Correspondent: Camp bed. The Nazis forced female prisoners into prostitution - Archive. Sisters, mothers, ladies: the theme of violence in women's camp memoirs
Torture is often referred to as various minor troubles that happen to everyone in everyday life. This definition is awarded to the upbringing of naughty children, long standing in line, a lot of laundry, subsequent ironing, and even the process of preparing food. All this, of course, can be very painful and unpleasant (although the degree of exhaustion largely depends on the character and inclinations of the person), but still bears little resemblance to the most terrible torture in the history of mankind. The practice of interrogations "with partiality" and other violent acts against prisoners took place in almost all countries of the world. The time frame is also not defined, but since relatively recent events are psychologically closer to a modern person, his attention is drawn to the methods and special equipment invented in the twentieth century, in particular in German concentration camps of the time. But there were both ancient Eastern and medieval torture. The Nazis were also taught by their colleagues from the Japanese counterintelligence, the NKVD and other similar punitive bodies. So why was all this mockery of people?
Meaning of the term
To begin with, when starting to study any issue or phenomenon, any researcher tries to define it. “To name it correctly is already half to understand” - says
So, torture is the deliberate infliction of suffering. At the same time, the nature of the torment does not matter, it can be not only physical (in the form of pain, thirst, hunger or sleep deprivation), but also moral and psychological. By the way, the most terrible tortures in the history of mankind, as a rule, combine both "channels of influence".
But it is not only the fact of suffering that matters. Senseless torment is called torture. Torture differs from it in purposefulness. In other words, a person is whipped or hung on a rack not just like that, but in order to get some kind of result. Using violence, the victim is encouraged to confess guilt, disclose hidden information, and sometimes simply punished for some misconduct or crime. The twentieth century added another item to the list of possible targets of torture: torture in concentration camps was sometimes carried out in order to study the reaction of the body to unbearable conditions in order to determine the limit of human capabilities. These experiments were recognized by the Nuremberg Tribunal as inhumane and pseudoscientific, which did not prevent them from studying their results after the defeat of Nazi Germany by physiologists of the victorious countries.
Death or Judgment
The purposeful nature of the actions suggests that after receiving the result, even the most terrible tortures stopped. There was no point in continuing. The position of executioner-executor, as a rule, was occupied by a professional who knew about pain techniques and peculiarities of psychology, if not all, then a lot, and there was no point in wasting his efforts on senseless bullying. After confessing the victim to the crime, she could expect, depending on the degree of civilization of society, immediate death or treatment, followed by trial. A legal execution after partial interrogations during the investigation was characteristic of the punitive justice of Germany in the initial Hitler era and of Stalin's "open trials" (the Shakhty case, the trial of the industrial party, the massacre of Trotskyists, etc.). After giving the defendants a tolerable appearance, they were dressed in decent costumes and shown to the public. Broken morally, people most often dutifully repeated everything that investigators forced them to confess. Torture and executions were put on stream. The veracity of the testimony did not matter. Both in Germany and in the USSR of the 1930s, the confession of the accused was considered the “queen of evidence” (A. Ya. Vyshinsky, USSR prosecutor). Severe torture was used to obtain it.
Deadly torture of the Inquisition
In few areas of its activity (except in the manufacture of murder weapons) humanity has succeeded so much. At the same time, it should be noted that in recent centuries there has even been some regression compared to ancient times. European executions and torture of women in the Middle Ages were carried out, as a rule, on charges of witchcraft, and the external attractiveness of the unfortunate victim most often became the reason. However, the Inquisition sometimes condemned those who actually committed terrible crimes, but the specificity of that time was the unequivocal doom of the condemned. No matter how long the torment lasted, it ended only in the death of the condemned. As an execution weapon, they could use the Iron Maiden, the Copper Bull, a fire, or the sharp-edged pendulum described by Edgar Pom, methodically lowered inch by inch onto the chest of the victim. The terrible tortures of the Inquisition differed in duration and were accompanied by unthinkable moral torments. The preliminary investigation may have been carried out with the use of other ingenious mechanical devices to slowly split the bones of the fingers and limbs and rupture the muscular ligaments. The most famous tools are:
A metal expanding pear used for particularly sophisticated torture of women in the Middle Ages;
- "Spanish boot";
A Spanish armchair with clamps and a brazier for the legs and buttocks;
An iron bra (pectoral), worn on the chest in a red-hot form;
- "crocodiles" and special tongs for crushing the male genitalia.
The executioners of the Inquisition also had other torture equipment, which it is better not to know about for people with a sensitive psyche.
East, Ancient and Modern
No matter how ingenious the European inventors of self-damaging technology may be, the most terrible tortures in the history of mankind were still invented in the East. The Inquisition used metal tools, which sometimes had a very intricate design, while in Asia they preferred everything natural, natural (today these tools would probably be called environmentally friendly). Insects, plants, animals - everything went into action. Eastern torture and executions had the same goals as European ones, but were technically longer and more sophisticated. Ancient Persian executioners, for example, practiced scaphism (from the Greek word "skafium" - a trough). The victim was immobilized with chains, tied to a trough, forced to eat honey and drink milk, then smeared the whole body with a sweet composition, and lowered into the swamp. Blood-sucking insects slowly ate a person alive. The same was done approximately in the case of execution on an anthill, and if the unfortunate man was to be burned in the scorching sun, his eyelids were cut off for greater torment. There were other types of torture that used elements of the biosystem. For example, bamboo is known to grow rapidly, up to a meter a day. It is enough just to hang the victim at a short distance above the young shoots, and cut the ends of the stems at an acute angle. The victim has time to change his mind, confess to everything and betray his accomplices. If he persists, he will slowly and painfully be pierced by plants. This choice was not always available, however.
Torture as a method of inquiry
Both in and in the later period, various types of torture were used not only by inquisitors and other officially recognized savage structures, but also by ordinary state authorities, today called law enforcement. He was part of a set of methods of investigation and inquiry. From the second half of the 16th century, different types of bodily influence were practiced in Russia, such as: whip, suspension, rack, cauterization with ticks and open fire, immersion in water, and so on. Enlightened Europe, too, was by no means distinguished by humanism, but practice showed that in some cases torture, bullying, and even the fear of death did not guarantee the clarification of the truth. Moreover, in some cases, the victim was ready to confess to the most shameful crime, preferring a terrible end to endless horror and pain. There is a well-known case of a miller, which is remembered by an inscription on the pediment of the French Palace of Justice. He took on someone else's guilt under torture, was executed, and the real criminal was soon caught.
Abolition of torture in different countries
At the end of the 17th century, a gradual departure from torture practice began and the transition from it to other, more humane methods of interrogation. One of the results of the Enlightenment was the realization that not the cruelty of punishment, but its inevitability affects the reduction of criminal activity. In Prussia, torture has been abolished since 1754, this country was the first to put its legal proceedings at the service of humanism. Then the process went forward, different states followed suit in the following sequence:
| STATE | The Year of the Fatal Ban on Torture | Year of official prohibition of torture |
| Denmark | 1776 | 1787 |
| Austria | 1780 | 1789 |
| France | ||
| Netherlands | 1789 | 1789 |
| Sicilian kingdoms | 1789 | 1789 |
| Austrian Netherlands | 1794 | 1794 |
| Republic of Venice | 1800 | 1800 |
| Bavaria | 1806 | 1806 |
| papal states | 1815 | 1815 |
| Norway | 1819 | 1819 |
| Hanover | 1822 | 1822 |
| Portugal | 1826 | 1826 |
| Greece | 1827 | 1827 |
| Switzerland (*) | 1831-1854 | 1854 |
Note:
*) the legislation of the various cantons of Switzerland changed at different times of the specified period.
Two countries deserve special mention - Britain and Russia.
Catherine the Great abolished torture in 1774 by issuing a secret decree. By this, on the one hand, she continued to keep criminals in fear, but, on the other, she showed a desire to follow the ideas of the Enlightenment. This decision was legally formalized by Alexander I in 1801.
As for England, torture was banned there in 1772, but not all, but only some.
Illegal torture
The legislative ban did not at all mean their complete exclusion from the practice of pre-trial investigation. In all countries there were representatives of the police class, ready to break the law in the name of its triumph. Another thing is that their actions were carried out illegally, and if exposed, they were threatened with legal prosecution. Of course, the methods have changed significantly. It was required to "work with people" more carefully, without leaving visible traces. In the 19th and 20th centuries, objects heavy but with a soft surface were used, such as sandbags, thick volumes (the irony of the situation was that most often these were codes of laws), rubber hoses, etc. attention and methods of moral pressure. Some interrogators sometimes threatened severe punishments, lengthy sentences, and even reprisals against loved ones. It was also torture. The horror experienced by the defendants prompted them to make confessions, slander themselves and receive undeserved punishments, until the majority of police officers performed their duty honestly, studying evidence and collecting evidence for a justified charge. Everything changed after totalitarian and dictatorial regimes came to power in some countries. It happened in the 20th century.
After the October Revolution of 1917, the Civil War broke out on the territory of the former Russian Empire, in which both warring parties most often did not consider themselves bound by the legislative norms that were binding under the tsar. Torture of prisoners of war in order to obtain information about the enemy was practiced by both the White Guard counterintelligence and the Cheka. During the years of the Red Terror, most often executions took place, but bullying of representatives of the "class of exploiters", which included the clergy, nobles, and simply decently dressed "gentlemen", took on a mass character. In the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, the NKVD used forbidden interrogation methods, depriving detainees of sleep, food, water, beating and mutilating them. This was done with the permission of the leadership, and sometimes on his direct orders. The goal was rarely to find out the truth - the repressions were carried out for intimidation, and the task of the investigator was to obtain a signature on the protocol containing a confession in counter-revolutionary activities, as well as a slander of other citizens. As a rule, Stalin's "shoulder masters" did not use special torture devices, being content with available items, such as a paperweight (they were beaten on the head), or even an ordinary door, which pinched fingers and other protruding parts of the body.
In Nazi Germany
Torture in the concentration camps established after Adolf Hitler's rise to power differed in style from those previously practiced in that they were a strange mixture of Eastern sophistication with European practicality. Initially, these "correctional institutions" were created for guilty Germans and representatives of national minorities declared hostile (Gypsies and Jews). Then came the turn of experiments that had the character of some scientific character, but in cruelty surpassed the most terrible torture in the history of mankind.
In attempts to create antidotes and vaccines, Nazi SS doctors administered lethal injections to prisoners, performed operations without anesthesia, including abdominal ones, froze prisoners, put them in heat, and did not let them sleep, eat and drink. Thus, they wanted to develop technologies for the "production" of ideal soldiers who are not afraid of frost, heat and mutilation, resistant to the effects of poisonous substances and pathogenic bacilli. The history of torture during the Second World War forever imprinted the names of doctors Pletner and Mengele, who, along with other representatives of criminal fascist medicine, became the personification of inhumanity. They also conducted experiments on lengthening limbs by mechanical stretching, strangling people in rarefied air, and other experiments that caused excruciating agony, sometimes lasting for long hours.
