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

by Sarah Helm

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

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.

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.

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.

Himmler had calculated, women could be tortured in different ways from men; the simple fact that husbands had been killed and children taken away – usually to Nazi foster homes – was for most women pain enough.