If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women (42 page)

The Czech girls said it was possible to smuggle out letters with the clothes. Once or twice they had even fooled the guards by sending back clothes of girls who were not executed, with notes hidden inside. ‘Everyone was trying to help the Poles at this time,’ said Maria.

Everyone was shocked by these experiments, and terrified the same might happen to them, so they asked me if I would like to send some clothes home, so I could smuggle out a message to my parents about what was happening. Both my parents were in the Polish underground in Warsaw. I thought this was a big opportunity to tell them about the camp.

With this in mind Maria and some friends drew a big map, showing where the camp was, and the layout. ‘We wrote about the experiments and the executions, and everything we could, and the Czech girls put the letter in the bundle with my clothes. I told them to send everything except my overcoat and my snow boots – just in case. The guards sealed the box and stamped it with official SS stamps and sent it off.’

Later in the war both of Maria’s parents were captured and shot, so she would never have known their reaction to receiving the package, had it not been for a friend who lived close by in Warsaw and who was present when her parents opened it.

‘Imagine what they thought at first,’ said Maria. ‘They thought I must have been executed. But my friend told me that when they found the letter they were full of joy that I had been so clever to do it!’ Maria hoped her parents would pass the information on to the Polish underground and that it would reach the outside world. ‘But, you see, for us in the camp it was a victory anyway. Of course we wanted to tell the world about the crimes, but the joy for us was that we’d also fooled our enemy. It was a little victory. Actually this was quite a big thing. Sometimes it was smaller things. But these were the things that kept us prisoners going.’

*

By the end of October some of the women had been in the ward for two months. Beds once white were now grey and sticky. Stefania Łotocka tried to pull her blanket up tight around her neck so that the stink of her leg did not escape, but it didn’t work. Her matted hair formed a sort of coxcomb on top of her head.

They had been mutilated; now they’d been abandoned. Even Oberheuser rarely walked through the ward. Swarms of flies fed on pus, and white bandages were covered with black maggots. They would be killed by the filth, if nothing else, thought Stefania as she watched the cockroaches in the cracks of walls.

One morning Oberheuser walked onto the ward, brisk and important, announcing that they were all to be cleaned up and given clean nightdresses. The professor was coming again. Though he wasn’t due until 2 p.m. the women were prepared hours ahead, laid out on special boards in the surgery ‘like bodies in a mortuary’. Each wore a ragged nightdress and had been given a card to balance on her front, on which codes were written in fine Gothic flourishes. As the hours passed their wounds ached and bled. Oberheuser rearranged the cards from time to time: A1 A11, C1 C11, D1 D11, E1 E11.

It was late afternoon when Karl Gebhardt turned up with his doctors. All of them were drunk. Gebhardt, in boastful mood, showed off his
Kaninchen
to the rest, who marvelled at the sight.
‘Look here,’
he said, proudly pointing at swollen legs and festering wounds, and as he explained something behind his hand, everyone roared with laughter and a dozen eyes looked on, making mental notes. According to one woman, Gebhardt’s appearance that day was ‘fat with a pale, pudding-like face and small eyes. Dressed in civilian clothes – a navy-blue sweater.’

Each time the chief surgeon came up to one of the women, Fischer and Oberheuser hovered at his elbow trying to impress with their report, and as he nodded Oberheuser ‘beamed with satisfaction’, her face ‘excited and red’. Quickly bored with Oberheuser and the patients,
Gebhardt left
.

Like his staff Karl Gebhardt had obviously lost interest in the cases; the results, yet again, produced nothing new. Grawitz, the director of the experimental programme, had not even turned up this time. In any case, the man who promoted the sulphonamide experiments in the first place, Heinrich Himmler, had found more absorbing experiments to follow.

By late October 1942 Himmler’s enthusiasm for medical experimentation was burgeoning. Instead of cures for battlefield wounds, he was asking Sigmund Rascher, another favoured doctor, to find ways to revive sailors and airmen pulled out of freezing seas. Himmler had been reading about
methods used by coastal communities in past centuries to save shipwrecked crews in the Baltic. Country folk often knew excellent remedies, he told Rascher in a letter, such as teas brewed from medicinal herbs.

