When Didi saw the setting in which the camp had been built, she was heartened. It was not what she had imagined a prison camp would be like at all. Despite the women being tired and hungry after the ordeal of the train journey, the march from the railway station, a distance of about 3 kilometers, had not taken long, and they had skirted around the edge of the pretty village of Fürstenberg, with its elegant villas and gardens stretching down to the lake—the Schwedtsee. Of course, it would have been much more enjoyable had they been free women and not prisoners. Before the concentration camp had opened its gates to women prisoners in 1939, the area had been a place where people came for holidays or days of relaxation, messing about in boats or having picnics on the banks of the Schwedtsee, which was surrounded by pine forests. For Didi the trees and the woodland represented the place in which she planned to hide when she managed to get out of the camp, for she was still determined to escape.
As the column of women reached the outer gates of the camp, though, it became depressingly clear, even to Didi, that escape was probably never going to be a realistic option. For Ravensbrück concentration camp stood behind a vast wall, at least 5 meters high, which was topped by electrified barbed wire. As the women poured through the gates they found themselves in an open area that they later discovered to be the Appelplatz, the place where, several times each day, they would be made to stand in all weathers to be counted. To the left was a long, wooden building surrounded by barbed wire. This was the canteen where all the SS guards and the female overseers (Aufseherinnen) gathered in their spare time and were served food by prisoners, who were not allowed to eat even a tiny fraction of what the Germans consumed. On the right, opposite the canteen, was another long, wooden barrack, which housed the showers and the kitchen; behind it was a narrow passageway, bordered on the other side by a bunker used to house prisoners in solitary confinement, in the dark and without even the most basic facilities. The passageway would soon become one of the most feared places in the camp for the new arrivals, as this was where prisoners were executed by a shot in the back of the neck. With typical German efficiency, at the other end of the passage was a crematorium, which enabled the guards to kill a woman and then dispose of her body in record time.
On the other side of the Appelplatz was a wide path, the Lagerstrasse, or Camp Street, on either side of which were more wooden barracks. Two of those on the left were used as a hospital, the Revier, another feared place, where patients were just as likely to be killed as they were to be made well again. The other huts, known as the Strafblock, a prison within the prison, were where those who committed a misdemeanor, or what was regarded as one by the guards, were punished. Behind these buildings was the morgue, while the huts on the right of Lagerstrasse housed the prisoners.
Although the camp was primarily for women, there were a small number of huts, a kitchen and a hospital set aside for male prisoners. Ravensbrück had been built by men from the nearby camp of Sachsenhausen, and when repairs or more buildings were required, the men had to be brought from there to do the work; and in 1941, it had been decided to have a small number of men living permanently at Ravensbrück. This small camp-within-a-camp was initially planned to house only the 350 men necessary for the work, but by the end of 1943 there were between 8,000 and 10,000 men living there.
To complete the camp setup and make the transportation of inmates and supplies efficient, two railway tracks bordered the camp: one to the north, the other on the south side running straight past the Siemens factory, where many of the prisoners were forced to work. To the east, after the railway lines had passed the camp, the lines gradually merged.1
There was another smaller facility built to the southeast of the main site. It was officially called Uckermarck but was known as the Jugendlager—youth camp—as its original purpose had been to house German juvenile delinquents. At the time of Didi’s arrival at Ravensbrück, Uckermarck was being evacuated in readiness for conversion into an extermination camp that would allow the Germans, in what was left of the war, to obliterate all evidence of what had gone on in Ravensbrück by murdering as many of the women prisoners as they could. It was to be an impossible task for them. Even with the two ovens in the crematorium burning night and day, they were losing their battle to clean up the camp. Geneviève de Gaulle Anthonioz, who had belonged to the Resistance and was a niece of Charles de Gaulle, was a prisoner at Ravensbrück around the same time as Didi. She recalled how the smoke from the crematorium was “becoming worse. Acrid smoke fills my cell… one of the furnaces had been overloaded with dead bodies and has caught fire.”2
In this hellhole Didi spent the first few weeks of the autumn of 1944. She was put into a hut with Frenchwomen, as she was still claiming to be French. She had told no one of her real identity and the women with whom she became friendly only ever knew her as Jacqueline du Tertre. She quickly learned to trust no one. Even the most loyal person could be persuaded to betray a friend when confronted by starvation or the wrath of the guards and overseers.
