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Ravensbrück was a German concentration camp located 90 km north of Berlin. It was founded in 1938 by SS leader Heinrich Himmler and was unusual in that it was a camp primarily for women, and opened in May 1939. There were children in the camp as well. At first, they arrived with mothers who were Gypsies or Jews incarcerated in the camp or were born to imprisoned women. There were few of them at that time. There were 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 were Roma children with their mothers or sisters brought into the camp after the Roma 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, and Jewish children after the Budapest Ghetto was closed. With a few exceptions all these children died of starvation. Ravensbrück had 70 sub-camps used for slave labor that were spread across an area from the Baltic Sea to Bavaria.
Ravensbrück served as a training camp for over 4,000 female overseers. The technical term for a female guard in a Nazi camp was an Aufseherin. The women either stayed in the camp or eventually served in other camps. The female chief overseers (Oberaufseherinnen) in Ravensbrück were:
- May 1939-1940: Anne Zimmer (1939-1940), with deputy wardress Jane Bernigau
- 1941-June 1942: Johanna Langefeld
- June 1942-October 1942: Maria Mandel
- October 1942: Johanna Langefeld returned
Later, several women were head female guards at the same time
- 1942-1944: Anne Klein (nee Plaubel) (unverified. See Talk:Klein Plaubel)
- 1944-1945: Erna Rose
- 1944-1945: Else Grabner
- 1944: Kaethe Hoern
- 1944-1945: Margarete Gallinat (who also served as head wardress at Vught)
- 1944: Elsa Erich
- 1944: Hildegard Neumann
and their assistant Dorothea Binz (1943-1945)
Most of these women went on to serve as chief wardresses in other camps. Other high ranking SS women included Christel Jankowsky, Ilse Goeritz, Greta Boesel, Margot Dreschel, Elisabeth Kammer, and head wardress at the Uckermark death complex of Ravensbrück was Ruth Closius. The treatment by the SS women in Ravensbrück was normally brutal. Elfriede Muller, an SS Aufseherin in the camp was so harsh that the prisoners nicknamed her "The Beast of Ravensbrück."
When a new prisoner arrived at Ravensbrück they were required to wear a color-coded triangle (a Winkel) that identified them by category with a letter sewn within the triangle that indicated the prisoner's nationality. Polish women wore red triangle, red denoting a political prisoner, with a letter "P". By 1942, Polish women became the largest national component at the camp. Jewish women wore yellow triangles, but sometimes, unlike the other prisoners, they wore a second triangle for the other categories or for "race defilement". Between 1942 and 1943 almost all Jewish women from the Ravensbrück camp where sent to Auschwitz in several transports following Nazis policy to make Germany "Judenrein" (cleansed of Jews). Common criminals wore green triangles, Soviet prisoners of war, German and Austrian Communists had red triangles and members of the Jehovah's Witnesses were labeled with lavender triangles. Classified separately with black triangles were prostitutes and Gypsies. The pink triangles for homosexuals played no role in the Ravensbrück women camp, but the camp did have some lesbians imprisoned in the camp for other crimes.
Based on the Nazis incomplete transport list "Zugangsliste" consisting 25,028 names of women sent by Nazis to the camp, it is estimated that inmates of Ravensbrück ethnic structure was the following: Poles 24.9%, Germans 19.9%, Jews 15.1%, Russians 15.0%, French 7.3%, Gypsies 5.4%, other 12.4%. Gestapo categorized the inmates as follows: political 83,54%, anti-social 12,35%, criminal 2,02%, Jehovah Witnesses 1.11%, racial defilement 0.78%, other 0.20%. The list is one of the most important documents, preserved in the last moments of the camp operation by courageous members of the Polish underground girl guides unit "Mury" (The Walls). The rest of the camp documents were burned by escaping SS overseers in pits or in the crematorium.
One of the forms of the resistance were underground education programs organized by prisoners for their fellow inmates. All national groups had some sort of program. The most extensive were among Polish women where various high school level classes were taught by experienced teachers.
Inmates at Ravensbrück suffered greatly. Living in subhuman conditions, thousands were shot, strangled, gased, buried alive, or worked to death. A special method of torture were medical experiments conducted on 86 women; 74 of them were Polish inmates. There were two types of the experiments done on Polish political prisoners. The first one aimed at testing the efficiency of sulphonamide drugs. These experiments involved the deliberate cutting out and infection of bones and muscles of the legs with virulent bacteria, the cutting out of nerves, the introduction of virulent substances like pieces of wood or glass into the tissue and the causing of artificial bone fractures. The second one aimed at studying the processes of regeneration of bones, muscles and nerves, and also the possibilities of transplanting bones from one person to another. All the experiments were done against the will and despite the open protest of all the victims. Five of the polish victims died as the result of the experiments. Six others were executed in the camp. The rest of the "rabbits" or Kaninchen as they were called survived thanks to help of other inmates in the camp.
