In the Visitor Center, which opened in 2007, guests can find information about the memorial and its activities. The building also serves as a starting point for guided tours. Books on the history of the Ravensbrück camp complex, the post-war history of the site and Nazi history in general are on sale. A model of the former camp complex provides initial orientation.

Headquarters of the SS camp administration and the administration of the Ravensbrück women's concentration camp. The first floor housed the “Political Department” and post censorship as well as the “Camp Doctor's Department”, while the rooms of the commandant and his deputy, the commandant's office and other parts of the camp administration were located on the upper floor. After the liberation of the camp in April 1945, the Soviet armed forces used the commandant's office building until 1977. Since 1984, it has served as a central exhibition space for the memorial. In 2013, the exhibition “Ravensbrück Women's Concentration Camp. History and Remembrance” was opened there in 2013.

In addition to the waterworks, this building housed the driver's quarters, garages and workshops as well as the SS telephone and telegraph station. For a time, the “ Effektenkammer” of the women's concentration camp was located on the top floor.

Erected in 1940-42, the building included a vehicle depot, garages, repair workshops and a cinema room for members of the SS. From 1945-77, the buildings were used exclusively by the Soviet armed forces. Today they house the administration, library, archive, depot, special exhibition areas and an event hall.

There was a separate gate for the guards next to the gate to the prisoners' camp. The guardhouse was used to control all incoming and outgoing persons, especially the convoys of prisoners. In 1943/44, the still preserved stone gate was erected, which formed a sluice with the main gate behind it, which no longer exists. The gate complex was considerably altered during the period when the camp area was used by the Soviet armed forces in 1945-94.

The camp initially consisted of one camp road and two rows of barracks for up to 3,000 prisoners. From 1940, it was extended to the south by three camp roads and three rows of barracks [25]. Camp roads 2-4 were bordered by poplar trees. An “industrial estate” [22a] was added to the east and the SS garment factory with a large heating plant [22b] to the south. A small camp for male prisoners was opened in 1941 [24]. The entire camp complex was surrounded by a camp wall, parts of which have been preserved to this day. Many traces of the camp's history have been destroyed due to its subsequent Soviet use.

Since 2000, the outlines of the former barrack sites have been marked by hollows in the ground in the area of the first two rows of barracks.

The prisoners' kitchen and the prisoners' bath were housed in the single-storey service building. Many survivors remember the bath as being of central importance due to the degrading admission procedure for prisoners that took place there.
Today, the remains of the walls, the floor of the prisoners' bath and the cellars are protected by an enclosure and cover.

From May 1939, prisoners were housed in barracks on both sides of Camp Road 1. The linden trees grew from seedlings that lined both sides of the camp road.

The remains of the walls, the floor of the prisoners' baths and the cellars are now protected by an enclosure and cover.

The first infirmary was located in two interconnected barracks. Many sick people hoped to escape the debilitating work for a few days by receiving inpatient treatment in the infirmary. At the same time, however, a stay in the infirmary also entailed the risk of being classified as superfluous by the SS, being invalided out and killed. From 1942 onwards, the number of sick people in the overcrowded camp continued to rise. The SS expanded the area and also gradually converted seven accommodation barracks into sick bays (see No. 14/15). By the end of the war, one fifth of all accommodation barracks in the women's camp belonged to the infirmary.

The first buildings were completed in 1940, where prisoners had to make prisoners' clothing and later also uniforms for the SS. By 1945, further buildings had been constructed which belonged to the Waffen-SS clothing factory and the SS-owned “Gesellschaft für Textil- und Lederverwertung mbH (Texled), Werk Ravensbrück”. These included tailoring, weaving, furriery, tearing and an administration building.

This complex of buildings, known as the “ Mechanische Werkstätten” or “Schneiderei”, consists of eight interconnected workshops. After its completion in 1942, it was one of the central places of forced labor in the Ravensbrück women's concentration camp.
The current state of the building dates back to restoration work carried out in 1999/2000. There is an exhibition on the conditions of forced labor, a roller that had to be pulled by prisoners for leveling work and other exhibits.

The men's camp, in which around 20,000 men from all over Europe were imprisoned from 1941-45, formed part of the Ravensbrück camp complex. It was under the command of the women's camp. In this way, the SS secured a labor pool of male prisoners for the constant expansion of the camp complex and its subcamps.

The women's camp was extended several times. The first barracks of the “new camp” were completed in the late summer of 1940. Construction work on the 4th and 5th rows of barracks continued well into 1944. Initially, the two parts of the camp were separated by a wall, which was gradually breached during the expansion process and later demolished.

