Women's Concentration Camps In Nazi Germany

​A Concentration Camp was a place where they held Jews and other prisoners which they treated very harshly. There were twenty three major concentration camps all over the world. Such as Poland, Germany, Netherlands, and France. Also there were Extermination Camps which is where mass murders occurred during this time. Some of these camps were called Belzec, Chelmno, and Majdanek. Even though they were treated poorly, some of the prisoners survived.

During the Holocaust, Ravensbruck was the largest all-female concentration camp. It is estimated that 50,000 women died at Ravensbruck, either from harsh living conditions, slave labor or were put to death. The soviets liberated the camp on April 29-30,1945 and found approximately 3,500 extremely ill prisoners living at the camp.The Nazis sent the rest on a death march.The Holocaust was awful, many women died, and only some survived.

The men in the camps were housed in different barracks than the women. The men were housed in a completely different area on Ravensbruck grounds. In 1942 Ravensbruck and a few other concentration camps started opening brothels. After the male prisoners met or surpassed their quotas they were rewarded in the brothels. Most women were forced to work in them, but some volunteered after hearing they would be released in six months. Not one woman was

This camp was made in the end of 1938 but one year later at the end of 1939 there was approximately 2,290 people already there. In Ravensbruck there was several different cultures of women from other places than just Germany. Women from about 40 different nations stayed at Ravensbruck! It was a hard time for everyone to get along with others have differing opinions than you, and many others spoke different languages than you. Now since after this happened there is a memorial.

There was no comfy pillows or blankets not even mattress, but alike all camps there were wooden bunkers that fitted six people in each all stacked up. After being in there is no way out only death from barbed wires, electric fences, machine guns, and automatic rifles. There is many that still had determination to stay alive.

I chose WW2 concentration camps for my research about what happened in world war 2. I’ll start by talking about all the labor that people had to do in the war. Millions of people were caught and brought to concentration camps and they had to don a bunch of work. Millions of people were worked to the bone and a lot of them died during the war.If someone was slowing them down, the soldiers would shoot the person. They would also do things like hanging them, burn them and use them as target practice. People with a higher social status most the time got better jobs than the other prisoners like indoor jobs. While the other prisoners had jobs like carrying a bunch of heavy stuff while it’s 20 below zero.

Other know as Death camps or Extermination camps the Concentration camps have a horrible reputation. This was all for good reason. These camps housed people that were thought to be a danger to the German society. These prisoners were usually abused mentally and physically, they were held under extreme circumstances. The people in these camps were captured and detained without any trial or standard procedures applying to arrest and custody. The prisoners in these camps often had differing opinions on religions and practices. Other prisoners in the camps were prostitutes, homosexuals, alcoholics, drug addicts, the mentally ill, the blind, the deaf, convicts, democrats. For all of these ‘crimes’ they were sentenced death or a life of imprisonment.

In modern-day Germany, the Ravensbruck concentration camp lays dormant among the bustling movement of modern society. However, through the faded echoes of agonized screams, along with the phantom scent of stale, decayed flesh that wafts throughout vacant halls, the legacy of Ravensbruck’s nefarious past lives on (jewishvirtuallibrary.org). The sinister legacy the Ravensbruck concentration camp left behind is a shallow reflection of what the "lapins" of Ravensbruck, 86 young female prisoners were subjected to. The medical experiments performed on the women of Ravensbruck were inhumane.

During WWII, Concentration Camps were used to capture are keep prisoners and forced them to perform difficult labor. In Germany, the concentration camps were a way that the Nazi soldiers could execute all Jews and anyone that went against them or posed a threat to the Germans. From 1933 to 1945, these camps were strategically placed all over Europe to accommodate the growing number of undesirables the Germans wanted to eliminate using harsh killing methods. Three of the Largest and most influential camps during World War II includes Dachau, Buchenwald, and Auschwitz. Dachau concentration camp was created in March 1933, in Dachau, Germany. .

At first this camp was just a camp for building because it was only used for construction. Later this camp kept increasing emphasis on the use of concentration camp led by the prisoners in armaments production led to the expansion of the Gross Rosen camp. This camp kept increasing which meant trouble. In January 1945 this camp held 76,728 prisoners. Nearly 26,000 were women and were Jews. This camp held the largest amount of female prisoners than any other concentration camp.

Not long after Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany, the Nazi’s began establishing concentration camps in Germany as early as 1933. These camps housed people who were against and who were believed to be against Nazi policy. People from all over the areas of Nazi power that did not accept the new policies were captured and sent on trains straight to one of many concentration camps. Conditions at the camps were worse than terrible. Upon arrival the men and woman would be stripped of all belongings, even the clothing they were wearing and would be lined up.

The prisoners had horrible living conditions at Auschwitz that can show how horrible the camp really was. In the concentration camp the prisoners were living in places that didn’t even appear to be for people. The prisoners lived in places that were made to house 52 horses, yet the people were forced to live there (Auschwitz: The Camp of Death). The people either lived in wooden or brick houses, that were referred to as huts or barracks, which lacked many necessities (Auschwitz: The Camp of Death). A single barrack was to have 800 to 1000 people living in them, and the huts had to have around 400

Ravensbruck was a German concentration camp which was in use from May, 1939-April, 1945. Much like all other concentration camps, it was used to imprison many different types of people who the Germans did not consider part of the “Perfect race”. Ravensbrück was second in size only to the women's camp in Auschwitz. However, the one thing that singled out this concentration camp is that it was for women only. Only women were imprisoned in this concentration camp, and many starved to death, or were executed by German soldiers. In 1938, five hundred prisoners were transferred to Ravensbruck to construct the facilities. The camp was opened on May, 15 1939. Within the first week of the camp being open, it had over 800 women prisoners. All prisoners were forced to wear special triangles on their uniforms that would represent their race.

One of the countries that had camps was Germany, and that country had many of them. Other countries would be Poland, Ukraine, Latvia, Austria and France. There was the Czech Republic and Netherlands also. It was one way for the Nazis to have control of Jews, communists, socialists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals. It was also a place to keep the Jews and the asocial. In the same year there was a boycott of Jewish owned shops; boycott is the refusal to buy anything. Concentration camps are part of the Holocaust where they got rid of Jews, Gypsies, or anybody that was a threat to Hitler. The guards or Germans worked Jews hard in concentration camps.

The Nazis used gas chambers and crematoriums to kill the Jews at Death Camps. “At some point in the second half of 1941. Hitler is believed to have given the order to begin the systematic elimination of all Jews still living in German-occupied territory”(Downing, David 6). Gas chambers were one of the two big ways the Nazis killed the Jews.“Gas chambers were added in 1942. Each gas chamber was built beneath its own crematorium. It seems probable that at least 1 million Jews perished in the gas chambers”(Downing, David 9).