The torture of women by the Nazis concerned mainly the development of ways to deprive them of their reproductive function. Various methods were studied - from simple ones (removal of the uterus) to sophisticated ones, which, if the Reich won, had the prospect of mass application (irradiation and exposure to chemicals).
It all ended before the Victory, in 1944, when the concentration camps began to liberate Soviet and allied troops. Even the appearance of the prisoners spoke more eloquently than any evidence that in itself their detention in inhuman conditions was torture.
The current state of affairs
Nazi torture became the standard of cruelty. After the defeat of Germany in 1945, humanity sighed with joy in the hope that this would never happen again. Unfortunately, although not on such a scale, but the torture of the flesh, mockery of human dignity and moral humiliation remain one of the terrible signs of the modern world. Developed countries, declaring their commitment to rights and freedoms, are looking for legal loopholes to create special territories where compliance with their own laws is not necessary. Prisoners of secret prisons have been subjected to the influence of punitive organs for many years without any specific charges being brought against them. The methods used by the military personnel of many countries during local and major armed conflicts in relation to prisoners and those simply suspected of sympathizing with the enemy sometimes surpass cruelty and mockery of people in Nazi concentration camps. In the international investigation of such precedents, too often, instead of objectivity, one can observe the duality of standards, when the war crimes of one of the parties are completely or partially hushed up.
Will the era of a new Enlightenment come, when torture will finally be finally and irrevocably recognized as a disgrace to humanity and will be banned? So far there is little hope...
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The story contains scenes of torture, violence, sex. If this offends your tender soul - do not read, but go to x ... from here!
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The plot takes place during the Great Patriotic War. A partisan detachment operates on the territory occupied by the Nazis. The Nazis know that there are many women among the partisans, but how to figure them out. Finally, they managed to catch the girl Katya when she was trying to draw a diagram of the location of German firing points ...
The captive girl was led into a small room at the school, where the Gestapo department was now located. A young officer interrogated Katya. In addition to him, there were several policemen and two vulgar-looking women in the room. Katya knew them, they served the Germans. I just didn't quite know how.
The officer instructed the guards holding the girl to let her go, which they did. He gestured for her to sit down. The girl sat down. The officer ordered one of the girls to bring tea. But Kate refused. The officer took a sip, then lit a cigarette. He offered Katya, but she refused. The officer started the conversation, and he spoke good Russian.
What is your name?
Katerina.
I know that you were engaged in intelligence in favor of the communists. It's true?
But you are so young, so beautiful. You probably fell into their service by accident?
Not! I am a Komsomol member and I want to become a communist, like my father, Hero of the Soviet Union, who died at the front.
I regret that such a young beautiful girl fell for the bait of the red-assed. At one time, my father served in the Russian army in the First World War. He commanded a company. He has many glorious victories and awards to his credit. But when the communists came to power, he was accused of being an enemy of the people for all his services to his homeland and shot. Starvation awaited my mother and me, as children of enemies of the people, but one of the Germans (who was in captivity and whom his father did not allow to be shot) helped us escape to Germany and even enter the service. I always wanted to be a hero like my father. And now I have come to save my homeland from the communists.
You are a fascist bitch, an invader, a murderer of innocent people...
We never kill innocent people. On the contrary, we return to them what the red-assed have taken from them. Yes, we recently hanged two women who set fire to houses where our soldiers temporarily settled. But the soldiers managed to run out, and the owners lost the last thing that the war had not taken away from them.
They fought against...
Your people!
Not true!
Okay, let's say we're invaders. You are now required to answer a few questions. After that, we will determine the punishment for you.
I will not answer your questions!
Okay, then name with whom you are organizing terrorist attacks against German soldiers.
Not true. We have been watching you.
Then why should I answer?
So that the innocent don't get hurt.
I won't name anyone...
Then I will invite the boys to untie your stubborn tongue.
You won't get anything!
And we'll see this. So far, there has not been a single case out of 15 and so that nothing has come of it ... Let's get to work, boys!
For her own life, she had to fight with rats, hunger, thieves and bosses.
At some point, the Gulag camps became almost the most intelligent place in the USSR. Scientists, writers, actors, officials, the top of the army and many others were imprisoned for espionage and treason. They had to scratch out their own lives, literally and figuratively. And the women... Many here remained women.
"I dreamed of becoming a children's writer"
Evgenia Fedorova dreamed of becoming a children's writer, so at the age of 18 she entered the Bryusov Literary Institute in Moscow. In her personal life, too, everything was fine: in 1929 she got married and a couple of years later gave birth to two sons.
By 1932, it seemed that here it was, the dream began to come true. Evgenia published several children's books, worked as a freelance correspondent. A supportive husband in everything, children, a favorite pastime - well, what else seems to be needed for happiness.
In 1934 she went to work at Artek to collect material. However, it didn’t work out there: “The overly vigilant Komsomol members called me class alien and crawled through,” Fedorova herself later recalled. Evgenia was expelled from the camp.
denunciation of a friend
She went to tour guide courses - classes were held in the Caucasus in the village of Krasnaya Polyana, where Evgenia met Yura - young, bright, handsome. From his reports, all the girls of the course were thrilled. And he turned his attention to Zhenya.
From the very first day we liked each other and began to spend a lot of time together, - writes Evgenia. Even the family faded into the background: "Of course, my children and my family created problems in our relationship with Yura. Although by that time I was already about to leave my husband, Mac."
There was no limit to her delight when it turned out that the young people were “accidentally” sent together to Krasnaya Polyana as guides. Joint summer, romance and a lot of poetry. Whether there was something more, Evgenia correctly holds back. So the summer passed. Ahead was the return to Moscow, the search for work. Dear friend left a little earlier, and Evgenia continued to work.
Shortly before leaving Krasnaya Polyana, she was called on an urgent matter - they pulled her right out of the excursion.
Then there was a search (they turned over a few photographs - and that's okay), an order to take only the most necessary with them.
So I didn’t take anything except an empty backpack, which, rather out of habit, I threw on my shoulder, putting there a thin volume of Selvinsky’s “Pacific Poems”
Evgenia Fedorova
Accompanied by an officer, the woman went to the Sochi Directorate of the NKVD. There, as the author writes years later, she met the only person working in law enforcement.
When Yevgenia was brought in for interrogation, he gave her a chance to escape, leaving her documents and forms of other interrogations on the table. He risked his position, freedom and life. After all, the arrested had every chance to go free with documents. But the hint was not understood, she wrote a letter to the hostel management with a request to transfer all the things to her mother. And then... Moscow, shipping and the Gulag. During interrogation by the investigator, she found out that she had been arrested on the basis of a denunciation by ... Yura.
"In time"
Collage © L!FE. Photo © Gulag Barashevo // Virtual Gulag Museum
She went to prison at the age of 29, in 1935. Closed on the 58th article ("Counter-revolutionary activity"). In her memoirs, "On the Gulag Islands," she wrote that if she had been a year later, she would not have survived.
All those who were arrested in 1937 in such cases were shot, they wrote later in the preface to the book.
Until the last, there was hope that it would be possible to prove his innocence. Even after hearing the verdict in 1936, I expected that everything would soon be cleared up.
When I was in the Butyrskaya Pereliya, it seemed to me that it would be possible to prove something to someone, to convince them, to make them understand themselves. I got eight years of camps
Evgenia Fedorova
War with Urkagans
Prisoners under political articles were sent to the Butyrka transit prison. And from there - to various camps. The first point where the writer was sent was the camp in Pindushi (Republic of Karelia).
In 1934, I took tourists here on excursions. The campsite was surrounded by barbed wire on three sides, Lake Onega was blue on the fourth, she recalls.
In the cells they sat with thieves, and sometimes murderers.
In the barracks we lived together with the urks, but they were a minority, and we generally behaved peacefully and decently. At first, they only "splintered" (robbed) the newcomers. Near me in the camp lived a merry fat and always disheveled laugher. She told me without any malice: "But I'll take the watch anyway." The next morning I lost my watch, ”recalls Evgenia.
It was impossible to prove anything to the Urks. Moreover, the administration of the prison did not help in this matter either. To all attempts to call for common sense, the answer was one: "Not caught - not a thief."
"They're Kids"
Collage © L!FE. Frame of the film "Freeze-die-resurrect!" / © Kinopoisk
Eugene was sent to work as a copyist in a design bureau. She was given six juvenile prisoners who showed at least some desire to learn.
Bribes are smooth from them, because they are youngsters. We are imprisoned for absenteeism in a reinforced regime convoy - they are not. Our bread rations are cut down to 200-300 grams for non-compliance with the norm. Youngsters always get their 500
Evgenia Fedorova
The behavior of the "kids" was appropriate. They could raid a stall located on the territory of the camp, or smash windows somewhere "for fun".
The students reacted to the work with curiosity, which, however, was quickly replaced by anger.
At first they liked to hold brand new compasses in their hands, they were flattered by the company of those arrested under Article 58. But soon the kids got tired of it. When the flies ate ink diluted with sugar water, they completely lost their temper. Near the drawings stood a three-story mat, and the tracing paper was torn into small pieces. Miraculously, they managed to save the drawings, - Evgenia recalls.
"Feast" on rotten potatoes
For the prisoners of the camps, rotten potatoes were a real white bull. Throughout the year, starting in autumn, women were driven to the vegetable store to sort out potatoes. The rotten one was given to the kitchen, the good one was poured back into the bins. And so day after day, until spring came and the potatoes ran out, - the writer notes.
In 1937, the stage came.
In the evening, we were called on the forms with things and sent for shipment. Most of the prisoners were members of the intelligentsia.
Evgenia Fedorova
All were united by the 58th article and its various points. The worst - 58-1 - treason. According to it, 10 years of camps were supposed, which were sometimes replaced by execution. Article 58-6 - espionage, 58-8 - terror. Although for the most part the number 19 stood above the deeds, which meant "intention."
Fedorova and the others were sent to "Watershed", camp "Yuzhny", in the Urals, in Solikamsk. From the barge, on which the prisoners were brought, it was 18–20 kilometers to the camp itself. At the same time, the guards did not give the opportunity to get around on the side of the road, where it was more or less dry. We walked along the road knee-deep in mud and water.
But finally we are at the camp. A small hut-hut is the only women's barrack. 34 people live here on solid bunk beds - the entire female population of the camp. In proportion to the growing heat, a horde of bedbugs multiplied, driving us out of the barracks, - the woman recalls.
Boiled mash in a broth of crushed bones. This powder floated in the soup, looking like insoluble gravel. I brought a bucket and handed out the brew to the bowls. They ate slowly and silently. Because when they started talking, the hunger came back to life
Evgenia Fedorova
There was a real war with rats. They seemed to feel when the prisoners would eat, and they came shortly before that.
Screaming: "Shoot you damned!" - was useless. To drive them away completely, it was necessary to stomp their feet and throw something at them, - writes Evgenia.
First parcels
Collage © L!FE. Photo © Wikimedia Commons
In the autumn of 1937, the first parcels arrived. They were given out in a shack near the detention center. The authorities took everything they liked, and gave the rest to us. A pack of urkagans swooped down on the owner of the coveted box of food and took everything away - this was not the first Gulag lesson the prisoners had to endure.
