Johanna Langefeld was arrested under automatic arrest on December 20, 1945. It is believed that she possesses important and detailed information about concentration camps that might interest the Central Investigation Bureau.
From the attachment: Interrogated: Johanna Langefeld, German, concentration camp supervisor, last residence: Pfronten - Oesch Hense 262 1/2, Füssen, Germany, arrested on December 20 at 12:15 PM, made the following written statement: "I, Johanna Langefeld, née May, was born on March 5, 1900, in Kupferdreh, near Essen. From 1924 to 1926, I was married to Wilhelm Langefeld. We lived in Mülheim, in the Ruhr-Styrum district. In 1926, my husband died. Two years later, on August 2, 1928, in Düsseldorf, I gave birth to an illegitimate son, Herbert, who took my maiden name—May, as required by German law at the time."
The guard who enters her cell on December 23, 1946, is astonished to find it empty. Johanna Langefeld, a 46-year-old experienced concentration camp supervisor, arrested in Germany by American soldiers, extradited to Poland, and awaiting trial for Auschwitz crimes at Montelupich prison along with other accused, had simply disappeared. The prison authorities knew only that she had been sent to clean apartments that were soon to be occupied by new prison employees, and she never returned.
A few years later, rumors began to spread that someone had helped her escape. Such incredible stories circulated in Poland that it was hard to believe them. Could it really be true that former Ravensbrück prisoners freed Johanna Langefeld from Montelupich? Could the victims have saved their tormentor? Such things simply don’t happen.
In mid-March, she sets out for Auschwitz on a short reconnaissance mission. She is also supposed to make preparations for receiving the female guards and prisoners who will be transferred there with her. She returns a few days later to make a list. It includes trusted camp messengers, Bible Students, as well as black and green patches who will form the "armed" wing of the Oberaufseherin and ensure order in the new, uncertain conditions at Auschwitz.
Johanna Langefeld told American investigators that she left with a heavy heart and that her only comfort was that she would once again take with her "the poorest of the poor, who would be left at the mercy of the beasts in human form if they remained in Ravensbrück." Her fears about the fate of the prisoners who remained behind were soon confirmed, as she added: "My successor was a prison guard named Maria Mandl, who, under the special protection of the commandant, transformed into just such a beast in female form."
By March 26, 1942, everything was ready. On that day, a thousand female prisoners left Ravensbrück on foot, accompanied by guards and SS men. (...) At Auschwitz, Johanna Langefeld was assigned a small, single-story house on Polna Street, in a district from which almost the entire population had been evicted nearly two years earlier when the decision was made to build a concentration camp on this land. The infrastructure of the former barracks—twenty brick buildings—was perfectly suited for this, needing only expansion. To maintain discretion around the camp, a dead zone was created. The Poles who were allowed to stay in the area also lived almost like in a camp. They were not allowed to walk on the right side of the road, cross the Soła River, possess a radio (punishable by death), or throw bread to the marching columns (also punishable by death). After every prisoner escape from the camp, all nearby homes were searched. Apparently, when the town was still called Oświęcim, people lived here in harmony—Jews, who were the majority and controlled industry, and Poles engaged in agriculture (...).
Johanna Langefeld didn’t know how long she would have to stay in Auschwitz, so she took Herbert with her. Sophie Gode’s daughter and Herbert’s friend, Johanna Bracken, remembered that when he returned to Germany, he had grown up and became more handsome. He boasted that he rode horses in Auschwitz and that the camp commandant himself taught him. As a mother with a child, Langefeld was given a small house in the district inhabited by SS officers, not a room in a multi-story building behind the Auschwitz gate, where the other female guards were housed.
Langefeld also took with her eight female overseers experienced in dealing with female prisoners. Among them were Johanna Bormann, who would be called "the woman with the dogs," Therese Rosi Brandl, who learned her trade under Maria Mandl, and the bloody and brutal "damned whore" Margot Drexler. The latter two would prove particularly active during selections for the gas chambers. Their task would be not only to maintain order in the camp but also to introduce the new staff, who would arrive at Auschwitz after a short training at Ravensbrück, to the work practices.
