Ravensbrück

Ravensbrück: The Story of the Nazi Concentration Camp for Women is an incredible account of what one survivor called “heroism, superhuman tenacity, and an exceptional will to survive.”

On a May morning in 1939, eight hundred women—housewives, doctors, opera singers, politicians, and prostitutes—were marched through the forests 50 miles north of Berlin. Whipping and kicking them were countless German guards. Their destination was a specifically female concentration camp designed by Heinrich Himmler, the primary architect of the Nazi genocide. By the end of the war, 130,000 women from more than twenty European countries were imprisoned there, including prominent figures such as General de Gaulle's niece and the sister of New York City's wartime mayor.

Few of those women were Jewish. Originally, Ravensbrück was a place for outcasts, Roma, political enemies, foreign resistance fighters, the sick, the disabled, and the "insane"—women classified as "inferior" and who, according to the Nazis, should be extirpated from society.

For more than six years, the prisoners were subjected to beatings, torture, slave labor, starvation, medical experiments, and random executions. In the final months of the war, Ravensbrück became an extermination camp; by 1945, between 30,000 and 50,000 women had been murdered there.

For decades, this story was hidden behind the Iron Curtain, and to this day, it remains little known. Using testimonies unearthed since the end of the Cold War and interviews with survivors who had never spoken before, Sarah Helm went to the heart of the camp, demonstrating, in painstaking detail, how easily and quickly the terror evolved.

Inspiring, chilling, and deeply moving, Ravensbrück: The Story of the Nazi Concentration Camp for Women is a groundbreaking work of historical research. It reminds us of the human capacity for both bestial cruelty and courage and resilience against all odds.