I have now started to look into Savitri Devi’s beloved Hertha (or, as the British spelled her name, Herta) Ehlert. Originally, I shied away from it, because I don’t do overly researched topics – there is too little left for me to find. But in this case, something came up very early on. Her death date is given on Wikipedia as 4 April 1997, without quoting any source. However, when I accessed her birth certificate via Ancestry (because I was actually looking for Mr Ehlert), it showed the date of her death as 20 August 1982. In Bad Homburg, which fits the story. Find A Grave repeats the Wikipedia date but has no information on her burial. (How do you find a grave that way?) So there was definitely something to discover here.
Obviously, somebody had mixed up two women of the same name. I don’t know how that happened. But the first step had to be to establish which data belonged to which Hert(h)a. The Homburg death certificate fits the birth certificate on Ancestry, which is for a Hertha Ließ, born 26 March 1905 in Berlin. She married Willi Naumann in 1971. So far, so good. That is what Wikipedia tells us about Savitri’s Hertha, and is also consistent with the Bundesarchiv file ALLPROZ 8/146 that is described in the Invenio database as:
Ehlert, Herta
Inventory designation: British trials against Germans for the killing and maltreatment of prisoners of war and civilians
Date of birth: 26.3.1905
Official title/rank: SS supervisor
Subject of the application/proceedings: Mistreatment with fatal consequences of allied nationals + in KL Bergen-Belsen; mistreatment with fatal consequences of allied nationals + KL Auschwitz, 1942-1945
Role in the trial: Defendant
Sentence: 15 [years] imprisonment (released in 1953)
There is also the file B 106 / 67316 Bd. 107, again for Herta Ehlert, documenting her restitution claims. This possibly checks out, as someone had already remarked on it. However, I can’t see her date of birth in the database (and her name is written – this time by the German authorities – with a t instead of a th), so I would have to see what the file actually says.
Because there is another Herta Ehlert in the database, and I suspect she might be the other one we’re looking for. She was born on 25 May 1913 in Klein Tarpen, and her file (R 9361-III/213274) is exactly where you might expect Bergen-Belsen Hertha’s file to be: in the collection Sammlung Berlin Document Center (BDC): Personenbezogene Unterlagen der SS und SA (Personal files of the SS and SA). So here are two files that I would need to check.
Luckily, Herta of Klein Tarpen’s baptism record is on Ancestry, and here we learn that Ehlert was her maiden name. So she is definitely out of the running for Savitri’s Hertha, because that one was married to Mr Ehlert. Sadly, because this is from a church record instead of the Standesamt, the civil authorities, we can’t see if maybe she died in 1997.
This is a prime example of the detective work a biographer has to do. Check everything. Never assume the data you find on the internet is correct. I’ve been saying it for years, and I’m saying it again: Researchers, even academics, are often lazy.
As for that: Compare the English and the German version of Hert(h)a Ehlert’s Wikipedia entry. The English version is vile. There is no other word for it. It also, in its description of her character, quotes exactly one „witness“ (I use that word with caution) to cast her in the worst possible light. Also, note the wording „After the war, she lived under the assumed name Herta Naumann.“ It wasn’t an assumed name. It was the name of her second husband whom, as I have shown above, she married in 1971 – quite a while „after the war“. An absolutely nasty piece of writing.
The German version, quite astonishingly in our national climate of self-hate and self-debasement, is much more nuanced:
Ehlert was a saleswoman in a bakery before she was sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp for training as a supervisor on 15 November 1939 through the employment office. Among other things, she was deployed there as head of field detachments. At the beginning of 1943, she was transferred to Majdanek concentration camp and from there to Plaszow concentration camp in the spring of 1944. From November 1944, she worked in the Rajsko subcamp of the Auschwitz concentration camp as a supervisor in the garden detachment. During the evacuation, Ehlert left the Auschwitz concentration camp on 18 January 1945 and arrived at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp on an evacuation transport at the beginning of February 1945.
