When Ravensbruck Concentration Camp Were Discovered! (REAL FOOTAGE)

For the first time in years, it felt like  the worst was finally over. But one morning   in late April 1945, deep inside forests,  a group of Soviet soldiers came across a   place the Nazis had never wanted anyone  to find. What was waiting behind that   fence would turn out to be one of the  darkest discoveries of the entire war.

The Ravensbr ck concentration  camp was established in May 1939,   about 90 kilometers north of Berlin, in  a flat, forested area near the town of F   rstenberg in what is now the German state of  Mecklenburg. The Nazis chose this location   deliberately.

 It was remote enough that the  outside world wouldn’t easily notice it,   but close enough to the capital that  the SS could manage it efficiently. Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS who  oversaw all the Nazi concentration camps,   personally selected the site and supervised its  early construction.The camp was built by male   prisoners brought from Sachsenhausen, another camp  nearby.

 They constructed the barracks, the walls,   the administrative buildings, essentially building  the prison that would soon hold tens of thousands   of women. Construction finished in the spring of  1939, and the first women arrived on May 18 of   that year.

 There were 867 of them, mostly German  and Austrian women, including political prisoners,   criminals under Nazi law, Jehovah’s Witnesses,  and women labeled “asocial” by the regime. That was a catch-all term the Nazis used  for women they considered to be a problem:   prostitutes, homeless women,  those who defied social norms,   or simply women who had been accused  of things without any real trial.

The camp’s first commandant was SS-Oberf hrer  Max Koegel, who ran it from 1939 to 1942. He   was replaced by Fritz Suhren, who would oversee  the camp during its most brutal years and would   eventually become one of the most wanted  war criminals in Europe after the war. The SS female guards, called Aufseherinnen,  were recruited from ordinary German women,   trained at Ravensbr ck itself, and  then deployed across the camp system.  

Many of them became extraordinarily cruel.  The most notorious of these was Dorothea Binz,   a young woman from a nearby village who started  working at Ravensbr ck in 1939 at just 19 years   old and quickly developed a reputation  for extreme violence against prisoners. In its early years, Ravensbr ck held  a few thousand women at most.

 But the   war changed everything. As Germany invaded  country after country, women from Poland,   France, the Soviet Union, Belgium, the  Netherlands, Yugoslavia, and beyond were   swept into the camp. By the early 1940s,  the prisoner population was exploding far   beyond what the camp was designed to hold.

 And as the numbers grew, the conditions   got worse in ways that are difficult to  describe without feeling physically sick. But what came next is where things go  from horrific to almost incomprehensible. Beginning in the summer of 1942,  Nazi doctors began conducting medical   experiments on prisoners at Ravensbr ck.

 These  weren’t fringe actors operating in secret,   they were SS physicians who had  full institutional support and   were connected to a broader network of human  experimentation happening across the camp system. The experiments at Ravensbr ck were  primarily of two types: bone, muscle,   and nerve experiments, and wound  infection experiments.

 Both were   done without the consent of the women, and both  caused permanent damage, disability, and death. The wound infection experiments were  tied to a very specific military context.   Germany was fighting a war on multiple  fronts, and soldiers were dying not just   from bullets but from gas gangrene, a horrific  bacterial infection that could set into wounds,   especially in battlefield conditions. The Nazi  doctors wanted to understand how to treat it.

 So   instead of using laboratory methods or animal  testing, they decided to use the prisoners.   Doctors including Karl Gebhardt, who  was Himmler’s personal physician,   made deliberate incisions in the legs of healthy  women and then observed what happened. Some   of the women died from the infections.

 Others  survived but were left with permanent injuries,   including damaged muscle tissue, infections  that recurred for years, and severe scarring. The bone and muscle experiments involved the  surgical removal of bones or sections of muscle,   often without adequate anaesthesia.  Doctors wanted to test whether bones   could be transplanted and whether nerves  could regenerate.

 Women had sections of   their shin bones removed entirely or  had muscles cut away from their legs. The goal was partly to study these procedures  for potential use on injured soldiers,   and partly simply to satisfy scientific curiosity  within a system that had already decided these   women’s lives had no value. Some of the women  subjected to these procedures were as young as 16.

