Ravensbrück concentration camp

In the SS' Service: Female guards at Germany's Ravensbrück concentration camp | DW | 11.08.2020

The concentration camp for women and children only since summer 1939...

1939 - 1945 Ravensbrück concentration camp - Mahn- und Gedenkstätte Ravensbrück

Around 120,000 women and children, 20,000 men and 1,200 adolescent girls and young women (imprisoned in the Uckermark “juvenile protective custody camp”) were registered as Ravensbrück prisoners between 1939 and 1945. These prisoners came from over 30 nations and included Jewish, Sinti and Roma people. Tens of thousands of them were murdered, died of hunger and disease or were killed in medical experiments. In the course of “Operation 14 f 13”, prisoners considered infirm or unfit for work were selected and murdered. Along with the victims of “14 f 13”, a number of Jewish prisoners were taken to the Bernburg “sanatorium and nursing home” and were murdered in the facility’s gas chamber. From 1941 onward, Ravensbrück was used as a place of execution. Countless women — the exact number is not known — were shot to death. In early 1945, the SS set up a provisional gas chamber at Ravensbrück in a hut next to the crematorium, where between 5,000 and 6,000 prisoners were gassed between late January and April 1945. Among them were approximately 100 prisoners from the men’s camp.

Nazi Ravensbrück camp: How ordinary women became SS torturers

How ordinary women became SS torturers

Ravensbrück concentration camp - Wikipedia



Among the thousands executed at Ravensbrück were four members of the British World War II organization Special Operations Executive (SOE): Denise Bloch, Cecily Lefort, Lilian Rolfe and Violette Szabo. Other victims included the Roman Catholic nun Élise Rivet, Elisabeth de Rothschild (the only member of the Rothschild family to die in the Holocaust), Russian Orthodox nun St. Maria Skobtsova, the 25-year-old French Princess Anne de Bauffremont-Courtenay, Milena Jesenská, lover of Franz Kafka,[12] and Olga Benário, wife of the Brazilian Communist leader Luís Carlos Prestes. The largest single group of women executed at the camp were 200 young Polish members of the Home Army. A number of lesbians were imprisoned and murdered at the camp, including Henny Schermann and Mary Pünjer.[

SOE agents who survived were Yvonne Baseden and Eileen Nearne, who was a prisoner in 1944 before being transferred to another work camp and escaping. Englishwoman Mary Lindell and American Virginia d'Albert-Lake, both leaders of escape and evasion lines in France, survived. One of the Communist survivors of the camp was French Resistance member Louise Magadur.

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Just like in other camps there were male guards "Kapo´s". I recall in Ravensbruck they were all female and Poles according to the document and nicknamed "Bogolka" or something like that.