Ravensbrück concentration camp

Agents of Evil

The photograph above is a collage of the faces of the female SS guards in Ravensbrück concentration camp. Like their male counterparts, they were also agents of evil. They had subscribed to the Nazi ideology.

Ravensbrück was a purpose-built concentration camp to imprison predominantly women. It housed around 120,000 women and children, 20,000 men, and 1,200 adolescent girls and young women (imprisoned in the Uckermark Juvenile Protective Custody Camp) registered as Ravensbrück prisoners between 1939 and 1945. These prisoners came from over 30 nations and included Jewish, Sinti, and Roma people. It was also a camp where they conducted many experiments. In 1942 and 1943, selected inmates were infected with gas gangrene or other bacteria and given a series of cures—that more often than not—resulted in death or severe disabilities. In 1944, they subjected prisoners to experimental bone transplants and amputations.

The female SS guards were pivotal to the running of the camp. Many of them were mothers and had children.

Guard Johanna Langefeld with her son and a daughter of another guard

A job advertisement from a 1944 German newspaper stated the following, “Healthy, female workers between the ages of 20 and 40 wanted for a military site. Good wages and freeboard, accommodation, and clothing are promised.”

An estimated 3,500 women worked as Nazi concentration camp guards, and all of them started at Ravensbrück. Many would later work in extermination camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau or in Bergen-Belsen.

Guards, like Anna Enserer, were employed in Ravensbrück from 1940 to the spring of 1942. In the spring of 1942, Anna Enserer was assigned to Auschwitz, where she was on duty until November 1942. After falling pregnant and giving birth, she left the baby with her mother returned to Auschwitz, and was employed as a block leader.

As part of the research into the SS guards of the Ravensbrück Women’s Concentration Camp, memorial staff interviewed the former SS guard Anna Enserer (1919-2007). The conversation took place in her apartment. During a break in the interview, Ms. Enserer opened a kitchen drawer and pulled out this small place card. Her name, “Overseer Enserer (II), Anna,” was written in the middle of the broken letters, surrounded by green fir branches with burning candles. On the right is a child-like angel figure with blonde hair holding a violin in his hand. Most likely, the prisoners made this name card for a Ravensbrück SS Christmas party.

From autumn 1941 onwards at the latest, arts, crafts, and drawings were made by prisoners in several workshops and work detachments for the SS: not only toys, badges, or dolls, but also congratulations and Christmas cards or, as in this case, place cards for the official one Christmas party.

The murder of prisoners in Ravensbrück evolved. Initially, prisoners were shot in the back. Later, women were transported to a T4 Program killing center or Auschwitz to the gas chambers. Prisoners at Ravensbrück were also murdered by lethal injection and cremated in the nearby resort town of Fürstenberg. In late January or early February 1945, approximately 2,200 women were murdered by gas chambers constructed next to Fürstenberg’s crematorium.

SS chief Heinrich Himmler visiting Ravensbrück (Jan 1941)

From July 1942 to about September 1943, experiments were conducted to investigate the effectiveness of sulfanilamide at the Ravensbrück Concentration Camp for the benefit of the German Armed Forces. Wounds deliberately inflicted on the experimental subjects were infected with bacteria such as streptococcus, gas gangrene, and tetanus.

At Ravensbrück, SS female guards, armed with attack dogs, forced malnourished women inmates to march to slave labor sites each day, guarded them as they performed manual labor, and then force-marched them back to the concentration camp. The prisoners, under notoriously inhumane conditions, were held as German shepherds used as guard dogs.

Anna W. was a prisoner at Ravensbrück. The following is an excerpt of her testimony.

The camp was liberated on April 30, 1945, by Soviet troops. Very few of the female guards were ever convicted.

-Anna: “I was sterilized myself, but in Ravensbrück.
Q: In Ravensbrück. How old were you back then?
Anna: Sixteen.
Q: And did you know what…
Anna: Not quite sixteen.
Q: Did you know what kind of…
Anna: No, I did not know that. They said they were just examining, but the pain afterwards, so then you realized.
Q: That was of course, very, very…
Anna: There were several young girls, of, how old were they, twelve years, twelve, fifteen-, sixteen-year-olds.
Q: And Friedel [her husband], too?
Anna: No.
Q: No, not him. Because I know that they also did this to the boys…
Anna: Yes, I even know some where they did it.
Q: Yes, I think Ranko B., no?
Anna: Yes.
Q: He spoke about it. This is something very terrible, for a woman, no?
Anna: Very much, yes. For now I have to suffer from it. Since I could have had a family, could have, I could have had grandchildren who would be twenty years by now, my grandchildren, right…”

