Ravensbrück Memorial Site

Established by the SS in 1939, Ravensbrück held over 130,000 women from more than 40 nations, along with children and a smaller number of men. The camp was initially designed to hold 3,000 inmates but expanded significantly over time.

Ravensbrück was primarily a labor camp, with prisoners forced to work in the camp’s industries, which included textile production and electrical components for the German war effort. The conditions were brutal, characterized by overcrowding, inadequate food, and lack of medical care, leading to high mortality rates. The camp also witnessed medical experiments conducted on prisoners, including sterilization and testing of sulfonamide drugs.

The camp’s population included political prisoners, Jews, “asocials”, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and others deemed undesirable by the Nazi regime. In 1941, a small men’s camp was established, and in 1942, the “Uckermark youth protective custody camp” was added. The camp complex also included a gas chamber, built in 1944, where thousands of prisoners were murdered.

As the war neared its end, the SS began evacuating prisoners from Ravensbrück. In late April 1945, the Swedish Red Cross, negotiated by Count Folke Bernadotte, evacuated around 7,500 prisoners to Sweden. The Soviet Army liberated the camp on April 30, 1945, finding only a few thousand sick and weak prisoners.

After the war, the Soviet Army used parts of the former camp as a barracks. Efforts to preserve the area around the crematorium as a memorial site began in 1948. In 1959, the “Nationale Mahn- und Gedenkstätte Ravensbrück” was inaugurated, becoming one of the three KZ memorials in the GDR. The memorial underwent significant changes after 1993, becoming part of the Brandenburg Memorials Foundation. In 2013, a new permanent exhibition titled “The Women’s Concentration Camp Ravensbrück – History and Memory” was opened.