz
.

By the early autumn of 1943, Ramdohr was determined to extend his spy network still further. One group he had so far failed to penetrate were the Red Army women, whose unity had largely proved impossible to break. With the decision to send some to work in the subcamps, he saw his chance. If the women were scattered around far-flung outposts and cut off from their leader, whoever she was, their unity would be easier to crush. He certainly had spies in all the subcamps by now.

Earlier in the year the RAF had bombed a major Heinkel aircraft factory situated at Rostock, on the Baltic. A replacement factory was constructed nearby on the edge of a small lagoon at Barth, on the northern tip of Germany. In the autumn of 1943 Heinkel managers started coming to Ravensbrück to recruit women for the factory. A number of Red Army doctors and nurses were called
nach vorn
and selected. Valentina Samoilova was sent in the winter, as she told me in her spacious apartment in the centre of Kiev.

We talked first of Stalingrad, where Valentina had fought to hold a vital bridge in the final days of the siege. ‘One day the Germans held the bridge, one day it was the Soviets. It was like that. It was a very bloody fight,’ said Valentina, now eighty-nine. Then she talked of Barth. Along with the other Red Army doctors working in the
Revier
, Valentina had refused to take the SS bribes, she said, and knew at once she would be punished. ‘We had contacts in the office and they told us we were going to this place called Barth.’

Other Red Army women were sent there too, including Lyusya Malygina, Maria Klyugman, Tamara Tschajalo and another doctor called Zina Avidowa. Before the group left there was a secret meeting with Yevgenia Lazarevna Klemm to agree a strategy.