Himmler went on: ‘
I can also imagine
that a fisherman’s wife might take her half-frozen husband to bed with her after he had been rescued and warm him up that way.’ He urged Rascher to try the same, and told him to use Ravensbrück prostitutes, sent to work in the Dachau brothel, for the ‘human warmth’. At first Rascher rejected the idea, saying that it wouldn’t work, but Himmler insisted and as Rascher was another close friend, and a devotee of the Reichsführer’s Ancestral Heritage projects, he came round.

Since the establishment some months earlier of a brothel at Buchenwald, staffed by Ravensbrück women, a brothel had also been set up at Dachau, and Ravensbrück women had been sent to work there too. From among these women Rascher was given four ‘prostitutes’ for his tests.

One of the women, however, Rascher rejected on the grounds that she was too Nordic. He wrote later that she ‘
showed unobjectionably Nordic
racial characteristics: blonde hair, blue eyes, corresponding head and body structure’.

I asked the girl why she had volunteered for the brothel. I received the answer: ‘To get out of the concentration camp, because I was promised that all those who would volunteer for the brothel for half a year would be released from the camp.’ To my objection that it was a great shame to volunteer as a prostitute, I was told: ‘Rather half a year in the brothel than half a year in the concentration camp.’

Rascher said the woman had also given him an account of ‘the most peculiar conditions’ at Ravensbrück, and this account was confirmed by the others.

It hurts my racial feelings to expose as a prostitute to racially inferior concentration camp elements a girl who has the appearance of a pure Nordic and who could perhaps by assignment of proper work be put on the right road. Therefore, I refused to use this girl for my experimental purposes.

Content to use the other Ravensbrück women, Rascher prepared for the experiments, keeping Himmler informed of progress. First, eight male prisoners were placed in a large tank of near-freezing water and left there until they passed out. Each of the men was removed from the tank, unconscious, and placed between two Ravensbrück women lying naked in a spacious bed. The women were told to nestle as close as possible to the moribund man. All three were covered with blankets. The result was that the men quickly revived. Once the subjects regained consciousness they did not lose it again, but
‘very quickly grasped
the situation’, as Rascher put it later, and ‘snuggled up to the naked female bodies’.

The rate at which the men’s body temperature rose was about the same as if they had been warmed by packed blankets. ‘But in four cases the men performed an act of sexual intercourse with the women.’ The chilled men’s temperature rose faster after intercourse. Experiments using only one woman instead of two showed an even faster re-warming, perhaps, according to Rascher, because inhibitions were removed and the woman snuggled closer to the man. In none of the cases was the re-warming of the man any more effective than if they had been placed in a hot bath. And in one of the cases the man had a cerebral haemorrhage and died.

In early November a man called Ludwig Stumpfegger turned up at Hohenlychen, and any hopes that the Ravensbrück experiments might come to an end were dashed. The access to female material for experimentation had tempted Stumpfegger to come and do some tests himself: he wanted to break bones and see if they would grow back together again. Stumpfegger, another Himmler favourite, proposed the experiments to Gebhardt. Gebhardt knew Stumpfegger well – they had worked on the German medical team at the 1936 Berlin Olympics – but he claimed later that he
opposed Stumpfegger’s tests
on the grounds that such experiments had already been done.

But Stumpfegger had Himmler’s approval. The Reichsführer had recently carried out a tour of convalescent homes for wounded soldiers, and believed more could be done to mend broken bones. He proposed to Stumpfegger that he experiment on young Polish prisoners at Ravensbrück.

On 2 November a sixteen-year-old Polish dancer called Basia Pietrzyk, the baby of the Lublin transport, became one of Stumpfegger’s first victims. Basia was a slight, graceful figure whose dark hair and black eyes had earned her the nickname ‘Pepper’ in the Polish block. During her operation Stumpfegger chiselled pieces of bone out of her right and left tibias before plastering over the legs up to the groin and scribbling on the cast the code 1A, to signal the start of his series of experiments. He took the pieces of Basia’s legs away in his car to Hohenlychen to study them.

Once again the operations were conducted in supposed secrecy, but once again the secrecy misfired. Not only was the Polish radiographer Zofia Mączka able to observe as before, but now she was even brought in to participate, as it was she who was ordered to take the X-rays before and after each operation.