On 15 April 1945, the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp was liberated by British troops, who found over 10,000 dead and around 60,000 survivors. The SS camp personnel were ordered to remove all the bodies and bury them in mass graves.
Let’s pause here for a moment and let Savitri Devi take over for what that single sentence entailed:
I shudder when I recall the horror of the scene described to me by Frau E, one of the main persons sentenced to long terms of imprisonment by the British judge in that iniquitous „Belsen trial“ – the scene of the arrest of the German staff of the camp.
Twenty-five of the women who, at first, had left the camp with one of the SS men in command and had gone to Neue[n]gamme, were treacherously told by the Allied military authorities that they could safely come back to Belsen; moreover, that they were to resume their posts there, and to run the place under Allied supervision. They came back in confidence, only to find themselves immediately surrounded by a crowd of yelling men, with drawn bayonets. Huddled against one another in terror, they saw the narrowing circle move towards them from all sides, nearer and nearer, until the cold, sharp points of steel touched them, scratched them, were thrust an inch or two into the flesh of some of them. They saw the ugly, evil glee on the grinning faces of the Jews and degraded Aryans who accompanied them and helped them in this cowards‘ enterprise. For along with the regular British soldiery, the Allied military authorities had sent and were still sending to Belsen, as to every other place in which prominent National Socialists were captured, motor-lorries full of frenzied Israelites. It was to these that Adolf Hitler’s unfortunate followers were to be specifically delivered.
The women were completely stripped and, not only submitted to the most minute and insulting examination in the midst of coarse jeers, but threatened or wounded with bayonet thrusts without even the slightest pretext, or dragged aside by their hair and beaten on the head and on the body with the thick end of the military policemen’s guns, until some of them were unconscious. Needless to say, everything they possessed – clothes, jewellery, money, books, family photographs, and other property – was taken away from them and never given back to this very day. […]
Then, the women were hurled into the mortuary of the camp, a small, cold, and dark room, with a stone floor, and locked in. They were given nothing to lie upon, not even straw, and were not allowed more than one blanket for every four of them. The room contained nothing but an empty pail in one corner, and had no ventilation. The long day dragged on. No food and no water were brought to the prisoners. Now and then, from outside, a sharp, thin shriek, or a loud howl – a distant or nearby cry of pain – reached their ears. They half guessed what was going on from one end of the camp to the other. But they were locked in. […]
A long sleepless night followed that atrocious day. And a new morning dawned. Still no one came to unlock the cell. Still no food and no water were brought to the helpless women. The day wore on, as slowly and as horribly as the one before. The same shrieks of pain were heard. Sometimes they seemed as though they came from very near; sometimes they seemed to come from far away. And still the door remained closed. And still not a scrap of bread to eat; not a drop of water to drink – or to wash in. The pail in the corner was now overflowing and useless. And the whole room was filled with its stench.
The night came, and slowly passed also. The third day dawned. And still no one came to open the door; to remove the pail; and to bring food and water – water especially. Weakened by hunger, their throats parched with thirst, sleepless, and more and more dirty – now sitting and lying in their own filth – the helpless women began to give way to despair. Were they all going to be left to die in that horrid room, that chamber of hell if ever there was one? […]
Another night dragged on. Then came the morning of the fourth day, and a part of the fourth day itself. At last the door opened. The women were given some food and some water. But only because they had to be kept alive in order that their martyrdom might continue.Through the famine conditions that had prevailed ever since the destruction of means of transport by the Allies themselves, as I have said, many of the internees were already in a hopeless state of health before the Allied forces set foot in the camp. Most of these died. Many more – who might have been saved, had they been fed gradually, at first on light food – were killed through sudden over-eating, thanks to the senseless kindness of their „liberators.“ Plenty of dead bodies were lying about, without mentioning those of the SS warders, whom the British military policemen had tortured and done to death.
The German women, hardly able to stand on their legs after their three days confinement – and several of them wounded by bayonet thrusts – were made to run, at the point of the bayonets, and ordered to bury the corpses; which they did all day, and the following days.
