H and I took a hike around the forested trail of the Sidowsee out of Himmelpfort and continued along the path back towards Fürstenberg.
A sub-camp for forced labour of the Ravensbrück Women‘s detention centre, little remains in terms of remembrance for this concentration camp for young girls and women considered difficult or otherwise delinquent for various infractions and were put to work under very harsh conditions (the overseers, Aufseherinnen, were particularly brutal and subject to the Ravensbrücker Prozess by British authorities for war crimes). Girls as young as sixteen produced components for Siemens & Halske for the war effort, including V2 rocket bombs and intercom systems for submarines, and once they aged out at twenty-one, they were transferred to Ravensbrück.
The juvenile camp was closed at the beginning of 1945 to convert it to an emergency extermination operation with a gas chamber, with some five-thousand female inmates deemed too sick, uncooperative of having outlived their usefulness for slave labour at fifty-two. Of the estimated one hundred thirty thousand women processed through Ravensbrück, the site conserved and memorialised after being liberated by the Soviets in March of 1945 along with the site at Uckermark, some additional fifty thousand perished due to punishingly austere treatment, starvation rations and medical experimentation. Eighty percent were political prisoners (members of the resistance) from all over Nazi occupied territories with a significant population of Jewish, Sini and Roma women imprisoned only for their heritage. Inmates were forced to wear triangles sewn into their uniforms in order to denote their crime and nationality—often in combination—lesbians, prostitutes, Romani (leveled with the accusation of racial pollution) and those who refused to get married were lumped together and wore black triangles.
synchronoptica
one year ago: Operation Nickel Grass (with synchronoptica)
seven years ago: a visit to Büdingen, assorted links to revisit plus Victorian mosseries
eight years ago: computer-generated music from Alan Turing
nine years ago: the inspiration for the Flying Dutchman plus automating laundry
ten years ago: the reasoning behind making Brussels the capital of the EU plus Wikipedia as a major
