27.4.1945: Hörbare Beweise für NS-Verbrechen

Verbrechen festhalten, Beweise sichern, Gräuel zeigen: Darin lag die wesentliche Funktion der Bilder, die Soldaten bei der Befreiung von Konzentrationslagern anfertigten. Mit den Schreckensbildern sollte Betroffenheit erzeugt und Abgrenzung von der NS-Ideologie erwirkt werden.

Bekannt sind in diesem Zusammenhang vor allem Fotos und Filme. Auch im Radio wurde über die Verbrechen in den Konzentrationslagern und die Situation der Häftlinge berichtet – wenn auch selten und nur in den ersten Nachkriegsjahren. Für den US-amerikanischen Rundfunk meldete sich die Kriegsberichterstatterin Sigrid Schultz aus dem befreiten Frauen-Konzentrationslager Ravensbrück.

In ihren Schilderungen legte Schultz Wert auf die Würde der Opfer. Damit setzte sie damals nicht gekannte Standards: Die USA brachten massenhaft Bildbroschüren in Umlauf, die den NS-Terror vor allem in den KZs mit Schockbildern anklagten. Individuelle Geschichten blieben dabei oft unsichtbar. 

Sigrid Schultz aus dem befreiten Konzentrationslager Ravensbrück, MBS, 1:45 min., 27.4.1945, Österreichische Mediathek/Technisches Museum Wien 

I have talked to more than thirty of these women, who had managed 

to survive the harrowing ordeal of enslavement. Many of them had been dragged from prison to concentration camp and to labour concentration camp for years. The prisoners in Ravensbrück included society women and little seamstresses of France – Polish, Czech, Russian, Dutch, Belgian women. The guards in charge of the prisoners were Schutzstaffel­women in regular military uniforms, wearing the button jacket, the big cape 

and high boots of the SS. ‘And those boots were hard nailed, which we knew only too well, because we were kicked around with them’, said Ravensbrück prisoner number 42216. She was a cultured women from Brest. She and her companions had actually seen one of their female Schutzstaffel­officers trample on a woman who had fainted from exhaustion. The SS­women carried whips with leather tops and used them freely. Upon arrival in Ravensbrück all women were given a steril­ 

ity shot and now they fear they will remain sterile for life. The American among the prisoners of Ravensbrück, who were sent to Leipzig, was married to a Frenchman; her name was Countess Roberta de Mauduit, and she was known as „Betty“ by her comrades. The day I talked to them, she had suffered a nervous breakdown and was unable to see visitors. The healthiest and most beautiful women of the concentration camp of Ravensbrück were segregated in an experimental station, where veins were removed from their legs and wreathed on other bodies, while the wounds were infected with diseases which the Germans wanted 

to study.