If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women by Sarah Helm Read Free Book Online

against it?’ asked Lina.
    News that Olga Benario, a name from the glory days of communist resistance, was in the fortress gave some women hope. Olga had been brought alone from Berlin in a Gestapo van, and escorted straight down to the Lichtenburgdungeons. Communist comrades managed to make contact and found her heartbroken at the recent separation from her child. They smuggled messages and tiny gifts to her cell. Recalling Olga’s stunning courtroom snatch in 1928, some dreamt of escape, but Lina Haag said there was ‘no sense’ in attempting anything. ‘The Führer always comes out on top and we are just poor devils – absolutely forsaken, miserable devils …’ Then a Gypsy trapeze artist called Katharina Waitz tried to scale the fortress walls. She was captured and beaten. The Lichtenburg commandant, Max Koegel, liked to beat. Lina recalled that on Easter day he beat three naked women ‘until he could go on no longer’.
    On 1 October 1938, the day Hitler’s forces took the Sudetenland, Koegel turned hoses on his prisoners. They had all been ordered to the courtyard to hear the Führer’s victory address, but the Jehovah’s Witnesses refused to descend the steps, so guards forced them down, dragging old women by their hair. As Prussian tunes struck up someone whispered ‘war is coming’ and the fortress suddenly erupted. All the Jehovah’s Witnesses started shouting hysterically before sinking to their knees and praying. The guards thrashed and the mob hit back. Koegel ordered fire hoses to be turned on the praying women, who were knocked flying, flattened, bitten by dogs. Clinging to one another, they nearly drowned, ‘like dripping mice’ , said Marianne Korn, one of the praying women.
    Soon after the riot Himmler visited the fortress to see that order had been restored. The Reichsführer SS inspected Lichtenburg several times, bringing the head of the Nazi women’s movement, Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, to show off his prisoners to. On his visits he sometimes authorised releases. One day he released Lina Haag, on condition she didn’t speak about her treatment.
    Himmler also inspected the women guards. He must have noted that Johanna Langefeld had a certain authority – a knack for quietening prisoners without a fuss – because he marked her down as Ravensbrück’s future chief woman guard.
    It was the local children who first suspected something was about to be built on the northern shore of the Schwedtsee – or Lake Schwedt – but when they told their parents they were ordered to say nothing. Until 1938 the children played on a piece of scrubland near the lake where the trees were thinner and the bathing was good. One day they were told the area was out of bounds. Over the next few weeks locals in the town of Fürstenberg – of which the village of Ravensbrück is a small suburb – watched as barges delivered building materials up the River Havel. The children told parents they’d seen men in striped uniforms, who chopped down trees.
    Ravensbrück, fifty miles north of Berlin, on the southern edge of the Mecklenburg lake district, was, as Himmler identified in 1938, a good locationfor a concentration camp. Rail and water connections were good. Fürstenberg, cradled by three lakes, the Röblinsee, Baalensee and Schwedtsee, sits astride the River Havel, which divides into several channels as it flows through the town.
    Another factor that influenced Himmler’s choice was the siting in an area of natural beauty. Himmler believed that the cleansing of German blood should begin close to nature, and the invigorating forces of the German forests played a central role in the mythology of the Heimat – German soil. Buchenwald – meaning Beech Forest – was sited in a famous wooded area close to Weimar and several other camps were deliberately located in beauty spots. Just weeks before Ravensbrück was opened a stretch of water here was declared an ‘organic source for the Aryan race’. Fürstenberg