The motto of Camp Vogelstadt, painted on a wooden sign above the main entrance was: "Arbeit macht das leben suss" - "Work makes life sweet." The motto was a cruel irony for Vogelstadt's three-hundred hand picked inmates. They were all young girls, chosen for their beauty. There "work" was to make life sweet for any SS man with twenty minutes to spare, and a taste for the pleasures of the flesh.

Camp Vogelstadt was located in southern Bavaria, about halfway between Munchen and Traustein, far enough from the nearest village so that ordinary German citizens would not be scandalized by the goings-on there. It was only a couple hours' drive to Dachau in the northwest-which made it easy for camp personnel to travel to the better-known concentration camp and requisition any attractive girl who had been admitted.

The Commandant of Camp Vogelstadt, SS Colonel Gerhart P. Klavver, had one peculiarity to which we owe a good deal of our present knowledge of what went on at Vogelstadt: he kept a dairy. An unsuccessful writer before Hitler came to power; he now apparently was keeping notes on his day-to-day experiences in the hopes of writing them up in a novel. How he expected to justify his part in the shameful brutalities is incomprehensible.

Through Colonel Klavver's diary, and through eyewitness reports of survivors, we can build up a detailed and accurate picture of what happened to Elsa Jordaens, the high spirited Flemish girl who split Camp Vogelstadt right down the middle.

Elsa, like most of the girls at Camp Vogelstadt, arrived in a closed van crammed with sobbing, terrified victims. The other girls in this particular "shipment," like herself, had spent the previous night in a cell of the local police station in Schorndorf. A couple of them had been molested by police officials there, while their SS guards looked on and laughed, but at least they had been given a meager meal of thin soup and black bread. All of the girls were between the ages of sixteen and twenty-four. Elsa herself was twenty-two; a striking beauty with long legs, lovely wheat-colored hair, and a firm, well formed bosom.

"Outside, outside!" someone shouted. The doors of the van opened and the girls filed out, blinking, into the morning sunshine.

Elsa saw a row of wooden buildings and two larger structures of brick. Crude wooden walks set into the camp's mud connected these buildings. Several guard towers and a high barbed wire fence testified to the impossibility of escape. The camp was ringed with anti-aircraft guns, which showed the high priority put on it.

"March! Schnell!" screamed the lieutenant in charge. Uncertainly the girls straggled toward the building he was indicating with a riding crop. He used the crop on their buttocks to speed them up.

Inside they found themselves in a large bare room with a stone floor. Four SS clerks were scribbling busily away at their desks. A number of uniformed men were loitering nearby, and when they saw the girls they good-naturedly called out a series of obscene comments.

A door opened, and a thickset man with a shaven head entered. This was SS Captain Kleibert, the second-in-command.

"Strip!" he shouted to the girls.

The girls-most of them from sheltered homes-hesitated.

"Take off your clothes! All of them! Immediately!'

This had the desired effect. The girls, blushing with embarrassment, began to undress. One of them a delicate-looking brunette, stopped when she got to her brassiere, unable to bring herself to remove it. Kleibert stepped up to her and ripped it off by main force. When the girl tried to cover her breasts, he pulled her hands away and ordered her to stand at attention.

They stood around, naked, for a half hour while the clerks took their names and particulars. Since none in this group had been in a concentration camp, they were given tags with numbers, to be worn around their necks until they could have numbers tattooed beneath their armpits.

Next came the medical examination. They were herded into another room and examined for the state of their general health and for evidence of disease.

When it came Elsa's turn to climb upon the examination table and put her feet in the stirrups, she refused. The humiliation was too much to endure. The room was full of idle SS men who had come to watch. The examination would have made her ashamed even if she had been alone with the doctor. But an audience was more than she could stand. "You will learn to obey!" the doctor said. He slapped her face, hard, bloodying her nose. Still Elsa obstinately shook her head. The doctor's hand struck the pretty face again, this time with a balled fist. Elsa's lower lip split open sending a spray of blood across her cheek. Her eyes pinched tightly closed as Elsa nonetheless refused to comply. "Teach her a lesson," the doctor said to one of the idlers along the wall.

Eagerly the man stepped forward. He grabbed Elsa by the hair and yanked her head back immobilizing the girl. Then he began to use his fingers on the sensitive parts of her body, pinching her breasts and poking his dirty fingers into her warm slit, until Elsa was ready to cry. She held out for as long as she could, but when he forced her to bend over and she felt the first blows of a leather strap on her bare back, she sobbed: "I'll do it, I'll do it…"

The doctor was not gentle with her now. The instrument he used for the internal examination was hard, sharp and cold. Elsa grimaced and moaned in pain as the doctor manipulated the instrument inside her, causing unnecessary pain in the process.