Sources

https://www.dw.com/en/ravensbr%C3%BCck-female-concentration-camp-guards/a-54517319

Eine Tischkarte für die SS-Weihnachtsfeier

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-55661782

https://www.thefirstnews.com/article/faces-of-evil-hitlers-death-camp-women-revealed-in-new-online-project-27301

Anna W. Holocaust Testimony Excerpt

Betsie ten Boom—Dutch Hero

Not all heroes wear uniforms or capes. Not all resistance fighters use guns. In fact, the bravest ones don’t. Betsie ten Boom was a Hero and resistance fighter. She and her family saw what was happening with their Jewish neighbours and acted. I wish politicians nowadays would follow Betsie’s example and not do the easy thing—but the right thing.

Many people will know the name of Corrie ten Boom from the book and movie The Hiding Place, which tells the story of Corrie and her family who hid Jews in their home during the war.

Betsie was Corrie’s older sister, and her story is less known. Betsie was a member of the Dutch Reformed Church and strongly believed all men were equal in the eyes of God. She remained steadfast in that belief until the day she died.

She was born on 19th August 1885 in Amsterdam, with Congenital pernicious anemia, which is believed to be caused by a malfunction of the gastric juices of intrinsic factor during the nine weeks before birth. Her illness prevented her from bearing children, so she chose, at a young age, not to marry. Whilst she wasn’t active outside of the home during the Nazi invasion of the Netherlands, she did keep everyone who passed through the home fed and watered and was a welcoming host.

In May 1942, a Jewish woman came to the Ten Boom home begging for help, knowing that if caught, she would be vulnerable to being deported by the Nazis or worse. The Ten Boom family, without hesitation, did what they saw as their duty as Christians and helped the woman They not only took this woman in but also opened their home to many others who were also in need.

In February 1944, the Nazis started suspecting that the Ten Booms were hiding Jews in their home and raided their home on the 28th of February. The ten Boom family and other people at the house, about 30 in all, were arrested for their resistance activities and taken to Scheveningen prison. The six Jews they were hiding had not been discovered, and all survived with the help of other Resistance workers. Casper ten Boom became ill and died ten days later at the prison.

Afterwards, Betsie and Corrie were moved to Vught near ‘s-Hertogenbosch, a concentration camp for political prisoners. Writing in The Hiding Place, Corrie recalls:
“Together we climbed onto the train, together found seats in a crowded compartment, together wept tears of gratitude. The four months in Scheveningen had been our first separation in 53 years; it seemed to me that I could bear whatever happened with Betsie beside me.”

What is remarkable about Betsie is her positivity and determination that even in such a horrible, hate-filled place, she could see potential, she accepted the ordeal. She was the encourager for Corrie, who didn’t always see things the way her sister did. This is reflected in her statement to Corrie after they were given the rules by the guards in the camp:
“Corrie, if people can be taught to hate, they can be taught to love! We must find the way, you and I, no matter how long it takes. I saw a grey uniform and a visored hat; Betsie saw a wounded human being. And I wondered, not for the first time, what sort of a person she was, this sister of mine, what kind of road she followed while I trudged beside her.”

In June 1944, Betsie ten Boom and her sister Corrie were transferred to Ravensbrück Concentration Camp. Her strong faith in God kept her from depression throughout her life, especially within the camps. Corrie told of how Betsie reached out to help others and helped Corrie see the best in everything, no matter what the circumstances.

One day, Betsie and Corrie were out levelling rough ground inside the camp wall. As Betsie wasn’t strong—she couldn’t put as much on her shovel, and when the guards saw her efforts, they made fun of her and beat her with a whip. This enraged Corrie, who rushed at the guard before Betsie stopped her, pleading for her to keep calm and keep working. When looking at the mark the whip left, Betsie said, “Don’t look at it, Corrie. Look at Jesus only.”

The harsh treatment, working long days outdoors, 4 am starts and lack of nutritious food led to Betsie becoming weaker as winter began. No longer able to do any duties, Betsie was brought to the camp hospital. One morning, Corrie had sneaked around to the hospital window after roll call to see her, only to find she had passed away. Betsie died on December 16, 1944.

Sources

https://www.hhhistory.com/2021/10/betsie-ten-boom-uncommon-hero.html

https://collections.yadvashem.org/en/righteous/4014036

Betsie ten Boom: Fighting Until the End for G-d’s Chosen People

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Waldemar Hugh Nods—Forgotten Hero

I have been doing posts about World War II and the Holocaust since 2016. When I started, I reckoned I’d have enough material to last for a year, two years tops. Seven years on, I am still finding new stories daily. Stories like that of Waldemar Hugh Nods.

