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Who Did What Now
155. Ravensbrück Concentration Camp
01:04:36
Experiments, Torture and Slave Labour at the Frauenlager
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- [00:10]
Katie Charlwood
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- [01:00]
Ben
Acast helps creators launch, grow and mine monetize their podcasts everywhere acast.com.
- [01:09]
Unknown
Hey, do you want to hear the next big new tech podcast hit before anyone else, check out the daily tech news show Experiment Week. We're swapping out our normal shows to try out some new ideas. We've done this before and launched big hits like behind the Data, the Tech John and more. This year we have exclusive Android faithful reactions to the Pixel 9 event. It's all on the DTNS feed, so starting August 11th, don't miss it.
- [01:41]
Ben
Acast helps creators launch, grow and monetize their podcasts everywhere acast.com hello, delicious friends, and welcome to who did what Now? The History podcast. That's not your history class. With me, your host, Katy Charlwood, history harlot and reader of books. So, did you know, gentle listeners, that who did what now was number two on the US Apple Podcasts history charts this week? So thank you. That's not me, that's you. You did this. You've been listening and sharing and commenting and doing all the good stuff and. And thank you. Thank you, thank you. It's really, really nice to just see that happen because it means that I'm doing something right, you know, And I really, really appreciate you for listening. I know I'm a wee bit more emotional today because I'm recording this on my grandfather's anniversary. The kindest man I've ever known and the pettiest. He once blew up a quarry out of spite. And you may be thinking to yourself, Katie, how does one blow up a quarry out of spite? And let me tell you, with great determination and a really good understanding of physics. Now, I don't have the physics part, but I do have the determination and the pettiness, which is why I don't blow things up. I just set files for legal reasons. That's a joke. I've never even been to Louisiana, so. Not here, not away anyway. So. That's such a silly joke anyway. That was such a silly joke. It was definitely a joke for legal reasons. Definitely. Absolutely a joke. No, and day of release is actually going to be my son's birthday. So yeah. Oh goodness. If, if any of you do want to get him some weird ass Lego, go to town. The address is on the website, it's in the notes. Do what you want to do. At this point. Do you want. Do what you want to do? The boy. God, the boy loves his Lego. He really does. Yeah, I think my house is gonna be made of Lego at one point. Like if he keeps carrying on and honestly I'm not mad about it, it'd be great. Maybe he could build me some more shelves or something like a bookcase. A bookcase made of Lego. That would be amazing. So what's been really interesting this week for me actually has been seeing how people perceive me. So like, if you've listened to me or seen me for a long time, then you know what I'm about, you know where I'm coming from and you understand what I do. A lot of people have seen me for the first time this week because I went a little bit viral. A little bit viral. I feel like once you get over a million and a half views, I feel like that's. Yeah, I'm gonna take that as a viral moment. Cuz that's, that's, that's a country, you know, that's a population of a country, you know. And so people have seen me for the first time talking about very horrible things. And I've had a lot of accusations and complaints about me being perky or joyful or happy to talk about horrible stuff. Which is wild to me because. No, I think people need to like spend time with other humans more because I understand media literacy is dead, but like, come on. And so people who have been watching me for a long time, I've actually had comments and messages going, thank you for this. I can see how this is draining. Like, I can see how exhausted you are. I can see how much this is affecting you. And it is. I mean, I lost my voice. I lost my voice from scream whispering because I was trying not to like just get overwhelmed and just. I can upset my neighbours, you know, and, and it has been it has been a lot and I had to take. I had to take a week off because it was just too much for me. And that really solidified the idea that I need to just power through. Like the only way up is through. Okay? And so that's what we're gonna do. And I'm gonna try and get as much information out there this month and just to get it done. And then I'm gonna talk about anything else. Email me suggestions for weird shit from history. I need something silly and fun and ridiculous because I'll do it at this point, because this stuff, I have had to look at the horrible, horrible stuff. Like I haven't felt this bad since I was reading JonBenet Ramsey's autopsy notes as my six year old daughter, as she was at the time, was curled up sleeping, sort of half on me because my kids are little clampets. They just like stuck on me. And, and yeah, that was, that was a tough read. That was a tough one. And I haven't felt that bad since I was looking at that. There's a lot, a lot going on here. But I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, katie, it's been five minutes, quit your jibber jabber. In fact me, in fact you. I will, but first we've got to get our source on. Our sources are. Encyclopaedia of Camps and Ghettos by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The Dynamics of Destruction. The Development of Concentration Camps, 1933-1945 by Nicholas Waxman. The Final Judgment. The Story of Nuremberg by Victor Hein Bernstein. Sulfona made research on Human Subjects in Nazi Concentration camps a critical reevaluation of the epistemological and ethical dimension by Volke Ruhlke. The Role of Psychopharmacology in the Medical Abuses of the Third Reich. From Euthanasia Programs to Human Experimentation by Francisco Luiz Munoz et al. The Holocaust Chronicle by Marilyn Harin et al. Cleansing the Fatherland by Peter Kraust and Gotts Alle. Forced labor in Nazi Concentration Camps by Mac Bogellen. Inside Ravensbruck by Janet Flanner. Remembering Ravensbruck Holocaust Healing by Natalie Hess. If this Is a Woman Inside Ravensbruck. Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women by Sarah Helm. The Nazi Camp System by Karl Heinz Roth. I use it uncomfortably. Good, then let's begin. So we touched on Ravensbruck a little bit in last week's episode when we discussed the horrible, horrific, vile human that was Irma Griesi. The Beast of Belsen, the Hyena of Auschwitz. Her right I, I don't know why, but you know what I think of is an Arrested Development. An like, when it comes to Irma, I just get that vibe. But evil, you know, And Irma Grace was just a terrible person. If you haven't listened to last week's episode and you think that you can do that in a safe mental way, go do that. This week's episode I don't think is going to be much better. So blanket warning. I'm talking about concentration camps. This is not going to be a safe episode. If you are upset by human suffering, it's gonna be bad. I, I, it's bad. Put this on mute. Listen to the whole thing. If you want to do it that way, if you want to support me, otherwise, just go do something else. Listen to the episode about the Chicago testicle thieves. Because that's just funny and also very surprising. Nobody's made that into a silly, like, gangster movie. Like, I feel like the Coen brothers could do it. You know, I feel like that's a thing. So I also feel like I have to explain again. I'm really, I really struggle with the German R sound. And so there's a possibility I'm gonna say the name of this camp correctly once. The other times, it's gonna sound vaguely possible to it kind of like how if you squint an oat potato, it kind of looks like Mother Teresa. That's like me saving Ravensbruck. Right? It's, it's kind of there, but it's not. So Ravensburg was established in the autumn of 1938 in the north of Germany near Furstenburg. So it's like 50 miles north of Berlin. And it was the only major concentration camp for women. And yeah, that's the thing. So there were other concentration camps like Oranienburg and Lichtenburg and a few of those. And what happened is they consolidated them. So, like, because they had some that were just like shacks that they had built and they slowly made more formal camps. And they even had some places where they just reutilized spaces that were already there. Like in Australia, had hard time castle. You had. They did that with a lot, with castles. They're like, here's a castle. They dug underground bunkers. Like, they did all these weird, weird options. They utilized old prisons, all this jazz, right? But they constructed. I say they, it was the, I think it was the tot that did it. So. But basically it was a camp for women because they removed women from other camps and just brought them solely for this. Right? And like, most Concentration camps. It was built for. Fairly close to a railway station. Si. Heinrich Himmler chose this location because it was out of the way but still accessible. And you might be thinking, but how did they build the camp? Like most camps, they ferried in prisoners from other camps. So they did this here, they did this on the island of Alderney. Like, they would take prisoners, make them build the camp, and then, pfft, that's what they did. So in late 1938, 500 prisoners were transferred from Sachsenhausen to build the new camp. They built an infirmary, a kitchen, a crematoria, and 14 barracks. Well, I think it was eight barracks initially, and then it grew. And each was supposed to hold about 250 prisoners each. They also built a small camp for men that was isolated from the women's camp and the camps. The camps weren't just one big structure. They weren't just one building with, like, a wall and the barbed wire on top. Like, there was walls with barbed wire on top. Like, that's a thing. But it wasn't just one singular building. And I think one. When we discuss concentration camps, there's this concept that it's just this small, or not even small, but like, this one singular thing, because it's a camp, but it's not. It's a whole network, it's a whole series. So it's not just one structure, it's a complex. And Ravensbruck had three 31 sub camps. Like, over the course of its life, the camp expanded four times in these 31 sub camps. Just to, like, layer this on to you so you understand just how big this is. These are the sub camps. Abteroda, Ansbach, Belzug, Bockheid, Berlin, Oberschohne, Berkentine, Contrary, Tableaub, Eberswold, Feldberg, Henigsdorf, Helsbroeck, Horenlaicken, Karlshagen, Klozdorf, Stargard, Koningbed, Neumark, Markov, Neustadt, Rennes, Pinnemundse, Brenslau, Rachlin, Gradzow, Staggard, Stenhohing, Schwarzenforst, Uckemark and Wilken. And so the camps Rostock, Marienne and Berlin, Schonfeld, these were run by Haeckel. So that's the. That's the plane manufacturer. Like, that's. That's all the planes. And Furstenberg and New Brandenburg, they were run. I say they run. They were. I don't know. I don't want to say least, but Siemens, like the. The electric company, make the phones and the TVs and whatever else they do these days. Them. So they had that one or those ones. On the 18th of May, 1939, the first female prisoners arrived at the camp. You had 860 German women and seven Austrian women. On the 20th of May, 400 Roma were brought in. And on the 28th of September, the first Polish prisoners began to arrive. And by the end of the year, the camp population was 2,000, 290. And as the war progressed, prisoners were arriving from 20 European countries. And by the end of 1941, two years in, there were 12,000 prisoners. By 1942, 15,000. And by 1943, 42,000. In 1944, Ravensbruck camp had over 80,000 prisoners. And the camp it did, like I mentioned earlier, had a crematoria, which was used for corpses. And in November 1944, a gas chamber was built. See, the thing about the crematoria is it existed specifically for burning, burning the corpses, because people would just die there, like you would just die at the camp. So you would have, you know, labor, you would have illness, you would have all this stuff happening. And bodies were piled. They were just piled on the floor or on the ground. And then someone's work duty was to move the corpses and take them to the crematoria. So I had mentioned the Hohenlachen sub camp earlier, and it was a medical facility, a sanatorium for treating injured SS men. So Dr. Karl Gebrat. Karl, he