KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (44 page)

One of the prisoners to suffer both Stalin’s and Hitler’s
camps, Margarete Buber-Neumann immediately saw glaring differences with the Gulag. Karaganda had been a vast complex of camps spread across an area as large as a midsize European country. Ravensbrück, by contrast, held around 3,200 prisoners in less than two dozen barracks, surrounded by a high wall with electrified barbed wire. Also, Ravensbrück was a camp exclusively for women, as there was
still strict gender separation in the SS system. And Buber-Neumann was struck by the SS drills and exercises; everything was done with Prussian thoroughness, she thought. Painful as it was, such strict order also had its benefits. The new purpose-built barracks, with beds, tables, lockers, blankets, toilets, and washrooms, “seemed a palace” compared to the filth of Karaganda.
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Unbeknownst to
Margarete Buber-Neumann, Ravensbrück was also unlike other SS concentration camps at this time. The prewar delay in terror against female prisoners continued into the early war years, as SS leaders persisted with differential treatment. Heinrich Himmler still saw female prisoners as less dangerous than male ones, and more susceptible to reform.
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Obsessed with corporal punishment, Himmler demanded
more than once that female prisoners should only be whipped as a last resort; he eventually ordered all such cases to be referred to him personally.
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Such interventions were less important for their specifics than for their message: women, as the “weaker sex,” should be treated with more moderation than men.

Basic living conditions in Ravensbrück were considerably better than in other early
wartime KL. Clothes and bedding were changed regularly in 1940, and there was just about enough food. Margarete Buber-Neumann, for one, was surprised by the size of her first meal, which included fruit porridge, bread, sausage, margarine, and lard. As for the treatment of the sick, seriously ill prisoners could still be taken to hospitals on the outside and some were released altogether.
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Ravensbrück was also set apart by forced labor, which was hard, but not yet destructive. While many women worked in construction, there were no quarries or brick works, which claimed so many lives in KL for men. Instead, the Ravensbrück SS increasingly focused on the mass production of uniforms in large tailors’ workshops, since women were “best suited for this kind of work,” as one SS manager noted.
Provisional production started in late 1939, spurred on by Himmler, and in summer 1940 the workshops became part of a newly created SS enterprise, the Company for Textile and Leather Utilization (Texled). Prisoner productivity almost reached civilian levels, and because female forced labor was even cheaper than men’s, Texled was probably the only SS business profitable from the start. The Ravensbrück
tailors’ workshop produced some seventy-three thousand prisoner shirts between July 1940 and March 1941, as well as other garments, and for a long time, Texled remained the main employer in Ravensbrück. By October 1, 1940, almost seventeen percent of inmates worked for the SS company, rising to an all-time high of around sixty percent by September 1942. The women feared the SS supervisors and
the hard work. But it was nowhere near as exhausting as building work; the workshops were partially mechanized, with sewing and knitting machines, and prisoners were sheltered from the elements.
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Most important of all, physical violence was less endemic and lethal than in the KL for men, as the Ravensbrück guards exercised a far less brutal regimen. True, the top posts were occupied by uncompromising
Camp SS men, such as Commandant Max Koegel. A grizzled war veteran and right-wing extremist, Koegel had come to Dachau as a guard in April 1933 and never looked back. Before Ravensbrück had even opened, he had already demanded the construction of a large cell block in the new camp to break the defiance of “hysterical women,” as he put it.
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But the leading female officer in Ravensbrück was cut
from a different cloth. Johanna Langefeld, the senior camp supervisor, had not signed up with the Nazi Party until her late thirties, in 1937. From a deeply religious family, she worked in social care and the prison service before joining Lichtenburg in 1938. In contrast to Koegel, Langefeld really did see reeducation as an important goal and opposed some of his more violent initiatives. This mattered,
because Langefeld set the tone inside the camp and did not push her female guards to excesses.
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While most new female guards quickly got used to slapping prisoners, or even kicking them, they rarely went further in the early war years.
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Their behavior was influenced, no doubt, by the fact that the state execution policy, which had boosted violence levels in the KL for men, was not initially
extended to Ravensbrück; the first execution of a woman did not take place until February 1941, apparently, and only in 1942 did such killings become the norm.
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As a result, almost all women survived Ravensbrück during the early war years. Over two years (1940–41), around one hundred female prisoners lost their lives—less than two percent of the prisoner population and a fraction of the deaths
in KL for men; only in 1943 did the Ravensbrück SS feel the need to establish its own crematorium. The contrast between the sexes was plain to see even inside Ravensbrück itself. From April 1941, a separate compound for men was set up here, to supply forced labor for the extension of the camp. This was an important development in itself; in the future, more and more camps would become mixed, though
male and female prisoners were still held in separate compounds. By the end of 1941, around one thousand men had arrived in the new Ravensbrück subcamp, where conditions soon resembled the other KL for men; in the last three months of 1941 alone, more than fifty male prisoners died here. Proportionally, about as many men died in Ravensbrück in a single month as women did in two years.
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In many
ways, the women’s camp in Ravensbrück was still stuck in the prewar period; for the inmates, the real break came not in 1939, but 1942. This is not to say that the camp was unaffected by wider developments. Living conditions deteriorated after the outbreak of war. Food cuts, combined with the freezing temperatures, caused widespread illness during the first winter, and with some 6,400 women arriving
in 1940–41, many barracks were overcrowded.
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Then there were the daily hardships and humiliations. The local SS established a particularly degrading ritual on arrival, when women had to undress, shower, and endure a bodily examination; many were also shaved. Any “feeble attempts at modesty had to be abandoned,” Buber-Neumann wrote. These assaults on women’s bodies and their gender identities—“with
our bald heads, we looked like men,” another prisoner noted in her diary—had not been common before the war. The trauma was greatly intensified by the presence of SS men, who ogled the naked women, made lewd remarks, or slapped them.
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Like in the other KL, there were scales of suffering within Ravensbrück, too. German political prisoners enjoyed some benefits; their barracks, for example, were
often less packed. Meanwhile, Polish women, who replaced German “asocials” as the largest prisoner group in 1941, initially faced added discrimination; in the infirmary, some SS doctors apparently refused to see prisoners who could not speak German.
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And Jewish women—around ten percent of the prisoner population (1939–42)—remained at the bottom of the hierarchy, singled out for the worst labor
and abuse.
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In these respects, at least, Ravensbrück moved in line with general SS terror, as the abuse of Poles and Jews escalated across the whole of the KL system in the early war years.

