New book, by Sarah Helm, about Ravensbrück camp for women, will be out Jan.15, 2015

Cover of new book by Sarah Helm

I have ordered a copy of the new book, written by Sarah Helm, which is available from amazon.com. The book is about the women’s concentration camp at Ravensbrück.

You can see photos of the alleged Ravensbrück gas chamber on this blog: http://roadstakenfromtravelerdrive.wordpress.com/tag/ravensbruck-concentration-camp/

I wrote about the Ravensbrück concentration camp for women in this previous blog post:

https://furtherglory.wordpress.com/2010/04/29/gas-chamber-at-ravensbruck-womens-camp/

and in this previous blog post:

https://furtherglory.wordpress.com/2012/06/23/the-ravensbruck-gas-chamber-and-the-lachout-document/

Sarah Helm has written extensively about the British SOE women, who were allegedly killed by the Germans in World War II. I used information from her books on my website at http://www.scrapbookpages.com/DachauScrapbook/BritishSOEagents.html

Now Sarah Helm has written a new book about the women prisoners at the Ravensbrück camp; her book will be out on January 15 this year.

You can read more about the gas chamber at Ravensbrück on this website:  http://www.deathcamps.org/gas_chambers/gas_chambers_ravensbrueck.html

[The following information was] Extracted from [Sarah Helm’s new book entitled] If This Is A Woman: Inside Ravensbruck, Hitler’s Concentration Camp For Women by Sarah Helm, to be published on January 15, price £25.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2903887/Nazi-death-camp-WOMEN-s-shocking-medical-experiments-injected-prisoners-petrol-syphilis.html#ixzz3OSrPS5y4

The title of Sarah Helm’s book is  similar to the title of a famous poem entitled “If this is a Man,” written by Primo Levi. I blogged about him at https://furtherglory.wordpress.com/2011/01/10/primo-levi-the-story-of-ten-days-jan-18th-to-jan-27th-1945/

This quote is from the news article in the Daily Mail newspaper:

The air was thick with smoke from the crematorium [at Ravensbruck]. Its three furnaces could barely keep pace.

The gassing at Ravensbruck went on almost right to the end, even during air raids and when Russian guns could be heard in the distance. Over one weekend alone, 2,500 women were gassed.

The aim was to destroy evidence of what had happened there before the Allies arrived.

But there were still thousands left on site on April 30, 1945, when the surviving women awoke to the roar of Russian artillery, the gunfire so close that the sky above the perimeter wall lit up.

The SS guards had fled, and the women prepared a red banner to hang across the camp gates.

But their Red Army ‘liberators’ brought a fresh horror — rape.

Ever since it had crossed the German border, the advancing Red Army had engaged in sexual rampage and now it even raped these starved concentration camp women — many of them fellow Russians.

On entering the gates, these new arrivals would stare in horror and disbelief at the corpse carts, the emaciated forms squatting around the kitchen block and the crematorium furnaces billowing smoke.

The conditions took a terrifying toll. Broken by slave labour, weakened by disease and starvation, beaten to a pulp for no reason, the women succumbed in droves — as was intended.

Ravensbruck had been built as nothing short of an enormous death machine where everything was designed to kill.Those who became too ill or exhausted to work were ‘selected’ for extermination.

Volleys of gunshots from the woods behind the camp signified a new round of killings. Trucks regularly arrived — known as Himmelfahrt (‘heaven-bound’) or black transports — to take away batches of women for unknown destinations from which they would never return.

Later these turned out to be the gas chambers of secret Nazi killing centres in Germany or Austria or — more often — the death camps of Auschwitz or Belsen.

The inspiration behind this facsimile of hell was Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, who supervised the network of concentration camps. He was a frequent visitor.
To aid the wholesale slaughter, Himmler now decreed that Ravensbruck should have its own gas chamber, which was built in January 1945. The camp had become overcrowded to breaking point and he needed to make space for even more prisoners, especially with the camps in the East forced to close.

Shooting and poisoning took too long. Gassing was quicker. It would double the numbers killed. A temporary gas chamber was fashioned out of an old tool shed close to the crematorium, just outside the camp wall.

Measuring 12ft by 18ft, it resembled a car garage. Gaps and holes in the walls were covered with mastic and a special airtight cover fixed over the roof with a small hatch.

The women were pushed inside, 150 at a time, and the door shut. Then a canister of gas was thrown in from the roof. According to a witness, there was moaning and crying for two to three minutes, then silence.

Prisoners in the closest blocks would hear the lorries pull up and wondered why the engines were left running for so long. Then someone said it was to cover the screams from the gas chamber.

In my humble opinion, I believe that Sarah Helm’s reputation as a writer will be harmed by this book.  The so-called “gas chamber” at Ravensbruck was probably a disinfection chamber for killing the lice in the clothing of the prisoners during the typhus epidemic in the camp in the last days of World War II.  Why wait until January 1945 to set up a homicidal gas chamber?

Women in the British SOE – what really happened to them?

This morning I got an e-mail from a woman who wrote that she is a cousin of Diana Rowden, a British SOE  agent in World War II, whom she says was murdered at the Natzweiler concentration camp.

This brought back memories of my trip to France and my visit to the Natzweiler Memorial Site a couple of years ago.  I had a hellavuh time getting to the place.  The former Natzweiler camp is located on a steep, winding mountain road, 5 miles from the nearest train station and there is no bus service. I had to hire a taxi driver to drive me there from the nearest town.

