If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women (37 page)

The outcome was that more and more Ravensbrück women, along with prisoners in all concentration camps, were to be deployed as slave labourers making military equipment, clothes and arms. With this new priority in mind, Himmler had toured the workshops in March and flown into a fury on discovering that the women harnessed to the weaving treadmill were still only working an eight-hour shift. Eleven-hour shifts were introduced, as well as night shifts in the sewing workshops and stringent production quotas.

In his discussions with the commandant, Himmler also revealed that talks had begun with the German electrical giant Siemens, and with officials of the Luftwaffe, to enable Siemens to install a factory at Ravensbrück to make electrical parts for fighter planes. The plan had wide-ranging implications for the prisoners: soon the women would be deployed as slave labour in one of the key areas of arms production. The deal also had implications for the company of Siemens & Halske, as it then was, cementing its already close relations with the Nazi regime. Its plant at Ravensbrück made Siemens one of the first major German companies to install a factory at a concentration camp, and the first of all German companies to exploit women slave labourers.

Founded in 1847, Siemens & Halske had started as a family firm, but by the 1930s it was the country’s biggest electrical company, and to preserve its market dominance it collaborated with Hitler’s Third Reich, securing lucrative arms contracts. Several senior company figures, including Friedrich Lüschen, who invented the first telephone cable, joined the SS, and one of the directors, Rudolf Bingel, became so close to Heinrich Himmler that he was invited to join his
circle of friends
– the Reichsführer’s favourite German industrialists.

In the run-up to war Siemens, which was based in Berlin, lost thousands of workers, called up to the front.
To make up the shortfall
the company took more than 3600 Jews as slave labour. Hoping their work for Siemens might spare them from deportation, the Jews worked hard, and Siemens found
them invaluable, especially the women, with their nimble fingers well
adapted for precision work
. By early 1942, however, the
shipment of Germany’s Jews
to the new gas chambers in Poland was well under way, and Siemens required another new workforce, so the prospect of cheap female labour at Ravensbrück could not have come at a better time. Moreover the camp was ideally located: out of the firing line of Allied bombers, it had excellent communication links and was convenient for company headquarters in Berlin.

Within a week of Himmler’s March 1942 visit to the camp, Oswald Pohl, his economic chief, wrote to Siemens promising 6000 women workers from the camp. Work on building the plant was to start in early summer.

In the meantime, Ravensbrück became aware of other new slave-labour directives issued by Himmler, some of which were implemented sooner. One of these directives, set out in a letter to Pohl, involved establishing brothels at the male camps, in which Ravensbrück women would work as prostitutes. After visiting the quarries at Mauthausen men’s camp, where emaciated prisoners were dying like flies, Himmler had hit upon the idea of reinvigorating the slave labourers with the lure of coupons to visit a brothel. To Himmler’s mind, the availability of sex would ‘
encourage the men
to work better’.

Soon after the order was issued the Ravensbrück doctor Gerhard Schiedlausky began selecting women according to certain criteria. Those chosen were told they would be released after six months at the brothels. Most of them were German black triangles, classed as asocials and imprisoned in Ravensbrück precisely because they were prostitutes. Now these same women might win early release by working again as prostitutes in the male camps.

‘
The women chosen
had to be pretty, with good teeth, and with no venereal infections or skin disease,’ recalled Schiedlausky. The first to leave were twelve prisoners assigned to brothels at Mauthausen, four to Dachau, fourteen to Buchenwald and twelve to Flossenbürg. Edith Sparmann recalls the women arriving at the
Effektenkammer
to collect clothes. They didn’t have to take their own clothes, but could choose whatever they wanted ‘in order to look their best’, and were accompanied by women guards.

Of all the new ‘central directives’ imposed on Ravensbrück in the first half of 1942 the most hated were those that set new hours and quotas for the sewing shop. This workshop, in the industrial area at the back of the camp, had long been one of its most dreaded workplaces. The noise of machines was deafening and the air always thick with dust. Stretching down the room were conveyor belts, with lines of women sitting alongside at sewing machines, making uniforms for the Waffen-SS as well as clothes for the camp prisoners.

