Inside Ravensbrück: The Most Brutal Blocks of the N4zi Women’s Camp

Chapter 1: The Foundations of the Reich’s Machine

In northern Germany, ninety kilometers from Berlin, surrounded by pine forests and a lake that in summer reflected the blue sky with an obscene indifference, there existed between 1939 and 1945 a place the Reich had built specifically to destroy women. Not to imprison them or interrogate them, but to destroy them systematically, methodically, with the same administrative logic a factory uses to manage its production. That place was called Ravensbrück. And inside its barbed wire perimeter, the blocks were not merely buildings, but instruments. Each served a precise function within the machine. Each embodied a different way of ending a person. What happened inside those brick walls and wooden structures, what more than 130,000 women from forty different countries endured between the first day of operation and the last, is what this account will trace here, block by block, without softening anything.

The Ravensbrück camp opened in May 1939 with 906 prisoners transferred from Lichtenburg. Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, had designed it as the centralized solution for the women the Reich wanted imprisoned. German communists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, women classified as antisocial, prostitutes, common criminals, Jews. As the years passed and the war expanded, the camp filled with Polish, French, Soviet, Dutch, Belgian, Norwegian, and Czech women. By 1944, Ravensbrück held three times more women than its infrastructure could support. And under that strain, every block became something even worse than it had already been. The first thing a woman touched upon arriving at Ravensbrück was not a bed or a chair. It was the quarantine line.

The quarantine blocks were the first buildings newly arrived prisoners were assigned to after the intake process. After registration, the shaving of their heads, the tattoo or the number sewn onto their clothing. After everything they had carried was taken away, they were brick structures that filled quickly and emptied their contents into the rest of the camp with an irregularity no one explained. A woman might spend days in quarantine or weeks without information, without knowing what came next, without understanding the unwritten rules that would determine whether she survived. That ignorance was part of the design. The camp did not run on hunger and cold alone. It also ran on uncertainty.

In the quarantine blocks, the prisoners received their first lesson in the language of Ravensbrück. It was a simple language. The whistle that tore hundreds of women from their bunks at 4:30 in the morning. Appell, the morning roll call in the yard, could last minutes or hours, depending on the guard’s mood, depending on whether someone was missing, depending on whether Dorothea Binz had come out that morning with her whip ready to use it. In winter, Appell on frozen ground in inadequate clothing was a calculated form of torture. In summer, under a sun with no shade for hours, it was another kind of torture, different but equally calculated. A prisoner who arrived in good physical condition could lose weeks of bodily reserves in her first quarantine because the camp did not allow her to recover from arrival.

It forced her to start wasting away from the very first day. Dorothea Binz was nineteen years old when she entered Ravensbrück as an auxiliary guard in 1939. She was from Fürstenberg, the village by the lake where the camp stood, which means she knew that landscape before the camp existed. She rose through the guard hierarchy with a speed her superiors attributed to her ability to maintain order. By 1943, she was the Oberaufseherin, the chief guard of the entire women’s camp. Binz was recognizable from a distance. She walked with her whip coiled in her hand and could shift from a calm expression to physical violence in a fraction of a second. Prisoners learned to identify her before they saw her by the sound of her steps in the mud, by the reaction of nearby guards when she appeared.

Binz was executed in May 1947 after the Hamburg trial. Until the end, she maintained that she had only followed orders. But if the quarantine blocks were the introduction to the system, the true heart of Ravensbrück’s terror had a specific name, the bunker. It was the camp’s punishment block, a structure set apart from the rest, built with thicker walls, with cells whose purposes the Reich’s documents described in administrative language. Though the survivors remembered them in the only language possible for such things, that of the body that does not forget. The Ravensbrück bunker was not a metaphor. It was a brick building with a central corridor and cells on both sides. Some were dark, with tiny barred windows. Others had no window at all.

