Notes of Ravensbruck

Lana West

The Background

• Ravensbruck was a concentration camp for women.

• It was located about 50 miles north of Berlin.
• It opened on May 15, 1939.
• On May 18 the first group of 867 prisoners came from Lichtenburg.
• were mostly of German anti-fascists, either Social Democrats or
Communists
• Some coincidentally Jewish
• A high wall with electrified barbed wire enclosed the women in the
camp.
• Ravensbruck housed Jews, Gypsies, Poles, Russians, Ukrainians,
Germans and other nationalities.
• It was designed to hold 6,000 prisoners.
• The number of inmates grew from 2,000 in 1939 to 10,800 in 1942.
• Between May 1939 and June 1944, an estimated 43,000 women were
brought to Ravensbruck.
• During the next nine months, an estimated 90,000 more came.
• The most serious overcrowding occurred after the evacuation of
Auschwitz in January 1945.
• The maximum amount of women held in Ravensbruck was about
32,000.

Human Statistics

• The prisoners were organized into categories.

♦ Color-coded triangles and nationality
• Political prisoners wore red triangles.
♦ Including resistance fighters and Soviet prisoners of war
• Jehovah's Witnesses wore purple triangles.
• “Asocial” wore black triangles
♦ Including lesbians, prostitutes, and Gypsies
• Criminals wore green triangles.
♦ Common criminals or those who broke Nazi imposed laws
• Jewish women wore yellow triangles.
♦ If they were also political prisoners, they wore a red triangle
and yellow triangle that formed a Star of David, or a yellow
stripe on top of the red triangle.
• A letter within the triangle signified the prisoner's nationality.
• Nazis burned many records before they fled, so the exact number of
occupants is impossible to find.
• The camp memorial’s estimated about 132,000.
• There were 28,000 women from the Soviet Union, almost 24,000 from
Germany and Austria, nearly 8,000 French women, and thousands from
other countries in Europe.
• There were even British and American women imprisoned at the camp.
• While no exact records are available, an estimated twenty percent of the
total population was Jewish — more than 20,000 women.
• Some of the Ravensbruck prisoners arrived at the camp with their
children or gave birth there.
• Most of the newborns only lived briefly and then were murdered by the
Nazi doctors and nurses.
• The ledgers suggest that 882 children were deported to Ravensbruck.

Camp Life

• By the end of the war, conditions had deteriorated significantly.

• Barracks built for 250 women later housed 1,500 or 2,000, with three to
four to a bed.
• Thousands of women did not even have part of a bed, and were lying on
the floor, without even a blanket.
• When 500 Jewish women arrived from Hungary in the fall of 1944, they
were placed in a huge tent with a straw floor and died in masses.
• A plague of lice and danger of disease from the water made life in the
barracks even more unbearable.
• The women were awakened for roll call by 4:00 a.m.
• Before roll call, as many as 500 women stood in the latrine around three
“toilets” with no doors.
• After standing outside until everyone was accounted for, they drank their
imitation coffee and went off to work.
• They returned to their assigned barracks for their noontime soup and
again in the evening, when the soup was repeated.
• On Sundays the women were not required to work, and socialized in the
barracks or outside to the limited extent possible.
• The regime was strict, punishment was inflicted, and harsh labor was
required.
• Solitary confinement in the dark and airless prison cells of the “Bunker,”
the usual punishment for acts considered sabotage or resistance, was
often accompanied by severe beatings or other torture.
• Other routine torture methods included attacks by SS dogs.
• In addition to the “Bunker,” there was a barrack separated from the camp
by a fence, which served as a punishment block.
• SS Reichsführer and Head of the German Police, Heinrich Himmler,
ordered whippings beginning in April 1942.
• A prisoner categorized as a criminal carried out the orders, and received
extra rations.
• The camp doctor was required to be present at each punishment, to
confirm it had been carried out.
• Himmler later ordered whipping to be used only as a “last resort.”

Medical Experiments

• Beginning in 1942, medical experiments were performed on the inmates;

some women were infected with gas gangrene or bacterial inflammations,
while others were forced to receive bone transplants and bone
amputations.
• Other experiments involved sulfonamide and sterilization techniques.
• Pregnant Jewish women were sent to the gas chambers, while abortions
were performed on non-Jews.
• Most of these women died or were murdered afterward, and those who
survived were crippled and disfigured.

• Between 1942-1943, Ravensbruck served as a training camp for 3,500

female SS supervisors who went on to maltreat, torture, and murder
women in other camps.
• Prisoners that were sentenced to death in 1942 were sent to separate
institutions or death camps.
• Some women, including those incapable of work and Jewish political
prisoners, were gassed at a euthanasia center set up in the psychiatric
facility of Bernberg.
• By 1943, a crematorium was built at Ravensbruck, near the camp for
minors, which housed about 1,000 girls.

Gas Chambers

• In February 1945, a gas chamber was constructed at Ravensbruck.

• By April 1945, between 2,200 and 2,300 were killed in the gas chamber.
• The majority of those killed by gas in the camp were Hungarian, mostly
Jewish, then Polish, then Russian.
• Women prisoners working as scribes counted a total number of 3,660
names on lists for “Mittwerda;” the Nazi code name for the gas chamber.
• However, since some of the transports went directly from the satellite
camps to the gas chamber, the number of women murdered in the camp's
gas chamber is estimated to be 5,000 to 6,000.
• The so-called “youth concentration camp” Uckermark, less than a mile
from Ravensbruck, was sometimes the conduit to the gas chamber.
• The SS used this adjacent camp for old, sick, and weakened women who
had been selected as “unable to work;” and were sometimes given
poisonous “white powder.”
• Women who were sentenced to death for acts such as espionage at times
were shot in a special corridor between buildings, and other women
received lethal injections.
• In March 1945, an evacuation order was given to the inmates of
Ravensbruck and 24,500 prisoners were sent to Mecklenburg.
• In early April 1945, 500 prisoners were handed over to the Swedish and
Danish Red Cross and 2,500 German prisoners were set free.