The women who were selected for experiments were  sometimes told they had been “volunteered” or were   given the choice between experimentation and  execution, which was no real choice at all.   Many of the Polish women who were subjected to  experiments became known after the war as the   “Ravensbr ck Rabbits”, Kr liki in Polish, because  they had been used like laboratory animals.

The camp was divided into several sections. There  was the main women’s camp, a smaller men’s section   established in 1941, and a youth camp nearby. The  women in the main camp were organized into blocks,   with each barrack holding far more people  than it was designed for. By 1943 and 1944,   conditions had deteriorated so badly that blocks  designed for maybe 150 women were holding 400 or   more. Sleeping in shifts became common. Sanitation  was nonexistent.

 Lice and fleas were everywhere,   and typhus, dysentery, and tuberculosis  spread through the population continuously. Every morning, the prisoners were  forced to stand for roll call,   sometimes for hours. In the freezing winters  near the lake, this alone was enough to kill   people who were already weakened. Then  came the work.

 Ravensbr ck was a labor   camp as much as anything else, and the women  were put to work in a variety of settings.   Many worked in the Siemens factory that  was built right next to the camp in 1942. Siemens, the same company that still  exists today, used prisoner labor to   produce electrical components for the German war  machine.

 Women worked ten-hour shifts for no pay,   received minimal food, and were punished  for not meeting production quotas. Others worked in the camp’s own  workshops producing uniforms,   doing embroidery, weaving, sorting clothing  taken from other prisoners and deportees,   or doing agricultural work in the surrounding  area.

 The camp also ran a training program of   sorts for female SS guards from other  camps, so Ravensbr ck functioned as a   kind of hub for the brutal guard system  that operated throughout occupied Europe. Punishment at Ravensbr ck was administered  casually and brutally. Women were beaten for minor   infractions.

 The punishment bunker, a small cell  block at the edge of the camp, held women in dark,   tiny cells for days or weeks. Flogging was  officially part of the disciplinary system,   carried out formally in front of other  prisoners as a warning. Dorothea Binz   was known to administer beatings personally and  seemed to enjoy it. Other guards used dogs. Some   women were simply shot for attempting to escape  or for reasons that weren’t documented at all.

Despite this, resistance existed. Women shared  food. They hid sick prisoners during selections.   Polish women organized secretly and maintained  contact with the outside world through letters   using coded language. Some women managed to  hide paper and write down what was happening,   smuggling testimony out of the camp in the hope  that someone would eventually know the truth.

By late 1944, the camp was receiving more  prisoners than it could handle, because the   Soviet Army was pushing westward and the Nazis  were evacuating camps further east. Women from   Auschwitz-Birkenau, from camps in Poland and the  Baltic states, were crammed into Ravensbr ck. The   population swelled to somewhere between 45,000 and  50,000 women. The death rate accelerated sharply.

And it was around this time that  the Nazis began making decisions   about the camp’s future that crossed into  outright mass murder on a scale even greater   than what had already been happening.  They decided to build a gas chamber. This one was relatively small compared to the  enormous facilities at Auschwitz-Birkenau, but   it was deadly. It began operating in late January  or early February 1945.

 Estimates suggest that   between 5,000 and 6,000 women were gassed there  in just a few months before the camp’s liberation. The selection process for the gas chamber  was conducted by SS doctors in the camp,   who would examine prisoners and mark those  deemed too weak to work. These women were told   they were being transferred to a rest camp called  Mittwerda or Uckermark. Many suspected the truth.  

Some tried to sabotage the selections by wearing  makeup or pinching their cheeks to look healthier.   Others were simply too sick to resist. The  women selected were transported to the gas   chamber in small groups and killed using Zyklon  B or carbon monoxide, depending on the account. At the same time, the camp was facing another  crisis.

 The Soviet Red Army was advancing from   the east at a pace that made it clear Germany  was losing the war. In late January 1945,   the Soviets liberated Auschwitz, and the  news spread among prisoners and guards alike.   Himmler began negotiating with Count Folke  Bernadotte, a Swedish Red Cross official,   about possibly releasing some prisoners in  exchange for favorable treatment after the   war. These negotiations would eventually result  in the famous White Buses operation in early 1945.

