BY TASS
On April 30, 1945, the Red Army released prisoners of the women’s concentration camp Ravensbrück. Soviet soldiers were joyfully met about 3 thousand women – all of whom were not able to be evacuated by Nazis running in fear. Among the rescued were about 700 citizens of the Soviet Union.
The women’s death camp in the village of Ravensbrück (90 km north of Berlin) was built in 1939 and was originally intended for Germans, unsuitable to the Hitler regime. With the beginning of the Second World War, women began to be deported here from the Netherlands, Poland, Yugoslavia, and subsequently from a number of other European countries.
In February 1943 the first Soviet prisoners of war arrived here – doctors, nurses and intermediaries who participated in the battles for Crimea. Brave women outright refused to wear a triangle with the letter R (Russland): “You will not separate us by nationality, we are Soviet citizens.” Assigned essays were forced to change the identification sign to SU- “Soviet Union.”
Women were raised at 4 o’clock in the morning, slave labor lasted 14 hours a day. The punishments in the camp were severe: the “guilty” were tortured by the shepherds, beaten with weaves, deprived of nutrition. In December of 1944. SS head Henrikh Gimmler, who visited the camp, was dissatisfied with the work productivity of exhausted prisoners. In the period from his visit until the liberation of the camp, about 6 thousand people were killed in gas chambers.
Ravensbrück is also sadly known for the inhuman experiments that camp doctors carried out on prisoners. Women were introduced triggers of infectious diseases, amputated healthy limbs, sterilized. Children born in Ravensbrück were taken from their mothers, most of them died of exhaustion.
No surprise that the death rate in Ravensbrück was so high: out of 132 thousand inmates, more than 90 thousand did not return home. Mostly they were dying of hunger, exhaustive labor, security mockery. In addition, twice a month a selection of prisoners subject to extinction was held.
“Never forget the black night of Ravensbrück,” – such an oath was given by prisoners on the day of the liberation of the concentration camp by parts of the 49th army of the 2nd Belarusian Front.
Women evacuated by fascists in connection with the approach of Soviet troops were soon also rescued. Already on May 3, 1945, a military hospital was organized in Ravensbrück, where the best Soviet doctors of the nearest military positions worked. Women from more than 20 countries, who survived the horrors of Ravensbrück, throughout their lives, brought a memory of the feat of liberating their Soviet soldiers.
The following article was Translated from Russian to English and originally appeared in Liberation of the Ravensbrück concentration camp – Biographies and references – TASS
This camp was built to hold women, about 132,000 prisoners passed through Ravensbrück.
TASS-DOSSIER. 75 years ago, on April 30, 1945, Soviet troops liberated the Ravensbrück concentration camp in Germany. Especially for TASS, the material about this event was prepared by the Russian historian Alexei Isaev.
History
The Ravensbrück concentration camp (literally translated as “Raven Bridge”) was built in Germany in 1938 to house women. The place for it was chosen in Mecklenburg, near the city of Fürstenberg, just a few dozen kilometers north of Berlin, on the road to Rostock. It must be said that the Nazis specifically chose places with difficult natural conditions for concentration camps. Ravensbrück was located in a valley with constantly blowing cold and damp winds. Lake Schwedtsee and the forest protected the camp from prying eyes.
The first prisoners were sent to Ravensbrück in the spring of 1939. Initially, the camp was designed for 6 thousand people and included 14 barracks and auxiliary buildings. By the end of 1944, however, Ravensbrück had at least 12,000 people permanently held, and in January 1945 there were 36,000 people in ravensbrück. As a result, 800-900 prisoners were herded into barracks, where 120 people used to be accommodated. In Ravensbrück, members of the European resistance movement were held, as well as family members of resistance figures and political opponents of the Nazis. Among the 860 first prisoners of the camp were 150 German anti-fascists. Among them were the wife and daughter of the leader of the German Communists Ernst Thälmann – Rosa and Irma Thälmann, as well as the wife of the Czechoslovak journalist and Communist Party activist Julius Fucik – Gusta.
With the outbreak of war, foreign prisoners were increasingly brought to Ravensbrück. This is how a Frenchwoman, an activist of the international democratic women’s movement, Marie Claude Vaillant-Couturier, arrested by the Vichy police, got into it.
In 1941, the women’s concentration camp was supplemented by a small men’s camp for 350 prisoners, adjacent to the main one.
Already in October 1941, the first women from the USSR came to Ravensbrück. On February 27, 1943, a group of Soviet women from among the prisoners of war arrived at the concentration camp in the amount of 536 people. They were underground women, pilots, signallers, car drivers, doctors and political workers. They were captured near Kiev, in Kerch, Sevastopol, in encirclements and in the course of punitive actions. In total, during the war, about 2,000 women from the Soviet republics passed through the camp, including a female sanitary instructor and intelligence officer Maria Bayda from Sevastopol.
In terms of the number of prisoners, Ravensbrück, of course, was inferior to the extermination camps in Poland. About 132,000 prisoners from 23 countries, including 120,000 women and about a thousand children, passed through Ravensbrück during the war. For comparison: more than 4 million people passed through Auschwitz, about 1 million people each passed through Majdanek and Treblinka. Of the concentration camps in Germany built by the Nazis before the war, Ravensbrück had a high mortality rate. Of the 132 thousand prisoners, 92.7 thousand died For comparison: in the Dachau death camp, 66 thousand people out of 280 thousand were tortured and executed. comparable to Ravensbrück in terms of mortality was only the Flossenbürg concentration camp (near Nuremberg) – 80 thousand killed prisoners out of 112 thousand.
In 1942, workshops were built next to the camp, where the labor of the prisoners of Ravensbrück was used. They were engaged, in particular, in sewing uniforms for the SS. Medical experiments on prisoners were also conducted in Ravensbrück.
On the morning of April 27, 1945, the evacuation of the prisoners of the camp began. 20,000 men were lined up in columns and sent on foot to the northwest.
Liberation of Ravensbrück
On April 30, 1945, the 492nd Rifle Regiment of the 199th Rifle Division of the 49th Army of the 2nd Belorussian Front approached the concentration camp from the east. The guards escaped, and the remaining prisoners and prisoners met the liberators. In Ravensbrück by this time there were about 2-3 thousand people. They met the liberators. Columns with hijacked prisoners were also soon rescued. Among the 20,000 liberated were 700 Soviet citizens. The regiment’s combat log specifically noted that Ernst Thälmann’s wife had been released in Ravensbrück. This name was well known in the Soviet Union.
In memory of the liberation of the prisoners of the camp, a stone was erected at the fork in the road between the cities of Krivitz and Schwerin with the inscription: “On May 1, 1945, prisoners of the Sachsenhausen and Ravensbrück concentration camps were liberated here by Soviet soldiers.” Currently, there is a museum on the territory of the former Ravensbrück camp.
