Prisoners’ experience

Contact with civilians, civilians following orders, hall 8:

„[…] Contacts between the deported women and civilians occurred only during working hours and under rigorous observation of hierarchical rang orders. The Siemens workers for example only had contact with one particular supervisor and only for important reasons to do with the work. There normally was a „Bande Rouge“ person responsible for liaising between both categories, be it to assign jobs, note absences or to note down observations. […] The civilian was only following orders given to them by their superior: collecting facts to press charges and then, the proper Pilate, washing their hands in innocence, the case now being out of their jurisdiction. It does not matter if the slave was punished with twenty-five lashes of the whip or cane, if with shooting, release or selection; for them it was only important to have followed the rules. The civilians working in the factory were absolute sticklers to the rules[…].“

– Lidia Beccia Rolfi, * 1925, Italian; Siemens: October 1944 – April 1945, Hall 8

Engineer or SS-man?:

„[…] This civilian engineer should have been an SS-man. He had no compunction about reporting prisoners „unwilling“ to work to the guard supervisor and demand an official report. […] For him it seemed a given that prisoners had no claim to human rights. […]“

– Magarete Buber-Neumann, * 1901, German; Siemens: from winter 1942/43, Hall 1

Nauseated, nice civilian:

„[…] It happened that we had no water in the camp and so had to come to work unwashed. In most cases you were not allowed to wash yourself a little; it was only after this condition continued for a few days that we were allowed to wash our hands and faces under the tap, but this was not as a concession to us but because civilians were nauseated by us unwashed prisoners, as they put it […] There were also civilians who behaved  very decently and humanely towards us prisoners, only they couldn’t let that on, as they were threatened at every meeting  that they would be brought to a KZ too if they had private conversations with these prisoners, these “vermin of the people”. […]“

– Inge Wodrig, * unknown, German

Master Krszork:

„Master Krszok was a civilian, but an inveterate Nazi. He treated the imprisoned women roughly and harshly. […] Soon I noticed however, that he was not so much about the work but more about the fact that he didn’t have to go to the front and could weather out the war at home.“

– Gusta Fučiková, * unknown, Czech; Siemens: from September 1943, Hall 8

No punishment:

„[…] In reality the punishments never came, in part also because the supervisor overseeing us was a civilian of German-French origin who was capable of the language too; the other one was Master Strauss whom I always remember because he got on so well with my sister and me. “I guess between Strass and Paganini, there’s got to be friendship“, he would say. With him, who only spoke German, we got on with very few words and he taught us through gestures how to repair, to adjust and dismantle and reassemble devices that we had to build: he showed us how to do the work and we repeated his gestures. If something didn’t work, we would call him and he’d help us.”

– Bianca Paganini, * 1922, Italian; Siemens: November 1944 – April 1945, Hall 21

Friendly supervisor:

„I was lucky to get Frau Hintze, one of the friendly ones, as my supervisor. She often brought us some food or took care of our letters by taking them with her to Berlin and posting them from there. That was an especially big help for us.“

– Bianca Paganini, * 1922, Italian; Siemens: November 1944 – April 1945, Hall 21

A humane person:

„My friends in our work area and I were lucky, as our bald-headed and bent-over Meister Alfred Nitschke, a Berliner and a father of two, was a humane person. He hardly observed us at all. He would even warn us when the guard, who was walking up and down the walkway in the middle of the hall all day long, was coming close. Sometimes we were able to try – while discussing procedure with the female German Masters at length – to damage little individual parts and sabotage them, but carefully of course. Meister Nitschke even reported to some of us how the Red Army was advancing towards the west.“

– Marija Jacenko, * unknown, Soviet Union / Ukranian; Start of work at Siemens unknown,  Hall 4

„I worked in a large open-space office in a work hall. I had to record manufactured workpieces and make graphic representations. My immediate superior was a civilian employee named Gerstenberger, an old Social Democrat who assured us that he had to live in similarly bad conditions in a nearby barrack. He had been transferred here for disciplinary reasons. He did what he could for us. Occasionally he would steal potatoes and share some of his bread with us. […] Our top boss was called Grade. I initiated a search for him later, but he was never found. If a woman was bending over with pain, he would come at her with a cane and beat her until she would crawl back to her stool. If a comrade – we had to wind the finest, hair-thin wires onto a spool – would break the wire three times, he would count that as sabotage. In such cases the prisoners were disposed of.”

