Dan Snow's History Hit - Escape From a Nazi Concentration Camp

Episode Date: March 7, 2022

In April 1945, weeks before the Nazi defeat, nine women made a last-ditch escape from the concentration camp at Ravensbruck. The group, who had all been imprisoned for resistance activity, then undertook a perilously 10-day journey across Nazi frontlines. In today's episode, Dan speaks to Gwen Strauss, whose great-aunt was among the nine, about how she uncovered the details of this incredible escape whilst researching her book. If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.

Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History. I've got an extraordinary tale of survival and heroism on the podcast now. A tale of female French resistance fighters who were in Ravensbrück concentration camp at the end of the Second World War, the dying days of the Second World War. They risked death daily, starvation, disease, brutality at the hands of their SS captors. They were also terrified about the advancing Red Army hearing tales of the war crimes being committed. Terrified they'd be caught up in the wave of sexual assault that was coming in the tracks of the Red Army advance and so they decided while they still could to break out. They seized their opportunity in a moment of chaos and the

nine of them battled their way across Germany towards the advancing American troops. It's an extraordinary story. It's a story told by Gwen Strauss. She's an American author living in Paris. She's the great-niece of one of the women, and it was very late in her great-aunt's life that she finally sat down and told her family members

what she'd been through. Gwen was able to do some detective work and has written an extraordinary account of these nine women, what they did during the war and what happened to been through. Gwen was able to do some detective work and has written an extraordinary account of these nine women, what they did during the war and what happened to them afterwards. This is one of the most remarkable true stories that they'll come across

from the dying days of the Second World War. If you want more stories like this, for example, the story of the Great Escape, the famous Great Escape, or as we say, the real Great Escape, an equally fascinating escape that took place during the Second World War, but far less known,

you can find all that at History Hit TV. So we keep all the back episodes of this podcast without the ads, but also where we have hundreds of hours of history documentaries for true history fans. It's like Netflix, but just for history. So please do go and check that out on History Hit TV. If you follow the link in the description for this podcast, you will get taken straight there and you'll get two weeks free if you check it out now. But in the meantime, here is Gwen Strauss talking about nine very remarkable women. Gwen, thank you very much for coming to the

podcast. Thank you for inviting me. Ravensbrück is one of those names that fills you with horror, but I didn't realize that the particular nature of the camp, its character. What were the origins of Ravensbrück? How is it different from other camps in the system? Well, first of all, it's the only camp that was built for women, exclusively for women. It had a long history. It started in 1939 and was one of the last camps to be liberated in April of 1945. So it was also one of the longest running concentration camps. The first group of prisoners, I think they were around 900, and it was really just a kind of a prison for supposedly re-educating sort of wayward women. But quite quickly, Himmler saw the opportunity to use the slave labor. And of course, once the war started, there was an influx of huge amounts,

and there was up to 45. It was built for 3,000 women, but by 1944, there were 45,000 women there in just abhorrent conditions, as you can imagine, overcrowding. And about 130,000 went through that camp over the period of the war. Estimates of the mortality are still in dispute because the SS was able to burn all the documents before the Russians liberated the camp. And so the estimates of the mortality go anywhere from 30,000 to 90,000 who died there. Who were these women that were being sent there initially before the war? So before the war, there were some political prisoners. There were some women who had been in the Reichstag, definitely a group of communists who had an opposition to fascism. So originally it was sort of political prisoners. And then there was a group of hardened kind of

common criminals. There was Jehovah's Witness. They were kind of a thorn in the side of the Nazis because they thought Hitler was the Antichrist. So there was a group of them. There was also race shamers. Those would be women that had, Jewish women that had slept with German men. And then there were some Jews, but ironically at the beginning, this is before the final solution. So they had this idea of get the Jews out of Germany. And if you could pay your way out, you're free to go. So the first groups were these criminals and then political prisoners and Jehovah's Witnesses. And then quite quickly, there was this idea of the asocials, which was a concept Himmler developed of, you know, basically vagrants, widows, homeless,

