If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women (11 page)

Other local girls were keen to join up too. Margarete Mewes, the mother of three from Fürstenberg, took a job at the same time as Binz, as did Elisabeth Volkenrath, a farmer’s daughter.

All SS camp staff were told to toughen up when war broke out. According to Rudolf Höss, by now an officer at Sachsenhausen, on the day the German forces crossed into Poland, Eicke himself had summoned all senior concentration camp officers to tell them they must henceforth ‘
treat orders as
sacrosanct and even those that appear most hard and severe must be implemented without hesitation’. Höss recalled Eicke saying: ‘The harsh laws of war now prevailed.’ From now on the job of SS camp staff was to ‘protect the homeland against all internal enemies’ – the fight to suppress those in the camps was as important for the future of the Reich as the fight at the front.

‘He, Eicke, therefore demanded the men serving in the camps should show an inflexible harshness towards the prisoners. Only the SS were capable of protecting the National Socialist state from all internal danger. Other organisations lacked the necessary toughness.’

Koegel understood Eicke’s orders well. The Ravensbrück enemy within – just 1607 women on 1 September 1939 – was small in number, but Koegel was showing due harshness towards every one of them. More were joining their ranks every day. On 16 September a group of political prisoners were brought in, including Luise Mauer, a courier for the German Communist Party, who had risked her life running secret messages across borders. Luise had little fighting spirit in her after being forced to stand outside the camp gates in the rain for hours, before being stripped, deloused, and shorn in the ‘bath’, and even less after she was sent to the most back-breaking work, shovelling coal from the bottom of barges. These
‘September prisoners’
were then assigned to a special block where they could not infect the camp with their dangerous plotting.

While the communists were crushed, however, it was the handful of Poles – the first real foreign ‘enemies’ to arrive – who were hated most. Within days of crossing into Poland the German forces had set about not only seizing Polish land and property but capturing and killing its ruling classes, including countless women teachers, trade unionists, countesses, community leaders, officers’ wives and journalists.

So ‘filthy’ were these ‘Slavs’ that when they first passed the Ravensbrück gates they were brutally scrubbed ‘clean’ before being sent to the
Strafblock
and put on brick-throwing work ‘
until hands were
bloody and raw’, in the words of Maria Moldenhawer, a Polish aristocrat and instructor of ‘military readiness’ in Warsaw girls’ schools.

To whip up ever more hatred, stories were spread that the Poles had cut out the tongues of German soldiers or poisoned their tea. Renee Salska had gouged out the eyes of German children, the guards said, though her only crime was to have taught Polish history in a Poznań school.

The first ‘internal enemies’ to rise up in Ravensbrück, however, were not these Polish newcomers but Koegel’s oldest and most hated enemies of all: the Jehovah’s Witnesses. The same religious women who rioted at Lichtenburg were now refusing his orders to sew bags for the war effort. A sewing workshop for the military had been established at the camp to make use of their skills, but this was war work, they protested, it was against their pacifist principles. This sent the commandant into another blind rage.

It says a lot about the mindset of Max Koegel that even now the prisoners who riled him most were not the ‘communist whores’, the ‘Slav vermin’ or the ‘Jewish bitches’, but these religious ‘hags’. Every threat had been levelled at them and every cruelty inflicted so as to make them renounce their
faith by signing on the dotted line. To break their unity, the women had even been split up among different blocks, but they had immediately begun to try converting others to their faith, so they’d been moved back together again. And as punishment they were given the hated Käthe Knoll as their Blockova, a feared green triangle who was said to have murdered her mother. But still the forms lay stacked and unsigned in Langefeld’s office.

Langefeld herself seemed unperturbed; in most respects these respectable German housewives were model prisoners who caused her no trouble. Perhaps it was precisely because they were ‘model German housewives’ that Koegel found them harder to show his teeth to than the communists, the Jews, the Slavs and the whores – and this is what drove him mad.

Nor was the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ protest insignificant. In the autumn of 1939 they made up more than half of the women in the camp, and Koegel had called for more powers to restrain them, demanding a bigger, more permanent prison building. Now that war had begun, Ravensbrück should be equipped with the same secure cell block as the male camps.

