Vera Salvequart.

17-01-2018

gestapo

28 year old Vera Salvequart was born on the 26th of November 1919 in Wonotsch in Czechoslovakia and had trained as a nurse.  She  had also served several periods in prison for having relationships with Jewish men. She had not been an SS guard, but rather a prisoner herself in Ravensbrück.  She was sent to Konzentration Camp Ravensbrück in December 1944 and she served in the camp’s medical wing as a nurse during her stay, and oversaw the gassing of thousands of women.

Her job was to fill out death certificates for the dead, and inspect their cadavers for gold teeth, which were kept to finance the war effort. By February 1945, she was reportedly taking a more active role in the killings; now she was poisoning the sickly in the medical wing to avoid the effort of having to transport them to the gas chambers.

Although former prisoners testified about this active role, Salvequart herself would only confess to her earlier duties filling out death certificates at her trial. After Ravensbrück was liberated by the Soviet Union in April 1945, she was captured, as well as the others who had served there, and held for military trials dubbed the Ravensbrück Trials.

At the trials, she went on record stating:

I remember that the sick had no trust in the beginning because they thought that I took part in the mass murdering. I must say that in their place, I would have had the same impression. I was locked up without interruption, couldn’t go anywhere alone, and all they knew about me was that I lived there where they murdered so many people. Additionally, the prisoners saw when I entered the washroom in the case of Schikovsky; they heard the woman scream and therefore assumed that I was part of the murder.

In her own defense, she claimed that she had acted in a benevolent fashion towards the prisoners, and described how she saved some women and children from death by substituting their camp identification number with that of those already dead.

Salvequart also claimed that one of her lovers was a British spy. She appealed for clemency on the basis of having stolen schematics for the V-2 rockets being produced at the camp prior to 1944, hoping to smuggle it to the British; she was granted a temporary reprieve while this was taken into consideration.

However, clemency was denied, and on 26-06-1947 she was hanged by Albert Pierrepoint on the gallows at Hameln prison [de] at the age of 27.

Vera Salvequart petitioned the King for a reprieve in view of her passing secrets to the British.  She was the first of thirteen prisoners to be hanged that day by Albert Pierrepoint,    assisted by Regimental Sergeant Major Richard Anthony O’Neill, the execution being carried out at 9.03 am.

Mackintosh Berney-Ficklin  who feared German martyrdom, ordered that Vera and the other hanged were buried in the Hamelin prison yard. Berney-Ficklin died age 68 on 17-02-1961 in Cape Town.

In 1954 Vera Salvequart  and all other war criminals are reburied in holy ground at Am Wehl Cemetery. The graveyard had graves with crosses but after many discussions about the Neo Nazi visits, on 05-03-1986 all 200 Iron Crosses were removed and the graveside is now a grass field.