If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women (83 page)

Julia saw bodies everywhere, and seems to have looked for them too. In the death cellar, she saw bodies awaiting transport to the furnace. Near the crematorium she saw gold being extracted from the teeth of the dead. A little later she noticed an aunt of her husband’s among the arrivals from Hungary. Hearing that the relative had been taken to one of the death blocks where prisoners with dysentery were left with no food until they died, she went to investigate. ‘I tried to see her but the Blockova would not allow me in. I never saw my husband’s aunt again.’

Julia listened too, and she reported what she’d heard people say. ‘I remember a woman telling me that her newborn baby was dead having been eaten by rats in Block Eleven.’ On another occasion she was patrolling near the crematorium and overheard a senior SS officer whom she didn’t recognise. She
noticed him again and again, sometimes with another officer, who was also new to the camp.

I remember two senior officers. One of them was a man by the name of Höss, and I once heard him say that it was a waste of coal to burn the bodies of the dead prisoners, or words to that effect. The same Höss was a tall thin man aged about forty-five to fifty who always wore a fur-lined coat. He was not as bad as the other officer whose name I don’t remember. This one was tall, stout, aged between forty-five and fifty – very good-looking and well dressed. He was one of the most brutal and cruel men I have seen in the camp.

A short time later Julia saw two more strangers to Ravensbrück – this time both were doctors, who she learned had come ‘from Auschwitz’.

Chapter 31

A Children’s Party

R
udolf Höss, commandant of Auschwitz, moved to Ravensbrück just a few weeks after the Auschwitz gas chambers had shut down.
Bank records
prove it: on 30 November 1944, ‘Höss, Rudolf’ deposited 50 Reichsmarks in a Fürstenberg bank.

Höss was not the only Auschwitz boss to be seen around Ravensbrück in late 1944. The other man spotted by Julia Barry, ‘one of the most brutal and cruel men I have ever seen’, may have been the gassing expert Otto Moll, also present at this time, though it could also have been Albert Sauer, another former death-camp commandant.

One of the SS doctors seen by Julia Barry was probably Franz Lucas, who had previously worked on the ramp at Auschwitz; the other could have been Carl Clauberg, who masterminded Himmler’s sterilisation experiments at Auschwitz. Both came to Ravensbrück in the winter of 1944–5. The sudden appearance at Ravensbrück of a pack of experienced exterminators was sinister, though the explanation was to some extent banal: they were out of a job. Their camps were all to the east, and had either been overrun by Russians or were about to be. The Auschwitz extermination programme had halted on 2 November; the Red Army was expected to reach the camp in early January.

Dr Franz Lucas had been moved from Auschwitz to Stutthof camp, near Danzig (Gdansk), early in 1944, but Stutthof too was about to be overrun. The camp of Riga-Kaiserwald, where Albert Sauer had been commandant, was overrun when the Red Army took Latvia in October.

There may also have been a simple reason to send quite so many unemployed SS men to Ravensbrück: there were few other KZs to go to. The
remainder were commanded by high-ranking officers who would not want idle colleagues on their patches. Fritz Suhren, the women’s camp’s middleranking commandant, was not in so strong a position to complain, though even Suhren
appears to have been irked
by their arrival.

The most important reason for posting such men to Ravensbrück was, however, sinister in the extreme: as experts in mass murder they were needed to launch a new extermination programme. It is no coincidence that just before these men arrived, Himmler had issued a new directive requiring an immediate, massive increase in the rate of killing and construction of a gas chamber to carry it out.

Like so many other SS orders, Himmler’s latest edict for Ravensbrück did not survive the destruction of Nazi documents and it took some time for details to emerge. When the first and most important Ravensbrück war crimes trials were held in Hamburg in 1946 and 1947,
facts of extermination
were certainly revealed but no evidence was presented showing that the killing order came direct from Himmler.