The cell building, also called the bunker by the prisoners, was an integral part of the camp's punishment system and a place of particular terror. It consisted of 78 cells. When the memorial was founded in 1959, the first museum was set up in this building. National memorial rooms were set up here in the mid-1980s. Opened in 2006, the permanent exhibition “Ravensbrück. The Cell Building”, which opened in 2006, also explains the history of the memorial rooms.

The “Ravensbrück National Memorial” was opened in 1959. It comprised the crematorium, the cell building, part of the historic camp wall with the cemetery in front of it, a tribune and the memorial with steps on the shore of Lake Schwedt. The artistic design includes the “Tragende” sculpture created by Will Lammert and a group of figures behind the crematorium. Visitors entered the cell building, which was used as a museum, through an aperture in the wall.

Initially, the deceased were cremated in the municipal crematorium in Fürstenberg. In the spring of 1943, the SS had a crematorium built outside the camp wall, which was extended in the fall of 1944. After large quantities of human remains were discovered along the camp wall to the right of the crematorium entrance during construction work in 2011, the area was turned into a burial ground.

In the mid-1950s, the reburial of the dead who had been buried in various mass graves in the course of the liberation of the women's concentration camp began. The new cemetery was established at the foot of the “Wall of Nations” and planted with roses. In 1986, a memorial stone was added in memory of the murdered Jewish prisoners; this was followed in 1995 by a memorial stone in memory of the murdered Sinti and Roma.

A memorial stone was erected in 1959. It commemorates the mass shootings that took place in the vicinity of the crematorium until the end of the war in 1945. The women were executed by neck shot by an SS special commando. Until 1942, a place south-east of the camp served as an execution site.

The Siemens & Halske company set up production facilities near the women's concentration camp in 1942-44. Female prisoners performed forced labor in the 20 production halls. From December 1944, they were housed in a separate residential barracks camp. By the end of April 1945, over 2,000 prisoners were employed in the coil winding shop in the production of switching parts and other parts for the armaments industry.

In August 1944, the SS had a tent erected between blocks 24 and 26, in which over 4,000 prisoners were crammed together at times.

The Ravensbrück camp complex was connected to the rail network of the German Reichsbahn. The rail facilities and ramps were primarily used to deliver goods that were to be sorted and processed in the SS-owned factories. The so-called loot barracks, which have been preserved, were used for temporary storage. In 2005, a reconstructed cargo wagon was erected nearby.

The construction of the “ Jugenderziehungslager” or “Jugendschutzlager Uckermark” began in 1941/42. In mid-1944, it comprised around 15 barracks. The camp was a facility of the Reich Criminal Police and was under the command of the women's concentration camp. Around 1,200 girls and young women were imprisoned there under conditions that differed little from those of the women's concentration camp. From December 1944, the youth camp was gradually cleared and subsequently used as a selection and death camp for the concentration camp. The site is accessible to visitors all year round via Himmelpforter Landstraße.

The former SS settlement reflects the hierarchical relationships within the SS: it included four single-family houses for high-ranking SS members (“Führerhäuser”), ten two-family houses for members of the middle ranks (“Unterführerhäuser”) and eight buildings in which female guards lived. After liberation, they were mainly used as accommodation for members of the Soviet and CIS forces until 1994. Since 2002, the Ravensbrück International Youth Meeting Center / Youth Hostel has been located in the guards' quarters. The educational services of the memorial are housed in one of the guards' houses, and the exhibition “In the wake of the SS: female guards of the Ravensbrück women's concentration camp” is housed in the house next door. Since 2010, the exhibition “Das Führerhaus. Everyday life and crimes of the Ravensbrück SS officers” has been on display in one of the former ‘’Führerhäuser‘’.

Since 2010, the memorial has been showing the exhibition “The Führerhaus. Everyday life and crimes of the Ravensbrück SS officers”.

Most prisoners reached the Ravensbrück camp complex via the goods yard area at Fürstenberg station. In 1941, a separate “Ravensbrück stop” was set up on the line to Lychen/Templin.

In the summer of 1991, Fürstenberg came to the attention of the international public with the construction of a supermarket at the entrance to the memorial. The building was then not used as a supermarket and stood largely empty until it was demolished in 2011.

In 1965, the sculpture “Müttergruppe” (Mothers' Group) (bronze) by sculptor Fritz Cremer was erected.