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Ravensbrück

Ravensbrück concentration camp was set up as a women's camp in May 1939. Amongst the 2,000 inmates recorded at the end of that year there were 440 Romanies from the Austrian Burgenland who had been brought to the camp on June 29th as antisocials. For two days the women, many with their babies, had to sit on the ground until the registration process was completed. 37 The number of prisoners here rose steadily: in 1941 there were already 7,900, in 1942 10,800 and by the end of 1944 around 43,000 prisoners in the camp. These figures say nothing about the actual number of women who passed through the gates as they do not include those who died or were transferred to other camps. Up to the liberation of the camp on April 30th 1945 between 107,000 and 132,000 women, including children and the elderly, came into or passed through the camp. There were at least 5,000 Romanies in Ravensbrück. 38

The black triangle

In Ravensbrück the Gypsies wore the black triangular patch of the antisocial. The women's stories, however, show clearly that it was not their supposed criminality, but racist motives, that led to their incarceration in a concentration camp. Many Romany women made an important contribution to the family's income as traders. Self-employment was completely forbidden to Gypsies under National Socialism so that the women were scarcely in a position to obtain the necessary peddlers' licence. Women who were denounced or caught by the police while trading were accused of begging and taken to the concentration camps as antisocials. Other Sinti and Romany women were sent to the camp because they had practised fortune-telling. Regarding Mrs W. who was detained in Cologne on October 16th 1939, the record said:

"The accused traded in items of daily use from door to door. While doing this she practised fortune-telling as a Gypsy. In this way she put the wife of Hugo B. in a state of anxiety and fear, so that she became mentally ill and had to be placed in the mental hospital in Bonn."40

Mrs W. was sent to Ravensbrück. Her four children remained behind. With the outbreak of war the National Socialists began a systematic search for Romany women who told fortunes. On November 20th 1939 all police offices received the following decree from Security Headquarters:

"Recently I have received repeated reports according to which Gypsy women are making use of the present situation and through fortune-telling bringing evident unease among the population. This action which is harmful to the nation must in all circumstances be stopped.'

All Gypsy women with previous convictions for fortune-telling as well as all those who "are or have been suspected with reason of telling fortunes" were to be arrested and interned in a concentration camp. It is most likely that such reasons played a role in the imprisonment of 101 Gypsy women recorded in spring 1940.42 More and more often, women who fled to avoid the strict regulations and questioning by the police were interned as antisocials. This affected above all women who had been forbidden to live together with a non- Gypsy husband and who wanted to escape from the threat of compulsory sterilisation. Women who had left home to visit relatives in other towns or to find shelter were also sent to concentration camp as antisocials. Apart from these individual detentions, there were also larger transports of Gypsies into the camp. For example, a former prisoner describes a group arriving at the end of 1943:

"They were all in a very poor state. They had to stand on parade to be counted, and were given neither shoes nor stockings."

Romanies and Sinti were also to be found among those who had been transferred from other camps. Many women and girls selected as suitable for work were sent, particularly during 1944, from Auschwitz, thus avoiding the gas chambers.

The Gypsy Block

At first all Romanies and Sinti were housed in a separate Gypsy Block but, as the number of prisoners grew, they were split up among different blocks." Helene W. seventeen at the time describes her arrival in Ravensbrück:

"Then we came into Ravensbrück, there they first of all cropped our hair... There was a large block called the Gypsy Block. It was overcrowded. Because the Gypsy Block was overcrowded the Sinti slept in the washrooms, they lay everywhere because it was so full."45

In Ravensbrück the Gypsies with the Jews belonged to the lowest level of the prisoner hierarchy which meant their chances of survival were considerably reduced." They were rarely allowed to take up a post within the prisoners' self-regulation system in order to soften the despotism and terror. Most of their relations were either already murdered, or in concentration camps themselves, so even restricted outside help in the form of parcels was not available. Knowledge of the death of near relations often broke their will to live. In addition to the generally demeaning conditions of concentration camp imprisonment, Romany and Sinti women suffered complete and profound humiliation. Inevitably, imprisonment forced victims to break the taboos and ritual systems which were part of their cultural identity. Particularly demeaning, for example, was being forced to display themselves naked in front of men. Persecuted on racial grounds, they were the preferred victims of the deadly crimes and medical experiments of the SS.

Force and brutality

It was mainly women who were employed as guards inside the camp. Gypsy inmates unanimously described these guards as particularly brutal. Ceija Stojka who has described her life story in books emphasises this:

"I came to Ravensbrück with my mother and sister and women were in charge there and they were even worse than the men in Auschwitz. There was a certain Binz, her dog was called Prince and she was more evil than any devil, this woman... If someone was particularly pretty, she would harass this woman for an especially long time, with washing clothes, with various types of work until she really looked the way Binz had imagined her. She would have to wash all the time, wash, wash, in winter with the terrible cold. And then often she would not come back."47

Concerning the SS guard Erika Bergmann, a court report says:

"This guard was given the job one day of escorting a column of Ravensbrück prisoners outside the camp to work at levelling the ground. As a twenty year old Gypsy woman was apparently not working hard enough she let her dog loose on the prisoner. The dog tore open the young girl's abdomen. Bleeding and with her intestines hanging out the unconscious victim was laid in the reeds on Bergmann's orders and left to lie there for some hours without the prisoners being allowed to look after her. When the column was ready to march back to camp in the evening the Gypsy woman was dead."48

This sort of brutality was the rule rather than the exception in the camp.

Work or death

Work to the point of complete physical exhaustion was the order of the day in the camp. Until the middle of 1942 the Gypsies had to work within the camp, producing rush mats and straw shoes in the weaving workshop or sewing confiscated furs into warm jackets for the armed forces in the tailoring factory. Heavy carrying, loading and unloading and road-building were part of the regime. If a woman could not carry out the work she was beaten by the SS, often to death. The children, too, were tortured with the hardest physical labour.

