Ravensbrück concentration camp


Ravensbrück was a Nazi Germany concentration camp exclusively for women from 1939 to 1945, located in northern Germany, north of Berlin at a site near the village of Ravensbrück. The camp memorial's estimated figure of 132,000 women who were in the camp during the war includes about 48,500 from Poland, 28,000 from the Soviet Union, almost 24,000 from Germany and Austria, nearly 8,000 from France, almost 2,000 from Belgium, and thousands from other countries including a few from the United Kingdom and the United States. More than 20,000 of the total were Jewish. More than 80 percent were political prisoners. Many prisoners were employed as slave laborers by Siemens & Halske. From 1942 to 1945, the Nazis undertook medical experiments on Ravensbrück prisoners to test the effectiveness of sulfonamides.
In the spring of 1941 the SS established a small adjacent camp for male inmates, who built and managed the camp's gas chambers in January 1945. Of the female prisoners who passed through the Ravensbrück camp, about 50,000 perished. No precise accounting for the number of prisoners murdered in the gas-chamber at Ravensbrück can be given, but a compilation of witness accounts suggests that the number was over 5,000 and the true figure may have been much higher.

Prisoners

Construction of the camp began in November 1938 on the order of the SS leader, Heinrich Himmler, and was unusual in that it was intended exclusively to hold female inmates. Ravensbrück first housed prisoners in May 1939, when the SS moved 900 women from the Lichtenburg concentration camp in Saxony. Eight months after the start of World War II the camp's maximum capacity was already exceeded. It underwent major expansion following the invasion of Poland. By the summer of 1941, with the launch of Operation Barbarossa, an estimated total of 5,000 women were imprisoned and fed gradually decreasing hunger rations. By the end of 1942 the inmate population of Ravensbrück had grown to about 10,000. The greatest number of prisoners at one time in Ravensbrück was probably about 45,000.
Between 1939 and 1945 some 130,000 to 132,000 prisoners passed through the Ravensbrück camp system. According to Encyclopædia Britannica, about 50,000 of them perished from disease, starvation, overwork and despair; some 2,200 were murdered in the gas chambers. Upon liberation on 29–30 April 1945, approximately 3,500 prisoners were still alive in the main camp.
Although the inmates came from every country in German-occupied Europe, the largest single national group in the camp were Polish. In the spring of 1941 the SS authorities established a small men's camp adjacent to the main camp. The male inmates built and managed the gas chambers for the camp in 1944.
There were children in the camp as well. At first they arrived with mothers who were Romani or Jews incarcerated in the camp or were born to imprisoned women. There were few children early on, including a few Czech children from Lidice in July 1942. Later the children in the camp represented almost all nations of Europe occupied by Germany. Between April and October 1944, their number increased considerably, consisting of two groups. One group was composed of Romani children brought into the camp with their mothers or sisters after the Romani camp in Auschwitz-Birkenau was closed. The other group included mostly children who were brought with Polish mothers sent to Ravensbrück after the collapse of the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. Most of these children died of starvation.
Ravensbrück had 70 sub-camps used for slave labour that were spread across an area from the Baltic Sea to Bavaria.
Among the thousands executed at Ravensbrück were four members of the British World War II organization Special Operations Executive : Denise Bloch, Cecily Lefort, Lilian Rolfe and Violette Szabo. Other victims included the Roman Catholic nuns and Élise Rivet, Élisabeth de Rothschild, Russian Orthodox nun St. Maria Skobtsova, the 25-year-old French Princess Anne de Bauffremont-Courtenay, Milena Jesenská, lover of Franz Kafka, and Olga Benário, wife of the Brazilian Communist leader Luís Carlos Prestes. The largest single group of women executed at the camp were 200 young Polish members of the Home Army. A number of lesbians were imprisoned and murdered at the camp, including Henny Schermann and Mary Pünjer.
Among the survivors of Ravensbrück was author Corrie ten Boom, arrested with her family for harbouring Jews in their home in Haarlem, the Netherlands. She documented her ordeal alongside her sister Betsie ten Boom in her book The Hiding Place, which was eventually produced as a motion picture. Polish Countess Karolina Lanckoronska, an art historian and author of Michelangelo in Ravensbrück, was imprisoned there from 1943 until 1945. SOE agents who survived were Yvonne Baseden and Eileen Nearne, who was a prisoner in 1944 before being transferred to another work camp and escaping. Englishwoman Mary Lindell and American Virginia d'Albert-Lake, both leaders of escape and evasion lines in France, survived. Another SOE agent, Odette Sansom, also survived and is the subject of several biographies documenting her ordeals. Among the Communist survivors of the camp was French Resistance member Louise Magadur.
Maisie Renault, sister of Gilbert Renault, wrote about her captivity in Ravensbrück in La Grande Misère which won France's Prix Verité in 1948. Other survivors who wrote memoirs about their experiences include Gemma La Guardia Gluck, sister of New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, as well as Germaine Tillion, a Ravensbrück survivor from France who published her own eyewitness account of the camp in 1975. After liberation, Anna Garcin-Mayade, French painter and member of the French Resistance, painted works illustrating prisoners and the terrible conditions of the camps; these were recreations of works she had created while in the camps.
In 2005, Ravensbrück survivor Judith Sherman published a book of prose and poetry titled Say the Name. Sherman writes of her childhood home in Kurima, Czechoslovakia, and of several deportations, hiding in homes and in the forest, undergoing torture, and witnessing murder in Ravensbrück before her final liberation. Approximately 500 women from Ravensbrück were transferred to Dachau, where they were assigned as labourers to the Agfa-Commando; the women assembled ignition timing devices for bombs, artillery ammunition, and V-1 and V-2 rockets.
Gustav Noske, the former German Minister of Defense, stayed in Ravensbrück concentration camp after his arrest by the Gestapo in 1944. Later Noske was freed by advancing Allied troops from a Gestapo prison in Berlin.