Along with the dead bodies of internees, the women recognised those of a number of their own comrades, the warders of the camp, all bearing horrible wounds, some with entrails drawn out. The sharp shrieks and howlings of pain heard during those three days, became more and more understandable. Moreover, these were not the last victims of the invaders‘ brutality within the camp area. Frau E and Frau B, who both lived through all that I have just tried to describe from their accounts, were the actual eyewitnesses of further nightmare scenes. […]
Frau E could not retain her tears as she related to me those scenes of horror that haunt her to this day – that now haunt me, although I have not seen them myself; that will haunt me all my life. […]After they had, under the brutal supervision of the Military Police, buried as many of the dead bodies as they could, the German women were sent back to the narrow room – the former mortuary – that they occupied as a common prison cell. The place stank. The overflowing pail was still there. And for many days more the prisoners were neither allowed to empty it and put it back, nor given another one for the same use, nor given a drop of water. They could neither wash themselves nor wash their clothes. Their hands, reeking with the stench of corpses after each day’s servitude, they could wash, if they cared to, only in their own urine. And with those hands they had to eat! […]
When at last all the dead bodies were buried, the prisoners were made to clean the lavatories. It was pointed out to them – deliberately, so that they might feel the humiliation all the more – that these were used by the numerous Jews, now masters of the camp. Under the threat of bayonets – as always – the proud Nazi women were ordered to remove the filth with their own hands. Then, and then only, were they allowed to clean their own awful cell, which by this time had become a cesspool.(Savitri Devi: Gold in the Furnace)
To continue with the German Wikipedia entry:
Ehlert was then arrested, taken to Celle prison and interrogated by British military personnel. In the Bergen-Belsen trial (17 September to 17 November 1945), she was charged with crimes committed in the Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps, based on witness testimony. During the trial, the sisters Inga and Jutta Madlung also testified as defence witnesses for Ehlert. Jutta Madlung was a prisoner in Ravensbrück concentration camp from 8 September 1942 to 13 August 1943 for telling political jokes, listening to English records and being friends with a Jewish woman. Together with her sister, she was a member of Ehlert’s labour detachment in the Ravensbrück Siemens camp and described in court that Ehlert had behaved in a benevolent and helpful manner towards the prisoners. According to Jutta Madlung’s testimony, Ehlert did not beat any prisoners and was a positive exception among the female guards.
Ehlert pleaded „not guilty“ at the beginning of the trial, as did all the defendants. She was found guilty of accessory to manslaughter on 17 November 1945 and sentenced to 15 years in prison, although she was acquitted on the Auschwitz charge. On 7 May 1953, she was released early from imprisonment in the Werl prison. She was then briefly sent to the Fischerhof rehabilitation facility in Uelzen on 8 May 1953. She was visited there by Savitri Devi, whom she had already befriended in the Werl prison in February 1949. After her release, Ehlert received compensation from the Federal Republic of Germany for those returning home [„Heimkehrerentschädigung“. It reads a bit weird in English, but it makes complete sense in German. ;)]. In 1972, the Frankfurt am Main Regional Court reopened investigations against Ehlert, which were discontinued in 1974 on the grounds that there was „no sufficient cause for public prosecution.“
After the first divorce, she remarried, took the name Naumann and lived in Bad Homburg.
Maybe not quite. Like I said, she remarried in 1971. Her first husband Hans (or, officially, Johannes Hermann Joachim) Ehlert had died on 1 July 1964, according to Ancestry and Family Search, in Herborn. I don’t know if the reason he did not die in Bad Homburg was because he and Hertha had divorced by that point, or was due to some other circumstances; so she might simply have been widowed by the time she met Willi Naumann. I’ll write a bit more about Hans Ehlert at the end of this post; let’s stick to Hertha’s story for now.
The website www.bergenbelsen.co.uk has the actual transcripts of the Belsen trial, at least the statements of the accused. If you want a summary of the complete trial, there is a great resource at the Library of Congress. The Belsen trial is covered in Volume II.