was appointed the medical superintendent at Hohenleichen, focusing on sport and occupational injuries for military personnel. On top of that, it became a Reich sport sanitarium. It was a fashionable place to stay as top athletes and national players were covered there and Nazi celebrities would visit. Right? So you've got like Hitler, Himmler. Then you've got people like the mayor of Tokyo, the Greek Crown Prince and Princess Rudolph Hess, and delegations from Italy, France, Portuguese, Peru and Argentina. Let's face it, for most of those, you were not surprised. So here's the interesting bit for me. If you listen to my Princess Alice of Battenberg episode, which I still think is one of my better ones, if the sound quality is up to snuff, I haven't listened to it in a bit. So what Alice of Battenberg would do is she would travel and sort of bring supplies, and she would help out allies in the Second World War. And she was like, she would travel because she was like, I'm going to visit my sister and this person and that person. And they're like, okay, your daughters are married to Nazis. And the crown princes and princesses, they're. They're really into the whole Nazism thing. And so they assumed that she was on their side. And she got away with a lot of stuff because of that. That and the fact. And she was congenitally deaf. Alice of Badenberg was a boss, and we support her. Okay. I'm not usually a fan of nuns, but she's cool. Actually. Actually, this is the one time in SG where you see a lot of nuns do things and you're like, yes, nun. You do your thing. So in the Hochenluichen sub camp, you had cinema screenings and a treatment pool because it was like, fancy, you know? And Dr. Carl Gibhart worked his way up the SS ladder because he had been the head physician at the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin. I'm pretty sure we all remember the Black power moment that happened there. So good for them. And what was that about your German Aryan superiority there? Hitler? Oh, no. So Carl wasn't really the best of doctors. He was a good SS man, but not a great doctor per se because he almost killed several patients because he refused to use antibiotics. And so he rises up through the Waffen SS and gets put in charge of medical staff at Block 10 in Ravensbruck. And whenever you hear anything medical and concentration camp, that is never going to be a good. A good outcome. Now, I looked at the photos because some prisoners had managed to sneak in a camera, and so they were taking photos of the experimentation that had happened to them when they were in the camp. It's amazing that these photos managed to survive at the best of times. But, like, the risk you're taking doing that, like, to get that information out there, knowing that if you're caught, you're. You're dead. Like, there's no if, ands or buts about it. You're dead. So here's the thing about medical experiments at Ravensbruck. And the thing is, they didn't actually serve any medical purpose. Patients were more guinea pigs than anything else. But I am getting ahead of myself because you may associate concentration camps with Jewish people, people that the Reich saw as racially inferior. So the question remains, how would they be good lab rats? Because, like, if they're physically inferior to you, how are you gonna test on them? Like, because you have a peak physical Aryan shit going on. Like, you see them as subhuman. That's not accurate medical testing. Like, that's not a thing. So initially, the camp held the politically undesirable socialists, Communists, Social Democrats. I Shouldn't have to keep telling you this, but the Nazis were not socialists. They used the term social democrats, but they were not. They were not. They were not in the slightest. They were not any of it. They were just a bunch of pricks. Okay, so you also had Catholics, Jehovah Witnesses and the asocials. I think I covered this before. But asocial people were anyone who were not seen as worthy when it came to the Reich. Like the homeless, anyone who wasn't working, anyone in receipt of a welfare payment, homosexuals. So they all came under that asocial banner, you know. So the idea was that these women would be re educated through slave. Sorry, sorry, forced labor. But we're gonna, we're gonna circle back to that in a little while. The medical block 10 looked like, well, a regular medical block, but was effectively a torture chamber under the guise of scientific research. Block 10 had a laboratory, which I think Dexter probably would have had a better one. And depending on your age, you either will or won't know which Dexter I'm referring to. It had sterilization facilities and an operating table. Dr. Herta Oberheiser, one of the first women in Germany to hold a medical doctorate. Although that's not saying much because a Nazi medical degree was just a shitty ideology smothered in eugenics with a Roman salute on top. So Oberheiser, Gebhardt and Percy Treiter were under the commandant Fritzuren, under doctor's authority. It was never, never questioned by anyone. Not prisoners, not camp staff, not SS guards, not the, not the Osahanine. None of them. Right, none of them. The doctors had a team of SS assistants. These were not members of the ss by the way. Like the amount of papers I read that they were labeled as SS assistants, which is like assistant to the ss, not assistant to wear the ss. Which I think is a good distinction we need to make. Because they were often function Shaftlinger who were recruited from the prisoners. So this is just more abuse, more control and a whole show of power within the camp. And Himmler, fucking Himmler, he was a big fan of human experimentation, seeing it as critical to the Nazis racial purity and eugenics program. Because they had hemlock support, they had even more protection for the doctors and their experiments and the power structures within the camp. I mean all the camps really. They were designed to allow the medical torture to occur. And the doctor supported by a network of assistants, administrators and of course high ranking Nazis. They had a carte blanche to do as they pleased as long as it was done with the intent of furthering the Aryan race, morality, empathy and ethics were not that big of a deal here. The experiments conducted at Ravensbruck