[04-30-2010]  

In 1939, the SS chose Ravensbrück near Fürstenberg to be the site of the largest-ever concentration camp built for women on German territory. In the spring of 1939, the first female prisoners were committed to Ravensbrück coming from Lichtenburg Concentration Camp. In April 1941, a camp for men was opened at Ravensbrück, too – a historical fact less known today. And in June 1942, so-called “Jugendschutzlager Uckermark” – a sort of protective camp for young women and girls – was constructed within walking distance from the other two in June 1942 completing the camp triad.

The concentration camp for women was enlarged time and again up to 1945. The camp managers divided the premises that housed the prisoners into more and smaller barracks, shacks and huts and supplemented them, in the autumn of 1944, by a tent in order to cope with the streams of “evacuees” from the concentration and extermination camps in the East of Europe. Production plants for forced labourers were enclosed within, and work garages or factories also built outside, the actual camp site. Ravensbrück had a total of more than 40 sub camps which were the main camp’s equal in using (up) forced labourers.  

Between the years 1939 and 1945, the camp administration enrolled about 132,000 women and children, 1,000 female juveniles and 20,000 men as prisoners to-be. The deportees’ total included women and men from over 40 nations.  

Considering that Jewish women, as of 1941/42, were deported to the East of Europe and, once there, were often directly sent to the extermination camps, Ravensbrück’s population included only few numbers of them first. It was not before the Nazis chose Ravensbrück to be the destination of “death marches”, i.e. as of 1944 that Jewish inmates’ figures rose at the camp. Until 1942, mainly German and Austrian women had been committed to Ravensbrück. In the early stage of the camp, so-called “Bibelforscherinnen” (literally “bible researchers” or rather Yehovah’s witnesses) and political opponents had constituted large prisoners’ groups. Already in June 1939, the camp was filled with 400 Sinti and Roma from Austrian Burgenland denounced and branded as “anti-social elements”. And more than 1,000 female Sinti and Roma previously detained in Auschwitz were moved to Ravensbrück in 1944.

From 1942 onward, women from various countries were deported to Ravensbrück most of whom had either been committed resistance fighters or, as forced labourers, been accused of diverse “offences” and “misbehaviour at work”. Prisoners to-be now came increasingly from France, Poland, Russia and the Ukraine to be joined, as of 1943, by female inmates deported from prisons and camps in occupied Europe. This new influx of human resources promoted the SS’ interests of recruiting prisoners still fit to work as forced labourers in armaments’ industry. As the stream of prisoners’ transports heading for Ravensbrück did not end, inmates’ figures went up dramatically – by more than 48,000 in the second half of the year 1944 alone.

Ravensbrück Concentration Camp detained more than 800 children aged between two and 16. And on top of that: the births of more than 500 children are evidenced by the pertinent register kept on place for the months between mid-September 1944 and mid-April 1945 alone. More than half of the children born in Ravensbrück had to leave this life after some weeks, though, and only few children deported to Ravensbrück outlived the camp. The overall death toll (men, women and children) at Ravensbrück is between 20,000 and 30,000 victims.

Keeping more than 46,000 female and about 7,800 male prisoners, Ravensbrück Concentration Camp and its sub camps in operation still were desperately overcrowded early in 1945. By transferring prisoners to the Mauthausen and Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camps, the SS attempted to abate inmates’ numbers at Ravensbrück. Although the SS had “evacuated” the male detainees of Ravensbrück Concentration Camp to Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp early in March, mid-April saw the arrival of new male inmates under the “evacuation transports” scheme, i.e. about 6,000 prisoners from Mittelbau-Dora and the Neuengamme sub camp Watenstedt. The International Red Cross and both the Swedish and Danish Red Cross societies took simultaneous action in April 1945 by moving out around 7,500 prisoners and sending them to Sweden (known under the “White Buses action”). Mainly women from Scandinavia, Belgium, Luxemburg, the Netherlands, France and Poland benefited from this rescue program. Tired out, weakened and not provided with food, the male inmates had to start out walking on 24th and 26th April on a death march heading north-westward. On 27th and 28th April it was the turn of about 20,000 women to undergo such march. Approximately 2,000 sick women, men and children were left on the camp site to be found and freed there by the Red Army on 30th April.