Chapter 2: The Architecture of Punishment and the Bunker

The smallest measured little more than a meter wide, enough to stand or sit with the knees pressed to the chest, not enough to lie down with the body stretched out. In those cells, a prisoner could be locked up for days or weeks. The ration she received in the bunker was smaller than the already insufficient ration in the general camp. For punishments deemed serious, that ration was reduced to water and hard bread every two or three days. A woman who spent a month in the bunker cells came out with a body that had regressed by weeks in its already fragile physical state. If she managed to come out at all, the man who ruled the Ravensbrück bunker during the camp’s busiest years was Ludwig Ramdohr. He was the Gestapo officer assigned to the camp, responsible for interrogations, for deciding whether suspicion would become punishment and what form that punishment would take.

Ramdohr was known for combining direct physical violence with a coldness the prisoners found more terrifying than visible sadism. He did not shout. He asked questions, and when the answers were not the ones he wanted, he acted with the precision of someone who had practiced. His methods in the bunker included beatings with solid objects, partial drowning, prolonged sleep deprivation through repeated interruptions during the night, and the use of standing cells, Stehzellen, for extended isolation. Ramdohr was tried in Hamburg, sentenced to death, and executed in May 1947 alongside Binz and Suhren. The standing cells of the Ravensbrück bunker were the exact equivalent of Block 11 in Auschwitz. A standing cell was a space so narrow that the prisoner locked inside it could only remain standing, with no possibility of sitting or lying down.

Four women could be forced simultaneously into one of those cells, pressed against one another, with the air from four bodies heating a space designed for one. Nights in those cells caused cramps, fainting, and loss of sensation in the legs. Anyone who endured five nights came out with legs in a condition the camp Revier, the infirmary, had no means to treat properly. And anyone who left the bunker with her body that damaged returned to a camp where physical weakness was the quickest road to selection. The bunker was not only individual punishment, it was also a collective demonstration. When a prisoner tried to escape, when an internal resistance network was discovered, when someone was accused of possessing a forbidden object or passing information to the outside, the consequences did not stop with the accused person. The camp punished the group. Barracks mates, commando companions, any woman who might have known something and failed to report it, all entered the bunker circuit.

That mechanism of collective punishment had a purpose Ramdohr and Suhren understood well. If the price of solidarity with another person was the bunker, solidarity became a calculation the body could not always afford to make. Carmen Mory was Swiss. She arrived at Ravensbrück as a prisoner in 1941, accused of spying for the British. But inside the camp, she built a position for herself as a Gestapo informant that made her one of the most feared figures in Barracks 16, the block for the sick. Mory is one of the cases the camp produced with some regularity, a prisoner who found, in collaboration with the system, a form of power the camp offered her and that she would never have had outside it. Her role in Barracks 16 and her relationship to the bunker as a channel for denunciation were documented at the Hamburg trial with a precision that condemned her to death. She was the only prisoner executed in that proceeding. She took her own life in her cell the night before the scheduled execution.

From the bunker, the chain of Ravensbrück’s terror led to the block the prisoners called by different names, though in camp documents it appeared as the Revier, the infirmary. The name suggests a place of care. The Revier at Ravensbrück was something else. It was the space where camp medicine operated by the same logic as the rest of the system. The bodies that arrived there were not patients, but logistical problems to be solved. The Ravensbrück Revier was a group of buildings that grew along with the camp. In the early years, it was a single block. Over time, it expanded to include separate wards, a consultation room, bed wards for the sick who were still useful for work and therefore worth treating, and wards for those who were not. The distinction between those two categories was made by the SS doctor in charge, not according to medical criteria, but according to productivity.

A prisoner with an infection that could be resolved in weeks and would allow her to return to her commando received minimal treatment, but enough to put the body back into the system. A prisoner whose condition required more time or whose recovery was uncertain went into the other category. That other category had a name in camp slang. The sick considered beyond recovery for work were not sent home. They were not transferred to hospitals. They remained in the Revier under conditions that accelerated what the camp called the natural resolution of the case, meaning death by active neglect. Less food, no medication, no adequate heat. And when the Revier’s occupancy exceeded the system’s capacity, the camp had another mechanism, internal selection. Once a week, or more often during times of crisis, the SS doctor walked through the Revier beds and pointed. Those selected did not walk out. They left on lists that ended in the bunker, in the gas chamber during the camp’s late period, or directly in the backyard where a bullet was the fastest procedure.