War and Retribution

During the first weeks of the Second World War, the Third Reich was awash with rumors about Polish atrocities. Having blamed Poland for the outbreak of war, Nazi propaganda now accused
Poles of gruesome war crimes, in another reversal of reality. From the first days of the invasion, German soldiers sent paranoid reports about ambushes by “snipers.” Such rumors spread fast, amplified by Nazi leaders.
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In particular, Nazi propaganda seized upon events in the Polish city of Bydgoszcz (Bromberg), where several hundred ethnic German civilians were killed in clashes with Polish
forces in early September 1939 (German units, among them two Death’s Head battalions, later massacred large numbers of local Poles). For days, Nazi papers carried lurid articles and even fantasized about ritual killings. According to the
Völkischer Beobachter
of September 10, Poles had “cut off the left breast of an old woman, ripped out her heart, and threw it into a bowl, which had been used
to catch her blood”; all this was illustrated with graphic photos of severed body parts.
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A few days later, Hitler himself stoked the flames further. In a frenzied speech in occupied Danzig on September 19, he claimed that Polish troops had butchered thousands of ethnic Germans “like animals,” among them women and children, and mutilated countless captured German soldiers “in a bestial way,
gouging out their eyes.”
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Many Germans bought into this atrocity propaganda and demanded swift retaliation.
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Poles taken to the KL felt the full force of public outrage. On September 13, 1939, when 534 Polish Jews were assembled at a Berlin railway station en route to Sachsenhausen, they faced a mob baying for the blood of the “Bromberg murderers” (in fact, the prisoners were residents of
Berlin); more spectators waited at the station in Oranienburg, throwing stones and excrement.
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Much worse was to follow, as Camp SS men were itching for brutal retribution and hounded the Poles as soon as they arrived.