Between 120 and 140 Gypsy women were sterilized in the camp in January 1945. All of them, unaware of the consequences, signed the consent form after being told by the camp overseers that the German authorities would release them if they agreed to sterilization.
All inmates were required to do heavy labor. The women were forced to work at many kinds of slave labor, from heavy outdoor jobs to building the V-2 rocket parts for the giant German company, Siemens AG. Ravensbruck also supplied every major camp, except Auschwitz with women to work in the camp brothels. In 1942 the Germans sent fifty female political prisoners with overseers to each of the following camps to work in their brothels; Buchenwald, Dachau, Flossenburg, Mauthausen, Neuengamme, and Sachsenhausen. Most of the women volunteered because they made money, had Sundays and mornings off, received nice clothes, took regular showers, and were treated fairly well. But, most subsequently returned to Ravensbruck after a few months suffering from venereal disease.
Ravensbrück had a gas chamber and crematorium, and at the end of 1944 it became a death camp. With the Soviet Army's rapid approach in the Spring of 1945, the SS decided to exterminate as many prisoners as they could in order to avoid anyone being left to testify as to what had happened in the camp. With the Russians only hours away, at the end of April, the SS ordered the women still physically well enough to walk to leave the camp. Less than 2,000 malnourished and sickly women and 300 men remained in the camp when it was liberated by the Red Army on April 30, 1945. The survivors of the Death March were liberated in the following hours by a Russian scout unit. By the time liberation came, tens of thousands (estimates are about 30,000 to 40,000) women and children had perished there.
Amongst the thousands executed by the Germans at Ravensbrück were four female members of the SOE: Denise Bloch, Cecily Lefort, Lilian Rolfe, and Violette Szabo as well as the Roman Catholic nun, Elise Rivet, Elisabeth de Rothschild, the 25-year-old French Princess Anne de Bauffremont-Courtenay, and Olga Benário, wife of the Brazilian Communist leader Luís Carlos Prestes. The largest group of executed women at the Ravensbrück camp, 200 in total, was the Polish group of young patriots, members of Polish Home Army.
The name of the camp appeared in numerous trials held against Nazis after WWII. One of those trials Doctors' Trial was held by a Military Tribunal from October 1946 till February 1948 in Nuremberg, Germany. The following Nazi doctors participating in the medical experiments in Ravensbrück were found guilty and sentenced by the Tribunal:
- Viktor Brack
- Rudolf Brandt
- Karl Brant
- Fritz Fischer
- Karl Gebhardt
- Karl Genzken
- Siegfried Handloser
- Joachim Mrugowsky
- Herta Oberheuser
- Adolf Pokorny
- Helmut Poppendick
- Paul Rostock
- Gerhard Schiedlausky
- Percy Treite
They all conducted or participated in various experiments such as sulphanilamide (Sulfonamide), bone, muscle, nerve regeneration, bone transplantation and sterilization experiments.
Renewed attention and interest in the camp came about following the Düsseldorf War Crimes Trials, or the Majdanek Trial, which began in 1976. Among the most notorious of those placed on trial was a guard supervisor at Ravensbrück, Hermine Braunsteiner, who had been tracked down by the famous Nazi-hunter, Simon Wiesenthal. Numerous witnesses from Ravensbrück identified her as the pale, blue-eyed, six-foot tall blonde, called "The Stomping Mare" because of her penchant for killing children by trampling them, often in front of their mothers. In 1981, the then 61-year-old woman was sentenced to life imprisonment for numerous child murders and other brutal crimes. Other guards were tried at the Auschwitz Trial, Belsen Trial, Ravensbrück Trials or in individual trials:
- Charlotte Arps
- Suze Arts
- Erika Bergmann
- Margarete Bisaecke
- Juana Bormann
- Herta Bothe
- Therese Brandl
- Herta Ehlert
- Anes Fabritzek
- Wilma Fath
- Anna Fest
- Irma Grese
- Elly Hartmann
- Ruth Hildner
- Ulla Erna Frieda Juerss
- Wally Meta Kilkowski
- Elizabeth Lupka
- Elfriede Mohnecke
- Margarete Rabe
- Gertrud Rabestein
- Elizabeth Volkenrath
- Frieda Woetzel
- Emma Zimmer
were a few of the guards tried for war crimes at Ravensbrück, and at other camps at which they served.
Information on all these guards, except Suze Arts and Elizabeth Lupka were found in Daniel Patrick Brown's book, "THE CAMP WOMEN The Female Auxiliaries Who Assisted the SS in Running the Concentration Camp System."
See also:
External links
- Homepage Memorial Ravensbrueck (http://www.ravensbrueck.de)
- Medical Experiments Conducted on Polish Inmates (http://individual.utoronto.ca/jarekg/Ravensbruck)de:KZ Ravensbrück