lesbians, the Roma and Sinti people, anyone kind of that was seen as not deserving to live and would somehow muddy the pure Aryan blood. Were conditions barbarte from the beginning? No, actually in the early days, but really early, there was kind of a conflict because the head guard was this woman named Joanna Langefeld, and she didn't believe in beating women. She came from a social work background, kind of. Anyway, she thought that it was a sort of re-education for women, though she was deeply anti-Semitic and really loved Hitler and really loved Himmler. She kind of thought these women deserved a chance, though not the Jewish women. And on the other side, there was an SS commander named Kögel,

who really believed that the camp should be just like the male concentration camps. He was trained in Dachau. He was very good friends with Haas, who became the head of Auschwitz. You know, he believed really in violent and really sadistic punishments. So once the war started and there started to be this influx of a lot of Polish women, Polish political prisoners, and the crowding started to happen, there was a punishment block was built. And then Kogel fought for and got from Himmler permission to have beatings. And then it begins to be like any concentration camp. What were conditions like at the end of the war in spring 1945?

They were awful. Really, really awful. First of all, Ravensbrück was the second largest concentration camp after Auschwitz-Birkenau. And it was severely overcrowded. Like I said, there was 45,000 people for a place for 3,000. It was so overcrowded and it was built on the edge of a lake that was kind of a swamp. They had built these sort of tents. Women were living in their knee deep in mud. The last groups of women that had come from the East, a lot of them gave birth. A lot of them became pregnant because they'd been raped by German soldiers.

There was incredible death soldiers. There was incredible death rates. There was a crematorium. There were gassings. There was executions every day. By the end of the war, it was kind of a chaotic, nightmarish, horrific place. Sort of breakdown of order. Even as the Red Cross was organizing the saving and liberation of women, the SS commander at the time was continuing with this, trying to kill as many people as he could. They had medical experiments there. A lot of the Sinti and Roma girls were just horribly massacred by the doctors trying to find ways to mass sterilize unwanted populations. Because the idea too was, oh, maybe we won't kill these unwanted people. We'll keep them alive

so that we have this slave labor, but we don't want them to reproduce. So it was really horrific at the end. And then you identify these nine women who worked together and managed to break out. First of all, what they were doing in the camp in the first place, they came from all over Europe. Yes, they did in a way, but they really came from France. There were six French women, two Dutch women, and one Spaniard.

And they had all been arrested in the resistance in France. The two Dutch, for example, had come to Paris to join the Dutch resistance. And actually, both of them walked right into a trap. So they actually didn't have time to join the resistance. They were picked up immediately. The Spaniard was a young child, probably of Spanish refugees, was in the foster care home, grew up there. And it was a home that was hiding Jewish children. All of the women were all from around France. And one of them,

the reason I know this story, one of them was my great aunt, my great aunt, Hélène, Hélène Podliarski. And it was a story that she told me when she was 83. So it was 60 years later, because it happened when she was 22, 3, 4, 5, and around those ages. She had been in the resistance in France, and she was pretty important in the resistance. She was an agent de liaison, but she was also in charge of a pretty large region. And she got picked up and arrested by the Gestapo, tortured and everything. And finally, she was deported to Ravensbrück. And on the same transport was a friend of hers from high school named Zaza. So my great aunt

told me the story and I asked, it was kind of surprising because she had never really talked about it, that I knew of anyway. I asked her if I could come back and record it, which I did with another member of my family. We made a transcript of the interview this sort of afternoon together. She corrected it and then that was sort of it. But then a few years later, I ran into a book. It was published by another one of the women in the group, Zaza. And it seemed kind of similar. My great aunt couldn't remember the names of the other women. She didn't really remember how many women there were. You know, there was a lot of holes in her memory when she told me the story. So then I read Zaza's account,

which had been written immediately after the war, but not published until 20 years after her death. And it seemed similar. So I showed it to Hélène and she confirmed that indeed Zaza was her friend, Suzanne Modet, and that that was the group of women. And so it was sort of from there that I began to kind of figure out who they were.

