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May 23 - June 22, 2025
when Mildred returns, she has terrible news. For some reason, the verdict has been overturned. Mildred’s lawyer told her she should
“expect a stiffer sentence.”
Arvid is dead.
Shortly before eight p.m. on December 22, 1942, Arvid was hanged,
Göring “exploded” when he learned that Mildred wasn’t given a death sentence. The word imprisonment drove him into an apoplectic fit,
The next day, Hitler swiftly rejected Mildred’s verdict and ordered her execution.
To preserve the appearance of judicial propriety, he assigned a different panel of judges to hear her case.
January 13, 1943,
salacious testimony
Mildred also wears an armband stamped with two black letters: TK, short for Todeskandidatin—death candidate.
The girl is “half naked and crying very hard.” The guard shoves the girl in the cell. The women lie in their cots, silent, listening to the girl sob. This can only mean one thing. Mildred has been taken away. After a long while, we then talked in whispers to the “new one” who had been Mildred’s cellmate until she had been picked up for her execution.
women are decapitated.
The Johann Mannhardt Company produced six guillotines by 1860. One ended up at Bruchsal Prison in southwest Germany, near the town of Karlsruhe,
On December 28, 1936, Hitler’s minister of justice issued a new set of guidelines that he hoped would maximize efficiency. He divided Germany into three execution regions and assigned one region to each executioner. Eleven prisons in Germany would serve as execution sites. He dispensed with scaffolds and axes, tools of the past. From then on, executions would be conducted exclusively by guillotine.
On February 8, 1937, a team of men at Bruchsal Prison dismantled the Mannhardt guillotine, distributed the parts into an assortment of wooden crates, and loaded them onto a truck bound for Berlin.
a black curtain should conceal the guillotine until the very last second. “This would ensure a smooth flow,” he wrote.
Margarete von Zahn-Harnack was taught that “it is worthwhile to rebel.”
Her mother, Agnes von Zahn-Harnack, a women’s rights activist, was the first woman to attend the University of Berlin
Nine members of her family have recently been executed for opposing Hitler’s regime.
Margarete adored Mildred; her beheading was unspeakably horrific. The urn is a gift, an act of generosity that provides the Harnacks a small measure of comfort. Now at least Mildred can have a proper burial.
Dr. Stieve keeps a list of all the women he dissects. The list is 182 names long. Next to each name is the age of the woman at her death. Number 84 is Mildred Harnack, age 40.
After Hitler became chancellor, the number of death sentences doled out in courtrooms rose sharply. Between 1933 and 1944, judges ordered 17,383 executions, the overwhelming majority of which were punishments for political crimes, including treason. Exactly
In 1943, the number of prisoners in concentration camps skyrockets. Two years ago, there were fifty-three thousand. Last year, there were eighty thousand. By the winter of 1943, there are three hundred and fifteen thousand prisoners. Auschwitz has the largest number of prisoners, over eighty-five thousand.
Sachsenhausen,
At Auschwitz, the systematic extermination of Jews is carried out using the poison gas Zyklon B, produced by the chemical conglomerate I. G. Farben. Between 1943 and 1944, an estimated six thousand Jews are murdered each day at Auschwitz.
two-thirds of the Jewish population in Europe—or six million Jews—were murdered.
Ravensbrück is the only concentration camp built exclusively for women.
Siemens factory nearby employs Ravensbrück prisoners to manufacture electrical components for weapons.
Siemens pays the SS directly,
she winds fewer spools than her daily quota, she is whipped—twenty-five lashes.
The more there are rivalries, the more battles between the prisoners, the easier it is to control the camp.
Ravensbrück was originally designed to hold three thousand women; by 1942 it holds eighteen thousand,
In February 1945, a gas chamber is constructed at Ravensbrü
Germany will surrender this spring. As Allied forces advance into Germany, SS officers and camp guards at Ravensbrück start fleeing. Some round up prisoners and send them south to the Mauthausen concentration camp or west to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. In late April, SS officers force twenty thousand women in ragged prison garb to march north toward the town of Mecklenburg.
One prisoner scrambles into a large empty crate, followed by her friend. She remembered, “We could hear the SS shouting ‘Raus raus, schnell schnell’” (“Out, out, quick, quick”
We waited several hours and we could hear the sick women calling out for water in every language.
On April 30, 1945, the day Hitler commits suicide, a patrol unit from the Red Army reaches Ravensbrü
Gertrud and several other women hide in the forest for two days.
she is seventy-two, she doesn’
me...
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the r...
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Approximately 130,000 women were imprisoned at Ravensbrück between 1939 and 1945. The number who died there is estimated to be between 30,000 and 90,000. Women were shot, starved, poisoned, and flogged to death. Nearly all who were subjected to medical experiments died. Roughly 6,000 were gassed.
Days before the camp was liberated, SS officers emptied wagonloads of documents into the crematorium and incinerated the evidence.
Toward the end of 1945, Gertrud Klapputh walks through the war-torn streets of Berlin, knocking on doors, searching for friends and family. Most apartments and houses are heaps of rubble. Eventually, she finds a place to live. She has no possessions, not a single cup.
She left Ravensbrück with nothing except the soiled dress on her back and two folded pieces of paper: Arvid’s last letter to Mildred.
The Red Cross is no help.
New York Times
Harriette has lost her own daughter, not to mention three grandchildren, and it’s all Mildred’s fault. All of it.
Mildred and Arvid joined the picket line outside the town’s mine and visited the town jail to talk with strikers who’d been locked up.
Baltimore Sun