didn't mean shit. And I feel the need to confirm this. They didn't mean shit. Y' all can, you know, go on about, oh, well, look what we learned from all their experiments. The majority of the shit they did, the majority of the torture that they did, the suffering that they actively participated in and ensured continued, all, most of that. The majority of that 80, 90% of that didn't mean shit. Okay, let's be clear. It didn't mean anything. Okay. There was no valuable research to be obtained by this, right? No, no, no. If this had gone through any sort of, like, appropriate system, most of this wouldn't have made it through, you know, the hypothesis stage. Like, it wouldn't have gone past that. The abstract. No, sorry. I'm not sorry. The purpose of them was to advance the Nazi war effort further the ideals of racial superiority and eugenics and to test the limits of human endurance. The Nazis were bloody obsessed with racial impurity, and so they wanted to ensure undesirable procreation was not an issue. So they fought this war against internal enemies. So Roma and Sinti people were sterilized, some as young as eight years old. And. And how did they do this? Radiation. Radiation was one of the ways they did this, where they aggressively radiated the wounds of children, causing them excruciating pain, sterilizing them, and quite often killing them. Like, it would create. It would create growths and welts in the body and people would suffer, they would be in excruciating pain and they would die. So you've got sterilization, which prevents people from being pregnant. But what if you're already pregnant? Well, abortions were common and often performed late term and brutally for the majority of the camp's run. If a baby was born in the camp, they did not survive. Now you will hear the odd story of infants being born later, sort of 1945, sort of as the Allies are making their approach. And babies that are born in Ravensbruck at the time, some did survive, but before that they did not because they were murdered. Sometimes they were left on the floor of a sealed room and just left to either succumb to ailments or starve, so on and so forth. Others, when they were born, they were smothered or they were drowned, usually in front of the mother. And in some cases they were just thrown into the crematoria alive. Although on occasion a doctor might find it interesting. To experiment on one. So the most well known experimentations were the bone, muscle and nerve regeneration and bone transplantation experiments. These were designed to simulate injuries suffered by Nazi soldiers out in the world. So Gelpart would deliberately injure healthy women, breaking bones, amputating them, cutting them, and at one point they even cut out segments of thigh muscle just because these women became known as rabbits. Doctors would try to transplant nerve tissues and bones. Sometimes they were injured just to see how it progressed. Others were used to test hypothermia cures. They were chilled, sometimes dunked, their temperatures brought down to close to death. Sometimes they were immersed in ice cold water or exposed to zero temperatures until they lost consciousness or died. Then they tested different methods to heat them up, including body heat. And by body heat, I mean they were raped by guards. So when I read this, and I was reading the reports on this, I mean, apart from the fact that I'm already really fucking angry about it, as I'm sure you can tell. On top of that, the language that was used about the heating them up was they were forced to have sex with guards. It's fucking rape. They were assaulted and raped by guards because it was just another way for them to just fucking insert their power. And they're just like, oh, well, we did it for exper. What? I'm sorry, I'm sorry, were you. Are you seriously saying that this is your plan? Are you going to go to, you know, the higher ups and go, well, the best way to treat heimothermia and our soldiers is for them to bang each other. Ah, you think that's going to fly in the Reich like. No, no, that was never the intention. The whole purpose of it was to go, well, we just wanted to rule it out. What? No, no. Then of course you had the starvation. They were starving anyway and so they studied malnutrition. Like just how many calories did a body need to survive? And the doctors took meticulous notes as the prisoners slowly starved to death. Then of course, we had the sulfonamide trials. Sulfonamide was an early type of antibiotics. Female prisoners were cut open wounds created in their flesh, wounds that would be deliberately infected. You know, they would infect it with bacteria including streptococcus gas, gangrene and tetanus. And this was for the benefit of the German armed forces. They wanted to replicate battlefield wounds. Blood circulation was interrupted by tying off blood vessels at both ends to simul that infection was aggravated by shoving ground up glass, dirt and wood shavings into the wound. Sulfonamide, sulfanilide and other drugs were trialed on treating the infections. Some died from experimentation, others were just killed after. And that's, that's what they did. That's just what they did. But being in the medical block was not the only way to be killed at the camp. And when it came to work, when it came to labour, the women would be selected for work call, which conveniently overlapped with roll call. They could be out there digging ditches, creating parts of a Heinkel, which made aircraft for the army, so the Luftwaffe, they could be building V2 rockets for Siemens. They could be working in textile mills or making uniforms for soldiers. Like one of the things they had to do was sort through the uniforms of like Soviet soldiers, which were often like dirty, infected with lice and all this. So you had them, you had people that were on like corpse detail, so they would move corpses. Like there was one work detail which basically had a big, I want to say like a plough, except it was a big stone and they were just drag it until they died. So when they left the, you know, the main camp where the barracks are, and they had to travel to all of these factories to work, they would walk miles. Like you're talking miles. And so eventually sort of like Siemens, I know what they had done is they had moved their, their