If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women (95 page)

It isn’t known whether the women learned why they had been released at this time. Virginia’s transfer was arranged by General Eisenhower’s office as part of an exchange for captured Germans. Her American mother’s pleas had finally reached Eisenhower’s desk, and when a deal was being struck to exchange a small number of Allied prisoners for Germans held in Allied hands, Virginia’s name was put on the list.

Geneviève’s release was requested by her uncle, General de Gaulle, now provisional president of France. She would always insist later on that her uncle had nothing to do with her release, and would never have ‘favoured a member of his family’, but correspondence held by the International Committee of the Red Cross tells a different story. Geneviève’s father, Xavier de Gaulle, brother of Charles, first raised the alarm about his daughter, but the general let it be known that he too was seeking her release. In a letter on 15 September 1944 an official of the ICRC in Geneva wrote to the German Red Cross: ‘
The committee has been
informed by one of its delegates of the anxiety of Monsieur le Général de Gaulle about his niece, Mademoiselle Geneviève de Gaulle, imprisoned in Ravensbrück, Block 122 [
sic
], no. 27372.’ The letter inquired about her health and stated that the General ‘particularly requested that she should be sent to Switzerland and treated in a sanatorium’.

Himmler’s other two prize Ravensbrück hostages, Odette Churchill and Gemma La Guardia Gluck, remained unclaimed. There is no evidence that Himmler ever attempted to inform the British that a ‘relative’ of the prime minister was held in Ravensbrück, but even if Winston Churchill had learned of it, nothing would have been done: Odette had lied all along about her Churchill family connection. Nor is there evidence that Fiorello La Guardia knew at this stage that Gemma was in the camp. Had he known it seems unlikely that he would have tried to secure her release. Even after the war, when Gemma had to wait many months to return to the US, living in hardship in Berlin, her brother declined to help.

By this time La Guardia was running the UN’s refugee programme, UNRRA. He knew by now the suffering that his sister had undergone, and that her husband had been murdered in Mauthausen. Nevertheless, La Guardia wrote to Gemma telling her he could not speed her passage home as he could not make exceptions for a family member. ‘
If any different
treatment were applied to you it would cause hundreds of thousands of demands for the same treatment.’

The transfer of Geneviève and Virginia to the Liebenau internment centre was another sign of Himmler’s growing eagerness to make concessions over certain prisoners in the hope that it would help him get a hearing in London and Washington for his fantastical ideas of a separate peace. As the two Ravensbrück women were being handed over, Himmler’s aides were finalising the details of a far more ambitious prisoner release, through contacts in Switzerland.

On Himmler’s instruction, Walter Schellenberg, his intelligence chief, agreed a deal in January with a Swiss politician and Nazi sympathiser, Jean-Marie Musy, by which every other month 1200 Jews of an estimated 600,000 still alive in Nazi camps would be transferred to Switzerland in return for 5 million Swiss francs for each transport. Because Hitler vehemently opposed all prisoner releases, Himmler stipulated that the deal stay secret. His purpose, once again, was public relations. ‘
The object of this action
was to bring about a favourable reaction in the international Press, which, at a later date, would present Germany in a better light,’ said Franz Göring, one of Schellenberg’s aides, and the man charged to carry out the plan.

In a detailed report to British security service officials after the war, Göring gave an extraordinary insight into the fantasies many Nazi leaders and their friends had, even now, that they could keep their crimes a secret or at least present them to the world in a favourable light. According to Göring (no relation to Hermann Göring), Musy also proposed to Himmler that women from Ravensbrück be set free – Jews and non-Jews alike. The Swiss man said: ‘the release of these women would create a terrific impression which in the course of time could redound to Germany’s credit’.

Attempts to secure the Jewish releases began in the first weeks of 1945, when Göring set about requisitioning a rescue train and locating the 1200 names on Musy’s list. Although an SS man, Göring was a foreign intelligence specialist, unfamiliar with the world of the camps, and seems to have been astonished by what he found there. To his surprise, many of the Jews he was looking for were dead or lost in the system, or else camp commandants refused to hand them over.