Percy Treite was Ravensbrück’s chief surgeon during the years of peak camp activity. Treite combined genuine technical competence with a willingness to place it at the service of the system that required no pressure. He performed amputations on prisoners subjected to surgical experiments when the infections in those wounds reached a point the camp could no longer ignore without losing the experimental subject. And those amputations were carried out with anesthesia when Treite considered it necessary, and without it when there was no time, or when the doctor judged the prisoner did not deserve it. Treite also signed the Revier death certificates with causes of death that did not correspond to the real cause because the system required paperwork and paperwork demanded acceptable causes. Heart failure, pneumonia, general weakness. The language of medicine turned into a tool for concealing what medicine was doing. Treite was tried in Hamburg in 1946 and took his own life in his cell with a pill before sentence was pronounced. He was thirty-five years old.

Chapter 3: Medical Experiments and the Polish Rabbits

Herta Oberheuser arrived at Ravensbrück in 1940 as an SS doctor. She was twenty-seven years old and the only woman among the physicians in the concentration camp system. Oberheuser matters to the history of the Ravensbrück Revier not only because of the experiments she carried out in the surgical room of the medical block, but because of the way her presence in the camp redefined what prisoners could expect from medical personnel. A prisoner who arrived at the Revier with an infection or a fracture could not know whether the woman in the white coat approaching to examine her was about to relieve the pain or begin a procedure that would multiply it. That uncertainty, the doctor as a simultaneous source of possible relief and likely harm, was part of what the system did with medicine in Ravensbrück.

The block of medical experiments at Ravensbrück is known in the camp’s history mainly for what happened to the Polish prisoners between 1942 and 1944. Those women are known in the historical record by a name they themselves adopted with an irony that was also a form of dignity, the rabbits, Kaninchen in German. They were used as laboratory animals, and they knew it. The way they responded was to document it and survive to tell it. The story of the Ravensbrück rabbits begins in July 1942, when SS Dr. Karl Gebhardt received authorization from Himmler to conduct experiments on the treatment of infected war wounds using camp prisoners. Gebhardt was Himmler’s personal physician and director of the SS hospital in Hohenlychen, a few kilometers from Ravensbrück. The context of the experiment was specific. Reinhard Heydrich, one of the chief architects of the final solution, had been wounded in an assassination attempt in Prague in May 1942 and had died of septicemia a few days later.

The question Gebhardt needed to answer, at least according to the experiment’s formal justification, was whether sulfonamides, the first available antibiotics, might have saved Heydrich if they had been administered correctly. To answer it, Gebhardt needed bodies on which to practice. The chosen bodies were those of young, healthy Polish women. Most of them political prisoners. A total of 74 women underwent Gebhardt’s experiments at Ravensbrück between 1942 and 1944. The procedure was as follows. A surgical incision was made in the prisoner’s leg, usually in the calf or thigh. That incision was deliberately infected with bacteria, generally staphylococci, streptococci, or the gas gangrene bacterium Clostridium perfringens. Foreign objects were then introduced into the wound. Wood splinters, pieces of glass, bone dust. The idea was to recreate the conditions of a shrapnel wound in war. Then they waited for the infection to develop before applying sulfonamides in some cases, or no treatment at all in others, in order to compare results.

The prisoners who underwent those experiments were asked nothing. There was no consent and no possibility of refusing without consequences. Some died from the infections that had been induced. Others permanently lost the use of their legs. Others developed osteomyelitis, a bone infection that remained with them for the rest of their lives. Those who survived both the camp and the experiments left with bodies marked in a way post-war physicians immediately recognized as experimental in origin, not as wounds from war or labor. What distinguishes the Ravensbrück rabbits in the history of camp victims is not only the horror of what was done to them, but what they did with that horror. The Polish prisoners subjected to the experiments organized a systematic documentation effort inside the camp of what was being done to them. They memorized details, dates, doctors’ names, the procedures applied, the physical consequences observed. They transmitted that information outside through clandestine communication networks the Polish resistance maintained with the camp. Some of those communications reached London.