Over the next weeks, as more and more Polish women were called to the
Revier
, Zofia recorded three different sorts of operation: bone-breaking; bone
grafts and bone splinters. The breaking lasted up to three hours, during which the shinbones of both legs were smashed with hammers on the operating table. The bones were set – either with or without clamps – and the wounds sewn shut and put in casts. After a few days the casts were removed and the bones left to heal without the cast. In other operations a whole fibula or tibia was just taken out.

Operations on muscles began at the same time, also at Stumpfegger’s instigation. In these the victim would be recalled several times. First a piece of muscle was excised from the shin and thigh, and in later operations larger and larger pieces were taken.

Izabela Rek was called to the
Revier
and entered to see five of her friends already undressed, lying with their faces turned to the wall, with thermometers in their anuses. She was soon the sixth to lie there. After an operation on one of her legs (she had operations on both) Dr Rosenthal picked up a knitting needle from a nearby table and tapped an area of exposed bone, while Izabela looked on.

With the new series of experiments under way, the sound of bones being smashed and splintered, and muscles grafted onto bone, came from the operating theatre every day, accompanied by Herta Oberheuser’s whistling, especially if Dr Fischer was around.

When Maria Grabowska was wheeled up to the theatre door to await her operation, she heard the sound of drilling from inside. She waited an hour, and Oberheuser opened the theatre door, ‘her white overall soaked in blood’. Maria was left with pain so acute that it felt as if her shinbone had been pierced with a nail and drilled, which was near enough what had been done to her. It was so unbearable that she felt her heart contracting.

Eugenia Mikulska is held down by nurses as the doctors cut into her shin, even though the anaesthetic has clearly not worked. Days later, when she summons the strength to look at her leg, she sees the bone completely uncovered from just under the knee to her ankle, with folds of green flesh all around it. Sent for new dressings a few days later, she waits outside the operating theatre and hears her friend Jadwiga Dzido screaming from inside, so Eugenia tries to run away but finds her legs won’t carry her and she falls. A nurse comes up and asks: ‘Why are you running away? You know you’ve got to go in there like her and he’ll cut you up too.’

Before Rosenthal begins on Eugenia, he notices her small foot and high instep and asks if she is a ballet dancer. ‘No, I’m a nurse,’ she says. ‘Oh
Krankenschwester
,
Krankenschwester
,’ he repeats, as he cuts away the living muscle. When Eugenia gets back to the ward she shouts out, ‘There is no God’ but Jadwiga Dzido is shouting far louder. ‘Give me a sword, give me a sword, I
must defend myself. All Poland is bleeding and I am bleeding,’ she cries over and over again.

Jadwiga is delirious. She is also haemorrhaging badly. Blood is flowing from her mutilated leg, which is locked in an iron splint, so Eugenia forces herself out of bed, hobbling and falling, to reach Jadwiga. On the third attempt she gets there and, propped up on Jadwiga’s mattress, she makes some kind of tourniquet for her friend’s leg. But Jadwiga looks nearly finished. Oberheuser comes in soon, and the look on her face shows she thinks so too.

The next day, Jadwiga is still delirious and fading, so Eugenia, who is mending, hops through to the other room to tell other friends about Jadwiga Dzido. When she turns again, to go back to her bed, she stops at the door in horror. Oberheuser and Gerda Quernheim are standing over Jadwiga holding a syringe that is about to slide in. ‘And I kept thinking: “You must not kill her.”’

Eugenia and others now shout out: ‘Don’t kill her. She’s not going to die,’ and Oberheuser and Quernheim look over towards Eugenia. There is silence. Oberheuser pulls Gerda Quernheim’s hand away from Jadwiga and they walk off.

Eugenia looks at Jadwiga, now thinking the only hope is that she will come out of her delirium. Miraculously, almost at that very moment, she opens her eyes, looks at Eugenia and says, quite normally: ‘Where am I? What is happening?’

When supper comes Eugenia persuades Jadwiga to eat, and she does. Four years later Jadwiga Dzido becomes one of four Polish rabbits to give evidence at the Nuremberg doctors’ trial.

The rabbits’ accounts not only detail the butchery they themselves were subjected to but also throw light on other atrocities going on inside the
Revier
at the same time; in particular their reports reveal how the Ravensbrück doctors were increasingly and habitually using injections to kill.