Göring was undeterred, and found two of the Jewish women on the list in Ravensbrück. Charlotte Wreschner and her sister Margarete, arrivals from Holland in 1944, were told in January 1945 that they were to be freed. Along with a Jewish mother and daughter from Turkey, and another Jewish woman,
they were sent to the concentration camp of Theresienstadt, near Prague, where those on the release list were being assembled and where the rescue train to Switzerland would leave from.

A new problem then arose: according to Göring, instructions had been given to commandants that nobody should be released who knew about the gas chambers, as their stories would not yield ‘favourable publicity’. Theresienstadt had been chosen as the gathering point for the prisoners, and the camp from which most on Musy’s list were selected, precisely because there were no gas chambers at this ‘show camp’. Although Jewish prisoners here had been regularly taken off to Auschwitz to be gassed, those who remained were supposedly ignorant of the true horror.

The Ravensbrück women, however, knew very well about the gas chambers, both at Ravensbrück itself and, from other prisoners, about Auschwitz. On arrival at Theresienstadt Adolf Eichmann, mastermind of the Jewish extermination programme, interrogated the Wreschner sisters in person to find out exactly what they knew. ‘It became clear that we were isolated and that they did not want to allow us to enter the camp, out of fear we might know too much and that we might talk about it to the inmates of Theresienstadt,’ said Charlotte Wreschner in evidence later. When the sisters promised not to talk of what they knew, Eichmann did allow them to mix with other prisoners, warning them that if they did talk they’d ‘go up the chimney’ themselves.

In the ongoing confusion Göring realised that many other prisoners on his list knew about the gas chambers too, and therefore could not leave on his train, which was by now waiting to go. Given a shortfall in numbers, Göring then invited other prisoners at Theresienstadt to volunteer to come to Switzerland, but no one wished to do so, which astonished him, until someone explained that the prisoners were terrified that the train was really a death train going to Auschwitz. It was only when Göring’s train neared the Swiss border that the prisoners he had persuaded to come along relaxed, ‘as though released from some frightful nightmare’.

A few days after the first group arrived safely, headlines in the Swiss press declared that 200 leading Nazis had secured asylum as a result. The stories may have been planted by Ernst Kaltenbrunner, head of Hitler’s security police, and an opponent of Himmler, on purpose to scupper Himmler’s plans. If so, Kaltenbrunner succeeded. Hitler was furious to hear that Himmler was releasing prisoners – albeit for money, which was how Himmler sought to justify his action to the Führer. Hitler ordered that from now on releases must stop, which ruled out the further Ravensbrück releases that had also been discussed with the Swiss.

*

Although in January 1945 the Swiss plan was scotched, Swedish plans to help prisoners had gathered pace. The previous autumn Himmler had signalled to the Swedes, via Felix Kersten, that he might be willing to release Norwegian policemen. In December that release was agreed, and fifty Norwegian policemen, as well as fifty Danish students, were delivered into Swedish hands.

The releases gave the Swedes reason to believe that Kersten exercised real influence over Himmler, who might now be persuaded to consider a far wider prisoner-release plan than any proposed to date. At the very least it was worth exploring, especially as, after the Swiss debacle in January, it became clear that no other government or international organisation was willing or able to act.

As the Allies prepared for their final assault on Germany, attitudes in Washington and London towards the fate of prisoners had, if anything, hardened. This was displayed in a bald statement issued in December 1944 by the western Allies’ joint military leadership, the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF). The statement urged prisoners of all nations to ‘stay put, await the arrival of allied forces and be prepared for an orderly repatriation after the end of the war’.

To anyone aware of the reality inside Hitler’s concentration camps, the idea of ‘staying put’, let alone of ‘orderly repatriations’, appeared at best unrealistic and at worst absurd. Even as the SHAEF statement was being issued, in Ravensbrück death rates were edging up towards 200 a day as the gassing was stepped up. At Belsen, near Hanover, prisoners were dying of sickness and starvation at the rate of 300 a day. Yet the judgement at Allied headquarters meant that until Germany had surrendered, prisoners in the camps were on their own.

