Early in 1938 Heinrich Himmler began to plan a concentration camp for “deviant” women: prostitutes, abortionists, “asocials” and socialists, habitual criminals, communists and Jehovah’s Witnesses, among others. He chose a site near the village of Ravensbrück in the picturesque Lake District of Mecklenburg, an hour away from Berlin, where one of his best friends in the SS had a country house. Male prisoners were sent from Sachsenhausen and built the new camp; on 15 May 1939 the first 867 women arrived, and 130,000 more would follow before Ravensbrück was liberated by the Red Army in April 1945. Himmler had been warned from the start that the camp – grotesquely crowded, holding 50,000 at its peak – would be too small.
Sarah Helm’s first book was about Vera Atkins, who worked in the French section of the Special Operations Executive and after the war traced some of the female agents she had lost in action to Ravensbrück. Helm is a tireless researcher. She has recovered the testimony of scores of women, many from eastern Europe, many of whom had until now been silent; she describes the Nazi medical experiments at the camp from the perspective of its terrified victims; and she recovers the history of the ancillary children’s camp nearby. She makes unimaginable suffering seem almost graspable through hundreds of intimate stories. She rightly says her book is the first exhaustive “biography of Ravensbrück beginning at the beginning and ending at the end”.
That said, Ravensbrück is not “still today, hidden away, its crimes unknown, the voices of its prisoners silenced”, as Helm claims. Far from it. A bibliography published in 2000 has almost a thousand entries; the camp became a memorial in the German Democratic Republic in 1959 and since 1993 has become part of a new, larger commemorative site. Two of the Ravensbrück doctors, Herta Oberheuser and her boss Karl Gebhardt, were among those convicted in the well publicised Nuremberg Doctors’ trial of 1946, and the records of the trials, conducted by British occupation authorities, of another 21 women and 17 men for war crimes committed at Ravensbrück, have been open for decades. The camp has been well known and intensively studied for almost half a century. But Helm is nonetheless getting at something; well known for what?
Not for the sheer numbers murdered there. An exact accounting is impossible, but orders of magnitude are clear: 5,000-6,000 died in a gas chamber hastily built in late 1944 when Auschwitz stopped taking new arrivals, and several thousand more in the gas chambers of a nearby Nazi euthanasia centre. Between 30,000 and 50,000 died from cold, starvation, shooting, beatings, lethal injections, disease and medical experimentation; tens of thousands were sent east to be murdered. But, in the quantitative league tables of Nazi crime, these numbers scarcely register. In Auschwitz, 400,000 Hungarian Jews were gassed during six weeks of the summer of 1944 alone; the purpose-built killing factory at Treblinka murdered between 870,000 and 925,000 Jews in just over a year, between July 1942 and November 1943.
Ravensbrück is also not seared into the western visual imagination. Unlike the British liberation of Bergen-Belsen, Ravensbrück’s was not recorded by a professional film crew; unlike Dachau, Buchenwald or Orhdruf, no iconic photographs were taken there: no tiers of emaciated prisoners on bunks, no German civilians made to see what they had wrought, no shocked American generals standing over corpse heaps.
Ravensbrück does not fit well into the Holocaust story. In the first place, the number of Jews there was always relatively small in comparison with other categories of prisoners; Himmler declared it Judenfrei after the last thousand or so Jewish women were sent to Auschwitz in late 1942. It did not stay that way – some Hungarian Jewish women who had escaped the summer roundups of 1944 ended up in Ravensbrück as did the survivors of the infamous winter death marches from the east – but the camp does not figure prominently in the story of genocide. For a time its role, however small, was almost forgotten. Two recent books on Jews at Ravensbrück now restore it to memory by bearing witness on a human scale. In neither is the argument quantitative. One estimates that Jews constituted about 20% of a total of 132,000 prisoners; the other, after an exhaustive survey, identifies 16,331 Jewish prisoners — probably a low number — of whom 25% are known to have survived. The author, Judith Buber Agassi, provides a compact disc with their names and other information.
