The Dressmakers of Auschwitz

At the height of the Holocaust, 25 women tailored and crafted exquisite garments for the wives of SS guards and high-ranking Nazi officers in an exclusive salon the Nazis called the “Upper Tailoring Studio,” located within the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.

Magda Goebbels, wife of Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, was one of their clients. Founded by Hedwig Höss, the wife of the camp commandant, their work was in such high demand that there was a six-month backlog of orders. The youngest worker was just 14, and the oldest were in their early twenties. Most of them grew up in tailoring families and were familiar with fashion trade that would save their lives.

Female Prisoners

In early 1942 Slovakia was plastered with posters and handbills ordering unmarried Jewish girls to report to work camps for service. Some were deported immediately, some went into hiding, thousands of them headed east on German transport trains to concentration camps in occupied Poland.

Female prisoners were mainly assigned to work outdoors, dredging swamps and ponds, digging ditches, strengthening riverbanks, and using pickaxes and hand tools to demolish houses left behind as Poles fled their homes. Once bricks were chipped away from walls, they were loaded onto a cart where women instead of horses would deliver the load to a construction site.

Hedwig Höss and Marta Fuchs

Some luckier women ended up as servants and attendants to the camp officers. One was Marta Fuchs, a dressmaker who became a general domestic servant for Hedwig Höss and her family. Hedwig was married to Rudolf Höss, the Commandant of Auschwitz. Marta was assigned to maintain their garden and swimming pool and entertain the Höss children with sleigh rides or playing on the garden swings at the Höss’s villa.

Marta Fuchs

One day, Hedwig lamented that she needed someone to repurpose some scrap fur pieces into a coat. Marta assured her that she could easily do that. Hedwig was so pleased with the result that Marta became Hedwig’s in-house dressmaker and tailor. The villa’s attic was reconfigured as a sewing room where dresses and female finery pillaged from Auschwitz prisoners were reconditioned and Marta crafted formal outfits for the Hoss children and dresses for Hedwig, who insisted that Marta replace any buttons from the prisoner’s confiscated clothing because she didn’t want contact with anything “that Jewish hands had touched.” (Quoted from The Dressmakers of Auschwitz, by Lucy Adington)

By this time, Hedwig had hired some seamstresses to work with Marta. Climbing up to the attic one day, Hedwig was impressed by the quality and speed she saw in Marta and another Jewish woman’s sewing. Hedwig was perplexed by what she saw and said “You work quickly and well. How is that possible? After all, Jews are parasites and con artists, and…do nothing but sit around in cafes? Where did you learn to work like this?” (ibid.)

Soon, Hedwig’s fancy clothing became the envy of jealous Nazi officers’ wives. Hedwig saw the possibility to grow her attic workshop into a high-end fashion salon dedicated to the Nazi elite within the confines of the Auschwitz concentration camp. This was the genesis of the studio with Marta at the helm.

The Creation of the Upper Tailoring Studio

By 1944, women who were identified as “dressmakers” were selected to join an elite group of stitchers and textile workers in a new fashion salon called the Obere Nähstube, Upper Tailoring Studio. Requests for relatives to join the studio were funneled through Marta and the number of workers grew as friends and sisters were added to the group. Marta saw the new dressmaking studio as a refuge to provide rescue for as many women as possible.

Hoss Family Portrait (1943)

The studio was set up in the upper basement of the Stabsgebaude, or staff building. It had amenities such as running water, flush toilets, and working showers. The women worked around the clock and slept in shifts in double decker wooden bunk beds with straw mattresses. They wore better quality clothing, confiscated by the SS from the new arrivals to the camp, than the second-rate fare they wore before their assignment to the Stabsgebaude.

Meals consisted of tea and coffee substitutes, turnip soup, potato peelings, and sometimes margarine or sausage with bread. Some sympathetic guards would occasionally dole out sugar cubes and chocolate bars.

Sisters Bracha and Katka Berkovic who were part of the team of dressmakers

The 25 dressmakers were from Slovakia, Hungary, France, Poland, Russia, and Germany. When SS clients arrived for a consultation, they would leaf through the many fashion magazines on hand, chose fabrics, trim and accessories that would best fit the design, and Marta’s team would create patterns, cut the fabric into the required pieces, and fabricate beautiful lingerie, suits, dresses and gowns.