Waldemar Hugh Nods was born on 1 September 1908 in Surinam, South America, a Dutch colony. His parents were some of the first Surinamese people born free from slavery. Slavery was abolished in 1863 in Surinam.

In 1928, 20-year-old Waldemar came to study in the Netherlands. His dark skin color caused attention and discrimination.

In October 1928, Waldemar met Rika van der Lans: white, 17 years his senior, and already married with four children. When they began their relationship, it caused a scandal.

Rika had already upset her Catholic parents by marrying a Protestant, Willem Hagenaar, in 1913. However, by the time she met Waldemar, she was separated from Willem and took their children to live in The Hague. She supported the children by renting out rooms, which is how she met Waldemar.

When she found herself pregnant by Waldemar, it led to alienation from her
children and their family. Their son Waldy was born on 17 November 1929. he was nicknamed “Sonny Boy,” after the Al Jolson song, popular at the time.

Rika Waldemar and their son were evicted from their home. They met an elderly Jewish man named Sam, who offered them shelter.

Waldemar completed his studies in 1931 and secured a job as an accountant. His new family moved with him to Scheveningen, a seaside district of The Hague, where they opened a guesthouse, with financial help from Sam, in 1934: Pension Walda.

Despite the Great Depression, the guesthouse was remarkably successful, especially with German tourists. This was mainly thanks to Waldemar’s perfect German, acquired by studying for his diploma in business correspondence in German.

Finally, Waldemar and Rika were married on 17 May 1937.

Right at the time, Rika’s affairs with her own children seem to normalize again when the Germans invade the country. Rika and Waldemar were forced to shelter German soldiers. After a while, the family had to leave because the area was being cleared for the Atlantic Wall. Because Rika mentions that she has five children, they are assigned a larger house. Then in November 1942, the couple began to hide Jews from the Nazis at the request of a young resistance fighter. They were seen by the Dutch resistance as ideal candidates as they were a small family with spare rooms in their home and were also free of the antisemitism that occurred among the resistance, which made Jews harder to hide than other Dutch fugitives.

Their son, Waldy, was unaware of the hidden guests until the day he was brought home by the police after getting in a fight with a boy who had racially abused him. This panicked his mother, who told him about the Jews and insisted that nobody must ever find out.

In August 1943, the family moved to a house on Pijnboomstraat where they continued to hide Jews and others. The resistance sent them fugitives others were unwilling to accommodate. Among them were Dobbe Franken, the daughter of a leading member of the Jewish Council in Rotterdam, and Gerard van Haringen, a Dutch SS deserter, who now regretted running away from home aged 17 to sign up. Just before dawn on 18 January 1944, the house was raided. Everyone, including Waldy and the hidden fugitives, was interrogated. Waldemar admitted to hiding Jews.

Rika took all the blame and was sentenced to life imprisonment. She was first imprisoned in Scheveningen, and from there, she went to Vught concentration camp (near ‘s-Hertogenbosch) and was eventually taken to Ravensbrück, where she was murdered in February 1945.

Waldemar was given a lenient sentence compared to his wife, whom he last saw at Scheveningen prison. He was deported via Vught concentration camp to Neuengamme Concentration Camp on 23 February 1944 and was given prisoner number 32180.

Waldemar’s dark skin stood out at Neuengamme. The SS guards remarked, “He was a chimpanzee who surprisingly turned out to be able to understand and perform complicated instructions to the letter in German.” Thanks to his language skills he was put to work in the camp post office and was able to communicate with his family.

Waldemar wrote his last letter to his relatives on 7 January 1945 in German as prescribed.

“[ … ] and Waldie my boy, how are you? Work hard and also do your best with football.”

He knew that the war would soon be over and hoped to return home soon:

“[ … ] back as soon as possible. [ … ] I am waiting for that now.”

In April 1945, due to the evacuation of the Neuengamme main camp, Waldemar Nods, like many other prisoners, was put on the passenger ship Cap Arcona, which was moored in the Lübecker Bay, the stretch of sea Northeast of Hamburg. On 3 May 1945, the ship was accidentally bombed by British aircraft. The vast majority of prisoners on board the Cap Arcona died.

Waldemar initially survives the attack. He jumped into the sea and swam to the coast (he was a good swimmer in Surinam—he already swam long distances in the river), made it to shore only to be gunned down by SS child soldiers, with orders to shoot any survivors.

Waldemar and Rika’s son, Waldy, grew up in a foster home. He worked as a financial and economic journalist at Het Parool and later at Bruynzeel in Suriname.

Waldemar died at the age of 85 in 2015.

