Guarding the Truth

Like so many World War II tales, the story Margarete tells started with a summons. Not, though, the brutal knock of the Gestapo -- instead, a summons to the personnel office of Ruhrchemie AG, a chemical company on Germany's western border where she worked as a lab assistant, filling bombs for the Luftwaffe. It was August 1944. Margarete was 21, a cheeky, fun-loving young woman with an eighth-grade education. Her best friend, Leni, had signed up for what the company called a two-week apprenticeship outside Berlin. Margarete stepped forward and asked to be put on the list, too.

A more ordinary girl from a more typical German family can hardly be imagined. Her household was neither ardently Nazi nor resolutely opposed. Her father, a left-leaning miner, refused to hang the Nazi banner, while her mother, devout and authoritarian, quietly placed little swastika flags in the flowerpots. Both brothers served in Hitler's army; one deserted and was jailed and later compensated as a victim of persecution by the regime. "I came from a social democratic household," Margarete will insist repeatedly, years later. "We had nothing to do with the Nazis."

Within days, Margarete and her girlfriends Leni and Friedchen were on a train headed east, away from the Ruhr Valley, which was being carpet-bombed by the Allies day and night. They were lighthearted and delirious with joy at getting out. Margarete had curls in her brown hair, red polish on her fingernails.

Their first inkling about the true nature of their "apprenticeship," Margarete says, was the barbed wire. "We got out, and we knew it was a concentration camp. We were furious." Entering the SS cafeteria, "we saw the prisoners out the window," she recalls, her dark eyes hardening. "My God, it was awful."

Konzentrationslager Ravensbrueck was completed in 1939 to incarcerate Hitler's political enemies, but within a few years it had evolved into a brutal exemplar of Nazi "extermination through work," a slave labor camp where "undesirable" women -- first German opponents of the regime and prostitutes and criminals, then Gypsies, Jews and resisters -- toiled for the Nazi war machine. By mid-1944, the camp -- a high-walled, barbed-wire hellhole in which 40,000 starving, disease-ridden prisoners were crammed into barracks built for one-fifth that number -- supplied slaves to dozens of satellite camps and factories locally and across Germany.

The camp also served as the training ground for female SS guards, who, like notorious war criminal Irma Grese, then went on to serve in death camps such as Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen or Maidanek. Several dozen, with whips and dogs, ran the barracks alongside armed SS men, and more than 400 others marched the prisoners to their grinding work each day. Historians have shown that virtually all these female SS guards were simple German-speaking women from either the surrounding Mecklenburg region or Austria; most, like Margarete, were under 30, unattached, and had little schooling. Early in the war, many joined of their own initiative, applying for jobs that paid twice what they could make as maids or waitresses. But as demand for labor skyrocketed in 1943, more prisoners were jammed in, and the SS ordered defense contractors whose factories benefited from their slaves -- like Margarete's employer, Ruhrchemie -- to provide the women to guard them. Margarete and her friends had been requisitioned for the women's auxiliary of the SS.

In that hot and beautiful August of 1944, Margarete says, the young women from Ruhrchemie swore to stick together. After being photographed and assigned uniforms -- different, she says, from those of "those other, volunteer guards" -- the three of them signed up to supervise various outside work details: a crew that made wooden shoes in a neighboring village, one that sewed military uniforms, others that grew vegetables for the camp or built roads and landing strips farther afield. Eventually Margarete -- armed with a whistle, should a prisoner bolt -- oversaw a crew in a factory run by the electronics firm Siemens AG, where prisoners made parts for Nazi aircraft and submarines.

At the beginning, Margarete says today, she and her girlfriends had no idea gruesome things were going on. A brief lecture was the extent of her training. Then they were put to work. Each day at 6 a.m., she and several other guards met a small group of prisoners at the front gate and marched them away. At lunch they returned, and in the afternoon she awaited a new assignment or went out again with the same crew. At first, she told Jacobeit, she was homesick and tearful, but it developed into a tedious routine.

The Ruhrchemie girls were afraid from the start of the tougher, veteran guards, according to Margarete. In fact, scores of survivor accounts document the guards' brutality toward the prisoners. The most sadistic guards, in the barracks, forced women to stand barefoot for hours in subfreezing weather, kicked and beat them, and goaded German shepherds to maul their legs. Deputy head overseer Dorothea Binz personally whipped those sent to the camp jail; one survivor recalled Binz, who was later executed for war crimes, forcing her to eat mud-soaked bread "like a dog." Meanwhile, beatings were also common among the guards on work detail, delivered to anyone who slowed production.

Prisoners do recall a few kind young women who took risks trying to make life easier for them, and Margarete, while not claiming any heroism, says she did her best to be kind. She never struck a soul, she says. And, most importantly, at no time, she has insisted from the start, did she actually enter the prisoners' compound. By night, she lived in an SS barracks beyond the camp walls.

"We didn't know, not until the very end," she told a German TV interviewer in 1999, echoing the evasion offered by most Germans of her generation. "We had no choice."

She had just one goal, she said -- to keep her head down and stay out of trouble. It was advice her father gave, when, later that autumn, she was sent to guard a transport of prisoners back to the Ruhr. He was furious to learn where she worked, she said, but she and her friends had been cowed, afraid of the camp Kommandant's order to stop crying or they'd wind up in the camp themselves.