If This Is A Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women

by Sarah Helm

When Hitler reorganised his euthanasia programme after the Church protests in the summer of 1941, two gassing centres closed, but two new ones soon opened. One of these was located in a former sanatorium in Bernburg, a pretty German town south of Berlin, on the banks of the River Saale. During the war there had been no cause for the Ravensbrück prisoners to think of Bernburg, or any other ‘euthanasia’ centre, as a possible destination; afterwards, when the story of the T4 programme began to emerge in the Nuremberg medical trials and elsewhere, the connection was made. Evidence came out that in 1940 Bernburg’s sanatorium was fitted with a gas chamber, disguised as a shower room. In this room, which measured 14 square metres, more than 8000 people were gassed. Adjoining the gas chamber was a crematorium with two ovens, a dissecting room and a mortuary.