Soon the 58th began to follow the package with their pack to fight off the raiders. Evgenia was sent oranges, halva and crackers. Other prisoners under the same article and "comrades" from the barracks helped to convey to the barracks. "Gift of fate" was necessary to share with everyone.
Go knock
You are still young, you will ruin your whole life, and we will help if you don’t work with us, ”she heard from the camp authorities in the fall of 1937.
There was no point in refusing anyway. After the "Watershed" on the worst conditions, it seems, they could only be sent straight to hell. But he was also at the disposal of the authorities of the main department of camps and places of detention.
In the end, I said "yes" with the firm intention of running. I was sent to "Pudozhstroy" (Karelia) to find out if the former state wreckers are engaged in their sabotage within the camp. It was a test, - the author writes.
Near Onega was Mount Pudozh, where valuable and rare ore was discovered. But they did not melt in blast furnaces. And so the prisoners - metallurgists, electricians, chemists - created an experimental installation for rotating electric furnaces, where titanium and vanadium were melted, which made up the ore.
The conditions here were, by the standards of the Gulag camps, simply fabulous. The four of us lived in a room. There was even a dining room - something like a modern wardroom on a ship.
Soon the authorities called me to the carpet, began to ask about certain people. Evgenia honestly said that she was discovered: the informers in the camp were calculated instantly. A couple more weeks of unsuccessful attempts and ... forwarding.
Sat for cannibalism
A new, or rather another, place was Shveyprom, which is not far from the city of Kem in Karelia. The working day lasted 12 hours. Two or three five-minute breaks and one 20-minute break for lunch.
There were quite a few Ukrainians. They were imprisoned for cannibalism during a famine in the 1930s
Evgenia Fedorova
They were transported from "Solovki". As the writer recalls, all the women went to work in silence with sleepy faces. It seemed, with sightless eyes.
Collage © L!FE. Frame of the film Gulag Vorkuta / © Kinopoisk
Before dawn we heard explosions. Nobody officially announced, but we all knew that the war with Germany had begun
Evgenia Fedorova
The men rushed with statements asking to be taken to the front. Women - in the hope of becoming nurses, orderlies - whatever. No one was taken to the front, but everyone was ordered to get ready for the stage.
Solikamsk. The men all worked at the logging site, and there were only two women's barracks. In one - several logging crews and employees of the financial unit, accountants, kitchen, laundry, infirmary servants. In the second lived urkagan women who never worked, but served the male population of the camp, - the author writes.
Hospital. freedom
In 1943, Evgenia was admitted to a hospital in Moshev (Perm Territory). At some point, the woman was ill with sepsis. By the time we were sorting through the documents, she had practically cured herself. But since there is a piece of paper - you have to carry it.
Gradually I learned the basics of the profession from doctors, they even began to let tuberculosis patients go on night duty, no one had any illusions about their recovery.
If an extra ration happened to come in, the surgeons tried to divide it among those who had a chance of life. Almost fought, proving that their patient is worthy
Evgenia Fedorova
In the summer of 1944 - with things to go out. They gave money exactly for the road and distributed the Labor Army soldiers in the Bondyuzhinsky district of the Urals to the hospital.
It's so strange to go somewhere without a guard from behind. For the first time in nine years. Without a single document in my pocket, but I'm free. At will.
"Will"
Collage © L!FE. Photo © Wikimedia Commons
The hospital where Fedorova was assigned stood on the Timsher River. The patients were prisoners of the local camp, most of whom had already come to the hospital as a last resort. Many had dystrophy.
The Labor Army soldiers at the logging site were slowly but surely dying, turning into goners who were unable to hold an ax in their hands. Wild living conditions in barracks freezing through in winter, unusable clothes. This led to a starvation ration of 200 grams of bread, inevitable dystrophy, - Evgenia recalls.
Of the 10 barracks, only one was intended for those who had a chance to survive. Of the rest, no one else returned to the camp or to work.
Soon Eugenia's mother arrived along with her youngest son Vyacheslav. By that time, the eldest was 16 years old, he did not go to the Urals to his mother-prisoner. In addition, he was preparing to enter the current MIPT, without reporting on his "parental past."
Already a former prisoner received a passport without the right to reside in a hundred-kilometer zone of large cities, but even the presence of at least some kind of document was a joy. Their family moved to Borovsk, near Solikamsk. And everything seemed to be getting better. So five years passed.
"To Siberia. Forever"
I was arrested for the second time at the end of March 1949,” the woman recalls.
The long-awaited rehabilitation took place only in 1957. By that time, the sons had been expelled from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology due to the dark past of their mother. Evgenia moved with her mother to Moscow, got a room in a communal apartment on Kutuzovsky Prospekt. Two years later, she began to work on her memoirs.
My sons and I managed to go to America
Evgenia Fedorova
The author is silent about how he managed to escape from the Land of the Soviets. She lived in New York, New Jersey, published children's books, and traveled extensively. She died in Boston in 1995.
Alena Shapovalova
One of the most tragic and cynical pages in the annals of the Gulag is undoubtedly the one that tells about the fate of the woman behind the barbed wire. A woman in the camps is a special tragedy, a special topic. Not only because the camp, thorn, logging or wheelbarrow are not combined with the idea of the purpose of the fair sex. But also because a woman is a mother. Either the mother of children left in the wild, or - giving birth in the camp.
The stay of women in camps and prisons for the leadership of the Gulag turned out to be a kind of "failure in the system", because every year, and especially during periods of mass replenishment of the contingent of prisoners, it caused a lot of problems, the solution of which could not be found.
The presence of a huge number of women in the camps, where there were a minimum of conditions for the existence of even a healthy, hard-working man, made the situation unpredictable and dangerous.
According to the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the USSR, the total number of female prisoners held in camps and colonies for the period 1946-1950. characterized by the following data: as of January 1, 1946, 211,946 people; as of January 1, 1947, 437,127 people; as of January 1, 1948, 477,648 people; January 1, 1950 - 521,588 people.
Until 1947, the NKVD instruction dated 1939 “On the regime for keeping prisoners” No. 00889 was in force in camps and prisons. According to this instruction, the joint placement of women and men prisoners in common areas, but in separate barracks, was allowed. It was also allowed to place prisoners on the territory of residential areas in cases caused by the interests of production.
After the end of the Second World War, in the conditions of a new mass filling of the camps, the old rules were not able to effectively regulate the situation in the zones. The problem of cohabitation of prisoners and, quite naturally, a sharp increase in the number of pregnant women in camps and prisons came to light especially clearly.
The reasons for such a sharp increase in the number of women who became pregnant in the conditions of imprisonment lay, as they say, on the surface and were not a secret to the Gulag authorities.
“Before the war and even before 1947, a significant mass of the female contingent was sentenced to relatively short terms of imprisonment. This was a serious deterrent for women to cohabitation, as they had the prospect of quickly returning to their families and normalizing their lives. Those sentenced to long terms lose this prospect to a certain extent and more easily go to violate the regime and, in particular, to cohabitation and pregnancy, counting on this for an easier situation and even for early release from prison. The increase in the terms of conviction of the majority of imprisoned women undoubtedly affects the growth of pregnancy in camps and colonies ”(GARF. Report on the state of isolation of imprisoned women and the presence of pregnancy in camps and colonies of the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs. F. 9414 D. 2549).
The last statement was not groundless, after a significant influx of women into the camps in 1945-1946 and the complications caused by this circumstance in the well-functioning mechanism of the prison economy, the authorities had mercy and in record time carried out two partial amnesties (in 1947 and 1949) for pregnant women and women with young children.
The response was not long in coming. According to the guards themselves, this measure "increased the desire of female prisoners for cohabitation and pregnancy."
The statistics for the camp authorities looked depressing.
As usual, after receiving the relevant information, field checks were arranged and a thorough analysis of the current situation was made. The details came up at times quite juicy.
“The facts of forcing women to commit themselves are isolated. Such facts were revealed in ITL construction No. 352 of the Glavpromstroy of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, when the foremen of the male teams, working for a long time together with the female teams at the same construction site, forced individual women to cohabit either by threats or by promises of certain material benefits (for example, one male team of part attributed her earnings to the women's brigade because the foreman of the men's brigade cohabited with one of the female prisoners of the women's brigade).
In general, the situation threatened to get completely out of control. Due to the fact that the procedure for placing imprisoned women, which was in force until 1947, in the conditions of increasing terms of imprisonment contributed to the rapid growth of cohabitation, the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs in 1947 took measures to strengthen the isolation of imprisoned women from men. This found its expression in the newly issued “Instructions on the regime of keeping prisoners in forced labor camps and colonies”, announced by order of the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs No. 0190 of 1947.
This instruction provided for the creation of special women's units and only in exceptional cases was it allowed to place women in men's units, but in separate isolated zones.
“As of January 1, 1950, 545 separate women's camp units were organized in camps and colonies, in which 67% of prisoners are women.
The remaining 33% of women are kept in common units with men, but in separate fenced off areas.
At construction No. 501 (“Dead Road”), approximately every fourth or fifth camp was for women. Women's zones were no different from men's. The same structure and, as a rule, the same work. In some cases, it could be work in sewing workshops, in others - logging, embankment, "snow fighting" (that is, clearing the railroad from snow) in winter.
35 kilometers south of the Nadym pier, near the bank of the river. Heigiyaha (Longyugan) a women's logging column was built with three sub-tasks. The terms of the "ukaznitsy", which made up the vast majority here, according to the former civilian cultural worker of the 9th camp department M. M. Solovyova, prevailed from 10 to 15 years. Women felled the forest and took it to the right place using horses.
Nikita Petrov's study "GULAG" provides data on women in places of detention in the USSR during the period we are considering. From January 1, 1948 to March 1, 1949, the number of convicted women with children increased by 138% and pregnant women by 98%. As of January 1, 1948, to March 1, 1949, 2,356,685 prisoners were kept in the ITL and ITK. Women with children and pregnant women accounted for 6.3% of the total number of female prisoners held in camps and colonies. Convicted women with children and pregnant women kept in places of detention were accommodated in 234 specially adapted rooms (baby houses) and less often in separate sections of barracks.
From the women's lumber camp south of the city of Nadym, ruins have survived today, which allow us to get some idea of the conditions in which the prisoners were kept. Women here were placed in dugout barracks, deepened by about 1 m 30 cm. The size of dugouts varies, reaching a length of 15 meters.
Former from 1950 to 1953 in this civilian camp, Margarita Mikhailovna Solovieva, who served as a cultist here, reported that the dugouts were divided into two sections - 60 places each, each prisoner had her own bunks.
About the work of women in this camp, a former civilian reported: work area. In the mornings, after roll call, they, led by the brigadier, were taken out of the zone, where the convoy received the prisoners and took them to work. Women felled the forest all day, and then brought it to the shore. Lunch was delivered to the place of work. Rafts were made from fallen timber and sent to Nadym for sleepers. And felling the forest is not a woman's business. On horseback, try to pull out this forest. There were no tractors. A horse was harnessed to the drag and urged on. And now the women will work for a day, they will come, and they are given a gruel.”
