The 30th of April 1945, Nazi Germany. The Soviet forces liberate Ravensbrück – one of the worst
Nazi concentration camps which would epitomize the true bestiality and horrors of the Nazi regime
and its death camps. Upon entering the camp, the soldiers from the 2nd Belorussian Front encounter
thousands of emaciated and sickly women still imprisoned in the camp, who endured forced labor,
malnutrition, medical experiments, and extreme abuse. Following the liberation,
the Soviet soldiers provide medical aid and care to the surviving inmates and attempt to identify
the remaining SS guards and personnel responsible for the atrocities committed at the camp. In the
years that follow, many of the former Ravensbrück camp staff will face trials for war crimes and
crimes against humanity that they committed during the Second World War. One of them is Fritz Suhren.
Fritz Suhren was born on the 10th of June 1908 in Varel,
then part of German Empire. On 1 October 1928 he joined the SA and
2 months later Suhren became a member of the Nazi Party. In October 1931 he joined the SS.
After Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933, the Nazi Party rapidly consolidated its
control and implemented its ideology. Hitler and the Nazis worked to dismantle democratic
institutions, suspended civil liberties, curtailed freedom of the press, and quickly implemented a
series of discriminatory policies, primarily targeting Jews. The Nazis ruthlessly suppressed
any form of dissent or opposition. Political opponents, including communists, socialists,
and members of other parties, were arrested, imprisoned, or sent to concentration camps.
In March 1939, one year after the German Annexation of Austria,
Fritz Suhren was sent to Graz to work as a SS section staff leader. Whilst there,
Suhren became an alcoholic and had to commit not to drink any alcoholic drinks for 2 years.
World War 2 started on the 1st of September 1939 and 2 years later in 1941 Suhren was
sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp to work as a deputy commandant. The
camp was located north of Berlin and held Jews, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses,
Roma and Sinti people and, later, Soviet civilians. One of the camp’s
most prominent prisoners was Yakov Dzhugashvili, Joseph Stalin's son,
who died at Sachsenhausen in 1943 after his father refused to make a deal to secure his release.
On the 22nd of June, 1941, Nazi Germany, under the codename Operation Barbarossa,
invaded the Soviet Union, its ally in the war against Poland.
Three army groups counting more than 3 million German soldiers attacked the
Soviet Union across a broad front stretching from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Black
Sea in the south. The soldiers were supported by additional 650,000 troops from Germany’s allies.
In the first six weeks after the German attack the Soviet Union saw catastrophic military
losses and the German armies eventually captured some 5,7 million Soviet Red
Army troops during the Second World War. From the very beginning, German policy on
the treatment of Soviet prisoners of war was determined by Nazi ideology. German political
and military leaders regarded Soviet prisoners of war not only as racially less valuable but
as potential enemies, obstacles in the German conquest of "living space." The Nazi regime
claimed that it was under no obligation for the humane care of prisoners of war from the Red Army
because the Soviet Union had not ratified the 1929 Geneva Convention on Prisoners of War, nor
had it specifically declared its commitment to the 1907 Hague Convention on the Rules of War. Many
Soviet prisoners of war died due to the appalling treatment, malnutrition, diseases, and executions.
Some 3.3 million Soviet prisoners of war, or about 57 percent of those taken prisoner,
were dead by the end of the war. Second only to the Jews, Soviet prisoners of war were the
largest group of victims of Nazi racial policy. Several weeks after the German attack on the
Soviet Union, several high-ranking SS officers met in Sachsenhausen concentration camp to discuss the
fate of these Soviet prisoners. The first group of Soviet prisoners of war arrived in Sachsenhausen
at the end of August 1941. By the end of October of the same year, the SS had deported about
12,000 Soviet prisoners of war to Sachsenhausen. Camp authorities shot thousands of them shortly
after they arrived in the camp. Estimates of Soviet prisoners of war killed at Sachsenhausen
range from 11,000-18,000. According to the witness and Kapo Karl Zander,
Fritz Suhren oversaw the mass execution. In the early stage of the camp's existence
the SS and police incarcerated mainly political opponents and one of them was Harry Naujoks, a
German anti-fascist and communist. Because of his unflappable calm and his organizational talent,
he was chosen by SS authorities to serve as a camp elder and oversee other inmates.
This difficult and dangerous post often changed hands, as different groups of prisoners schemed to
obtain it for themselves. Naujoks was generally regarded, at least among other prisoners,
as having acted with integrity and courage. In May 1942, he was ordered by Fritz Suhren to execute
a fellow prisoner by hanging but he refused. Naujoks was able to survive the insubordination
and to avoid executing the prisoner himself, but he was forced by Suhren to stand next to
the gallows during the hanging, which was made to be particularly slow and painful.