sort of buildings, their little factory workshops closer because they were like, no, they're too tired, they, they don't have this. And the women who worked in the factories, like factory detail was one of the worst that you could get because you're more likely to die if you were on factory detail. Like you have an 11 hour workday and you were not allowed a break, you just weren't allowed one. And that's, ah, Now I don't want to say it's a form of labor because this is slavery. So because the majority of the Ravensbruck camp prisoners were political prisoners, asocials, etc. Their heads weren't necessarily shaved, especially if they were blond. See, Ravensbruck, being a female, you know, concentration camp, because that's where they put them. It was the main supplier for the brothels set up in most major camps towards the end of the war. And you hear people argue, oh, it was voluntary, it was a voluntary thing. No, some women were sent there as punishment, first of all. Secondly, there's no such thing as voluntary when you're a prisoner, right? If you're a slave, you can't volunteer to do a thing because other people have the power. They are controlling you, like, don't, don't act like this was a choice that isn't a choice. These women, desperate, starving, suffering, many of whom not speaking the same language as each other, they're here and they are told that they're going to be freed from the camp system in six months if they, if they volunteer for this service. Nobody was ever released. They were never released early. It was a lie. What? The Nazis lied. Shocking. What's next, the British government. So these women got slightly better rations and they were exempt from factory work, but they actually had a higher death rate from sexual abuse and venereal diseases. So there's this whole thing of, of the brothels in the camps, and the brothels in the camps weren't necessarily there to service the SS because it was seen as a violation to, to have sexual relations with a Jewish person. You know, so if they were Jewish, couldn't do that. Asocials and things, you got, you got wiggle room there, which, yeah, otherwise you're like a race defiler, you know, and so, and so a lot of the purpose for these brothels within the camps was for the male inmates. Like, a lot of it was, you did a good job, go have sex now. Like that was a thing, which again, is just another way to elicit control. So although you had more women dying in factory work or as a result of factory work, the death rate comparatively, because obviously less women are being sent to the brothels, you have a higher death rate for women in the brothels than those working in the factory. But more people, more women died doing factory work. But no matter which way you put it, they were commodities. Now, adult women weren't the only people in the camp. There were also children. The arrivals list at Ravensbruck named 881 children between ages 2 and 16 from 18 different nations between 1939 and in 1945. Children would arrive with their mothers. The largest on mass, I believe, was after the Vossa Uprising. Children would have to line up with their mothers for roll call, which could take hours. And they had to stand. They had to do it. I don't know if you've ever met a toddler. That's not an easy thing to do. When the women were working, the children had to stay indoors in the barracks. When they turned 12, boys were sent to the men's camp and girls were sent to work in the factories. And with the combination of diseases sweeping through the camp, children were often the first to die. Now, I've seen people argue, people who never took a biology class or Home ec, because they teach you body science and home ec, right? That's part of it. It's not just learning how to bake a pie, right? So I've heard these kind of people argue that, you know, children don't need as many calories and children should survive longer because they need to eat less. No, no. What's, what's something you notice about children? It's not the same in adults, right? They grow, they get bigger, right. A lot of their calorie consumption is used to help them grow, right? That's how that works, right? Adults, we've stopped growing, we just need calories to maintain, right. That's why kids can snack, right? Because they're just consuming more calories a little bit often to keep them growing and producing more cells and blood and all that jazz, right? All that. So they're doing that. That's what they need them for. And so children, because they actually need to consume more, then of course, if they've got any sort of pre existing conditions like those can also, also force them to require sometimes double, triple the calories that other children would need. You know, so children, because they are smaller, they are more susceptible and so they would die. Some women were worked to death, leaving children orphaned, with no one to care for them, making them susceptible to dangers. And then sometimes you would get these, they'd call them camp mothers. So they would just take care, they would claim a child and look after them and care for them. And some of these kids managed to survive somehow, I say somehow through care and community and protection from other women. Like they didn't have this child. This was not their child, this was someone else. And they were in a situation in which their lives, their lives were on the line and they still went out of their way to protect them. Like that's how they survived, that's how. So like I said earlier, some babies that were born near the end of the war managed to survive as well. Conditions worsened over time at the camp and the crematoria just couldn't keep up with the bodies of the dead. And on top of that, it just, it wasn't running at maximum capacity because Germany was having a coke shortage. Coke, if you don't know, it's, it's coal based. It's a coal based fuel, right? So it's a little bit like charcoal, you know, in it's, it's a very consistent like burning unit. Like it keeps a very consistent burn. And it's sort of chalky is probably the best way I could describe it. And so there's a shortage in Germany because, well, the war and they don't have the same supply chains. It's kind of like how they invented Fanta. They just didn't have the supply chains. Of course, I had to make