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Ravensbruck: Everyday Life in a Women's Concentration Camp 1939-45

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Ravensbruck was the only Nazi concentration camp that was built and operated exclusively for women prisoners. It was a labor camp located within Germany, not far from Berlin. Originally designed for indoctrination and industrial production (and mainly administered by the inmates), by war's end it had degenerated into just another overcrowded death camp with an agenda of mass extermination and the gas chamber (More than 140,000 Ravensbruck inmates did not survive the war). Jack Morrison's Ravensbruck: Everyday Life In A Women's Concentration Camp is an informative case study of how women of different nationalities and social backgrounds coped for years with a chronic lack of food and basic sanitation, illnesses, prejudices, and death. It was through asserting courage, love, and carving out their own cultural life under the harshest of conditions that the survivors overcame fear, hunger and hate. Ravensbruck is an impressive, much appreciated, highly recommended addition to Holocaust studies reading lists and library reference collections.

As a former student of Dr. Morrison's, I was especially happy to read about his top-notch research in a published format. Dr. Morrison informatively and lucidly illustrates the complex dynamic of women's history, Nazi Germany, and the horror of the Holocaust while at the same time bringing a human face to the tragedy which befell so many people from various backgrounds during the Second World War. I was lucky enough to hear Dr. Morrison speak about this engrossing topic on several occasions, but for those who have not, this book provides an excellent format for exploring Dr. Morrison's meticulous work. I recommend this book to anyone with an interest in general history as well as the Holocaust. Bravo, Dr. Morrison!

You don't have to be a German history professor or a Holocaust expert to enjoy Jack Morrison's fascinating and informative "Ravensbruck: Everyday Life in a Women's Concentration Camp 1939-45." Though Morrison is clearly well-versed, widely-read and highly knowledgeable about his subject, he has the unique ability to translate his vast amounts of knowledge into words which will capture the attention and imagination of everyday folks like myself, while still fully serving his academic research mission.

Highly interesting, extremely well-researched, and rich in illustrations, Morrison's book is perfect for anyone wanting more information about the experience of women in the Holocaust, especially in Ravensbruck, a concentration camp reserved especially for them. Using what was in many cases newly-discovered information, his book details every aspect of concentration camp life as it happened to the very real women victims of Ravensbruck.

I would highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the Holocaust, and especially those with an interest in the camps or in women's unique perspective on their "everyday lives."

I am a cofounder of NOW (National Organization for Women) and a lifelong feminist activist. I was born in Berlin, Germany, of Polish Jewish parents, with whom I fled to the US to escape the Holocaust. I have just read "Ravensbrück," which was written by the half-brother of a friend of mine. I last visited Berlin in September 2011 as a guest of the German Foreign Office but, regretfully, a visit to Ravensbrück was not on my tour.

"Ravensbrück" is a must-read for anyone interested in the Holocaust and women.

Sonia Pressman Fuentes
spfuentes@comcast.net
[...]

First of all, the sub-title is incomplete. It should be: "A HISTORIAN'S SOCIOLOGICAL OBSERVATIONS OF THE STRUCTURE, OPERATION AND CULTURE OF EVERYDAY LIFE IN A WOMEN'S CONCENTRATION CAMP 1939-1945." I will focus in this brief review on the sociological contributions of this study. I will not attempt to describe the book's sickening, depressing, but totally gripping substance. These features are well covered in other reviews.

There are three fairly distinct levels of social organization in the camp. The first level of social structure in the camp is the broad Nazi system itself, the organization that, among other features of German governance, set-up and developed the organization of the concentration camps, Ravensbruck among them. This level of organization is the general context for the book, but is not discussed in great detail.

The second level is the formal organization of Ravensbruck. There are three parts: (1)The camp organization of inmates, barracks, kitchens, workplaces, infirmiry and so on, and the strata of German Army operatives in charge of these. (2) The inmates in leadership positions and authority in charge of the day-to-day operation of these facilities, who reported to their Army superiors, e.g., the inmate overseers, block seniors, room seniors and the like. These inmates, although greatly constrained by the Army superiors to whom they reported, nevertheless had a surprising degree of autonomy and power in the camp. (3) The spatial and work-grouping and explicit labeling (clothing patches) of inmates according to the category of the "offense" that put them in the camp: Gypsies, criminals, Jews, Jehovah Witnesses,Poles, French, Communists.

The third level is in some ways the most interesting. This is the informal organization of the inmates. Within and between the groups under "3" above there were well developed levels of stratification, privilege, punishment and sharing/not sharing that operated among inmates to control access to work assignments, information, food, clothing, medicine, and other valued commodities. The severe shortages of practivally everything needed for existence in the camp meant that such access was for individual inmates as well as for groups a matter of life and death.

This book is a unique and important contribution to sociological knowledge about prisons. It is unfortunate that Morrison does not explixitly relate his study to this knowledge, but in another sense his study is a stronger contribution for not doing so.

The conditions of life and death for the inmates of Ravensbruck were, of course, extreme. But without any doubt there is much in Morrison's description of life in Ravendbruck that is in broad outline consonant with what is described in the sociological literaure on prisons. This is true whether it's sex amomg the prisoners, theft from the prison and stealing and barter among the inmates, favors from prison guards, development distinctive prison sub-cultures according to nationality, religion, language, and so on.

