Ravensbruck: Everyday Life in a Women's Concentration Camp

A comprehensive history of the only concentration camp entirely for women, this book tells the story of Ravensbr ck from the moment when the first 867 women were transported to the camp in 1939 until the moment when most of the remaining inhabitants were forcibly marched away from it in 1945. Morrison, a professor of history at Shippensburg University, spent two years meticulously conducting research at (and helping to organize) the archives at the former concentration camp. Since the Nazis destroyed most of the camp's records, he relies heavily on memoirs and interviews to provide a comprehensive picture of the administrative hierarchy and the prisoners' daily lives. Ravensbr ck, he explains, was a labor camp rather than an extermination camp--still, tens of thousands of women died there due to the harsh conditions and the brutal treatment. He notes that although the inmates were divided into groups (designated by differently colored triangles) depending on their status as political prisoners, criminals, prostitutes, Gypsies, Jehovah's Witnesses or Jews, they worked together to better their chances of survival, by sharing food, assisting ill women and ""adopting"" the younger prisoners. Most important, Morrison takes issue with Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners, arguing that most of the German townspeople near the camp did not know much about it and that many of those who did treated the inmates with kindness. In contrast to survivor accounts such as Genevi ve de Gaulle Anthonioz's The Dawn of Hope: A Memoir of Ravensbr ck, Morrison's study has a detached, scholarly feeling that contrasts with the drama of what he relates. Photos and drawings by former Ravensbr ck inmates. (May)