More importantly, Ravensbrück is an outlier to the Holocaust narrative because the question of who counts as a Jew, not measured by Nazi racial laws but by more subtle markers of identity and memory, is more exigent there than in any other camp. Helm implicitly recognises this in her account of the life and death of the camp’s most famous victim: Olga Benário Prestes, Jew and communist. Benário was the model for Die Tragende (“Woman Carrying”), a statue of an emaciated woman carrying a comrade which stood over the East German memorial site at Ravensbrück. For the communist regime she represented anti-fascist heroism and brought the camp into line with the official state narrative which held that all the perpetrators were in the west and all the resisters in the east. Perhaps her statue does not portray adequately a “tortured wife and mother”; it certainly elides her Jewishness and yet, according to Helm, she lived and died in the camp as a Jew.
The truth is more complex. Olga was so deeply estranged from her German Jewish family that her mother refused to take the infant daughter to whom Olga gave birth in prison. Luckily for the baby, Anita Benário Prestes, she was taken by her Brazilian grandmother and is now a retired professor of history in Rio. Her father was the Brazilian insurrectionist communist leader, Luís Carlos Prestes. He was jailed and his wife, Olga, was betrayed by British intelligence services to the Brazilian authorities who put her on a closely guarded boat to Germany as a goodwill gesture to Hitler. The SS took her off in Hamburg and threw her in prison. International pressure got her released for a time; then came the war, re-imprisonment, this time in Ravensbrück, and finally death.
Benário was, without question, not taken to Ravensbrück as a Jew; like another famous prisoner with whom she was gassed, the Austrian socialist Käthe Pick Leichter, she was a political prisoner who was Jewish; she wore a yellow star but also a red badge.(Some sources say that her other badge was black to label her an “asocial”, intended to make the communist prisoners shun her. They did not.) Benario was the only Jewish block leader chosen by the head guard because political prisoners were known for their organisational skills.
Even her end is difficult to fit into a Holocaust narrative. She and Leichter were among 1,600 women gassed over the course of a few days: Jews, yes, but also infirm and weak prostitutes (the asocials, who wore black triangles) and criminals (who wore green triangles). “All sorts” were taken by the end, reports a witness. They were killed in one of the clandestine euthanasia centres where the Aryan mentally ill and disabled were taken, from the institutions where they had lived, to be murdered; relatives were sent notices that they had died of natural causes. This is what happened in the case of Herta Cohen, a Jew among the 1600, who was in Ravensbrück because she had had sex with a Dusseldorf police officer in violation of racial hygiene laws. The camp commandant wrote a letter to local authorities saying that Cohen had died of a stroke and asked them to find her sister to inform her of Herta’s death, and to inquire whether there was a space in a local cemetery to receive her ashes. If there was no word within ten days her remains would be tossed away; Leichter’s ashes were sent back to Vienna along with a last letter. We have only a letter of Benário’s to her family, sent on the eve of her murder. Whatever this represents it is not vernichtung – the rendering into nothing – that was the work of the death camps and the death squads, the Einsatzgruppen.
The deepest problem in knowing Ravensbrück has to do with gender. Helm aims to “throw light on the Nazis’ crimes against women”, and at the same time to show how “what happened at the camp for women can illuminate the wider Nazi story”. Of course there were Nazi crimes against women qua women and Helm exposes them in great detail: in prison for prostitution, they were then forced to be prostitutes; a midwife imprisoned for performing abortions, illegal in Germany, performed them on inmates. Female survivors at Ravensbrück were raped by their Russian liberators, a crime that can not be laid at the Nazis’ feet. And then there were the “inhuman acts of lesbian love” that haunted the survivor Wanda Wojtaski who, sitting under a picture of Pope John Paul II, spoke with Helm in her Krakow apartment about sexual deviancy with the same fervour others reserved for speaking about the cruelties of the camp. But none us this gets us very far.