The strictness of the camp order could not exclude the contacts of female prisoners with guards and with male prisoners. Here, for example, is the story told by Margarita Mikhailovna Solovieva: “Mostly women considered each other. There were sometimes skirmishes, scandals, but all this quickly stopped. It was difficult in autumn, when male prisoners brought hay for horses on pontoons. The women unloaded. There was enough work here. Here "love" began, running around, fighting and massacre between women.
They ran to the pontoon, and the bank was steep... The soldiers fired upwards so that they dispersed, but where is there... Shoot, don't shoot - they won't leave. If she has been sitting there for eight years and has not seen anyone or anything, she does not care if you kill her now or shoot her in a day. So they rushed at the men that at first it was scary.
Some strokes of the position of women in the camps "Construction 501" are, for example, "Minutes of the second party conference of the Ob ITL Construction 501 of the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs. June 2 - 4, 1951, Salekhard.
It says: “At the 34th women's camp, when Yershov was the head of the camp, for a long time 59 men were kept, of which: 21 people, mostly convicted of crimes of crime - treason, were used at the grassroots leading, administrative work. And the camp was in the hands of these prisoners. Ershov himself used imprisoned women for personal purposes as housekeepers and embroiderers of personal items.
Prisoners from the grassroots administration, using the patronage of Yershov, took away parcels and wages from prisoners, persuaded women to cohabit - arbitrariness reigned. All this led to mass promiscuity among female prisoners.
Only this can explain that prisoner Egorova T.I., who was tried for an unimportant crime, and is 19 years old, under the influence of a criminal recidivism, committed the murder of prisoner Dunaeva M.V. etc.".
In the system of the Ob ITL, there was absolutely no training of stove-makers, carpenters, electricians, and foremen of track crews from female prisoners. Therefore, in a number of cases, the local administration was simply forced to keep men in the women's camps.
In the "Memorandum on the state of the construction camp No. 503 of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the USSR", compiled in June 1951, in particular, the implementation of ministerial order No. 80 on the procedure for keeping women prisoners was analyzed. The document reported that the order on the isolated placement of women from men was not fully implemented, and, as a result, in column No. 54, “on the day of the check, 8 pregnant women were registered, in addition, in April 11 pregnant women were transferred to another column ... On column No. 22… 14 pregnancies were registered.”
In Kurt Baerens' book Germans in Penal Camps and Prisons of the Soviet Union, a former prisoner, a German woman deported from East Prussia and serving time in the Salekhard region, testifies: who made up the contingent of the men's camp. In the accompanying papers, they were not indicated properly. They tried to get into our dwelling by all means, including with the help of homemade master keys, and managed to get into both halves of the women's barracks, breaking open the floor and walls, breaking out parts of the ceiling. The Russian guards did not protect us. Only twelve days after our appeal, the employees of the Ministry of Internal Affairs took the criminals out of the camp.”
Documents from the Ministry of the Interior dated 1952 and 1953 shed some light on the position of women and children in the system of the General Directorate of Railway Construction Camps at the end of the Stalin era.
“An extract from the commission’s report addressed to the Minister of the Interior, Comrade S. Kruglov, dated December 4, 1952, No. 50/2257 s” indicated that the cost of keeping prisoners in the northern and Far Eastern camps of the GULZhDS is about twice as expensive as their content in other camps. Based on this, it was concluded that it was necessary to place, in particular, mothers with children in the Gulag camps located in more favorable climatic conditions. For reasons unknown to us, the conclusion to this proposal was negative.
As a result of difficult living conditions, only for 10 months in 1952, 1486 cases of primary diseases were registered for an average monthly number of children - 408 people. Considering that 33 children (or 8.1 percent of the total) died during the same period, it turns out that on average each child had four different diseases during this period. The leading causes of death were dysentery and dyspepsia - 45.5 percent, as well as pneumonia - 30.2 percent.
On our own behalf, we add the following: given that the death rate among prisoners was about 0.5 percent per year, we have to state that children died 16 times more often.
In a report dated February 9, 1953, the Office of the Ob ITL and Construction 501 reported that the conditions for mothers with children had improved as a result of their redeployment to newly converted premises from the Obskaya station to Salekhard and from Igarka to Ermakovo.
The so-called "Column of the House of Mother and Child" was arranged in Salekhard, in the region of the Angalsky Cape. There was also a maternity hospital.
As N. Petrov notes in his study “GULAG”, the continuously increasing number of convicted women with children and pregnant women throughout the country put the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs in a difficult position due to exceptional difficulties in ensuring the correct upbringing of children, their normal placement and medical care. The average cost of maintaining one imprisoned woman with a child was 12 rubles a day. 72 kop. or 4,643 rubles per year.
On August 28, 1950, the Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR prescribed the release from punishment of convicted pregnant women and women with young children. The certificate, signed by Colonel Nikulochkin, Deputy Head of the 2nd Directorate of the GULAG of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the USSR, reported that on April 24, 1951, pursuant to this decree, 100% of pregnant women and women with children in prisons were released from places of detention, as well as 94 .5% of women with children outside the camp-colony. A total of 119,041 women were released out of 122,738 falling into the listed categories.
On May 3, 1951, the head of the Gulag, Lieutenant-General I. Dolgikh, documented: “3,697 women with children outside the camp-colony were not released because they did not receive documents confirming that they had children.
The work to liberate women with children continues.”
No matter how harshly the then state, represented by its highest representatives, treated violators of the law, it could not ignore the huge demographic damage caused by the war. This damage had to be compensated or at least not interfere with its compensation.
The journey from Berlin Tegel Airport to Ravensbrück takes just over an hour. In February 2006, when I first drove here, it was snowing heavily and a truck crashed on the Berlin ring road, so the journey took longer.
Heinrich Himmler often traveled to Ravensbrück, even in such ferocious weather. Friends lived in the vicinity of the head of the SS, and if he passed by, he looked at the inspection in the camp. He rarely left without issuing new orders. One day he ordered more root vegetables to be put into the captives' soup. And another time he was indignant that the extermination of prisoners was going too slowly.
Ravensbrück was the only Nazi concentration camp for women. The camp takes its name from a small village in the vicinity of Fürstenberg and is located about 80 km north of Berlin on the road leading to the Baltic Sea. Women entering the camp at night sometimes thought they were near the sea because they smelled salt in the air and sand under their feet. But when it dawned, they realized that the camp was on the shore of the lake and surrounded by forest. Himmler liked to set up camps in hidden places with beautiful nature. The view of the camp is still hidden today; the heinous crimes that took place here and the courage of its victims are still largely unknown.
Ravensbrück was established in May 1939, only four months before the start of the war, and was liberated by the soldiers of the Soviet Army six years later - this camp was one of the last to reach the Allies. In its first year of existence, it held fewer than 2,000 prisoners, almost all of whom were Germans. Many were arrested because they opposed Hitler - for example, the communists, or Jehovah's Witnesses, who called Hitler the Antichrist. Others were imprisoned because the Nazis considered them inferior creatures whose presence in society was undesirable: prostitutes, criminals, beggars, gypsies. Later, thousands of women from Nazi-occupied countries began to be kept in the camp, many of whom took part in the Resistance. Children were also brought here. A small proportion of the prisoners - about 10 percent - were Jews, but officially the camp was not intended only for them.
The largest number of prisoners in Ravensbrück was 45,000 women; in more than six years of the camp's existence, about 130,000 women passed through its gates, who were beaten, starved, forced to work to death, poisoned, tortured, and killed in gas chambers. Rough estimates of the number of victims vary from 30,000 to 90,000; the real number is likely to be between these figures - too few SS documents have survived to speak for sure. The massive destruction of evidence at Ravensbrück is one of the reasons why so little is known about the camp. In the last days of its existence, the cases of all prisoners were burned in the crematorium or at the stake, along with the bodies. The ashes were thrown into the lake.
I first learned about Ravensbrück when I was writing my earlier book about Vera Atkins, an intelligence officer with Special Operations during World War II. Immediately after her graduation, Vera began an independent search for women from the USO (British Office of Special Operations - approx. Newo than) who parachuted into occupied French territory to aid the Resistance, many of whom were reported missing. Vera followed their trail and discovered that some of them had been captured and placed in concentration camps.
I tried to recreate her quest and started with the personal notes that her half-sister Phoebe Atkins kept in brown cardboard boxes at their home in Cornwall. The word "Ravensbrück" was written on one of these boxes. Inside were handwritten interviews with surviving and suspected members of the SS, some of the first evidence received about the camp. I flipped through the papers. “We were forced to undress and shaved our heads,” one of the women told Vera. There was a "pillar of suffocating blue smoke."
Faith Atkins. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
One survivor spoke of a camp hospital where "the bacteria that cause syphilis were injected into the spinal cord." Another described the women's arrival at the camp after the "death march" from Auschwitz, through the snow. One of the USO agents, imprisoned in the Dachau camp, wrote that he had heard about women from Ravensbrück who were forced to work in the Dachau brothel.
Several people mentioned a young female guard named Binz with "short blond hair". Another warden was once a nanny at Wimbledon. Among the prisoners, according to a British investigator, were "the cream of the female society of Europe", including Charles de Gaulle's niece, a former British golf champion and many Polish countesses.
I started looking up dates of birth and addresses, in case any of the survivors - or even the overseers - were still alive. Someone gave Vera the address of Mrs. Shatne, "who knew about the sterilization of children in Block 11." Dr. Louise Le Port drew up a detailed report, which indicated that the camp was built on the territory belonging to Himmler, and his personal residence was nearby. Le Port lived at Mérignac, Department of the Gironde, however, judging by her date of birth, she was already dead by that time. A Guernsey woman, Julia Barry, lived in Nettlebed, Oxfordshire. The Russian survivor allegedly worked "at a mother and child center at the Leningradsky railway station."
On the back of the box, I found a handwritten list of prisoners taken out by a Polish woman who took notes in the camp and also drew sketches and maps. “The Poles were better informed,” the note says. The woman who made the list was most likely long dead, but some of the addresses were in London, and those who escaped were still alive.
I took these sketches with me on my first trip to Ravensbrück, hoping they would help me get my bearings when I got there. However, due to the snow blockages on the road, I doubted whether I would get there at all.
Many tried to get to Ravensbrück, but failed. Representatives of the Red Cross tried to get to the camp in the chaos of the last days of the war, but were forced to turn back, so huge was the flow of refugees moving towards them. A few months after the end of the war, when Vera Atkins chose this road to begin her investigation, she was stopped at a Russian checkpoint; the camp was in the Russian zone of occupation and access to citizens of the allied countries was closed. By this time Vera's expedition had become part of a larger British investigation into the camp, which resulted in the first Ravensbrück war crimes trials beginning in Hamburg in 1946.
In the 1950s, as the Cold War began, Ravensbrück disappeared behind an Iron Curtain that divided survivors from east and west and split the camp's history in two.