The guards were mainly men from the Waffen SS who lived in houses outside the camp wall. They escorted prisoners when they were being moved to and from subcamps and other work facilities, and also provided security for the camp perimeter, ensuring that escapes could never happen. They would sometimes aid the overseers, who were all women, recruited from the general public with the promise of high wages and light work.
From its beginning, Ravensbrück was the place where overseers for all the concentration camps were trained. New recruits were taught how to prevent prisoners escaping, how to make them work efficiently and how to punish them for any infringements of camp regulations. The women selected as overseers were a diverse group. Many were poorly educated and quickly became used to the idea of being able to bully women whose education had been far better than their own. Others applied to be overseers out of political conviction and in order to do their best for the Fatherland, while yet more applied for these positions for financial reasons: an overseer was paid very much more than an office worker.3
While many of these women were little better than criminal types, they were not all cast in the mold of the ugly harridans that people have come to believe them to be. Even the infamous Irma Grese, possibly the most sadistic, psychopathic overseer of all time, who began her career at Ravensbrück, was, in her earlier days, a physically attractive young woman, although by the time she was executed for war crimes in December 1946 her dissolute lifestyle had left its mark: photos of her at the time of her trial show a haggard, hard-looking woman who appears to be much older than her 22 years. Happily for Didi, although not for others elsewhere, by the time she arrived at the camp Grese had gone on to pastures new at Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen.4
There is no record of Didi receiving any particular ill treatment while in Ravensbrück although she, along with all those in the camp, certainly suffered from the appalling general conditions, the lack of food and medical treatment, and the ever-present threat of specifically targeted cruelty for no apparent reason other than the whims of the overseers and guards.
One of the senior overseers working at the camp during Didi’s incarceration was Dorothea Binz. Known to the French prisoners as La Binz, she had come to the camp in 1939 and remained there for the rest of the war, dispensing her violent form of discipline to anyone who happened to get in her way. Whenever La Binz appeared, accompanied by a large dog, the prisoners were on their guard. Binz was a small, blond woman with a vicious temper who regularly beat prisoners or whipped them simply because she enjoyed it. She often used to deliver her beatings in multiples of 25. Twenty-five lashes from a whip or a strong stick were just about survivable; 50 could sometimes be survived by the most robust of prisoners; but no one survived 75. On one occasion, having beaten a prisoner to death, La Binz was observed standing on the woman’s legs, gently rocking back and forth. When she eventually went on her way, her boots were covered with her victim’s blood.5
La Binz was not the only sadistic overseer at the camp. The 36-year-old Greta Boesel was another. Although a trained nurse, she was in charge of work details. Her favorite saying, when referring to the unfortunate souls in her charge, was: “If they cannot work, let them rot.” As part of her remit she sent prisoners to be murdered at Uckermarck, and when the gas chamber was opened at Ravensbrück in December 1944 delighted in selecting those who were to be gassed. The head nurse at Ravensbrück was 58-year-old Elisabeth Marschall. Despite her original choice of occupation, Marschall was not interested in attending to the health of the prisoners. Instead she too helped select those who were to be murdered and also attended the doctors who conducted medical experiments in the camp, causing untold suffering to the women, which resulted in painful, lingering deaths. Marschall was assisted by Vera Salvequart, a 25-year-old Czech-born nurse who had spent much of the war as a concentration camp prisoner herself and, as a prisoner, had been sent to work in the Revier, where she dispensed poison to the patients.
In the Ravensbrück trials conducted after the war, Binz, Boesel, Marschall and Salvequart were among 11 criminals from the camp who were sentenced to death for the atrocities they had committed. Several others, including women, were given long prison sentences. Salvequart petitioned George VI, asking him to grant her a reprieve and stating that she had been a prisoner and had, earlier in the war, passed secrets to the British. Her reprieve was not granted and she, along with the others, was hanged by Britain’s chief executioner, Albert Pierrepoint.
