Many people assumed that when the Nazi camps were liberated, the worst was finally over.
But for the female guards of Ravensbr ck, it wasn t.
Because what happened next, inside a prison in a small German town, would reveal exactly how far ordinary women had fallen, and what it looked like when the world finally decided to hold them accountable.
Ravensbr ck was built specifically to hold women.
It was the first and only concentration camp for women located inside the borders of Nazi Germany.
The order to build it came from Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, in 1938.
The site was chosen near the small town of F rstenberg because it was isolated and far from public view.
What happened there was never meant to be seen by outsiders.
The first prisoners arrived on May 18, 1939.
There were 867 women, transferred from Lichtenburg, an old castle in Saxony that had been used as a temporary women’s prison camp since 1938.
Most were political prisoners.
They included German women labeled enemies of the Nazi state, such as Communists, Social Democrats, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Roma women, and others the Nazi system classified as criminals.
The definition was broad enough to include almost anyone who did not fit Nazi expectations.
To guard these women, the Third Reich needed women.
SS rules did not allow male guards to directly supervise female prisoners, so as soon as Ravensbr ck opened, the SS began recruiting female staff.
They were called Aufseherinnen, meaning female overseers, and the positions were advertised openly across Germany.
The requirements were simple.
Applicants had to be German citizens, physically healthy, and at least 21 years old.
No previous experience was needed.
The pay was better than what many women could earn in factories or domestic service, where most recruits came from.
They received a uniform, housing inside or near the camp, and a level of authority that few working-class German women had ever experienced before.
The first group of female guards arrived at Ravensbr ck in 1939 alongside the prisoners.
By 1940, the SS had created a formal training program at the camp.
New recruits spent several weeks on probation.
During that time, they watched and then took part in the daily control of prisoners.
They observed punishment beatings.
They stood through roll calls.
Most importantly, they were repeatedly taught that the women wearing striped prison uniforms were not ordinary human beings.
They were described as racial enemies, political threats, or criminals.
During the war, more than 4,000 women completed guard training at Ravensbr ck.
The camp became the main training center for female guards across the entire concentration camp system.
Graduates were sent to camps such as Auschwitz-Birkenau, Bergen-Belsen, Majdanek, Neuengamme, Flossenb rg, and dozens of smaller camps.
Life inside Ravensbr ck was far from normal.
Roll call took place twice a day, once at dawn and again at dusk.
Prisoners had to stand in the main assembly yard no matter the weather or their physical condition.
During winter, that meant standing for hours in temperatures below freezing.
Women with high fevers, women suffering from infected wounds, and women already weakened by starvation were all forced to remain standing.
If the number of prisoners did not match the SS records, nobody was allowed to move until the count was corrected.
Waiting four hours was common.
Sometimes it lasted five or six hours.
Any movement or noise could lead to a beating.
The workday usually began around 4:30 in the morning and lasted until dark.
Some prisoners were sent outside the camp for hard labor such as road construction, drainage projects, or building work.
Others worked inside the camp in industrial jobs.
Beginning in 1942, the German electrical company Siemens operated a factory next to the camp and used prisoner labor to produce equipment and components for the German military.
Women often worked 12-hour shifts there.
Siemens paid the SS for their labor.
The prisoners received nothing.
Food was extremely limited.
A typical daily ration consisted of a bowl of thin turnip or nettle soup, a small piece of bread, and sometimes a little margarine or a spoonful of beet jam.
Altogether, it provided about 1,300 calories a day for women performing exhausting physical labor.
The result was starvation.
Many women lost 20, 30, or even 40 pounds within a few months.
When they became too weak to work, they were sent to the Revier, the camp infirmary.
It had very little medicine and almost no ability to treat serious illness.
For many prisoners, it was simply a place where death came more slowly.
The official punishment for breaking camp rules, such as arriving late to roll call, speaking when not allowed, or being caught with extra food, was flogging.
Prisoners received 25 lashes across the back or the backs of their thighs.
The blows were delivered with a cane or leather strap by a guard or SS officer while the prisoner was bent over a wooden block.