In fact the contents of the directive would have been entirely lost to history had it not been for Anni Rudroff, an Austrian doctor, who read the order when working as secretary to Edmund Bräuning in the camp HQ. In 1948, when the last Ravensbrück trial was being prepared, Anni was tracked down to the Soviet sector of Berlin by a British war crimes investigator looking for evidence against Artur Conrad, the executioner, whom she had known in the HQ. In a brief but damning statement Anni described Conrad’s role in the shooting of Polish women. Almost as an afterthought she then mentioned Himmler’s order.

From 5 Jan
until 16 Dec 1944 I worked in the camp office. In October there came an order from Himmler, which Schutzhaftlagerführer Bräuning left on the table and which I personally read. The order was directed to the Commandant and stated: ‘In your camp, with retrospective effect for six months, 2000 people monthly have to die; Reichsführer SS.’ The Schutzhaftlagerführer Bräuning got the order to construct the gas chambers.

Anni Rudroff’s evidence is arguably the most important piece of testimony about Ravensbrück, showing that in these last months of the war Himmler had personally ordered a mass-extermination programme to begin at the women’s camp. Perhaps because Anni’s evidence came to light late in investigations, because it was presented with no fanfare, or because she herself then disappeared – as did Edmund Bräuning – the revelation received little attention. There is certainly no reason to doubt its veracity. The British investigator who took Anni’s evidence was clearly impressed by her. ‘
She signed it
– or rather, solemnly affirmed it as she did not belong to any religion,’ stated Major Józef Liniewski.

In any case the prisoners all knew such an order must have been issued because well before gassing even started they saw a massive increase in killing.

Moreover, just as he had micro-managed every stage of the camp’s evolution, it was entirely natural that Himmler should personally order extermination to begin. No prisoner could have invented the phrasing. Himmler wanted far more than 2000 a month killed but to disguise the extent of the required slaughter he camouflaged the facts with characteristic bureaucratic pedantry, ordering the killing to be ‘retrospective for six months’.

Himmler’s reason for ordering the extermination is also abundantly clear. Ravensbrück was out of control; disease was spreading and threatening the SS and the wider community. Order had to be restored before another vast influx of women arrived from Auschwitz, which was due to be evacuated within weeks. How else could control be reasserted without mass killing? No longer could the useless mouths be sent off to outside gas chambers: Majdanek and Castle Hartheim were already closed and the Auschwitz gas chambers shut down.

At other camps, already liquidated ahead of the Russian advance – Stutthof for example – mass killing had been done largely by shooting or by drowning in the Baltic. At Ravensbrück, however, with men like Höss on hand, extermination was to be done by gas. A number of concentration camps situated on German soil – Sachsenhausen, for example – had operated their own gas chambers or gas vans in the past, but Ravensbrück now became the only such camp to be fitted with a gas chamber for the first time, in order to carry out mass extermination on site in the final months of the war.

Everything that now happened quite clearly stemmed from the order seen by Anni Rudroff. The capacity of the crematorium was increased. A site was cleared where victims could be held while the gassing was done; the site chosen was the Uckermark Youth Camp, just half a mile away and hidden in the woods. By early December the Youth Camp had been evacuated, the teenagers and young women either freed or sent to Ravensbrück.

At the same time construction of new living barracks for the Siemens workers began; they were in future to sleep out at the plant itself. This was necessary so that the Siemens women wouldn’t walk past the gas chamber which was to be sited near the crematorium by the south wall – in other words, right alongside the route they had hitherto taken to work.

Exactly who took charge of installing the gas chamber, and precisely when, the testimony does not reveal. There is evidence to suggest that as early as
October 1944 – about the same time Himmler’s killing order came in – a plan for a sophisticated concrete gas chamber was drawn up. An electrician called Walter Jahn, a prisoner at the men’s camp, said that he had been commissioned to design it.
This chamber was to stand
against the camp’s north wall disguised as the
Neue Wäscherei
– new washroom. A German communist arrested in 1941, Jahn was an unlikely gas-chamber architect, but he was a talented electrician whose abilities had already been enlisted by the SS for projects including servicing the radios in Oswald Pohl’s cars. It was while giving evidence at Pohl’s trial that he described his plan for the gas chamber, but its construction was delayed, he said, apparently
for want of materials
, hard to come by at this stage of the war.

