Training Facility for Female SS Guards
The women’s concentration camp Ravensbrück also served as a training facility for newly recruited and newly hired female SS guards, who after completing their training, were deployed to other concentration camps and sub camps. Approximately 3500 female camp guards were trained at Ravensbrück from September 1942 to April 1945. This period roughly coincides with the time served by commandant Fritz Suhren. The training facility in Ravensbrück was set up to meet the growing need for human resources. This was in part because of the enlargement of the women’s concentration camp. But there was also a growing need for female guards because of the increasing number of inmates who had to work in the various sub camps. Compared with 1941, there were about three times as many female guards starting their service in Ravensbrück in 1942.1See Heike 1994, p. 230. The inmates had to address the SS guards with Frau Aufseherin (Madam Overseer). The security guards’ names were thus mostly unknown to the inmates. Frequent transfers were to prevent inmates and guards from getting to know each other and to ensure that guards and inmates remained anonymous.2See Heike 1994, p. 227 f. Thus the female guards, at least in the large camps for women like the women’s concentration camp Ravensbrück, remained more or less anonymous. At St. Lambrecht too none of the interviewed prisoners remembered the names of the female guards.
The female guards were also to make sure that the women would write no more than the permitted number of letters and postcards. In concentration camp Ravensbrück an inmate was only allowed to write one letter a month and to receive one letter a month. When a prisoner arrived at the camp, they had to give an address of the recipient.
‘In the first years there was a strict censorship […] All outgoing letters had to be written on special camp paper with a printed heading, “Ravensbrück Concentration Camp for Women”, and underneath the censorship rules. […] The paper on which the Bible Students wrote was printed in green, and had, in addition, the words: “I am still a Jehovah’s Witness.” They were allowed to write only five lines at a time.’3Buber-Neumann 2009, p. 176.
This special limitation for Jehovah’s Witnesses in their contact with the outside world was an example of the bullying with which the Nazis hoped to break their commitment to their faith. The postal censorship was also to give the SS guards insight into the inmate’s disposition.
The SS guards were standardly equipped with guns, whips, and dogs.4See Heike 1994, p. 224 ff.
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