Johanna Langefeld would be responsible for blocks 1 to 10, but before the prisoners were placed in them, they had to stand for several hours on the assembly square. The SS men were looking for the one who had escaped, so they had to wait until she was found. Those who arrived from Ravensbrück were well aware of such procedures. The Slovak Jewish women were just learning it. (...) When Langefeld returned to Ravensbrück after her first visit to Auschwitz, at the beginning of March, she was shocked by what she saw in the Silesian camp. "The prisoners are in a terrible state, completely emaciated," she said to Berthe Teege. But she also saw in Ravensbrück figures almost without bodies, clothed only in skin, women in rags, "Goldstücki" as they were called, ready to lick drops of soup spilled from the cauldron off the ground. Those who had stopped fighting, who had stopped clinging to life. Women heavily beaten, with frostbite, with wounds on their bodies. So what surprised her so much? Perhaps the sight of naked corpses piled up in front of barracks or on the assembly square, being thrown into burning pits? Some still showed signs of life. In Ravensbrück, the bodies of women who had died or been killed were still placed in wooden coffins and taken out of the camp. Such practices were not carried out in Auschwitz.
Could it be about the sanitary conditions? The new Oberaufseherin was to oversee ten blocks that had been occupied by Soviet prisoners of war. They had been shot, gassed, or transferred to Birkenau, so some space had become available. The barracks were dirty, infested with lice. These were damp, smelly holes that would soon become overcrowded to the limit. Each was to house a thousand women, but transports would arrive so frequently that this number would quickly increase.
Prisoners slept under shared blankets, and scabies spread. In Ravensbrück, the situation was also deteriorating in this regard, but "zugangs" still received clean striped uniforms or clothes from the Effektenkammer. Slovak Jewish women arriving in Auschwitz left all their belongings in huge piles and had to change into dirty, lice-infested clothes from Soviet prisoners. There were so few sanitary facilities that after just a few days, women relieved themselves wherever they could.
Could it be that Johanna Langefeld was horrified by the mud? The Birkenau camp, where part of the men had already been moved and where the women’s division would soon be relocated, was built on marshy ground, surrounded by ponds. Since no one bothered to cover the paths with even black gravel, as in Ravensbrück, the wet earth turned into miles of muddy sludge, knee-deep. Prisoners would lose their clogs in it. The puddles were an excellent breeding ground for anopheles mosquitoes—the carriers of malaria, and coli bacteria proliferated in the well. But after all, Birkenau was not meant to hold people. Polish prisoner Seweryna Szmaglewska would later say that it was more of a "pre-crematory waiting room." The landscape around Auschwitz-Birkenau was a treeless, gray plain, which even brazen crows avoided. It was shrouded in smoke, spreading a sickly sweet odor of burning bodies around the area. So perhaps it was this smell that bothered Johanna Langefeld?
"As evidence of how little I knew about the purpose of this camp, which I was deliberately not informed about, is the fact that I wanted to select the best among the prisoners [from Ravensbrück], who, as they said, were to form the core of the new camp," Langefeld testified during the investigation. "For the fact that I managed to do this [only] to a small extent, I still thank God, because after a short time my eyes were opened to the purpose of this camp. The general impression was so depressing for me that I could not sleep for whole nights and often had barely the courage to breathe.
After barely 14 days, taking advantage of the opportunity that SS Obergruppenführer Pohl visited the camp, I tried to make him aware of the deficiencies and pathologies in the camp and asked for their removal, as they were mentally exhausting me. My request was met with a reluctant remark that it was impossible at the time. My request to be transferred back to Ravensbrück was brusquely rejected, with the comment that everyone must remain in their assigned place, so I reluctantly accepted that what seemed unchangeable. I was already aware that I would have to fight an even harder battle for the law here, and with all the means at my disposal, I tried to protect the women who were now being brought to the camp in smaller and larger transports from the tyranny of those responsible for the camp as a whole."
