Ravensbrück Memorial Museum
Memorial plaque for the lesbian prisoners in the Ravensbrück women's concentration camp
14. July 2021
An initiative of committed women first approached the Brandenburg Memorials Foundation five years ago. The request was gradually joined by a whole alliance of supporters. In the committees of the foundation, the reasons for imprisonment and the concept of persecution in relation to lesbian women in the Nazi regime were discussed critically. As a result, in spring 2021 the Brandenburg Memorials Foundation, together with the Federal Foundation Magnus Hirschfeld, commissioned an expert opinion from Prof. Martin Lücke of the Free University of Berlin, which deals with the fate of lesbian women in Ravensbrück and subjects the concept of persecution to a critical analysis. On the basis of this report and after intensive consultation, the expert commission of the Brandenburg Memorials Foundation considered the evidence of persecution of lesbian women both inside and outside the concentration camp to be established. The recommendation to the memorial and the foundation to make the memorial sign possible on site was unanimous.
Ravensbrück was the central women's concentration camp in the German Reich. About 120,000 women and 20,000 men from over 30 nations were imprisoned here from 1939-1945. They were part of the political resistance, racially persecuted as Jews or Sinti and Roma or imprisoned as "asocial", because of "intercourse with foreigners", as Jehovah's Witnesses, because of refusal to work or because they were against the "national community". Towards the end of the war, more and more civilian forced labourers were also imprisoned in the concentration camps if they were accused of an offence.
Among the prisoners marked as lesbian, there are so far three who were selected for murder in the Bernburg sanatoriums in the course of Aktion 14f13 because of a characterisation as lesbian. Others fell into the persecution system of National Socialism through denunciations from the population due to a reported lesbian lifestyle. Still others lived openly lesbian lives before their imprisonment and for this reason alone were excluded from the National Socialist "Volksgemeinschaft". The camp regulations in the Ravensbrück concentration camp made lesbian love a punishable offence.
The memorial sign in the form of a ceramic sphere will be inaugurated on the new memorial site at the former camp wall in 2022 as part of the 77th anniversary of the liberation.
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