When the Doctors’ Trial in Nuremberg began in December 1946, the surviving Ravensbrück rabbits appeared as witnesses. Their testimony was precise and detailed, with names and dates matching the documents the Allies had captured. Karl Gebhardt was sentenced to death and executed in June 1948, but Gebhardt’s experiments were not the only ones carried out in the medical block at Ravensbrück. Fritz Fischer, a physician subordinate to Gebhardt, took part in the same infected wound experiments and was also tried at Nuremberg. Herta Oberheuser participated in surgical procedures on the rabbits that included the removal of muscle and nerve tissue to study regeneration, and in some cases, the injection of foreign substances directly into the muscles to analyze the inflammatory response. Oberheuser was sentenced to 20 years. She was released in 1952 after serving fewer than 6 years and resumed medical practice in West Germany as a family doctor. A group of surviving Ravensbrück rabbits tracked her down and denounced her publicly in 1958. Her medical license was revoked in 1960. She died in 1978, free.

The Ravensbrück medical block also produced a category of prisoners the camp itself recognized as distinct. Those who were no longer useful for work and no longer recoverable for experimentation. Those women were sent to Barrack 16, known in camp jargon as the Schonungsblock, the rest block. The name was another euphemism. The Schonungsblock at Ravensbrück was not a place of rest. It was the block where women went to die while waiting to be killed, or to be killed while waiting to die, depending on the stage of the camp and the capacity of the Revier. Barrack 16 was ruled during its most infamous period by Carmen Mory, the Swiss prisoner already mentioned as a Gestapo informant. There she held a power she used in both ways the camp made possible, protecting some women with whom she had relationships of favoritism or exchange, and destroying others through denunciations, selective deprivation, or simply by ignoring visible suffering as if it did not exist.

Chapter 4: Industrial Slavery and the Siemens Workshops

The prisoners of Barracks 16 who observed her described at the Hamburg trial a figure who had internalized the camp’s logic to the point of reproducing it from within with an efficiency the SS guards themselves would hardly have needed to supervise. In Barracks 16 were women with advanced tuberculosis, with untreated cancer, with the aftereffects of surgical experiments, with the consequences of severe malnutrition pushed to the point of what the camp called the Muselmann, the term also used in Auschwitz for people who had crossed the metabolic threshold beyond which the body could no longer reverse the process of destruction. Those women were in Barracks 16 because the system no longer needed anything from them except that they disappear quickly enough. The ration they received was lower than that of the general camp. Medical care was intermittent. The cold remained the same. And when the block’s occupancy reached a point that compromised the system’s logistical functioning, Treite came, or Oberheuser came, or the list came.

The prisoners who worked as inmate nurses in Barracks 16 lived within the same ethical impossibility described in other parts of the camp. They knew what was happening. They had instructions about what they were and were not supposed to do, and they operated in a zone where any attempt to do the right thing could make them the next name on the list. Some found narrow margins, delaying a diagnosis, falsifying a record, obtaining an extra piece of bread for a woman on the edge. Those acts did not change the statistical outcome of Barracks 16, but they did alter the outcome of individual cases. And in Ravensbrück, changing the outcome of a single case was as much as the margin allowed. While Barracks 16 was the end of the line for many, another part of the camp represented something different, active industrial slavery. Siemens and Halske installed a production workshop at Ravensbrück beginning in 1942 using the labor of the camp’s prisoners.

There, electrical components were manufactured for the German war effort. Parts for radios, communications equipment, precision components requiring repetitive manual work and sustained concentration. The company paid the Reich a daily rate for each prisoner used, between three and four marks depending on the period. The prisoners received none of that money. The blocks associated with Siemens labor at Ravensbrück were, in terms of immediate physical conditions, marginally better than some of the camp’s worst blocks. The work was done indoors. The temperature in the workshop was easier to control than the outdoor cold. It did not involve the kind of brute physical strain found in construction or drainage commandos. But Siemens labor had its own form of destruction. Sustained concentration for twelve hours a day in a body receiving 600 calories of food. Mechanical repetition until error became inevitable. And the consequences of that error, which the Siemens system had established with the same administrative efficiency the company applied to everything else.

