Ravensbrück: "Hitler's Hell for Women"
Located near the village of Ravensbrück in northern Germany, about 50 miles north of Berlin, Ravensbrück was Nazi Germany's largest women-only camp. Himmler chose the site because he "believed that the cleansing of German blood should begin close to nature" (Helm, 20).
Upon arrival at the camp, women prisoners were stripped naked, forced to endure a humiliating medical examination, and shaved. They were issued an identificaiton number which must be shouted out at the two required roll calls per day. They were also categorized with cloth triangles that they were required to sew onto their prisoner uniforms.
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Black - 'asocials' (sex workers, beggars, petty criminals, lesbians)
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Green - habitual criminals
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Red - political prisoners
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Lilac - Jehovah's Witnesses
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Yellow - Jewish
Often categories would overlap. For instance, a Jewish political prisoner would have the red triangle sewn over the yellow (see photo). This method of categorization made it easy for SS guards to determine treatment of the women. While all the women were horrifically treated, Jewish women often received the worst of the abuse.
This treatment of the women upon their arrival served to dehumanize them and attempted to rob them of their own embodied rhetoric. Within camps, women were dehumanized differently than men that "specifically targeted their bodily integrity" (Ephgrave, 16). Although the women would call each other by their names, giving them some sense of self, the forced shouting of their numbers during roll call was a constant reminder they were unworthy of names, and even their lives, in the eyes of the Nazis.
Over 120,000 women were imprisoned at Ravensbrück between May 1939 and April 1945. At least 30,000 women were murdered there. "Many were resistance fighters or political opponents. Others were deemed "unfit" for Nazi society: Jews, lesbians, sex workers or homeless women" (U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum). They were shot, gassed, hanged, starved, died of disease, were worked to death, and were subjected to, and often died, from unethical medical experimentation.
In the summer of 1942, camp doctors began their unethical medical experiment program. Known as "rabbits," nearly 80 women prisoners were selected as subjects for these experiments.
Also, in 1942, the SS opened up brothels in various camps. At least 100 women prisoners from Ravensbrück worked in the brothels. Some were forced, some "volunteered" upon promises of preferential treatment or release from the camp after 6 months. No woman was released as a result of voluteering.
When the Red Army arrived in April 1945, they found approximately 2,000 women left to die in the camp. The remaining women, some 20,000, had been sent on a Death March.
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While Ravensbrück was under the commandment of SS men commandants (Max Koegal, May 1939 to July 1942, and Fritz Suhren, July 1942 to April 1945), the guards were only women, members of the "female civilian employees of the SS." Johanna Langefeld was the chief woman guard from May 1939 to March 1943.
Survivors of the camp would later testify at Nuremberg against some of the guards and camp doctors. Max Koegel was captured by US Forces, but he committed suicide in prison before trial. Fritz Suhren was captured and tried by a French military court in 1949, along with the director of forced labor at Ravensbrück, Hans Pflaum. They were both sentenced to death.
Johanna Langefeld, however, escaped while awaiting trial. An escape organized by her former victims - Polish prisoners of the Ravensbrück concentration camp.
In disability rhetoric, Jay Dolmage uses the concept of mētis, “the rhetorical art of cunning, the use of embodied strategies” to show how “all rhetoric is embodied” (5). The concept centers disability rather than marginalize it. It is not without contradiction, however. "Mētis can simultaneously be associated with the rhetoric of control and repression...while at the same time retaining a rhetoric of creativity and release" (Dolmage quoting Letiche and Statler, 162).
Mētis and its contradictory nature is a concept which can be applied to the women of Ravensbrück, both guards and prisoners alike. From the embodied brutality from guards to the "rabbits" risking their bodies to document the unethical medical experiments on them. The different uses of bodily rhetoric within the camp was a true example that "mētis is impartial, prone to misuses, and gains its ethical character only through its applications and iterations, not through any inherent quality" (Dolmage, 164).