Mahn- und Gedenkstätte Ravensbrück

Description

In Fürstenberg/Havel the Mahn- und Gedenkstätte Ravensbrück preserves the memory of the victims of the Ravensbrück concentration camp as well as of the adjacent camps and SS forced‑labour sites. Since 1993 the Stiftung Brandenburgische Gedenkstätten has been responsible for the site; the complex is registered as a monument of national and international significance in the Brandenburg State Monument Register.

Between 1939 and 1945 a women’s concentration camp of the National Socialist regime was located here. The first transport arrived in 1939 from the Lichtenburg concentration camp; at first political prisoners and those persecuted as “asocial” predominated. With the outbreak of the war women, men and also children from the occupied territories — especially Poland, the Soviet Union, Ukraine and Belarus — were deported to the camp. Later Jewish women from eastern extermination camps were also brought here and forced to work in armaments factories on the site. Of around 130,000 imprisoned women and 20,000 men it is estimated that roughly 28,000 died as a result of hunger, exhaustion, medical experiments, shootings or gassings.

After liberation the Soviet army used large parts of the grounds; the first commemorative ceremonies by former prisoners already took place in 1948. In the 1950s the leadership of the GDR decided to establish a national memorial and commemoration site; from the mid‑1950s a commissioned team of architects shaped the grounds, which were inaugurated in 1959 with a central bronze sculpture. The official opening of the National Mahn‑ and Gedenkstätte took place in 1959; since then the complex has been repeatedly expanded and reorganised.

Since reunification, following the withdrawal of CIS troops, the site has been opened for research and the public and has been redesigned; traces of subsequent use were removed and the footprints of the barracks are discreetly marked in the ground. In the former camp commandant’s office the permanent exhibition has presented since 2013, across about 900 square metres, more than 1,500 objects. Supplementary displays focus on the cell block, the female guards, everyday SS life and forced labour; the cell block contains dedicated commemorative rooms for different groups of victims. The depot, archive, media library and photo archive document the holdings with thousands of objects, photographs and testimony recordings. In 2023 approximately 70,000 people visited the memorial.