A prisoner who produced defective parts was reported. A prisoner who was reported could be sent back to the general camp, which in Ravensbrück meant moving in the wrong direction. Siemens did not directly supervise punishments. But the circuit between workshop and camp was short and clear enough for the women workers to understand the equation. The women who worked for Siemens at Ravensbrück reached the workshop from their housing blocks in formation, counted and recorded. The workshop was inside the camp perimeter, which meant they did not leave the wire to work. That distinguished them from the external commandos, which had their own distinct dangers. In the Siemens workshop, the danger was different. Repetition until error. The quality control the company exercised through supervisors who reported to the camp system and the constant awareness that a poor day of production could translate into transfer to an even worse commando.

The parts those women produced, those precision electrical components, left Ravensbrück and entered the Reich’s industrial production circuit. They equipped military communications. They served the very war effort that had placed those women in the camp. The irony was perfectly cruel. After the war, Siemens and Halske continued operating. The company went through formal denazification processes, but superficial ones. By the 1950s and 1960s, it was already one of West Germany’s leading industrial corporations. The payments it had made to the Reich for the labor of Ravensbrück prisoners did not produce individual compensation for the women who had performed it. It took decades of legal and political pressure before victims of slave labor in German companies received partial compensation, and that process did not begin in any meaningful way until the year 2000, 55 years after liberation.

In 1944, Ravensbrück faced a problem the system had never designed a way to solve, too many prisoners for the blocks available. The evacuation of camps in the East, as the Soviet Army advanced, sent waves of women westward, and Ravensbrück received those waves with no infrastructure to absorb them. The already overcrowded blocks filled beyond all margin. Then the camp made a decision survivors remembered as the worst of all the conditions they experienced at Ravensbrück because it marked the point at which the infrastructure of horror collapsed in on itself. They built the tent. The tent, das Zelt in German, was exactly what the name suggests, a structure of canvas and poles erected on camp grounds where no space remained in any block. In the autumn of 1944, between 4,000 and 6,000 women were housed there. There were no bunks, no solid floor, no heating, no permanent lighting, no sanitary facilities inside the structure. Only buckets that filled within hours and had to be emptied by prisoners at designated points to which access was controlled and often denied.

Chapter 5: The Tent, the Gas Chamber, and Liberation

The tent had a dirt floor, which the damp autumn turned into mud and the approaching winter would turn into something worse. The women who spent months in the Ravensbrück tent during the winter of 1944 to 1945 described an experience that even survivors of the worst barracks in Birkenau recognized as exceptional in its brutality. Not because of the individual elements, which the camp distributed in other forms elsewhere, but because of the combination. The cold was constant because the canvas provided no insulation. Ground moisture passed into the body sleeping on it. Diseases already circulating through the camp multiplied in the tent’s overcrowding with a speed that turned typhus and dysentery into an epidemic inside a space that was already an epidemic. When morning came, those who had died during the night still lay among the living until the system processed them. And that did not always happen the same day.

The tent had no permanent guards inside because there was not enough personnel to maintain constant presence in every structure of the overloaded camp. That created a paradox. Inside the tent, the prisoners were physically less supervised than in the blocks. But that lack of supervision was not freedom. It was abandonment. The system did not need to be present inside the tent because the conditions did the work on their own. The cold, the hunger, the disease, the overcrowding. Each one was enough to destroy a body in weeks. Together, they were efficient in a way any individual guard might have envied. Survivors of the tent described the experience with images ordinary language can scarcely contain. They described the sound of the tent on a windy night. The canvas moving and letting the cold in through the gaps at the edges. They described the smell, the specific smell of thousands of human bodies without access to water or sanitary facilities crowded into a space designed for less than a tenth of that number.

