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

[...]

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.

[...]

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."

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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.

[...]

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.'"

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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?"

[...] 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.

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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.