1939May 1939–April 1945 · Fürstenberg/Havel, Brandenburg

Ravensbrück women's concentration camp

Bronze memorial figures of women before the brick camp wall and barbed wire at Ravensbrück — Photo: ho visto nina volare from Italy. CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Ravensbrück, beside a lake at Fürstenberg north of Berlin, was the largest Nazi concentration camp for women. Some 120,000 women from more than 30 countries were held there, among them resistance fighters, Jews, Sinti and Roma and women labelled 'asocial'. SS doctors carried out surgical experiments on Polish prisoners, and a gas chamber was used in the camp's last months. Soviet troops arrived on 30 April 1945.