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Ravensbruck, Where Up to 90,000 Women Perished During the Holocaust
(Times of Israel) J.P. O'Malley - 50 miles north of Berlin, Ravensbruck was the only concentration camp the Nazis built to house female prisoners. It operated for six years beginning in May 1939 and over 130,000 women passed through its gates, says British author Sarah Helm in If This Is a Woman - Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women. "In the beginning Ravensbruck was very small. It consisted largely of German women, who were either asocials or political prisoners. Basically anyone who openly opposed Hitler," and many women in that particular group were Jewish, says Helm. By autumn 1944, Ravensbruck had become overcrowded, the result of the enormous evacuation process in the East, where the Russians had begun liberating numerous camps, such as Auschwitz. Hitler took the rather bizarre decision to take all the survivors out of these camps and march them back to Germany. Transportation of people across Eastern Europe had become a major problem. Still, Hitler insisted that every last Jew be removed from Hungary before the Red Army arrived. In the view of warped Nazi ideology, gassing became a practical way of controlling population numbers in horrifically overcrowded work camps. "The killing had to go up by 2,000 a month at Ravensbruck during this time," says Helm. So a gas chamber was set up. "Parts of that gas chamber were said to have been brought directly from Auschwitz, which at that time had been dismantled."