There had also been some dispute
about who amongst the SS should oversee the construction. Another interesting fact revealed by Anni Rudroff was that Edmund Bräuning had refused to implement Himmler’s order to organise the gassing, and we know he left the camp in disgrace in January, when Anni herself was locked in the bunker, presumably because she knew too much. It was therefore almost certainly Rudolf Höss, Albert Sauer and Otto Moll between them who selected the new site by the crematorium and agreed – at least as a stop-gap while the
Neue Wäscherei
chamber was built – to construct a simple structure which would not demand materials. This temporary gas chamber was to be fashioned out of an old tool shed.
It was Hanna Sturm
who made the partitions and banged in the nails. As she did so she saw canisters of the gas
Zyklon B
(prussic acid) lying alongside the shed.

After Hanna had completed her work, the painting gang followed, as the French woman Suzanne Hugounencq explained. ‘
We passed in front
of the crematorium in front of which lay bodies waiting for burning,’ she recalled. ‘That morning there were some very important SS men around, with loud voices and fat bellies, and they had the arrogance of people with great power.’ The civilian boss of the painting gang received instructions from the fat men – ‘very submissively but with apprehension’ – and the job of painting the shed fell to Suzanne and two Germans.

Inside were large barrels containing chemicals used for mixing the paint. ‘When the SS left there was an ominous silence. We had to get to work. We had to empty the building of all these materials. The building must have been four metres wide and six long. It had a large door and a window on the left side that let in the light. On the outside it had two shutters. It was like a garage for a car, perhaps.’

The women returned the next day, by which time the shutters of the window had been nailed down with a plank and something had been fixed to the wall. The three big chiefs came to inspect. ‘One suggested that two holes were drilled about five centimetres wide and two holes were also
pierced in the wall of the block. A special airtight cover was erected over the top to make sure everything was sealed tight. It was our job to plug all the gaps and holes with mastic, which was not easy to see in the total darkness we had to work in.’

After the painting gang finished their work, this ‘temporary’ gas chamber too was put on hold for a while. Perhaps Höss and his team were still expecting Jahn’s concrete design to be built. More likely they just wanted to try another method of mass killing first – a method they were also familiar with.

Although shooting prisoners had been common at Ravensbrück for the past four years, the numbers shot in a month rarely exceeded forty, and to date these had mostly been termed executions, as the victims had been given ‘death sentences’ for a ‘crime’. The shooting that now began was on an entirely different scale – fifty a night. It was called killing, not execution, and was done in such secrecy that today many questions about it remain unanswered. It is partly through Percival Treite, who as camp doctor had to be present, that we have any reliable detail at all.

Before his trial, in 1946, Treite talked openly of the shooting, but only through self-interest: after observing the shooting once he said he refused to be present again and hoped this would count in his favour with the judges.

Treite’s testimony on the shooting came in three stages. In a statement given to British forces on 4 May 1945 – five days after giving himself up – he said that the extermination at Ravensbrück began with mass shooting in the winter of 1944–5.

‘
First of all
fifty prisoners were killed daily in front of the crematorium by a shot through the neck,’ he said. A doctor had to be there because ‘one bullet doesn’t always kill the prisoner immediately’. In a second statement, on 14 August 1946, he described how the victims were not only the old and sick but also ‘
young women capable of work
’, who were brought to a place near the crematorium and shot in the back of the neck with a small-calibre gun from a short distance – the
Genickschuss
.

It was always done at first light, said Treite. ‘
The dawn was enough
for the executioners to see what they were doing.’ Afterwards two prisoners from the men’s camp brought the victims to the crematorium, where Treite waited to ‘perform my task of certifying death’. Hellinger prised out the gold fillings and crowns ‘and the bodies were burned’. In a further statement on 2 October 1946, Treite talked of an occasion when fifty prisoners were brought from the Youth Camp to be shot by rifle two at a time.