Jerry’s Reviews > Ravensbrück: Life and Death in Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women > Status Update

It's disturbing to learn Russian soldiers "systematically" raped pretty much all women, including Ravensbrück survivors. It's ironic the prisoners didn't need to fear rape from their German captors, who treated them as less than human otherwise. Only to find liberation brought about new and even more degrading horrors. Also, the Russian Army women had to contend with being treated as collaborators for being captured.

Revensbrück has a gas chamber as of late 1944/early 1945. Even as the war is winding to its inevitable conclusion, the Nazis have become more fanatical. The only difference is rather than murdering on the basis of race, they're murdering those who can't work as slave laborers.

I think I will never understand the shear magnitude of the concentration camps and the logistics required for them.

As much as I try to assign some logic to it all, the challenge is logic didn't really apply. At the same time there were strict rules, so much happened as the result of arbitrary decisions. And the prisoner hierarchy played as much of a role as the Germans.

This is fundamentally how it all was allowed to happen. Civilian manager at Ravensbrück Siemens camp said to a prisoner worker, "'But you have all done something wrong, haven't you'...as if that justified it to him....But he was not a bad man." Ordinary Men similarly describes how evil triumphed because regular people let it.

As Germany's situation disintegrated, discipline failed; abuse became even worse.

The book makes clear slave labor at concentration camps was a key element in the war effort, especially as the situation became more dire for Germany. But I still don't comprehend how increasing transports of prisoners and the allocation of limited transport for this could even be a net positive for the Nazis in the war effort. It seems the more the world was imploding for them, the more focused they became on this.

Apparently Ravensbrück was used to hold Himmler's "hostage" prisoners, both male and female. These were believed to be potential leverage for Himmler, especially if things started to turn for the worse for Nazi Germany.

The more I read on the Holocaust, the less I understand & comprehend it! All kinds of rules, but they were followed only when it suited.

The Germany "Jew-free" decree applied to concentration camps. In 1943, Jews, even from Auschwitz, were showing back up at Ravensbrück (for forced labor purposes).

One thing books like this make clear: a lot of people knew what was going on. Yet even the Red Cross took a blind eye.

It is tragic to read about how so many who survived Ravensbrück and its subcamps became victims yet again after the war under Soviet and East German suspicion. And yet we are all aware of at least hundreds, likely thousands, and maybe tens of thousands of actual perpetrators who were never held to account.

I am always saddened when I learn about victims who end up being revictimized.

Even the “good doctor” isn’t so good and the prisoner doctors stopped doctoring when the Germans tried to bribe them. Turns out the “good doctor” was doing some experiments of his own. He as sentenced to death after the war but committed suicide.