At last it was over, she stood shivering and naked against the wall with the other girls. But they were not to be dismissed. The Colonel himself, with Kleibert standing beside him like a glowering devil, made his indoctrination speech.

"You girls are most fortunate. You have been selected to serve the manly needs of the SS. You will receive more to eat than if you were sent to Dachau or Buchenwald, because our brave men do not like their love partners to be skinny. You will do your utmost to please our brave men, who in these trying times need all the relaxation they can get. Whatever is required of you, you will comply with-with enthusiasm! If there are complaints about your cooperation, you will end up in the soap dish. Is that understood? Very well."

He turned to the sergeant. "Take them to Barracks B. Wait a minute. That one…" He pointed to Elsa. "Take her to the training barracks."

Elsa soon found out what "training" barracks meant. This was reserved for those girls who the Nazis thought needed preliminary breaking in.

She was forced down on a bed, her wrists and ankles lashed to the bed posts. There would be no question of shyness or lack of cooperation.

Her "initiation" was begun by the sergeant who tied her to the bed. He was not gentle in pursuit of satisfying his lust forcing his fat penis into her dry hole with savagery.

Elsa spent ten days and nights in the "training barracks. By then her battered body was adjudged to have been properly thrashed and her spirit sufficiently broken. She was moved to another barracks, and now she was expected to give full satisfaction, without being tied up.

The Rule, Elsa was told by some of the older inmates, was that after three complaints had been entered against a girl, she was disposed of. Sometimes that meant the ovens, sometimes in the gas chamber. The more sadistic of the SS men kept the girls in a state of perpetual terror by threatening to turn in a complaint. The girls would beg them not to complain, promising to satisfy the most depraved lusts. The list of revolting degeneracy's compiled by the SS patrons was unimaginable, Elsa found herself in a daze much of the time, stupefied by the hellish nightmare she was enduring. She learned to behave like a docile puppet, smiling automatically, no matter what she was forced to do.

Sometimes when a particularly sadistic SS man would hurt her beyond endurance she would cry out, and then would be warned to behave or receive a complaint.

Yet there was only so much a human being can endure. Elsa, brutalized though she was from her three-month imprisonment at Camp Vogelstadt, had reached the breaking point. Otherwise she might not have taken the risk.

She waited until one of the periodic "victory celebrations' that somehow always coincided with the arrival of the SS paymaster. On these occasions the off-duty SS men would generally arrive drunk, and get drunker still, passing bottles around. In the excess of comradeship, the screens between the beds would come down. The men would get drunker and drunker, singing marching songs and old student tunes, making speeches about crushing England, America and Russia, staggering from girl to girl with their pathetic middle-aged lusts. The night always ended up in a wild general orgy, in which the girls with their ghastly forced smiles would become sweaty and exhausted, complying with the intoxicated urging of their sadistic masters.

Captain Kleibert was always an enthusiastic participant in these affairs.

On the night in question, Elsa waited until most of the men passed out. The remainder were either too sodden with drink to notice much of anything, or were cavorting in the beds with their unwilling partners.

Elsa searched among the sprawled bodies until she located Kleibert. She pressed herself against him and simulated passion. Kleibert stirred weakly in his stupor, but remained more than half asleep. If anyone had been watching, however, they could not have told for sure that he was not awake. Elsa felt around Kleibert's belt for the knife he always carried. Once she had seen that knife slice of a girl's breast; another time it had been pushed deep into a prisoner's navel.

Now Elsa ran her finger across Kleibert's chest until she felt his heartbeat. Kleibert moaned in his sleep. Elsa whispered an endearment and saw a smile shape his mouth. Expertly she pushed the knife blade between his ribs, into his heart.

It was only then that he opened his eyes. They widened in horror. He opened his mouth but could not speak.

"That was for all the girls you murdered," Elsa hissed.

If any of the other SS men saw Kleibert's legs thrashing, his body twitching, they must have thought it was excitement causing it. Elsa held him down until he stopped moving, the feigned smile still on her face. When she knew he was dead, the smile became real for a moment.

When Kleibert's body was discovered the next morning, the SS men were thrown into a panic. They had always feared the possibility of an uprising among the prisoners they so mistreated. Ever since the assassination of Heydrich, the "Butcher of Lidice," the SS had been especially fearful. If a man as high in the Hierarchy as Heydrich could be killed, then none of them were safe. Heydrich, the man who had first organized the concentration camps, who had built the SS to what it now was, had paid for his crimes. He had lingered in unspeakable agony from a severed spinal cord, before he finally died in a Prague hospital. Now it was Kleibert's turn.

