By the spring of 1943 the German war machine was suffering massive losses on the Eastern Front. Reverberations caused by the setback on the Eastern Front were increasingly being felt across the whole of Germany and occupied countries, in spite its ardent determination to win the war. Rolling stock for transporting large shipments of Jews by rail was causing major problems in some areas, for the armed forces desperately needed to move troops and other vital equipment from one part of the front to another as quickly as possible. While the ‘Final Solution’ accelerated at an even greater rate in the various killing centres of Poland, the need for a vast labour pool was a constant concern for the SS.
It was for this reason that the SS pressed the concentration camp system for more labour and ensuring that the camps were run more efficiently and profitably than ever before. In April 1943, a part of the Bergen-Belsen camp was taken over by the SS Economic-Administration Main Office. Initially the camp had been designated as a Zivilinterniertenlager or civilian internment camp. However, the SS re-designated Belsen as an Aufenthaltslager or holding camp. SS officials saw the potential of the camp where Jews could be transported and held there to be exchanged for German civilians interned in other countries, or for hard currency. The idea seemed a lucrative and effective means of increasing German man power for the front.
Within a couple of months the SS divided the camp into subsections for individual groups. There was a special camp for Polish Jews, a Hungarian camp, a neutrals camp for citizens of neutral countries, and a ‘Star camp’ for Dutch Jews. The POW camp known as Stalag XI-C was shut down and became a branch camp of Stalag XI-B. The SS saw the potential to make this part of the camp into a hospital for Russian POWs. Once they had recovered in the hospital they could be fed, set to work and eventually exchanged for money, or better still swapped for German POWs. The plan was fraught with internal problems, but nonetheless the hospital was opened and sick Russian POWs moved there. The SS gave the impression to the Geneva Convention that the camp was purely a holding area, and the inmates that were being cared for properly.
During the summer of 1943 thousands of Jews were transported to Belsen. Between then and December 1944 some 15,000 Jews, including 2,750 children and minors, were transported to the camp. With them they brought enormous quantities of food, money and jewels. All were taken from them, as well as a huge amount of alcoholic drink. This was distributed among the SS and Wehrmacht guards to be consumed when off duty in the barracks.
Generally the SS did not feel any sympathy towards one or other Jewish group from any particular country; however some SS men were confronted by a moral and emotional conflict when they received Western Jews, particularly from the ‘Homeland’. They were able to identify with them much more easily than those from Poland and Russia. Unlike Eastern Jews whose religious, racial and national feelings were combined in one single identity, and had for centuries been ingrained in fear and terror from centuries of pogroms, Western Jews were recognized completely differently, as they had not suffered from years of pain and anguish. It was for this reason that the SS went to great lengths to mislead the Western Jews into believing they were being looked after. In some circumstances naivety of the Western Jews was such that some from the transport actually offered tips to those that were unloading them.
When they arrived through the gates they were greeted by the SS guards often in polite voices telling them to come through at their leisure, but in an orderly fashion. The SS wanted to make it as deceptive as possible tricking them into believing that they had reached a resettlement centre where they could rest before resuming their place of work and residence. The SS were shrewd in their understanding of the essential differences between Eastern and Western Jews, and this had become even more apparent during the last year of the war, as more people from the West arrived.
The early summer of 1943 had brought about an unusual atmosphere not seen in many other camps. This feeling was the direct result of the dire military situation on the Eastern Front and the fact the inmates had bargaining power. While SS rules in the camp were more stringent than ever before, there was also an underlying mood that some SS-men were becoming more relaxed, and forcing themselves to be slightly more affable with the inmates. As the prisoners were herded through into the camp for instance, the guards were ordered not to use whips or any type of physical abuse. However, once in the camp, the deception would be unmasked with guards hurling abuse and beating the prisoners for the least infringement of camp rules.
At the end of July 1943 the Wehrmacht in Russia had suffered permanent change. It now lacked the resources to conduct major offensive operations. The war had become nothing more for the average soldier than a long, bitter struggle to survive. With nothing but a string of defeats in its wake the German Army were now withdrawing across a devastated Soviet landscape, with little hope of holding back the Red Army. The summer campaign in Russia had been completely disastrous. Against overwhelming superiority the Germans withdrew some 150 miles along a 650 mile front.
