Ravensbrück Concentration Camp

The collection contains among others:

“Guidelines for the Camp Commandant”, Administration documents, post-war correspondence, statements from the former Camp Commandant Suhren, camp layouts, service regulations, logbook of the former camp scribe in CC Ravensbrück, Commando Karlshagen (Peenemünde); transport lists, status reports, Gestapo-personnel files, Gestapo-correspondence, lists of prisoner names, crematory and cemetery lists, death lists, release and repatriation lists (post-war compilation), list of names of deceased prisoners, survivor lists, list of prisoners who were victims of medical experiments, prisoner list of the men’s camp and the youth camp, numbers books, block lists, book of births, various documents relating to an underground movement of prisoners in the women’s camp, various post-war documents, correspondence with the Polish Red Cross

History of Concentration Camp Ravensbrück 1938-1945:

As of November 1938, the Economic and Administrative Main Office (WVHA) of the SS had a concentration camp constructed near Ravensbrück, situated approx. 90 km north of Berlin, for female prisoners. From then on the Concentration Camp Ravensbrück was the sole major women’s CC on German soil. The first prisoners were approx. 1,000 women from CC Lichtenburg. Until the turn of the year 1939/40 the SS had incarcerated around 2,000 women in Ravensbrück from those European countries under Wehrmacht occupation. Three years later there were already over 10,500 inmates in the camp. In April 1941 a men’s camp was attached to the women’s CC, and was run by the SS as a sub-camp of CC Sachsenhausen. As of summer 1942 in the immediate vicinity, the “Youth Protective Custody Camp Uckermark” for so-called “asocial criminalized” girls and young women also arose, and was subordinate to Reich Criminal Police Department. The SS put the prisoners arriving in the camp to work in construction as well as in SS-owned companies and, starting in 1942, increasingly in war production. The Siemens & Halske Company built 20 factories near the grounds, in which the prisoners had to do forced labor. Distributed across the entire Reich, more than 70 sub-camps of Ravensbrück main camp emerged, where the prisoners were exploited for the armaments production. Furthermore, starting in 1942 the SS forced women from CC Ravensbrück to serve as prostitutes in several concentration camps. Between 1939 and 1945 there were 132,000 women and children, 20,000 men and 10,000 female adolescents registered as prisoners in the CC Uckermark. They came from over 40 nations (primarily from Poland and the Soviet Union), among them approx. 5 percent Sinti and Roma and approx. 14 percent Jews, who had the lowermost chances of survival. Tens of thousands of these prisoners died of starvation, the arduous labor, horrendous hygienic conditions resulting from the increasingly overcrowding, medical experiments and targeted acts of extermination. In 1943, because of the ever-rising mortality rate among the prisoners, the SS decided to build a crematory. In early 1945 the SS also constructed a gas chamber next to the crematory, in which they murdered approx. 6,000 prisoners, primarily ill and invalids. On 30 April 1945, when Concentration Camp Ravensbrück was liberated by troops of the Red Army, there were merely 3,000 sick prisoners still in the CC, as the SS had just before then forced thousands of prisoners still capable of walking onto a death march headed Northwest.

Source: Schoppmann, Claudia: Ravensbrück (KZ), in: Lexikon des Holocaust, ed.by Wolfgang Benz, München 2002, p. 190-191 and http://www.memorialmuseums.org/denkmaeler/view/228/Mahn--und-Gedenkstätte-Ravensbrück [Latest access 2012-08-14].