Ravensbrück : life and death in Hitler's concentration camp for women

Resource Information

The work Ravensbrück : life and death in Hitler's concentration camp for women represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in Austin Public Library. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

This resource has been enriched with EBSCO NoveList data.

Label

Ravensbrück : life and death in Hitler's concentration camp for women

Title remainder

life and death in Hitler's concentration camp for women

Statement of responsibility

Sarah Helm

Title variation

Life and death in Hitler's concentration camp for women

Title variation remainder

life and death in Hitlers concentration camp for women

Creator

• trueHelm, Sarah

Subject

• HISTORY / Holocaust
• Women concentration camp inmates -- Germany | Ravensbrück
• Women prisoners -- Germany | Ravensbrück
• trueWorld War II
• World War, 1939-1945 -- Prisoners and prisons, German
• Biographies
• trueConcentration camps
• Gaulle-Anthonioz, Geneviève de
• Gluck, Gemma La Guardia, 1881-1962
• HISTORY / Europe / General
• Himmler, Heinrich, 1900-1945
• Ravensbrück (Concentration camp)
• trueWomen concentration camp inmates

Genre

• trueBiographies

Language

eng

Summary

On a sunny morning in May 1939 a phalanx of 867 women -- housewives, doctors, opera singers, politicians, prostitutes -- was marched through the woods fifty miles north of Berlin, driven on past a shining lake, then herded in through giant gates. Whipping and kicking them were scores of German women guards. Their destination was Ravensbrück, a concentration camp designed specifically for women by Heinrich Himmler, prime architect of the Holocaust. By the end of the war 130,000 women from more than twenty different European countries had been imprisoned there; among the prominent names were Genevieve de Gaulle, General de Gaulle's niece, and Gemma La Guardia Gluck, sister of the wartime mayor of New York. Only a small number of these women were Jewish; Ravensbrück was largely a place for the Nazis to eliminate other inferior beings -- social outcasts, Gypsies, political enemies, foreign resisters, the sick, the disabled, and the "mad." Over six years the prisoners endured beatings, torture, slave labor, starvation, and random execution. In the final months of the war, Ravensbrück became an extermination camp. Estimates of the final death toll by April 1945 have ranged from 30,000 to 90,000. For decades the story of Ravensbrück was hidden behind the Iron Curtain, and today it is still little known. Using testimony unearthed since the end of the Cold War and interviews with survivors who have never talked before, Sarah Helm has ventured into the heart of the camp, demonstrating for the reader in detail how easily and quickly the unthinkable horror evolved. Far more than a catalog of atrocities, however, Ravensbrück is also a compelling account of what one survivor called "the heroism, superhuman tenacity, and exceptional willpower to survive." For every prisoner whose strength failed, another found the will to resist through acts of self-sacrifice and friendship, as well as sabotage, protest, and escape. While the core of this book is told from inside the camp, the story also sheds new light on the evolution of the wider genocide, the impotence of the world to respond, and Himmler's final attempt to seek a separate peace with the Allies using the women of Ravensbrück as a bargaining chip

Tone

• trueSobering

Writing style

• trueRichly detailed

Biography type

contains biographical information

Cataloging source

DLC

Dewey number

940.53/1853154

Illustrations

• illustrations
• maps
• plates

Index

index present

Literary form

non fiction

Nature of contents

bibliography