Piotr Setkiewicz, a historian and head of the Research Center at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Oświęcim: "When Johanna Langefeld arrived in March 1942, Auschwitz had one gas chamber, which was occasionally activated when 500-600 people were gathered. (...) Nevertheless, from the very beginning, Langefeld must have known about the gas chamber and that smaller transports of emaciated Jews were being killed there. Initially, prisoners entered in their clothes, but later there was the problem of how to remove them, as the Germans didn’t waste anything, so the condemned had to undress before entering. They resisted this, so they were told they were going to the bathhouse. And all this, Johanna Langefeld must have already seen, as the gas chamber and crematorium were only a hundred meters away from the women’s camp.
The prisoners throw the bodies of their deceased comrades onto a pile. Later, they will all be burned together. On the aussen, it is easy to lose one’s life. You could collapse from exhaustion, be torn apart by dogs, or be shot "while attempting to escape." At Auschwitz, officers on horseback could shoot without warning. They would later note this in their reports, hoping to please their superiors and get a pass to Katowice for a day or two.
The prisoners dismantled houses of peasants evicted from Brzezinka. They received long, heavy iron bars and had to use them to break down walls. (...) If they were lucky, they sorted clothes and jewelry in "Canada," served in the kitchen, administration, or hospital.
Piotr Setkiewicz: "Langefeld herself worked about eight hours a day, from seven in the morning to four in the afternoon. On Saturdays, until one o’clock. After work, she returned home. As a single woman, her entertainment options were limited. She could go to Katowice, to a shop, or to the theater, but more likely by train than by car, as she was not entitled to a company car. Besides, Auschwitz had very few at its disposal—just four. She could also go to the cinema or attend a concert on the camp grounds. The cultural-educational department tried to make the SS men’s leisure time enjoyable.
When the men participated in integration events and gathered around common tables to sing patriotic or folk songs, drink, and sway to the melody, their wives played bridge, shared recipes for making cakes without butter, drank wine, and gossiped.
Whether Langefeld was invited by them is unknown. Her functionaries believed she seemed to struggle with herself to adapt to the new place, so she might not have felt like socializing. In her free time, she probably focused exclusively on her son. She and Herbert were very close.
Two weeks after arriving at Auschwitz, Johanna Langefeld summoned Luise Mauer. The messenger was to inform the prisoners that they should immediately disappear from Lagerstrasse and not leave the barracks until further notice. Shortly afterward, a convoy of about three hundred women, children, and men passed through the street. They were directed to a tunnel that ended in a room with ventilation shafts. Those standing close could hear terrible screams coming from there. Fifteen minutes later, silence fell.
When Johanna Langefeld returned to the office, she was pale, distracted, unable to gather her thoughts. "I didn’t know that people were being killed here," she said. "Did you see that?" she asked the messengers anxiously, and when they confirmed, she warned, "For God's sake, don’t tell anyone about this, or they’ll gas you too."
Johanna Langefeld witnessed an execution in the gas chamber for the first time. The sight of hundreds of naked, tangled bodies, mutilated in the struggle for the last breath, covered in excrement, was probably a shock for her. Berthe Teege testified: "One day Langefeld received an order to prepare about three thousand female prisoners, mostly Czech and Polish Jews, whose names had already been selected by Höss and the garrison doctor, Dr. von Bodtmann, for gassing."
Langefeld was terrified. This was different from the selection for Bernburg—putting a few dozen women on trucks, waving them goodbye, and forgetting they ever existed. This time, death was counted in thousands and could be observed closely; it had a specific smell and color, and its ultimate triumph was marked by the four walls of the gas chamber.
Death in Auschwitz-Birkenau was not a detail; it was wholesale and almost a daily ritual. Langefeld used a tried-and-true method and tried to delegate this task to her subordinates, but Teege and Mauer refused. Just as in Ravensbrück, Oberaufseherin did not report them, but instead assigned guards. Drexler and Brandl accepted the order without hesitation.
"Langefeld was one of the truly convinced supporters of the Nazi system, and I was told that she was a friend of Himmler. However, when she learned that prisoners were being killed with gas in Auschwitz, there was an internal change within her," Berthe Teege testified. "She couldn’t endure the mass murders and complained about it to Commandant Höss several times."
*The book "Our Lady of Ravensbrück" was published by the Foksal Publishing Group. Abbreviations are by the editors.
