Life and Death in Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women

I have read most books about the concentration and extermination camps built by the Nazi's. I have also read a lot about Stalin's Gulags. This book was different in so many ways from the others. The research Ms. Helm did astounded me from the very first paragraph. I cannot begin to imagine the amount of work she put into writing this amazing book. It was very difficult to read due to the pain of these women, and I can barely think about what it must have been like to interview survivors and read, first-hand, the documents about this horrible place. I was deeply moved by the stories of the women who suffered so terribly. The detail in the book paints a picture that is so real that you can smell the camp. One horror follows another and I just wanted to see anyone escape and live. A monumental achievement.

Heretofore unknown history comes alive in this amazing tome. I know I will find many, many nuggets of insight when I read it again. Well researched and quite readable considering the horrific subject matter. Well done, Ms. Helm.

If you want to learn information beyond the Holocaust this is the book to read. Ravensbruck is the story of women who were tortured and murdered because they were depicted as just animals to be discarded.

Ms. Helm needs to be commended by bringing the history of Ravensbruck into the lime light.

Their history needs to be included in the annuals of the holocaust.

This book needs to be discussed in schools and in women studies at the university level.

Thank you Ms. Helm with your excellent education on the women who needed to be introduced to the world.

Whether Ravensbrück was an extermination camp or not is a cruel matter of semantics : life had no meaning , death was a bureaucratic event , prisoners were used and abused by the German staff , medical experimentation was a daily event ( inmates where then "upgraded" to rabbit status) and Siemens " efficiently" used the strongest women as slave-workers until they became too weak and were eliminated.
Prisoners were all women : gypsies,Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals,communists,prostitutes,political dissidents,few Jewish prisoners initially,mainly German,then after 1939,Polish,Russian,French,British etc.
How and why anybody survived this nightmare is well researched in this superbly disturbing book, which follows the prisoners until their final liberation and rape by the Soviet troops.
How many died will never be known : they were starved,beaten,poisoned,shot,hanged or gassed.
Whether justice will ever be done depends on the testimony of the survivors and on the skill of authors like Sarah Helm to relay the horrors of the daily lives of tens of thousands of innocent victims.

Whether Ravensbrück was an extermination camp or not is a cruel matter of semantics : life had no meaning , death was a bureaucratic event , prisoners were used and abused by the German staff , medical experimentation was a daily event ( inmates where then "upgraded" to rabbit status) and Siemens " efficiently" used the strongest women as slave-workers until they became too weak and were eliminated.
Prisoners were all women : gypsies,Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals,communists,prostitutes,political dissidents,few Jewish prisoners initially,mainly German,then after 1939,Polish,Russian,French,British etc.
How and why anybody survived this nightmare is well researched in this superbly disturbing book, which follows the prisoners until their final liberation and rape by the Soviet troops.
How many died will never be known : they were starved,beaten,poisoned,shot,hanged or gassed.
Whether justice will ever be done depends on the testimony of the survivors and on the skill of authors like Sarah Helm to relay the horrors of the daily lives of tens of thousands of innocent victims.

Disturbing, realistic and lengthy. It could have been abbreviated a bit more and still made its point. I am a WWII history buff - especially when it comes to the issues regarding the Holocaust. Well done. well documented, but LENGTHY to the point where you needed a scorecard to refresh your memory on the characters.

A major work By Sandra Helm,depicting the horrors of Nazi Germany!It tells of actual people who were in the death camps,and who suffered unbelievable torture, and deaths of whole families because of their nationality or their religion,or their political beliefs!The author has done extensive research,and interviewed survivors of Nazism.As one reads this book, that tells of events over sixty years ago,one has to question the happenings in our world today.A small group of evil people who manage to poison a whole country and allowed this ideology to take over countries,kill millions and wipe out a whole generation of young men and women.These are the true events that took place in a women,s concentration camp,where every day was a fight to survive!

An astonishing book...I can't imagine the horrors the women of this camp experienced but the author did an astounding work as a chronicle to what happened there and those who had to experience such a place. We also got a video featuring war film of both Ravensbruck and Buchenwald which were a most interesting accompaniment to this amazing work. Heaven rest the souls of those who lost their dignity and lives to such a place.

