If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women (14 page)

Just weeks after the start of the war, Hitler rewarded Himmler’s efficiency on the war front with the rank of Reich Commissar for the Consolidation of Germandom, which required him to remove all unwanted people from newly captured Poland, and transform the land into a perfect living space for a genetically cleansed German super-race. By January the task was well in hand; he had already moved the population of the Warthegau and Gdansk corridor and resettled the areas with ethnic Germans, transported in from the Baltic States. The Polish ruling classes were also being rounded up and two million Polish Jews were being moved to reservations in the so-called ‘General Government’, a part of annexed eastern Poland. The Führer had not yet ruled on where these Jews would eventually go but many around Hitler assumed they would be pushed further east, or even deported to Africa – an idea to resettle them in the French colony of Madagascar had been floated.

With the largest human experiment ever imagined under way, Himmler had now found the time to head to Ravensbrück to examine more localised experiments. He had also arranged a meeting at Ravensbrück with Oswald Pohl, who had started an experiment of his own. At his nearby estate Pohl
was trying out different breeds of poultry, and Himmler, who used to breed chickens too, was eager to pick his brains.

The screech of wheels in icy ruts alerted the camp that Himmler was close. Gangs of prisoners stood knee-deep in snow, shovelling a path. Out on the frozen lake more women were at work, hacking ice for the camp storeroom. The weakest often collapsed on the ice, dragging axes in frostbitten hands. ‘Their frozen corpses sometimes had to be hacked free,’ recalled Luise Mauer.

Outside the headquarters building the Reichsführer’s car pulled to a halt. Koegel, newly promoted to Sturmbannführer (major) and officially confirmed as commandant, stepped out to greet him. Followed by Langefeld, the men strode through the camp gates to inspect a line-up of excited women guards. Himmler then joined Koegel in his office to hear in detail about the ongoing revolt by Jehovah’s Witnesses. These women’s refusal to sew military mailbags had grown over recent weeks into a full-blown protest, which Koegel had failed to break, and the commandant was raging with anger.

Many prisoners later recalled the protest, marked by the religious women’s extraordinary resilience. First they were forced to stand in ice and snow for hours on end, until several collapsed with frostbite. As soon as Koegel’s new stone bunker was complete, the women were locked inside, nine to a cell, in total darkness, and given no food. Still not a single woman had broken ranks.

Koegel now appealed to Himmler for even greater powers to break them. The only way, he insisted, was to beat them. Random beating took place every day, but Koegel asked for authorisation to use the
Prügelstrafe
, a method used in male camps. This ‘official’ beating meant strapping a prisoner, stomach down, over a wooden horse, or
Bock
, and giving them twenty-five lashes on the buttocks with an oxhide whip. Such punishment could only be authorised by Himmler himself, and to date he had refused to permit it. Why he had withheld it at Ravensbrück is not recorded, but we know that Johanna Langefeld believed such thrashing to be unnecessary, and had made clear she was opposed.

Himmler asked first to see the Jehovah’s Witnesses in their cells before he made his mind up. Koegel was proud of his new prison. Stone-built, surrounded by pine saplings, it was impenetrable. Dorothea Binz, the forester’s daughter, and Maria Mandl, a more experienced Austrian guard, had been chosen to run the new bunker, which made them almost as powerful as Johanna Langefeld – and certainly more feared. No other women guards might enter without Koegel’s say-so.

By the time Himmler arrived
on 4 January 1940
, the Jehovah’s Witnesses had been in the bunker for three weeks. A guard unlocked one of the doors. Himmler and Koegel peered into the darkness at a huddle of starving, freezing women crammed inside a wet, stinking cell. The women were praying. Himmler was heard to comment that they were ‘in a bad way’.

Amongst the first group were Erna Ludolph and Marianne Korn, their white headscarves barely visible as they prayed in silence in the freezing darkness. Both women had spent at least five years in prisons for refusing to give up their faith; both had been amongst those hosed down like ‘drowned mice’ during the Lichtenburg riot.

