Inside the Nazi death camp for WOMEN
Published for the first time in a shattering new book, prisoners’ testimonies from . . .
Inmates were subjected to live vivisections
than these were the spine-chilling medical experiments carried out on the inmates. These began with the camp’s doctor, Walter Sonntag.
Encouraged by Himmler he began by testing ways of killing off prisoners. Injecting petrol or phenol into their veins was his favoured method.
Sonntag was a sadistic brute. Each morning, dressed in his immaculate, black SS uniform, he passed along the line of women waiting outside the camp hospital who were suffering from dog bites, gashes from beatings or frostbite and kicked them with his jackboots or lashed out with his bamboo stick, smiling as he did so.
He particularly enjoyed extracting healthy teeth without anaesthetic.
One of Himmler’s obsessions was his belief that regular sex made for better soldiers, and he instructed Sonntag to find a way for them to have intercourse in brothels without contracting venereal disease. The doctor experimented on prostitutes in Ravensbruck in search of a cure for syphilis and gonorrhoea.
No records remain of how he carried out his trials, though everyone was aware they were happening. A camp survivor heard of ‘syphilis being injected into the spinal cord’.
But firm evidence does exist of a series of macabre medical trials that began in the summer of 1942, when 75 of the youngest and fittest women — all Poles — were summoned to the parade ground, where SS surgeon Karl Gebhardt lifted their skirts and inspected their legs.
Six of them were selected and sent to the hospital block.
There they were bathed and put in beds with crisp, clean sheets. Then a nurse shaved their legs before wheeling them into the operating theatre. ‘Be brave,’ she told them.
As she sank under the anaesthetic, one of them repeated over and over: ‘We are not guinea pigs . . . we are not guinea pigs.’ But that’s precisely what they were, though the camp name for them would be Kaninchen — ‘rabbits’. When that first ‘rabbit’ woke, her legs were in plaster. Within hours she and the others were screaming in agony as their legs began to swell.
They were being used in vivisection experiments to discover the best drugs for treating the war wounds of Germany’s soldiers. The women’s legs had been cut open and dosed with bacteria, with added dirt, glass and splinters to ensure that infection spread further.
Days later, the plaster was removed and their wounds agonisingly scraped out before being treated with different experimental drugs. ‘Rabbits’ who fought against what was being done to them, or screamed too loudly because of the pain or were no longer of any use, were put out of their misery with lethal injections or simply taken out into the forest and shot.
The medical experiments were supposed to be top secret. But the whole camp was aware of them, and was horrified. ‘We were terrified the same might happen to us,’ recalled Maria Bielicka, ‘and everyone went out of their way to help the “rabbits”.’
Inmates brought them titbits of food. The Poles in the camp set up an aid committee and assigned a Polish ‘mother’ to each ‘rabbit’ to try and look after her welfare.
But the tests worsened as ever more fanciful medical theories were explored and right to the very end, the ‘ rabbits’ l i ved in f ear of extermination, knowing that, alive, they were proof of the atrocity.
To aid the wholesale slaughter, Himmler now decreed t hat Ravensbruck should have its own gas chamber, which was built in January 1945. The camp had become overcrowded to breaking point and he needed to make space for even more prisoners, especially with the camps in the East forced to close.
Shooting and poisoning took too long. Gassing was quicker. It would double the numbers killed. A temporary gas chamber was fashioned out of an old tool shed close to the crematorium, just outside the camp wall. Measuring 12ft by 18ft, it resembled a car garage. Gaps and holes in the walls were covered with mastic and a special airtight cover fixed over the roof with a small hatch.
The women were pushed inside, 150 at a time, and the door shut. Then a canister of gas was thrown in from the roof. According to a witness, there was moaning and crying for two to three minutes, then silence.
Prisoners in the closest blocks would hear the lorries pull up and wondered why the engines were left running for so long. Then someone said it was to cover the screams from the gas chamber.
The air was thick with smoke from the crematorium. Its three furnaces could barely keep pace.
The gassing at Ravensbruck went on almost right to the end, even during air raids and when Russian guns could be heard in the distance. Over one weekend alone, 2,500 women were gassed.
The aim was to destroy evidence of what had happened there before the Allies arrived.
But there were still thousands left on site on April 30, 1945, when the surviving women awoke to the roar
of Russian artillery, the gunfire so close that the sky above the perimeter wall lit up.
The SS guards had fled, and the women prepared a red banner to hang across the camp gates.
But their Red Army ‘liberators’ brought a fresh horror — rape.
Ever since it had crossed the German border, the advancing Red Army had engaged in sexual rampage and now it even raped these starved concentration camp women — many of them fellow Russians.
Nadia Vasilyeva, a nurse, remembered how the troops ‘at first greeted us as sisters but then they turned into animals’.
‘I was little more than a corpse,’ recalled Ilse Heinrich, ‘and then I had to undergo that!’ Pregnant women and those with newborn babies were also raped.
Another woman complained that the soldiers were demanding payment for liberation. ‘The Germans never raped us because we were Russian swine, but our own soldiers did. Stalin had said that no soldiers should be taken prisoner, so they felt they could treat us like dirt.’
Given all that the brave women of Ravensbruck had been through and managed to survive against the odds, this violation by their own side was the final humiliation.
If This is A Woman: Inside Ravensbruck, Hitler’s Concentration Camp For Women by Sarah Helm is published on January 15, price £25. Offer price at £20 until January 24. Call 0808 272 0808 or go to mailbookshop.co.uk, p&p free for a limited time only.