Sources

https://www.kz-gedenkstaette-neuengamme.de/vorbereitung/biografie_waldemar_nods.html

https://vrijheid.scouting.nl/scouting-in-de-oorlog/database-bestanden/burgerslachtoffers/766-burgerslachtoffers-waldy-sonny-boy-nods/file

https://olc.chocochaos.com/dosn15z.htm

Click to access life_story_waldemar_nods_2.pdf

https://www.oorlogsbronnen.nl/tijdlijn/Waldemar-Hugh-Nods/02/110382

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The Horrors of the Holocaust

***********************WARNING GRAPHIC CONTENT***********************

This will be the most horrific post I have done on the Holocaust. Generally, I try to avoid graphic images because they make me feel uncomfortable.

However, there is nothing comfortable about the Holocaust, and it should make us feel uneasy. There were millions murdered in the most gruesome way possible. I can’t even say imaginable, because I still can’t imagine it. Even those who survived suffered for years to come, sometimes until they died, at times decades later.

The photograph above is of the bodies of women and children found during the liberation of Auschwitz.

“My memories from there have stayed with me all my life,” said Aleksander Vorontsov, who was part of a film crew that captured some of the horror the troops found at Auschwitz, remembered. “All of that was the most moving and horrific thing that I filmed during the war.”

A young man sits on an overturned stool next to a burnt body inside the Thekla concentration sub-camp outside Leipzig, Germany, shortly after its liberation by U.S. Forces in April 1945.

Many of those who had managed to survive Auschwitz were gravely ill. The Nazis left Them behind to die.

German doctor Fritz Klein stands amid the corpses of prisoners in one of the mass graves at the Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp soon after its liberation by British troops in April 1945.

After the liberation of Auschwitz, Ivan Dudnik, a 15-year-old Russian boy, was rescued. He was captured and sent to the camp by the Nazis, and he went insane from the horrors he witnessed there.

A pile of human bones and skulls lies on the grounds of the Majdanek concentration camp soon after its liberation by Soviet troops in 1944.

A female survivor after the liberation of Auschwitz

A starving child lying on the street of the Warsaw ghetto, as photographed by a sergeant in the Wehrmacht, circa 1941.

A Polish supervisor logs in the Polish dead as a pile of bodies lies atop a wheelbarrow. 1942. Warsaw ghetto.

12 April 1945—Bodies of prisoners of Ohrdruf stacked like cord-wood

Bogumila Jasuik, one of the “Ravensbruck Rabbits” chosen for medical experimentation. “German doctors experimented on her twice in November and December 1942, making four cuts on the muscles of her thigh.” (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum).

What amazes me more than anything else is that there is so much evidence, yet there are so many who still deny the Holocaust ever happened.

Sources

https://www.eisenhowerlibrary.gov/research/photographs/world-war-ii-holocaust-images

https://allthatsinteresting.com/warsaw-ghetto#22

https://allthatsinteresting.com/liberation-of-auschwitz#34

Science and Suffering: Victims and Perpetrators of Nazi Human Experimentation

https://allthatsinteresting.com/holocaust-photos#19

Holocaust and Art

These drawings are from Ravensbrück, Fallersleben and Salzwedel concentration camps. The artists are unknown, but I don’t think that actually matters. The subtleties of the pictures say so much. The text on the above picture from Ravensbrück, says, “Herr Kommando Führer, I am report for the morning roll call.”

Drawings from Fallersleben concentration camp.

In August 1944, a women’s satellite camp of Neuengamme concentration camp was established in Fallersleben for armaments production at the Volkswagen plant. The female Jewish prisoners, most of whom were from Hungary, arrived at the camp on three transports. 500 Jewish women were taken from Auschwitz-Birkenau to Fallersleben probably in August 1944. Additional women were brought to Fallersleben on two transports in November 1944 and January 1945 from Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

With the caption “Opa” as in Grandfather however, I think they mean dirty old man in this context, because the old guard is watching women while they are showering.

Drawings from Salzwedel concentration camp.

In late July or early August 1944, a women’s satellite camp of Neuengamme concentration camp was established in Salzwedel. The Polte factory in Magdeburg had a branch in Salzwedel, which had operated under the title “Draht- und Metallfabrik Salzwedel” before World War II. When the war started, the factory began producing infantry and flak ammunition. The Polte factory requested 5,600 prisoners to use as forced labourers. Most of the 1,520 Jewish women in the Salzwedel satellite camp came from Hungary, while the rest came from Poland and Greece. The women arrived at Salzwedel on three transports from Auschwitz-Birkenau and Bergen-Belsen in late July/early August, in October and again in December 1944. They were forced to work in two 12-hour shifts and were housed in a camp of huts in the grounds of a fertiliser plant on Gardelegener Straße.