It was day twenty-one of their bunker arrest when Himmler appeared, recalled Erna Ludolph. ‘
He let the guards
open a cell door for him and he got a fright at the sight of us.’ Now he spoke. ‘Don’t you see your God has left you? We can do with you whatever we like.’ One of the Jehovah’s Witnesses in the cell responded: ‘God will save us. And if he does not – we will not serve you.’ Himmler stopped outside another cell. Again he asked for the door to be opened and peered inside. He asked a young woman called Ruth Bruch if she was ready to renounce her faith. She said: ‘I will only follow God’s rules.’ Himmler replied, ‘Shame on you girl,’ and turned to go.

Himmler and Koegel strode down the Lagerstrasse as the commandant raised other matters of concern, many of which arose due to wider developments in the war. The round-ups in Poland, for example, meant that growing numbers of Polish women were arriving every day; soon more new living blocks would be required.

The Jewish block was already packed to capacity, as was the
Strafblock
, which was filling with new asocials. The
Revier
could not cope with the number of sick, queuing to see a doctor, most of them black or green triangles, covered in sores. To the commandant all such women were ‘hags, bitches and whores’, but Himmler rarely used such language; to him they were ‘useless mouths’, ‘lives not worth living’.
^*
Although Koegel was not to know – the matter was far too secret – Himmler already had plans for dealing with them; by January 1940 the first extermination of lives not worth living had begun – not in the concentration camps, but in German sanatoria, and in the name of euthanasia.

Hitler’s intention to weed out Germany’s mentally and physically disabled – including the blind, deaf, mute and epileptic – in order to rejeuvenate the race (and spare the public purse) had long been known inside the party, but as always the Führer trod carefully, wary of public opinion at home and abroad. He knew that such a programme of mass killing could not be authorised by any law, however it was camouflaged, but the
cover of war
would obscure its criminality. For this reason Hitler waited until war was under way before directing, in October 1939, that the ‘euthanasia’ begin. Public reaction
could still not be guaranteed, so an elaborate cover story was devised to fool both Germans at home and possible observers abroad.

First, a special office inside Hitler’s own Chancellery was set up to run the ‘euthanasia’ programme, code-named T4 after the address of the office itself, situated at Berlin’s Tiergartenstrasse 4. Killing centres were set up inside existing hospitals and sanatoria – five in Germany, one in annexed Austria – and a ‘commission’ of doctors, all sworn to secrecy, would diagnose the incurably ill and the insane.

Many practical arrangements were made for disguising what was going to happen. A ‘Limited company for the transport of invalids in the Public Interest’ was established to manage bus transport, while hospital staff in the sanatoria were taught how to send out lying letters to the families of the dead.

The decision on how to kill had been more difficult. In Poland, Himmler had ordered that all mentally ill be shot, but in Germany mass shooting of sanatoria patients was ruled out: it would expose what was happening. After some discussion amongst top doctors, a proposal to use carbon monoxide gas was agreed. One idea was to administer it by releasing the gas into hospital dormitories when patients slept. Others suggested introducing gas into a purpose-built sealed chamber through showerheads. A decision was taken to test the gas-chamber idea at one of the chosen T4 killing centres. The results were satisfactory, and were almost certainly conveyed to Himmler shortly before he arrived for his Ravensbrück tour.

The inspection over, Himmler was eager to return to Koegel’s office, where his friend Pohl was waiting to talk about poultry. Johanna Langefeld was also hoping to catch a word with Himmler and entered the room just as his discussions with Pohl began. Her purpose was to lobby against Koegel’s request for the
Prügelstrafe
, but when she entered Koegel’s office, a curious scene greeted her, as she described to Grete Buber-Neumann after the war:

In one of the rooms
at the commandant’s building Himmler sat next to the man who was in charge of the chicken sheds at Pohl’s estate nearby. Also present were the upper ranks of the camp administration and several female guards. Himmler was in deep discussion of the business of chickenrearing both from the point of view of research on racial genetics but also from the point of view of the farmer himself. Pohl had brought his chief chicken farmer with him to join in the talks with Himmler.

Langefeld tried to talk to Himmler about Koegel’s request for official beating, and was hopeful that the Reichsführer would agree with her, but he
turned a deaf ear. ‘Instead he continued his enthusiastic discussion of the business of rearing a racially perfect breed of chickens.’

