If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women (116 page)

When I eventually received a response from the Siemens archivist Dr Frank Wittendorfer, it came in the form of a brief statement which began: ‘During World War Two, German industrial companies were incorporated by the NS dictatorship into the “war economy” system.’ In other words, Siemens was reiterating its long-held argument that it was ‘forced to cooperate’ with Hitler from the start, and therefore, even today, accepts no legal responsibility for its actions. The statement gave details of its compensation payments made over the years, while stressing it had ‘no legal obligation’ to make any such payments. It mentioned the company’s ‘profound regret’, but omitted to give any details about what was regretted.

These mealy-mouthed words were distasteful and contrasted with responses of other German institutions which, increasingly in recent years, have had the courage to face their past. During the Nazi era a doctorate awarded by Heidelberg University to Käthe Leichter, the Jewish-Austrian sociologist imprisoned in Ravensbrück and gassed at Bernburg, was revoked. When her son Franz Leichter asked for it be reinstated the university rector, Dr Stefan Maul, replied describing Käthe’s case as ‘a harrowing testament to our country’s and our university’s shameful past and the many unjustified and unspeakable crimes committed’. The removal of the doctorate by his predecessors was a ‘blatant violation of human rights’, and he added: ‘Today in 2013 we are whether we like it or not the successor of those who committed this injustice, those who let it happen and hushed it up.’ The employment of slave labourers by Siemens was surely a far more shocking violation of human rights, but it was also more costly to rectify, and when in 1993 a Ravensbrück prisoner, Waltraud Blass, sought to use new laws brought in since German reunification in order to secure payment of her lost wages in a Munich court Siemens refused to accept liability and the case was thrown out. There is evidence, however, that some within Siemens – apart from the archivist – may be
ready to look back. At the instigation of the camp’s educational staff and of Siemens’s trade unions, workshops are held at Ravensbrück for Siemens trainees, where they can study the camp ‘in an environment that makes them feel safe about confronting their past’, as the head of the camp education section put it. In December 2013 a Siemens director asked to meet two survivors, including Selma van de Perre, and reportedly spoke of his company’s ‘guilt’. The meeting, however, was held behind closed doors; the expression of guilt, ‘hushed up’. And while groups of employees are helped to ‘feel safe’ as they learn about the past, up at the Siemens plant there is not even a ‘safe’ place for survivors to stand nor a shelter to keep off the rain. There is no rose bed here, no memorial to the Siemens victims. The name Siemens is nowhere to be seen. Before long the remains of the Siemenslager will be entirely overgrown.

I left the Siemens plant and headed across a strip of waste ground towards the Youth Camp. Fog was closing in. Once again it was hard to find the way. A rusty railway track disappeared into the trees. Just beyond it was a clearing with a little shrine made of shells, put up by the Berlin feminist group Gedenkort in memory of the teenage girls imprisoned here before the Youth Camp became a death camp, as well as those who died later.

Piles of ugly concrete and sheets of zinc stick up out of the ground near by. Perhaps this was one of the blocks.

Then, suddenly, six wire-mesh figures appeared out of the trees.
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Like ghosts they seemed to be tilting forward as if to welcome me. Between February and April 1945 an estimated 6000 women were marched out into these woods from the Ravensbrück main camp. They were told they were coming somewhere where they would be treated better, but instead they were brought here and most were murdered, or taken by truck to the gas chamber and gassed or shot.

What happened on this forsaken patch of land was Ravensbrück’s most abominable crime. Yet nobody passing by would ever know. There is no reason even to pass by; the land, owned by the state of Brandenburg (as is the Siemens site) and not even incorporated into the main Ravensbrück memorial site, is far off the beaten track. Nobody seems to want to lay claim to it, except the feminists of Gedenkort. A shortage of money is given as one reason why the Youth Camp seems to have been forgotten. More important is a dispute over terminology. The camp director proposed that the former Youth Camp be called an extermination camp, but members of the Jewish council of Germany objected, saying only the Jewish death camps, set up
under the terms of the Final Solution, can be defined as such.
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Yet again, nobody can quite think how to tell the Ravensbrück story. There is a reluctance to take what happened here as seriously as other Nazi crimes so the site lies abandoned ‘on the margins’.