At any moment the shop-floor boss, an Austrian called Gustav Binder,
nicknamed Schinderhannes after a notorious Rhineland outlaw executed in 1803, might come raging out of his office and throw a stool, or perhaps a shoe with needles still protruding, that would catch a woman on the face.

After Himmler’s visit the ordeal intensified. The factory barracks were enlarged, the prisoners worked eleven-hour shifts, and for the first time there were two shifts – day and night. There were new quotas too, which the Ravensbrück textile bosses – Fritz Opitz, the manager; his deputy, Josef Graf; and Binder, the shop-floor man – were required to enforce. All were qualified tailors, trained at Texled’s Dachau headquarters. One of the four biggest SS enterprises,
Texled was professionally run
, used the latest equipment and relied almost totally on camp slave labour so was highly profitable. Oswald Pohl located the main Texled sewing shop at Ravensbrück because garment making was
‘women’s work’
.

Fritz Opitz, the boss, set out in late April for the Texled HQ at Dachau to take instructions on the new quotas. Opitz, however, though a master tailor, could barely read or write, so Graf, recently invalided back from the Russian front, and Binder worked out the schedule. Binder sat at a sewing machine and sewed each section of each garment himself, while Graf stood by with a stopwatch. In this way they worked out the minimum time it took to sew, say, a cuff or a seam.

They set the quota at two and a half minutes per shirt, which meant a minimum output of 180 garments each shift, given precisely fifty-seven women on each of the ten belts, working for eleven hours starting at 7 a.m. and finishing at 6 p.m. The night shift would start at 7 p.m. and finish at 6 the next morning, and all prisoners had a half-hour break in the middle. Binder then ‘trained’ the women to work the quotas, and he began with the night shift. With windows blacked out at all times, the women sat at their machines, their feet clad in special cotton slippers, ready to press the pedals.

‘Tonight we are going to produce 180 shirts,’ says Binder, who stands next to the first woman on the line and counts out the seconds on his chronometer as she sews her section of shirt. When she fails to meet the target, he hits her across the face and she falls off her stool. The other 600 or so workers tremble and watch Binder, his face flushed, shaking, pouring with sweat. He has a rustic complexion and a thick neck. He pulls the woman back to her seat and she sets her machine running to try again while he takes up his chronometer. After two, three, four more failed attempts, the woman has been battered so hard she can barely sit up, but on the fifth attempt she succeeds. Binder does this for each of the women on the line.

And for a while the quota is met, so Binder delegates supervision to deputies and retreats behind the swing door leading to the office where
Graf sits, and where a prisoner plots production on a graph, based on the count of shirts, trousers and jackets at the end of every shift. If the lines climb, Binder and Graf can report with pride to Opitz that the quotas are achieved and Opitz can report to Dachau. These men are not answerable to the SS commandant, and though they carry whips they don’t wear SS uniforms, because they pride themselves on being tailors, not mere SS guards.

But it is always touch and go, as the timings are so precise that the belts must run continuously, so it is essential that the cutting supervisor, the German prisoner Maria Wiedmaier, a communist and Ravensbrück old-timer, keeps the sewers supplied with fabric. It is also essential that broken needles or snarled threads are dealt with swiftly, so another prisoner, a Czech called Nelly, has the job of running round the machines changing threads and broken needles. She has to move fast so that the sewer can finish her garment section before the next one comes along the belt.

And as each sewer adds to the work of the one before, there can be no pause, apart from the half-hour stoppage. Extra toilet breaks are allowed, but on a rota basis: a guard who has all the 600 prisoner numbers on a list calls out the numbers one by one throughout the shift, but never reaches the end, so that some numbers go uncalled for days and the woman may have to urinate where she sits. And this is punished, often with standing to attention out of doors for up to four hours, often at night in the freezing cold, and after April, shoes and winter clothes (socks and jackets) are taken away and the women wear just thin cotton.