That is the most unbelievably exciting thing to happen, isn't it? I mean, particularly because it's a family member, but to have that kind of corroboration and start to fit that jigsaw together must have been extraordinary. It was because there wasn't really enough material from what Hélène had told me to be able to figure out exactly. And I found out later real inconsistencies in her story. And Zaza's account was really written almost immediately after the war. So it had a lot of details in it. And then I was able to find a few other accounts. One was one of the Dutch women. Two documentary filmmakers contacted my Tante Hélène because they were making a documentary about one of the Dutch women, Lone, who had written also a book, but near the

end of her life in Dutch. And so they ended up doing this film, which was really beautiful because by the time they got together to do it, it was really near the end of Elan and Elen's life. And they were the only two left living in the group of nine. And so the documentary has this really beautiful reunion with the two of them after 60 years. This is extraordinary. Now, did these women, had they formed a bond in Ravensbrück or were they thrown together by circumstance in the kind of chaos of the last days of the Reich? They were in Ravensbrück and they were in the political group, the French political prisoners bloc, where most of them became quite close to each other. It was kind of a tight-knit group. They were selected from there to go as slave labor to Haseg Leipzig, which is an armaments factory, because most of the women were used as labor. And the Reich made a lot of money off of this. They sold their labor

to the German industries and they would get paid for it. And women were cheaper. So the German industries loved using women. And they also lived longer. Men would die sooner than women in these factories. So these young women were sent off to Leipzig and they were working in an armaments factory making Panzerfaust. These are these shoulder-held grenade launchers. And the part that my Tante Hélène was very proud of was she was able to sabotage them And she was an engineer and a mathematician. She spoke Russian, German, Polish, English, French, all fluently. She befriended the German factory foreman, and his name was Fritz Stupitz. I think he fell in love with her. He started to help her and put her in charge of the thermostats. And with her understanding of engineering, she was able to trick the temperature gauges on the thermostats so that the forging process didn't work. And even though they would come out looking red hot, they would actually, upon use, would blow up in the soldiers' faces.

Wow. Yeah. And it's really kind of crazy. She was really proud of this, as well she should be, because she said it made her feel like she was still a soldier in the fight, that she had some control over her life in a way. The factory kept getting inspected by German SS because something was wrong, but they couldn't figure out what it was. They never suspected women were capable of sabotage like that, so they never got caught. But the factory was also known by the Allies as being an armament factory, so it was often bombed. And it was ruined in April. So in April, they were

set off on a march, you know, like a death march from Leipzig. And that's where they escaped from. They were able to escape in that chaotic moment. So during the march, they break away together. Was it a spur of the moment thing? Had they stored any supplies? So what happened was they, first they set off, they were being sent towards Dresden. They knew that things were bad. They knew that Russians were coming from one side. They knew the Allies weren't far away. Also, there had been a group of women from Auschwitz who had marched from Auschwitz into their camp.

They had saved a few of them, Jewish women, by ripping off their yellow stars and hiding them in their block. And from those women, they had learned a lot about what had been going on in the East and also the death marches. So by this point, they know that if they don't try to escape, they're going to die. Alain had been trying to escape for a long time. In fact, Fritz had given her wire clippers and he was trying to get her papers. But she had always wanted Zaza to go with her and Zaza didn't want to. So they had been planning to escape or at least to try. didn't want to you know so they had been planning to escape or at least to try but when the march comes i think at that point and i think lon really insisted to everybody look we have to escape we

can't just march to our death they're going to just shoot us in a field at the end of this which is true actually so they decide to escape then they realize they have to all escape together they're in these rows of five and it should have been 10 of them, but one woman balked at the last minute. And basically there was a moment of chaos when the guards weren't paying attention that they were able to slide out into a ditch and they piled on top of each other and acted like corpses. They had passed so many piles of corpses

that this was a way to hide. And then they let the march go past them. But then they were in the middle of Germany, in Saxony, in the middle of the war, and they had to find the troops. And the march go past them. But then they were in the middle of Germany, in Saxony, in the middle of the war, and they had to find the troops. And the escape starts there, really. It's like 10 days of them trying to figure out how to survive and find the Americans and not find the Russians. We listen to Dan Snow's history.

