Political Analysis and Global Affairs

  It begins under a gray northern sky. A line of wooden barracks. Cold wind curling off the swamp. May 1939 — the first women arrive. Ravensbrück sat about fifty miles north of Berlin, remote yet close enough for trains to arrive on schedule. It was the only major Nazi concentration camp built specifically for women. Six years later, the fences would hold more than 130,000 prisoners — women, children, and, eventually, a few thousand men. Half would never leave alive. Built for Control, Not Just Confinement The SS didn’t build Ravensbrück to hold criminals. It built it to break people. After Hitler took power, Heinrich Himmler’s SS had filled Germany with camps for “undesirables.” By the late 1930s, overcrowding pushed the regime to build a women’s facility. The village of Ravensbrück, isolated but linked to Berlin, became the site. It opened with 18 barracks, meant for 6,000 inmates. By 1945, there were more than 36,000. The prisoners came from over thirty countries: Poles...