Interesting and a story that should be told about everyone that the Nazi's incarcerated. What is interesting is how the International Committee of the Red Cross, not wanting to "upset" the Germans just ignored everything they knew. Despicable.

This book is a must read for anyone interested in the WWII concentration and death camps. Very well researched and the writing is top notch. A very long book, but I finished it quickly since I couldn't put it down.

Excellent, thoroughly studied, enormous amount of work, insightful, and goes along with a true life story I know of a concentration camp survivor who was there at Ravensbruck for 10 months - Corrie ten Boom of the Netherlands

Ms. Helm has done an amazing amount of research to bring the lives and horrors to life of some of the women who passed through the gates of Ravensbruck. I've read dozens of memoirs from survivors and yet this book presents new information. Considering the content and knowing the outcome, I can't help but say this is an incredibly good read.

This was a very well researched , exhaustive study where one learns many new details about Ravensbruck . My one personal reservation is that as I was reading , I had a growing alarm that the book really does not convey the absolute horror of a woman's concentration camp , where approx 90,000 of the 134.000 inmates passing through died before the wars end . And it wasn't even a death camp ! It felt in reading more like a summer girl's camp gone wacko , with several mean girl counsellors , some antics and matching blue and white checked blankets !! These poor victims were not sent to be returned . They died of misery , starvation , disease , poor to no sanitation , whippings , hangings and torture . Even describing Auschwitz , designed specifically as a death camp , again yielding lots of great new details (cudos ) , does not convey to me the misery upon misery heaped on its poor victims with the intent to murder each and every one of them .

I have been interested in anything pertaining to the Holocaust and WW II ever since my days of teaching history nearly two decades ago. It is one of the darkest periods in human history and there is a large body of work on the subject. Sarah Helm's monumental work on the Ravensbruck concentration camp, a camp located in northern Germany, designed exclusively for women inmates and largely operated by women, can be considered an essential addition to Holocaust and WW II literature as it provides an in-depth look at the camp and shows evidence of meticulous research.

I have read several memoirs by survivors of Ravensbruck, so I had an idea of what life had been like for inmates. There's "The Dawn of Hope: A Memoir of Ravensbruck" by Genevieve de Gaulle Anthonioz and "Michelangelo in Ravensbruck: One Woman's War Against the Nazis" by Karolina Lanckoronska. Corrie Ten Boom, who authored "The Hiding Place" was also once an inmate at Ravensbruck during WW II. Helm's book however, provides an almost exhaustive view of the camp, from its origins to the daily operations, the lives of the inmates and guards, and more. The camp was opened in May 1939 and liberated by the Red Army six years later. Initially, the camp's prisoners consisted almost entirely of Germans - communists, Jehovah's Witnesses, prostitutes, criminals. Gypsies and anyone deemed a threat by the Nazis. As the war progressed, the camp began to fill up with prisoners from different parts of Europe which had fallen to the Third Reich. This work is also important because so many documents and evidence pertaining to the camp had been destroyed, and author Sarah Helm has painstakingly pieced together the camp's history through much effort and compilation of personal papers of former prisoners such as Vera Atkins, a wartime officer with the British secret services Special Operations Executive (SOE), other survivors' accounts, memoirs, etc.

The witnesses and survivors' accounts are riveting and horrifying to read. Some of these accounts are based on eyewitness testimony at the war crimes trials and I was disturbed to read of the deliberate killing of babies born at Ravensbruck through starvation. Such horrifying accounts of deliberate Nazi cruelty abounds in this work. It serves as a stark reminder of man's inhumanity and is a lesson to us all. Highly recommended.

Well researched and documented, but kept going over the same ground. About half way through I had to stop. And I'm a compulsive reader. Would have been an extremely powerful work if it could have been condensed. Never forget!

The Ravensbruck concentration camp for women was one of the last to be liberated at the end of World War II. Then the camp and its records were locked behind the Iron Curtain, so that little was ever written about it after the war. This meticulously researched book, RAVENSBRUCK, is a scholarly work that is nevertheless highly readable. It tells the full story of the Ravensbruck camp, commencing with its opening in 1939, in the words of female prisoners who survived long enough to write or talk about it; and, in some instances, in the words of their female prison guards.

