Ravensbrück concentration camp

Ravensbrück was a German concentration camp exclusively for women from 1939-1945, located in northern Germany, 90km north of Berlin at a site near the village of Ravensbrück (part of Fürstenberg/Havel). The largest single national group consisted of 40,000 Polish women. Others included 26,000 Jewish from all countries, 18,800 Russian, 8,000 French, and 1,000 Dutch. More than 80% were political prisoners. Many slave labor prisoners were employed by Siemens & Halske. From 1942-1945, medical experiments to test the effectiveness of sulfonamides were undertaken.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 1944. Of some 130,000 female prisoners who passed through the Ravensbrück camp, about 50,000 of them perished, some 2,200 were killed in the gas chambers and 15,000 survived until liberation.PrisonersConstruction of the camp began in November 1938 by the order of the SS leader Heinrich Himmler and was unusual in that the camp was intended exclusively to hold female inmates. Ravensbrück first housed prisoners in May 1939, when the SS moved 900 women from the Lichtenburg women's 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, who were fed gradually decreasing hunger rations. By the end of 1942, the inmate population of Ravensbrück had grown to about 10,000.