While I was in the crematorium building at Natzweiler, I noticed a small plaque on the wall in honor of four women SOE agents who were executed there; their bodies were burned in the one oven of the crematorium.  I remembered that I had seen a similar sign, honoring four other women SOE agents on the wall of the crematorium at Dachau.  I couldn’t help wondering why four women would be brought such a long way,  to a place as isolated as Natzweiler, for execution.  They were brought from a Gestapo prison in Germany to Natzweiler, a camp in Alsace, which is now in France. Why weren’t all eight of the women taken to Dachau for execution, I wondered.

After I got back from my trip, I started doing some research on Natzweiler and I learned that there were several male SOE agents who had been prisoners at Natzweiler and when this camp had to be closed, they were transferred to Dachau.  The SOE men had arrived at Dachau just a week before the SOE women were brought in for execution.  Curiously, the four SOE women had been executed at Natzweiler shortly before the men were transferred.  This struck me as being more than a coincidence.

Did the Gestapo deliberately arrange for several male SOE agents to be at Natzweiler, and then at Dachau, so there would be witnesses to the execution of the SOE women?  And why weren’t the men executed?  Not only were the SOE men not executed, they were privileged prisoners who were treated very well.

One of the SOE men, Albert Guérisse, claimed to be an eye-witness to the arrival of the four SOE women at Natzweiler. Guérisse said that the Commandant of the camp had driven his car down to the railroad station to pick up the women and he drove a couple of laps around the camp, as if he were giving them a tour.  All the prisoners inside the camp were able to  see these women who had been brought to Natzweiler for a secret execution.

Another SOE man, Brian Stonehouse, claimed that he was working near the gate and saw the women arrive on foot; he just happened to be an artist and a fashion expert, so he was able to sketch the women and describe their outfits in detail, right down to the hair ribbons they wore.

The cousin of Diana Rowden, who e-mailed me, wrote that she had met one of the former prisoners at Natzweiler when she visited the Memorial Site. This man told her that he had seen the women SOE agents as they  arrived at night. So we have three different eye-witness versions of the arrival of the women SOE agents at Natzweiler.

I believe that what may have happened is that all three of these witnesses saw the wives and girlfriends of the SS officers at Natzweiler arriving for a party that was going on in honor of an SS man who was leaving because he was being transferred to another camp.

Then I found out that there were four more British SOE women who were executed at Ravensbrück, the women’s concentration camp.  This makes no sense at all.  Why not take all 12 women to the women’s camp for execution?  Both Dachau and Natzweiler were camps for men.

There was one British SOE woman at Ravensbrück, Odette Sansom, who was not executed; she survived because she was having an affair with the Commandant, Fritz Hartjenstein. Odette claimed that all her toenails were pulled out by the Gestapo men who were trying to make her talk.

I spent a great deal of time researching the British SOE and read several books pertaining to the SOE women. On my web site http://www.scrapbookpages.com, I wrote about what I found out here and here.

Here is a quote from this page of my web site:

Of the four British SOE agents allegedly executed at Dachau, Noor Inayat Khan has become the most famous. Noor has gone down in history as a great heroine because she defied her captors to the end, never cooperating with the Germans in any way.

Noor Inayat Khan was the first woman to be sent to France to work as a wireless operator, even though there were other women in the SOE who would have been better suited for this job. Her trainer thought that Noor was too emotional and when she was given a mock interrogation to see how she would hold up under an interrogation by the Gestapo, she failed miserably. Physically tiny and fearful of guns, she was also “not overly burdened with brains,” according to her instructor. Moreover, her exotic beauty might draw attention to her, causing her to be more vulnerable to arrest by the Gestapo.

Noor Inayat Khan was sent to France, even before she had finished her training, on an RAF Lysander plane on the night of June 16, 1943 to become a wireless operator for the Cinema sub circuit of the Prosper line; her organizer was Emile Garry. Noor was captured around October 1, 1943 after she was allegedly betrayed by the sister of Emile Garry.

According to the book “A Life in Secrets,” by Sarah Helm, Noor was denounced by Renée Garry who told the Gestapo where to find her. Renée was in love with another SOE agent named France Antelme, but when Nora arrived, Antelme gave his affection to her.

Renée Garry allegedly sold Noor to the Gestapo for money and revenge, but what was the real motive for Noor’s betrayal? Did the British deliberately select their least qualified female agent to send to France because they wanted her to be caught? Was this a deliberate plan to allow the Germans to capture a British radio?

In her book “Flames in the Field,” Rita Kramer wrote that Henri Déricourt, who was a double agent in the Prosper line, said that the British had deliberately sacrificed women SOE agents as part of a scheme to distract from the invasion of Sicily. These women were “decoys” who were meant to be captured after the British learned that the Germans had infiltrated the Prosper Network. The purpose was to plant disinformation about the invasion of Sicily.

You can read more about the women who were allegedly executed at Dachau here and about the women who were allegedly executed at Natzweiler here.

There are no records whatsoever that would prove that these 12 SOE women were executed.

So what really happened to the women SOE agents?  My theory is that all 12 were sent to Ravensbrück and they died in the typhus epidemic there, or they were transferred from Ravensbrück to Bergen-Belsen where they died in the typhus epidemic.  The records from Ravensbrück were confiscated by the Soviet liberators and have never been made public.

The British deliberately sacrificed these women SOE agents by arranging for them to get caught, and now the women are being widely promoted as heroines in order to cover up the truth.  I have explained this in another blog post.