So here is a study that in an important sense replicates studies in other prisons, but does so independent of the author's knowledge of these studies, and comes up with findings that are in important ways similar to and consistent with these studies. This, it seems to me, makes Morrison's contribution to sociological knowledge even stronger than if he had set out to focus on the sociological features of Ravensbruck. Do sociological students of prisons know about this book? I'd be greatly surprised.

Another feature of this book that speaks well for its contribution to sociology is that the language of this book is objective, sober, cold and clearly descriptive, almost entirely eschewing an emotional or polemic tenor. (This, of course, is important for historians too.) Accomplishing this is not a small feat, given the horrendous,insanely inhumane life in this camp. Ravensbruck shares many ugly, unthinkable characteristics with other concentration camps, but in fact Ravensbruck was designed and operated mostly as a work camp. Life at Ravensbruck, although hideous for nearly all its inmates, was in fact slightly better than life at other concentration camps that had a major agenda of extermination. This somewhat-less-than-hell feature of Ravensbruck was the case particularly in its early years. But conditions at the camp deteriorated greatly in the later years of the war (1944 and 1945) when overcrowding and shortages of food and everything else related to basic survival became more and more severe. Order at the camp--but not great brutality--virtually disintegrated toward the war's end. Some German guards at the camp even attempted to disguise themselves as inmates to escape the rage of the camp's liberators.

It may be worth speculating, as Morrison touches on briefly, that the Nazi regime made this camp, at least in its early life, somewhat less punishing than other concentration camps, because the inmates were all women (and children too), but such a notion surely receives no support in the camp's later stages.

[Full disclosure: This book was written by a half-brother of mine I wasn't sure existed until July 2011. (Nor did he know about me.) I found him through research on the internet. He is 74 and is a retired Shippensburg University Professor of History. I am a 79 year old retired Michigan State University Professor of Sociology. We have not yet met in person, only by phone and by email. Denton E. Morrison, August 18, 2011.]

My mother found this book on the internet while searching for any Holocaust literature with my grandmother's name in it. Turns out she's mentioned in the footnotes a few times because the author used information she gave during an interview. We decided to get this book to read for our own personal education. I enjoy the author's style and wish he had written more books to read. I've always considered my Holocaust education to be quite strong; however, there were so many facts that I never even knew about until I read this book. I would recommend this to both the reader who needs this for school/research and to the reader who just wants to educate him/herself.

A thorough, extremely well- researched history of this women's Nazi concentration camp, including, in part, its (changing) purpose against the backdrop of Nazi Germany and the course of the war, descriptions of the camp's administration and designations of "crimes" and varying treatment of prisoners based on nationality and their "crimes", and the formation of groups and friendships, including underground educational programs. Reading of such atrocities as the medical experiments conducted and the treatment of children is counterbalanced by examples of the courage exhibited by these women as they struggled to survive and create meaning in their prison life. The book is filled with art work drawn and hidden by prisoners, as contrasted with the official Nazi photographs of camp life. It tells the story of the camp from its inception to the ultimate "Death March" and liberation. This is far more than a history book. I was impressed by the quantity of information the author obtained, insuring that knowledge of the workings of this camp will not be forgotten to history. This is far more than a history book, however; it is a fascinating sociological perspective, partly of the twisted Nazi beliefs, but with a focus on how the surviving women with such vastly differing cultural, economic, and religious backgrounds grouped themselves and accommodated themselves to their years in prison.

If you doubt this author's information, just look to Corrie ten Boom's book, The Hiding Place. You think the women were well fed? Are you crazy??? Why would they have starved the other millions of prisoners and fed these women well? They definitely did mistreat, overwork, and yes, kill many women at Ravensbruck. If you have seen any pictures at all of those prisoners still alive in ANY of the concentration camps, you know that they were not well fed. Please, don't be another ignorant person that denies that any of this happened - get real!

An insightful look into the Concentration camp specificly established for women by the nazi state. Gives full depth and description of this camp, the women who served as aufseherins such as Dorothea Binz who was executed after the war, the various women among the inmate population, as well as the camp itself. Section by section. Aspect by aspect, including the treatment of lesbians by the nazi state and this camp.

A must read for anyone interested in this camp in peticular or this period and nazi germany in general.

When it comes to holocaust histories, quantity seems to be the ideal and not quality. Like so many books about the holocaust, Ravensbruck just does not have the evidence to support the claims made by the author. In one section he talks about homicidal gas chambers and admits that there is not sufficient evidence to support that there even were any at Ravensbruck, yet he insist they "had" to be there. He even goes as far as adding a gas chamber in his drawing of the layout for the camp, placing the gas chamber when he does not even have proof that there were gas chambers there in the first place. Next, he manipulates workers for this gas chamber. Of course there is no evidence of workers either, so he says that most likely they would have been male prisoners from a near by men's camp. Of course, none have survived and lo and behold the author has an explanation for this too. They must have been killed. Of course any reasonable reader would realize that this is all speculation. Ravensbruck was in Germany and it has long been admitted, even by Elie Wiesel, that there were no homicidal gas chambers on German soil. I guess Mr. Morrison was just not privy to this public information and knowledge.

As for the women prisoners starving, the first half of the book shows pictures, drawn by a female inmate, and they all show sick, starving women. Towards the end of the book, however, the author shows real pictures and the women look healthy and well fed. Why do these photos give a completely different version from the drawings? Obviously, given the subjective nature of the drawings, it is easy to discern where the truth lies in this matter.