Hugh Cecil

Process of elimination: the horrors of Ravensbrück revealed

A review of If This is a Woman by Sarah Helm offers some shreds of hope in the heroic behaviour of many of the camp inmates

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  • If This is a Woman: Inside Ravensbrück: Hitler’s Concentration Camp for Women

    Sarah Helm

    Little Brown, pp. 768

Concentration camps in Nazi Germany were originally set up in 1933 to terrorise Hitler’s political enemies; as war drew near, their function expanded to gratify his obsession (and that of Reichsführer Himmler, as head of the SS which administered them) with ‘purifying the race’ by getting rid of gypsies, Jews, ‘asocials’ — prostitutes, criminals, vagabonds — as well as the mentally ill and handicapped.

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