In this episode, we explore the horrific history of Ravensbrück, the only Nazi concentration camp built exclusively for women. We examine how Heinrich Himmler established this facility in nineteen thirty-eight, ninety kilometers north of Berlin, where between one hundred thirty thousand and one hundred forty-five thousand women from across occupied Europe were imprisoned, tortured, and murdered between nineteen thirty-nine and nineteen forty-five. We detail the systematic brutality inflicted by female guards like Dorothea Binz and Johanna Langefeld, the medical experiments conducted by SS doctor Karl Gebhardt on Polish women dubbed "rabbits," and the exploitation of prisoners as slave labor for companies including Siemens. We trace the experiences of French resistance members like Jacqueline Fleury and Germaine Tillion, Jewish deportees like eleven-year-old Lily Lenel Rosenberg, and Polish survivors like Wanda Półtawska who endured bone removal experiments. We cover the establishment of the Kinderzimmer death ward for infants, the operation of gas chambers that killed six thousand in three months during nineteen forty-five, and the eventual liberation by the Red Army on April thirtieth, nineteen forty-five. We conclude with the post-war trials that resulted in death sentences for commandants Max Koegel and Fritz Suhren, doctor Karl Gebhardt, and guard Dorothea Binz, while examining why this women's Holocaust remained largely forgotten by male historians for decades.
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Aug 31 202532 mins