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Inmates at forced labor in the Ravensbrueck concentration camp. Germany, between 1940 and 1942. See more photographs |
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. |
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. |
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RAVENSBRUECK SUBCAMPS |
THE LIBERATION OF RAVENSBRUECK 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. |
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