The White Buses, organized by the Swedish and  Danish Red Cross, arrived at Ravensbr ck beginning   in late March 1945. Their mission was to  evacuate Scandinavian prisoners: Norwegians,   Danes, and Swedes who had been arrested  for resistance activities. Initially,   the agreement covered only these  nationalities, but eventually, French,   Belgian, and Polish women were included.

  Between late March and mid-April 1945,   approximately 7,500 women were evacuated from  Ravensbr ck by the White Buses and transported   to Sweden and Denmark. For those women, this  rescue was the difference between life and death. But for the majority of prisoners still  in the camp as April 1945 arrived,   a different fate awaited.

 On April 27 and  28, with Soviet forces just days away,   the SS began forcing remaining prisoners on a  death march westward. Around 20,000 to 25,000   women were driven out of the camp on foot,  marching through the forests and roads of   northern Germany with no clear destination.  The guards shot those who fell behind. Many   died of exhaustion, starvation, and exposure.

  Others managed to escape into the woods during   the chaos or were liberated by Soviet  or Allied forces in the following days. Commandant Fritz Suhren fled the camp on April 28  with a small group of prisoners he intended to use   as hostages or bargaining chips. He drove west  and eventually handed over the last prisoners,   including Odette Sansom, a British  Special Operations Executive agent   who had been held at Ravensbr ck, and others,  to American forces in an attempt to negotiate   his own safety. It didn’t work. He was  captured, tried, and executed in 1950.

Behind him, he left a camp that was  still full of sick and dying women. On April 30, 1945, the same day Adolf Hitler died  by suicide in his Berlin bunker, Soviet forces   of the 49th Army reached Ravensbr ck. What they  found was a camp on the edge of total collapse. The SS had already fled.

 The gas chamber  had been used as recently as the last week   of April and then partially dismantled in a  rushed attempt to hide evidence. Documents   had been burned. The Soviets who arrived  were soldiers who encountered something they   were completely unprepared for, even if they  had already seen terrible things in the war. Estimates suggest somewhere between 2,000  and 3,000 women remained in the main camp,   along with a larger number who had not yet left or  had already returned from the surrounding woods.  

Many of the women were in critical condition.  Some were so weak they could not stand. The Soviet soldiers did provide immediate aid with  what they had. They shared their rations, which,   given that some of the women had been starving for  months or years, actually posed a medical risk,   because refeeding severely malnourished people  too quickly can cause fatal complications.

 This   phenomenon, now called refeeding syndrome,  likely killed some women in the early days   after liberation. Soviet medical units followed  the combat troops and began setting up field   hospitals and doing what they could, but  the needs vastly exceeded their capacity. The local German civilian population in  F rstenberg and the surrounding area was   a complicated presence. Many of them had lived  within sight of the camp for years.

 The smoke   from the crematorium had been visible from  town. The smell had been unmistakable at times.   The women prisoners had been marched through  local streets to work details. The claim that   local people had no idea what was happening  inside the camp is almost impossible to accept,   yet it was widely made in the years  after the war.

 The Soviets forced   some local Germans to enter the  camp and witness what was inside,   a practice also used by American forces at camps  like Dachau and Buchenwald in the same weeks. In the days and weeks after liberation, a  more systematic effort began to understand   the full scope of what had happened at  Ravensbr ck.

 It involved investigators   from multiple Allied nations, journalists,  and eventually, war crimes prosecutors. The Nazis had tried hard to destroy evidence.  But they didn’t get rid of everything. Documents   survived, some because they had been hidden  by prisoners, others simply because the speed   of the German collapse outpaced the  SS’s ability to destroy everything.

Soviet investigators began documenting the  camp almost immediately. They photographed the   barracks, the medical facilities, the punishment  bunker, and the remnants of the gas chamber. They   interviewed survivors, many of whom were still  at the camp or in nearby Soviet-controlled areas,   and compiled testimony about what had happened  there.

 In the summer of 1945, the Soviets   conducted a formal investigation and produced  a report, though this document remained largely   inaccessible to Western researchers for decades  due to Cold War restrictions on Soviet archives. British investigators also arrived, particularly  because a number of British nationals,   mostly women agents from the Special  Operations Executive, the wartime spy and   sabotage organisation, had been held and killed  at Ravensbr ck.

