The 3rd of February 1947, Hamburg, Germany. The former staff of Ravensbrück, the largest
concentration camp for women in Nazi Germany, hears their sentences read. After almost 2
months of gruesome testimonies, the world finally learns the truth about inhumane mistreatment and
torture conducted by camp’s male and female personnel during camp’s 6 year existence.
Out of 16 defendants, 11 are sentenced to death by hanging. One of them is Vera Salvequart.
Vera Salvequart was born on the 26th of November 1919 in Ohníč, then part of Czechoslovakia.
While Vera’s mother was a Czech, her adopted father was a Sudeten
German which was a name for ethnic Germans living in Czechoslovakia.
Soon after Vera was born, the family emigrated to Germany.
In 1933 Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party came into power and Germany became a dictatorship.
The Nazi regime quickly began to restrict the civil and human rights of the Jewish people
and less than 2 months after Hitler became the chancellor,
the first concentration camp - Dachau - was established in March 1933.
On the 15th of September 1935 the Nazi regime announced two new laws : “The Reich Citizenship
Law” which declared that only Aryans could be citizens of the Reich; and “The Law for the
Protection of German Blood and Honor” which forbade marriages and extramarital sexual
relations between Germans and Jews, the employment of German maids under the age of 45 in Jewish
homes and the raising of the German flag by Jews. These laws became known as the Nuremberg Laws
or Nuremberg Race Laws and were the legal basis for the racist anti-Jewish policy in Germany.
Thirteen additional decrees were added to the Nuremberg Laws over the next 8 years.
These included the first official definition of who was to be considered a Jew
and who an Aryan. Jews with three or four Jewish grandparents were considered full- blooded Jews.
During this time Salvequart completed her training to become a nurse
and then studied medicine for two semesters.
The Second World War started on the 1st of September 1939 with the invasion of Poland.
In May 1941, Vera Salvequart was first arrested by the Gestapo for having a relationship with
a Jewish man, which was punishable under the Nuremberg Race Laws, and for refusing to disclose
his whereabouts. As punishment she served 10 months in Flossenbürg concentration camp.
Flossenbürg’s original purpose was to exploit the forced labor of prisoners
for the production of granite for Nazi construction projects.
Until mid-1943, the quarry occupied the labor of about half of the prisoner population. However,
in 1943 the camp became a key supplier of Messerschmitt Bf 109 aircraft parts.
In May 1942 Salvequart was arrested again for another relationship with a Jew.
This time she received a two-year prison sentence.
After a short period of freedom, she was arrested for the third time
in November 1944 together with her Jewish lover and his sister. After a short detention in the
Theresienstadt concentration camp located in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia,
Salvequart was sent to the Ravensbrück concentration camp in December 1944.
Ravensbrück, opened in May 1939, was the only major women's camp established by the Nazis.
Starting in the summer of 1942, SS medical doctors subjected nearly 80
Polish female prisoners at Ravensbrück to unethical medical experiments. SS doctors
experimented with treating wounds with various chemical substances,
such as sulfanilamide, to prevent infections. They also tested various
methods of setting and transplanting bones. Such experiments even included amputations.
SS doctors such as Herta Oberheuser also carried out forced abortions of women
who were already seven or eight months pregnant and sterilization experiments on women and
children, many of them Roma in an attempt to develop an efficient method of sterilization.
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 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 trained
here how to handle the prisoners that they were going to supervise.
The SS guards were able to dominate and control the camp’s large population with the help of the
kapos. The kapos were prisoners in Nazi camps who were selected by the SS to supervise the
other camp inmates. The kapos received better food, clothing and housing and had a reputation
of brutal supervisors, beating, denouncing and even killing their fellow prisoners.
One such kapo was Vera Salvequart who also served as a nurse due to her professional training.
As a nurse, she participated in the gassing of women and children,
removing gold teeth and crowns from murdered victims, and completing death certificates.
From February 1945, she took a direct part in the extermination of prisoners in the camp’s hospital,
giving them, together with the SS men, poisonous white powder.
Prisoners, who took the powder or received an injection under the pretext of giving them
strength before transport, soon fell into a heavy sleep, and after some time they stopped breathing.
Allegedly Salvequart and her fellow Nazi colleagues used to poison the innocent
sick people to avoid the effort of having to transport them to the gas chambers.
On the one hand, Salvequart murdered, but at the same time she saved other prisoners by
giving them hot tea and food as well as releasing them from roll calls that could last for hours.
She also saved some women and children from death by substituting their camp identification number
with that of those already dead.
After the end of the war, Vera Salvequart was first temporarily housed in an American camp and
then for some time, she lived in Hofheim am Taunus under the false name Anna Markova and worked there
as a manager in an office for racially persecuted people. However, the job ended very quickly. After
the allegations of embezzlement, Salvequart fled to Cologne, where she was arrested by
the British army. Vera Salvequart who had been on the British Army's wanted list for a long time,
was then brought to the "Civil Internment Camp" in Paderborn-Staumühle.
She was then tried at the first Ravensbrück trial which began on the 5th of December 1946.
During the court proceedings, Salvequart claimed that her activity had only been limited to filling
out death certificates. She also described how she had saved some women and children from death
by substituting their camp identification number with that of those who had already died.
She also claimed to have hidden one infant and had male prisoners bring him food and milk.
According to Salvequart’s testimony, the existence of the baby became known in the
camp and when Ruth Neudeck, one of the camp’s guards, found out about the child’s existence,
she took the child away from Salvequart and threw it on the dirty food wagon like a parcel of cloth
saying “ A little Jew will be a very big Jew one day”. The child was later killed.
Salvequart claimed that after this she had tried to poison Neudeck
when on one occasion she came to Salvequart complaining of a headache and asking for medicine,
but Neudeck took too little of the white power to kill her.
Salvequart also said that the SS had threatened to send her to the gas chambers but because she had
helped prisoners so much, several male prisoners disguised her as a male inmate to save her life
and this guise she kept until the end of the war.
However, numerous witnesses questioned the credibility of her statements.
On the 3rd of February 1947 the British military tribunal
sentenced Vera Salvequart to death by hanging.
However, Salvequart asked for a pardon, claiming that she had stolen the schematics for the V2
missiles produced at Ravensbrück prior to 1944 for smuggling it to the British. The execution
of the sentence was temporarily postponed while this was taken into consideration and
the remaining defendants sentenced to death were hanged on 2nd and 3rd of May 1947.
If Salvequart had hoped that her life would be saved, she was wrong. Her request was rejected.
Vera Salvequart was 27 years old when the British executioner Albert Pierrepoint carried out the
sentence on the 26th of June 1947. Shortly after, her body was buried with the other
executed war criminals at Wehl Cemetery in Hameln. There were no tears shed for Vera Salvequart.
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