Langefeld told Grete that she knew Koegel had been trying behind her back to win Himmler over to the
Prügelstrafe
plan. ‘This was the time that Langefeld saw Koegel for what he really was, a sadistic criminal,’ Grete commented. The commandant had even claimed that the beating was necessary to protect Langefeld herself, telling Himmler that she had been ‘attacked by a prisoner with a knife, though this was entirely untrue’.

Commenting further on Langefeld’s account, Grete said it was clear to her that Langefeld was already a ‘deeply confused woman’ at this time in the life of the camp. ‘The conflict between morality and immorality was taking place inside Langefeld’s head. On the one hand here was a woman who supported the Nazi racist insanity and anti-Semitism, but on the other hand she was ridden with guilt because women were to be sentenced to corporal punishment.’

Langefeld stayed in Koegel’s office, and eventually had a chance of speaking to the Reichsführer. ‘But when he had heard everything he wanted to hear on the subject of chickens, he ignored what Langefeld had been saying, and issued the order that beating should in future be permitted at Ravensbrück,’ said Grete.

However, the imprisoned Jehovah’s Witnesses were not the first to be beaten. Instead, Himmler ordered Koegel to release them from the bunker and assign them to hard labour in the snow. He seems to have grasped what Koegel could not: no amount of beating would make the Witnesses renounce their faith. Moreover, apart from their refusal to do war work, or recognise the Führer, they were model prisoners; it was against their faith to lie or escape and they made excellent domestic servants. So not long after his visit to the camp, Himmler ordered that the Jehovah’s Witnesses be employed in SS homes as cleaners – he even offered some to Oswald Pohl for use on his nearby estate.

Before he left Ravensbrück Himmler signed the release form for a German communist prisoner who’d tried to escape in July and had been imprisoned in the punishment block ever since. Her release was postdated by three months to 20 April, which was Hitler’s fifty-first birthday. It was a tradition to release prisoners on the Führer’s birthday.

A month after Himmler’s visit the first
Prügelstrafe
lashings took place. The victims were
Mariechen Öl and Hilde Schulleit
, caught stealing a pot of lard.
Himmler had personally approved
the beating; under the new orders the Reichsführer had to be consulted each time.

As the orders also required, a doctor attended, and the chief guard, Langefeld, was obliged to look on. The
Bock
was positioned in one of the
bunker cells, the women were tied face down, and once their skirts were lifted each was thrashed on the buttocks twenty-five times. On this occasion Koegel himself took the oxhide whip.

By the time that the
Prügelstrafe
lashings began, many new prisoners had been locked inside the bunker cells vacated by the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Marianne Wachstein, imprisoned in the wooden cells the previous summer, had continued to protest about her treatment, for which she was locked up in the new bunker in early February 1940. Just as she had described the first prison building, so she was able to give an account of this one, and once again, because she wrote it all down having just been released – she would be set free three weeks later – the details were fresh in her mind. Her writing even switches back and forth from past to present tense, because she knows the events she describes are still going on.

Marianne said she was brought before Langefeld in early February 1940 and told her crime was ‘slandering the state’, and that the sentence was twenty-eight days in the new bunker. When she protested, Langefeld told her the punishment ‘came from Koegel’.

They took her to her cell ‘without considering that my feet were bleeding and frozen and that I was so emaciated that every single rib could be counted and in some places my skin was hanging like an empty sack’. She passed out, and Zimmer tried to wake her ‘by spilling water on me through the opening where the food is pushed in’. When this didn’t wake her, Zimmer ordered an assistant to hit Marianne with a broomstick through the same opening. ‘When I woke up from the blows I was wet all over and had to stay in the cold winter in a wet dress and wet socks – in solitary confinement there are no shoes – for several days.’

A guard called Kolb opened Marianne’s cell door to insult her.

Frau Kolb said: ‘It stinks in here,’ so I replied: ‘I beg your pardon Frau Aufseherin, but I can’t possibly stink, I wash my body three times a day.’ Upon that she answered: ‘All Jews stink,’ and I had the feeling that if I said another word she would hit me, so I kept silent. When she opened the door again in order to bring in the food she said again: ‘You stink,’ and closed the door quickly.