 Among these were Violette Szabo,   Noor Inayat Khan, Lilian Rolfe, and Denise Bloch,  all of whom had been executed at the camp in   early 1945. Their cases became some of the most  well-documented examples of what the camp had done   to specific individuals, and they helped drive  British interest in prosecuting those responsible. What investigators gradually pieced together  was the full scope of the camp’s history.  

It had held somewhere between 130,000 and 150,000  women and girls over its six years of operation,   drawn from over 30 countries. Somewhere between  30,000 and 90,000 of them had died there. After that came the Ravensbr ck trials.  These took place in Hamburg, Germany,   and were conducted in four separate proceedings  between December 1946 and July 1948.

 They were not   as prominent as the Nuremberg trials, which had  received enormous international media attention,   but they were serious legal proceedings  that resulted in significant convictions. The first Ravensbr ck trial began on December  5, 1946, and concluded on February 3,   1947. Sixteen defendants were tried.

  Out of which eleven were sentenced to   death and executed by hanging on May  2, 1947, at Hameln Prison in Germany. Subsequent trials focused on different groups  of defendants, including the doctors who had   conducted medical experiments. Karl Gebhardt had  already been tried and sentenced to death at the   Nuremberg Doctors’ Trial in August 1947, and he  was executed in June 1948.

 Fritz Fischer, another   doctor involved in the experiments, was sentenced  to life imprisonment but was released in 1954 as   part of a broader amnesty for war criminals  that many survivors found deeply upsetting. Not everyone responsible for what happened  at Ravensbr ck was tried. Many guards and   SS personnel had fled, changed their  identities, or were simply never found.

Surviving Ravensbr ck did not mean the  suffering ended. For many of the women   who walked out of that camp, the years and  decades that followed were marked by poverty,   illness, trauma, and a  frustrating lack of recognition. The political geography of postwar  Europe complicated almost everything.  

Polish survivors who had been arrested for  activities connected to the Western-backed   Polish government in exile, or who had  been members of the Home Army resistance,   sometimes found it difficult to get  official recognition in postwar Poland. French survivors had a somewhat  different experience.

 France took   considerable pride in its resistance  movement, and French women who had been   deported to Ravensbr ck for resistance  activities were celebrated as heroines,   at least in some quarters. Organizations like  the Amicale de Ravensbr ck were established   in France relatively quickly after the war to  support survivors and keep the memory alive.

Germaine Tillion, a French anthropologist and  resistance member who had been imprisoned at   Ravensbr ck and survived, became one of  the most important advocates for memory   and justice. She spent decades researching and  writing about the camp, producing scholarly   work that is still considered essential today.  She lived until 2008, dying at the age of 100.

For many survivors across all nationalities,  the physical aftermath of the experiments and   the years of malnutrition, exposure, and disease  meant lives marked by chronic illness. Women who   had had bones removed struggled with mobility for  the rest of their lives. Those who had suffered   severe infections during wound experiments  dealt with recurring problems for decades.

And the psychological damage was  profound and largely unaddressed.   The concept of psychological trauma as a medical  condition requiring treatment was barely developed   in 1945, and the resources simply weren’t  available, even if the knowledge had been. The question of compensation was a long,  painful, and often humiliating process.  

West Germany established a reparations program  in the 1950s under the Luxembourg Agreement   with Israel and subsequent legislation, but  survivors had to apply individually, prove   their imprisonment, and navigate a bureaucratic  system that many found retraumatizing. Survivors   from Communist countries often couldn’t access  these programs at all due to Cold War barriers.

Children born to prisoners at Ravensbr ck  faced a particularly harsh postwar reality.   Some babies had been born in the camp, a  small number survived infancy, which was   remarkable given the conditions. Others had been  conceived before imprisonment. These children,   raised in the shadow of their mothers’ trauma,  often grew up knowing very little about what   their mothers had been through because many  survivors simply could not speak about it.

Today, Ravensbr ck stands as one of the most   important memorial sites connected  to women imprisoned under Nazi rule.