As one form of harassment, the female SS guards would occupy Jews and Gypsies in particular with completely pointless toil, for example, shovelling snow or sand from one heap to another. While this was being done the guards shouted and hit the women.

After 1942, just as at Buchenwald, numerous detached work brigades were set up for armaments production, and Gypsies were among those transferred to them. Rosa Wiegand describes the work in the Heinkel factory in Barth, Pomerania:

"It often happened that one of the guards would strike me with a strap. Once I was so mistreated that I could no longer walk. I still carried on working, otherwise I would have been sent back. They hit me often, just like that, without a reason, without my having done anything. Once I had to stand the whole day outside the factory because I had laughed while working; I had to stand still the whole day, after I had worked twelve hours during the night and should have been resting."

Extermination

So far it has not been possible to ascertain the number of Sinti and Romanies who fell victim to the systematic murderous crimes of the SS. It can, however, be assumed that there were very many amongst the women who were transferred to institutions after 1942 and gassed there during the Euthanasia Programme, as well as amongst those who were killed with phenol injections in the years 1943-1944. In addition there were several hundred Gypsies amongst the estimated 5,000 women murdered in the gas chambers during the final weeks of Ravensbrück. Mrs W. can still remember perfectly how she saw the smoking chimney of the crematorium every day as they marched in and out of the camp to work:

"Next to the showers was the crematorium where day and night people were... it went 'puff, puff. First there was black smoke and then a really reddish smoke came out, that happened every day as the people were burnt."52

Forced sterilisation

All the Gypsy women in Ravensbrück were affected by one method of Nazi extermination sterilisation. Had many of them not been moved to other camps because of the advancing troops, then certainly none of the women and girls would have been spared this first step to eventual genocide. The doctors Clauberg, Lucas, Schumann, Sonntag and Treite had, at various times from the beginning of the forties, been experimenting in Ravensbrück with different methods of sterilisation. The aim of the experiments was to find a cheap, quick method which could be used for the mass sterilisation of women who were regarded by the National Socialists as racially or socially inferior. Jews as well as Gypsies were collectively threatened with this, as well as Poles and Russians, and German women who had had relations with the foreign workers who had been brought to Germany. In nearly all the Nazi publications about Gypsies compulsory sterilisation was unanimously recommended very early on for their "elimination as lesser genetic types". It was therefore no coincidence that the doctors in Ravensbrück carried out their experiments in the main on Gypsy women whose ability to work was needed but whose further procreation was not desired. All the reports about these experiments emphasise that they were conducted mostly on Gypsy women together with Jewish women and a few others. With regard to Dr Sonntag, who worked in the camp from May 1940 to December 1941, it is said:

"So for example he sterilised Gypsy children. I heard the screaming of these children aged between nine and eleven, who staggered along the camp streets back to their block after this sterilisation. These children were later (one or two days later) found dead in their beds. "54

Dr Schumann, who as resident medical director took part in many euthanasia actions, experimented briefly with sterilisation by X-ray radiation. Once again it was Gypsy children who were the victims. A Polish eyewitness described how, after the radiation treatment, the crying children asked their mothers what had been done to them.

In his earlier experiments in Auschwitz, Dr Clauberg tortured numerous Jewish and Gypsy women to death, or marked them for the rest of their lives. From 1940, following discussions with SS Head Heinrich Himmler, he tried to develop a method of sterilisation which would make a costly operation unnecessary, and experimented with the injection of a liquid into the womb. Clauberg arrived in Ravensbrück at the beginning of 1945. This time the sterilisation affected Gypsies only. Ceija Stojka was in Ravensbrück when the period of sterilisation began but was able to avoid it herself through being transferred to another camp:

"While we were in Ravensbrück the children were sterilised. My mother and I were already on the list. They said to us: 'Anyone who lets themselves be sterilised today or tomorrow will get a release pass next week and can go home. But we already knew that this was not so. "55

A girl whose parents had been murdered in Auschwitz and who was being looked after by Mrs Stojka's mother, was taken away while she herself was not in the barracks:

"And then they brought her and the others back like pigs (on a cart). And Resi (lay) on top dead, the others too, and a couple more were still twitching underneath them. It lasted less than two hours and then they too went cold."

The sterilisation programme began in the Gypsy Block. Mrs W. escaped sterilisation only because she was in another block and was deported to Bergen- Belsen:

"It was then said: "The Sinti are all sterilised, so that there will be no offspring.' From girls of twelve up to forty-five year olds, I will never forget it, six weeks before the transport went to Bergen-Belsen. They had sterilised all the Sinti. Without anaesthetic, without anything. There were also twelve year old children. Then they took the children out in wheelbarrows when they had been sterilised and just threw them back in the block, twelve year olds!"36

That it was overwhelmingly very young girls who were sterilised was also described by Zdenka Nedvedova-Nejedla who was active as a prisoner doctor in the sickbay.

"I tended children the whole night after the operation. All these girls were bleeding from between their legs and in such pain that I had to secretly give them pain killer. "57

In view of these findings, Ravensbrück could be classed as the centre of the mass sterilisation of Gypsies. For those women who were the victims of these operations there was no liberation in 1945. The burden of the brutal action described here - not being able to have children - destroyed their lives in many ways. In view of the significance of the family in Romany culture and the fact that most of the women could not speak about what had been done to them because of the existing taboos, these women in particular still suffer today. The majority of the SS doctors on the other hand were not punished. In 1956 an attempt was made to bring a case against Dr Clauberg over the sterilisation experiments; it was abandoned after just nine months.