Ravensbrück was inaugurated by the Nazis in 1939 to serve as a model concentration camp for female political prisoners, initially housing the Nazis’ political enemies, some of whom were Jewish.
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Over the six years the camp was in operation, thousands of political prisoners, Jehovah's witnesses, criminals, and those considered “asocial”—a category that included both lesbians and the Roma-Sinti—were deported to Ravensbrück, located about 50 miles from Berlin . Prisoners became slave laborers and the victims of numerous torturous actions.
As more and more prisoners arrived at Ravensbrück to exceed acceptable capacity, the already miserable rations and housing conditions were stretched even more thinly. By the end of the war and the camp’s liberation in 1945, some 132,000 women and children had been imprisoned in Ravensbrück.
Ravensbrück, the concentration camp that the Nazis created to incarcerate women, received its first transport of prisoners in the spring of 1939. While not created as a camp specifically for Jewish women, they were among the camp's inmate population for nearly all of its six- year existence. Of the total of some 132,000 women and children who were imprisoned in the camp, some 20 percent were Jewish.
The others were political prisoners (some of whom were also Jews), Jehovah’s Witnesses, criminals, and those considered “asocial”—a category that included both lesbians and Gypsies. At least one of the women who was imprisoned and ordered murdered at the camp, Henny Schermann, was arrested as both a lesbian and a Jew. Like the term “asocial,” the term “criminal” has to be taken in its Nazi context. While it might refer to a woman who fits our own concept of a criminal, for example a thief or a murderer, it also included women who broke Nazi-imposed laws.
Even the term “political prisoner” was broad, including resistance fighters, those who helped Jews, members of the Soviet Army, and a small number of women (one of whom was Jewish) held as hostages because they had powerful relatives. Each category had its own colored triangle, sewn on the women’s uniforms: red for political, purple for Jehovah’s Witnesses, black for asocial, green for criminal, and yellow for Jews. If Jewish prisoners were also classified as political, they wore both a red and a yellow triangle, arranged as a Star of David. Jewish women were always set apart by their “race” on camp lists, even when they were also in another category.