The Ravensbrück concentration camp was the first of its kind designed specifically for women, and it became one of the longest-running camps in the Nazi system. More than 132,000 female inmates passed through its gates, enduring torturous labor and unspeakable cruelty. Among them, 86 selected women—the vast majority of them Polish—were subjected to chilling pseudo-medical experiments. These women became known as the Rabbits of Ravensbrück.
The camp's origins date back to November 1938, when Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler ordered the construction of the first concentration camp for women. Ravensbrück was located on Himmler's private estate near the town of Fürstenberg in Mecklenburg, about 85 kilometers northwest of Berlin. Prisoners from the nearby Sachsenhausen camp were assigned to build it, and the first transport arrived in March 1939.
The original plans called for 15,000 inmates, but that number was quickly exceeded and the camp was enlarged. By 1945, some 40 sub-camps and many external commands had been established. In 1941, a men's camp was set up near the women's camp, its inmates used to expand the industrial infrastructure. In the summer of 1942, a sub-camp for young people was established nearby. At the end of 1944, a gas chamber was built at the camp, where up to 6,000 people were killed.
In total, 132,000 women and children representing nearly 30 nationalities passed through Ravensbrück, and some 92,000 perished there. The main duty of the female prisoners was hard labor in production halls belonging to German companies, including Siemens. The number of Polish women is estimated at about 40,000, of whom only 8,000 survived.
The first Polish women were brought to the camp on September 23, 1939. They were Polish activists who had been living in Germany. Women from occupied Poland quickly joined them. Exactly 56 transports arrived at Ravensbrück, departing from Pomerania, Bydgoszcz, Toruń, Grudziądz, Poznań, Kielce, Radom, Piotrków, Częstochowa, Tomaszów Mazowiecki, Tarnów, Mysłowice, Białystok, Grodno, Lwów, Warsaw, and Lublin. The most dramatic stories are associated with the last two cities.
The transports of female prisoners took the form of so-called Sondertransports, or special transports, which included Polish women with deferred death sentences. They usually consisted of political prisoners involved in the underground. Next to their names on the transport lists was added the note that "return to the country is undesirable," which was tantamount to a death sentence and gave a pretext for many criminal practices.
This was the fate of women from the so-called Lublin-Warsaw transports. Seventy-four female prisoners were selected from among them—70 had been imprisoned in the Lublin Castle prison, while the remaining four survived the hell of Warsaw's Pawiak prison. These women were chosen for the most criminal practices at Ravensbrück: the medical experiments conducted by the Germans between 1942 and 1944.
In addition to the Polish women, the experiments included one Ukrainian, one German, and 10 mentally ill women of various nationalities—86 people in total. Two factors are often cited as the genesis of the experiments. The first was the high mortality rate of soldiers on the Eastern Front and the resulting desire to discover new forms of medical aid. The second was the death of Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Reich Main Security Office, who died of gas gangrene infection on June 5, 1942, after an assassination attempt by the Czech resistance.
Direct responsibility for the medical experiments lay with the head of the SS and police health service, Prof. Ernst Grawitz, who issued the relevant directives to Prof. Karl Gebhardt, one of the doctors at Ravensbrück. From the beginning, the experiments followed a specific plan, and the "operations," as these procedures were euphemistically called, can be divided into two types.
The first type was infectious surgeries, which involved applying purulent germs that entered the body through a mechanically created wound. The operated limbs reacted with inflammation and abscess. Such wounds were then sutured, causing immense pain and leading the wound to open on its own. Another form of this experiment was introducing germs intravenously into the calf, which caused swelling of the leg that persisted for days.
The second type was the so-called pure operations. These included bone procedures, during which bones were broken and then assembled with clamps, wounds were sewn up and plastered, and tibial bones were sometimes transplanted. Muscle procedures involved cutting out parts of the thigh and lower leg muscles repeatedly, each time removing larger slices, causing irreversible loss and weakness of the limbs. Nerve procedures involved cutting out parts of the nerves in the lower leg.
Some Polish women, like Alicja Jurkowska, learned about the unusual nature of the examination while it was being performed. She later recalled that at the second dressing, she felt a tendon or band of muscle being separated and stretched, giving her the impression that her knee came together with her ankle, and then she heard the jaws of the scissors as the muscle was loosened. Others tried to inquire only after the procedure, which was most often met with aggression from the German staff.
Maria Karczmarz testified after the war that she could not move her right leg and, lifting the quilt, saw that it was in a cast all the way above the knee. The leg was in great pain. When she asked the Oberschwester what had happened, she received the answer: "Cursed Polish bandit. You dare to ask what happened to you?" The nurse then left and locked her and five of her friends out.
The memoirs of the female prisoners, while gruesome, are an extremely valuable source for learning about the criminal experiments. Specific German doctors were responsible for these crimes, and they did not remain anonymous. Among the medical staff, the greatest cruelty was demonstrated by Dr. Fritz Fischer, Prof. Karl Gebhardt, Dr. Herta Oberheuser, Dr. Rolf Rosenthal, Dr. Gerhard Schiedlausky, Dr. Ludwig Stumpfegger, and Dr. Percival Treite, known as "Percy."
Dr. Fischer was an assistant to Prof. Gebhardt at Ravensbrück. He was sentenced to life imprisonment by the US Military Tribunal, but the sentence was commuted to 15 years in 1951. He left prison four years later, reportedly for good behavior, and died in Nuremberg in 1980.
Prof. Gebhardt, an orthopedist and close colleague of Heinrich Himmler, not only supervised the criminal experiments but also participated in them directly. He was sentenced to death, and the sentence was carried out on June 2, 1948.
