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

had always been popular with nature lovers who came to boat on the lakes, or visit the baroque Palace of Fürstenberg.
    In the early 1930s the town was briefly a communist stronghold, and as the Nazis first sought a foothold there were several street battles, but before Hitler became chancellor, opposition had been eradicated. A Nazi mayor was appointed and a Nazi priest, Pastor Märker, took over in the town’s evangelical church. Hitler’s ‘German Christians’, strong in such rural areas, organised nationalist festivities and parades.
    By the late 1930s the Jews of Fürstenberg had largely gone. Eva Hamburger, a Jewish hotelier, resisted expulsion, but after the pogrom of ‘Kristallnacht’, the ‘night of broken glass’, of 9/10 November 1938, she too moved out. In Fürstenberg that night the Jewish cemetery was destroyed and Eva Hamburger’s hotel was smashed up. Soon after the local paper reported that the last Jewish property at Number 3 Röbinsee was sold.
    Like most small German towns, Fürstenberg had suffered badly in the slump, so the arrival of a concentration camp meant jobs and trade. The fact that the prisoners were women was not controversial. Valesca Kaper, the middle-aged wife of a shopkeeper, was an effective leader of the local Frauenschaft (Nazi women’s group) who often lectured women on the evils of make-up, smoking and alcohol, and explained the burden that ‘asocials’ placed on the state. Josef Goebbels even made a speech in Fürstenberg telling the townspeople: ‘If the family is the nation’s source of strength, the woman is its core and centre.’
    In the spring of 1939, as the date of the camp opening came nearer, women were urged to ‘serve on the home front’ – which included working as concentration camp guards, but nothing official was said about recruitment; in fact, nothing official was said about the camp at all. Only a small reference in the Forest News to ‘an accident near the large construction site’ provided a hint that the concentration camp was even being built.
    In early May a concert of music by Haydn and Mozart was performed and the local Gestapo hosted a sporting event of shooting and grenade-throwing.The cinema showed a romantic comedy. The paper reported that, after a hard winter, charitable donations were sought and bankruptcy notices appeared.
    All this time, the lock on the river was opening constantly for barges bringing materials and the camp wall became easily visible from the town side of the lake. Several local women put their names down for a job, including Margarete Mewes, a housemaid and young mother. On the first Sunday of May Fürstenberg held its traditional Mother’s Day celebrations. Frau Kaper handed out Mother Crosses to those who had borne more than four children, thereby answering Hitler’s call to multiply the Aryan gene.
    On 15 May , a bright sunny morning, several blue buses drove through the town and turned towards the ‘construction site’. Just before dawn that day the same blue buses had pulled up in front of the gates of Lichtenburg Castle, 300 miles to the south. Moments later female figures streamed out over the castle drawbridge, clutching little bags, and climbed into the vehicles. It was a clear night, but inside the buses it was quite dark. No one was sorry to see the black, hulking fortress disappear behind them into the darkness, though none had any idea what awaited them.
    Some of the women dared to hope that the journey would lead them somewhere better, and a journey – any journey – was itself a taste of freedom, but the political prisoners warned there was no chance of anything better. Hitler’s next advance into Czechoslovakia was only a matter of time. Husbands, brothers, fathers, sons were dying faster than ever in Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen and Dachau. Several women carried official notifications of such deaths in their bags, along with pictures of children and packages of letters.
    Jewish women here