Reich History
By Claudia Berdella
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| View of the Sobibor extermination camp, 1943 |
Studying the Holocaust is an interesting and tolling task when gone in-depth and below what the general surface level of understanding of it is. There are so many intricacies that go along with it. Of course, most people will know, recognize and have a basic understanding of the big names of it: Auschwitz, Dachau, and sometimes Buchenwald. However, what most do not know, is that Auschwitz was one of six extermination camps. The closest in operations was Majdanek, then the other four being Chełmno, Belzec, Treblinka and Sobibor. Nor are people aware of the torture (and somewhat transit) camp Neue Bremm, or similar subcamps. Many know about the twin experiments done at Auschwitz by Josef Mengele, but very little is circulated about those done on Polish women— “The Rabbits”— at the Ravensbruck concentration camp by Fritz Sischer, Karl Gebhardt and Herta Oberhausen. The Ravensbrück camp itself is a fascinating part of Reich history; it was a camp consisting of only female inmates where Jews were typically (until 1944) the smallest group imprisoned— and that’s not because they were instantly killed, the main prisoners were simply not typically Jewish, they mainly housed Jehovah’s Witnesses, Soviets, Political enemies, as well as asocials and deviants (like lesbians, and that resulted in quite a bit of homosexual intercourse to occur in the early years of the camps existence). In fact, after the last of the extermination camps shut down, Ravensbrück became a temporary one with at least two known gas chambers (and a suspected third in a train car, but any real evidence has been destroyed along with most witnesses should it have been there). For more on the Ravensbrück camp, the book Ravensbrück: Life and Death in Hitler’s Concentration Camp For Women is a wonderful resource on it.
Obviously, it is a topic which is inherently hard to look into (possibly because people don’t want to admit they have just as much a capacity to enact similar), it reveals harsh realities of human nature, and it’s just not something most people will look into past what they’re taught in school, which frankly, isn’t much. While this is certainly the case, there will always be people willing to research such things, and luckily for as much as the SS tried to destroy the evidence of a lot, they extensively recorded their doings so it is not hard to find direct information from the ones enacting the genocide. There is always a book or file (though, sadly quite a bit is hidden in Russian archives and isn’t accessible).