The dark reason why the female guards of Ravensbrück were publicly executed.

The SS was the usual. Ravensbrook He broke that masculine image. It was the largest women’s field. He was the only great field built expressly for women. There were also female guards in Ravensbrook. After the war, The researchers examined them apart. Then they crossed their descriptions with testimonies from survivors.

 No It was just a matter of guardians, too. The place mattered. Ravensbrook raised in 1939. next to a lake in Brandenburg. It was close to Havel’s Fürstenberg about 80 km north north of Berlin. Born to lock women, that’s why it became the main destiny for which the regime marked as enemies. Jews arrived there, political prisoners, Roma, resisters, Jehovah’s Witnesses and asocials.

 That label could mean homelessness or a relationship that the regime does not accepted. There were six categories. For fill that field, the SS searched fast and cheap staff. Since 1939 They published notices in newspapers and They took the offer to the offices of job, where they were looking for young German women.

They paid more than a factory and included accommodation, food and uniform. The filter was minimal. It was enough to be German and comply with Nazi racial rules. No They asked for police experience, they did not do psychological tests  and neither They checked background information.

 To those future watchmen, later called Aufsejerinen, They were immediately sent to training courses. just a few weeks. With courses so brief, the next election did not arrive in a classroom, he arrived next to a veteran In the first weeks, the new guardians observed orders droughts, punishments and the routine of the field.

There they learned. The SS taught them that hitting prey was a normal way to impose authority. If they doubted, They pressed.  If they acted with toughness, the SS promoted them. When the course became even shorter, Ravensbrook was able to send more guardians to other fields and subfields of Europe busy.

 Ravensbrook did not hold them, distributed During the war, about 3,500 women served as guardians and most started precisely there. In 1944  there were about 150 at the same time. They guarded between 45 and 50,000 prey. that Control depended on fear. If a dam resisted, they punished her on the spot and everyone knew it.

 After the war, survivors from different countries They described several guardians almost with the same words. there were not spoken to each other. Still, their stories They coincided. That repetition in testimonies led to specific names. One of them appeared in Ravensbrook in 1939 when Dorotea Vince arrived at 19 years old and came from domestic cleaning service and cook for others.

 It became very young there. Ravensbrook was next to Fürstenberg of the Havel and was the largest women’s camp in Nazi Germany. At After a year, Vince asked to join as vigilant and began to climb into the field. He rose quickly afterward. with time reached the highest position between the guardians and that promotion gave daily command over other guards and on the bodies of the prisoners.

He hit them for no reason, he let out his dog against them and left them for hours whole in counts under the cold, although counting the women took just a few minutes. Vince ended up like the head of camp surveillance. that rise did not leave power only in the hands of the guards. The SS also They distributed among some prey.

 Carmen Mori was a Swiss prisoner in Ravensbrook and his name circulated together to war espionage. He wasn’t a guard. Even so, the CSS appointed her head of barracks with control over other women inside the block. They did it on purpose. This is how they brought violence inside of the barracks without monitoring each bed or each order.

 In the infirmary, between smell heavy and narrow beds, Mori hit to the sick and dying. many nor They could get up.  The survivors said something else. Mori personally killed at least one prisoner, that’s why they feared her so much. No came from outside. was one of them. In the Lazaretto, the sick were beaten other prisoners.

 There the violence changed shape. See Albequart, a Czech nurse, attended the infirmary of the field, the revier, which officially He had to help the sick prisoners. In reality, they sent those who already They were too weak to work. Several survivors recalled a white powder mixed in food, always without explanation. After eat it,  many died shortly after.

 Salve Quart later said that It was just a harmless add-on, but repeated deaths left another printing: plate, white powder, new deaths and silence. That silence no longer covered nothing. At the end of 1944, Germany had already lost the war. After Kursk, the red army pushed towards the west and entered Poland. In June 1944,  the allies landed in Normandy and advanced through France.

The SS understood the risk  and They accelerated everything. At Ravensbrook the response was to kill faster. The SS He set up a gas chamber next to the crematorium. It was smaller, more improvised, but it was enough for the last months. The prisoners They were talking about a move to Mid, True, a recovery center that does not existed. They lined them up in rows.