In April, women from the evacuated Porta Westfalica-Hausberge and Fallersleben satellite camps arrived at Salzwedel, bringing the number of prisoners to approximately 3,000. Salzwedel was the only satellite camp of Neuengamme concentration camp not to be evacuated. The prisoners, were liberated by the Ninth U.S. Army on April 14, 1945.

The caption says “‘Lice hunt Fransche Stube Salzwedel”

The caption says “April 14 Liberation! Salzwedel”

I think that the drawings are very powerful. They are subtle in a way and yet one can detect a darkness in them.

sources

https://www.kz-gedenkstaette-neuengamme.de/en/history/satellite-camps/satellite-camps/fallersleben-women/

https://www.kz-gedenkstaette-neuengamme.de/en/history/satellite-camps/satellite-camps/salzwedel/

https://beeldbankwo2.nl/nl/beelden/detail/d1ef45ae-025a-11e7-904b-d89d6717b464/media/d03fc2b7-73a6-1aad-ccf4-aecf65eb9ffc?mode=detail&view=horizontal&q=tekeningen&rows=1&page=136

Nurses who killed.

SS officers and German nurses gather during the dedication ceremony of the new SS hospital in Auschwitz.
Among those pictured are Karl Hoecker, Josef Kramer and SS-Hauptsturmfuhrer Heinrich Schwarz. Among the nurses probably are Martha Mzyk and Lotte Nitschke.

Anyone who ever had to go through a medical procedure will know how important the job of a nurse is. When you arrive at the medical facility it is usually a Nurse who sees you first, A nurse will care for you set you mind at ease, often they get to do the mots horrible tasks after or during a surgery. I remember well how some nurses went beyond their duty when I was in hospital.

It is therefore so surprising that so many nurses in the third reich, were willing participants in the mass murder of the disables and also others.

Christian nurses’ associations dominated German nursing when the Nazis rose to power in 1933. At the time, nursing was widely considered to be more of a spiritual calling or a public service than a professional career. The Nazi regime reorganized Germany’s professional nursing associations. It barred Jewish nurses and restricted membership to politically reliable “Aryans.” Nazi propaganda promoted the idea that nursing was a patriotic service to the state. Nazi nurses’ associations encouraged values of militaristic duty and obedience. Nursing schools began indoctrinating students with Nazi ideology through classes on race and eugenics.

Many nurses who did not necessarily support the Nazi regime still implemented its discriminatory and murderous policies through the course of their regular, daily work. Engaging with patients more frequently and directly than doctors, nurses were often the ones who actually applied the regime’s medical policies. Nurses played a central role in the regime’s so-called “euthanasia” program. Under the program, roughly 250,000 children and adults with mental and physical disabilities were murdered. They were killed by starvation, lethal injection, or gassing.

Although some of these nurses reported that they struggled with a guilty conscience, others did not see anything wrong with their actions, and they believed that they were releasing these patients from their suffering.

Staff at the T4 “killing centres”, where the euthanasia programme was carried out, swore an oath of silence and nurses accompanied patients on special buses with windows blacked out to the gas chambers. at one such “killing centre” at Hadamar near Frankfurt in Germany in 1941, nurses and staff drank beer to celebrate the killing of their 10,000th patient in a special ceremony right outside the door of the gas chamber.

Factors influencing the nurses’ willingness to kill are described and include the socialization of the German people toward euthanasia as well as ideological commitment, economic factors, and putative duress.

Although the Nazis actually carried out the mass murder of the disabled, There were sentiments globally towards euthanasia, for example: A 1937 Gallup poll showed that 45% of the American population was in favor of euthanasia for “defective” infants.

Nurses in Nazi Germany were under the illusion that they were remaining true to their professional ethics, unaffected by the social change around them. Nurses weren’t only working in the T4 centres but also in the concentration camps like Auschwitz and Ravensbrück.

During the Ravensbrück Trials several nurses were sentenced to death.

The first Ravensbrück trial was held from December 5, 1946 until February 3, 1947, against sixteen Ravensbrück concentration camp staff and officials. All of them were found guilty. Twelve were sentenced to death. One died during trial and two committed suicide. The death sentences ,except for one, were carried out on May 2—3, 1947, in Hamelin prison.