In Soviet territories, this place became a memorial to communist camp heroines, and all streets and schools in East Germany were named after them.
Meanwhile, in the West, Ravensbrück literally disappeared from sight. Former prisoners, historians and journalists could not get even close to this place. In their countries, ex-prisoners fought to get their stories published, but it proved too difficult to get proof. The transcripts of the Hamburg Tribunal were hidden under the heading "secret" for thirty years.
"Where was he?" was one of the most common questions I was asked when I started the Ravensbrück book. Along with “Why was a separate women's camp needed? Were these women Jewish? Was it a death camp or a work camp? Are any of them alive now?
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
In the countries that lost the most people in this camp, groups of survivors tried to keep the memory of what happened. Approximately 8,000 French, 1,000 Dutch, 18,000 Russians and 40,000 Poles were imprisoned. Now, in each of the countries - for different reasons - this story is being forgotten.
The ignorance of both the British - who had only about twenty women in the camp - and the Americans is really frightening. In Britain, Dachau, the first concentration camp, and possibly the Bergen-Belsen camp may be known, since British troops liberated it and captured the horror they saw in footage that forever traumatized the British consciousness. Another thing is with Auschwitz, which became synonymous with the extermination of Jews in gas chambers and left a real echo.
After reading the materials collected by Vera, I decided to take a look at what was generally written about the camp. Popular historians (almost all of whom are men) had little to say. Even books written after the end of the Cold War seemed to describe an entirely male world. Then a friend of mine working in Berlin shared with me a solid collection of essays written by predominantly German women scientists. In the 1990s, feminist historians launched a backlash. This book is designed to liberate women from the anonymity that the word "prisoner" implies. Many further studies, often German, were built on the same principle: the history of Ravensbrück was considered too one-sidedly, which seemed to drown out all the pain of terrible events. Once I happened to stumble upon references to a certain "Book of Memory" - it seemed to me something much more interesting, so I tried to contact the author.
More than once I came across the memoirs of other prisoners published in the 1960s and 70s. Their books were gathering dust in the depths of public libraries, although the covers of many were extremely provocative. On the cover of the memoirs of French literature teacher Micheline Morel, there was a luxurious, Bond girl-style woman thrown behind barbed wire. A book about one of the first matrons of Ravensbrück, Irma Grese, was called The Beautiful Beast("Beautiful Beast"). The language of these memoirs seemed outdated, far-fetched. Some described the guards as "lesbians with a brutal look", others drew attention to the "savagery" of the captured German women, which "gave reason to reflect on the basic virtues of the race." Such texts were confusing, there was a feeling that not a single author knew how to put together a story well. In the preface to one of the collections of memoirs, the famous French writer François Mauriac wrote that Ravensbrück became "a shame that the world decided to forget." Perhaps I should write about something else, so I went to meet Yvonne Basedin, the only survivor I had information about, to get her opinion.
Yvonne was one of the women in the SOE unit led by Vera Atkins. She was caught helping the Resistance in France and sent to Ravensbrück. Yvonne was always willing to talk about her work in the Resistance, but as soon as I brought up the topic of Ravensbrück, she immediately "knew nothing" and turned away from me.
This time I said that I was going to write a book about the camp, and I hope to hear her story. She looked up at me in horror.
"Oh no, you can't do that."
I asked why not. “It's too terrible. Can't you write about something else? How are you going to tell your kids what you do?”
Didn't she think the story should be told? "Oh yeah. Nobody knows anything about Ravensbrück at all. No one has wanted to know since our return.” She looked out the window.
As I was about to leave, she gave me a small book—another memoir, with a particularly horrific cover of woven black and white figures. Yvonne didn't read it, as she said, holding it out to me insistently. It looked like she wanted to get rid of it.
At home, I found another one, blue in color, under a frightening cover. I read the book in one sitting. The author was a young French lawyer named Denise Dufournier. She was able to write a simple and touching story of the struggle for life. The “abomination” of the book was not only that the story of Ravensbrück was forgotten, but also that everything actually happened.
A few days later, French was on my answering machine. The speaker was Dr. Louise le Port (now Liard), a doctor from the city of Mérignac, whom I had previously thought dead. However, now she invited me to Bordeaux, where she then lived. I could stay as long as I wanted, as we had a lot to discuss. “But you should hurry. I am 93 years old".
I soon got in touch with Berbel Schindler-Zefkov, author of The Book of Memory. Berbel, the daughter of a German communist prisoner, compiled a "database" of prisoners; she traveled for a long time in search of lists of prisoners in forgotten archives. She gave me the address of Valentina Makarova, a Belarusian partisan who survived Auschwitz. Valentina answered me, offering to visit her in Minsk.
By the time I got to the suburbs of Berlin, the snow began to disappear. I passed the sign for Sachsenhausen, where the concentration camp for men was located. This meant that I was moving in the right direction. Sachsenhausen and Ravensbrück were closely linked. The men's camp even baked bread for the female prisoners, and every day it was sent to Ravensbrück along this road. At first, each woman received half a loaf every evening. By the end of the war, they were given hardly more than a thin piece, and "useless mouths", as the Nazis called those they wanted to get rid of, got nothing at all.
SS officers, warders and prisoners moved regularly from one camp to another as Himmler's administration tried to make the most of resources. At the beginning of the war, a women's department was opened in Auschwitz, and then in other men's camps, and female guards were trained in Ravensbrück, who were then sent to other camps. By the end of the war, several high-ranking SS officers were sent from Auschwitz to Ravensbrück. Prisoners were also exchanged. Thus, despite the fact that Ravensbrück was an all-women's camp, it borrowed many features from the men's camps.
The SS empire Himmler created was vast: by the middle of the war, there were at least 15,000 Nazi camps, including temporary work camps, as well as thousands of auxiliary ones connected with the main concentration camps scattered throughout Germany and Poland. The largest and most terrifying were the camps built in 1942 as part of the Final Solution to the Jewish Question. It is estimated that by the end of the war, 6 million Jews had been exterminated. Today, the facts about the genocide of the Jews are so well known and so staggering that many believe that Hitler's extermination program consisted only in the Holocaust.
People interested in Ravensbrück are usually very surprised to learn that most of the women imprisoned there were not Jewish.
To date, historians distinguish between separate types of camps, but these names can be confusing. Ravensbrück is often defined as a "slave labor" camp. This term is intended to soften the horror of what was happening, and could also be one of the reasons why the camp was forgotten. Certainly, Ravensbrück became an important element of the slave labor system - Siemens, the giant in the world of electronics, had factories there - but labor was just a stage on the road to death. The prisoners called Ravensbrück the death camp. A French survivor, ethnologist Germaine Tillon, said people there were "slowly decimated".
Photo: PPCC Antifa
Moving away from Berlin, I observed white fields that were replaced by dense trees. From time to time I drove past abandoned collective farms left over from communist times.
In the depths of the forest, the snow fell more and more, and it became difficult for me to find my way. Women from Ravensbrück were often sent into the forest during the snowfall to cut down trees. Snow stuck to their wooden shoes, so they walked on a kind of snow platform, their feet were twisted. If they fell, they were attacked by German Shepherds, which were led nearby on leashes by the guards.
The names of the villages in the forest resembled those I had read about in the testimony. From the village of Altglobzo was Dorothea Bintz, a warden with short hair. Then the spire of the Fürstenberg church appeared. The camp was not visible from the city center, but I knew that it was on the other side of the lake. Prisoners told how, leaving the gates of the camp, they saw a spire. I passed the Fürstenberg station where so many terrible journeys ended. One February night, the women of the Red Army arrived here, brought from the Crimea in wagons for transporting livestock.
Dorothea Binz at the first Ravensbrück trial in 1947. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
On the other side of the Fürstenberg, a cobblestone road, built by the prisoners, led to the camp. On the left side stood houses with gable roofs; thanks to Vera's map, I knew that guards lived in these houses. In one of the houses there was a hostel where I was going to spend the night. The interior of the former owners has long been replaced with immaculate modern furnishings, but the spirits of the guards still live in their old rooms.
On the right side, a view of the wide and snow-white expanse of the lake opened up. Ahead was the commandant's headquarters and a high wall. A few minutes later I was already standing at the entrance to the camp. Ahead was another wide white field planted with linden trees, which, as I later learned, had been planted in the early days of the camp. All the barracks, which were located under the trees, disappeared. During the Cold War, the Russians used the camp as a tank base and demolished most of the buildings. Russian soldiers played football at what was once called Appelplatz, where prisoners stood for roll call. I heard about the Russian base, but didn't expect to find such a degree of destruction.
Camp Siemens, a few hundred meters from the south wall, was overgrown and very difficult to get into. The same thing happened with the annex, the "camp for the young", where many murders were committed. I had to imagine them, but I didn't have to imagine the cold. The prisoners stood here in the square for hours, dressed in thin cotton clothes. I decided to take refuge in the "bunker", a stone prison building whose cells were converted during the Cold War into memorials to fallen communists. Lists of names were carved into shining black granite.
In one of the rooms, workers were removing memorials and refinishing the room. Now that power has returned to the west again, historians and archivists have been working on a new account of the events that took place here and on a new memorial exhibition.
Outside the camp walls, I found other, more personal memorials. Next to the crematorium was a long, high-walled passageway known as the "shooting alley". Here lay a small bouquet of roses: if they had not frozen, they would have withered. There was a sign next to it.
Three bouquets of flowers lay on the stoves in the crematorium, and the shore of the lake was strewn with roses. Ever since the camp was re-opened, ex-prisoners have been coming to pay their respects to their dead friends. I needed to find other survivors while I had time.
Now I understood what my book should be: a biography of Ravensbrück from beginning to end. I have to do my best to put the pieces of this story together. The book should shed light on Nazi crimes against women and show how understanding what happened in women's women's camps can expand our knowledge of the history of Nazism.
So much evidence has been destroyed, so many facts have been forgotten and distorted. But still much has been preserved, and now you can find new evidence. British court records have long returned to the public domain, and many details of those events have been found in them. Documents hidden behind the Iron Curtain have also become available: since the end of the Cold War, the Russians have partly opened their archives, and evidence has been found in several European capitals that had never before been examined. Survivors from the east and west sides began to share memories with each other. Their children asked questions, found hidden letters and diaries.
The voices of the prisoners themselves played the most important role in the creation of this book. They will guide me, reveal to me what really happened. A few months later, in the spring, I returned for the annual ceremony to mark the camp's liberation and met Valentina Makarova, an Auschwitz death march survivor. She wrote to me from Minsk. Her hair was white with a blue tint, her face was sharp as a flint. When I asked how she managed to survive, she replied: "I believed in victory." She said it like I should have known it.
When I approached the room in which the executions were carried out, the sun suddenly peeped through the clouds for several minutes. Wood pigeons sang in the lindens, as if trying to drown out the noise from passing cars. A bus was parked near the building, in which French schoolchildren arrived; they crowded around the car to smoke cigarettes.
