The historical Site

Smuggled Out of Ravensbrück

At around 10 in the morning on 24th May 1975, a task force dispatched by the Stasi regional administration for the Neubrandenburg area began to dig in the forest. Dr Henryk Grabowski, a Polish doctor and former inmate of Prisoner of War Camp IIA, had alerted the Stasi to the site. In the middle of the forest, a metre from a boundary stone, a kilometre to the east of the garrison of the Fünfeichen Signal Regiment of the GDR National People’s Army, not far from the Burg Stargard-Neubrandenburg railway line, they uncovered a jar containing documents over thirty years old. 

The GDR government handed its contents over to the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers’ Party, who passed them on to the State Museum in Oświęcim/Auschwitz. Krystyna Oleksy, former head of the education department, remembers that in 1989 she and her colleague Irena Polska yielded to the entreaties of the Polish survivors and, despite the shortage of paper at the time, made it possible for them to be published under the title: “To Let the World Know,” Illegal Documents from the Ravensbrück Concentration Camp („Aby świat się dowiedział ...": Nielegalne dokumenty z obozu Ravensbrück).

The Discovery

The glass jar held the following, in good condition:

1. 36 pages (of various sizes) of letters and poems, 

2. a drawing, 

3. a miniature carving of an eagle with two inscriptions: “Poland is not yet lost“ and “Freedom and Victory, 1943".

The letters, 14 in all, date from the period between spring and autumn 1943. They were written by Polish women and girls imprisoned in the largest women’s camp in what was then the German Reich - the Ravensbrück concentration camp.

The jar also held 37 poems by three Polish women, representing two generations of inmates:

a. Zofia Górska, arrested at the age of 18 and deported from Radom in 1942; she left 17 poems, 

b. Grażyna Chrostowska, deported from Lublin in 1941 at the age of 19; she left 15 poems, 

c. 5 poems are by Halina Golczowa, deported in 1942 at the age of around 40. 

The smuggled documents also include lists of shootings: between November 1941 and September 1943, the SS shot Polish women in Ravensbrück, most of whom were still very young, Grażyna Chrostowska among them. The uncovered lists mention 145 names; in one letter, the author refers to a total of 184 victims. It is likely that other lists were smuggled out, however not found in the jar.

Lastly, the stash contains a table listing the medical experiments carried out on 74 Polish women between July 1942 and August 1943. The abuses documented include experiments with sulphonamides, bone, muscle and nerve transplants, and regeneration experiments on the women’s legs. The sulphonamide experiments were designed to research the treatment of battle injuries (gas gangrene). The resistance fighters, arrested during the German occupation of Poland, underwent “surgery” without their knowledge or agreement, and without sufficient treatment for their wounds. The youngest was 16 years old, the oldest 48. Building block 8 in the “interdisciplinary project folder“ relates to the Nuremberg Doctors’ Trial and deals exclusively with these crimes, the SS doctors responsible and their victims, four of whom testified as witnesses to the court.

The History of the Smuggled Papers

The illegal documents, letters and poems alike, have a unique historic value. The imprisoned women and girls wanted to chronicle the Nazi crimes and send this information out into the outside world. They hoped that this would ensure that the crimes would be punished and the victims remembered. 

At the other end of this correspondence were Polish prisoners of war, held in a POW camp (Stalag IIA) near Neubrandenburg. The letters, which request such items as Polish books, writing paper, and even medicines and items required for religious rites, which the men could evidently obtain, indicate that they had considerably greater freedom of movement than the women. 

Where smuggling took place?

The Auschwitz Museum’s 1989 publication documents the smuggled stash itself as well as the memories and letters of the people involved. This revealed the process by which the documents and goods were exchanged, the identities of the men and how the glass jar came to be buried: according to the letters, the participants met outside the main camp on fatigue duties in Neustrelitz.

Contact was established by the so-called horse gang – ten women responsible for SS horses in a stable in Fürstenberg, for which (between December 1942 and February 1943) they were required to fetch hay from Neustrelitz. Later, the links to the prisoners of war there, who had to collect goods for the SS from the warehouses in Neustrelitz every Monday, were further developed by the loading details. The women of the loading details also made contact with French prisoners of war from Stalag IIA, working in Fürstenberg in detachment A85. Almost all the women and girls in the two loading details had arrived at Ravensbrück in August and September 1941 on transports from Warsaw and Lublin.

The men, whose letters and memoirs were also recorded in the Polish publication, belonged to a resistance group predominantly made up of young Polish doctors. They were taken prisoner by the Germans during the war and made to care for the sick and wounded in the POW camp hospital.

One of the correspondents, a woman named Zofia Pocilowska, explained in 1975 that goods and documents were exchanged via two toilet huts that must have been in the grounds of the SS warehouses in Neustrelitz.

“To Let the World Know”

The papers found in the glass jar are just the remnant of a larger collection. The male prisoners of war were evidently able to forward other information on. We know that in around 1943 there was indeed a British BBC radio broadcast that reported on the medical experiments in Ravensbrück. Dr Henryk Grabowski, a member of the resistance group, reports that not only did the world learn about these experiments (and did nothing about them), but also that the SS were alerted. They suddenly increased their security sweeps within the prisoner of war camp, as a result of which the men buried any of the concentration camp inmates’ papers still hidden in the hospital. Just drawing up such documents in the camp was perilous and required an incredible degree of organisation and secrecy. The prisoners were doing everything possible to get information to Poland, to the Polish government in exile and to the BBC in London.

Sometimes the “guinea pigs” smuggled themselves into the loading details – a highly dangerous act that took a great deal of courage. They were strictly forbidden to leave the camp under any circumstances, but they wanted to show the prisoners of war the surgery to their legs, at least from a distance.

Once the prisoners managed to get hold of a camera so that they could secretly photograph a women, whose legs had been mutilated by the medical experiments, behind one of the barracks in the camp. The film was hidden by the French prisoner Germaine Tillion and picked up after the camp was liberated.