Working with satins, silks, cotton, and linens, the women were expected to produce two dresses every week. Customers eventually included high ranking Nazi clients from Berlin.

Resistance

Marta wanted to save as many women as she could. She started with the workers themselves who now had clean clothes, the opportunity to wash, and the satisfaction and self-esteem of having civilized meaningful work.

Some resistance was measured in small doses, like fabricating forbidden items such as a prayer book for holidays or a Sabbath candle.

In the larger scheme, resistance included secretly helping the underground resistance movements to communicate with people outside the camp and smuggle messages out through a courier network. Coded letters and postcards were sent by the dressmakers, trying to convey the genocide of Auschwitz.

Fruits and vegetables smuggled in from Hedwig Höss’s garden were shared among the women. They collected and distributed any medicines they could find.

Whenever a dressmaker got sick, they rallied to surreptitiously nurse each other back to health, risking a beating or worse by the guards for their acts of kindness and mercy. A highly valued smuggled item was any newspaper, to learn what was happening beyond their prison walls.

When their guards fell asleep, they would softly tune in BBC radio for news of the Allied war effort. It was through such a clandestine news broadcast they learned of the Allied landing in France on D-Day. The newspapers and radio broadcasts raised morale and gave them hope that the tide of the war was turning.

In late 1944 and early 1945, Allied bombs began to fall, and the Germans frantically began to destroy the records documenting the Auschwitz genocide. There were so many files, ledger books, and detailed records targeted for destruction, the Germans built bonfires to destroy them.

January 17, 1945, was the women’s last day of work. The dressmakers, along with tens of thousands of prisoners, were forced to march in the winter snow to other camps in the west and northwest as Auschwitz was evacuated and virtually abandoned. Ten days later, the advancing Russian army arrived and liberated the remaining sick and infirm prisoners that were left behind.

By May, American, British and Russian troops were converging and Germany surrendered on May 2, 1945.

Marta Fuchs

Marta was born in 1918 in present-day Hungary. She became an artist and dressmaker and was a rising star in the fashion and haute couture circles of Prague. She might have ended up as a fashion icon in Paris if her path in life had been different. Instead, she ended up in Auschwitz and became the “kapo” or leader of the Upper Tailoring Studio.

When Auschwitz was abandoned, Marta and five others broke away from the Death March in an escape effort. They made it as far as the Slovak/Polish border before they were met by gunfire from German troops. Four of the escapees were shot to death, but Marta and a Polish friend escaped. Marta was saved when the German bullets struck books in her knapsack while she was running into the woods.

After the war, she opened her own business in Prague. “Salon Marta” produced reasonably priced good quality women’s clothing.

Rudolf and Frau Höss: The Commandant and his wife

Edna Hedwig Höss was 21 when she married Rudolf Höss upon his release from prison on a murder sentence in 1929. They lived in a garden villa within the Auschwitz property that was adorned with roses from her rose garden. (Their family was featured in the film, The Zone of Interest.) She hosted parties to entertain high level Nazis including Adolf Eichmann, Dr Josef Mengele, and Heinrich Himmler, whom her children affectionately called “Uncle Heini”.

Toward the end of the war, Edna, Rudolf, and their five children evaded authorities and settled in northern Germany under false names. Heinrich was discovered by a team of British Nazi hunters in March 1946, arrested and handed over to the Americans to testify at Nuremburg and then stand trial in Poland.

The Execution of Rudolf Hoss

Hoss’ autobiography was written in jail. He denied any guilt for his war crimes because he had only “followed orders”. One year later, the former Commander of the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp was found guilty and his death sentence by hanging was carried out on April 16, 1947. His execution took place in a courtyard near the grounds of the former Auschwitz crematorium, where 1.1 million people, the vast majority of them Jews, were murdered.

Edna Hedwig Hoss passed away in September 1989 while visiting her daughter and granddaughter in Virginia. She was 81.

Legacy

The story of the Upper Tailoring Studio was largely unknown until British author and clothing historian Lucy Adlington published her bestselling book The Dressmakers of Auschwitz in September 2021. The New York Times Best Seller has been translated into 22 languages, highlighting its global impact and themes of friendship, loyalty, and female heroism.

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