– Johanna Sohst, * 1915, German, “half-Jew“; Siemens: Summer 1944 – April 1945, Hall 2

The survivor Lidia Beccaria Rolfi reports about her encounter with a civilian guard:

„[…] for me the first woman in the camp since my arrival who was neither deported nor part of the SS. This civilian, a Fräulein (Miss, TN) Masalski, was a department supervisor, and theoretically she was supposed to show me how to do the work, but she didn’t want to come close to a person infested with lice. […] When the demonstration – held at a safe distance – was over, Fräulein Masalski would return to her station, lose interest in me and let me put her rushed demonstration into practice by myself.“

She further reports about the harassment she endured from a female SS guard and the reaction of a civilian guard:

„[…] but it also happened that a guard amused herself in harassing a deportee she didn’t like. And the SS guard in my hall frequently ordered me out, grinning, to unload coal, while the civilian guard could have very well intervened by saying she needed my work, but she kept out of it.“

– Lidia Beccia Rolfi, * 1925, Italian; Siemens: October 1944 – April 1945, Hall 8

Paganini about a civilian Siemens worker in hall 21:

„[…] Meister Strauss, who I remember always, because he got on so well with my sister and me. „I guess you’ve got to get along if you’re Paganini and Strauss“ he would say. {168} […] he taught us with gestures how to repair, to adjust, to disassemble and reassemble devices that we had to make: he showed us how to do the work and we repeated his gestures. If something didn’t function, we would call him and he would help us.“

– Bianca Paganini, * 1922, Italian; Siemens: November 1944 – April 1945, Hall 21

„As I became very quick in my work, I did – once I reached my quota – whatever I liked: I wrote and drew, learned poems by heart, weaved my way in between machines to visit Mara who worked with the Tri at the back of the barrack. Mara – I don’t know how – managed to save a pocket edition of the Divine Comedy and she sometimes lent it to me. It felt good to read in Italian.“

– Lidia Beccia Rolfi, * 1925, Italian; Siemens: October 1944 – April 1945, Hall 8

„You had a certain quota. If you didn’t reach it, you were punished. There were also bonus awards, but we did not accept them.“

– Barbara Zajączkowska-Rubinstein, * 1926, Polish; Start of work at Siemens unknown, hall unknown

„I could also recall that there was an argument at the beginning whether we, the office prisoners, should take the bonus awards or not. We did not have to work extra hard for it, like the machine workers had to, we kind of got these awards for free, but it disgusted us to take them.“
– Noen Beuzemaker, * unknown, Dutch

Siemens: from October 1942, Hall 2

„We made manometers and voltmeters, we did the adjusting, that means we collected the devices from all over the workshop and readied them for use. We had to work quickly, we needed to finish 30 during the night and thirty during the day; if we didn’t manage to reach the quota of thirty, we could be punished.“

– Bianca Paganini, * 1922, Italian; Siemens: November 1944 – April 1945, Hall 21

“We were delighted that the sabotage worked. That evening we sang and danced for joy, because we had managed to sabotage something. “

– Esther Bejerano, * 1924, German Jew; Siemens: from Winter 1943/44, Hall 4

“What sabotage did we do at Siemens ? Well I have always thought of it as using every opportunity we got to destroy things, be it material (and especially scarce materials) or the work process or the administration.

[…] it was the only „political“ work we could do under those circumstances, and it was therefore useful and necessary.”

– Noen Beuzemaker, * unnknown, Dutch; Siemens: ab October 1942, Hall 2

“There was unintended sabotage, when you mixed up a workpiece because you were inept or inattentive, destroyed a tool or damaged a device. The deported person working on the machine would, regardless of the cause of damage, be seen as responsible for it and be punished, sometimes by hanging.

[…] The deliberate acts of sabotage were also relatively frequent. Take, for example, Maria Montuoro […] she knew perfectly how to best break the pieces. She worked at the most notorious spot in hall 8, handling a toxic acid, the „Tri“. But she made no effort to be moved to a better station, just so she could stay there, and particularly during the night shift, systematically sabotage the capacitors she was working on.

