The Nazi Concentration Camp Ravensbruck
The Only Concentration Camp Built Especially for Women
Oct 21, 2009
Ravensbruck Concentration Camp was located around 50 miles north of Berlin. The camp was opened in late 1938 with most of the construction done by inmates from Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp. Ravensbruck was the only main camp intended solely for women prisoners.
Ravensbruck Before the Second World War
Like other camps built before the Second World War, Ravensbruck’s first inmates were criminals, political prisoners, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Roma, anti-socials and Jews. Women were also arrested and incarcerated for prostitution, having an abortion and relations with non-German men. At this time female homosexuality wasn’t recognised in the same way that male homosexuality was. In the early days of the camp there was less than 1,000 female inmates in Ravensbruck; a population which steadily began to increase.
Ravensbruck During the Second World War
As the war progressed and the Wehrmacht occupied vast swathes of Europe, the population of Ravensbruck swelled. There were women from Poland, the Soviet Union, France, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and others and a massive increase in the number of Jewish inmates. As a woman only camp all the camp overseers were female, although the camp was run by SS men. By 1942 Ravensbruck also served as a training centre for women becoming camp guards, some who remained at Ravensbruck, others went on to work at camps who had large female sub camps. Most of these female guards signed up because the money was relatively high and a lack of other work in Nazi Germany.
Conditions in Ravensbruck
As with all other Concentration Camps, conditions in Ravensbruck were atrocious. Although it was a camp for women this does not mean they were treated any better than men were, they were forced into hard labour, either at SS Textile factories or more physical work, were given meagre rations, had terrible living conditions, made to stand outside for hours in freezing conditions during roll-call and were frequently beaten for the slightest infringement of camp rules. Women inmates went through selection processes at the camp whereby guards deemed who was fit for work and who wasn’t. Those that weren’t were normally shot; from 1942 onwards they were then sent to a nearby sanatorium which already had a gas chamber built for the T4 Euthanasia programme. Although there was a crematorium, there wasn’t a gas chamber at Ravensbruck until early 1945, and although only operational for a few months, thousands of prisoners were gassed. At this point the population at the camp was very high, with its sprawling sub camp complexes plus an influx of prisoners transferred from other camps. As occurred in other camps, the inmates at Ravensbruck were subjected to horrific scientific experiments such as using different chemicals in the treatment of wounds and attempts at bone transplants. Many of these prisoners died painfully or were permanently disfigured if they survived. The doctors also tested different methods of sterilisation on many prisoners to find the most efficient.
Liberation of Ravensbruck in 1945
By the closing stages of the Second World War there were around 45,000 female prisoners in the camp and around 5,000 men spread throughout the sub camps. As the Red Army approached from the East the SS began to evacuate the camp, some of the male prisoners were sent to Sachsenhausen and some of the women sent to Mauthausen and Bergen-Belsen. The SS also began death marches with the remaining prisoners who were fit enough to do so, most of these marches were intercepted by the Soviets and the prisoners liberated. The Red Army reached Ravensbruck in April 1945 and there were only a couple of thousand severely ill prisoners remaining. Modern estimates have put the number of people who died at Ravensbruck to be around 20,000-30,000.
Sources:
Morrison, J.G. Ravensbrück: everyday life in a women’s concentration camp, 1939-1945. New Jersey: Markus Weiner Publishers, 2000.
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