Nazi concentration camp for women. The camp was located 56 miles north of Berlin on swampy land near the Havel River. On May 15, 1939, the first prisoners arrived, 867 women transferred from Lichtenburg. The camp was staffed by 150 female SS supervisors (Aufseherinnen), male guards, and male administrators. In 1942 and 1943 Ravensbruck served as a training base for women supervisors, and 3,500 women were trained there for work in Ravensbruck and other camps. Among them was Irma Grese.
In late 1939 the camp held 2,000 prisoners. By late 1942 there were 10,800. In 1944 the main camp contained 26,700 female prisoners and several thousand female minors grouped in a detention camp for children. Most of the camp was evacuated in March 1945 as the Russians approached, and 24,500 prisoners were marched into Mechlenburg. When the camp was liberated by Soviet troops on April 29-30, they found 3,500 ill and famished females.
During its existence, at least 107,753 (123,000 according to Tillion 1975, 17) women were interned in Ravensbruck and its satellite detention centers, most of which were industrial slave-labor sites. There was a concentration camp for men near Ravensbruck, but it was connected with the Sachsenhausen camp rather than Ravensbruck. Approximately 50,000 inmates died while imprisoned at Ravensbruck. In addition to general overwork, exposure, malnutrition, disease, and abuse, individual women were subjected to excruciating medical experimentation in the camp, including bone transplants, induced gas gangrene, and deliberately infected incisions. Early in 1945 a gas chamber was constructed at the camp, and between 2,200 and 2,400 women were gassed there. Max Koegel, who had been commandant from the opening of the camp until the summer of 1942, committed suicide in 1946. His successor, Fritz Suhren, was tried and executed in 1950.
Germaine Tillion, a member of the French resistance, was arrested on August 13, 1942. She and her mother, who was also involved in the resistance, were sent to Ravensbruck in October 1943. She wrote,For a stipulated price the businessman or industrialist received the 500 or 1,000 women requested, along with Aufseherin-nen who, equipped with trained dogs and clubs, could force twelve hours of work a day from exhausted and starving women, right up to the point of death. They would be replaced with more of the same, without additional cost to the client. But thanks to the Aufseherinnen, the dogs, and the beatings, it was a perfect cycle, with no waste; the prisoners worked until they could work no more.