[…] Even the theft of a piece of wire, a sheet of paper, of a cloth rag was seen as sabotage, but everybody committed that. Any form of friendship between inmates was also seen as sabotage.

[…] Aiding our fellow inmates in their survival and at the cost of the smooth running of production was seen by the system as the most profound sabotage”.

– Lidia Beccia Rolfi, * 1925, Italian; Siemens: October 1944 – April 1945, Hall 8

“As there were 42 Slovenian women working in our hall, sometimes more, sometimes less, our contribution to sabotage was especially large. Although there were, as everywhere, prisoners of different nationalities, there were no traitors among us”.

– Mara Pavletic, * unknown, Slovenian; begin of work at Siemens unknown, hall 8

„Siemens-System“, Hall 2:

„Siemens had an elaborate system for poisoning the relations between prisoners and guards. Very few of them resisted this system and showed any kindness to prisoners. […]“

– Rita Sprengel, * 1907, German; Siemens: November 1942 – October 1944, Hall 2

Commission from Berlin, hall 1:

„Once a delegation came from Berlin – the Director General of Siemens was part of it – in order to inspect the camp. The Director General literally (I was in the office) said:“ I can only wonder at the fact that these people do such good work under these conditions.”

– Mimi de Bontemps, * unknown, from Luxembourg; Start of work at Siemens, unknown, hall 1

„Profitable business“:

„Two comrades (Anni Vavk and Ria Bockowa) once got their hands on the calculations and accounting statements of the Siemens forced labour business. They deduced from these documents that Siemens had expected to pay off the costs for the buildings and machinery at the facility in Ravensbruck from the work produced there within two years. Contrary to this estimate, the costs had already been recovered within one year.“

– Rita Sprengel, * 1907, German; Siemens: November 1942 – October 1944, Hall 2

„The day I spent soldering my hands together, messing about with the solder and trying to fix wires to a coil, but I got pathetically little done. Despite my poor performance, I still got accepted, as the colleague to my right, a Danish woman I had never seen before, did the soldering for me, and at the end of the evening my box was full of completed coils. In the following days I learned this skill, became a competent worker and managed to fulfill the minimum production quotas.“

– Lidia Beccia Rolfi, * 1925, Italian; Siemens: October 1944 – April 1945, Hall 8

„At first I was put to work in the Siemens camp office, making daily lists of the dead, the new arrivals and of numbers of sick and required workers. In this work I mistyped on purpose to boycott the task because I didn’t want to register the names of my fellow inmates. I was under constant supervision and the threat of death from the SS so my activity there was quite short-lived. […]“

– Theodoline Katzenmaier,  * 1918, German; Start of work shift at Siemens, unknown, hall X and hall 6.

„We entered the factory, this time officially and by the rules, both designated for hall 8. The twenty enormous storage halls of Siemens stretched in 5 rows, each hall separated by free space, almost like a street. The outlay of the Siemens facility was not different from that of the camp Ravensbruck, the architect followed the same design of grey and economic lines.

Our hall was just one big shed without any interior partitions, no latrines, dismal and noisy. The coiling machines made a deafening noise.“

– Lidia Beccia Rolfi, * 1925, Italian; Siemens: October 1944 – April 1945, Hall 8

„The Germans didn’t just hold foreign prisoners without any basis in law of verdict, they also forced them to work for Hitler’s war machine. This was the case at Siemens. […]“

– Yvonne Useldinger (nee Hostert), * 1921, from Luxemburg; Siemens: May 1943 – April 1945, Hall 2

„[…] You ask yourself if this is worth a person’s life. If I am irreplaceable, then I understand that I sacrifice my life for not having to work for the war. But if they have so many people that they can send ten or twenty instead of you, people who work because they are afraid or for whatever reason, then my life would not have been sacrificed for a reasonable purpose. That is my opinion to that. […]“

– Irma Trksak, * 1917, Austrian; Siemens: Late October 1942 – January 1945, Hall 3, then the most senior in the Siemens camp