a fantastiche reference. Of course I did. I can't help myself. Listen back to the Coca Cola episode, which I think is like episode three or something. If you don't listen to it, it's shit. So I could redo that one. So in beginning of 1942, the SS started selections and the prisoners who were deemed too injured, weak or sick to work were killed. Initially they were shot, but bullets are expensive and time consuming. They decided instead to transfer them to Bernburg, which had been used for Action T4. Action T4 was the state sponsored euthanasia program where they killed disabled people, adults, children, psychiatric patients, etc. It had a gas chamber because of course they tested out on disabled people first. As part of Operation Einfhr F ein Trie, the SS sent 1600 female prisoners and 300 male prisoners to start. Half were Jewish, 25 were Roma, 13 were Jehovah's Witnesses. The next round of the euthanasia killings happened later that year. This carried on until 1945, when a gas chamber was constructed at the camp. And during those two and a half years, around 60 transports left for Hatheim near Linz in Austria. Each of those transports held anywhere between 60 to 1,000 prisoners each time. Some weren't sent away at all. Some were just killed using lethal injections in the camp infirmary. Others were transferred out to Auschwitz Birkenau. And like the gas chamber in Ravensbruck was only running for three, four months. And during that time they gassed 6,000 prisoners. What's interesting is when the camp opened up, initially it was seen as like a really decent prison. Like you had women who were sent there who had been placed in sort of camps and prisons like in the Soviet areas that the Reich had taken over. And like there was one such prisoner she was talking about, like when she first went there, she was given like proper meals. You had porridge with dried fruit, you had coffee, like it was a substantial breakfast, right? By the time the camps were nearing the end, they were getting black bread and like a little like a half cup of coffee. Like it was barely enough to sustain you. But when it started it was like, oh, look, we're treating our prisoners really well. Look at all the food they're getting, so on and so forth. And like the barracks were supposed to be initially like One to a bed, and by the end was four. And they were topping and tailing, so, like, your head was next to someone's feet. The bodies of the dead, they would just leave on the floor of the barracks. And they used to have, like, toilets. I say toilets. They had latrines and they had sort of little bathrooms to clean themselves. And by the end, there wasn't really anything to clean themselves with. It was. It was filthy. But the women of the camp, they would have, like, I want to say, like a cleaning ritual. And they would make the effort to wash themselves, you know, with whatever they could so that they had this semblance of. Of. Of normalcy, you know, something that was like a little protest to the abuse they were suffering. So many women were in this camp, like, from a whole host of backgrounds. Like, you had, like, a princess and a watchmaker and a French member of the SOE, the Special Operations Executive, which is like MI5 before it was MI5. So you've got, you know, again, princesses, watchmakers, spies, Irish nuns, because of course there are. Go, please go into any country and try and not find an Irish nun. I dare you. I mean, I think currently the only place there isn't an Irish one is Palestine, and that's because they've probably already been shot. So what I'm gonna do as well is I'm gonna do an episode, a Bitty Sod probably, where I'm just gonna, like, explain a few people who were, you know, murdered in these camps or died as a result of being in these camps. And again, I'm not a fan of nuns at the best of times, but these guys, I mean, respect for some of them, you know, I mean, some of them did. Did very well, you know, and, you know, weren't. Weren't horrible. They actually did things to save lives. So. So many people died in these camps. So apart from gas chambers and little injection and being transferred to Buchanau, you had around 4,000 prisoners who were sent to Ucomak, which was a youth camp for deviant girls, which had been dissolved because they needed the room. I think I'll cover that as well in another video. Some people, when they were brought here, were murdered by gassing, starvation, or strychnine poisoning. Every two to three weeks, the prisoners would be tested by the SS commandant and the doctors by lifting their skirts above their heads and running. Anyone with scars, swollen ankles, or were too weak to keep up were sent to recovery at Midweida. Sometimes this meant that they were locked in a room, left to Die others were put in a special van that had been converted into mobile gas chambers with the exhaust pipe directly connected to the freight compartment. And people were dead within 15 to 20 minutes. More than 132,000 women and children were incarcerated at Ravensbruck. It is estimated that 92,000 died by starvation, executions or disease in the last few months of the war. And with the Red army approaching, the SS decided to cut their losses and exterminate as many prisoners as possible. They wanted to get rid of the evidence to remove as many witnesses of their crimes as possible, because they were caught. They were caught, they shitted at the fan and the Red army was coming for them. So in March 1945, 130 pregnant women and babies were gassed. They tried to cover up their shit, some of the documents destroyed, but oh, they had so many because they were fastidious. They even tried to manipulate the perception of the camp. They collected a group of the healthiest French women and had them sent back to France with the promise that they would not speak of the worst of it. Basically, the Swedish and Danish Red Cross had. Well, they existed. And so they found basically the healthiest looking girls they had. They grabbed their inmates, they put them on these and were just like, we will let you live, but watch out. And some women, till the day they died, could not speak of the horrors that happened to them at the camp. They could not speak of the worst. At the end of March 1945, the SS decided to transfer the archives and machinery from the workshop to a safer place. On the 27th and 28th of April, all women who still could walk were ordered to leave the camp. In a death march, 24,500 people marched. 