Guarding the Truth

Still, by February 1945, the girls from the Ruhr had taken a step up the SS ladder: Leni and Friedchen were assigned to one of the coveted chalets overlooking the lake, and, after a bout of typhus, Margarete squeezed in a bed, too. "It was a real nice little house," she recalled, while showing Jacobeit through it on her first visit, pointing out the spots where the wardrobes had been, the beds. The rooms were all decorated "with rugs and curtains, and such, from the storehouses -- thick and very modern rugs." On moving in, she was surprised to find a silk comforter waiting on her bed. Each of the guards had one -- looted, like the rugs, from the goods stripped from incoming prisoners. "They had just hauled in all the Jews from France," Margarete recalled in a videotaped interview with Ravensbrueck historians in 2004. "And they always brought their best things, didn't they?"

On the videotape, she smiles, then falters. "I didn't like it -- I always folded it down," she hastily adds.

Nonetheless, she admits grasping eagerly at the perks allowed by the SS leadership: nightly outings to the cinema in nearby Fuerstenberg or the SS theater outside the camp gate, dinners in town, flirting with the SS men and, later, the Siemens engineers. "Dancing was not allowed," Margarete says, with a little giggle, "but we all had boyfriends. The men were allowed to come over in the evenings."

Most of Margarete's memories glitter with the energy of that long-ago youth. She was always bold, a little reckless, she concedes. She didn't make curfew, she chatted with German-speaking prisoners and her friends; she exploited a swollen leg to beg off work. "But there was always this fear, this fear at the back of your neck," she says.

Still, when ordered to accompany the Ruhr transport to the Buchenwald concentration camp in late 1944, for example, she balked. "I was afraid of being stuck with all those tough guards," she said. "I just wanted to be with my friends." So she staged a hunger strike, then faked a pregnancy and, at last, won the return to Ravensbrueck she sought. When she was ordered to explain, she conveniently burst into tears. More than anything, she says today, she wanted to have fun.

"It was my youth, you see, even if it wasn't much of a youth, and we didn't know the worst of what was going on. Truthfully -- we felt so free! The landscape was beautiful, the weather was heavenly."

Margarete felt sorry for the prisoners, she has said, but could not help them. "You had to put your life on the line," she says. "And I wanted to live." Yes, she'd seen the deep wounds on the prisoners' legs, seen other guards hit them. But she did not dwell on it; she shied from "this fear, this threat, which came from the camp." She told the TV reporter in 1999, "You could turn your brain off, if you tried."

When she is asked on camera about the prisoners, her face goes blank. She struggles, then inevitably launches into a happier anecdote: How the prisoners shared their food with her. How much fun they all had roasting potatoes in a field. The times they lied to cover for her, when she had to go to the toilet. "I had a lot of sympathy for them," she murmured in 1999. "And they had a lot for us, too!"

Yet for all these happy memories, the nine months Margarete Barthel worked at Ravensbrueck were the most hideous in the camp's history. While more than 1,000 women a month were dying from the inhuman conditions, skeletal Jewish prisoners from Auschwitz and other eastern camps arrived in waves, evacuated ahead of the approaching Soviet army. With them came the Auschwitz executioners. In short order, Ravensbrueck shifted to the systematic murder of "excess" prisoners unable to work. Kommandant Fritz Suhren ordered a gas chamber built, and the barracks guards began selecting the sick and injured for transfer to the adjacent Uckermark death camp, where as many as 6,000 were gassed or shot.

It was then, Margarete says, that she began to understand what was really going on inside the walls. The executions that began in February 1945, historians say, were carried out in utmost secrecy. But in the morning the work detail guards would see the main gate open, the pavement wet. "From washing down the blood, we assumed," Margarete said. "Sometimes Leni would say, 'Did you hear the shooting last night?'" Later that warm spring, from their chalet, the closest to the camp wall, they'd see flames shooting out of the crematorium chimney. "My friend at the office said they were burning files, but it was a sweetish smell, nauseating. I said to Leni, 'Smell that. You know what, they're burning people in there,'" she recalls. "I'd tell Leni, 'Shut the window, it stinks.'"

When the order to evacuate came on April 27, the SS hauled out the stores of candy, champagne and vodka, and the guards got drunk. Margarete and the others helped themselves to Red Cross food packets intended for the prisoners. Thousands of prisoners were forced on death marches; at the same time, in an effort to buy favorable treatment from the Allies, SS chief Heinrich Himmler allowed thousands more to be bused to Sweden. Margarete and Friedchen accompanied a column westward, in trucks. At Neustadt-Glewe, they met a drunken Suhren, who would later be captured and executed for his crimes. He told them that Germany had capitulated and that they should try to find their way home. So Margarete and Friedchen set off on foot, discarding all traces of the SS but their boots. Leather boots were priceless then, after all; Margarete kept hers until 1956.

The industrial Ruhr is green now, the coal mines and factories that fueled Germany's postwar economic miracle for the most part buried under trees and sod. Of the Ruhrchemie comrades who returned to the rubble in 1945, only Margarete Barthel is still alive. Despite her contention that the company had lied to her, Margarete returned to work at the long gray plant, now a subsidiary of the global conglomerate Celanese Corp. She was 22 and wild, she says. "I could have used a psychotherapist, for sure," she remembers. "I just wanted to get out, get out -- I felt like I had missed out on so much."