SECTION 16 – HOLOCAUST COMPANIES: SIEMENS

THE HOLOCAUST
WORLD WAR II (1941-1945)

Ravensbrück
Concentration Camp Map

(Siemens Factory)

The Official Story

RAVENSBRÜCK CONCENTRATION CAMP
(Fürstenberg/Havel, Germany)

Ravensbrück was a German concentration camp exclusively for women from 1939 to 1945, located in northern Germany, 90 km (56 mi) north of Berlin at a site near the village of Ravensbrück (part of Fürstenberg/Havel). The camp memorial’s estimated figure of 132,000 women who were in the camp during the war includes about 48,500 from Poland, 28,000 from the Soviet Union, almost 24,000 from Germany and Austria, nearly 8,000 from France, and thousands from other countries including a few from the United Kingdom and the United States. More than 20,000 of the total were Jewish. More than 80 percent were political prisoners. Many prisoners were employed as slave labor by Siemens & Halske. From 1942 to 1945, the Nazis undertook medical experiments to test the effectiveness of sulfonamides.

In the spring of 1941, the SS established a small adjacent camp for male inmates, who built and managed the camp’s gas chambers in 1944. Of some 130,000 female prisoners who passed through the Ravensbrück camp, about 50,000 perished; some 2,200 were killed in the gas chambers.

Forced labor

All inmates were required to do heavy labor ranging from strenuous outdoor jobs to building the V-2 rocket parts for Siemens. The SS also built several factories near Ravensbrück for the production of textiles and electrical components.

The women forced to work at Ravensbrück concentration camp’s industries used their skills in sewing and their access to the factory to make soldiers’ socks. They purposely adjusted the machines to make the fabric thin at the heel and the toes, causing the socks to wear prematurely at those places when the German soldiers marched. This gave the soldiers sore feet.

For the women in the camp, it was important to retain some of their dignity and sense of humanity. Therefore, they made necklaces, bracelets, and other personal items, like small dolls and books, as keepsakes. These personal effects were of great importance to the women and many of them risked their lives to keep these possessions. Some of these types of effects can be seen at the exhibition “Voices from Ravensbrück” (hosted by Lund University Library, Sweden).

The bodies of those killed in the camp were cremated in the nearby Fürstenberg crematorium until 1943 when SS authorities constructed a crematorium at a site near the camp prison. In January 1945, the SS also transformed a hut near the crematorium into a gas chamber, where they murdered several thousand prisoners before the camp’s liberation in April 1945; in particular, they executed some 3,600 prisoners from the Uckermark police camp for “deviant” girls and women, which was taken under the control of the Ravensbrück SS at the start of 1945.

Source: Wikipedia