 Vince and other guardians walked the lines and They decided who lived and who died without pause. Then came the camera, the They took them there, they killed them and then they they cremated Between January and April 1945 They killed between 5000 and 6000 women. Sometimes they chose for one visible illness, other times for pure random.

 Some were marked by having previously disturbed a guard or for being in the wrong place. The elections became another way of total power and some guardians they used without hesitation. That power no longer it was enough. The field was at its limit. Prisoners of the camps further east They arrived on foot.

 Others entered later, one after another. When the forces Soviets approached Auschwitz, the SS emptied those fields with marches winters to the west. Thousands They died from hunger, cold and gunshots. That’s why they called them marches of the death. Many survivors ended up At Ravensbrook and the camp ya It far exceeded his capacity.

 The Illness ran through the barracks. The rations became even more small. Inside everything was more tight. Outside, Germany will be one day. In April 1945, the SS evacuated almost all the remaining ones, He pushed them on another march towards the west, They shot those who fell behind. The 30th April, the same day that Hitler committed suicide in Berlin, the Soviets.

 They found an almost empty field with several thousand women. They were too sick to move. 8 days then, on May 8, the war in Europe is over. While in the field the women followed motionless, many members of the SS were already doing something else. They threw away the uniform, burned papers, then they were lost in the mass of refugees and civilians crossing a Germany destroyed.

 Some took fake names, others received help on clandestine routes to South America and many more returned home to wait. This dispersion gave room for Hiding did not provide security. The main research on Rivensbrook remained in British hands, partly because they had been there many British prisoners and women of Western Europe, especially French and Dutch resistance, arrested and deported by Germans.

 In the summer of 1945, the british research team war crimes  started interrogate the survivors. Names arrived, scenes returned. In the minutes reappeared again and again same surnames of guardians and same episodes of violence. Women who had returned to France, Poland, The Netherlands, Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union described separately to the same people and  same behavior. They couldn’t coordinate.

Still, the statements of survivors from five countries They agreed on specific details and verifiable. That precision no longer was left in the reports. In May 1945, a few days after the capitulation German, Dorotea Vince was arrested near  Gustrow, in the northeast from Germany. He was 25 years old.

 The witnesses They said that she appeared serene and almost without concern while the investigation began to close on names concrete. Then Carmen Mori followed. They located her in Switzerland and handed her over to the British authorities, although his past in intelligence ago tangled the file. That didn’t change central.

 The evidence about what he did Within Ravensbrook they were supported by  themselves and the survivors They no longer only gave surnames, but also precise places within the field. In Germany captured Vera Salvequart and several women recognized her by medical block. Your descriptions coincided with sufficient precision to fix your name in the summary.

 with those recognitions, the summary stopped grow in silence. At the end of 1946, British researchers already said that the evidence was sufficient to accuse. It was the turn. December 5th in Hamburg The first Ravensbrook trial opened before a British military court. No It was an isolated  record. was part of the chase british war crimes against citizens of allied countries.

 In Ravensbrook had locked up many French, Dutch, Polish, Soviet and British . Many They came from the resistance. In that first 16 defendants appeared in the trial. there There were Dorotea Vince, Carmen Mori, Vera Salvequart and other guardians and CSS officers, even men who They had sent into the field.

 The central name among men was Fritz Suren. He ran Ravensbrook from 1942.  He fled at the end of the war. tried to surrender to the Americans and then they handed him over to the British process. After the arrests, the court incorporated the accused in a trial for crimes of war and the accusation brought together dozens of testimonies of survivors  of Ravensbrook.

 In the room they sounded surnames, positions and acts seen from close. That was said bluntly. The names were repeated there. The prosecutors accused of murdering civilians allied countries, torture and treatment inhumane on the field. The witnesses accused accused men and women for their name and then describe what each one he had seen with his own eyes.

No one spoke out of rumor. Each identification tightened the case. there The defense tried to shift the blame up within a chain of command which, according to his lawyers, annulled the personal responsibility. With the women the argument was even more precise. They had not created the order of countryside, they lived under male command and did not They could really resist.

 At In the end, the defense reduced everything to a single idea. The accused were only following orders from above. In front of that line, the The prosecution rejected both defenses. that same year, Nuremberg had already left Of course, obeying orders did not erase a war crime. The responsibility staff was still standing.