But a belt will often stop suddenly in the middle of a shift when a woman falls asleep at her machine. Binder has timed the tasks by his own performance, unaware that a half-starved prisoner will take twice as long and soon lose strength. The instant he hears the belt stop, Binder is out of his office and hurling scissors at the sleeping woman. If he misses he stands over her, grabs her by the hair, lifts her up and smashes her face down onto the machine until her nose pours blood.

Binder and Graf sometimes come onto the shop floor together, both drunk. They pick out an elderly woman, accuse her of some crime, then start to beat her, and throw her across the table so that she falls to the floor on the other side. On one such occasion a young woman, maybe a niece or a daughter, tries to help the older woman, but the drunken tailors grab her and Binder kicks her in the stomach with his metal-shod jackboots. Now she too falls, clutching her stomach and screaming. As work resumes, the girl is left lying there. Eventually she is removed to the
Revier
, from which
word comes that she has died
.

It is in the final hour of the night shift, when the women should be
looking forward to a rest, that the worst fear spreads. Everyone knows that the garments are being counted; they know what will happen if they miss the quota. So when all the machines finally stop and silence falls they turn their eyes, 600 sets of them, towards Binder’s door.
Suddenly Schinderhannes
comes charging out of his den, face scarlet, eyes glaring, fists clenched, shouting abuse. All eyes follow him as he rampages from one woman to the next, grabbing their hair and smashing heads against sewing machines, until he himself is completely exhausted.

The whole workshop will be punished for missing the quota – probably by having to stand to attention for several hours before returning to blocks for sleep, or by a new, higher quota that is even more impossible to achieve.

Some machinists managed better than others. When Grete Buber-Neumann joined the sewing shop she noticed a young Ukrainian girl who occasionally looked across from her machine and smiled. During the midnight break the girl, Nina, taught Grete Russian folk songs that they sometimes sang together as they worked – the machines were so loud that nobody could hear. And there was one supervisor called Siepel, a Hungarian, who tried to help by going around showing the women how it was done. The women learned to love him, only to find one day he had left for the front.

One day the prisoner supervisor, Maria Wiedmaier, took Grete aside and offered her a better job in the workshop office. Maria had the power to do this now, as she was so favoured by Binder for helping him reach the quotas. Many of the German communists had a servile attitude to the SS, said Grete. The work seemed to give these prisoners a purpose, and they ‘put their heart and souls into war work’. Perhaps this is not too surprising, as the German prisoners also had loved ones at the front, and families at home in bomb shelters.

Maria Wiedmaier worked so hard that Graf was heard to comment one day: ‘What would I do without her?’ Binder thought so highly of her that he even called her as a witness at his trial. He clearly still felt pride in his work at Ravensbrück, boasting in court of his famous ‘140 pairs of trousers a day’.
^*

‘And is it true that the same task was carried out in the same way, according to the same rules, in the same two and a half minutes, every day?’ asked Stephen Stewart,
^†
the chief prosecutor. ‘
Jawohl
,’ said Binder.

After Binder was sentenced to death, his wife made an appeal saying it
was he who was under pressure, not the prisoners: they kept on trying to sabotage the work. The prisoners had ‘maliciously damaged hundreds of clothes so that it was impossible for my husband to fulfil the quota’. Could the court spare his life for her sake, and the sake of their two children? But Binder was hanged, along with Graf and Opitz.

There was, however, an element of truth in what Martha Binder said. One of the unintended consequences of Himmler’s decision to harness prisoners to the war effort was the incentive it gave for sabotage. There had been no point in sabotaging sand shifting, or coal unloading, but damaging the garments to be worn by German soldiers was worth the risk.

Most prisoners in the sewing shop were far too exhausted, too terrified of the consequences, or both, to even consider sabotage, and workers on the conveyor belts were far too exposed to risk it. In the cutting area, however, under less stringent supervision, Katarzyna
Kawurek
put properly cut pieces of uniform in the waste, which infuriated Binder. ‘He could never match the right number of items in each pile,’ said Katarzyna, ‘but he never guessed that anyone might be putting them in the waste.’