Guards

Camp commandants included :
The other male officers were :
  • Paul Borchert, chief of political section.
  • , Schutzhaftlagerführer, assistant to Fritz Suhren.
  • , chief of labor section.
  • Albert Sauer, arrived at Ravensbrück with Johann Schwarzhuber, bringing 8,000 prisoners from Auschwitz.
  • Johann Schwarzhuber, assistant to Fritz Suhren, replaced around January 1945. He introduced the gas chamber in the camp.
Besides the male Nazi administrators, the camp staff included over 150 female guards assigned to oversee the prisoners at some point during the camp's operational period. The technical term for a female guard in a Nazi camp was an Aufseherin, 'overseer'. Ravensbrück also served as a training camp for over 4,000 female overseers. The women either stayed in the camp or eventually served in other camps.
Some of these women went on to serve as chief wardresses in other camps. Several dozen block overseers, accompanied by dogs, SS men and whips oversaw the prisoners in their living quarters in Ravensbrück, at roll call and during food distribution. At any single time, a report overseer handled the roll calls and general discipline of the internees. Rosel Laurenzen originally served as head of the labour pool at the camp along with her assistant Gertrud Schoeber. In 1944 Greta Bösel took over this command. Other high ranking female guards included, Ilse Göritz, Margot Dreschel, and Elisabeth Kammer. Head wardress at the Uckermark death complex of Ravensbrück was Ruth Neudeck. Regular Aufseherinnen were not usually granted access to the internees' compound unless they supervised inside work details. Most of the SS women met their prisoner work gangs at the gate each morning and returned them later in the day. The treatment by the female guards in Ravensbrück was normally brutal. Elfriede Muller, an Aufseherin in the camp was so harsh that the prisoners nicknamed her "The Beast of Ravensbrück". Other guards in the camp included Hermine Boettcher-Brueckner, Luise Danz, Irma Grese, Herta Oberheuser, and Margarethe de Hueber.
The female chief overseers in Ravensbrück were:
  1. May 1939 – March 1942: Oberaufseherin Johanna Langefeld and her assistant Emma Zimmer
  2. March–October 1942: Oberaufseherin Maria Mandl and assistant Margarete Gallinat
  3. October 1942 – August 1943 Johanna Langefeld who returned from Auschwitz
  4. August 1943 – September 1944 Chef Oberaufseherin Anna Klein, with deputy wardress Dorothea Binz
  5. September 1944 – April 1945 Chef Oberaufseherin Luise Brunner, Lagerfuehrerin Lotte Toberentz, with deputy wardress Dorothea Binz; in 1945 nurse Vera Salvequart used to poison the sick to avoid having to carry them to the gas chambers
In 1973, the U.S. government extradited Hermine Braunsteiner, living in Maspeth, Queens, NY, for trial in Germany for war crimes, and in 2006, extradited Elfriede Rinkel, 84, a former Ravensbrück guard, who had lived in San Francisco, CA since 1959.