In the autumn of 1939 he finally received permission for the new prison, and male prisoners from Sachsenhausen were brought in to build it, though Koegel saw to it that the Jehovah’s Witnesses helped them. Constructed out of stone on two levels, one sunk deep into the ground, it would have seventy-eight cells, replacing the wooden structure where Hanna Sturm was still incarcerated.

After nearly three months in isolation, Hanna had lost track of time, but she knew autumn had come, as it was icy cold in her cell and she still had only a thin summer dress. Olga had left the neighbouring cell long ago, but Hanna could still hear Hedwig Apfel. Each time Mewes, the new
Strafblock
guard, entered Hedwig’s cell the opera singer shrieked and laughed and threw her pot back in Mewes’s face.

Since war had begun, numbers in the
Strafblock
had swelled, and Mewes was brought in to help Zimmer, handing out the food and patrolling at night. A sullen brute, Mewes had had three children, all by different Fürstenberg men, or so Hanna had picked up by listening to gossiping guards. At least, thought Hanna, she could be thankful that Margot Kaiser had been moved on. Under the commandant’s new regime, the twenty-year-old green-triangle prisoner from Chemnitz had been promoted and was now the camp’s most powerful inmate.

In any male concentration camp, Margot Kaiser would have been called a Kapo (‘trusty’, inmate foreman), or Senior Kapo. Here in Ravensbrück the word was less commonly used, but the practice of co-opting prisoners to carry out the day-to-day work of running the camp was to all intents and
purposes the same as it was in Buchenwald, Dachau or Sachsenhausen. The female prisoner guards were more likely to be called by their official titles – the Blockova was the block chief, the Stubova the room chief – but they were all put in post to assist the SS, just as the
Kapos
were in male camps. Such prisoner jobs had existed from the start, but in the autumn of 1939, in line with the new harshness, the Kapo system had been tightened up, with a new hierarchy. The job of
Lagerläuferin
– camp runner – was introduced: prisoners whose job was to carry messages back and forth as required. And a ‘head prisoner’ was appointed; Margot Kaiser was the first to get the job. Her official title was
Lagerälteste
, camp senior, though the prisoners called her
Lagerschreck
– camp terror.

The Kapo system had always been at the very heart of the concentration camp blueprint. For one thing, it saved on staff and money: without these willing prisoner helpers, the SS would not have been able to control the vast numbers held in their camps. But as Rudolf Höss explained in his memoir, the Kapos were far more than just free labour. ‘The more there are rivalries, the more battles between the prisoners, the easier it is to control the camp. Divide and rule – that is the principle not only of high politics but also in a concentration camp.’ And the prisoner staff in no way represented the needs or wishes of the prisoners. Their job was to obey SS commands; as soon as they failed to do so they were removed. And this was the trap, as Heinrich Himmler himself explained in a speech to officers of the German army. ‘The Kapo must make the men march,’ he said, ‘and as soon as he doesn’t do his job we make him return to his block with fellow prisoners and there they will beat him to death.’

From the beginning, the system worked just as well with women as it had with men; there was no lack of prisoners willing to take bribes of better clothing, more food and their own bed. As in the male camps, the women Kapos also wore green armbands, indicating their privileged jobs and allowing them to move around freely. In the early days, just as in the men’s camps, the women chosen were often the green triangles; co-opting the criminal class to rule over political prisoners was the most obvious way to institute ‘divide and rule’. The experience of the male camps had proved that the ‘greens’ were most likely to bring zeal to the work. A ‘green’ Kapo at Mauthausen called August Adam, a gangland criminal, had the task of assigning work to new arrivals and boasted later about how he used to pick out lawyers, priests and professors and tell them: ‘Well, here I am in command. The world has turned upside down.’ Then he would beat them with his bat and send them to the
Scheisskompanie
– latrine gang.