Now, keep in mind the above mentioned events from 1972 onwards, as well as her second marriage in 1971, because we get some interesting background information on both in the letters of Savitri Devi and her friend Beryl Cheetham. A big thank you to Greg Johnson and the Savitri Devi Archive.
[Savitri Devi to Beryl Cheetham]
[Montbrison]
8 February 1968[…] Am enclosing a letter for Hertha Ehlert — the very Hertha I speak of in Defiance and in Pilgrimage – „H.E.“
She used to live in Bad Homburg, Luisenstraße 39 (the back staircase at the last floor). But she was to change her address. Ask the „Einwohnersamt“ – or the local police if there is no „Einwohnersamt“; they keep a record of all the inhabitants and changes of address. And give Hertha the enclosed letter. Am sure she’ll be glad to see you. But she does not speak English. I hope that makes no difference. Your German must be as good as mine, I imagine.
[Savitri Devi to Beryl Cheetham]
Montbrison
11 September 1968[…] I am so glad you liked my friend Hertha. Surely I shall try to see her again if ever I can go to Frankfurt.
[Beryl Cheetham to Savitri Devi]
Frankfurt am Main
11 July 1979[…] By the way, do you know what has happened to Hertha Ehlert? When I received your letter I telephoned her at the last number I had (where she worked) but the person there told me that she had changed her name and moved from Gartenfeldstraße where she used to live in Bad Homburg. However, I sent her a short letter at Gartenfeldstraße but it was returned “Unknown.” I can only assume that she has had trouble from some sort of left-wing elements who give a lot of trouble to ex-SS people here. It is terrible that she should be ‘hunted’ in this way at her age and after having served her sentence in prison.
[Beryl Cheetham to Savitri Devi]
Frankfurt am Main
6 December 1981[…] Yes, I have one German friend who is a good National Socialist, D— F—, who is only 34 and whom I met through Wolfgang Kirchstein — whom I distrust after I took him to visit Hertha Ehlert when I first came here (she told you about him I think as I remember your telling me that she didn’t like him). Because the Verfassungsschutz visited my firm where I worked then, asking about me, and Hertha told me that they had visited her firm also — at the same time. This betrayal could only have come from him, and I have had nothing else to do with him ever since. The Verfassungsschutz still check up on me — after every right-wing action here, I get odd phone calls from very polite people who have the “wrong number,” but who are obviously checking up to see if I am still in residence and not — having had something to do with it — in flight! Did you ever find out what happened to Hertha? I told you she moved from her address and her job in Bad Homburg.
So, to sum it up: Beryl Cheetham visited Hertha Ehlert at least once in 1968 and kept in contact with her for a while. She introduced this Wolfgang Kirchstein to her who perhaps worked for the Verfassungsschutz or the police. As a result, both Beryl Cheetham and Hertha Ehlert’s workplaces got a visit from the Verfassungsschutz. In 1971, Hertha Ehlert remarried, changed her name to Naumann, and moved to a new address. In 1972, the Verfassungsschutz or the police had gathered enough evidence (in their eyes) to bring the matter to court; we don’t know whether it was because of past or present National Socialist activity. Maybe there still exists some documentation somewhere; I’ll look into it.
Hertha Naumann’s last address was Heuchelheimer Straße 92 d. A Karl-Heinz Otto informed the authorities of her death; I don’t know (yet) what his connection to her was.
Hertha Naumann’s grave apparently still exists in the beautiful Friedhof am Untertor in Bad Homburg. But I wasn’t told the location of the plot, and this being a bit of a sensitive topic – the curtness of the reply may or may not indicate that people are aware of who she was – I didn’t want to press the issue. The cemetery wasn’t that large, I figured. I would find the grave myself.
Well, I’ve visited cemeteries all my life (yes, really), and I’ve done biographical research for more than a dozen years now. I really should have known better.