Elisabeth Marschall was the Head Nurse at the Ravensbrück concentration camp. Her duties included selecting prisoners for execution, overseeing medical experiments, and selecting which prisoners would be shipped to Auschwitz. At the Hamburg Ravensbrück Trials, she was found guilty and sentenced to death. On 3 May 1947 she was hanged by British executioner Albert Pierrepoint on the gallows in Hameln prison. Aged 60, she was the oldest female Nazi to be executed.

sources

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-role-of-doctors-and-nurses

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7227577/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1455849/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12735075/

https://www.irishtimes.com/news/health/nazi-nurses-toasted-10-000th-victim-with-beer-conference-told-1.1144955

https://military-history.fandom.com/wiki/Elisabeth_Marschall

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/01939459922043749

Herta Bothe—The Sadist of Stutthof and the Lenient Sentence

Herta Bothe was a German concentration camp guard during World War II. She was imprisoned for war crimes after the defeat of Nazi Germany and was subsequently released from prison early on 22 December 1951 as an act of leniency by the British government. She was 6ft 3in, which must have been quite intimidating for the prisoners.

In September 1942, Bothe became the SS-Aufseherin camp guard at the Nazi German Ravensbrück concentration camp for women. The former nurse took a four-week training course and was sent as an overseer to the Stutthof camp near Danzig (now Gdańsk). There she became known as the “Sadist of Stutthof” due to her merciless beatings of female prisoners. On other accounts he was also known as the “Sadist of Bergen-Belsen.”

At the age of 24, she accompanied a death march of women from central Poland to Bergen-Belsen. At the Belsen trial, she claimed that she had stuck prisoners with her hand as a means of discipline but never used an instrument to do so, nor did she claim to have killed anyone. She was sentenced to ten years in prison and is still alive today. In a rare interview she said:

“Did I make a mistake? No. The mistake was that it was a concentration camp, but I had to go to it, otherwise, I would have been put into it myself. That was my mistake.”

That was an excuse former guards often gave. But it was not true. Records show that some new recruits did leave Ravensbrück as soon as they realised what the job involved. They were allowed to go and did not suffer negative consequences.

The Allied soldiers forced her to place the corpses of dead prisoners into mass graves adjacent to the main camp. She recalled in an interview some sixty years later that, while carrying the corpses, they were not allowed to wear gloves, and she was terrified of contracting typhus. She said the dead bodies were so rotten that the arms and legs tore away when they were moved. She also recalled the emaciated bodies were still heavy enough to cause her considerable back pain. Bothe was arrested and taken to a prison at Celle.

At the Belsen Trial, she was characterized as a “ruthless overseer” and sentenced to ten years in prison for using a pistol on prisoners. Bothe admitted to striking inmates with her hands for camp violations like stealing but maintained that she never beat anyone “with a stick or a rod” and added that she never “killed anyone.” Her contention of innocence was deemed questionable as one Bergen-Belsen survivor claimed to have witnessed Bothe beat a Hungarian Jew named Éva to death with a wooden block while another teenager stated that he saw her shoot two prisoners for reasons he could not understand. Nevertheless, she was released early from prison on 22 December 1951 as an act of leniency by the British government.

Bothe died on March 16,2000 at the age of 79.

sources

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-55661782

https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/herta-bothe

https://marcuse.faculty.history.ucsb.edu/classes/33d/projects/naziwomen/herta.htm

https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205125134

A Guide to Female Nazi Guards

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Odette Hallowes—Tortured and Starved in Ravensbrück—and Survived

This is one of those amazing stories of resilience and perseverance.

Odette Sansom, aka Odette Churchill and Odette Hallowes, code name Lise, was an agent for the United Kingdom’s clandestine Special Operations Executive (SOE) in France during World War II.

She was born on 28 April 1912 in Amiens, France.

She met an Englishman, Roy Patrick Sansom, in Boulogne and married him in Boulogne-sur-Mer on 27 October 1931, moving with him to Britain. The couple had three daughters, Françoise Edith, born in 1932 in Boulogne; Lili M, born in 1934 in Fulham; and Marianne O, born in 1936 in Fulham. Mr Sansom joined the army at the beginning of the Second World War, and Odette Sansom and the children moved to Somerset for their safety.

In the spring of 1942, the Admiralty appealed for postcards or family photographs taken on the French coastline for possible war use. Hearing the broadcast, Odette wrote that she had photographs taken around Boulogne, but she mistakenly sent her letter to the War Office instead of the Admiralty. That brought her to the attention of Colonel Maurice Buckmaster’s Special Operations Executive.

Odette was recruited as a courier for the SPINDLE circuit of Special Operations Executive. She was a wife and mother of three who didn’t drink, smoke, or swear, and to the casual observer, she was quite ordinary, perhaps even boring. Yet, she was a trained killer. She feared neither danger nor dagger—interrogation nor torture. She didn’t think twice about confronting German generals or commandants and often placed principle before prudence. Like her colleagues in the SOE, she signed up for the war knowing that arrest (and execution) was a genuine possibility—a fate that awaited almost one in two for F Section (France) couriers.