In September 1942 Fritz Suhren came to Ravensbrück concentration camp where he would serve as a
commandant. His policy upon taking command in 1942 was to exterminate the prisoners
through working them as hard as possible while feeding them the least amount of food he could.
Ravensbrück, opened in May 1939, was the only major women's camp established by the
Nazis. In total, some 132,000 women from all over Europe passed through the camp, including Poles,
Russians, Jews, Gypsies, and others. Of that number, over 92,000 women perished.
Ravensbrück camp was staffed both by SS men, who served as guards and administrators, and by 150
women, who served as supervisors. These female supervisors were either SS volunteers or women
who had taken the job for the good pay and working conditions. Ravensbrück also housed
a training camp for female SS guards who were taught by Dorothea Binz - the sadistically
cruel German Nazi officer and supervisor - who instructed her trainees on how to handle the
prisoners that they were going to supervise. These prisoners would have to work until they
died, and the task of their supervisors was to get a maximum amount of work out of them whilst they
were still alive. Ravensbrück thus also became a training center or “a school of violence “for
about 3,500 female guards who went on to serve either there or at other concentration camps.
Starting in the summer of 1942, SS medical doctors subjected prisoners at Ravensbrück to unethical
medical experiments. The main coordinator of these experiments was Karl Gebhardt, and his assistants
became doctors Herta Oberheuser and Fritz Fischer. They often used a hammer to break legs of female
prisoners, then infected open wounds with aggressive bacteria and monitored the healing
with and without various chemical substances such as sulfanilamide, which was an early antibiotic,
to prevent infections. Believing it could help in treating amputee soldiers, they also tested
various methods of setting and transplanting bones. Such experiments included amputations
and were often performed without any anesthesia. The SS selected nearly 80 women, mostly Polish,
for these experiments. Many of the women died as a result and those who survived often suffered
permanent physical damage. SS doctors also carried out sterilization experiments on women
and children, many of them Roma people, to develop an efficient method of sterilization. They were
also involved in forced abortions of women who were already seven or eight months pregnant. In
addition to these forced abortions, they were also known for the beating of pregnant women to cause
miscarriages and the killing of newborns. As commandant at Ravensbrück,
Suhren had to provide inmates to Dr. Karl Gebhardt for experimentation.
Suhren initially objected to this, mainly because most of the inmates at the camp were political
prisoners, and at the beginning of 1943 he went to Berlin and complained to the Reich Security
Main Office about the practice. However, the SS command overruled Suhren's doubts,
and he was forced to apologize to Gebhardt and supply him with the prisoners he demanded.
Suhren later said he witnessed experiments that included exposing women to high levels
of X-rays in order to accomplish sterilization. One of the inmates at Ravensbrück concentration
camp was Odette Sansom, an Allied secret agent, who worked with the French Resistance and in 1943
was arrested by the Gestapo. While working for the French resistance, Odette Sansom developed
close relationship with Peter Churchill, a British Special Operations Executive,
who was not related to the British prime minister at the time. When they were both arrested by the
Nazis Churchill and Sansom claimed that they were a married couple and related to Winston
Churchill to make themselves seem more valuable as prisoners and less likely to be executed as spies.
On May 03, 1945, with the Allies just a few miles from the camp, Suhren decided
to drive Odette Sansom to the United Sates base because he believed that she was a relative of
Winston Churchill and hoped that her presence would save him. When they reached the camp,
he stepped out of the car and announced to the Americans: 'This is Frau Churchill. She has
been a prisoner. She is related to Winston Churchill, the Prime Minister of England.'
Odette said, in response, 'And this is Fritz Suhren, Commandant of Ravensbrück Concentration
Camp. Please make him your prisoner'. When Suhren was arrested he possesed
valuables stolen from the prisoners, such as currency, gold teeth, rings and watches.
When the Red Army liberated Ravensbrück on the 30th of April 1945, there were
about 3,500 sick women, men and children in the camp.
Of some 132,000 women that passed through the camp, over 92,000 women perished.
After the end of the war, justice finally caught up with the former
staff of Ravensbrück when they were tried at the first Ravensbrück trial
which began on the 5th of December 1946. On the 3rd of February 1947
the British military tribunal sentenced 11 defendands out of 16 to death by hanging.
But Fritz Suhren was not among them as in 1946 he had escaped and fled to Bavaria. However, he did
not escape justice. In 1949, Suhren was recaptured by U.S. soldiers, who extradited him to the French
occupation zone which was one of 4 Allied-occupied areas in Germany after World War II.
Suhren was then put on a trial began which began in February 1950. Several dozen former prisoners
testified against him and on March 10, 1950 a French military court found Suhren guilty of war
crimes and crimes against humanity and sentenced him to death by firing squad. Suhren was 42 years
old when he was executed on 12 July 1950. There were no tears shed for Firtz Suhren.
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