Colonel Klavver questioned the twenty-five girls who had been in the barracks that night. All of them denied having seen anything. He railed at their "stubbornness," and ordered them to be tortured in turn until the guilty one confessed.

Elsa could not bear the thought of the others being tortured for her act. She confessed. Possible she hoped for a quick execution. She was not to be granted a merciful death. Klavver demanded the names of her "accomplices." She told him she had none. He didn't believe her.

"Very well," the Colonel said grimly. "Take her to the Interrogation Room."

We know from Klavver's dairy exactly what Elsa Jordaens suffered in the Interrogation Room. First they strapped her on a special wooden rack, her legs drawn forward. Then the lash was administered until the rack was slippery with her blood. Elsa screamed for mercy. The corporal administering the punishment laughed, and brought the butt of the lash down on her kidneys. All this time Klavver sat sipping coffee, his legs crossed like a gentleman at an expensive club.

When Elsa finally fainted and could not be easily revived, they threw her in a cell for a few hours. Her body screamed in pain.

Klavver by this time had had a leisurely lunch. He ordered the interrogation resumed. Now they immersed her in a tub, holding her head under water until she nearly drowned. Elsa choked and gasp for air each time she was pulled from the water only to have her head shoved back into the tub again and again. After an hour of this they hung her face down across a table and let the water run out. When she regained consciousness again, choking and gasping, Klavver had another idea.

This time Elsa's hands were manacled behind her back, and she was hoisted over a door. The sadistic corporal was given a broom handle, and with it beat the girl all over her body. After nearly half an hour the girl began to swoon. The corporal brought her back to full awareness by forcing the broom handle between her legs, then up into her battered body. With frightful vengeance the blood smeared broom handle was jabbed repeatedly into Elsa's vagina. The butchering thrusts ripped apart the girl's womb plunging far into her lower abdomen. Her screams were frightful before she finally lapsed in merciful unconsciousness again.

Klavver got up and yawned. He was already bored. "We'll get nothing out of this one," he said. He looked out the window. Some SS men were engaged in bayonet practice in the field outside, thrusting their blades into practice dummies.

"Dress her and take her outside," he said. "We'll still get some use out of her."

Elsa was lifted off the door. Because of her injuries she was unable to stand on her own, so they held her up while they dressed her. It was the first time in months that she had worn a stitch of clothing. They dressed her in whatever they could find, including a red shirt that had belonged to the late Captain Kleibert.

Two men carried the injured girl outside. At Klavver's orders she was tied by the wrists to the branch of a tree. She dangled six inches off the ground, in agony from her injuries. "Your last chance," Klavver said. "Who are your accomplices?"

Her answer was to spit in Klavver's face.

Purple with fury, Klavver ordered the soldiers to begin.

The first was young. He had been drafted only a few weeks before and was not yet accustomed to brutality. He made clumsy ineffectual thrusts with his bayonet, while the Colonel waved his riding crop impatiently. It was soon clear that he was doing nothing more than passing his blade through Elsa's clothing, erratically slashing her flesh. The girl weakly whimpered at each thrust.

In disgust, Klavver called the second soldier over. This one was older and corpulent. His jowly smirk confirmed that he was delighted to have the opportunity. While Klavver looked on approvingly he used his bayonet to rip off Elsa's clothing. Then he made a number of short stabs at her thighs, drawing blood and making the girl moan in pain. Finally taking a professional stance, he thrust the blade deep into her thigh. Half dead though she was, she screamed in agony. Again the soldier thrust his bayonet into Elsa's soft body, this time the blade ripped into her narrow waist at the side.

Elsa continued to scream and shriek as the soldier again and again sank the bloody blade into her flesh. The bayonet tore into her lower belly with savage fury, then the girl's globular breasts were jabbed to shreds. One thrust sent the blade deep into her lower belly and Elsa's voice rose to an ear piercing shriek before blood gushed from between her lips. Her ravaged body twitched for a few seconds before she fell silent and her blood smeared remains succumbed dangling limply. Even then again and again he sank the bayonet into her slumped and obviously lifeless body.

"Well done," Klavver told the man. "But you have forgotten something."

He took the bayonet from the soldier and walked over to the blood-drenched body. Klavver gave a final trust of the bayonet into the dead girl and withdrew it. He handed the rifle back to its owner and said, "Let her hang there until nightfall. She will make a better target than a sack of straw."