Ravensbrueck

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United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Inmates at forced labor in the Ravensbrueck concentration camp. Germany, between 1940 and 1942.
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RAVENSBRUECK

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The Ravensbrueck concentration camp was the largest and, after the closure of the Lichtenburg camp, the only Nazi concentration camp almost exclusively for women. German authorities began construction of the camp in November 1938, at a site near the village of Ravensbrueck in northern Germany, about 56 miles north of Berlin. In the spring of 1941, the SS authorities established a small men's camp adjacent to the main camp.

The first prisoners at Ravensbrueck were approximately 900 women. The SS had transferred these prisoners from the Lichtenburg women's concentration camp in Saxony in May 1939. By the end of 1942, the female inmate population of Ravensbrueck had grown to about 10,000. In January 1945, the camp had more than 45,000 prisoners, mostly women. Besides the male Nazi administrators, the camp staff included over 150 female SS guards assigned to oversee the prisoners. Ravensbrueck also served as one of the main training camps for female SS guards.

Major Nazi camps in Europe, January 1944
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Periodically, the SS authorities subjected prisoners in the camp to "selections" in which the Germans isolated those prisoners considered too weak or injured to work and killed them. At first, "selected" prisoners were shot. Beginning in 1942, they were transferred to "euthanasia" killing centers or to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp. The SS staff also murdered some prisoners in the camp infirmary by lethal injection. The bodies of those killed in the camp were cremated in the nearby Fuerstenberg crematorium until 1943. In that year, SS authorities constructed a crematorium at a site near the camp prison. In the autumn of 1944, the SS constructed a gas chamber near the crematorium. The Germans gassed several thousand prisoners at Ravensbrueck before the camp's liberation in April 1945.

Starting in the summer of 1942, SS medical doctors subjected Ravensbrueck concentration camp prisoners to unethical medical experiments. SS doctors experimented with treating wounds with various chemical substances (such as sulfanilamide) to prevent infections. They also tested various methods of setting and transplanting bones; such experiments included amputations. The SS selected close to 80 women, mostly Polish, for these experiments. Most of the women died as a result. The survivors suffered permanent physical damage. SS doctors also carried out sterilization experiments on women and children, many of them Roma (Gypsies), in an attempt to develop an efficient method of sterilization.

Describes deportation to and conditions in Ravensbrueck
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RAVENSBRUECK SUBCAMPS

The SS required Ravensbrueck prisoners to perform forced labor, primarily in agricultural projects and local industry. By 1944, Germany increasingly relied on forced labor for the production of armaments. Ravensbrueck became the administrative center of a system of over 40 subcamps with nearly 70,000 predominantly female prisoners. These subcamps, many of which were established adjacent to armaments factories, were located throughout Germany, from Austria in the south to the Baltic Sea in the north. Several camps also provided prisoner labor for construction projects or clearing rubble in cities damaged by Allied air attacks. The SS also built several factories near Ravensbrueck for the production of textiles and electrical components.

Ravensbrueck
1938 – 1945
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THE LIBERATION OF RAVENSBRUECK

In late March 1945, the SS evacuated Ravensbrueck, forcing over 20,000 prisoners on a death march toward northern Mecklenburg. Advancing Soviet forces intersected the route of the march and liberated the prisoners. Shortly before the evacuation, the Germans had handed over several hundred female prisoners, mostly French, to officials of the Swedish and Danish Red Cross. When Soviet forces liberated Ravensbrueck on April 29-30, 1945, they found about 3,500 sick and weakened female prisoners in the camp.

Between 1939 and 1945, over 130,000 female prisoners passed through the Ravensbrueck camp system; only 40,000 survived. The inmates came from every country in German-occupied Europe, mostly from Poland and the occupied Soviet territories. Almost 15 percent of the prisoners were Jewish and close to 5 percent were Roma.