These punishments were carried out in front of other prisoners as a warning.
The victim had to count each lash out loud.
If she lost count or cried out without counting, the punishment started again from the beginning.
The female overseers also had the power to hand out unofficial punishments whenever they wanted.
No reports, paperwork, or approval were required.
Out of the more than 4,000 female guards, a smaller group rose to positions of power and became directly linked to some of the camp’s worst violence.
One of them was Dorothea Binz.
She arrived at Ravensbr ck in 1939 when she was just 19 years old.
She grew up in the nearby town of Alt Lychen and took the job partly because it was close to home.
Within two years she had been promoted.
By 1943, she had become Lagerf hrerin, the chief female overseer of the entire women’s camp and the highest-ranking female position at Ravensbr ck.
She was only 23 years old.
Survivors described her walking through the camp carrying a dog whip and accompanied by a German Shepherd.
They said she often selected prisoners for beatings without any clear reason, watched floggings with visible enjoyment, and was personally seen shooting prisoners in the camp yard.
Another woman was Greta B sel.
She supervised the outside work details beginning in 1941.
One of her main jobs was deciding whether prisoners were healthy enough to work.
Women she judged too sick or too weak were labeled *Arbeitsunf hig*, meaning unfit for labor.
Inside Ravensbr ck’s system, that label usually meant a prisoner was no longer considered useful.
What happened to those women afterward often followed directly from her decision.
Elisabeth Marshall served as the chief overseer of the Uckermark subcamp, located about two kilometers from the main Ravensbr ck camp.
Uckermark had originally been built as a detention center for young women.
In late 1944, the SS turned it into a place where prisoners considered unwanted were sent.
These included elderly women, seriously ill women, and women the SS simply decided were no longer needed.
Marshall was in charge while the camp effectively became a place of mass killing.
Vera Salvequart was a trained nurse who worked in the camp’s medical block.
According to postwar testimony, she gave patients in the sick ward a white powder believed to be phenol or a similar chemical.
She told the prisoners it was medicine.
Carmen Mory was different from the others.
She was Swiss-German and arrived at Ravensbr ck in 1941 as a prisoner after being convicted of espionage.
The SS later made her a *Block lteste*, or block elder.
This meant she was still a prisoner but was given authority over other prisoners in exchange for helping the camp administration.
Mory used that position to beat women under her control, report them for offenses they had not committed, and deny food to sick prisoners.
Ruth Neudeck was another female guard who took charge of the Uckermark subcamp during its deadliest period in early 1945.
Under her supervision, prisoners were deliberately starved at a faster rate and sent in groups to the gas chamber.
Emma Zimmer was a senior overseer who had worked at Ravensbr ck since 1940.
During her five years there, she was involved in beatings, supervised floggings, and took part in prisoner selections.
Ida Schreiter, another senior overseer, held important responsibilities during the period when the camp was at its most overcrowded and when deaths were at their highest.
For most of Ravensbr ck’s existence, prisoners died through starvation, disease, exhaustion, abuse, and occasional shootings.
Unlike camps such as Auschwitz or Treblinka, Ravensbr ck did not have a gas chamber during most of its operation.
That changed in the autumn of 1944.
By September 1944, Germany’s military situation was collapsing.
The Soviet Army had pushed into Poland, while Allied forces were advancing through France.
It was becoming clear that Germany was losing the war.
At the same time, the SS began trying to hide evidence of its crimes.
Records were burned, death certificates were altered, and at Ravensbr ck, a gas chamber was built.
The gas chamber was relatively small and was created inside a converted building near the edge of the camp.
Prisoners were brought there in groups and often told they were being disinfected or transferred elsewhere.
Most of the killings took place at night.
The SS kept almost no official records of the operation.
Historians estimate that between 5,000 and 6,000 women were murdered in the Ravensbr ck gas chamber, with most of the killings taking place between January and April 1945.
At the same time, beginning in February 1945, the SS started emptying the camp through a series of forced marches.
Prisoners who could barely stand were driven out of the gates and forced west across Germany.
Conditions were terrible.
