Ravensbrück, the first Nazi concentration camp for women, opened in May 1939. In the six years until its liberation, over 100,000 women from more than 20 nations passed through it. Almost half of the prisoners were Polish and German, 19% Russian and Ukrainian, 15% Jewish, 7% French, 5.5% Gypsy, and 8.5% others. These women were forced into slave labor, subjected to torturous medical experiments, starved, beaten, shot, and murdered in the gas chambers.
Inspired by Danuta Czech’s Auschwitz Chronicle 1939-1945, the author of the Ravensbrück Kalendarium has for the first time compiled information from a variety of sources into a documentation of the camp’s daily activities. In doing so, he provides a systematic examination of the structure, procedures, and events within the camp.
The work has three major components: a chronology of events, a section of photographs, and a compiled list of transports to the camp. The chronology, broken into chapters by year, provides an historical overview of the year prior to its days’ entries. These day-by-day records of events in the camp, each one accompanied by a citation of its source, trace the movement of women in and out of the camp, various selections, and other details of the camp’s “business.” The photo section includes both propaganda images of Ravensbrück from the so-called SS-album and a handful of images taken shortly after the camp’s liberation.
The final section, the list of transports into Ravensbrück, documents the arrival of prisoners at the camp between May 25, 1939 and January 26, 1945. Though the lists do not include individual prisoner names, they do provide the transport’s date, the number sequence assigned to that transport, the total number of women in the group, its ethnic breakdown, their reasons for imprisonment, and the transport’s place of origin. Like the chronology portion of the book, each transport listed includes a citation for the information’s source, in most cases, individual prisoner records held by the Archives at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (record group RG-04.006M: microfilm reels 20 to 23).
Besides these records, Phillip based this work on the holdings of various archives in Europe and Israel, personal narratives, and other publications on Ravensbrück. He includes a map of the concentration camp, a glossary of abbreviations and Nazi terminology, a bibliography of books on Ravensbrück and related subjects, and a personal and geographical index. The work is presently available only in German.
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| TABLE OF CONTENTS | |
| Geleitwort | 7 |
| Vorwort | 9 |
| Einleitung | 13 |
| Das Jahr 1939 | 21 |
| Das Jahr 1940 | 41 |
| Das Jahr 1941 | 61 |
| Das Jahr 1942 | 81 |
| Das Jahr 1943 | 113 |
| Das Jahr 1944 | 139 |
| Das Jahr 1945 | 183 |
| Abbildungen | 213 |
| Zugänge | 238 |
| Abkürzungen | 333 |
| Auswahlbibliographie | 335 |
| Personenregister | 341 |
| Ortsregister | 347 |