Condemnation of the perpetrators

Opening seven legal proceedings between 1946 and 1948, a British court martial in Hamburg called the Ravensbrück SS staff to account for the crimes committed on site. All in all 17 men and 21 women stood trial, and the court imposed capital punishment on 19 persons and imprisonment sentences of varying duration on 14 persons. In 1946/47, the Nuremberg trial charged SS physicians for having carried out medical experiments on women at Ravensbrück. And the years 1949 and 1950 witnessed the opening of court proceedings at Rastatt in the French occupation zone.

At the ITS

The ITS preserves historical documents on the camp itself – as well as numerous files on the camp’s detainees or survivors, either as originals or copies. The Ravensbrück collection ‘draws’ a complete and detailed picture of everyday life at the camp.

Genowefa Olejniczak

“I arrived at Ravensbrück on 27th July 1941 and remained incarcerated there until the war ended. I had to work hard. First, I was assigned to a penal commando, after that I was plaiting straw, did furrier’s work later on and finally was with the sewers at the factory’s courtyard, where we had to sew caps for the SS. This work was most tiring and exhausting: incessant piece work over twelve hours. On 28th April 1945, the day was just dawning, the camp was evacuated. We were walking day and night without having anything to eat, without having anything to drink, without being able to fall asleep – as we were followed hard by the SS with their dogs. They drove us to march on and reach Neustrelitz from where we had to head westward to an assembly point where we were supposed to go aboard a ship and sail to Sweden. We did not reach that destination, though, as meanwhile this place and its entire surroundings had been bombarded.   

Back home again, I could not use my legs first …. After some time, I regained my strength, though, and was no longer confined to the house. I got to know a man and married him. I did not live with him for long, though, just for one and a half years or so. He was station master in Poznan-Garbary where a Russian soldier shot him in 1947. So, I was left a widow with a little orphan daughter, nine months of age. After three years had gone by, I married for a second time. I myself wonder how I have managed to endure everything, that I am still alive and mentally normal. If it had not been for my belief, I would not have lived through all that.” (Genowefa Olejniczak from Poznan. She was forcibly taken away and compelled to work; after committing sabotage, she was sent to Ravensbrück. Source: http://www.bpb.de/themen/N64UNS,0,0,Ich_habe_Angst_vor_dem_Tod_gehabt_.html

Irmgard Konrad

“It was as early as September 1933, eight months after the Nazis had come to power, when I was arrested for the first time. … So, I was held in pre-trial prison, but set free, because nobody incriminated me. … For Fritz and me, the hardest time ever began, when I, as of 1941, had to wear the Yellow Star and work as forced labourer in a paper mill near Sackrau. Despite all risks his attitude involved for him, Fritz stood by me the whole time. In the summer of 1942, I was arrested again and moved from Breslau pre-trial prison directly to Auschwitz. I came to Ravensbrück in 1943 on the so-called ‘Mischlingstransport’ (“transport of half-Jews”). … Late in April 1945, we were forced to embark on the death march. In the first days of May, the Mecklenburg village Kritzow ‘brought’ me the liberation. Searching for Fritz, I profited by the help of the International Tracing Service. He did the same thing, and in 1947 finally I had a sign of life from him. We had found one another again and could at last begin a new life in Leipzig. … Naturally enough, life in a camp left one physically and emotionally deeply scarred, but matured one in a political sense.” (Irmgard Konrad from Wroclaw/Breslau. She was deported for being a communist and so-called “half-Jewess”. Source: www.bpb.de/themen/5MGFOW,0,0,Ich_wei%DF_nicht_wie_viel_Tausende_Frauen_wir_waren_.html Source: Frauenkonzentrationslager Ravensbrück - Kalendarium 2000 (Ravensbrück Concentration Camp for women – calendar of events 2000), Administration of the Senate for labour, vocational education and women, Berlin, 1999

Ravensbrück Memorial: http://www.ravensbrueck.de/mgr/neu/index.htm

Dossier of the BpB (= Bundesanstalt für politische Bildung/The Federal Agency for Civic Education) on Ravensbrück, last retrieval: 31.03.10 www.bpb.de/themen/SHJ187,0,0,Ravensbr%FCck_%96_%DCberlebende_erz%E4hlen.html

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