The atrocious treatment of the prisoners is well documented, based on the author's face-to-face interviews with former prisoners, on their letters and papers supplied to the author by their families, and on some post-WWII trial testimony. The author's clear understanding of the entire SS prison camp system (including transportation routes to the Ravensbruck camp) provides the background structure for the prisoners' individual stories. This reader especially weeps for the prisoners whose stories of the early days at Ravensbruck are included, but who actually died at Ravensbruck. Because the author uses the women's words to tell the camp's story chronologically, it sometimes catches the reader by surprise to learn that a particular prisoner who survived much of the worst that the camp had to offer did not ultimately survive.

The camp's locale, layout, rules, power structure (including the use of "trusted" prisoners to manage the other prisoners, and why this worked), meaningless work details (for example, shoveling sand into one pile and then shoveling the same sand into another pile), and punishments are all described in detail. In some ways, the treatment of the early Ravensbruck prisoners is all the more shocking because the majority were NOT Jewish, but were political prisoners--women picked up because they were Jehovah's Witnesses, prostitutes, Gypsies, communists, or petty criminals. For history buffs and for serious students of the WWII concentration camps, this is a must read.

This is one monumental work so important for our world. I have read hundreds of books on the Holocaust and this is the most comprehensive book I have taken on. It it loaded with things I have never read before. It is a very long book and difficult to read just due to the subject it is heartbreaking and it angers you that humans could do these things to one another...horrific.

A former prisoner Grete Burber-Neuman hears her doorbell ring one day in 1957 and there stands Johanna Langefield the former head guard at Ravensbrűck. She has come to explain her actions, wow not sure I would have let her in but I have seen time and time again Holocaust survivors have a huge ability to forgive, thus they survived and had good lives. Grete wrote it all down. To me that is a huge lesson these accounts give.

There is so much to share I don't feel it is a spoiler to share just a few things that really stuck out to me. Himmler was an absolute beast that is putting it mild. He was the man over all the concentration camps. This new camp was built before the war was in full action. To my surprise the majority of women were not Jewish. Many were political prisoners, Jehovahs Wittness, gypsies, lesbians, prostitues and some Jews that fell into other categories too. It was disturbing that Hitler was against homosexuals but many of the guards were lesbians taking guard of the lesbians in the camp, I don't think I have to expound on what happened then. The Jews were kept in the Judenblock and they did recieve worse treatment not getting the few hours of rest on Sundays that some others got.

The SS officers had lavish homes outside the camp with their families so they would be content in their environment. There is a chapter on Himmlers first visit to the camp. It was pointed out that Hitler never visited one concentration camp, this really upset me how he could order all this done and never look those people in the face, would that of stopped him probably not but still.

There is an account where one woman was in solitary confinement and another prisoner who emptied the slop buckets snuck her in food, she could have been killed for it but as fate would have it she was released soon after that. Some time later they both end up in another prison camp in ajoining cells and communicate thru a small hole in the wall. Hanna the former helper is being starved and now Olga pushes food thru to her. They decide she needs hot food so Hanna puts her mouth to the hole and Olga feeds her. The love they had to overcome these horrific events is amazing. I have to be honest this book is so very well written and researched but it is 743 pages in my Galley copy and I have 30 days to get my review done. Due to the subject I need to break up my reading of this book as my heart breaks for all these people went through. It's not a book I can just zip through in even 30 days. After 200+ pages I can say it is well worth the read and an important part of world history that must not be forgotten. If like me you love history and knowing the truth this needs to be in your collection. I will be reading every page but I will have to take breaks. Sarah Helm I applaud your labor of love to make sure this is never forgotten.

Nonfiction is frequently exhaustingly redundant, full of footnotes and incomprehensible language. This work gripped me from the title to the epilogue. Her descriptions of the horrors of this death camp are told in the words of those who experienced them. The witnesses and survivors come alive within a single sentence, a single paragraph. The perpetrators of these crimes come alive too--their small acts of kindness in stark contrast to their brutality. The fact that most vicious of guards were women is particularly chilling. In the end, some torturers were executed, some took their own lives, some were lost in the vast confusion of communism and the cold war and probably lived out their lives choosing to forget. Because of this book, compelling and thoughtful, readers are reminded of all of which we humans are capable. May we see ourselves at our best. May this never happen again.

