Since June 2023, the Ravensbrück Memorial has been running a two-year online exhibition project on the Ravensbrück men's camp. The Ravensbrück men's camp has received comparatively little attention in previous accounts of the Ravensbrück central women's concentration camp.
Between 1941 and 1945, more than 20,000 male prisoners were imprisoned in Ravensbrück and, from 1943, in the surrounding satellite camps and commandos, who were mainly exploited by the SS to build and expand the infrastructure of the camp complex. Almost 80 years after the liberation, the public still knows little about the men's camp, its role in the camp complex and the conditions for the prisoners there, despite the relevant research.
The aim of the project is to close research gaps, raise public awareness of the topic and integrate the history of the men's camp appropriately into the memory of Ravensbrück. Although the overall availability of sources can be described as fragmented, the almost complete survival of the " camp registry" (Nummernbuch) offers the opportunity to convey a comprehensive overview of the camp.
During the liberation of the camp, the former block registrar Józef Kwietniewski managed to save the documentation of the prisoners with the number book. The SS tried to destroy the files when the camps were liquidated. Today, the original is kept in the archives of the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) in Warsaw.
In order to expand the range of sources and databases, several archival trips were undertaken in Germany and abroad in the first year of the project. This allowed extensive archival holdings to be reviewed. Further research visits to Germany, France, the Netherlands, Poland and Slovakia are in preparation.
One initial research result is the reconstruction of a large part of the incoming and outgoing prisoner transports of the men's camp. The unexpectedly large number of direct admissions and the fact that some prisoners were brought in directly from Fürstenberg/Havel after having been deployed there as forced laborers or conscripts are striking.
As part of the project, a virtual 3D model of the Ravensbrück concentration camp was purchased, which is based on a variety of sources and depicts the situation at the end of the war in 1945. The model can be used in a variety of ways and is to be used in a partially interactive version with rotation and zoom functions for the online exhibition.
The virtual exhibition is the first in-depth media presentation of the topic and is intended to paint as differentiated and representative a picture as possible of the male prisoners of the Ravensbrück concentration camp complex. The thematic focus will be on the composition of the prisoner society, forms of forced labor, the system of prisoner functionaries, the differences to the conditions in the women's camp, contacts between male and female prisoners, evacuation transports and death marches, the liberation, the judicial process and the (lack of) culture of remembrance. The exhibition will present individual stories of persecution in a biographical approach.
The project can be realized thanks to the generous support of the Fondation Tour du Monde.
