If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women by Sarah Helm Page B
Authors: Sarah Helm
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courier for the German Communist Party, who had risked her life running secret messages across borders. Luise had little fighting spirit in her after being forced to stand outside the camp gates in the rain for hours, before being stripped, deloused, and shorn in the ‘bath’, and even less after she was sent to the most back-breaking work, shovelling coal from the bottom of barges. These ‘September prisoners’ were then assigned to a special block where they could not infect the camp with their dangerous plotting.
While the communists were crushed, however, it was the handful of Poles – the first real foreign ‘enemies’ to arrive – who were hated most. Within days of crossing into Poland the German forces had set about not only seizing Polish land and property but capturing and killing its ruling classes, including countless women teachers, trade unionists, countesses, community leaders, officers’ wives and journalists.
So ‘filthy’ were these ‘Slavs’ that when they first passed the Ravensbrück gates they were brutally scrubbed ‘clean’ before being sent to the Strafblock and put on brick-throwing work ‘ until hands were bloody and raw’, in the words of Maria Moldenhawer, a Polish aristocrat and instructor of ‘military readiness’ in Warsaw girls’ schools.
To whip up ever more hatred, stories were spread that the Poles had cut out the tongues of German soldiers or poisoned their tea. Renee Salska had gouged out the eyes of German children, the guards said, though her only crime was to have taught Polish history in a Poznań school.
The first ‘internal enemies’ to rise up in Ravensbrück, however, were not these Polish newcomers but Koegel’s oldest and most hated enemies of all: the Jehovah’s Witnesses. The same religious women who rioted at Lichtenburg were now refusing his orders to sew bags for the war effort. A sewing workshop for the military had been established at the camp to make use of their skills, but this was war work, they protested, it was against their pacifist principles. This sent the commandant into another blind rage.
It says a lot about the mindset of Max Koegel that even now the prisoners who riled him most were not the ‘communist whores’, the ‘Slav vermin’ or the ‘Jewish bitches’, but these religious ‘hags’. Every threat had been levelled at them and every cruelty inflicted so as to make them renounce theirfaith by signing on the dotted line. To break their unity, the women had even been split up among different blocks, but they had immediately begun to try converting others to their faith, so they’d been moved back together again. And as punishment they were given the hated Käthe Knoll as their Blockova, a feared green triangle who was said to have murdered her mother. But still the forms lay stacked and unsigned in Langefeld’s office.
Langefeld herself seemed unperturbed; in most respects these respectable German housewives were model prisoners who caused her no trouble. Perhaps it was precisely because they were ‘model German housewives’ that Koegel found them harder to show his teeth to than the communists, the Jews, the Slavs and the whores – and this is what drove him mad.
Nor was the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ protest insignificant. In the autumn of 1939 they made up more than half of the women in the camp, and Koegel had called for more powers to restrain them, demanding a bigger, more permanent prison building. Now that war had begun, Ravensbrück should be equipped with the same secure cell block as the male camps.
In the autumn of 1939 he finally received permission for the new prison, and male prisoners from Sachsenhausen were brought in to build it, though Koegel saw to it that the Jehovah’s Witnesses helped them. Constructed out of stone on two levels, one sunk deep into the ground, it would have seventy-eight cells, replacing the wooden structure where Hanna Sturm was still incarcerated.
After nearly three months
While the communists were crushed, however, it was the handful of Poles – the first real foreign ‘enemies’ to arrive – who were hated most. Within days of crossing into Poland the German forces had set about not only seizing Polish land and property but capturing and killing its ruling classes, including countless women teachers, trade unionists, countesses, community leaders, officers’ wives and journalists.
So ‘filthy’ were these ‘Slavs’ that when they first passed the Ravensbrück gates they were brutally scrubbed ‘clean’ before being sent to the Strafblock and put on brick-throwing work ‘ until hands were bloody and raw’, in the words of Maria Moldenhawer, a Polish aristocrat and instructor of ‘military readiness’ in Warsaw girls’ schools.
To whip up ever more hatred, stories were spread that the Poles had cut out the tongues of German soldiers or poisoned their tea. Renee Salska had gouged out the eyes of German children, the guards said, though her only crime was to have taught Polish history in a Poznań school.
The first ‘internal enemies’ to rise up in Ravensbrück, however, were not these Polish newcomers but Koegel’s oldest and most hated enemies of all: the Jehovah’s Witnesses. The same religious women who rioted at Lichtenburg were now refusing his orders to sew bags for the war effort. A sewing workshop for the military had been established at the camp to make use of their skills, but this was war work, they protested, it was against their pacifist principles. This sent the commandant into another blind rage.
It says a lot about the mindset of Max Koegel that even now the prisoners who riled him most were not the ‘communist whores’, the ‘Slav vermin’ or the ‘Jewish bitches’, but these religious ‘hags’. Every threat had been levelled at them and every cruelty inflicted so as to make them renounce theirfaith by signing on the dotted line. To break their unity, the women had even been split up among different blocks, but they had immediately begun to try converting others to their faith, so they’d been moved back together again. And as punishment they were given the hated Käthe Knoll as their Blockova, a feared green triangle who was said to have murdered her mother. But still the forms lay stacked and unsigned in Langefeld’s office.
Langefeld herself seemed unperturbed; in most respects these respectable German housewives were model prisoners who caused her no trouble. Perhaps it was precisely because they were ‘model German housewives’ that Koegel found them harder to show his teeth to than the communists, the Jews, the Slavs and the whores – and this is what drove him mad.
Nor was the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ protest insignificant. In the autumn of 1939 they made up more than half of the women in the camp, and Koegel had called for more powers to restrain them, demanding a bigger, more permanent prison building. Now that war had begun, Ravensbrück should be equipped with the same secure cell block as the male camps.
In the autumn of 1939 he finally received permission for the new prison, and male prisoners from Sachsenhausen were brought in to build it, though Koegel saw to it that the Jehovah’s Witnesses helped them. Constructed out of stone on two levels, one sunk deep into the ground, it would have seventy-eight cells, replacing the wooden structure where Hanna Sturm was still incarcerated.
After nearly three months
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