Ravensbrück: Life and Death in Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women

by Sarah Helm

The plan shows the main compound on the edge of the lake with the gate, the shower and kitchen building, and the Appellplatz. The gas chamber (‘gaz’) and crematorium are also visible. Against the south wall is the SS garden; just beyond it are the Siemenslager and the warehouses where goods stolen from prisoners (‘marchandises volées’) were sorted and stored. The ‘Camp d’Extermination’ at Uckermark is also clearly marked, as are the machine-gun posts to the north. On the shore of the lake are the remains of a small fort (‘fortin’) and the ‘marais’ – the sandy shore.

Ravensbrück opened in May 1939, just under four months before the outbreak of war, and was liberated by the Russians six years later – it was one of the very last camps to be reached by the Allies.

At its height, Ravensbrück had a population of about 45,000 women; over the six years of its existence around 130,000 women passed through its gates, to be beaten, starved, worked to death, poisoned, executed and gassed. Estimates of the final death toll have ranged from about 30,000 to 90,000; the real figure probably lies somewhere in between, but so few SS documents on the camp survive nobody will ever know for sure. The wholesale destruction of evidence at Ravensbrück is another reason the camp’s story has remained obscured. In the final days, every prisoner’s file was burned in the crematorium or on bonfires, along with the bodies. The ashes were thrown in the lake.

A survivor talked of a camp hospital where ‘syphilis germs were injected into the spinal cord’.

People who ask about Ravensbrück are often surprised that the majority of the women killed there were not Jews.

Prisoners at the time called Ravensbrück a death camp.

When I asked how she survived she said, ‘Because we believed in victory,’ as if this was something I should have known.

Langefeld was to be the Oberaufseherin – chief woman guard.

Unlike male camps, Ravensbrück had no watchtowers along the walls and no gun emplacements. But an electric fence was fixed to the interior of the perimeter wall, and placards along the fence showed a skull and crossbones warning of high voltage.

Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, which ran the concentration camps and much else in Nazi Germany, wanted his camps to be self-sufficient as far as possible.

As in all concentration camps, the grid layout was used at Ravensbrück mainly to ensure that prisoners could always be seen, which meant fewer guards. A complement of fifty-five women guards were assigned here and a troop of forty SS men, all under overall command of Hauptsturmführer Max Koegel.

On paper neither she nor any of her guards had any official standing. The women were not merely subordinate to the men, they had no badge or rank and were merely SS ‘auxiliaries’. Most of them were unarmed, though some guarding outside work parties carried a pistol and many had dogs. Himmler believed that women were more frightened than men of dogs.

The sleeping areas were filled with scores of three-tiered bunks, made of wooden planks. Every prisoner had a mattress filled with wood shavings and a pillow, as well as a sheet and a blue and white check blanket folded at the foot of the bed.

the dream of making Germany great again,

Olga Benario

in the 1930s, but Nazi language on women was uniquely toxic; not only did Hitler’s entourage openly scorn the ‘stupid’, ‘inferior’ female sex, they repeatedly demanded ‘separation’ of women from men, as if men didn’t see the point of women at all except as occasional adornments and, of course, as childbearers.*1 The Jews were not Hitler’s only scapegoats for Germany’s ills: women who had been emancipated during the Weimar years were blamed for taking men’s jobs and corrupting the country’s morals.

From the welfare service she had been promoted into the prison service.

In July 1933 the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring was passed, legalising mass sterilisation as a means of eliminating the weak, idle, criminal and insane. The Führer believed that all these degenerates were a drain on the public purse, and were to be removed from the chain of heredity in order to strengthen the Volksgemeinschaft, the community of pure-bred Germans. The Brauweiler director, Albert Bosse, declared in 1936 that 95 per cent of his women prisoners were ‘incapable of improvement and must be sterilised for moral reasons and for the purpose of maintaining the health of the Volk’.

now we’re clearing all you vermin out.’

many suspected the blaze was started by Nazi thugs as a pretext to terrorise every political opponent in the country. Hitler at once enforced a catch-all edict called ‘preventative detention’ which meant that anyone could be arrested for ‘treason’ and locked up indefinitely. Just ten miles north of Munich a brand-new camp was about to open to hold the ‘traitors’.

Opened on 22 March 1933, Dachau was the first Nazi concentration camp. Over the next weeks and months Hitler’s police sought out every communist or suspected communist and brought them here to be crushed. Social democrats were rounded up too, along with trade unionists and any other ‘enemy of the state’.

The sole aim of Hitler’s concentration camps in the early days was to crush all internal German opposition; only once this had been done would other objectives be pursued. The crushing was a task assigned to the man most fit for the job: Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, and soon also to become chief of police, including the Gestapo.

return to the Heimat – the German homeland

By the time Hitler came to power in 1933 Himmler had transformed the SS into an elite force. One of its tasks was to run the new concentration camps.

Hitler proposed the use of concentration camps as places to intern and then crush his opposition, taking as a model the concentration camps used for mass internment by the British during the South African War of 1899–1902. The style of the Nazi camps, however, would be set by Himmler, who personally identified the site for the prototype at Dachau. He also selected the Dachau commandant, Theodor Eicke, who became head of the ‘Death’s Head’ units, as the SS concentration-camp guard squads were called – they wore a skull and crossbones badge on their caps to denote loyalty to death. Himmler charged Eicke with devising a blueprint for terrorising all ‘enemies of the state’.

