Ravensbrück was a concentration camp built by the Nazis to imprison and exploit female prisoners in the Third Reich, often through forced labor. The construction of Ravensbrück began in November 1938. The camp was located on the edge of a small village, approximately fifty miles outside of Berlin in north-east Germany, and surrounded by a forest and a lake.
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At first, the main camp was made up of eighteen barracks, holding a maximum of approximately three thousand prisoners. In 1943 a crematorium was added, and in 1945 a gas chamber was also built just outside the camp.
In 1943, a number of connected sub-camps were also established, usually near factories where the prisoners were forced to work. By 1944, these sub-camps held over 70,000 predominantly female prisoners.
Ravensbrück held a range of different prisoners, who had been imprisoned for different reasons, and who came from over forty different countries.
Like much of the concentration camp system, Ravensbrück was originally built to imprison ‘asocials’, political prisoners and Jehovah’s Witnesses. As the Second World War continued, Ravensbrück increasingly also held Jews and Roma from German-occupied countries such as Poland, the Soviet Union, Hungary and Slovakia.
Although Ravensbrück was built specifically to hold women, a small camp for men was created in April 1941. The men imprisoned in this camp were forced to carry out hard labor such as building extensions to the main camp and new sub-camps.
As well as adults, children were imprisoned in the camp. In total, 881 children feature on the camp’s arrival lists.