We're talking about nine female resistance fighters who escaped the SS. More coming up. Hello, I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb. And on my podcast, Not Just the Tudors, I like to talk with historians about, well, just about everyone and everything. From the real Anne Boleyn. Everyone that knew her said how engaging she was. To a superstar artist. It's hard not to pay attention to Dura. From celebrity executioners. It's a big public spectacle. All the eyes are on you. To a teenage werewolf. There's one story of an infant who was taken by a wolf and eaten behind a hedge.

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Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts. Tell me, how did that journey go? Did they walk? Were they able to get transport? They walked. They didn't walk very far. I mean, part of the way this all started for me was I was trying to figure out where they, on the map, sort of where they went. And I thought, well, I'll go with my daughter and we'll just trace their journey and I'll write an

article. That was kind of my plan. Immediately became so much more when I saw the camps. But they walked from basically Leipzig towards Kolditz. They didn't walk very far. They were really in bad shape. You know, one of them had diphtheria. One of them had tuberculosis. They had broken bones. They were starved. The average life expectancy for a person in a Hasag factory for a man was three months

and for a woman was six months. And they had already been working in that factory for nine months. So they were in really bad condition. They were able to walk maybe 5, 10, sometimes 15 kilometers a day. And they would go to a town, Elen and Lohn, because they're the two that spoke German. They kind of created this really interesting strategy that's kind of counterintuitive. They figured it out pretty early on because they ran into a group of soldiers and they just acted as if they were supposed to be there.

So they would try to find the head of whatever village and talk to him and act as if they had every right to be there and they needed help and they needed someplace to sleep that night and some food. Because presumably there were refugees all over the place now. There were, but they were also going after refugees. The SS was in retreat and they passed, you know, camp escapees who had been caught and hung.

There was even a thing called a rabbit hunt in one village where they had gone off hunting refugees. It was very dangerous. And they did come to hostile villages where they had to make a quick getaway. They were smart. Theain was very beautiful. I mean, I think they used their charms too, but they came to one place where the police wanted to arrest them and the policeman was screaming and everything. And Alain was able to talk him down and explain that really they were just a group of women that didn't know anything,

that they had just been working in Germany for the Germans. And now they just want to go home. And they just wanted to avoid the front at all costs. Could they just, could you please just show them a map or draw a little map for them of where they should go? And somehow she talked him into drawing this map on the police letterhead paper. So it looked like a pass, like he was giving them a pass. And from then on, they would brandish that paper and say, we were given the police at Reitz and said that we have this pass partout. They used all these different ways to sort of subvert. The German soldiers hated the SS at this point in the war. And at one point, for example, they run into a group of German soldiers, deserters,

who finding out that the women had come from the SS and from the camps, take them in. They hated the SS. Everything's falling apart in Germany, really. There's also people who see the end of the war and they want to be on the right side of history. So they're nicer to them than they probably would be. And then there were some genuinely nice people who helped them. And they are suffering as well. Right.

There's been terrible loss. There's hunger everywhere. That part of Germany is completely bombed and devastated. I mean, it's a real kind of a terrible time and terrible place. And they get bombed a few times by the Allies, the women do, as they're walking, because the Allies don't know who they are. So it's crazy. Did they believe? It was the Americans they were aiming for, right?

