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

by Sarah Helm

Ravensbrück was the only Nazi concentration camp built for women.

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.

In the first year there were fewer than 2000 prisoners, almost all of whom were Germans. Many had been arrested because they opposed Hitler – communists, for example, and Jehovah’s Witnesses, who called Hitler the Antichrist.

A small proportion of the prisoners – about 10 per cent – were Jewish, but the camp was not formally designated a camp for Jews.

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...

Hitler’s programme for women could not have been clearer: German women were to stay at home, rear as many Aryan children as they were able, and obey their husbands. Women were not fit for public life; most jobs would be barred to women and access to university curtailed.

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.

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 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’.

Four weeks later, on 27 February 1933, as Hitler was still struggling to underpin his party’s power, the German parliament, the Reichstag, was set on fire. Communists were blamed, although many suspected the blaze was started by Nazi thugs as a pretext to terrorise every political opponent in the country.

Opened on 22 March 1933, Dachau was the first Nazi concentration camp.

Social democrats were rounded up too, along with trade unionists and any other ‘enemy of the state’.

in the first years of Nazi rule Jews were not locked up in significant numbers;

The sole aim of Hitler’s concentration camps in the early days was to crush all internal German opposition;

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.

By 1936 not only was the political opposition entirely eliminated, but humanitarian bodies and the German churches were all toeing the line.

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.

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 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.

Langefeld’s preferred punishment was forced standing for several hours without any food. If the standing woman fainted she’d be left lying for a while before being carried away.

The count after the first seven days – including a few new arrivals in addition to those from Lichtenburg – gave a total figure of 974 prisoners in the camp. Of these, 114 women wore red triangles (political prisoners); 388 Jehovah’s Witnesses wore lilac; 119 wore green (habitual criminals); 240 wore black (asocials); 137 wore yellow (Jews) and some of the categories overlapped.

In return for their release the women were told they simply had to sign a piece of paper renouncing their faith, but each one refused, repeating that the Führer was the Antichrist.

A letter was allowed once a month, and in these pre-war days as long as no mention was made of politics or the camp the women could still write at length.

Hitler opened a new front in the racial war, ordering the roundup of 3000 Austrian Sinti and Roma, most of whom had lived in Burgenland for generations.

The Ravensbrück enemy within – just 1607 women on 1 September 1939 – was small in number, but Koegel was showing due harshness towards every one of them. More were joining their ranks every day. On 16 September a group of political prisoners were brought in, including Luise Mauer, a courier for the German Communist Party, who had risked her life running secret messages across borders.

The first ‘internal enemies’ to rise up in Ravensbrück, however, were not these Polish newcomers but Koegel’s oldest and most hated enemies of all: the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Adolf Hitler showed little interest in the concentration camps – according to the records, he never visited a single one – but they lay at the centre of Himmler’s empire; whatever went on behind their walls was signed off with his pen.

by January 1940 the first extermination of lives not worth living had begun – not in the concentration camps, but in German sanatoria, and in the name of euthanasia.

Although thousands of asocials died at Ravensbrück, not a single black- or green-triangle survivor was called upon to give evidence for the Hamburg War Crimes trials, or at any later trials.

The prisoner lesbianism took many forms. Some of the women who came here were already openly gay. Although female homosexuality was not a ground for arrest, a handful were listed on the records as lesbisch and wore black triangles. Many confirmed lesbians made no attempt to hide their sexuality, some taking on men’s names – Max, Charlie or Jules – and sometimes preying on others who were not gay but were easily drawn in. Other women offered sex in return for food.

Erika Buchmann, who became Blockova of the Strafblock in 1942, said lovemaking in the block was ‘sometimes shameless and unrestrained’, but couples tried to seek privacy too.

National Socialist ethics of racial cleansing were by the mid-1930s at the core of the medical curriculum. Nazi doctors were required to cure the ‘whole’ of the German race, not simply to focus on the individual. And in order to treat public health, doctors were required to eliminate the racially subhuman or the genetically impure, enabling the German gene pool to cleanse itself and thrive.

In 1940 Himmler issued a decree ruling that any German woman who had intimate relations with a Polish man must have her head shorn in public, and then be led through the streets ‘as a warning to others’. But

In the early spring of 1942 the women were worried they were beginning to starve. The bread allowance was cut from 250 to 200 grams and the soup got thinner.

Death camps were being opened at Belzec, Treblinka and Sobibor, all in central Poland. A new department (IVB4: Jewish Affairs – Evacuation Affairs) of the Reich Security Head Office (RSHA), under the direction of Adolf Eichmann, was organising the exterminations and was about to send its first ‘official’ Jewish transport to Auschwitz.

Founded in 1847, Siemens & Halske had started as a family firm, but by the 1930s it was the country’s biggest electrical company, and to preserve its market dominance it collaborated with Hitler’s Third Reich, securing lucrative arms contracts.

By 1942, Himmler had started to see medical experimentation as a key purpose for the concentration camps. Here was a chance to use human guinea pigs, and to achieve bold scientific innovation that the conservative medical profession outside the camps would never envision. To this end Himmler had established

The men were brought to Ravensbrück for the tests, as the camp was convenient for Hohenlychen. Cuts were made in their leg muscles, small quantities of bacteria inserted to create infection, and then sulphonamide was introduced and the results examined. The tests proved inconclusive, but Himmler wanted more.*

Towards the end of 1942 prisoners were told they could receive food parcels from their families for the first time.

The earliest letters were mostly long lists of names of the executed women and of those operated upon, some with black crosses against them, which the four families meeting in Lublin must have pored over, before passing on bad news. There were also detailed accounts of operations, dates and more names.

Ravensbrück, designed originally for 3000, now held 18,000 women, and more were arriving every day.

Siemens women suffered severely from boils, swollen legs, diarrhoea and TB, but the long hours of repetitive tasks, and constant pressure to meet the quota, produced an illness of its own: nervous twitching.

‘It is a place of crime; children born in the camp are killed. People suffering from nervous shock or mental disease are killed by injection – from our transport, Teodozja Szych

During the course of 1943 the manner of the beatings worsened and a new sort of Bock was introduced. Women were put in special rubber pants in case they urinated and told to lie face-down on the table, which was indented like a trough, edged with wooden rods, and had iron stirrups for the legs, placed below knee level. Two inmates, usually green or black triangles, put the woman into the stirrups and fastened a leather belt that went around her shoulder blades. As the beating began they held on to the rubber pants, pulling tight as an SS man or another prisoner beat her with a leather riding whip. Near the end of the beating the woman would always pass out. Then the green triangles would lift her off the contraption and push her through the door where others were waiting their turn, fainting and urinating in terror.

In another experiment Zdenka had to collect the urine of pregnant women and inject it into another group of pregnant women, but this time Treite caught her cheating.

Himmler agreed in early 1943 that Red Cross food parcels could, in theory, be sent to certain categories of prisoner.

Hitler passed the so-called ‘Night and Fog’ decree in December 1941, and intended it to terrorise and deter resisters in western European countries. In the first years of Nazi occupation, resistance ringleaders were executed, but Hitler thought that created martyrs. Under the NN decree, dangerous resisters were to be sent to concentration camps instead, and executed in secret, their names and whereabouts never to be made known.

‘Every morning the prostitutes had to get up and let themselves be cleaned by female guards. After the coffee the SS men would come and start to rape and abuse the women. It would go on for sixteen hours a day, and only two and a half hours for lunch and dinner.’

As a total of 12,000 women arrived from Warsaw by early October, this meant as many as 1200 babies were likely to be born in the camp over the next nine months.