Despite the new policies, the camp still grew in size as more and more Jews were transported through the system. To help oversee the inmates of the camp, women guards were drafted in. These women known as the SS-Gefolge were indoctrinated by their superior officers to hate the inmates, especially the Jewish prisoners. They were told to regard all prisoners as subhuman adversaries of the State, and those who offered the slightest resistance were marked for immediate destruction. Although most were not violently anti-Semitic at the time, they were told to consider the Jews the most dangerous of all the enemies of National Socialism.
Strolling around the camp wearing white brassards on their lower left tunic sleeves with a black cloth strip bearing the silver threaded SS Aufseherin stamp, a side cap distinctly displaying the infamous ‘Totenkopf’ death head badge, together with military issue dress and wearing either hobnailed jack boots or black shoes with black socks, the female guards assisted their male counterparts in supervising the new arrivals, and their work detail.
Many new German women guards did not know what was actually in store for them. But once they were in training the prestige of the uniform, the elitism, the toughness and the comradeship soon overcame any morale scruples. Some apparently enjoyed meting out harsh and often brutal punishments for the slightest infractions of camp rules. Some were especially eager to show their SS superiors that they could be as brutal as their male counterparts.
Johanna Bormann was one of a handful of depraved and cruel women guards in the concentration camp. Even by SS standards, her behaviour was atrocious. Bormann would beat, kick, slap, and whip prisoners ruthlessly. She seemed to take great pride in the fact that her mere presence caused the inmates to tremble with fear. She gleefully followed the policy of controlled and disciplined terror laid down by the SS. With a nonchalant and cavalier attitude, this barbarous woman could conduct her cruel beatings without scruple.
Life for Bormann at Belsen was good; and even better was that she and her fellow comrades were able to steal from the dead. Surprisingly, the supervision of the SS members and female guards was actually loose. As a result there were so many causal opportunities to steal that it was hard to imagine that any of the SS members and female guards were free from involvement in this crime. From a female guard who wanted a new radio to the SS officer who dealt in stolen jewellery, corruption at the camps was endemic.
One of the most famous examples of corruption on a grand scale was that of Ilse Koch, known as ‘the Bitch of Buchenwald’. She was the chief female guard at the Buchenwald camp, and married to the camp commandant, Karl Koch. Both embezzled large sums of money and afforded themselves free range of the inmates’ belongings; there is also evidence that the Kochs had the witnesses to their misdeeds murdered.
When Johanna Bormann was transferred from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen in late 1944 she had packed her suitcase containing not only her belongings, but stolen jewellery and money in various currencies. Journeying to Belsen she hoped the fruits of a new camp would yield further temptations. As soon as Johanna arrived she was assigned immediately to roll call duties. Some weeks later her immediate superior, Irma Grese arrived. Grese had come from Auschwitz where her name was synonymous with brutality. In 1943, aged 20, she was transferred from Ravensbrück to Auschwitz, where she became Oberaufseherin, controlling thirty-one barracks housing some 30,000 women. Although she had mistreated prisoners at Ravensbrück, Auschwitz afforded her much greater opportunities for doing evil. Tidy and immaculately groomed, she strutted around the camp with her black boots, whip, and smart looking SS uniform looking for victims she could torture or kill. At Belsen she was determined to inflict the same misery. The Belsen commandant, Kramer, had already reassigned Grese, but she asked him if she could stay. Kramer, a man who was reputed to be one of her many lovers, authorized Grese to have her permanent assignment at Belsen. To her female colleagues it seemed that SS matron Grese wanted to remain at the typhus-ridden hell-hole just for the love of her SS boyfriend. Yet, as Johanna Bormann soon found out, Irma was in fact secretly having an affair with an SS guard who she referred always as ‘her Hatchi’. Hatchi was in fact SS-Oberscharführer Franz Hatzinger. Hatzinger and Grese had met each other while they were stationed at Auschwitz. He was a married man and fourteen years older than Grese, but it was clear to Johanna that they both were very close and regularly sneaked off secretly to have sex.
Another female guard at Belsen who wanted to stay for the love of another SS guard was Elisabeth Volkenrath. Her opportunity to stay at Belsen, like Grese, would ultimately put her own life in jeopardy as the allies fast approached from the west. But both women had decided to stay, whatever the outcome. In spite the deteriorating military situation the women continued to inflict the same sort of terror and cruelty they had become notorious for at Auschwitz. Prisoners were dying all around them and typhus was rife throughout the camp, but Grese and Volkenrath would order frail, emaciated prisoners to undergo strenuous exercises, including making inmates hold heavy rocks over their heads for extended periods of time.