Dr. Herta Oberheuser graduated from medical school in 1937 and was sent to Ravensbrück three years later. She was sentenced to 20 years in prison but was released after seven years for good behavior, after which she began working as a pediatrician. Due to protests, she was stripped of that position. She died on January 24, 1978.
Dr. Rosenthal was a gynecologist who graduated from medical school in 1940 and worked at Ravensbrück from 1941 to 1943. He was sentenced to death by hanging, and the sentence was carried out on May 3, 1947.
Dr. Schiedlausky, a Berliner, was chief physician at Ravensbrück from 1941 to 1943, when he was transferred to the Natzweiler camp. At Ravensbrück he took part in the selection of female prisoners, aborted pregnancies, and killed mentally ill inmates. He received the death penalty by hanging, carried out on May 3, 1947.
Dr. Stumpfegger, who received his doctorate on July 11, 1937, and even served as Hitler's personal physician at the end of the war, made a tragic record in terms of surgical experiments at Ravensbrück. He died in besieged Berlin on May 2, 1945.
The last of the doctors was gynecologist Dr. Percival Treite, who had worked at Ravensbrück since September 1943. Sentenced to death by a British court in Hamburg, he committed suicide in his cell on April 9, 1947.
The criminal experiments at Ravensbrück became known on a wider scale after the war, through witness accounts and trials. However, the first information arrived during the war through secret correspondence. In theory, prisoners could send letters to their families, but the correspondence passed through the watchful eye of censors. In principle, one could only write that the sender was feeling well, was in good health, and that the situation in the camp was satisfactory—which was far from the actual conditions.
So the prisoners sought alternative forms of contact with the world. Ravensbrück inmates decided to send secret messages, and the form of this correspondence illustrates the extremes to which they were forced. The letters were not written in ink or pencil, to which they had no access, but in their own urine. The inmates wanted a substance that would be colorless or would lose its color after a short time, and urine was perfect for this. With a thin lime stick, letters were applied to a sheet of paper, which the recipient could gently heat, for example with an iron, and whole sentences would appear.
One might ask how the addressees were supposed to know that the letters were written in such an unusual way. The memoirs of one prisoner, Krystyna Czyż-Wilgat, provide the answer. She explained that an ally turned out to be the favorite author of pre-war youth, Kornel Makuszyński. In the official content of the letter, addressing her younger brother, she reminded him how much they had liked Makuszyński's books, especially "Satan of the Seventh Class." The hero of that novel, in a moment of oppression, sends a letter of meaninglessness in which the actual content is encrypted: the first letters of each line, read from top to bottom, give the solution.
The content of their German letter was composed so that the first letters of each line gave the words "ur letter." The content between the lines was very short. It began with the words: "We have decided to write you the whole truth." This was followed by a few sentences about the operations. It ended with the announcement of the next letters and an agreement on what words in the letter from the family would be a sign that they had read the letter. The originator of this foray was Nina Iwańska, and Krystyna Czyż was responsible for the beautiful handwriting.
The motive was the pseudo-medical experiments described earlier, about which the Polish women wanted to inform their loved ones. The women not only described the operations but also provided a list of 74 women, so that all the victims of the German experiments are known to us by name. In the collection of the Museum of Martyrdom "Under the Clock" in Lublin, there are 27 letters from 1943–1944 written in this original but dramatic manner. Twelve secret letters were specially written on envelopes, which, marked with censorship stamps, often passed without much interest from the camp authorities. Another 15 letters were sent from outside the camp—female prisoners assigned to work outside wrote Germans as senders on the envelopes and then dropped the correspondence in mailboxes. The letters then went to families and friends, who learned not only about the gruesome experiments but also about the general realities of life in the Ravensbrück camp.
The camp ended its activities with the approach of the Red Army. As in other lagers, the extermination policy intensified toward the end, and those who could not be murdered were formed into columns and led on a so-called death march. On April 30, 1945, the Soviets liberated Ravensbrück, which still contained some 3,000 emaciated prisoners who were unable to join the death march on their own strength. They included both women and men from a nearby sub-camp.
Information about the crimes of the Ravensbrück crew spread rapidly, and those guilty sought to be tried in as many as seven trials held at the British Military Tribunals in Hamburg. Among the defendants were SS men and SS women serving in various positions in the camp, as well as former functionary prisoners, including kapos and nurses. A total of 38 people were tried, including 21 women. Setting aside the sometimes shockingly low sentences, few answered for their crimes.
In fact, the most important testimony to the German crimes was not the trials but the accounts of the survivors themselves—the women known as the Rabbits of Ravensbrück. Their story was and is a harrowing one, and in the 1950s it reached the United States, where Norman Cousins and Caroline Ferriday decided to extend medical care to the women and mitigate the effects of the criminal experiments. The treatments carried out in the States during 1959 were invaluable, although they could not completely eliminate the negative effects the experiments had brought.
A total of 74 Polish women were subjected to the experiments at Ravensbrück. Of them, five died of complications, six were executed, and 63 left the camp with the last evacuation transport on April 28, 1945. None of the women who experienced the cruelty of German doctors is alive today. The last "rabbit from Ravensbrück" was Dr. Wanda Półtawska, who passed away on October 24, 2023, at the age of nearly 102. Dr. Półtawska was also the author of the memoirs entitled "I Am Afraid of Dreams," dedicated to the experience of World War II. In the absence of witnesses—which is beginning to apply to every aspect of World War II—our memory of the crimes committed then becomes especially important.