In a perverse twist, most of the guards were women themselves. Rather, they were political prisoners, Resistance fighters, lesbians, prostitutes, even the sister of New York's Mayor LaGuardia. Ninety percent of Ravensbrück's prisoners were not Jewish. There are a handful of studies and memoirs that reference Ravensbrück, but until now no one has written a full account of this atrocity, perhaps due to the mostly masculine narrative of war, or perhaps because it lacks the Jewish context of most mainstream Holocaust history. He called it Ravensbrück, and during the years that followed thousands of people died there after enduring brutal forms of torture. Shortly before the outbreak of World War II, Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS and the architect of the Holocaust, oversaw the construction of a special concentration camp just fifty miles north of Berlin. A groundbreaking, masterful, and absorbing account of the last hidden atrocity of World War II-Ravensbrück-the largest female-only concentration camp, where more than 100,000 women consisting of more than twenty nationalities were imprisoned.
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