At Dachau Eicke did just that, creating a school for SS men who called him ‘Papa Eicke’ and whom he ‘hardened’ before they were sent off to other camps. Hardening meant the men should learn never to show weakness to the enemy and should only ‘show their teeth’ – in other words, they should hate. Amongst Eicke’s early recruits was Max Koegel, the future commandant o...

Himmler had calculated, women could be tortured in different ways from men;

Himmler also calculated that as long as the crushing of men was terrible enough, everyone else would soon acquiesce.

By 1936 not only was the political opposition entirely eliminated, but humanitarian bodies and the German churches were all toeing the line. The German Red Cross movement had been co-opted to the Nazi cause; at its meetings the Red Cross banner was waved alongside the swastika, while the guardians of the Geneva Conventions, the International Committee of the Red Cross, had inspected Himmler’s camps – or, at least, the show blocks – and given their stamp of approval. Western capitals took the view that Nazi concentration camps and prisons were an internal German affair and not a concern of theirs. In the mid-1930s most Western leaders still believed that the greatest threat to world peace was posed by communism, not by Nazi Germany.

“Now what can I get away with and what can’t I get away with?”

In 1937 the passing of a law against ‘Rassenschande’ – literally, ‘race shame’ – which outlawed relationships between Jews and non-Jews, brought a further influx of Jewish women to Moringen. Then in the second half of 1937 the women there noticed a sudden rise in the number of vagrants brought in ‘limping, some wearing supports, many others spitting blood’. In 1938 scores of prostitutes arrived.

The raids on Düsseldorf brothels were repeated across Germany throughout 1938, as the Nazi purge against its own unwanted underclasses entered a new stage.

From the moment Hitler came to power, mass sterilisation of the mentally ill and social degenerates had already been carried out.

They seem to me to be hiding behind God in disgust at their own meanness.’

The Lichtenburg commandant, Max Koegel, liked to beat. Lina recalled that on Easter day he beat three naked women ‘until he could go on no longer’.

The guards thrashed and the mob hit back. Koegel ordered fire hoses to be turned on the praying women, who were knocked flying, flattened, bitten by dogs. Clinging to one another, they nearly drowned, ‘like dripping mice’, said Marianne Korn, one of the praying women.

Buchenwald – meaning Beech Forest – was sited in a famous wooded area close to Weimar and several other camps were deliberately located in beauty spots. Just weeks before Ravensbrück was opened a stretch of water here was declared an ‘organic source for the Aryan race’.

‘Kristallnacht’, the ‘night of broken glass’, of 9–10 November 1938,

Like most small German towns, Fürstenberg had suffered badly in the slump, so the arrival of a concentration camp meant jobs and trade.

Josef Goebbels even made a speech in Fürstenberg telling the townspeople: ‘If the family is the nation’s source of strength, the woman is its core and centre.’

it was a camp rule that helping another was an offence.

The well-rehearsed SS routine had served its purpose – causing maximum terror at the moment of arrival. Anyone who had thought of resisting was from now on subdued. The ritual had been performed hundreds of times at male concentration camps, and now it was being enacted for the first time on the banks of the Schwedtsee. It would be worse for those who arrived later, in the dead of night, or in the snow, understanding nothing of the language. But all Ravensbrück survivors would remember the trauma of their arrival; all would recall their own silence.

This first group stands silent in the heat for perhaps two hours.

Nazis pointed to scientific studies showing that women had smaller brains than men and were therefore obviously inferior.

the next ritual starts: the bath.

Then the shavers come, and some of the women are pushed aside. ‘Beeilt euch, beeilt euch!’ – Get a move on – and the selected women’s hair is shaved off close to the scalp. Then another woman comes through. She makes the same women stand with their legs apart and shaves their pubic hair.

The prisoners were then issued new camp clothes: blue and white striped cotton dresses and jackets, a white headscarf, socks and rough wooden shoes, like clogs.

Each was given a number, printed on a small white piece of cloth. It matched the number they were given on arrival at Lichtenburg – from 1 to 867. The women were also given a coloured triangle made of felt. They were handed a needle and thread and told to sew these on to the left shoulder of their jackets. The triangle indicated which category the prisoner had been placed in: black for ‘asocials’ – prostitute, beggar, petty criminal, lesbian; green for habitual criminals; red for political prisoners; lilac for Jehovah’s Witnesses; yellow for Jews. The Jewish women were subdivided, depending on the reason for arrest. All Jews wore a yellow triangle, but those noted as ‘Pol. Jude’ –arrested for political crimes – wore their yellow triangle on a red background. The political Jews included the largest category, those arrested for Rassenschande, relations with a non-Jew; of these there were ninety-seven. Those Jews arrested as asocials wore their yellow triangle on a black background.

Inside the blocks everyone was allocated a bunk bed, a bowl, a plate, an aluminium cup, a knife, fork and spoon, as well as a small cloth for drying and polishing the utensils. Any fuzz on the implements would mean a report to Langefeld, who had given instructions on exactly how the polishing should be done.