Vera Salvequart
|
Vera Salvequart (26 November 1919 - 26 June 1947) was a Sudeten-German nurse who served as a kapo (prisoner functionary) at the Ravensbrück concentration camp from 1944 - 1945.
Biography edit
Salvequart was born in Czechoslovakia in 1919, but later moved to Germany. After the rise of the Nazi Party, she was arrested by the Gestapo in 1941 for having a relationship with a Jewish man and served 10 months in the Flossenbürg concentration camp. After her release, she was arrested again in 1942 for having a relationship with another Jew and was sent back to Flossenbürg for another two years. While serving her time, she was caught helping five prisoners of war escape from Flossenbürg and was sent to the Ravensbrück women's camp to work as a kapo.
Due to a staff shortage, Salvequart was put to work in the camp infirmary. Her main duties were to fill out death certificates and inspect the bodies of dead prisoners for gold teeth. However, by February 1945 Salvequart had begun to take a more active role in the killings. She oversaw the transfer of thousands of sick and injured women to the gas chambers and was also known to have personally killed a number of inmates through lethal injection in order to save the trouble of transporting them, which she justified as a mercy. One camp survivor recalled that Salvequart would entice prisoners into taking arsenic powder by telling them they were about to be transferred and needed to take the powder to keep their strength up, administering the lethal injection to those who refused. Several prisoners also remembered the case of a Polish woman named Schikovsky who was murdered by guards in the Ravensbrück washroom, testifying at Salvequart's trial that she had entered the washroom just before Schikovsky began screaming.
Salvequart was captured by Soviet forces while trying to escape Ravensbrück while disguised as a male prisoner from a subcamp. She was handed over to British authorities and was charged with war crimes at the Ravensbrück trials in 1946. Salvequart denied that she had taken part in any killings and claimed to have treated the Jews well and to have saved some from death by forging their death certificates. She also claimed that her disguise had been concocted by male subcamp prisoners from an adjacent camp to help her escape the gas chamber after her superiors tried to send her there as punishment for giving food to a Jewish child. No persons saved by Salvequart could be identified and she was convicted and sentenced to death. She appealed for clemency claiming that she had stolen German military schematics from Ravensbrück and smuggled them to a British spy, but this could not be substantiated and her appeal was denied. Salvequart was executed by hanging on 26 June 1947.