My gaze was fixed on the other side of the frozen lake, where I could see the spire of the Fürstenberg church. There, in the distance, workers were busy with boats; in summer, visitors often rent boats, not realizing that the ashes of camp prisoners lie at the bottom of the lake. The rushing wind drove a lone red rose along the edge of the ice.
“1957. The doorbell rings,” recalls Margarethe Buber-Neumann, a survivor of Ravensbrück. - I open it and see an elderly woman in front of me: she is breathing heavily, and several teeth are missing in her mouth. The guest mutters: “Don’t you recognize me? It's me, Johanna Langefeld. I was the head overseer at Ravensbrück." The last time I saw her was fourteen years ago, in her office at the camp. I acted as her secretary... She often prayed, asking God to give her the strength to end the evil that was going on in the camp, but every time a Jewish woman appeared on the threshold of her office, her face was distorted with hatred...
And here we are sitting at the same table. She says she would like to be born a man. He speaks of Himmler, whom he still calls "Reichsführer" from time to time. She speaks without stopping for several hours, gets confused in the events of different years and tries to somehow justify her actions.
Prisoners in Ravensbrück.
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
In early May 1939, a small line of trucks appeared from behind the trees surrounding the tiny village of Ravensbrück, lost in the Mecklenburg Forest. Cars drove along the lake shore, but their axles got stuck in the marshy coastal soil. Some of the newcomers jumped out to dig out the cars; others began to unload the boxes they had brought.
Among them was a woman in a uniform - a gray jacket and skirt. Her feet immediately sank into the sand, but she hurriedly freed herself, climbed to the top of the slope and surveyed the surroundings. Behind the lake, glittering in the sun, were rows of fallen trees. The smell of sawdust hung in the air. The sun was beating down, but there was no shade anywhere near. To her right, on the far side of the lake, was the small town of Fürstenberg. The coast was strewn with boat houses. The church spire was visible in the distance.
On the opposite shore of the lake, to her left, a long gray wall rose about 5 meters high. A forest path led to the iron gates of the complex, towering above the surroundings, on which there were signs "No Trespassing". A woman - medium height, stocky, with curly brown hair - purposefully moved towards the gate.
Johanna Langefeld arrived with the first batch of overseers and prisoners to oversee the unloading of equipment and inspect the new concentration camp for women; it was planned that it would start functioning in a few days, and Langefeld would become oberaufseerin- senior overseer. During her life she had seen many women's correctional institutions, but none of them could be compared with Ravensbrück.
A year before her new appointment, Langefeld held the position of head overseer in Lichtenburg, a medieval fortress near Torgau, a city on the banks of the Elbe. Lichtenburg was temporarily turned into a women's camp during the construction of Ravensbrück; crumbling halls and damp dungeons were cramped and contributed to the emergence of diseases; the conditions of detention were unbearable for the women. Ravensbrück was built specifically for its intended purpose. The camp area was about six acres - enough to more than accommodate about 1000 women from the first batch of prisoners.
Langefeld passed through the iron gates and walked along the Appelplatz, the main square of the camp, the size of a football field, capable of accommodating all the prisoners of the camp if necessary. There were loudspeakers at the edges of the square, above Langefeld's head, although so far the only sound in the camp grounds was the sound of hammering nails in the distance. The walls cut off the camp from the outside world, leaving only the sky above its territory visible.
Unlike the men's concentration camps, there were no watchtowers or machine-gun mounts along the walls in Ravensbrück. However, an electric fence snaked around the outer perimeter of the wall, accompanied by skull and crossbones signs warning that the fence was under high voltage. Only to the south, to the right of Lengefeld, did the surface rise enough to make out the tops of the trees on the hill.
The main building in the camp was a huge gray barracks. Wooden houses, erected in a checkerboard pattern, were one-story buildings with tiny windows that clung to the central square of the camp. Two rows of exactly the same barracks - the only difference was a slightly larger size - were located on either side of Lagerstrasse, Ravensbrück's main street.
Langefeld inspected the blocks one by one. The first was the SS dining room with brand new tables and chairs. To the left of the Appelplatz was also Revere- the Germans used this term to refer to infirmaries and medical bays. Crossing the square, she entered the sanitary block, equipped with dozens of showers. Boxes of striped cotton robes were stacked in a corner of the room, and at the table a handful of women were laying out piles of colored felt triangles.
Under the same roof as the bath house was the camp kitchen, gleaming with large pots and kettles. The next building was a warehouse for prison clothes, Effektenkammer where heaps of big brown paper bags were kept, and beyond that was the laundry room, Wascherei, with six centrifugal washing machines - Langefeld would like to see more of them.
A poultry farm was built nearby. Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS who ran concentration camps and more than that in Nazi Germany, wanted his creations to be as self-sufficient as possible. In Ravensbrück, it was planned to build cages for rabbits, a chicken coop and a vegetable garden, as well as to lay out fruit and flower gardens, where gooseberry bushes brought from the gardens of the Lichtenburg concentration camp were already beginning to be transplanted. The contents of the Lichtenburg cesspools were also brought to Ravensbrück and used as fertilizer. Among other things, Himmler demanded that the camps pool resources. In Ravensbrück, for example, there were no bread ovens, so bread was brought in daily from Sachsenhausen, the men's camp 80 kilometers to the south.
The senior warden walked along Lagerstrasse (the main street of the camp, going between the barracks - approx. New what), which started on the far side of the Appelplatz and led deeper into the camp. The barracks were located along Lagerstrasse in exact order, so that the windows of one building faced the back wall of another. In these buildings, 8 on each side of the "street", prisoners lived. Red sage flowers were planted at the first barrack; linden seedlings grew among the rest.
As in all concentration camps, the grid layout was used in Ravensbrück primarily to ensure that the prisoners were always visible, which meant that fewer guards were required. A brigade of thirty guards and a detachment of twelve SS men were sent there - all together under the command of Sturmbannführer Max Koegel.
Johanna Langefeld believed that she could run a women's concentration camp better than any man, and certainly better than Max Koegel, whose methods she despised. Himmler, however, made it clear that the administration of Ravensbrück had to rely on the principles of running the men's camps, which meant that Langefeld and her subordinates had to report to the SS commandant.
Formally, neither she nor the other guards had anything to do with the camp. They were not just subordinate to men - women had no rank or rank - they were only "auxiliary forces" of the SS. Most remained unarmed, although those guarding the work orders carried a pistol; many had service dogs. Himmler believed that women were more afraid of dogs than men.
However, Koegel's power here was not absolute. At that time, he was only acting commandant and did not have some powers. For example, the camp was not allowed to have a special prison, or "bunker", for troublemakers, which was instituted in the men's camps. He also could not order "official" beatings. Angered by the restrictions, the Sturmbannführer sent a request to superiors in the SS for more powers to punish prisoners, but the request was not granted.
However, Langefeld, who highly valued drill and discipline, not beatings, was satisfied with such conditions, mainly when she was able to achieve significant concessions in the day-to-day management of the camp. In the camp rules Lagerordnung, it was noted that the senior warden had the right to advise the Schutzhaftlagerführer (First Deputy Commandant) on "women's issues", although their content was not determined.
Langefeld looked around as she entered one of the barracks. Like many things, the organization of the rest of the prisoners in the camp was new to her - more than 150 women simply slept in each room, there were no separate cells, as she was used to. All buildings were divided into two large sleeping rooms, A and B, on either side of them - areas for washing, with a row of twelve basins for bathing and twelve latrines, as well as a common day room where the prisoners ate.
The sleeping areas were filled with three-story bunks made of wooden planks. Each prisoner had a mattress stuffed with sawdust, a pillow, a sheet, and a blue-and-white checkered blanket folded by the bed.
The value of Langefeld's drill and discipline was instilled from an early age. She was born in the family of a blacksmith under the name of Johann May, in the town of Kupferdre, Ruhr region, in March 1900. She and her older sister were brought up in a strict Lutheran tradition - her parents hammered into them the importance of frugality, obedience and daily prayer. Like any decent Protestant, Johanna knew from childhood that her life would be defined by the role of a faithful wife and mother: "Kinder, Küche, Kirche", that is, "children, kitchen, church", which was a familiar rule in her parents' house. But from an early age, Johanna dreamed of more.
Her parents often talked about Germany's past. After visiting church on Sunday, they recalled the humiliating occupation of their beloved Ruhr by Napoleon's troops, and the whole family knelt down, praying to God that he would return Germany to its former greatness. The idol of the girl was her namesake, Johanna Prochaszka, the heroine of the liberation wars of the early 19th century, who pretended to be a man in order to fight the French.
Johann Langefeld told all this to Margaret Buber-Neumann, a former prisoner, on whose door she knocked many years later, in an attempt to "explain her behavior." Margaret, imprisoned in Ravesbrück for four years, was shocked by the appearance of a former warden on her doorstep in 1957; Langefeld's story about her "Odyssey" Neumann was extremely interested, and she wrote it down.
In the year of the outbreak of the First World War, Johanna, who was then 14 years old, along with the rest rejoiced when the youths of Kupferdre went to the front to restore the greatness of Germany, until she realized that her role and the role of all German women in this matter was small. Two years later it became clear that the end of the war would not come soon, and German women were suddenly ordered to go to work in mines, offices and factories; there, deep in the rear, women were able to take on men's work, but only to be left out of work again after the return of men from the front.
Two million Germans had died in the trenches, but six million had survived, and now Johanna was watching Kupferdre's soldiers, many of them mutilated, every one of them humiliated. Under the terms of the surrender, Germany was obliged to pay reparations, which undermined the economy and accelerated hyperinflation; in 1924 Johann's beloved Ruhr was again occupied by the French, who "stole" German coal as punishment for unpaid reparations. Her parents lost their savings, she was looking for a penniless job. In 1924, Johanna married a miner named Wilhelm Langefeld, who died of a lung disease two years later.
Here Johanna's "odyssey" was interrupted; she "vanished into years," wrote Margaret. The mid-twenties became a dark period that fell out of her memory - she only reported an affair with another man, as a result of which she became pregnant and became dependent on Protestant charitable groups.
While Langefeld and millions of her kind survived with difficulty, other German women in the twenties gained freedom. The Socialist-led Weimar Republic accepted financial assistance from America, was able to stabilize the country and follow a new liberal course. German women gained the right to vote and for the first time in history joined political parties, especially those of the left. In imitation of Rosa Luxembourg, leader of the communist Spartacus movement, middle-class girls (including Margaret Buber-Neumann) cut their hair, watched plays by Bertolt Brecht, roamed the woods and chatted about the revolution with comrades in the communist youth group Wandervogel. Meanwhile, working-class women across the country were raising money for Red Aid, joining unions, and striking at factory gates.
In Munich in 1922, when Adolf Hitler blamed Germany's misfortunes on a "fat Jew," an early Jewish girl named Olga Benario ran away from home to join a communist cell, abandoning her wealthy middle-class parents. She was fourteen years old. A few months later, the dark-eyed schoolgirl was already leading her comrades along the paths of the Bavarian Alps, swimming in mountain streams, and then reading Marx with them by the fire and planning the German communist revolution. In 1928, she became famous when she attacked a Berlin courthouse and freed a German communist who was threatened with the guillotine. In 1929 Olga left Germany for Moscow to train with the Stalinist elite before leaving to start a revolution in Brazil.