Hall 2:

„Siemens had an elaborate system in place in order to poison the relations between the prisoners and the guards. Very few of them resisted this system and treated the prisoners decently. […]“

– Rita Sprengel, * 1907, German; Siemens: November 1942 – October 1944, Hall 2

„I worked in a large open-plan office in a hall. I had to record finished workpieces and make graphic representations.“

– Johanna Sohst, * 1915, German, „Half-Jew“; Siemens: Summer 1944 – April 1945, Hall 2

„The winding room was the most important hall. Precision work had to be done here on the manual and machine winding devices. […] Every coil had to have exactly the prescribed windings, done with the finest of copper wires. These coils were built into devices that were intended for airplanes. […]“

– Yvonne Useldinger (nee Hostert), * 1921, from Luxemburg; Siemens: Mai 1943 – April 1945, Hall 2

Hall 3:

„The work that I had to do consisted of adjusting metal contacts on a tiny detail. I sat the whole day without getting up from the workbench. My hands would go numb as they had to be held aloft all the time.

My eyes burned. My back became stiff. It was still better than being out in the frost, but every day I became terribly tired.“

– Olga Sosnovskaja, * 1925, Sowjet/Ukrainian; Start of work at Siemens unknown, Hall 3

„The whole of Siemens was producing for the V 2, the miracle weapon that they were hoping for. Very precious springs with platinum, gold or silver contacts were punch-pressed there for the relays, which were assembled and adjusted in hall 3. They were not to be touched with your fingers. The women couldn’t hold out there for longer than 3 or 4 months, then their nerves were frazzled.“

– Irma Trksak, * 1917, Austrian; Siemens: End of October 1942 – January 1945, Hall 3, then most senior at the Siemens camp

Hall 6:

„I had to count the smallest machine parts in barrack 6 of the Siemens labour camp, always piecework under high pressure.“

– Theodoline Katzenmaier,  * 1918, German; Start of work at Siemens unknown, hall X and hall 6

Hall 8:

„[…] The civilian only follows orders given by his superior: he brings the facts to report, and like a good Pontius Pilate, washes his hands of the responsibility straight after, as the case was not in his jurisdiction anymore. It doesn’t matter if the slave gets 25 lashes of the whip or cane, gets shot, released or selected for extermination; for him, following the rule book is all that counts. The civilians that worked in the factory followed the rules to the letter […].“

– Lidia Beccia Rolfi, * 1925, Italian; Siemens: October 1944 – April 1945, Hall 8

Hall 9:

„My department was responsible for mixing a pounder and a liquid to make the material needed. This was then put into enormous pots; the pots were lifted onto rolls where they were mixed. After mixing they were poured into forms, which in turn would be worked on in big hot-presses, as the mixture had to be pressed at a certain temperature. Then they were baked in the ovens and coated on both sides with a yellow paint that enabled an electrical contact. After drying, they were measured like batteries.

I think they were the kind of small resistors used in hot irons or radios.“

– Margrit Wreschner-Rustow (nee Wreschner), * 1925, German Jew; Siemens: April 1944 – March 1945, Hall 9

Hall 21 – Mano- und voltmeters:

„We worked in hall 21. We made manometers and voltmeters and did the adjusting, i.e. collected the work results of the whole hall and readied the devices for use. Under high pressure, thirty of these had to be produced at night, and thirty during the day; if we didn’t reach the quota of thirty, we could be punished. […]“

– Bianca Paganini, * 1922, Italian; Siemens: November 1944 – April 1945, Hall 21

,,The work was organized in two shifts: twelve hours for the day shift with a lunch break for the soup, and twelve hours for the night shift with a fifteen-minute break at midnight. The slave labourers were working full time, day and night with no breaks, not even for a trip to the latrine.”

Workers who could not work due to illness were replaced immediately, unproductive ones were dismissed and replaced by others in better physical condition: Only good workers who were productive and returned to work quickly after being ill a short time were used again after recuperating, but as soon as anybody slowed down the work rhythm in the slightest, they would be gotten rid of immediately.”

