Ravensbrück Concentration Camp

Built along the shore of Lake Schwedt near the towns of Furstenberg and Havel in northern Germany about an hour north of Berlin, the civilian detention center of Ravensbrück served as the Third Reich’s largest concentration camp specifically designed to house women. Prisoners included political dissidents and communists; artists and academics; religious nonconformists (such as Catholics and Jehovah’s Witnesses); ordinary criminals who had been found guilty of a variety of offenses from theft to murder; so-called race defilers, "Aryan women" who married non-Aryans; and those labeled as sexual deviants, that is, those who remained unmarried and lesbians; and Jews, a separate classification within the Third Reich designating enemies of the state. During nearly six years of operation (from May, 1939, to April, 1945), Ravensbrück processed more than 150,000 prisoners from more than twenty countries, most of them women although as the war progressed a smaller facility for men was opened adjacent to the camp’s grounds.

Background

When the facility at Ravensbrück was opened, conditions were relatively humane. The perception among Nazi authorities was that this was to be reeducation facility and that the women prisoners were to be rehabilitated rather than destroyed. The initial transport of just under two hundred women found carefully raked walkways, manicured lawns, and even colorful flower gardens with strolling peacocks and exotic parrots. The guards, most of them women, were courteous, and fresh linen and clean uniforms were provided each week. Meals were regular and often consisted of fresh bread and sausages. This, however, did not last.

Within six weeks, the camp population escalated to more than two thousand. Within a year, that number had risen to ten thousand. Prisoners were mostly from Germany and occupied Poland, but some were from as far away as Norway and Holland. Food became scarce, and sanitation processes collapsed and were followed by waves of typhus and tuberculosis. Prisoners were wedged sometimes two or three to a single wooden bunk. Treatment at the hands of the 150 camp guards struggling to maintain order became brutal. To enforce obedience, prisoners would be publicly whipped, tortured in small cells in the camp’s warehouses, forced to endure solitary confinement for weeks on end, and even shot outright for even minor offenses or restrained and attacked by German Shepherds while the rest of the camp watched in horror. To teach the other prisoners to abide camp regulations, rations would be cut and work details increased.

Ravensbrück was designed as a work camp, and prisoners were dispatched to satellite facilities to work long and taxing twelve-hour shifts. These subcamps included tailoring firms, small farms, armament facilities, and textile factories. Indeed, Ravensbrück prisoners were responsible for installing the complex electrical circuits on German V1 and V2 rockets at the regional Siemens Electrical Company. In addition, the women were used to clear rubble from nearby German cities bombed by the Allies. It was difficult and demanding work, often backbreaking and dangerous. However, those deemed unfit for work details were summarily shot—the infirm, elderly, or mentally challenged after being processed into the camp.

Camp records indicate that perhaps more than one hundred women were delegated to work in makeshift brothels, to be offered as work incentives to male prisoners in regional camps to meet their quotas. Children born to women incarcerated at Ravensbrück would be drowned, poisoned with a lethal injection, buried alive, or locked in sealed rooms to starve to death. Holocaust researchers estimate the number may have been in the hundreds. Eventually camp administration began authorizing sterilization for both women and girls to control the problem.

By late 1942, Ravensbrück was re-designated as a concentration camp and enlarged again, and the camp began processing large numbers of displaced Jews. The Nazi regime recognized the overcrowded conditions had stretched security arrangements as the camp population grew to more than 80,000. In late 1944, as part of the regime’s Final Solution, Ravensbrück camp was outfitted with a gas chamber and crematorium, and during the closing months of the war, more than 5,000 prisoners were executed and their corpses burned. With the approach of the Russian Army in mid-winter, 1945, Nazi authorities began to dismantle the camp facilities. They compelled the camp population—at the time more than 45,000 women and 5,000 men—to undertake a brutal sixty mile march to the camp at Mecklenberg to avoid the Red Army finding living witnesses able to testify to the camp operations. Fewer than half survived the ordeal. Nevertheless, when the Soviets liberated the camp on April 30, 1945, they found nearly 3,000 prisoners still on site. These survivors provided the compelling story of the camp operations, several publishing memoirs in the years after the war, most notably The Hiding Place (1971) by Corrie ten Boom (1892–1983), a Dutch freedom fighter imprisoned for assisting Jews in hiding from Nazi street sweeps.

Ravensbrück Today

The site of Ravensbrück is marked by a series of powerful understated sculptures designed by German expressionist artist Will Lammert (1892–1957) shortly before his death, including most notably the Ravensbrück Pietà, a gaunt woman, looking stoically upward, holding the corpse of a grown man. The Ravensbrück facility is most noted as the site of brutal medical experiments, beginning as early as 1942. Holocaust researchers have mined the archives of Ravensbrück for the Nazis’ meticulous records of experiments conducted to study how best to disinfect wounds and treat broken bones. Women, more than eighty, were subjected to heinous treatments in the name of research—they were deliberately cut without anesthesia and the wounds treated with a variety of experimental sulfonamide drugs; their bones would be broken and different experimental techniques for bone transplanting would be attempted. Many were subjected to amputations to develop better techniques for field hospital operations. Thirty-eight camp doctors, camp guards, and administrators were tried, and many were imprisoned or executed by British war crimes tribunals conducted in Hamburg between 1947 and 1949.

Bibliography

Anthonioz, Genevieve de Gaulle. The Dawn of Hope: A Memoir of Ravensbrück. New York: Arcade, 1999. Print.

Helm, Sarah. If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbrück, Hitler’s Concentration Camp for Women. New York: Little, 2015. Print.

---. Ravensbrück: Life and Death in Hitler’s Concentration Camp for Women. New York: Talese, 2015. Print.

Herbermann, Nanda. The Blessed Abyss: Inmate #6582 in Ravensbrück’s Concentration Camp for Women. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2000. Print.

Lanckoronska, Karolina. Michelangelo in Ravensbrück: One Woman’s War against the Nazis. Boston: Da Capo, 2007. Print.

Morrison, Jack G. Ravensbrück: Everyday Life in a Woman’s Concentration Camp, 1939–1945. Princeton: Wiener, 2000. Print.

Saidel, Rochelle G. The Jewish Women of Ravensbrück Concentration Camp. Madison: U of Wisconsin, 2006.