The epicenter of KL violence was in Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald, which held the vast majority of Polish prisoners in the early months of war. The Buchenwald SS improvised, just
as it had done after the 1938 pogrom, and forced the newly arriving Poles and Polish Jews into a compound next to the roll call square, cordoned off with barbed wire. This so-called special (or little) camp, set up in late September 1939, became an island of extreme suffering. Among the first prisoners were 110 Poles arrested in the border regions during the German advance. The fact that a few
of them really came from Bromberg proved their death sentence. Labeled as “snipers,” the SS pressed them into a small cage of planks and barbed wire, where they slowly starved to death; by Christmas Day, all but two of the 110 men inside the cage were dead.
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The other prisoners in the Buchenwald special camp were also fighting for survival. Exposed to freezing temperatures, hundreds of Poles
and Polish-born Jews suffered inside a wooden barrack and four large tents. At first, the prisoners still had to work in the quarry. Jakob Ihr, who had been arrested in Vienna, remembered that the “despair was so great, after only a few hours, that a number of our comrades beseeched the SS to shoot them dead.”
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Labor was eventually halted in late October 1939, when a dysentery epidemic spread
through the special camp. “The prisoners now dropped like flies,” another witness said after the war. Those who tried to escape to the relative safety of the main compound were whipped by the SS.
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The men in charge formed a terrifying double act. Hauptscharführer Blank, a Camp SS veteran, gained a reputation as a cold-blooded executioner, while his colleague, Hauptscharführer Hinkelmann, a violent
drunk, channeled his energy into new forms of prisoner abuse. Apparently, he particularly enjoyed beating hungry prisoners during the distribution of the watery soup. On other days, Hinkelmann and Blank handed out no food at all.
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The Buchenwald special camp was eventually closed down in early 1940. By then, around two out of three prisoners were dead.
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As the last survivors entered the main
camp compound in January and February 1940, even longtime inmates, like the camp elder Ernst Frommhold, were shocked: “17-year-old boys barely weighing 50–60 pounds, not a gram of fat on their bodies, only skin and bones. Even today, I cannot understand how such emaciated men could still be alive, and yet they were.”
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In all, well over five hundred Polish-born Jews and three hundred Poles had
died in the special camp.
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In Sachsenhausen, too, Polish-born Jews fared the worst in the early months of World War II. About a thousand men arrived between September and December 1939, some from Poland, but most from inside Germany itself. Around half of them came on the very first transport from Berlin on September 13, which had met with such public outrage. Among them was Leon Szalet, a
middle-aged estate agent brought up in Warsaw, who had lived in Berlin since 1921. Just before war broke out he had made a daring bid to leave: he managed to board a flight to London without a visa on August 27, but was turned back on arrival by zealous British immigration officials. Two weeks later, he was greeted in Sachsenhausen by a mob of screaming SS men, who “jumped on us like wild beasts.”
Szalet himself was beaten unconscious by one of the block leaders. In the evening of their first day, after hours of abuse, he and the other new prisoners fell on sacks of straw in their barracks. But few found any sleep: the horror of the past few hours and the dread of what would follow kept most of them awake all night.

Leon Szalet and the other Polish Jews were held in the Sachsenhausen little
camp, first established for “asocials” in summer 1938. As a special punishment, the SS had the barrack windows nailed shut with planks, an extreme form of isolation already familiar from prewar Dachau. There was no light and no ventilation. “Some men were close to suffocating,” Szalet recalled, “others literally died of thirst.” The SS forced prisoners who begged for water to drink their own
urine. By September 29, when the action was called off after the capitulation of Warsaw, some thirty-five men had died.
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The torment of the others continued over the following months. Initially, Polish Jews only left their barracks for roll calls and “sport.” The rest of the time was spent inside, at the mercy of Kapos and SS block leaders like Wilhelm “Pistol” Schubert, who regularly raided
the barracks at night. Among their many vicious games, SS men forced prisoners to fight each other for bread; those who refused were beaten or killed.
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Later, many of the inmates were pressed into forced labor. Their first destination was the Oranienburg brick works. “Our daily routine,” Leon Szalet wrote, “involved freezing, being chased, carrying snow or sand wrapped in our coats, stumbling,
falling and being chased again.”
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