The commandant of Ravensbrück was a 36-year-old married man with children, SS Obersturmführer Fritz Suhren. He arrived at the camp in October 1942, taking over from Commandant Max Koegel, and remained in charge until the end of the war. Suhren was responsible for the deaths of thousands of women. He adopted the policy of Vernichtung durch Arbeit (extermination through work) and was also responsible for the building of the gas chamber.
Life in Ravensbrück was a nightmare. The women were in constant fear for their lives and had no control over their own futures. If they rebelled they were punished; even if they behaved as they were instructed to and did nothing to antagonize the guards and overseers, they were also punished. Some of the women simply lost the will to do anything. In the camps there was a term for people like this: they were called Muselmänner. They spent their days shuffling around, not speaking or even seeming to see their fellow prisoners or the guards, totally indifferent to anything and everything that happened to them. By the time they had reached this state most were on the brink of death, too far away from the reality of their situation to be able to recover. Didi could not imagine ever being reduced to this pitiful state herself but, in the world she now inhabited, nothing was certain and her instinct told her that despite the odds against it happening, she had to keep believing she would survive. Unlike some who felt that they had been abandoned by the Almighty, Didi had a faith in God that remained strong and it was this that allowed her to keep going through the dark days she spent in Ravensbrück.
She was put to work in the camp garden for a short time, growing vegetables for the staff and inmates, although the former received most of what was produced. She was made to work hard but it was nothing compared with what she would ultimately have to do.
Soon after her arrival she bumped into Yvonne Baseden, a young Women’s Auxiliary Air Force officer (WAAF). Yvonne had also trained as a wireless operator and had been arrested in the summer of 1944 in a safe house set up in a cheese factory in southern France, having attended a daylight drop of arms from the United States Army Air Force (USAAF). She had a French mother and an English father but, like Didi, had decided not to admit to having anything to do with Britain, believing her chances of survival would be greater if she was thought to be French.
Ravensbrück was fast becoming a place for reunions, as three more SOE agents, known to the other inmates as the “little paratroopers,” suddenly turned up. They were wireless operators Lilian Rolfe (Nadine) and Denise Bloch (Ambroise), and courier Violette Szabo (Louise). Didi knew Violette slightly and she had left England for France on the same day as Denise, who was returning for her second mission, having first been recruited in France. While on the first mission Denise had been tasked with escorting a British wireless operator, Brian Stonehouse (Celestin), to help him with his French. He could speak it perfectly well but with an English accent. Stonehouse was the same person who had been the childhood friend of Jacqueline Nearne while they all lived in Boulogne-sur-Mer. Denise was actually French but was believed to be British because her two companions were British. She didn’t correct the error, perhaps thinking that she would be treated better if the Germans didn’t know her true nationality. Violette certainly wanted to stress that she was British despite having a French mother; it would have been easier for her to be believed anyway as she also spoke French with a marked English accent.
The sight of the three other agents made Didi really nervous and she tried to keep out of their way as much as possible, as she didn’t want to let anyone know that they were already acquainted. For some reason many of the prisoners were interested in the “little paratroopers” and Didi was aware that if she were not careful one of the guards or overseers would realize that she was avoiding contact with them and want to know why. If that happened she would not be able to keep up the pretense of being Jacqueline du Tertre and her entire cover would be blown. So Didi contrived to meet Violette and told her that she was posing as a French girl. While it was sad to meet under such difficult circumstances, the two girls caught up with each other’s news and Violette was horrified to hear about the torture Didi had suffered in the rue des Saussaies. She urged Didi to admit that she was British, telling her that when she herself had admitted to the Germans she was English, she hadn’t been mistreated at all;6 she was sure that it was because they were frightened of doing anything bad to British nationals in case of reprisals once the war was over. Didi, however, refused to change her mind but did agree on one thing: that should one of them formulate a plan to escape, she would share it with the other and they would abscond together, along with Lilian and Denise.
