Le baiser de la Butte Montmartre

Guarding the Truth

By Alix Christie
Sunday, February 26, 2006; Page 08 Washington Post

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

“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.”

(…)

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 ?”

(…)

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.”

(…)

“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.”

(…)

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?”

(…)

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.

(…)

“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.”

(…)

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.’”

(…)

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.

(…)

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.”

(…)

“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 [German social psychologist Harald Welzer, 47] told an audience in Berlin recently.

(…)

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.”