3,000 women and 300 men would survive the march. Ravensbruck was liberated by the Russian army on 30 April 1945. So they came in, they saw the horror of the camp and they were told by those who could not leave that others had marched ahead of them. And the survivors of the march were liberated by a Soviet scout unit some hours later. After liberation came the trials. The Ravensburg trials were a series of British military tribunals held In Hamburg between December 1946 and July 1948, the purpose of which was to bring to justice those responsible for the atrocities at Rahabensbroeck. So remember, it's the largest concentration camp for women in the entire German Reich. Those responsible for subjecting women to forced labour, execution, starvations and medical experiments. The trials were conducted in like seven separate proceedings and they would target a Range of accused camp commandants, SS doctors, the aufsherenen, so the female guards, the prisoner functionaries, so the functionschaftlinge. So the people, the prisoners that they had recruited to work for the Nazis, like in the camps, which, again, it's a bit of a sticky wicket, because in a place where you are under physical and psychological torture, is there really a choice? Is there really an option? Like, this is where the idea of just following orders. Well, like, it doesn't fly with me. Any member of the SS who was like, I was just following a goddess. No, motherfucker, you don't make it up the ladder. And the ss, like, you don't get that high by just following orders. If you are a prisoner and you are being forced to work in the prison in which you are imprisoned, where, like, it's do or die, I. I don't really see you having much of a choice, especially when you are, you know, you are being tortured yourself because you've got sleep deprivation, starvation, like, physical abuse. You've got it all. Like, they deliberately caused suffering in the camps. Like, that's the goal. So those who were collaborating or involved in this, the charges included murder, brutal abuse, deportation for forced labor, medical experiments that maimed or killed prisoners. And these trials were significant in that they placed many female perpetrators, which were often overlooked in accounts of Nazi crimes, on the same legal footing as their male counterparts. And the outcomes reflected the severity of the crimes proven in court. Many defendants were convicted with sentences ranging from prison terms to execution by hanging. Others were acquitted when evidence was insufficient or their involvement deemed minimal. Testimony from survivors was crucial. And this painted a harrowing picture of daily life in the camp. In exposing the systemic cruelty, like the Ravensbuk trials, they didn't just provide justice for victims, but they also expanded the historical understanding of the Holocaust. And this challenged the stereotype that women in the Third Reich were merely passive participants. And because they were, they were involved. Like Ilma Gracey from last week's episode, she was involved. And as someone who's always fighting and arguing about how women are often left out of the history books, how their stories are hidden and removed, and everything they've done is swept under the rug and ignored, it would be disingenuous of me, it would be insincere, and it would make me a fucking terrible historian if I didn't talk about this too, if I didn't bring this up. Because the majority of the people running the camp on the day to day were women. The Officer Heron, and it was them. Because a Lot of the men were fighting the war, so they had to hire women, even though they didn't want women to have jobs, which I'm going to clarify, even though I really shouldn't have to. But that is not a win. That is not a step forward for feminism. That's just cruelty and murder. So as I was researching this, I came across an interesting statistic, and that was the rate of death in Ravensbruck or from Ravensburg. And it was, I think, 42%. Basically, depending on where I look, it kind of goes anywhere between 39 and 42. And if it is 42%, then that would mean that within the German borders, like we're talking 1937 borders of Germany, the core country, that Ravensbruck would have had the highest death rate out of any of the German camps. Now, that's only if that's. That's correct. I haven't been able to fully validate that, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was true, because around about that, it's Nwan Rammer and Boggen Belsen, like, they're very, very close, but only because the mortality rate, I think, ran longer in the Ravens book. So it's a very interesting statistic to think about. Anyway, so those three are very interesting to consider because people talk about how there wasn't death happening within Nazi borders, like of their own country, as opposed to where they'd invaded. But, yeah, that's that. 132,000 passed through the camp. 92,000 did not survive. And like all fucking cowards, when they were caught, they tried to cover it up. And so ends our story on Ravensbruck concentration camp. It feels really weird to say if you enjoyed this episode. So if you were informed by this episode, if you were educated by this episode, if you were made to cry, God damn it. By this episode rating review five stars. If you're thinking, geez, she didn't say, fuck this for a game of soldiers, I didn't have a point. I didn't have a moment where that was appropriate. But there it is. I've said the catchphrase and in the end it's there. You've got it. But here's the thing. I know I haven't covered everything in this episode, but we're already raging on an hour and it feels weird to say if you liked this episode or enjoyed this episode. If you were informed by this episode, if you were educated in any way by this episode, feel free to rate and review five stars. You can say nice things about me. You don't have to say nice things about the episode because it's horrible and I know I missed stuff. I know there's things that I haven't included in this, but there's so much. There's so much. So I am gonna cover some pieces and some people in the, in the whole like