There were a number of graves without a marker, or it had become illegible, or the grave stone had toppled so the writing was facing down. What I also hadn’t considered in my incurable naiveté was that the grave might have deliberately been defaced to prevent it from becoming, as the popular saying goes, a „Nazi shrine“ or a „Nazi place of pilgrimage“. That is why they dug up Rudolf Heß‘ ashes, for crying out loud. It’s an absolute disgrace.
At any rate, I don’t think I missed any grave with a legible marker, and I didn’t find hers, but if you care to check: Ask for the location of the plot, and please send me a picture.
I did manage to find the address at which Savitri Devi visited her friend, Luisenstraße 39. The back staircase, if it still exists, is no longer accessible to visitors, as the ground floor is occupied by a shop. There’s a backyard to no. 43, two buildings down, but I could not see the back of no. 39 from there.
I did not check out the street Beryl Cheetham mentioned, Gartenfeldstraße, or Hertha Naumann’s last address, Heuchelheimer Straße 92 d. The latter appears from Google Streetview to be quite the typical block of flats from the 1950s/1960s.
So, quite a lot still to discover about Hertha Ehlert; we’ll see how far I get. I might either update this blog post as new information comes in, or write an additional post.
Johannes „Hans“ Hermann Joachim Ehlert (2 April 1893-1 July 1964)
„[…] Your talk reminds me of my husband’s passionate warnings against the Jewish danger. You would have got on well with my husband, an old fighter from the early days of the struggle who had won himself the golden medal of the Party for his courage, his outstanding qualities as a leader, and his devotion to our cause. You should have heard him speak of the Jews – and seen him deal with them! He would have understood you, if anyone!“
„Where is he now?“ asked I.
„I don’t know myself,“ replied my comrade. „At the time of the Capitulation, he was a prisoner of war in France. But for months and months, I have had no news of him. And she spoke of the loveliness of old times, when she and the handsome, fervent young S.A. man – who had met her at some Party gathering – were newly married, and so happy in their comfortable flat in Berlin. […]
„Have you any children?“
„Alas, no,“ said she. „I would probably not be here, if I had, for in that case, I would have long ago given up my service in the concentration camps.“ She paused a second and added, speaking of her husband: „That is what ‚he‘ wanted; ‚he‘ wanted me to stay at home and rear a large, healthy family. He often used to say that others could have done the job I did, while I would have been more useful as a mother of future warriors. Perhaps he was right.“
The more I looked at the beautiful, well-built, strong, masterful blonde, and the more I realised from her conversation, what an ardent Nazi she was, the more I felt convinced that her worthy husband was indeed right. And I told her so.(Savitri Devi: Defiance)
Hertha Ließ was Hans Ehlert’s second wife, not surprising given the age difference between them. His first wife Helene died in 1940, according to Family Search, and there was one son from that marriage, Joachim. He died in 1942, aged 21, so he probably fell in battle.
Hans Ehlert was born in Breslau, today’s Wrocław in Poland. He worked as a forester before becoming a member of the Panzer troops (staff). He and Hertha married on 16 July 1941. When Hans Ehlert went into Allied captivity on 11 May 1945 near Doorn, he was an Oberleutnant, as the form lists him, that is, an Obersturmführer in SS jargon, or first lieutenant. If I interpret the many abbreviations on the form correctly, he would have been part of the 34th SS Grenadier Division, 2nd Battalion. (The German Wikipedia entry has a bit more information than the English one.)
The „old fighter“ bit is interesting and was also misleading during the early stages of my research. Because there was one Julius Ehlert (neither he nor his membership number are listed on Wikipedia – I found his file at the Institut für Stadtgeschichte Frankfurt) who was an „old fighter“. However, he died in 1943 and so could not have been Hertha’s husband.
I leaned over the railing and looked down: a man, dressed in a greyish-green hunter’s suit was coming up as fast as he could. I knew Herr E. worked as a forester. I was now sure it was he. He stopped half way up the last flight of steps; gazed at me.