Olga Benario. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
Meanwhile, in the impoverished Ruhr Valley, Johanna Langefeld was by now a single mother with no hope for the future. The Wall Street Crash of 1929 triggered a worldwide depression that plunged Germany into a new and deeper economic crisis that put millions of people out of work and provoked widespread discontent. Langefeld's greatest fear was that her son Herbert would be taken away from her if she was forced into poverty. But instead of joining the poor, she decided to help them by turning to God. It was her religious beliefs that motivated her to work with the poorest of the poor, she told Margaret at the kitchen table in Frankfurt all these years later. She found work in the welfare service, where she taught housekeeping to unemployed women and "re-educated prostitutes."
In 1933, Johanna Langefeld found a new savior in Adolf Hitler. Hitler's program for women could not have been simpler: German women had to stay at home, give birth to as many Aryan children as possible and obey their husbands. Women were not fit for public life; most jobs would be out of reach for women, and their ability to enter universities would be limited.
Such sentiments were easy to find in any European country of the 1930s, but the Nazi language against women was unique in its offensiveness. Hitler's entourage not only spoke with open contempt about the "stupid", "lower" female sex - they demanded "segregation" between men and women over and over again, as if men did not see the point in women at all, except as a pleasant decoration and, of course, source of offspring. Jews were not Hitler's only scapegoats for Germany's troubles: women emancipated during the Weimar Republic were accused of stealing men's jobs and corrupting national morality.
And yet Hitler was able to charm millions of German women who wanted the "man with an iron grip" to return pride and faith in the Reich. Crowds of such supporters, many of whom were deeply religious and incensed by Joseph Goebbels' anti-Semitic propaganda, attended the Nuremberg rally in honor of the Nazi victory in 1933, where the American reporter William Shearer mingled with the crowd. “Hitler rode into this medieval town at sunset today, passing slender phalanxes of jubilant Nazis… Tens of thousands of swastika flags obscure the gothic scenery of this place…” Later that evening, outside the hotel where Hitler was staying: “I was a little shocked at the sight of the faces, especially faces of women… They looked at him as if they were the Messiah…”
There is no doubt that Langefeld cast her vote for Hitler. She yearned to avenge the humiliation of her country. And she was pleased with the idea of "respect for the family" that Hitler spoke of. She also had personal reasons to be grateful to the regime: for the first time, she had a stable job. For women - and even more so for single mothers - most career paths were closed, except for the one chosen by Lengefeld. She was transferred from the welfare service to the prison service. In 1935, she was promoted again: she became the head of a penal colony for prostitutes in Brauweiler, near Cologne.
In Brauweiler, it already began to seem that she did not fully share the methods of the Nazis in helping the "poorest of the poor." In July 1933, a law was passed to prevent the birth of offspring with hereditary diseases. Sterilization has become a way of dealing with weaklings, idlers, criminals and lunatics. The Fuhrer was sure that all these degenerates were leeches of the state treasury, they should be deprived of offspring in order to strengthen Volksgemeinschaft- a community of purebred Germans. In 1936, Brauweiler head Albert Bose stated that 95% of his female prisoners were "incapable of improvement and should be sterilized for moral reasons and the desire to create a healthy Volk".
In 1937, Bose fired Langefeld. Brauweiler's records indicate that she was fired for stealing, but in fact because of her struggle with such methods. The records also say that Langefeld still did not join the party, although this was mandatory for all workers.
The idea of "respect" for the family did not hold Lina Hag, the wife of a member of the communist parliament in Wütenberg. On January 30, 1933, when she heard that Hitler had been elected chancellor, it became clear to her that the new security service, the Gestapo, would come for her husband: “At the meetings, we warned everyone about the danger of Hitler. They thought that people would go against him. We were wrong".
And so it happened. On January 31 at 5 am, while Lina and her husband were still sleeping, Gestapo thugs showed up to them. The red count has begun. “Helmets, revolvers, clubs. They walked on clean linen with obvious pleasure. We were not strangers at all: we knew them, and they knew us. They were grown men, fellow citizens, neighbors, fathers. Ordinary people. But they pointed loaded pistols at us, and in their eyes there was only hatred.
Lina's husband began to dress. Lina wondered how he managed to put on his coat so quickly. Does he leave without saying a word?
What are you? she asked.
"What can I do," he said, shrugging his shoulders.
- He's a member of parliament! she shouted to the policemen armed with batons. They laughed.
- Heard? Commie, that's who you are. But we will clean this infection from you.
While the father of the family was being led under escort, Lina tried to drag their screaming ten-year-old daughter Kathy away from the window.
"I don't think people will put up with this," Lina said.
Four weeks later, on February 27, 1933, while Hitler was trying to seize power in the party, someone set fire to the German parliament, the Reichstag. The communists were blamed, although many assumed that the Nazis were behind the arson, who were looking for an excuse to intimidate political opponents. Hitler immediately issued a "preventive detention" order, now anyone could be arrested for "treason". Just ten miles from Munich, a new camp for such "traitors" was about to open.
The first concentration camp, Dachau, opened on March 22, 1933. In the weeks and months that followed, Hitler's police searched for every communist, even a potential one, and brought them to where their spirit was to be broken. The same fate awaited the Social Democrats, as well as members of the trade unions, and all other "enemies of the state."
There were Jews in Dachau, especially among the communists, but they were few in number - in the early years of Nazi rule, Jews were not arrested in huge numbers. Those who were at that time in the camps were arrested for resisting Hitler, and not for race. At first, the main purpose of the concentration camps was to suppress resistance within the country, and after that they could be taken for other purposes. The man best suited for the job, Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, who soon became head of the police, including the Gestapo, was in charge of the suppression.
Heinrich Luitpold Himmler did not look like the usual head of the police. He was a short, thin man with a weak chin and gold-rimmed glasses on a pointed nose. Born October 7, 1900, was the middle child of Gebhard Himmler, an assistant director of a school near Munich. Evenings in their cozy Munich apartment he spent helping Himmler Sr. with his stamp collection or listening to the heroic adventures of his military grandfather, while the charming mother of the family - a devout Catholic - embroidered in the corner.
Young Heinrich was an excellent student, but other students considered him a nerd and often bullied him. In physical education, he barely reached the uneven bars, so the teacher forced him to do painful squats under the hooting of classmates. Years later, Himmler invented a new torture in a male concentration camp: prisoners were chained into a circle and forced to jump and crouch until they fell. And then they were beaten to make sure they didn't get up.
After leaving school, Himmler dreamed of joining the army and even spent time as a cadet, but poor health and eyesight prevented him from becoming an officer. Instead, he studied farming and raised chickens. He was consumed by another romantic dream. He returned to his homeland. In his free time, he walked in his beloved Alps, often with his mother, or studied astrology with genealogy, along the way making notes in a diary about every detail in his life. “Thoughts and worries still do not leave my head,” he complains.
By the age of twenty, Himmler constantly berated himself for not conforming to social and sexual norms. "I'm always babbling," he wrote, and when it came to sex, "I don't let myself utter a word." By the 1920s he had joined the Thule men's society in Munich, where the origins of Aryan supremacy and the Jewish threat were discussed. He was also accepted into the Munich far-right wing of the parliamentarians. “It's good to put on the uniform again,” he noted. The National Socialists (Nazis) began to talk about him: "Heinrich will fix everything." He was unmatched in organizational skills and attention to detail. He also showed that he could divine Hitler's wishes. As Himmler found out, it is very useful to be "sly as foxes."
In 1928 he married Margaret Boden, a nurse seven years his senior. They had a daughter, Gudrun. Himmler also excelled in the professional sphere: in 1929 he was appointed head of the SS (at that time they were engaged only in the protection of Hitler). By 1933, when Hitler came to power, Himmler had turned the SS into an elite unit. One of his tasks was to manage the concentration camps.
Hitler proposed the idea of concentration camps in which oppositionists could be gathered and suppressed. As an example, he focused on the concentration camps of the British during the South African war of 1899-1902. Himmler was in charge of styling the Nazi camps; he personally chose the site for the prototype at Dachau and its commandant, Theodor Eicke. Subsequently, Eike became the commander of the "Dead Head" unit - the so-called concentration camp guard units; its members wore a skull and crossbones badge on their caps, showing their kinship with death. Himmler ordered Eicke to develop a plan to crush all "enemies of the state".
This is exactly what Eicke did at Dachau: he created an SS school, the students called him "Papa Eike", he "tempered" them before sending them to other camps. Tempering meant that students should be able to hide their weakness in front of enemies and “show only a grin” or, in other words, be able to hate. Among Eicke's first recruits was Max Koegel, the future commandant of Ravensbrück. He came to Dachau in search of work - he was in prison for theft and only recently got out.
Koegel was born in the south of Bavaria, in the mountain town of Füssen, famous for its lutes and Gothic castles. Koegel was the son of a shepherd and was orphaned at the age of 12. As a teenager, he herded cattle in the Alps until he began looking for work in Munich and got involved in the far-right "people's movement." In 1932 he joined the Nazi Party. "Papa Eike" quickly found a use for the thirty-eight-year-old Koegel, because he was already a man of the strongest temper.
At Dachau, Koegel also served with other SS men, such as Rudolf Höss, another recruit, the future commandant of Auschwitz, who served in Ravensbrück. Subsequently, Höss fondly recalled his days at Dachau, talking about the SS personnel who fell deeply in love with Eick and forever remembered his rules that "remained forever with them in their flesh and blood."
Eike's success was so great that soon several more camps were built on the Dachau model. But in those years, neither Eicke, nor Himmler, nor anyone else even thought about a concentration camp for women. The women who fought Hitler were simply not seen as a serious threat.
Thousands of women fell under Hitler's repressions. During the Weimar Republic, many of them felt free: union members, doctors, teachers, journalists. Often they were communists or the wives of communists. They were arrested, treated badly, but not sent to camps like Dachau; even the thought did not arise to open a women's department in the men's camps. Instead, they were sent to women's prisons or colonies. The regime there was tough, but tolerable.
Many political prisoners were taken to Moringen, a labor camp near Hannover. 150 women slept in unlocked rooms, and the guards ran to buy wool for knitting on their behalf. Sewing machines rattled in prisons. The table of the "nobility" stood apart from the rest, and the senior members of the Reichstag and the wives of the manufacturers sat behind it.
However, as Himmler found out, women can be tortured differently than men. The simple fact that the men were killed and the children taken - usually to Nazi orphanages - was already agonizing enough. Censorship did not allow asking for help.
Barbara Fürbringer tried to warn her American sister when she heard that her husband, a Communist Reichstag member, had been tortured to death at Dachau and their children placed in foster care by the Nazis:
Dear sister!
Unfortunately, things are not going well. My dear husband Theodor died suddenly at Dachau four months ago. Our three children were placed in a public welfare home in Munich. I am at the women's camp in Moringen. There wasn't a penny left in my account.