Before long all four women were moved to a work camp at Torgau, where they were employed in a munitions factory. It was delicate, dangerous work but they hoped they would not have to do it for long, as Violette had met someone there who helped her get a key for one of the gates in the camp wall. When Violette told Didi the good news, Didi was ready to drop everything and leave immediately, but Violette was more wary and thought it best to plan the escape properly before rushing into anything. It would be the one decision she would forever regret. While the four girls were planning their breakout, another prisoner overheard what they were discussing. Hoping to earn some privileges for herself, she immediately went to one of the overseers and told her what she had heard. Luckily another girl realized what was going on and found Violette to warn her of the other prisoner’s treachery. Violette knew that she would have to throw the key away and did so quickly before she could change her mind or the overseer could come and search her. It was a bitter blow to them all, as it had been the best chance they would ever get of escaping.
Soon afterwards Didi went on to another camp in Abteroda while Violette, Denise and Lilian were sent to a work camp at Königsberg in eastern Prussia, 700 kilometers away, to help build an airfield.7 The four never saw each other again. It was a bitter blow for Didi, for she was fond of Violette, saying: “She was a very solid person, a tomboy, but very kind. She would have done anything to help anyone else. I would have liked to have gone with her.”8
Separated from her friends—people whom she knew she could trust—Didi was alone once more. But unbeknown to her, a worse fate was in store for the “little paratroopers” when suddenly, early in 1945, they were taken back to Ravensbrück.
They might have avoided the torture that Didi had suffered, but Didi had been right to keep up the pretense of being French. With the end of the war in sight, the Germans wanted all trace of the English girls ever having been there to be removed. One evening, at the end of January or beginning of February 1945, they were sent for by Fritz Suhren, who read out a statement ordering their execution. They were taken to the passageway behind the camp kitchen and, one by one, forced to kneel and shot in the back of the neck by SS Sturmmann Schult. Their bodies were taken to the crematorium, but not before their ragged clothes had been removed and put into the camp store to be recycled for some other poor women.
In Abteroda Didi knew nothing of what had happened to her SOE friends and she had no time to think of what their fate might have been, as she had been taken there to work in the BMW aircraft-engine works, making parts for Messerschmitt aircraft. The Germans particularly liked having girls working for them in the factory, as their smaller fingers were more suited than men’s to putting together the tiny parts of the complicated aero engines. Every day she became more and more exhausted. The work was backbreaking, the hours long—12-hour shifts—and the concentration required to complete the task properly gave her a headache and made her eyes hurt. While she worked, she considered ways to escape but try as she might, she could find none.
Day after day she labored, hunched over a bench, until one day it occurred to her that if she couldn’t escape, she could at least refuse to work. That day she told the guards that she couldn’t work. She said that she was too tired and in any case didn’t see why she should help them when they were fighting against her own country, France. They shrugged their shoulders and told her that if she refused to work they would shave her head—a common punishment for disobedience—and she would not be given any food. Since the food was nothing more than a bowl of watery soup, she didn’t hesitate. She told them they could do what they liked, so they dragged her away from her work bench and shaved off her brown hair. Minutes later, and now completely bald, she was taken back to the bench and told to get on with her work. She again refused. This time one of the guards, armed with a rifle which he pointed menacingly at her, told her that she had 20 minutes to decide whether she would like to work or whether she would prefer to be shot. Didi finally relented. It would have been a futile gesture to lose her life in such a pointless way, so she began to work again; but in a show of resistance she did so at a very slow pace. Her industrial action was soon noticed and she was threatened with punishment once more, so she started working at a normal pace but broke parts as often as she dared. She was reprimanded again and again, but excused herself by saying she wasn’t used to doing that sort of work and obviously had no talent for it.
The thought that she could still do something to hamper the German war effort gave her a certain satisfaction, as did her blatant show of contempt for the guards. Even if they didn’t understand exactly what she was doing, she knew, and it boosted her morale to know that she was still able to thwart their attempts to break her spirit.
Then she was told that she was going to be moved again. The news was unexpected and it suddenly occurred to her that perhaps the guards had understood more than she realized and she was being sent to somewhere even worse than Abteroda as a punishment. Had she gone too far this time? Perhaps this was the end of the line. She knew that sometimes she was reckless in the way she dealt with the Germans; it was the only thing she could do to make herself feel a little bit better about her desperate situation, but was it worth risking her life? She had developed friendships with one or two of the French girls and didn’t want to be parted from them, but on the other hand a move to a different camp might possibly provide her with an opportunity to escape. She didn’t know what to think and, with a heavy heart, waited to hear what her fate would be.