The SS men who devised the final killing at Ravensbrück would certainly have called it extermination – they were the same exterminators who had murdered the Jews at Auschwitz. They’d be pleased to see how well their secret has been kept: seventy years ago they deliberately tucked this women’s extermination camp away in the woods so nobody would know about it. The exterminators also invented a name for the place, calling it Mittwerda and pretending it was a sanatorium.

There were certainly differences from earlier exterminations: the scale was smaller, and to save money the killers first tried to kill as many women as possible by starving them, or leaving them to stand almost naked in the snow for hours on end ‘without hair, without name, with no more strength to remember, her eyes empty, her womb cold like a frog in winter’, as Primo Levi wrote when he asked us to ‘Consider if This is a Woman’. He urged his readers: ‘Meditate that this came about. I commend these words to you. Tell your children.’ Levi wrote about Auschwitz but his message was universal.

We should certainly ‘meditate’ upon what happened here, and also give this extermination camp for women its rightful name and place in history. At Nuremberg Robert H. Jackson said the Nazi conspiracy ‘set one goal then, having achieved it, moved on to a more ambitious one’. Ravensbrück, which spanned the war years, is a useful prism through which to watch those goals evolve. The camp helped Hitler achieve some early aims: elimination of ‘asocials’, criminals, Gypsies and other useless mouths, including those unable to work; the first such group of women were gassed at Bernburg, an atrocity which the world today knows almost nothing of. The camp played a small part too in the more ‘ambitious goal’ – the annihilation of the Jews, not least by providing women guards and Kapos for Auschwitz’s women’s camp. Then, in the final weeks of the war, Ravensbrück moved centre stage, becoming the scene of the last major extermination by gas carried out in the Nazi camps before the end of the war.

Unlike the earlier phases of extermination, however, this final killing had no ‘goal’ because the creation of a master race had been abandoned. The
prisoners of Ravensbrück therefore – old, young, of many different nationalities, non-Jew and Jew, with nothing to unite them except that they were women – were killed just to make more room. Then they were killed because their legs weren’t good enough to join the death march. In reality these final gassings happened because the exterminators couldn’t stop. This was no marginal atrocity; it was where the Nazi horror ended – with the mass murder of women in the most bestial fashion with no cover of ideology, however obscene, for no reason at all.

As I left the clearing the rain was coming down heavily. I passed the wiremesh figures again. Had Ravensbrück stayed so stubbornly ‘in the margins’ of the story because of some kind of collective guilt about the victims – sisters, mothers, daughters, wives – abandoned here, the world unable to offer any help? Or perhaps the facts are just too horrible to contemplate – too painful. There is certainly testimony from Uckermark that I had found too troubling to report.

Is it best to leave these ghosts alone? It is certainly difficult to know how to remember such a place, but a clearer sign through the woods would at least help those who wish to come here to find the way.

Walking back to the main camp I entered the compound through the rear gate – the same gate through which the Youth Camp women left, and through which some, in the very last weeks, returned. By March 1945 the last extermination was extended to the whole of Ravensbrück. Across what is today just a vast empty space dotted by linden trees, the Nazis gave vent to their ‘inexorable desire to kill’, as Rudolf Höss put it, for several more weeks.

Parked in the trees while the murders reached a climax were Red Cross buses. What better image can there be of the world’s impotence in the face of the slaughter carried out in Hitler’s camps than these buses patiently waiting until the gassing was over before the rescue began? And yet Bernadotte’s mission was the only major prisoner rescue of the war.

By mid-April 1945 the Allies were closing in fast on Berlin; the Americans had uncovered Buchenwald and the British had found Belsen. There could now be no doubt about the horror in the camps, and that horror was still unfolding in several places not yet liberated, including Ravensbrück, where women were being lined up for gassing. Political and military realities, however, meant no change of strategy was considered that might protect the remaining camps in the last weeks of the war.

Negotiating with Himmler over the camps had never been an option either. Churchill’s edict of ‘no truck with Himmler’ ensured that the Allies never compromised their objective, which was to win the military war, crushing the Nazis and all they represented. Even offering safe passage to Bernadotte’s White Buses was a compromise too far for the Allies and was refused.