The censorship did not let her letter pass, and she had to rewrite it:
Dear sister!
Unfortunately, things are not going the way we would like. My dear husband Theodore died four months ago. Our three children live in Munich at Brenner Strasse 27. I live in Moringen, near Hannover, at Breite Strasse 32. I would be very grateful if you could send me some money.
Himmler calculated that if the breaking of the men was terrifying enough, then everyone else would be forced to give in. The method paid off in many respects, as Lena Hag, who was arrested a few weeks after her husband and placed in another prison, noted: “Did no one see where everything was going? Didn't anyone see the truth behind the shameless demagoguery of Goebbels' articles? I saw it even through the thick walls of the prison, as more and more people at large obeyed their demands.”
By 1936, the political opposition was completely destroyed, and the humanitarian units of the German churches began to support the regime. The German Red Cross sided with the Nazis; at all meetings, the banner of the Red Cross began to side by side with the swastika, and the guardian of the Geneva Conventions, the International Committee of the Red Cross, inspected Himmler's camps - or at least model blocks - and gave the green light. Western countries perceived the existence of concentration camps and prisons as an internal affair of Germany, considering it not their business. In the mid-1930s, most Western leaders still believed that the greatest threat to the world came from communism, not Nazi Germany.
Despite the absence of significant opposition both at home and abroad, at the initial stage of his reign, the Führer closely followed public opinion. In a speech given at an SS training camp, he remarked: “I always know that I should never take a single step that could turn back. You always need to feel the situation and ask yourself: “What can I give up at the moment, and what can I not?”
Even the struggle against the German Jews at first proceeded much more slowly than many party members would have liked. In the early years, Hitler passed laws that prevented the employment and public life of Jews, spurring hatred and persecution, but he felt that some time should pass before taking further steps. Himmler also knew how to feel the situation.
In November 1936, the Reichsführer SS, who was not only the head of the SS, but also the chief of police, had to deal with the upheaval in the international arena that originated in the German communist community. His cause got off the steamer in Hamburg straight into the hands of the Gestapo. She was eight months pregnant. Her name was Olga Benario. The leggy girl from Munich, who had run away from home and become a communist, was now a 35-year-old woman on the threshold of notoriety among the world's communists.
After training in Moscow in the early 1930s, Olga was accepted into the Comintern, and in 1935 Stalin sent her to Brazil to help coordinate a coup against President Getúlio Vargas. The operation was led by legendary Brazilian rebel leader Luis Carlos Prestes. The rebellion was organized with the aim of bringing about a communist revolution in the largest country in South America, thereby giving Stalin a foothold in the western hemisphere. However, with the help of information received from British intelligence, the plan was discovered, Olga was arrested along with another conspirator, Eliza Evert, and sent to Hitler as a "gift".
From the Hamburg docks, Olga was taken to the Barminstrasse prison in Berlin, where four weeks later she gave birth to a baby girl, Anita. Communists around the world launched a campaign to free them. The case attracted widespread attention, largely due to the fact that the child's father was the notorious Carlos Prestes, leader of the failed coup; they fell in love with each other and got married in Brazil. Olga's courage and her gloomy but refined beauty added to the poignancy of the story.
Such an unpleasant story was especially undesirable for publicity in the year of the Olympic Games in Berlin, when much was done to whitewash the image of the country. (For example, prior to the Olympics, Berlin gypsies were rounded up. In order to keep them out of the public eye, they were herded into a huge camp built on a swamp in the Berlin suburb of Marzan). The Gestapo chiefs attempted to defuse the situation by offering to release the child, handing him over to Olga's mother, a Jewess, Evgenia Benario, who at that time lived in Munich, but Evgenia did not want to accept the child: she had long ago disowned her communist daughter and did the same. most with granddaughter. Himmler then gave permission to Prestes' mother, Leocadia, to take Anita away, and in November 1937 the Brazilian grandmother took the child from Barminstraße prison. Olga, deprived of her baby, was left alone in the cell.
In a letter to Leocadia, she explained that she did not have time to prepare for the separation:
“I'm sorry that Anita's things are in such a state. Did you get her daily routine and weight chart? I tried my best to make a table. Are her internal organs okay? And the bones are her legs? She may have suffered because of the extraordinary circumstances of my pregnancy and her first year of life.”
By 1936, the number of women in German prisons began to rise. Despite the fear, the Germans continued to operate underground, many inspired by the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Among those sent to the women's "camp" Moringen in the mid-1930s were more communists and former members of the Reichstag, as well as women working in small groups or alone, like the disabled artist Gerda Lissak, who created anti-Nazi leaflets. Ilse Gostinski, a young Jewish woman who typed articles critical of the Fuhrer, was arrested by mistake. The Gestapo was looking for her twin sister Jelse, but she was in Oslo, arranged evacuation routes for Jewish children, so they took Ilse instead of her.
In 1936, 500 German housewives arrived in Moringen with Bibles and neat white headscarves. These women, Jehovah's Witnesses, protested when their husbands were drafted into the army. They declared that Hitler was the Antichrist, that God was the only ruler on Earth, not the Fuhrer. Their husbands and other male Jehovah's Witnesses were sent to Hitler's new camp called Buchenwald, where they were given 25 lashes with leather whips. But Himmler knew that even his SS men did not have the courage to flog German housewives, so in Moringen the head of the prison, a kindly lame retired soldier, simply took the Bible from Jehovah's Witnesses.
In 1937, the passage of a law against Rassenschande- literally, "desecration of the race" - forbidding relations between Jews and non-Jews, led to a further influx of Jews into Moringen. Later, in the second half of 1937, the women in the camp noticed a sudden increase in the number of vagrants brought in already “lame; some with crutches, many coughing up blood.” In 1938 many prostitutes arrived.
Elsa Krug was working as usual when a group of Düsseldorf police officers, arriving at 10 Corneliusstrasse, began screaming at the door. It was 2 am, July 30, 1938. Police raids became commonplace, and Elsa had no reason to panic, although they had become more frequent lately. Prostitution was legal under Nazi German law, but the police had many excuses to act: perhaps one of the women had failed a syphilis test, or an officer needed a tip on another communist cell in the Düsseldorf docks.
Several Düsseldorf officers knew these women personally. Elsa Krug was always in demand, either because of the special services she provided - she was engaged in sadomasochism - or because of gossip, and she always kept her eyes open. Elsa was also known on the streets; she took the girls under her wing whenever possible, especially if the homeless child had just arrived in the city, because Elsa found herself on the streets of Düsseldorf in the same position ten years ago - without work, away from home and without a penny for her soul.
However, it soon turned out that the July 30 raid was something special. Frightened customers grabbed what they could and ran half-naked into the street. That same night, similar raids took place near the place where Agnes Petri worked. Agnes' husband, a local pimp, was also captured. After combing the area, the police detained a total of 24 prostitutes, and by six in the morning they were all behind bars, without information about the release.
The attitude towards them at the police station was also different. The duty officer - Sergeant Paine - knew that most of the prostitutes spent the night in local cells more than once. Pulling out a large dark ledger, he wrote them down in the usual way, marking names, addresses, and personal effects. However, in the column titled "reason for arrest," Peinein diligently wrote "Asoziale," "asocial type," next to each name, a word he had not previously used. And at the end of the column, also for the first time, a red inscription appeared - “Transportation”.
In 1938, similar raids took place throughout Germany as the Nazi purges of the poor entered a new stage. The government launched the Aktion Arbeitsscheu Reich (Movement Against Parasites) program aimed at those who were considered marginal. This movement was not noticed by the rest of the world, it did not receive wide publicity in Germany either, but more than 20 thousand so-called "asocials" - "tramps, prostitutes, parasites, beggars and thieves" - were caught and sent to concentration camps.
There was still a year left before the outbreak of World War II, but Germany's war with its own undesirable elements had already begun. The Fuhrer declared that in preparing for war, the country must remain "clean and strong", so "useless mouths" must be closed. With the advent of Hitler to power, the mass sterilization of the mentally ill and mentally retarded began. In 1936, the gypsies were placed on reservations near major cities. In 1937, thousands of "hardened criminals" were sent to concentration camps without trial. Hitler approved of such measures, but the instigator of the persecution was the chief of police and head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, who also called for the sending of "asocials" to concentration camps in 1938.
The timing mattered. Long before 1937, the camps, originally set up to get rid of political opposition, began to empty. The communists, social democrats, and others arrested during the first years of Himmler's rule were largely defeated, and most of them returned home broken. Himmler, who opposed such a massive liberation, saw that his department was in danger, and began to look for new uses for the camps.
Before that, no one in all seriousness had suggested using the concentration camps for anything other than political opposition, and by filling them with criminals and the dregs of society, Himmler could resurrect his punitive empire. He saw himself as more than just a police chief, his interest in science - in all kinds of experiments that could help create the ideal Aryan race - has always been his main goal. By rounding up the "degenerates" within his camps, he secured a central role for himself in the Fuehrer's most ambitious experiment ever to clean up the German gene pool. In addition, the new prisoners were to become a ready labor force for the rebuilding of the Reich.
The nature and purpose of the concentration camps would now change. In parallel with the decrease in the number of German political prisoners, social outcasts would have appeared in their place. Among those arrested - prostitutes, petty criminals, the poor - at first there were as many women as men.
Now a new generation of purpose-built concentration camps was being created. And since Moringen and other women's prisons were already overcrowded and also costly, Himmler suggested building a concentration camp for women. In 1938, he called his advisers to discuss a possible location. Probably, Himmler's friend Gruppenführer Oswald Pohl proposed to build a new camp in the Mecklenburg lake district, near the village of Ravensbrück. Paul knew the area because he had a country house there.
Rudolf Hess later claimed to have warned Himmler that there would not be enough space: the number of women was to increase, especially after the start of the war. Others noted that the land was swampy and the construction of the camp would have been delayed. Himmler dismissed all objections. Only 80 km from Berlin, the location was convenient for checks, and he often went there to visit Paul or his childhood friend, the famous surgeon and SS man Karl Gebhardt, who was in charge of the Hohenlichen medical clinic just 8 km from the camp.
Himmler ordered the transfer of male prisoners from the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Berlin to the construction of Ravensbrück as soon as possible. At the same time, the remaining prisoners from the men's concentration camp at Lichtenburg near Torgau, which was already half empty, were to be transferred to the Buchenwald camp, opened in July 1937. The women assigned to the new women's camp were to be kept in Lichtenburg during the construction of Ravensbrück.
Inside the barred wagon, Lina Haag had no idea where she was going. After four years in a prison cell, she and many others were told they were being "shipped". The train stopped at a station every few hours, but their names - Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Mannheim - meant nothing to her. Lina looked at the "ordinary people" on the platforms - she had not seen such a picture in years - and ordinary people looked at "those pale figures with sunken eyes and matted hair." At night, women were removed from the train and handed over to local prisons. The women guards horrified Lina: “It was impossible to imagine that in the face of all this suffering they could gossip and laugh in the corridors. Most of them were virtuous, but this was a special kind of piety. They seemed to be hiding behind God, resisting their own baseness."