At this point in time, sixty years after the fall of the Nazi regime and the publication of the full horrors of Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen and the far too numerous other concentration and death camps scattered across Europe, countless books have been written about the Holocaust, ranging from memoirs by those who, like Primo Levi, endured them first hand, to historians chronicling the genocidal murders of Hitler and the SS and setting them in the context of World War II, German history, European anti-Semitism or countless other approaches. But no one had written about Ravensbruck, as Sarah Helm discovered when researching her excellent biography of Vera Atkins and the women of the SOE, A Life in Secrets: Vera Atkins and the Missing Agents of WWII. And that left a void. "Other camps showed what mankind was capable of doing to man. The Jewish death camps showed what mankind was capable of doing to an entire race," Helm writes. "Ravensbrück showed what mankind was capable of doing to women."

This book, however depressing it is to read a chronicle of the horrors inflicted on those women, is an awe-inspiring achievement and one worthy of six stars, if the store would only allow that for books that truly deserve the honor. In history books of this kind, it's often too easy to allow the research to overshadow the subject, as happened in Caroline Moorehead's book about the thousands of French women shipped to Ravensbrück late in the war, A Train in Winter: An Extraordinary Story of Women, Friendship, and Resistance in Occupied France. Moorehead became so caught up in trying to track individual stories that she wasn't able to create a coherent, overarching narrative for her tale, and the result was a patchwork quilt of a book. In contrast, Helm is firmly in control of her vast, sprawling subject from the very first pages, as she embarks on the task of recounting the many stages of Ravensbrück's history: from an "ordinary" concentration camp when it opened in the spring of 1939, housing German communists, Czech dissidents (including Franz Kafka's former fiancée), Jehovah's Witnesses and prostitutes or "anti-socials", to include Poles and eventually Russians, and ultimately women prisoners from every part of the Reich: Red Army soldiers, Norwegian underground resistance workers, French women smuggling downed British pilots back to England, Polish women who belonged to intellectual families... And as the camp grew in size, so its nature changed, and its relationship with other camps. Medical experiments began -- and so, too, did gassings.

Helm tells the story through the eyes of the women who lived it, although she imposes order on it (it's not oral history -- she structures it chronologically, and sets everything in the context of the evolution of the camp system, of what was happening with the war, to Himmler and the SS, etcetera.) Some are incredibly moving, like that of Olga Benario, a Communist who had been deported to Germany from Brazil as a "gift" to Hitler, and ended up as one of Ravensbrück's earliest prisoners; Helm draws on her letters to her infant daughter and relatives in Mexico as one of many of her primary sources. It's heartbreaking to read these and other letters and to see how badly many women underestimated the peril they were in. And yet, in spite of the danger, many of the women took astonishing risks to get the work out about what was happening: the Polish women used as guinea pigs for medical experiments smuggled out details of the camp and its leaders that ended up being broadcast on the BBC, while a French ethnologist imprisoned at Ravensbrück, who had formerly studied African tribes, began a formal study of the camp's life. Most poignant perhaps, is the fact that if the reason Ravensbrück's history hasn't been told before this is that its prisoners were only women, the history of a large part of its population -- the prostitutes and petty criminals who made up a large part of its population will never be told at all. If the camp's population were viewed as inferior beings, then the intellectuals, the doctors, the housewives who chronicled the camp's life in their memoirs and who attended reunions afterwards, admitted to Helm that they tended to shun these groups -- few could even remember a name. Indeed, their camp experiences are under-represented, except in a court case or two, but not for any lack of effort on the author's part. Every other group is heard from -- including the guards.

This is a grueling book to read, but an important one. It's also so well written that it's impossible to put down; it reads as if it were a novel and these women are speaking directly to the reader from the page. I knew from reading Sarah Helm's previous book that I was likely to encounter an excellent work; I had underestimated her skill. At one point in her epilogue, Helm writes that "nobody can quite think how to tell the Ravensbrück story." I disagree. I think Sarah Helm has done just that, and done so brilliantly. And if "the site lies abandoned 'on the margins'", well, hopefully this book will serve as a wake up call and help to change that state of affairs. It's certainly a powerful enough narrative to do so.

I'm not going to say that this is an easy book to read or that you'll sleep comfortably at night while doing so. I just think that if you don't read it, you'll be passing up one of the best non-fiction books of 2015. Six stars.