The green triangles at Ravensbrück were never in the same criminal league as August Adam; those chosen as Kapos here were more likely to be
simply feckless women who’d fallen into a life of petty theft, illegal abortion or dodging work. Even Käthe Knoll – a Kapo of sorts since the earliest days in Lichtenburg – had not, as it later turned out, murdered her mother but was arrested for ‘race shame’ after relations with a Jewish man; she had also led a life of petty crime. Margot Kaiser, the new
Lagerschreck
, had never murdered anyone before she arrived at Ravensbrück. Throughout her teens she’d tricked and thieved, until she was sent to work in a munitions factory, from which she ran away. By the time she left Ravensbrück, however, she had beaten at least ten women to death, as she admitted at her post-war trial.

Although the green triangles held most power, Ravensbrück also employed a large number of black triangles as Kapos particularly in the blocks, and in this respect the women’s camp differed from the men’s. Among the black triangles Ravensbrück had a useful resource that the male camp didn’t have:
Püffmutter
, brothel madams. Langefeld liked to appoint these women: if a
Puffmutter
could run a brothel, she could run a Ravensbrück block.

Philomena Müssgueller, a forty-one-year-old prostitute who had run a brothel in Munich for many years, was happy to be plucked out of the mayhem of the asocial block to work as a Blockova keeping order over ‘politicals’, especially as it won her an extra sausage and her own bed. Philomena already had her own gang of black-triangle acolytes, who fawned around her, and together they easily had the muscle to keep down a bunch of red triangles.

Marianne Scharinger, an Austrian, arrested for carrying out illegal abortions, was made Blockova of the Jewish block, while the Düsseldorf prostitute Else Krug had been chosen for the prize job of running the potato cellar. Peeling mountains of root vegetables to a strict deadline was gruelling and repetitive work, but much sought after thanks to the chance of pocketing a potato, cabbage or swede. Since the outbreak of war prisoners were getting one less ladle of soup a day, and Else had set up a smuggling ring, getting extra vegetables out to the hungry in her block.

As their power spread, nobody despised the Kapos more than the German and Austrian red triangles. The ‘September prisoner’ Luise Mauer was harassed by a prostitute Blockova called Ratzeweit, a ‘despicable’ character who lashed out and screeched when the women were late getting up for
Appell
. Ratzeweit liked to pick on older women, and harassed Lisel Plucker, an elderly political prisoner, so Lisel tried to kill herself by walking into the wire.

Maria Wiedmaier, who had organised Red Help committees for the Communist Party, had never had to take orders from such lowlife as
Müssgueller. ‘
Zimmer surrounded herself
with green triangles,’ she said, ‘and she made use of their meanness, and their brutish methods.’ These Kapos were also used as SS spies; one such spy spotted Minna Rupp, another newly arrived German communist, stealing half a carrot and reported her to Koegel, so Minna was sent to the
Strafblock
. Prisoners were barely able to meet at all any more, as the
Spitzel
(informers) were watching and would report not only to Koegel but to Langefeld as well.

Johanna Langefeld saw the value of the Kapo system too, particularly as Koegel tried to further undermine her authority. In the first six months of the camp the
Oberaufseherin
had lost several battles with the commandant, and now there was to be a new camp prison – or ‘bunker’ – against her wishes.

Langefeld had been as eager as anyone to fulfil Himmler’s edict on ‘protecting the homeland from internal enemies’. The mere sight of women standing for hours in the cold and wet demonstrated her iron discipline. Nevertheless, Koegel’s methods were not hers, and later she would tell American interrogators that she had always known Koegel was a sadist, though her statement suggests that she was just as angered by Koegel’s refusal to inform her of his plans as she was by his brutality.

In particular, he had secured the right – behind her back – to order women to the
Strafblock
and isolation cells without consultation. Worse, women guards – other than those assigned to work there – would be barred from entering the new stone bunker without Koegel’s permission. To counter this affront, Langefeld shored up her own power base in the living blocks, kitchen,
Wäscherei
and
Effektenkammer
by making sure that Kapos loyal to her were put in key positions. And she insisted on choosing these prisoner staff herself. She took her time, watching women on the Lagerstrasse and reading their files. She also listened to her informers, often other Kapos.

Doris Maase said later that from the very earliest months, Johanna Langefeld had recruited her ‘men of confidence’ from amongst the prostitutes. If she heard that a Blockova was losing control, the woman was sacked. Langefeld would then stride out onto the Lagerstrasse at
Appell
and pick another woman who had caught her eye.