If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women by Sarah Helm Page A
Authors: Sarah Helm
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rule. Work at the camp was their first job.
Dorothea had always lived in the woods around Fürstenberg, attending village schools and churches, playing down forest trails, chasing wild pigs, bathing in lakes in the summer, skating on them in winter. The family had moved around the area a great deal, and in the mid-1930s they settled in a village called Altglobsow, a poor hamlet, three miles from Ravensbrück, where villagers scraped a living felling trees or working on the land. Asnewcomers, the Binz family were viewed as outsiders, especially as Walter Binz’s official post as forester meant they were better off and had a bigger house.
At the age of ten Dorothea and her friends joined the Bund Deutscher Mädel (League of German Girls), the female wing of the Hitler Youth. At school she followed the Nazi curriculum, which taught children to despise Jews and revile society’s outcasts, although there is some evidence that her parents were not so fond of Hitler’s ideas. Walter Binz had not always been in favour with his employers, perhaps due to a reluctance to join the Nazi Party – compulsory for government and state officials. It was also well known that the forester had been before the courts for poaching; he was a drinker too, as was his wife, Rose. The Binz family were not disliked, but people in the village were wary of them, and often heard the shouts and screams that issued from their house. It was not a happy home.
Dorothea had had her own setbacks too: in her early teens she suffered a bout of tuberculosis, not unusual in the damp climate of this low-lying terrain, but Dorothea’s infection was severe and had meant many months in a TB clinic, so she missed out on some of her schooling, leaving with few, if any, qualifications.
Stigmatised as a carrier of TB and barred from many jobs due to the danger of contagion, on leaving school Dorothea went to work as a kitchen maid, so when the prospect arose of working as a guard at the new concentration camp she jumped at the chance. Later as she rose up the ladder, she would laughingly relate to other guards how her father had told her not to take the job, but the chance was too good to turn down: to live away from home, in comfortable quarters, with good pay and a smart uniform. Dorothea had already caught the eyes of the young SS officers, stationed at a nearby training depot, who drank in the Altglobsow village bar. Tall, slim and blonde, with rounded cheeks and upturned nose, she was known as a local beauty.
Other local girls were keen to join up too. Margarete Mewes, the mother of three from Fürstenberg, took a job at the same time as Binz, as did Elisabeth Volkenrath, a farmer’s daughter.
All SS camp staff were told to toughen up when war broke out. According to Rudolf Höss, by now an officer at Sachsenhausen, on the day the German forces crossed into Poland, Eicke himself had summoned all senior concentration camp officers to tell them they must henceforth ‘ treat orders as sacrosanct and even those that appear most hard and severe must be implemented without hesitation’. Höss recalled Eicke saying: ‘The harsh laws of war now prevailed.’ From now on the job of SS camp staff was to ‘protect the homeland against all internal enemies’ – the fight to suppress those in the camps was as important for the future of the Reich as the fight at the front.
‘He, Eicke, therefore demanded the men serving in the camps should show an inflexible harshness towards the prisoners. Only the SS were capable of protecting the National Socialist state from all internal danger. Other organisations lacked the necessary toughness.’
Koegel understood Eicke’s orders well. The Ravensbrück enemy within – just 1607 women on 1 September 1939 – was small in number, but Koegel was showing due harshness towards every one of them. More were joining their ranks every day. On 16 September a group of political prisoners were brought in, including Luise Mauer, a
Dorothea had always lived in the woods around Fürstenberg, attending village schools and churches, playing down forest trails, chasing wild pigs, bathing in lakes in the summer, skating on them in winter. The family had moved around the area a great deal, and in the mid-1930s they settled in a village called Altglobsow, a poor hamlet, three miles from Ravensbrück, where villagers scraped a living felling trees or working on the land. Asnewcomers, the Binz family were viewed as outsiders, especially as Walter Binz’s official post as forester meant they were better off and had a bigger house.
At the age of ten Dorothea and her friends joined the Bund Deutscher Mädel (League of German Girls), the female wing of the Hitler Youth. At school she followed the Nazi curriculum, which taught children to despise Jews and revile society’s outcasts, although there is some evidence that her parents were not so fond of Hitler’s ideas. Walter Binz had not always been in favour with his employers, perhaps due to a reluctance to join the Nazi Party – compulsory for government and state officials. It was also well known that the forester had been before the courts for poaching; he was a drinker too, as was his wife, Rose. The Binz family were not disliked, but people in the village were wary of them, and often heard the shouts and screams that issued from their house. It was not a happy home.
Dorothea had had her own setbacks too: in her early teens she suffered a bout of tuberculosis, not unusual in the damp climate of this low-lying terrain, but Dorothea’s infection was severe and had meant many months in a TB clinic, so she missed out on some of her schooling, leaving with few, if any, qualifications.
Stigmatised as a carrier of TB and barred from many jobs due to the danger of contagion, on leaving school Dorothea went to work as a kitchen maid, so when the prospect arose of working as a guard at the new concentration camp she jumped at the chance. Later as she rose up the ladder, she would laughingly relate to other guards how her father had told her not to take the job, but the chance was too good to turn down: to live away from home, in comfortable quarters, with good pay and a smart uniform. Dorothea had already caught the eyes of the young SS officers, stationed at a nearby training depot, who drank in the Altglobsow village bar. Tall, slim and blonde, with rounded cheeks and upturned nose, she was known as a local beauty.
Other local girls were keen to join up too. Margarete Mewes, the mother of three from Fürstenberg, took a job at the same time as Binz, as did Elisabeth Volkenrath, a farmer’s daughter.
All SS camp staff were told to toughen up when war broke out. According to Rudolf Höss, by now an officer at Sachsenhausen, on the day the German forces crossed into Poland, Eicke himself had summoned all senior concentration camp officers to tell them they must henceforth ‘ treat orders as sacrosanct and even those that appear most hard and severe must be implemented without hesitation’. Höss recalled Eicke saying: ‘The harsh laws of war now prevailed.’ From now on the job of SS camp staff was to ‘protect the homeland against all internal enemies’ – the fight to suppress those in the camps was as important for the future of the Reich as the fight at the front.
‘He, Eicke, therefore demanded the men serving in the camps should show an inflexible harshness towards the prisoners. Only the SS were capable of protecting the National Socialist state from all internal danger. Other organisations lacked the necessary toughness.’
Koegel understood Eicke’s orders well. The Ravensbrück enemy within – just 1607 women on 1 September 1939 – was small in number, but Koegel was showing due harshness towards every one of them. More were joining their ranks every day. On 16 September a group of political prisoners were brought in, including Luise Mauer, a
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