Summer Journey: Ravensbruck

Today we visited Ravensbruch Concentration Camp located about 50 miles north of Berlin.

Ravensbruck was the largest concentration camp for women in the German Reich (second only to Aushwitz/Birkenau).

German authorities began construction of the camp in November 1938. In 1941 the SS established a small men's camp adjacent to the main camp. In November 1938 SS authorities transported about 500 male prisoners from Sachsenhausen (discussed later) to construct the Ravensbruck camp. By January 1945, the camp had more than 50,000 prisoners, mostly women.

Besides the male Nazi administrators, the camp staff included over 150 female SS guards assigned to oversee the prisoners at one time during the camp's operational period.

Ravensbrück served as a training camp for over 4,000 female overseers. The technical term for a female guard in a Nazi camp was an Aufseherin. The women either stayed in the camp or eventually served in other camps.

Survivors from this camp say that the female SS guards were at first hesitant about executing orders. But this only lasted for two weeks and after two weeks they were extremely comfortable executing the orders. The female guards soon became just as comfortable dehumanizing the prisoners as the males. This was difficult for me to believe and underlies the deeper and most unsettling facets of the Nazi regime. The systems they created were extremely effective at getting people to forget their humanity - and no one was immune to it.

One of the pictures below confirms this by showing that officers lived on camp with their families! The thought that they could raise their children in this environment, seeing the continuous torture and death of other human beings is unimaginable.

Unethical medical experiments were also conducted here. Most of them are too horrific to describe.