She was betrayed by a double agent, Colonel Henri, in April 1943. Colonel Henri was a German officer, who claimed he wished to work for the Allies. Despite, Odette’s suspicions, his involvement led to her arrest.

Arrested in 1943 by the Gestapo, she was sent with fellow SOE agent Peter Churchill (no relation to the Prime Minister) to Fresnes Prison in Paris. At Fresnes, she was interrogated and tortured 14 times by the Gestapo, including having her toenails torn out, her back scorched by a red hot poker, and locked in a dark basement for 3 days at a time. During the interrogation, she lied to the Gestapo agents saying that Peter Churchill was her husband and the nephew of Prime Minister Winston Churchill to make the Germans believe she was a relative of Winston Churchill then she’d be kept alive as a bargaining tool.

In 1943, she was sentenced to death twice, to which she responded, “Then you will have to make up your mind on what count I am to be executed because I can only die once.” Infuriated, the Gestapo agent sent her to Ravensbruck Camp. At Ravensbruck, she was kept on a starvation diet in a cell where other prisoners could be heard being beaten. After D-Day, all food was removed for a week, all light was blocked from her cell, and the heat was turned up. She was expected to die after a few weeks but instead only fell unconscious and was relocated to solitary confinement. As a child, she’d been blind and bedridden from serious illnesses for three-and-a-half years, so the darkness didn’t bother her. As she was considered a difficult child (likely due to her illnesses) during her convent education, she was used to starvation punishments. As the Allies approached Ravensbruck, the commandant drove her to a nearby American base to surrender, hoping to use Odette as a bargaining tool to escape execution.

She testified against the prison guards charged with war crimes at the 1946 Hamburg Ravensbrück Trials, which resulted in Suhren’s execution in 1950. Roy and Odette’s marriage was dissolved in 1946, and she married Peter Churchill in 1947.

Despite her appalling treatment, she was not over-consumed with bitterness. Instead, after the war, she worked for various charities seeking to lessen the war pain for others. For her service, she was awarded the George Cross. Her humility meant she was not keen on accepting the award but she did so on behalf of all agents who suffered during the war. She briefly married Peter Churchill before marrying her third husband, Geoffrey Hallowes. She died in 1995 at the age of 83.

Sources

https://www.biographyonline.net/military/odette-sanson.html

https://time.com/5502645/decorated-wwii-spy-odette/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odette_Hallowes#Recruited_by_SOE

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Elfriede Huth—Ignorant and Evil

If you look for the name Elfried Huth, you probably won’t find anything. Her story is both amazing and appalling. It is also the most bizarre and disturbing love story you will ever read.

Elfriede was born on 14 July 1922, in Leipzig. 22 years later, being still quite young, she joined the ranks of the SS. Until the end of the war, Elfriede served in Ravensbrück Concentration Camp.

From June 1944–April 1945, she was handling an SS-trained guard dog. She claimed that she did not use her dog as a weapon against prisoners and that she did not join the Nazi party. However, other information contradicts this. One prisoner reported that the women were even worse than men in commanding their dogs to brutally attack the inmates.”

Elfriede somehow managed to avoid the Nuremberg trials. She left Germany for the United States and was admitted as an immigrant on or around 21 September 1959 in San Francisco, California. At a German-American club in San Francisco, she met Fred William Rinkel, a German Jew whose family had been murdered in the Holocaust, and they married about 1962. He died in 2004. Elfriede stated she never told her husband about her past.

Fred (aka Fritz) Rinkel grew up in Berlin and, before the Nazis came to power, had wanted to be an opera singer. Sometime during the war, he escaped to Shanghai. In 1947, after learning that his parents had been killed in concentration camps, Fritz, then 32, sailed to San Francisco.

One of Fred’s cousins said “My family assumed that Fritz was a confirmed bachelor, but in 1962, at age 47, he brought over his fiancée for an introduction. He had met Elfriede Huth at a dance at the German-American club in San Francisco. Elfriede was not Jewish. That Fritz would marry a German non-Jew seemed odd to my parents, but this was America and the couple were in love. Even at the age of 14, I could see that Fritz was besotted with Elfriede, calling her “Mein Liebling,” my darling, throughout the evening and gazing at her with puppy eyes.”

Together, they mixed easily in Jewish circles, attended synagogues and donated to Jewish charities.

When Fred Rinkel died in 2004, his widow buried him in a Jewish cemetery, under a gravestone adorned with the Star of David—with space for her when she died.

