Ravensbrück (German: [ˌʁaːvn̩sˈbʁʏk]) was a Nazi German concentration camp exclusively for women from 1939 to 1945, located in Northern Germany, 90 km (56 mi) north of Berlin at a site near the village of Ravensbrück (part of Fürstenberg/Havel). The camp memorial's estimated figure of 132,000 women who were in the camp during the war includes about 48,500 from Poland, 28,000 from the Soviet Union, almost 24,000 from Germany and Austria, nearly 8,000 from France, almost 2,000 from Belgium, and thousands from other countries including a few from the United Kingdom and the United States. More than 20,000 (15 percent) of the total were Jewish. More than 80 percent were political prisoners. Many prisoners were employed as slave laborers by Siemens & Halske. From 1942 to 1945, the Nazis undertook medical experiments on Ravensbrück prisoners to test the effectiveness of sulfonamides. In the spring of 1941 the SS established a small adjacent camp for male inmates, who built and managed the camp's gas chambers in January 1945. Of the female prisoners who passed through the Ravensbrück camp, about 50,000 perished. No precise accounting for the number of prisoners murdered in the gas-chamber at Ravensbrück can be given, but a compilation of witness accounts suggests that the number was over 5,000 and the true figure may have been much higher.
Prisoners
Construction of the camp began in November 1938 on the order of the SS leader, Heinrich Himmler, and was unusual in that it was intended exclusively to hold female inmates. Ravensbrück first housed prisoners in May 1939, when the SS moved 900 women from the Lichtenburg concentration camp in Saxony. Eight months after the start of World War II the camp's maximum capacity was already exceeded. It underwent major expansion following the invasion of Poland. By the summer of 1941, with the launch of Operation Barbarossa, an estimated total of 5,000 women were imprisoned and fed gradually decreasing hunger rations. By the end of 1942 the inmate population of Ravensbrück had grown to about 10,000. The greatest number of prisoners at one time in Ravensbrück was probably about 45,000. Between 1939 and 1945 some 130,000 to 132,000 prisoners passed through the Ravensbrück camp system. According to Encyclopædia Britannica, about 50,000 of them perished from disease, starvation, overwork and despair; some 2,200 were murdered in the gas chambers. Upon liberation on 29–30 April 1945, approximately 3,500 prisoners were still alive in the main camp. Although the inmates came from every country in German-occupied Europe, the largest single national group in the camp were Polish. In the spring of 1941 the SS authorities established a small men's camp adjacent to the main camp. The male inmates built and managed the gas chambers for the camp in 1944. There were children in the camp as well. At first they arrived with mothers who were Romani or Jews incarcerated in the camp or were born to imprisoned women. There were few children early on, including a few Czech children from Lidice in July 1942. Later the children in the camp represented almost all nations of Europe occupied by Germany. Between April and October 1944, their number increased considerably, consisting of two groups. One group was composed of Romani children brought into the camp with their mothers or sisters after the Romani camp in Auschwitz-Birkenau was closed. The other group included mostly children who were brought with Polish mothers sent to Ravensbrück after the collapse of the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. Most of these children died of starvation. Ravensbrück had 70 sub-camps used for slave labour that were spread across an area from the Baltic Sea to Bavaria.
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