Northern Germany was experiencing freezing temperatures, snow, and ice.
Women who collapsed during the marches were often shot where they fell.
Guards who had spent years carrying out beatings, roll calls, and prisoner selections inside the camp continued doing the same things on the open roads.
The Soviet Army reached Ravensbr ck on April 30, 1945.
By then, the gas chamber had been partly dismantled, most SS personnel had escaped, and around 3,000 prisoners who were too sick to march had been left behind.
Soviet soldiers found them still inside the camp barracks.
The camp commandant, SS-Obersturmbannf hrer Fritz Suhren, left Ravensbr ck on April 28 with several prisoners in his vehicle.
He apparently believed he could use them as bargaining chips if he was captured.
American forces arrested him a few days later.
Because some of his victims were French citizens, he was tried by a French court and was hanged in Paris in June 1950.
The British military tribunal investigating crimes committed at Ravensbr ck opened in Hamburg on December 5, 1946.
The location was chosen because Hamburg was inside the British occupation zone after the war, and British authorities had responsibility for many former Ravensbr ck staff members.
The trial was part of a larger series of British war crimes proceedings known as the Royal Warrant trials.
These ran alongside the famous Nuremberg trials but focused on camp personnel rather than top Nazi leaders.
The first Ravensbr ck trial lasted until February 3, 1947.
Sixteen people were charged: nine men and seven women.
They were accused of killing, abusing, mistreating, and causing suffering to Allied citizens who had been imprisoned at the camp.
The focus on Allied prisoners was largely a legal matter because British courts had the strongest authority over crimes committed against citizens of Allied nations.
The prosecution relied heavily on survivor testimony.
Women who had survived Ravensbr ck traveled to Hamburg and gave detailed accounts of what they had witnessed.
They identified guards, described specific incidents, and provided dates whenever they could remember them.
Defense lawyers tried to challenge their stories during cross-examination, but many witnesses who had not spoken to each other since liberation described the same events in remarkably similar detail.
That made their testimony difficult to dismiss.
Most of the defendants used the same defense.
They claimed they were simply following orders, had not personally committed the crimes described, and were only small parts of a much larger system.
The tribunal listened to these arguments but rejected them.
On February 3, 1947, the verdicts were announced.
Eleven of the sixteen defendants were sentenced to death.
Among the women were Dorothea Binz, Greta B sel, Elisabeth Marshall, Vera Salvequart, Margarete Mewes, Eugenie von Skene, and Gerda Schreiber.
Carmen Mory also received a death sentence.
The remaining defendants were given prison sentences ranging from ten years to life imprisonment.
Hamelin Prison, located about 60 kilometers south of Hannover, had been chosen by the British military as the main execution site in their occupation zone after the war.
It was an ordinary 19th-century prison, but it became the place where many convicted war criminals were executed.
It was also where Albert Pierrepoint worked whenever the British military needed executions carried out in Germany.
Pierrepoint was 37 years old in 1947 and had served as Britain’s chief executioner since 1940.
He had already hanged William Joyce, better known as Lord Haw-Haw, the Nazi radio propagandist, in January 1946.
He had also carried out several executions after the Bergen-Belsen trial in December 1945, including those of former camp guards Irma Grese and Elisabeth Volkenrath.
Pierrepoint was known for being experienced and highly methodical.
Before every execution, he calculated the exact drop length based on the prisoner’s weight to make death as quick as possible.
He worked fast, often completing the entire process within seconds of the prisoner entering the execution room.
On the morning of May 2, 1947, the seven women sentenced to death in the first Ravensbr ck trial were brought to the execution chamber at Hamelin.
They entered one at a time.
Each woman was placed on the trapdoor with her hands tied behind her back and her ankles strapped together.
A white hood was placed over her head, and the noose was positioned beneath the left side of the jaw.
Pierrepoint pulled the lever himself.
Dorothea Binz was 27 years old.
Witnesses at the time noted that she showed no visible fear or distress as she entered the execution room.
Several observers later said they found her calmness more unsettling than if she had cried or begged.
Carmen Mory was not among the women who were executed that morning.
