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Ravensbrück () was a women's concentration camp during World War II, located in northern Germany, north of Berlin at a site near the village of Ravensbrück (part of Fürstenberg/Havel). Construction of the camp began in November 1938 by the order of the ''SS'' leader Heinrich Himmler and was unusual in that the camp was intended to hold exclusively female inmates. The facility opened in May 1939 and underwent major expansion following the invasion of Poland. Between 1939 and 1945, some 130,000〔 to 132,000〔 female prisoners passed through the Ravensbrück camp system; around 40,000 were Polish and 26,000 were Jewish from all countries including Germany,〔 18,800 Russian; 8,000 French, and 1,000 Dutch.〔Helm 2015, p. 10.〕 According to Encyclopædia Britannica, about 50,000 of them perished from disease, starvation, overwork and despair; some 2,200 were killed in the gas chambers.〔Michael Berenbaum (2015), ( Ravensbrück, Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc. ) Retrieved 26 January 2015.〕 Only 15,000 of the total survived until liberation.〔 According to Britannica, on 29–30 April 1945 some 3,500 female prisoners were still alive in the main camp.〔 Although the inmates came from every country in German-occupied Europe, the largest single national group incarcerated in the camp consisted of Polish women. In the spring of 1941, the SS authorities established a small men's camp adjacent to the main camp. The male inmates built and managed the gas chambers for women, since 1944. Camp commandants included SS-Standartenführer Günther Tamaschke from May 1939 to August 1939, SS-Hauptsturmführer Max Koegel from January 1940 till August 1942, and SS-Hauptsturmführer Fritz Suhren from August 1942 until the camp's liberation at the end of April 1945. Many of the slave labor prisoners were employed by the German electrical engineering company Siemens & Halske.〔Silke Schaefer: the self-understanding of women in the camps. The camp Ravensbrück. Berlin 2002 (thesis, pdf file).〕 ==Prisoners== Ravensbrück first housed prisoners in May 1939, when the SS moved 900 women from the Lichtenburg women's concentration camp in Saxony. Eight months after the start of World War II the camp's maximum capacity was already exceeded. By the summer of 1941 (with the launch of Operation Barbarossa) the estimated total was 5,000 women prisoners, fed gradually decreasing hunger rations.〔Saidel 2006, p. 15.〕 By the end of 1942, the inmate population of Ravensbrück had grown to about 10,000. There were children in the camp as well. At first, they arrived with mothers who were Gypsies or Jews incarcerated in the camp or were born to imprisoned women. There were few of them at the time. There were a few Czech children from Lidice in July 1942. Later the children in the camp represented almost all nations of Europe occupied by Germany. Between April and October 1944 their number increased considerably, consisting of two groups. One group was composed of Romani children with their mothers or sisters brought into the camp after the Romani camp in Auschwitz-Birkenau was closed. The other group included mostly children who were brought with Polish mothers sent to Ravensbrück after the collapse of the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. With a few exceptions all these children died of starvation. Ravensbrück had 70 sub-camps used for slave labour that were spread across an area from the Baltic Sea to Bavaria. Among the thousands executed by the Germans at Ravensbrück were four female members of the British World War II organization Special Operations Executive: Denise Bloch, Cecily Lefort, Lilian Rolfe and Violette Szabo. Other victims included the Roman Catholic nun Élise Rivet, Elisabeth de Rothschild (the only member of the Rothschild family to die in the Holocaust), Russian Orthodox nun St. Maria Skobtsova, the 25-year-old French Princess Anne de Bauffremont-Courtenay, Milena Jesenská, lover of Franz Kafka 〔http://www.newrepublic.com/article/117172/kafka-decisive-years-and-kafka-years-insight-reviewed?google_editors_picks=true〕 and Olga Benário, wife of the Brazilian Communist leader Luís Carlos Prestes. The largest group of executed women at the Ravensbrück camp was composed of 200 young Polish patriots who were members of the Home Army. Among the survivors of Ravensbrück was author Corrie ten Boom, arrested with her family for harbouring Jews in their home in Haarlem, the Netherlands. She documented her ordeal alongside her sister Betsie ten Boom in her book ''The Hiding Place'', which was eventually produced as a motion picture. Polish Countess Karolina Lanckoronska, an art historian and author of ''Michelangelo in Ravensbruck'', was imprisoned there from 1943 utill 1945. Eileen Nearne, a member of the Special Operations Executive, was a prisoner in 1944 before being transferred to another work camp and escaping. Ravensbrück survivors who wrote memoirs about their experiences include Gemma LaGuardia Gluck, sister of New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, as well as Germaine Tillion, a Ravensbrück survivor from France who published her own eyewitness account of the camp in 1975.〔Germaine Tillion, ( Ravensbrück: An eyewitness account of a women's concentration camp. ) Transl. by Gerald Satterwhite. Anchor Press, 1975 - 256 pages. 〕 Approximately five hundred women from Ravensbrück were transferred to Dachau, where they were assigned as labourers to the Agfa-Commando; the women assembled ignition timing devices for bombs, artillery ammunition and V-1 and V-2 rockets. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Ravensbrück concentration camp」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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