They described managing the hours of the day inside that space as a constant negotiation between physical needs that could not be met and the instinct to preserve what little energy remained by moving as little as possible. They described the nights as something endured in stretches of minutes, not hours. While the tent existed outside the main camp structures, something was being built inside the Ravensbrück system that the camp had not needed until that point because its other mechanisms of death had been sufficient. A gas chamber. The Ravensbrück gas chamber was built in the autumn of 1944 during the same period in which the tent overflowed with human beings. The decision to build it was made in the context of a camp that needed to process bodies faster than the existing methods, selections to Auschwitz, lethal injections, active neglect in barrack 16 could handle. The Ravensbrück gas chamber was not inside the main camp. It stood in an adjacent wooded area far enough from the blocks that the sound did not carry clearly and close enough that transporting those selected remained efficient.

The building was small compared with the crematoria at Birkenau. It was not designed to process thousands in a single day, but to eliminate the dozens or hundreds generated by Ravensbrück’s internal selections. The gas used was Zyklon B, the same used in Auschwitz. The logistics were the same as well. The prisoners arrived with the explanation that they were going to shower or with no explanation at all. And then the doors were shut. The exact number of women who died in the Ravensbrück gas chamber between its opening in the autumn of 1944 and the camp’s evacuation in the winter of 1945 is difficult to establish precisely because the records that would have made such a calculation possible were destroyed by the SS before liberation. Historians’ estimates, based on survivor testimony, fragments of records that escaped destruction, and calculations of overall camp mortality, range from several thousand to more than 5,000 in that period alone. The camp had already been operating for 6 years by the time the gas chamber was installed, which means it had killed tens of thousands of women without it.

The gas chamber was the final acceleration of a process already years underway. Associated with the Ravensbrück gas chamber was a crematorium where the bodies were burned. Survivors who lived in the camp during its last months described crematorium smoke as a constant in the sky during that period, visible from the blocks at certain angles, with the wind sometimes carrying the smell to the barracks. That smell was unmistakable to those who had learned to recognize it, and in Ravensbrück by late 1944, most prisoners already recognized it. There was no way not to know what it meant. The camp did not need to say it in words. One of the blocks the Ravensbrück system used to funnel women toward the gas chamber was the one that in that late period functioned as the antechamber to final selection. Prisoners transferred from barrack 16, from the tent, from the quarantine blocks where newly arrived women from Eastern evacuations appeared in states of weakness the camp recorded as unfit for work, passed through a summary review that Treite or whoever was on duty that day carried out with the speed of someone who had too many cases and too little time.

Those who crossed that threshold in the wrong direction did not leave for another block. They left for the wooded area. Camp Commandant Fritz Suhren oversaw this process with the same administrative mindset he applied to the production reports from the Siemens workshops. Suhren knew the war was ending. He knew the Soviet army was advancing and that the Reich was shrinking. In that context, he accelerated the pace of eliminations within the camp according to a logic the SS applied in all camps during that period. Reduce the number of living witnesses before those witnesses could testify. Suhren fled in disguise after the camp’s liberation. He was captured in Austria in May 1945. He was tried in Hamburg and executed in June 1950. The Ravensbrück blocks in the final months of the camp between January and April 1945 were places where the system of control was disintegrating, but the danger was not. Guards who knew the war had been lost acted with an unpredictability prisoners experienced as a different kind of risk, though no less severe than the stable system that had preceded it.

A male or female guard acting out of the fear of someone who knows they will be judged might become more violent at that exact moment, not less. Selections in the blocks during those weeks no longer followed the regular rhythm of earlier periods. They had the arbitrariness of chaos, and chaos inside an armed system is a specific form of terror. On the 30th of April 1945, the Red Army reached Ravensbrück. What it found was what the Reich’s camps always left at the end. Those who could not be evacuated, the too sick or too weak to walk, the unburied bodies of those who had died in the preceding days, and the buildings whose walls still held what had happened inside them. The blocks of Ravensbrück at that moment were empty or nearly empty structures. The Soviet Army moved through with the same mixture of recognition and horror reported at other camps. They had already seen camps. Ravensbrück had its own specific character. It was a women’s camp, and that meant what the soldiers found in the barracks, in the Revier, in the space where the tent had stood had a dimension that even men who had spent 3 years at war on the Eastern Front took time to process. Historical research on Ravensbrück has advanced significantly since the war, especially after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when the archives the Soviet Army had captured and kept classified for decades began to become available to Western historians.