Qualla: Ravensbruck concentration camp

Ravensbruck concentration camp: Introduction

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Stephencdickson, CC BY-SA 4.0. Margarete Buber-Neumann arrived at Ravensbruck in 1940 after two years in a Soviet gulag. What she saw stopped her cold. Manicured lawns. Beds of red flowers. A wide street flanked by young trees, a peacock cage near the watchtower, a parrot in the trees screaming the same word over and over: Mama. The food that first night was sweet porridge with dried fruit, bread, margarine, sausage. This is a concentration camp? she wrote later. Within two years the lawns would be gone, the prisoners would be dying of starvation and typhus and beatings, and a gas chamber would be operating beside the crematorium. Ravensbruck was the only Nazi camp built specifically for women. About 132,000 women, 20,000 men, and 1,000 girls passed through its gates between 1939 and April 1945. About 50,000 of them did not come out.

Image: Stephencdickson | CC BY-SA 4.0

Ravensbruck concentration camp: The women who came

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Scanned von Benutzer--Radzuweit, Public domain. They came from every country the Nazis occupied. Polish women, the largest national group at nearly 49,000, included most of the Catholic resistance and, after August 1944, the survivors of the Warsaw Uprising. About 28,000 women came from the Soviet Union, 24,000 from Germany an...

Image: Scanned von Benutzer--Radzuweit | Public domain

Ravensbruck concentration camp: The Lapins

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Norbert Radtke (Photographer/ self), CC BY-SA 3.0. Starting in summer 1942, SS doctors performed surgical experiments on 86 women without consent. Seventy-four were Polish political prisoners. The doctors deliberately cut into their leg bones and muscles, infected the wounds with bacteria like staphylococcus and gangrene, severed...

Image: Norbert Radtke (Photographer/ self) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Ravensbruck concentration camp: Lives in the wire

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Adrian Tync, CC BY-SA 4.0. By 1944 the camp held more than 45,000 women in barracks built for a fraction of that number. The food shrank, the typhus spread, and the SS pushed inmates harder into slave labor for Siemens & Halske and the V-2 rocket program. Children began arriving in significant numbers, fir...

Image: Adrian Tync | CC BY-SA 4.0

Ravensbruck concentration camp: The gas chamber and the death march

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Norbert Radtke (Photographer / self), CC BY-SA 3.0. Until late 1944 the SS murdered prisoners individually or shipped them to the killing centers in occupied Poland. In January 1945, with the Soviet army closing in, they converted a hut beside the crematorium into a gas chamber and began murdering women on site. Between January an...

Image: Norbert Radtke (Photographer / self) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Ravensbruck concentration camp: What the survivors wrote

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Norbert Radtke (Photographer / self), CC BY-SA 3.0. The remarkable thing about Ravensbruck, more than almost any other camp, is how much its survivors wrote. Germaine Tillion, the French ethnologist who had been arrested for her Resistance work, used her training to document the camp from inside and published her account in 1975. ...

Image: Norbert Radtke (Photographer / self) | CC BY-SA 3.0