„[…] The night shift was from 6pm to 6am with an allotted break of 15 minutes at midnight and many other breaks as soon as air raid alarms sounded and the light in the work halls was extinguished. […].“

– Lidia Beccia Rolfi, * 1925, Italian; Siemens: October 1944 – April 1945, Hall 8

„[…] The night work was very exhausting, the artificial light strained the eyes badly. The work itself was not so difficult but demanded concentration as it was precision work. […]“

– Barbara Zajączkowska-Rubinstein, * 1926, Polish; Start of work at Siemens unknown, hall unknown

„[…] During the one-hour lunch break we would be marched back to the old camp at high speed, we dashed into the blocks and used, as Siemens workers, the advantage of having our tin bowls filled before the others. We had twenty minutes to eat, go to the toilet and wash our hands.[…]“

„[…] The night shift had been introduced for us in summer already, […] ,where we had to work for eleven hours and only had a half-hour break at midnight. […]“

– Astrid Blumensaadt (nee Pedersen), * unknown, Danish; at Siemens from 19.12.1943 – 08.04.1945, hall unknown

„[…] Well and then I got sent up there, to Siemens. And there, well because of having small hands, there were aircraft parts made there. And I, exactly because of my small hands for small things, I was sent to the spraying, and let’s say twelve-thirty, one in the morning, I would always collapse on them, I was all alone in this huge room. There was this wash basin there, a huge wash basin was there, with acetone to clean everything, and now your stomach is empty and windows – don’t even know if there were any windows. If so, you wouldn’t have been allowed to open them because of the blackout. I collapsed on them every night. The door had this glass window and when the SS passed through on controls and didn’t see me, then they knew I must have collapsed again. Everybody who was on duty there poured water over me from a bucket and then I was up and spraying again. Until six in the morning was my shift and I, soaking wet, had to go straight to roll call in front of the factory at 6.„

– Regina Chum (nee Waringer), * 1923, Austrian; Siemens: from mid-1944 to end of March 1945, hall unknown

„1500 prisoners were marched to the work barracks of Siemens every day, making aircraft and ship instruments under the protection of the camp. Now the living barracks for the Siemens prisoners were to be completed. This meant getting separated from my dear Czech friend. After lengthy negotiations with my superior, arguing with my state of health, I managed to get a directive relieving me from my old post and allowing me to apply to work at Siemens in the factory office. Shortly before Christmas Eve 1944 I was allowed to change and was able to make life somewhat easier, again at the side of my dear camp comrade. It necessitated getting used to a whole new field of work, and as I am not technically inclined by nature, I had a hard time of things to start with, the technical calculations especially gave me a headache.”

– Gertrud Popp, * unknown, German; Siemens: from December 1944 – release on21. April 1945, Hall unknown

Irma Trksak worked in hall 3 – relay construction – in her time in the Siemens camp. Her task was to draw diagrams portraying the productivity of the prisoners, how much was produced in a day and if the productivity of the prisoners had changed. In order to protect other inmates, Trksak falsified these statistics and lied in her translations.

„[…] And this I had to enter and draw curves. Whether their productivity increased or if they were becoming weaker and so on. Of course we tried to fib about it. We took from those who produced a lot, so the sums would be right, and those who produced less we gave a little extra to protect the women.[…] Or I was interpreting between Russian and German, when the Meister said something that was not good for the prisoner, I would weaken that and the other way round. So, it always evened out and the prisoner was not hit by anything bad, was not punished with deduction of costs or somehow being dismissed from the company.“

– Irma Trksak, * 1917, Austrian; Siemens: End of October 1942 – January 1945, Hall 3, then most senior at the Siemens facility

„Work times were from 6.30am to 7.30pm with a one-hour lunch break. But it happened that we had to work until 10pm, including on Sundays. Other female prisoners had to weld, there was no protective clothing. The women neither had protective goggles, nor gloves or aprons. Other women worked on the galvanizing, also without protection, metals were checked with acids there. The women got burns, their eyesight worsened, with red and swollen eyes. If a woman wanted to go to sick bay, she would be driven out again with a kick. At the beginning there were 500 in this factory, after a year that number had grown to 8000. […]“

– Janina Pawlak, * 1914, Poland; Siemens: April 1942 – November 1944, Hall unknown