Guarding the Truth

She says she was open about her time at Ravensbrueck, and quickly learned that this service had branded her for life. "There was always this strange aftertaste when I told people," she recalls. "I always said it wasn't voluntary -- but I couldn't get that to sink in." She married in 1949 and stopped working to raise four children; she and her husband later separated. Friedchen, she says, drank and took pills, and was dead within a decade. From time to time, she met up with Leni, before she, too, died, in 1997.

Margarete wanted to forget; all of German society wanted to forget. And this vow of silence succeeded for a time. Then, in the 1960s, historians outside Germany began to document the precise dimensions of Germany's guilt. It was 20 more years before German historians began publishing accounts of the crimes, including the first book about the Holocaust that Margarete clearly remembers having bought and read. "It was on Bergen-Belsen," she says. Then she bought more books, and more. "I have Auschwitz . . ., the experiments, Ravensbrueck," she says, ticking them off. "Because we didn't know. There is so much in those books we simply didn't know."

Much of it, she says, was too gruesome for words. How the SS had dumped the ashes of murdered prisoners in the lake, for example. "I told Leni, and we were horrified; we said to ourselves, 'Thank God we never swam there.'"

The more she read, she says, the more she realized what she had been party to -- and the greater her desire to prove she had not been one of those "brutal guards." In the privacy of her living room, she set out on her long, tortuous effort to explain. From the first time she told her daughter, in the 1960s, Margarete stressed her own innocence: She was a draftee; Ruhrchemie, which had lied to her, was the guilty party. "We should have gotten together and sued the company, or gone to the British," she told Jacobeit. Over time, she emerged with a convoluted trope that she would repeat forever after. "I felt I was made innocently guilty -- you could say that, couldn't you?"

Sigrid Jacobeit prizes the spark that makes us human. She knows better than most how easily it is lost -- she is a Holocaust historian, after all, and an East German. It was this quality of empathy, her refusal to pass easy judgment, that initially created a margin of safety for Margarete and her memories.

"It's very easy to judge all of these women and say they were all perpetrators, sadists who set dogs on the women, but the core question is, why?" says Jacobeit. "So many of them came for such banal reasons -- to get out of their parents' house, make money, maybe get a man. We have to try to understand these women -- and yet at the same time not understand the fact that they stayed."

Jacobeit doesn't think that Margarete, whom she sees as genuinely haunted by a kind of "leaden guilt," was necessarily among the worst, most brutal guards. Of all the survivors who have now heard her story, or seen her picture in print or on television, none has come forward to say she remembers Margarete; her words cannot be compared with any eyewitness account. "If you were to call her a criminal, it would surely wound her," Jacobeit says, but "the fact is, she was here, she supported the overall goal."

Deep down, Margarete must know it, too. Repeatedly, she has asked Jacobeit to find another former guard she could meet, or a former prisoner. She has to know, she says, whether the others knew more than she had; she needs to understand how she failed to see. In the 1999 TV interview, for the first time she admitted a small measure of guilt. "It still burdens me, even though I didn't do anything," she said. "The fact that I was there at all -- that I stood there and watched without trying to do anything against it."

Among Ravensbrueck survivors interviewed for this article, reaction to Margarete's story was unanimous: indignation and disgust. In the words of one of them, Batsheva Dagan, now a noted Israeli psychologist, "she's just looking for absolution."

Vera Gold was only 12 in 1944, a Jewish girl ripped from her Slovakian home. Her mother died en route to Bergen-Belsen; she and her sister survived Ravensbrueck and emigrated to Toronto after the war. Returning to Ravensbrueck's lakeshore 60 years later, Gold looked aghast across the water, measuring the scant half-mile between the camp and Fuerstenberg's red roofs. She feels about Margarete the same way she does about those townspeople. "Nobody knew?" she said bitterly. "How could they not have seen?"

For Ravensbrueck historians, Margarete's burden was a boon -- her surprise appearance sparked groundbreaking research into the last, untold chapter of the Third Reich. Starting in 2002, the historians combed through bank records to learn more about the SS female auxiliary -- work that culminated in an exhibit, "In the Wake of the SS: Female Guards at Ravensbrueck," which opened in time for the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the camp last April. Though former guards were studded across the region, the researchers located only one other willing to be identified -- and no one willing to meet with Margarete.

At the same time, the scrutiny of a younger, less forgiving generation of historians and journalists began to expose the cracks in Margarete's story.