bitisode, I think, and a few bits on social media just to kind of COVID everything. I'm gonna try and do different parts, but because I'm focusing on Nazi concentration camps, it has given me somewhat of a finite space. Not a lot, because there's a huge, huge amount that I can talk about and I've barely touched on Outwith Germany. So I'm going to be dealing with that and covering a few more and we're going to power through and get through as much. Sounds really weird to say it. To try and educate you as much as possible. Although I feel like with the recent happenings, I'm going to be having to explain Gestapo to people, which is gonna be super fun. It's not. It's not gonna be fun at all. Recommendation time. We're just gonna skip right into recommendation time because like, I'm on the socials, you know where I am. You just, just go find me Katie Charlwood, who did want. Now one of those is gonna be right. Okay, so we have, we have watching for watching. I'm gonna recommend, because it's the 20th anniversary watch when the Levees Broke like, or I think there's one on National Geographic. It's a race against time. Another Hurricane Katrina documentary. They are, they are powerful and worth watching and it really gives a very human side to the story because history doesn't exist in a vacuum. The whole is the sum of its parts, you know, and, and I just think it's very important to have like the whole story, like from the boots in the ground, from the people that survived it. For listening. Sidebar. Because I haven't done a sidebar this whole time because I've been too upset. So I have tried listening to four separate podcast series. Just anything that has that sort of like eight to ten episodes. Like, I'll settle for a six episode series if it's really good. You know, something finite. I want something that has a beginning, a middle and end. You know, I want to hear a series like over my dead body, Dr. Death, the cotton Club Murder, West Cork, you know, something like. But there is nothing I despise more when I'm listening to a podcast than a reenactment. I can't stand them. I can't I've actually stopped listening because of very, very poor reenactments. Because, like, if I wanted to listen to a radio play, I'd listen to a radio play. I love a radio play. But don't put radio play in my podcast. I'm. I'm here to listen to you tell the story. Like, I don't mind if you bring someone else to do the odd voice or you have a quote in. But don't reenact a scene, like, unless you're doing it for humorous purposes, which I can. I can be fine with. But I. I don't listen to a lot of, like, humor podcasts, actually, because I don't. I just. I just don't. I'm like, inform me. Like, tell me the whole story. Like, I want to hear the bits. But, like, and there was one that I tried to listen to, and I thought, this is going to be really interesting because the whole point is that it tells two sides of the story. And I was like, oh, this is going to be really good. It was not. It was not. I don't even know if I should try, like, the second episode to even get into it. You know what? I'm not done yet. You know what else bothers me? When a podcast has a misleading name. Motherf cker. Don't do that to me. No, don't call yourself Cult Talk and then have two episodes on Cults and the rest of it just be. Here's weird Crime. It's like, well, no, don't do that. Tell me about cults. Like, come on, there's. There's been enough of them. You can tell me things. Or it'll be like, oh, it's. It's the Poisoner's Notes, and it's like, great. And then it'll be like two episodes in Poison and the rest will just be general crime. And I'm like, why are you telling me this? Like, this isn't. This isn't even vaguely related. Like, I. I want to know what I'm getting into before I start. Like, I know what Generation Y is about. Small town murder is Ron Seal, Diamond Goat does exactly what it says on the tin, right? Crime in Sports. Crime in Sports. Right? Sports, sports, crime. Sporty people doing crime, right? Which is like one of my. You know what? Listen to Crime in Sports. I've decided, Listen to Crime in Sports. It's a really, really good show. I enjoy it. You don't need to know anything about sports to enjoy it. That's your listening recommendation. Because fuck it. Now reading and this is where I'm gonna get serious. I am going to urge you to read the Eyes of A Diary of Resilience by Plesya Al Khad. It is beautiful and optimistic and horrific and painful, and it is such a worthwhile read. It's heavy, but it's worth listening to. Her story is worth listening to. And with everything that's happened, because at time of recording the Al Jazeera, entire, entire Al Jazeera journalists and Gaza have been murdered by Israel. That is what's happened. And when you're killing the journalists, when you're killing the people that are showing what is happening, that are telling the truth, then in no way are you protecting anyone you are destroying. And with that, I. I am going to bid you good night. Adios. Au revoir. Au vuirizel, my friends. Bye Bye.
- [66:30]
Katie Charlwood
Beth, you're in charge of ordering the tacos for the meeting today?
- [66:33]
Ben
Yeah, I'm not going to order the tacos. Uh, what? I'm going to Easy Cater the tacos. With Easy Cater, you can order from a huge variety of restaurants, track expenses and save time.
- [66:44]
Katie Charlwood
Nice.
- [66:45]
Ben
Oh, by the way, you're emailing the meeting notes, right?
- [66:47]
Katie Charlwood
No, I'm going to easy mail them. Where's my music?
- [66:52]
Ben
Sorry, Ben, there's no Easycater for that.
- [66:55]
Katie Charlwood
Ezcator the easy way to order food for work. Order now@ezcator.com Acast helps creators launch, grow.
- [67:04]
Ben
And monetize their podcasts everywhere acast.com hey.
- [67:11]
Unknown
Do you want to hear the next big new tech podcast hit before anyone else, check out the daily tech news show Experiment Week. We're swapping out our normal shows to try out some new ideas. We've done this before and launched big hits like behind the Data, the Tech John and more. This year we have exclusive Android faithful reactions to the Pixel 9 event. It's all on the DTNS feed starting August 11th. Don't miss it.
- [67:42]
Ben
Acast helps creators launch, grow and monetize their podcasts everywhere acest. Com.