Yeah, the Americans are nothing. They had heard also from other women who had come, especially women from Hungary and Poland who had come to the camp, that the Russians were just brutal and that you didn't want to be caught by the Russians, which proved to be true. I mean, the Russians had reasons to be brutal. They had been completely decimated. The amount of loss and death and

carnage the Russians had suffered was so much greater. But in reaction, they basically rampaged raping any woman they found, basically. So the women were very scared of that, scared of being taken by the Russians. When the Russian soldiers liberated Ravensbrück, it's awful, but they raped many of the women there in the camps who were on death's door. They weren't wrong in being frightened. I mean, not to say that the American soldiers didn't also do rape, but it was of a different order. Anyway, so the women were terrified of that possibility. The Americans, everything about America was mythical. They were going to be the great saviors. So the culminating day of their escape is when they had to cross the

Molde River because that was the frontier. They found out between, they knew the Americans were on the other side of the river. That was the front line. And there were snipers and all of the women's families that I spoke with, because I found all the different women and found out who they were, and then went and interviewed their different families. And as much as they knew about what their aunt or their mother or their sister had told them, they had pretty much all talked about that the day that they crossed the river, because it was terrifying. And some of them couldn't swim, and the river was in flood, and the bridge had been bombed. So it was terrifying and some of them couldn't swim and the river was in flood and the bridge had been bombed so that it was quite harrowing but they made it across the mold and

then they were walking through the forest it was sort of the end of their rope they were really really falling apart but they had always had this really strong sense of solidarity anytime one of them would want to give up they would insist on there was all or nothing. They had to stick together as a group. And I think that's a lot of how they were able to survive. But they were walking through the woods and it was raining and there was wind and they had been shot at. Also, every village they go to, people are terrified. The Americans are coming, the Russians are coming, you know. And they get to this clearing in the woods where two of the women collapsed. They couldn't go on and they wouldn't leave without them. And in the distance, they saw a car coming with a gun mounted on the front. And they had been warned that the SS

were retreating and shooting anything that they saw. And so they were terrified this was SS. And they were trying to get the women up. But then Tante Hélène noticed that the color of the license plate was yellow which wasn't the color of the German license plates by then the jeep drove up and it was like two American soldiers and one American soldier said do you want to smoke that's what they all remember chewing gum and cigarettes so the soldiers took them to Kolditz castle and then later to a refugee camp. But Hélène ended up getting hired by the general there, the American general, to be a translator for him because she spoke all these languages. And there were, as you said, refugees everywhere and also Nazis trying to act like refugees to sort of slip through and the just general chaos and the real logistics for the American

army at that point was how to deal with all of these civilians while trying to carry on with a war. So they needed somebody who could communicate and help them with the questions and figure out who's who, sort things out. So she did that till the end of the war. Did they see each other again? Actually, one of the things that's kind of interesting she told me this part of the story is that they gave elena gigantic chrysler with a big star painted on it and she was able to drive it around the countryside she was able to requisition gas wherever she needed it so she filled up the car with all this canned food from the american commissary. And she drove to the village where Fritz Stupitz lived.

And she found him and gave him all this food. So I think that they were quite close. I don't think they had, she said they weren't romantic, but I think she felt incredibly grateful to him. And they stayed in contact. Then she drove home to her family. Some of the women stayed in contact for their whole lives. Some of them had become friends and were godparents to each other's children. And some of them really drifted away. One of them, for example, I was not able to find very much about her and none of the others knew where she was. The youngest one, the Spanish girl, Jose Bordenava. They were reunited when the Dutch filmmakers started to work on the documentary film. They were able to reunite some of the ones who were still alive.

And they got together and talked about what had happened. So there was a few of them that stayed close, and Hélène stayed close to a few of them as well. Did they all have different health and mental health outcomes? Did they all wear their experiences differently? Or was there anything that was universal for all of them? Well, they were all traumatized pretty profoundly. I have to say some of them fared better than others. They all went on and had lives, though one of them was quite ill and didn't live very long.

