Guarding the Truth

Simone Erpel, 42, curator of the exhibit and an expert on Ravensbrueck's final years, says it is "self-serving nonsense" to assert, as Margarete does, that there were two kinds of guards. There was no categorical moral difference between the volunteers and the drafted -- there weren't even the two distinct uniforms Margarete has cited. Margarete, as she herself admitted, heard the gunshots, saw the flames and the corpses. She was, Erpel says, as much a part of the daily horror of Ravensbrueck as any other guard.

It is incontestable that Margarete set foot inside the camp, Erpel says. She ate her meals in the SS canteen inside the gate, overlooking the prisoners at roll call. After repeated denials, Margarete herself let slip in 2004 that this "could take your appetite away." Yet once off-duty, she bolted for the movies, the dinners of fried potatoes and wurst in town. She flirted and slept with a lover, like the rest of the guards.

Perhaps most damning, it's clear that Margarete had at least one opportunity to leave the camp. In the early spring of 1945, she was actually ordered to leave. She had developed thrombosis in one leg, making it painful to walk or to stand, and was deemed "unfit for work." But the freedom of being on her own, and the pull of her girlfriends and a Prussian lover, convinced her otherwise. The Americans had already crossed the Rhine, she says: Where was she supposed to go? She refused.

"When people don't consider the work they are doing in such a concentration camp as remarkable, or particularly awful, then why shouldn't they do what in any other situation they would do?" asks German social psychologist Harald Welzer, 47. "We all go dancing after work, meet friends."

This juxtaposition of horror by day and entertainment by night is typical of low-level Nazi perpetrators, says Welzer, whose newly published book -- a study of a German police battalion that shot tens of thousands of Jews in Poland during the war -- is titled Perpetrators: How Utterly Ordinary People Became Mass Murderers. It's one of many recent studies concluding that most of those who participated in the genocide were neither National Socialist zealots nor sociopaths, but average people who slipped, bit by bit, into evil. Virtually all the battalion's members, he says, considered what they were doing normal. It was simply a job -- unpleasant, sometimes upsetting, but ultimately necessary and unavoidable. "Very, very rarely do you have any evidence that any of these people felt they had done anything wrong," he told an audience in Berlin recently.

The key to understanding this behavior, says Welzer, is to realize that under the Third Reich, a gradual process of exclusion took place. By the time war broke out, the perception of the "other," primarily Jews, as a threat to the majority had become so pervasive that otherwise moral people accepted their "duty" to do whatever was required to protect their community.

Margarete appears to have been no different. She was 9 when Hitler seized power; she read Der Stuermer, the rabid anti-Semitic paper (though she says she laughed at it). She wanted so badly to be in the League of German Girls (the female version of the Hitler Youth) that when her father refused to let her join, she begged her mother to sew her a uniform on the sly. All her memories of Ravensbrueck seem to underscore one dynamic: The guards belonged to the in-group, Jews and other "undesirables" to the out.

Erpel has documented cases of guards at Ravensbrueck who did refuse to serve in the camps. Refusing was difficult, indisputably, but it could be done. A woman could plead illness, elderly parents, fake a pregnancy; Margarete had already shown herself willing to do just that. More to the point, "there is not one documented case -- not one!" says Erpel vehemently, of a woman being punished for refusing to serve.

Welzer found the same. Even when police were explicitly excused from the mass slaughter of Jews, without adverse consequences, no more than 10 of 400 refused to shoot. "You realize with horror," he says, "that it was easier to decide to participate in mass murder than to break away from the dominant group."

Margarete Barthel -- like most -- chose to remain a guard out of fear and opportunism; there is little evidence that her own conscience troubled her that much at the time. In all the anecdotes, only once does she mention a moment in which the barbarity made her cry -- when a child was pulled, howling, from its mother's arms, outside what could only have been a death transport at the Ravensbrueck gate.

By last April, the anniversary of the camp's liberation, Margarete thought she'd said as much as she wanted to say. There had been a "mean article" in a local paper; she had fallen ill; her children begged her to stop doing interviews. She watched on television as the survivors of Ravensbrueck returned and examined the guard exhibit, some of them gazing for the first time in half a century on the faces of the guards who'd tormented them.

Yet Margarete's long journey had changed her -- to a degree. In 1999, she had divulged a final, taboo wish: to have her own ashes laid to rest at the camp. Asked why, she now says: "The ashes of all those women were just thrown into the lake. I had this feeling that I belonged there, too -- as a kind of apology."

But that apology, for many, can never be accepted.

Zophia Shulman, 75, was 14 when she was deported as a Jew from the Warsaw Ghetto to Ravensbrueck. A resident of Hartsdale, N.Y., she, too, returned for the 60th anniversary ceremonies. Surveying the bare, wind-whipped grounds alongside her husband, a survivor of the nearby Sachsenhausen camp, her dark eyes flashed.

Shulman sees no real difference among the guards. "They all participated, whether passively or actively," she says. "They did not shy away from participating, none of them."

Alix Christie lives in Berlin. She has reported for the San Francisco Chronicle, the Guardian of London, the Economist and Salon.