 At Ravensbrook, Prosecutors took that rule to detail. The hierarchy was not enough. No order forced Vince to leave for hours in the cold to prisoners hungry only to increase their pain. Nor did an order lead Salve Quart to giving suspicious substances to sick people who already seemed to recover. That was the break.

 The court looked at the act own. It wasn’t automatic. The judges they put the general rule next to those facts and separated deitive obedience staff. Vince, Mori and Salve Quart They received a death sentence. The others They received long sentences. On the 3rd of February 1947, The court found 11 guilty of the 16 accused.

 With the failure already dictated, the case left the allegations and entered the closed routine of the prison. Afterwards they no longer spoke lawyers, but the cell door and the execution schedule. On May 2 from 1947, The British carried out the executions in Jamelín prison, northern Germany. After  the war, they used that prison to apply death sentences to criminals of war.

 Dolotea Vince was 27 years old when they took her to the orca. In their last days, prison employees and officials described her as calm and almost without regret. She insisted in which his actions had been a service to his country. Let’s see Salbequart, the They were hanged along with Vince, although he continued writing letters in which he stated be innocent The sentence did not change.

Carmen Mori did not reach the orca. The exact details of his death ever They were completely clear. the night prior to the planned hanging, he died in his cell after using a sharp object against herself. After the hangings May, the Ravensbrook cause continued open. Between 1946 and 1948, british military courts They held three separate trials While the researchers gathered and They ordered tests.

 The balance was dry, 16 death sentences, only executed 14. The figure dropped due to the suicide of I died and because a penalty was reduced after the appeal. They took Fritz Suren out of first process for another trial. After It was decided by a French military court. A several defendants were given sentences of about years to life imprisonment.

 The court French executed Suren in June 1950. The convictions did not change what I was waiting for them when I returned. A few were enough a few words about Ravensbrook  and the pause came. dozens of thousands of women survived the camp and to the death marches of 1945, but they returned to countries they did not know listen to that story.

 There began another silence. In France, the memory of postwar it relied on the resistance and the liberation. It was a story  real, but left little room for women returning from hunger, from the cold and the blows. In Poland and in Soviet Union, authorities They filtered the memory of the war and They accepted some stories while others were separated.

 Some found distrust, others saw eyes secluded, silence and discomfort barely They started to talk. Many understood to count the field there would be a void and not an answer. That’s why they were silent. Some They didn’t talk about Ravensbrook for 20 or 30 years. As the years went by, some How many Polish dams did that break? pause.

 At Ravensbrook, SS doctors They spread their legs to imitate combat wounds and infections. They then infected the wounds with bacteria and tested treatments on women to whom nothing was ever explained. There was no choice, they couldn’t refuse. After the operations, they received almost no normal medical care and themselves They ended up calling each other rabbits, with a bitterness taken from the language of laboratory.

 A small group but decisive. Several testified at the trial of the Nuremberg doctors among 1946 and 1947, where 20 CSS doctors were prosecuted for crimes committed in the camps. Their stories took the nursing home field to  the living room court. From that path came a rule written in the Nuremberg code. No patient or subject research can be used without voluntary consent.

 But he registration was not left alone in the room. It also depended on who set Ravensbrook on paper. To Germain and Leon They arrested her for working in the resistance and deported her to Ravensbrook in 1943. Before the war she was an ethnographer and researcher. In the field he observed and He kept in memory everything he could.

 No I wrote, I remembered faces and scenes for later. After liberation, wrote one of the most testimonials early and detailed about Ravensbrook. And that text established facts when doubts and denials were already appearing of the holocaust. Then it became a great intellectual figure in France. Died in 2008, at 100 years old.

 After those testimonies, the memory was fixed also on the ground. Today the place is the Manungedenengstate Memorial and Museum Ravensbrook in Fürstenberg Havel, al northeast Germany. There they keep files, organize educational and receive visitors from all over the world. The place baffles, the landscape is now silent, it is difficult to unite that calm with the field that was there.

 And almost everyone the barracks there is nothing left but the absence. There is no noise left and yet, in that esplanade, no document or no judicial record weighs as much as that empty.