Ravensbruck - the Forgotten Camp?

 by Flixy Coote

Statue memorialising
Ravensbruck victims

On the 15th May 1939, the first 867 women arrived at Ravensbruck, a concentration camp created by the Nazis just 90 km north of Berlin to incarcerate women - Jews, Jehovah’s witnesses, prostitutes, lesbians, communists, socialists and other political prisoners. The Nazi’s only camp designed for just women would go on to house around 45,000 women at its peak, and over its 6 years of existence would house around 130,000 women in total before the liberation of the camp by the Red Army in April 1945. Overall, it is believed that between 30-90,000 women were killed/died during their time at the prison, however the real figure is very much unknown as in the final days of the camp every prisoner’s file was burned in the camp's crematorium or within bonfires. Although Ravensbruck was the largest concentration camp for women within Germany’s pre-war borders and second in size after the woman’s camp Auschwitz-Birkenau, it is still very commonly unknown, as the author Sarah Helm wrote within her book If this is a woman, “still today, hidden away, its crimes unknown, the voices of its prisoners silenced.” The stereotypical presentation of Ravensbruck as the forgotten prison may be attributed to several reasons.

One of these reasons is the idea that the prison does not fit well into the Holocaust story. Compared to other prisons, the number of Jews imprisoned there was relatively small (an estimated 20%) with only an estimated 25% that survived. Unlike camps such as Auschwitz-Birkenau, there was a much greater proportion of people imprisoned for other reasons. Therefore their deaths do not fit entirely into the narrative of the Holocaust because although the definition of the Holocaust is mass genocide, when one thinks of the Holocaust they think of the 6 million Jews killed by the Nazis in WW2 not so much the other political prisoners. 

Another reason for the characterization of Ravensbruck as the forgotten camp is the nature of its geographical location. As the cold war began in the 1950s, the camp got lost behind the iron curtain, splitting survivors and therefore breaking the history of the camp into two. The nature of the cold war meant that the camp was taken over for Soviet purposes and therefore much of the history of the camp has become entwined with the history of the cold war. The accessibility to the camp could have also played a role, its distance from Western Europe has almost created a divide between itself and other more well-known camps. 

A final reason as to why the camp is seen as “forgotten” is the attention it received after the war. Trials after the war such as the Nuremberg trials mainly focused on camps with a much higher death toll than Ravensbruck, for example Auswitchz where it is believed that 1.1 million people were killed and more widely known war crimes. Although Ravensbruck was acknowledged, the trials arguably cast shadow over the events that unfolded at the camp.

There are many other reasons as to why Ravensbruck has developed the legacy of being a ‘forgotten camp’ but as time passes it is more important than ever that the horrors and horrific injustices that occurred there are not forgotten.