In the first place, Ravensbrück was unique: the only camp especially for women in the entire murderous Nazi archipelago. Helm never explains why the regime kept it up. They did so, it seems, in part because Ravensbrück trained female guards for other camps. They also needed a place for all sorts of special prisoners: Gemma La Guardia Gluck, sister of the famous New York mayor; SOE agents; spies; members of the French resistance; Polish aristocrats and Scandinavian nationals whom Himmler hoped to bargain away. (In April 1944 Count Bernadotte rescued more than a thousand of these, Jews and non-Jews.) It is hard to make a general claim based on evidence from so special a place.
And much of what happened to women at Ravensbrück happened to women – as well as men – in other camps. The Nazi doctors who created wounds in the Polish experimental subjects and infected them with dirt and glass in order to test cures for gas gangrene worked at Auschwitz and used male subjects, too.
So much else besides their gender determined the fate of women and men at the hands of the Nazi state. Race and politics trumped it almost all the time. The book begins with Johanna Langerfeld, the head guard at Ravensbrück, knocking on the door of Grete Buber-Neumann, a survivor, in 1957. Helm follows their stories. Buber-Neumann had been Langerfeld’s secretary: back in the day, she writes, “if a Jewish woman had entered her office her face would fill with hatred”. Not now. Buber-Neumann, the wife first of the communist son of the philosopher Martin Buber and then of Franz Neumann, a leading German communist, had been sent to the Gulag when Neumann was executed in the purge trials of 1938. Both she and her husband were deviationists, more interested in fighting fascism than in party orthodoxy. In 1940, Stalin handed her over along with other heterodox German communists to Hitler. She survived Ravensbrück, where she was shunned by politically purer comrades.
Langerfeld, daughter of a blacksmith and with a son born out of wedlock, got her first job as a guard in a prison for prostitutes. In 1938, she became, on Himmler’s recommendation, head guard at Ravensbrück, a precarious position because she and her staff were not full members of the SS, which oversaw the camp. Still she was in charge of managing daily operations. From the beginning Langerfeld had trouble with her male superiors. She irritated the commander of Ravensbrück when she made it clear to him that the laundry was only for prisoners’ clothes; after being transferred to Auschwitz she got on the wrong side of Rudolph Höss, the commandant there, for being too lenient and for insubordination. He wanted her fired; Himmler refused, insisting that the women’s camp there have a woman in charge. It is not clear whether her heart was ever in the various selections for murder that she helped organised at Ravensbrück; she resisted gratuitous cruelties.
Her career ended in 1943. According to Buber-Neumann, Langerfeld stepped in to save from the Gestapo two Polish women who had been the subject of medical experiments and promised their freedom. “‘Herr Lagerkommandant,’” she said into the telephone, ‘Do you have permission from Berlin to shoot the rabbits?’” The women on crutches were released.Two weeks later she was fired; Himmler had refused to protect her this time. Langerfeld was cleared of insubordination by an SS court and died a broken woman in Augsburg in 1975. Sitting at Buber-Neumann’s table in 1957, she tells her, “I wish that I had been born a man.” This is the most unambiguous and at the same time tangled claim about gender that we hear from the witnesses in this book.
Ravensbrück remains unknown perhaps because it is not knowable within the categories of historical analysis we apply to the Holocaust or to mass murder in general. It does not illuminate Nazi crimes; it does not illuminate the peculiar fate of women; it does not speak in any especially helpful way to the persecution of Jews; it does not even tell us much about the persecution of Poles, although their voices are heard most frequently in this book. All of the hundreds of stories Helm assembles bear witness rather to the terrifying heterogeneity of Nazi crimes, and to their strangeness. Like the existence of the family camp and hospital at Auschwitz, the one and only concentration camp intended exclusively for women is hard to figure.
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