Eventually, the Office of Special Investigations uncovered her whereabouts and approached her on 4 October 2004. Rinkel confessed to having worked in the Ravensbrück concentration camp, as a voluntary dog handler: this activity was better paid than the ordinary work of supervisors.

She claimed that she did not use her dog as a weapon against prisoners and that she did not join the Nazi party. However, other information contradicts this, “One prisoner reported that women were even worse than men in commanding their dogs to brutally attack inmates.”

Elfriede claimed to have always behaved correctly. Insa Eschebach, a historian and the director of the Museum of the Ravensbrück concentration camp, deemed this a protective claim.

Dogs could be used recklessly. Some guards let the animals go on prisoners, on whom they, with a sometimes fatal consequence, inflicted severe bite wounds.

Since other crimes were barred, the Central Office of the State Justice Administration for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes in Ludwigsburg examined only whether it is possible to prove whether Huth murdered any inmates. If that could be proved, it risked a life sentence. Also, the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem insisted on a trial.

On 1 September 2006 Elfriede was deported to Germany under a settlement agreement signed in June 2006 after being charged by a federal law requiring the removal of aliens who took part in acts of Nazi-sponsored persecution filed by the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations (OSI) and the United States Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The German authorities were informed by the American authorities after her departure. Kurt Schrimm from the Central Office of the State Justice Administrations for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes stated that her files were given to the prosecutor in Cologne. All criminal proceedings were eventually closed due to missing initial suspicion.

Elfriede Huth said, “I never talked about this with my husband. There was nothing to talk about. You don’t talk about things like that, never. That is the past. I am not a Nazi. My relatives are not Nazis. I did nothing wrong,”

This was the level of her ignorance that she could not see anything wrong with that.

She insisted she had no problem with Jews. She worked “outside, not inside” the Ravensbruck camp, she said, after leaving a job in a factory near her birthplace in Leipzig.

She spent some time on a farm in the Rhineland with relatives, then she moved into a nursing home in Willich, Northrhine-Westfalia, where she died in July 2018.

I deliberately used her maiden name rather than her married name.

sources

My Cousin Fritz Was Married to a Nazi

Elfriede Huth: the only accomplice of the Nazis, which was deported from the United States

https://military-history.fandom.com/wiki/Elfriede_Rinkel

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/sep/21/secondworldwar.germany

https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Deported-former-guard-at-Nazi-camp-is-emphatic-2469325.php

https://parade.com/147595/parade/nazis-captured-in-the-united-states/#&gid=ci02a514724003247d&pid=nazis-captured-in-america-elfriede-rinkel

Women Victims of the Holocaust

Female prisoners of Ravensbruck dig under a guard’s watchful eye

I don’t know why I decided to do a blog specifically about the women victims of the Holocaust, but I just felt compelled to do one. I am married to a beautiful wife, and we have a beautiful daughter. I have two older sisters, and of course, like everyone else I also have a mother, who sadly passed away in 1996. All of these women have played an important part in my life, if not the most important part in my life. It is because of them I am the man I am today.

I could not imagine living without them. During the Holocaust, the treatment of women was harsh, more so than men. At least some men, if they were young enough and reasonably healthy, would have a slightly better chance of surviving.

It was normalized for women to be sent to the gas chambers immediately after selection on arrival at the death camps, especially when they had young children. The women not selected for immediate death, were subjected to experiments, forced sterilizations, rape, and punishments.

Following are just a few of the women victims of the Holocaust.

On July 14, 1933, the Nazi dictatorship enacted the Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases. Individuals who were subject to the law were those men and women who “suffered” from any of nine conditions listed in the law: hereditary feeblemindedness, schizophrenia, manic-depressive disorder, hereditary epilepsy, Huntington’s chorea (a rare and fatal degenerative disease), hereditary blindness, hereditary deafness, severe physical deformity, and chronic alcoholism.

Gerda D., a shop worker, was one of an estimated 400,000 Germans the forcibly sterilized. After a disputed diagnosis of schizophrenia, they sterilized her. Later, Nazi authorities forbade Gerda to marry because of the sterilization.

Women laborers forced to dig trenches in Ravensbruck for no other apparent reason than to dig trenches for the sake of it.

Emmi G., a 16-year-old housemaid, was diagnosed as schizophrenic. She was sterilized and sent to the Meseritz-Obrawalde Euthanasia Center. There she was murdered with an overdose of tranquilizers on December 7, 1942. Place and date uncertain.

13-year-old Vera Berger caught typhus and tuberculosis in Bergen-Belsen and suffered starvation, but the young Czechoslovakian survived the liberation. Ravensbruck Camp Hospital, 1945.

sources

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/gallery/women-during-the-holocaust-photographs

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/ravensbrueck

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