Ravensbrück, part I

Cindy arranged for us to take a tour of the women's concentration camp, Ravensbrück.  This camp is only 50 miles north of Berlin, but it took us about two hours to get there.  The direct line from Berlin to Fürstenberg/Havel was being repaired, so we had to find an alternative route.  When we got to the train station near our hotel (by the zoo), the clerk had trouble understanding where we wanted to go.  At one point, she was going to send us on a seven hour train ride.  Finally, Cindy asked her to show us a map and we were able to show her where we needed to go; we had a clear itinerary at last.  Unfortunately, we had  to make two changes--which was a bit intimidating.  We took the S-bahn to Berlin HbF and then a regular train to Birkenwerder.  From there, we had to catch a bus to Fürstenberg/Havel.  

Once at the "bus station" (really, it was more of a covered bus stop with a dirt floor), we had to figure out how to get to Ravensbrück.  We finally figured out that we weren't too far from the Fürstenberg/Havel train station.  We made our way there and noticed a taxi parked outside the station.  Entering the station was a bit like taking a trip back in time.  This place hadn't been updated in many, many decades.  The whole facility could do with a fresh paint job and updated furnishings.  It had a definite GDR-feel to it.

According to one of the online sites I reviewed, Himmler chose this site for the camp because it was both out-of-the-way and easy-to reach.  The area around Fürstenberg/Havel is lovely and wooded and Lake Schwedt separates the town and the camp.   

The Information Center at Ravensbrück is a modern building.  The women at the desk were very friendly and charming, and summoned our guide, Thomas.

Thomas gave us an overview of the camp using a 3D model.

We could see the homes of the commandants just up the hill from the Information Center.
 
And the houses where the guards lived are still in place.

Administrative offices are being re-purposed for the museum.

There are a number of other buildings on the periphery of the camp.

And yet no barracks remain at the camp site, only furrows in the ground.

Before the wall fell, the camp housed Soviet troops.  It was off limits for the west until reunification.
 
The first inmates at Ravensbrück when it opened in May of 1939 were German women characterized as anti-fascists.  The camp was designed for 2,000 prisoners, but toward the end of the war, following the evacuation of Auschwitz, 50,000 women were crowded into the camp (according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum).  The women who passed through the camp came from 30 different countries, including (much to my surprise) some British prisoners.  There were more Polish women there than any other nationality group.

Ravensbrück has a wall of nations commemorating the nationalities of women imprisoned there.
Most of the inmates came from  Poland and the USSR, but also  included those who'd been declared "asocials,"such as the  Roma & Sinti, Jehovah's Witnesses and Jews.  

 

 Although none of the online sites I reviewed acknowledged this, lesbians were also sent to Ravensbrück because of their sexuality, or "deviance" as the Nazi state deemed it.  Our guide told us this was actually a controversy among the governors of the Ravensbrück museum.  While they recognize that lesbians were among the women imprisoned there, they claim that sexuality was not a rationale for arrest.  There is, however, evidence illustrating that this was indeed true in at least four instances.  One of the consequences of this failure to acknowledge the truth of lesbian imprisonment is that they are not recognized on the "wall of nations" as the Sinti, Roma and Communists are.

We learned that although this was considered a "women's" camp, there were barracks added for men, although in much smaller numbers.  There was also a youth camp.  Interestingly, many women who had been at Ravensbrück were unaware that men were there.  The men were assigned work at the crematorium, but were forced to sleep there sequestered from the women inmates and forbidden to reveal their secret work.  In 1945, the Germans built a gas chamber on the premises.  Over 2,000 women perished there--mostly Hungarian Jews, but also Russian and Polish women.  Their ashes rest in Lake Schwedt.

Ravensbrück supplied slave laborers who worked on the V1 and V2 rockets produced at the Sieman's factory near the camp.

According to the Virtual Jewish Library, the camp was a primary depository for confiscated clothing.  The inmates were employed at a factory where they reworked leather and textiles.  They made the striped "uniforms" for prisoners and fur coats for Waffen-SS  and Wehrmacht.  They were also employed in making carpets, as well as road construction and work for the officers.

The camp had to be enlarged four times to accommodate the growing population of inmates.  The women imprisoned there had to provide labor for those construction projects.

 

Thomas told us a story about the commandant's young son who, when he saw one of the prisoners assigned to work in his family's garden, said, "Get back to work or I'll have my father punish you."  Thomas noted that the guards at Ravensbrück were young and cruel.  One of the most despicable was a young woman named Dorothea Binz who started working at the camp when she was 19.  

Binz moved rapidly up the ranks as a guard.  She often tortured prisoners herself, rather than passing them on to other guards to do the job.  She also sent women who refused to go to the sick ward on to locked bunkers before being subjected to medical experiments.

Thomas told us that the guards' behavior was quite capricious.   At times they were benign, at others, unspeakably cruel.

When I first heard about Ravensbrück, I was a little confused about the presence of Jewish women at the camp.  Apparently, the Jewish women who were there initially were exterminated through a program called Operation Reinhard in 1942, a.k.a., the implementation of the Final Solution.  The women were sent to the death camps.   More Jewish women were sent to Ravensbrück by the end of the war.

There's so much to reflect on with respect to Ravensbrück, I've decided to finish my discussion in a second post.