Guarding the Truth

By Alix Christie
Sunday, February 26, 2006

Margarete Barthel says she feels guilty for her wartime role as a guard at Ravensbrueck concentration camp. She also says it was the 'most beautiful' time of her life

The road to Ravensbrueck is buried in the outskirts of an ordinary German town, neither obvious nor clearly marked. Past grime-stained stucco houses frozen for more than half a century by East German communism, the fields and woods stretch east, toward Poland. A ribbon of asphalt breaks right and dips past an aging Soviet tank, then gently toward a pristine lake. Only then do the pocked concrete fence posts appear, with their few clinging strands of wire.

Two rows of three-story chalets with porches and brown shutters overlook the reed-lined lakeshore. It was those "wonderful houses" that Margarete Barthel, gazing out the car window, recognized first. The lake district of Mecklenburg was beautiful, she'd told her children; she'd waited years for the Berlin Wall to fall, to return and look again across the water at the red-tiled roofs of the town of Fuerstenberg.

Hundreds of women had made this pilgrimage since the Cold War ended, passing once more through the outer wall onto a silent plain, empty of all but the foundation lines of the barracks where so many were destroyed. Ravensbrueck, Margarete murmured to her daughter, Monika, who accompanied her on her return. Ravensbrueck, the only Nazi concentration camp dedicated to the incarceration and murder of women. Sixty years after some 30,000 perished here, those who passed through the camp are incessantly drawn back, braving infirmity and grief to retrace this bumpy road. All of them Holocaust survivors -- until that summer day in 1996, when Margarete Barthel walked into the main exhibition hall.

She was 74 then, still robust, intent as she scanned the photos for faces she might know. The docent who approached her took her for a typical visitor -- a Polish communist, French resistante, Czech Jew, perhaps. Margarete shook her head when asked if she needed help. "No, thank you," she responded. "I know my way around." She took a breath, then said it. "I was a guard here."

The telephone rang almost immediately one floor below, in the office of memorial director Sigrid Jacobeit. Even today, remembering that call raises goose flesh on her arms. Never before had one of the 3,500 young German and Austrian women trained to work as guards at Ravensbrueck or elsewhere returned and openly declared herself.

"Here was this woman," says Jacobeit, a slender, intense East German historian who ran the Ravensbrueck memorial from 1992 until her retirement last year. "She looked so -- grandmotherly -- yet she'd been a guard. I didn't know how to approach her." Jacobeit gazes at the photographs of elderly survivors on her office walls. "Then I said to myself, 'She's a human being, after all,' and I went upstairs."

Standing in the upstairs hall, Margarete was nervous but not afraid. She had done it: She had come back, as she felt she must. It had taken a day of travel from the Ruhr Valley, where she grew up and still lives, to the camp, about 50 miles north of Berlin. She did not know then that she was the only SS Aufseherin who had ever dared to show her face -- nor that this peculiar, forthright bluntness of hers would come to undermine the comforting tale of innocence she had told herself for 50 years.

The testimony of everyday German men and women who perpetrated Nazi horror has almost never come to light. Nazi leaders testified in their own postwar trials; a few wrote memoirs. Soldiers left diaries and letters that historians have since unearthed. But the vast majority of Nazi perpetrators -- the millions of low-level functionaries who did the daily, dirty work of genocide -- took their stories with them to the grave. Few divulged their pasts, even to their own families.

Margarete Barthel, now 83 and housebound by arthritis, is a rare exception. She alone has felt driven to try to explain. Not only how she became an SS guard, but also the perverse paradox of her life: That while today she feels guilt for "all those murdered people," the macabre truth is that, "for me, the time in Ravensbrueck was the most beautiful time."

Since coming forward, Margarete has told her story half a dozen times, both at Ravensbrueck and in the cramped living room of her modest row house in Oberhausen, near Duesseldorf. She seemed eager, almost desperate, to talk -- first to the camp historians, who were keen for any information about the guards, and, as time went on, to other researchers and journalists wielding more probing questions. At first, she relished sharing each detail. In her warm face and in her alert and smiling eyes shone a hunger to align fact and memory -- a desire for rehabilitation as a valued source. But then the questions got more pointed. Why had she done it, later interviewers wanted to know. And why, half a century later, did she feel compelled to speak?

All she wants is to set the record straight, Margarete says, for others to see her for the manipulated young woman she believed herself to be, not one of the criminal "blond beasts" that female SS are seen as. Her family learned her secret first -- and they believe her. When her daughter, Monika, was 16, Margarete recounted her life story. "At the time, I was enraged," Monika told one of Jacobeit's researchers in 2004. "But when I learned it wasn't voluntary -- that she'd been sent there -- well, what kind of chance did she have? What could she have done?"

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.

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."

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.

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.