During the night before her scheduled execution, she obtained a piece of broken glass in her cell.
Exactly how she got it was never fully determined.
She used it to cut her wrists and died before morning.
The British military officially recorded her death as a suicide.
These were the first women executed under the authority of a British military tribunal.
The British military held four more Ravensbr ck trials between late 1947 and 1948.
Each focused on a different part of the camp system or on specific groups of people involved in its crimes.
The second trial, which ended in late 1947, focused on the medical experiments carried out at Ravensbr ck.
Between 1942 and 1944, SS doctors conducted a series of experiments on 74 Polish political prisoners.
All were women, and most were in their twenties.
Many had been sent to the camp because of their involvement in the Polish resistance against Nazi occupation.
The experiments were extremely brutal.
Doctors deliberately broke bones and sometimes cut through them with surgical tools to study how they healed.
They removed sections of muscle and attempted to replace them with tissue from other prisoners to see if muscle transplants were possible.
They also infected wounds with dangerous bacteria, including streptococcus, tetanus, and gas gangrene, then withheld treatment to observe how the infections progressed.
Some women died during the experiments.
Others survived but were left permanently disabled.
Other prisoners began calling them *Lapins*, meaning rabbits, because they were used as test subjects.
Eventually, the women adopted the name themselves.
The doctors tried in the second trial were found guilty on multiple charges.
Several received death sentences.
The third trial took place in 1948 and focused specifically on the Uckermark subcamp.
Ruth Neudeck, who had supervised the facility during its final months, was the main defendant.
Evidence presented during the trial showed that women sent to Uckermark in early 1945 received only 200 grams of bread per day and no other food.
Combined with transfers to the Ravensbr ck gas chamber, the starvation policy meant that very few women sent there survived.
Neudeck was convicted and sentenced to death.
She was hanged at Hamelin in May 1948.
The fourth and fifth trials dealt with remaining staff connected to the main Ravensbr ck camp.
Emma Zimmer, whose role as a senior overseer had been documented by numerous survivor testimonies, was convicted and sentenced to death.
Ida Schreiter received the same sentence for her involvement in the camp’s daily violence and prisoner selections.
Both women were executed at Hamelin in 1948.
By the end of the fifth trial, British military courts had convicted 41 people for crimes committed at Ravensbr ck.
Across all five trials, 21 death sentences were handed down.
Dozens more served prison sentences.
Most of Ravensbr ck’s female staff disappeared into postwar Germany and were never prosecuted.
Some obtained false identity papers during the chaos that followed Germany’s defeat.
Others simply returned home, took off their uniforms, and resumed ordinary lives under their real names.
In the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s, West Germany was focused on rebuilding the country and strengthening its ties with Western nations through NATO.
There was limited political support for continuing large-scale investigations into former concentration camp staff.
The government of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer often resisted Allied pressure to continue broad denazification efforts, and many former SS members quietly returned to professional careers.
A small number of additional cases were brought in West Germany during the 1950s and 1960s.
These were mainly driven by Fritz Bauer, the Attorney General of the German state of Hesse.
Bauer later became famous for helping launch the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials in 1963.
At a time when many officials preferred to move on from the past, Bauer considered prosecuting camp personnel a serious priority.
Even so, his efforts reached only a small percentage of those responsible.
West German courts required stronger evidence for murder convictions than the British military tribunals had required, and many cases either collapsed or ended in acquittals.
Historians who studied Ravensbr ck records after the 1990s, including Bernhard Strebel, whose 2003 study remains one of the most detailed works on the camp, estimate that between 3,500 and 3,800 female overseers from Ravensbr ck were never tried anywhere for any crime.
They lived out the rest of their lives.
Some had children and grandchildren who either knew nothing about their wartime activities or were never told.
Meanwhile, many survivors spent the rest of their lives carrying physical injuries and psychological trauma from what they had endured inside the camp.
In 1959, the East German government established a memorial at Ravensbr ck.
By then, much of the original camp had already been demolished.
The memorial still stands today and receives tens of thousands of visitors every year.