„Herr E!“ exclaimed I, with enthusiasm. (In a flash, I remembered all that Hertha E. had told me about the „old fighter“ of the early days of the National Socialist struggle and later S.S. officer to whom she was wedded.) And without uttering the two forbidden Words, I raised my right hand.
„Frau Mukherji! – Hertha’s friend!“ said he, with joyous emotion, recognising me, although he had never seen me before, and raising his hand in his turn. „Come! Do come in – although my room is not a fitting place to receive anybody. But I know you do not mind those details. Come; I am so glad to make your acquaintance – at last!“
He stepped unto the landing – a blond man of moderate stature, with regular – irreproachably Nordic – features; blue eyes that looked intensely at me as hers had, sometimes. And I followed him into what was about the poorest, darkest and most desolate rooms I had, up till then, seen in [Germany]: a room with slanting walls (for this was the very top of the house) containing nothing but a table, two chairs, an old stove, and a narrow wooden bed like those one sees in a cabin on board ship, and lighted to some extent through a small window. […]
I remembered her relating me an episode that had taken place in a tramway car in Berlin, during the war; her husband, who had come from the front, on leave, and she, who had come, also on leave, from the camp where she was working as an overseer, were going together to the theatre. She was standing at his side when he suddenly noticed a Jew who had made himself comfortable in a corner without botherin to offer his seat to a lady and, which is more, to an S.S. officer’s wife. He had looked at the man sternly and, in an icy-cold voice, in which clang all the pride and power of the Third Reich, which he embodied, – a voice that had sent a thrill of satisfaction through most of the bystanders (and perhaps a tremor of terror through a few of them) – he had merely said: „Get down!“ As one can well imagine, the Yid had not waited for the order to be repeated; he had speedily obeyed, shrinking before the man in black uniform […].
He closed the door, squeezed both my hands in his and said, with tears in his eyes and an expression of such ecstatic happiness that it verged on one of pain: „She will be free on the eighth – in ten days‘ time! Do you know it? Free, free once more after all those nightmarish years, my poor Hertha! She is coming back, coming home. I am counting the days. Oh, I am so glad that you have come, you who love her; you who were such an uplifting force to her in jail (she told me all about you, last year, when she was allowed to come and spend a few days at my side in hospital, because the doctors thought I was going to die. […]“
I knew that Herr E. had been savagely beaten upon the head by an English Military policeman to whom he had refused to surrender his Party decorations for them to be defiled; so savagely, that he had never recovered from his injuries. I knew he had, after his return to Germany, spent all his time in a „Home for the brain-injured,“ only a mile or two away from Homburg. In fact, I had first sought him there, not knowing that he had become well enough to work, and that he had taken a room in the town.
„As a prisoner of war,“ continued Herr E., „I was, in England, for months confined to a cold, damp, and absolutely dark cell, my hands and feet chained to the wall, only because I had stood up to ‚them‘ and would not say ‚yes‘ to their nonsense about our glorious National Socialist régime. But even that was not the worst. They would come now and then to my cell to bring me my meagre food, and tell me about the Belsen trial. ‚Your precious wife you will never see again,‘ they said. ‚She is to be hanged with the rest of that murderous lot. Serves her right!‘ I could not see them, but I could hear the glee in their voices. They knew all the time that it was not true. Hertha had already been sentenced to fifteen years‘ imprisonment as you know. And yet, they would come and tell me that for the sheer pleasure of tormenting me, only because I was – because I am – a convinced Nazi. Those kind-hearted Englishmen, who call us ‚monsters‘! That, for me, was worse than the iron chains.“ […]
I enquired about Herr E.’s health. I had indeed never expected to find him looking so well after having been given up for lost only a year before.
„In Dornholzhausen, – in the Home for the brain-injured – I had the good luck of falling into the hands of an exceptionally able doctor,“ explained he. „I suppose that is what saved me. That and… my own will to live; and Destiny…“(Savitri Devi: Pilgrimage)
Clarissa Schnabel 