And yet it is impossible not to follow the story of the White Bus rescue
without cheering them on, in the knowledge that with Bernadotte’s mission under way at last someone was putting prisoners’ lives first. Bernadotte certainly had to compromise in order to carry out his rescue, which was done on Himmler’s terms. Not only was he obliged by Himmler to wait for the killing to subside at Ravensbrück, he was unable to rescue Jews until the last days. Had he not compromised, however, Bernadotte would not have got 17,000 prisoners out. He received little thanks. After the war he was still accused of failing to rescue enough Jews, though he eventually saved at least 7000. In 1947 Bernadotte was chosen to be the United Nations mediator in the Arab–Israeli war. On 17 September 1948 he was assassinated in Jerusalem by the Zionist militant group the Stern Gang.

In later years survivors wanted more than anything for their accounts of Ravensbrück to be heard and believed. They knew that if the next generations did not know the facts, they would never learn the lessons.

Antonina Nikiforova spent the proceeds of her first book on buying a small dacha near Leningrad and retreated there in order to write more. ‘My impressions of the camp were so strong, I could only quieten them by writing books,’ she wrote in a letter to another survivor.

Others decided to talk after decades of silence. Some spoke to me of things never mentioned before – sometimes they were surprising.

Nelly Langholm, the Norwegian from Stavanger, revealed the secret of her arrest. When the Germans occupied Norway in 1940 Nelly, a schoolgirl, came home one wet evening to find a German officer playing the piano in her house. ‘He said, “Now begins the Grimm’s fairy tale.” He said his name was Wolfgang Grimm and he had come to see me. I didn’t know why and he wouldn’t say. But he talked to me and he was so lovely and sweet and played the piano. And he came back the next day. And the next day. And I fell in love with him.’

Soon afterwards Nelly’s uncle was blown up by a German bomb and a cousin was captured. ‘Eventually I realised that it could not be and I wrote to him and said don’t come to my house any more because you are the enemy and I can’t see you any more. And then the next day the Gestapo came to my house and arrested me. They told me they had read the letter in which I said I was an enemy of Germany. I didn’t know if he had handed the letter into the Gestapo or if it was just the censor.’

Nelly said it ‘felt right in a way’ that she was sent to Ravensbrück. ‘I had done this terrible thing and fallen in love with a German and the Germans had killed our family. I thought I should be punished.’

When Nelly was first arrested one of her friends asked her mother why she had let the German into the house in the first place. Nelly’s mother told the friend that he had looked so miserable and cold and wet she couldn’t
leave him out there. ‘She was so beautiful, my mother. That was just like her to do that,’ said Nelly.

In the 1960s, on a visit to Berlin, Nelly saw Wolfgang Grimm again. ‘I was walking in the street with a friend and I suddenly saw him. He was standing up stock still like a statue staring at me. I just walked past and said nothing. There was nothing I could say.’

Listening to the voices of the Ravensbrück women I looked for clues about why this group survived. I could almost hear Maria Bielicka banging her fists on the table as she tried to explain why survival was in the blood of every Polish woman, ‘passed on from mother to daughter’.

Jeannie Rousseau, the French woman who passed on intelligence about the V2 bombs to Churchill survived because she refused not to. At Torgau she refused to make German arms. At the punishment camp of Königsberg she refused to die on the freezing airfield and escaped back to the main camp, hiding in a typhus truck. When Bernadotte arrived, Jeannie was locked in the
Strafblock
but refused to be left behind, and persuaded the Blockova to let her out.

‘You can refuse what is happening. Or go along with it. I was in the refusal camp,’ she said.

I asked her how she had the courage.

‘I don’t know. I was young. I thought if I do it, it will work. You simply cannot accept some things. Certain things.’

Many refused in other ways; they refused to accept the annihilation of what they knew, praying, talking, writing, reading, teaching whenever they could – the Polish teachers taught their young students in the camp so well that when they got home they were even awarded their exam certificates. Some ‘refused’ by remaining detached from events, which may have protected them. Natalia Chodkiewicz said: ‘The entire time I was in the camp it was as if I had a double personality. My real self seemed to be observing what was happening to my physical self.’