As the military fronts moved forward, however, there was nothing to stop the neutral Swedes from devising their own schemes; by January 1945 ideas first tabled in Paris and in Stockholm developed into a full-blown rescue plan, which envisaged a task force of buses and military vehicles, manned by volunteers, driving across the Danish border into Germany under the flag of the Swedish Red Cross.
^*

The objective, in the first instance, was to gather up all Scandinavian prisoners – mostly Danes and Norwegians, believed to number about 13,000 – and take them to a single camp near the Danish border, under Swedish care, before transferring them to Sweden for the rest of the war. Rescue of other nationals later was not ruled out.

Certain top officials in Stockholm scoffed at the idea of sending ‘
a pretty caravan
of Swedes’ into war-torn Germany, and on paper the ideas were so ambitious they must have seemed fanciful. However, new soundings from Kersten about Himmler’s state of mind, and intelligence about the situation on the ground, gave Stockholm reason to believe the plan might work.

The key to rescuing the prisoners would be knowing precisely who and where they were; this called for detailed knowledge about the location of camps and the names and nationalities of people in them – information that only the Swedes possessed, due in large part to the work of Wanda Hjort and the Gross Kreutz group.

In recent months Wanda, with Bjørn Heger, the young Norwegian doctor, and other cell members, had risked their lives criss-crossing bombed-out Germany and securing all details they could about prisoners. Using information from Wanda’s Norwegian contacts inside Sachsenhausen, linking up with a network of Danish and Norwegian pastors, and building links with the German communist resistance cells, the group had by January 1945 assembled an impressive database on the camps. They had also secured medicines from the Danish Red Cross, which they had managed to deliver to certain camps, using trusted intermediaries. The Swedish legation in Berlin was providing backup: Wanda and Bjørn Heger used a delegation car and the Gross Kreutz intelligence reached Stockholm
via the Swedish diplomatic bag
.

All this time the group had been appealing to Stockholm to implement their rescue plans, because there was no time to lose. In one report back to Sweden they passed on specific intelligence about the imminent annihilation of the camps. This new intelligence was based in part on a visit to a concentration camp by Wanda and her father, Johan Hjort, when they heard directly from an SS informer that the commandant planned to liquidate the camp ‘to the very last detail’ as soon as the Allies were close. The report didn’t name the camp, but we know that Wanda Hjort and her father
had visited Ravensbrück in December
, and had been in touch with the SS doctor there, Franz Lucas, and with Sylvia Salvesen.

However invaluable the Gross Kreutz cell’s intelligence, the Swedes could do nothing without Himmler’s say-so. By January Kersten was assuring Stockholm that the Reichsführer was receptive, particularly if an intermediary was appointed whom Himmler could trust.

Count Folke Bernadotte was one obvious choice. Though some in Stockholm considered him too lightweight, he had strong German ties and an innate diplomatic charm. Furthermore, Himmler would be impressed by Bernadotte’s royal blood and would know of his close connections with
the Allies – the count had an American wife and had recently met Eisenhower in Paris. Bernadotte was certainly ready and eager to take on the role.

On 16 February Bernadotte flew into Berlin, where barricades were being erected, people lined up at food queues, and death and destruction increased every day. With the help of the Swedish ambassador he sought a meeting with Himmler. He waited three days, seeing other top Nazis first, before he was told that Himmler would see him. The venue chosen was Karl Gebhardt’s SS clinic at Hohenlychen, sixty miles north of Berlin and five miles north of Ravensbrück.

Hohenlychen had long been one of Himmler’s favoured locations for secret meetings and talks. His old friend Karl Gebhardt was entirely trustworthy and the clinic was both convenient for Berlin and secluded.

Bernadotte was driven out to the clinic on 20 February. Under the ornate portico of the main sanatorium building, Gebhardt was waiting to greet him. As they awaited Himmler, Gebhardt told Bernadotte that the clinic was packed with German children waiting to have amputations after being wounded by Allied bombs.

Suddenly Himmler was before him: ‘
in green Waffen-SS uniform
without any decorations and wearing horn-rimmed spectacles’ he looked ‘the typically unimportant official’, except for his ‘well-shaped, delicate hands, which were carefully manicured’.