She had been arrested pregnant in France. What happened was her husband and her were both in the resistance and he had been arrested pregnant in France. What happened was her husband and her were both in the resistance, and he had been arrested. She went to the prison to tell him that she was pregnant because she thought that would give him, you know, will to live. And the Gestapo arrested her on the spot because she was also on the list of wanted people. And they didn't deport her right away, so she's in France, in Fren prison, and she gives birth to a baby that she names France.

And then she was deported after a couple of months. So she had her baby for 18 days and the baby was taken away from her. That's Zinka. And she talked all the time about her daughter and wanting to get back to France and everything. So when I first started the project researching, I really thought, well, France could still be alive. She was born in 1943.

And I thought if I could find her, that would be really great. And I was sort of miraculously able to find her by the end of all the research I found France and saw her. She knew who her mother was. And she had seen her mother, of course, after the war, she'd been reunited with her, but she didn't know any of the story of the escape or any of it. And it was really kind of an incredible meeting with her because I had been looking for her for so long. And I said, you know, you can't believe how long I've been looking for you. And she said, well, you know, imagine me, it's been 70 years to learn all this about my mother. So what I learned from her and also from some of the other children was their parents or their mothers didn't talk about what had happened to them.

It was really a secret, kind of a taboo subject, much more for women than for men, I think, because they weren't taken seriously as really being real resistance fighters. And there was something kind of like almost shameful about it or something like who knows what they really did in the resistance, you know, wink, wink. They were young and beautiful. They were all in their 20s. So a lot of them didn't talk about it, and I think that had an effect on the children. The children, like France, felt abandoned in a way or had some serious problems.

Zaza's children had very tragic. I think two of them committed suicide. I learned a lot about transgenerational trauma from this story. A lot of the children really suffered. I think they suffered because they didn't know why there was this sadness, a kind of deep sadness. And I think the women were all suffered from your classic PTSD. Plus, they'd had this intense friendship, this intense time together. And I don't know if they ever had that again, either. I think it's the same thing that soldiers feel after the war that they've made these friendships that they'll never be able to experience that kind of heightened adrenaline moments, you know.

to experience that kind of heightened adrenaline moments, you know. Alain went on to have a career as a scientist. She had a child. She was married a few times. She suffered from severe depression at the end of her life. Some of the women didn't have children, but a lot of them had children. Some of them did better than others. But it was an experience that shaped an enduring impact on their lives. None of them brushed it off.

No, no. It was definitely profound for all of them. Do you think any of them regretted that they got involved, that they got hooked up with the resistance in the first place? So one of my favorite ones is Mena. She was a French girl from Brittany, kind of working class factory girl in Paris. And she definitely was a flirt and she loved to be in love. I sympathize with her. I really felt close to her.

And she said that basically she joined because she was in love with this guy and he was in the resistance. And if she had known, she never would have done it. But at the same time, she became lifelong friends with Gigi, one of the other women that she met in the camps. And she was very beloved by the other women. And I mean, I think she was one of the more kind of dreamy ones, a little kind of head in the clouds.

And she ended up having not a very great marriage. She died young, as did her daughter. But her grandson spoke with me. And he had been told by his mother all the stories of the camp and of his grandmother. And he said it was kind of almost like a sacred transmission when his mother told him all this stuff about his grandmother. And Mena had made out of the coat that she wore the whole time that she was in the camp, she made a baby blanket for her daughter

and then later a baby teddy bear, stuffed teddy bear for her grandson from that coat. So it was obviously important to her a defining experience wow thank you so much for sharing i mean this is it's been intense yeah i've just been talking straight through i'm sorry that's what everyone's here for not listen to me listen to you um what is your book called? My book is called The Nine and it's available in, I hope, in most bookstores. It's available everywhere, I'm sure. Thank you so much for coming on. Thank you very much. Thanks for having me.

whose history has longed. This part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished. Thanks, folks. You've reached the end of another episode. Hope you're still awake. Appreciate your loyalty. Sticking through to the end.

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