Polish female prisoners of Ravensbrück

The Genocide of the Ethnic Poles

Edward Reid 

In September 1939, only weeks after Germany invaded Poland, the first Polish women began arriving at Ravensbrück, marking the beginning of one of the darkest chapters of German occupation and repression. By the end of the Second World War, approximately 40,000 Polish women had been imprisoned there, making them the largest national group in the camp. Many were members of the Polish resistance, teachers, nurses, students, couriers, political activists, or ordinary civilians arrested during German reprisals. Others were deported simply because they had been caught helping the underground or were related to someone suspected of resistance activity. Of the tens of thousands of Polish women imprisoned at Ravensbrück, only a fraction survived the hunger, forced labor, disease, executions, beatings, and medical experiments inflicted upon them.

Ravensbrück, built in 1939 near the village of the same name north of Berlin, became the largest concentration camp established specifically for women. It was not merely a prison or forced-labor facility. It became a place of calculated humiliation, exploitation, and murder, where women were stripped of their names, reduced to numbers, and forced to labor under brutal conditions for German industry. Starvation, overcrowding, epidemics, arbitrary punishment, and exhausting work weakened the prisoners physically and psychologically. The camp also became a center for some of the most barbaric medical experiments carried out under the German regime, with prisoners used as human test subjects in procedures designed to serve German military interests and the ideological ambitions of National Socialism.

The experiments conducted at Ravensbrück were especially cruel because they were performed on healthy young women who had committed no crime beyond resisting German occupation or belonging to a population the Germans considered expendable. German doctors deliberately cut open the prisoners’ legs and introduced bacteria into the wounds to cause severe infections. Wood splinters, pieces of glass, dirt, and other foreign materials were inserted into the wounds to imitate the injuries suffered by German soldiers on the battlefield. The doctors then tested sulfonamide drugs to determine whether they could control the resulting infections. Other experiments involved removing sections of muscle, severing nerves, deliberately breaking bones, and attempting bone or tibia transplants. Some operations were conducted with inadequate anesthesia, while others were performed without it, leaving the women to endure unimaginable pain, permanent disability, infection, and trauma.

The prisoners were not treated as human beings but as disposable material for German medical research. Adolf Hitler reportedly justified such experimentation by arguing that prisoners should not remain untouched by the war while German soldiers endured unbearable suffering. This reasoning revealed the moral corruption at the heart of the system. The suffering of German soldiers was used not as a reason to protect human life, but as an excuse to torture defenseless prisoners who had no ability to consent or refuse. Medicine, which should have been dedicated to healing, was transformed into an instrument of punishment, racial ideology, and military experimentation.

Among the prisoners subjected to these procedures was a group of 74 young Polish women who became known as the “Ravensbrück Rabbits.” Most had been arrested for involvement in the Polish underground and transported to Ravensbrück as political prisoners. Their nickname reflected the degrading manner in which the German doctors treated them, as though they were laboratory animals rather than human beings. The name also referred to the way many of the women were forced to hop or move with great difficulty after the operations left their legs mutilated, infected, or permanently damaged.

Between 1942 and 1943, doctors including Karl Gebhardt, Fritz Fischer, and Herta Oberheuser carried out a series of grotesque operations on these Polish women. The victims suffered deliberate infections, muscle removal, nerve damage, bone fractures, grafting procedures, and amputations. Several died directly from the experiments, while others were executed when their injuries became too severe or when the doctors no longer considered them useful. Those who survived were often left with lifelong disabilities, chronic pain, and deep psychological wounds. Yet even under these conditions, the women refused to surrender their humanity. They cared for one another after operations, carried those who could no longer walk, shared their meager food rations, and stood together against the attempts to isolate and dehumanize them.

Their resistance was not limited to survival. The Rabbits understood that the Germans intended to conceal the experiments and eventually eliminate the witnesses. They therefore worked with other prisoners to document what was happening and send evidence beyond the camp. Krystyna “Krysia” Czyż and other women helped compose secret messages describing the operations, the names of the doctors, and the condition of the victims. When ordinary writing materials were unavailable, prisoners used whatever means they could find, including invisible writing made with urine. Maria Bielicka and other inmates also cooperated with Czech and Polish prisoners to smuggle coded information through letters, clothing, and personal belongings. Some messages reached the Polish underground and were transmitted to the outside world, ensuring that the crimes committed at Ravensbrück could not be completely hidden.

As the German war effort collapsed, the SS attempted to destroy evidence and murder prisoners who could testify about the experiments. The surviving Rabbits knew that they had become dangerous witnesses. In response, prisoners of many nationalities organized an extraordinary effort to hide them. The women were moved between barracks, disguised, given different identification numbers, and concealed among other groups of inmates. Fellow prisoners shared information, created false records, and risked execution by refusing to reveal their location. For approximately three months, the surviving Rabbits were protected by the international prisoner community. Despite searches and threats from the SS, none of the 63 surviving women was betrayed.

After the war, several of the Ravensbrück Rabbits testified about the experiments and helped expose the crimes committed by German doctors. Their testimony contributed to the prosecution of Karl Gebhardt, Fritz Fischer, Herta Oberheuser, and others during the postwar medical trials. Gebhardt was convicted and executed in 1948. Fischer and Oberheuser received prison sentences, although both were released early, in 1954. Oberheuser even briefly attempted to resume medical practice. Many other perpetrators were never prosecuted, and most of the Polish survivors received little or no meaningful compensation for the injuries, disabilities, and suffering they endured.

The experiments at Ravensbrück and other concentration camps helped lead to the creation of the Nuremberg Code, a foundational document in modern medical ethics. The code declared that voluntary and informed consent is essential in human experimentation and that research must avoid unnecessary physical and psychological suffering. These principles emerged because German doctors had abandoned the most basic obligations of medicine and treated powerless prisoners as objects rather than people.

Today, the Ravensbrück Rabbits are remembered not only as victims of German medical crimes, but as women of extraordinary courage, loyalty, and resilience. They endured pain designed to destroy their bodies and a system intended to erase their dignity, yet they continued to protect one another, preserve evidence, and resist silence. Their survival was made possible by their own solidarity and by the bravery of fellow prisoners who risked their lives to hide them. Their story remains a warning about what can happen when medicine is separated from conscience, when ideology replaces morality, and when human beings are denied their fundamental dignity

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