The Sisterhood of Ravensbrück

Book review by Dr Anne Sarzin

Evil and good: Sinners and saints in Ravensbrück

With the Holocaust landscape of the Second World War as the dark and forbidding background, Lynne Olson’s extraordinary book, The Sisterhood of Ravensbrück, foregrounds and acknowledges the trailblazing lives of women in the French Resistance who, despite the stifling French patriarchy, forged pioneering roles for themselves in the male-dominated Resistance and who suffered the cruellest consequences inflicted by the barbarous Nazi regime in an all-female concentration camp only 50 kilometres north of Berlin.

It is both a personal story of a unique band of patriotic French women—Germaine Tillion, Anise Girard, Genevieve de Gaulle (General de Gaulle’s niece) and Jacqueline d’Alincourt—as well as the revelatory story of the little-known all-female concentration camp Ravensbrück where unmitigated evil flourished and where, among other brutal practices, the most inhumane medical experimentation was conducted on Polish women known as the lapins (rabbits).

The book firmly demolishes the myth that there were no extermination centres in Germany, as it conclusively shows that a gas chamber was constructed in December 1944 at Ravensbrück and used to maximum effect in the last months of the war. Specialists trained at Auschwitz were sent to implement Himmler’s order and, as Olson notes, ‘the camp began killing inmates at a breakneck pace….A second crematorium was added but even that wasn’t enough to dispose of all the bodies’. Even towards the end of January 1945, so close to the camp’s liberation by the Russians, the first of some 7000 women, mostly Jews, arrived from Auschwitz, joining women and children from Warsaw, (neither Jewish nor political prisoners). At that stage, 40,000 women were crammed in hellish conditions into a camp constructed for 10,000.  To deal with the situation at a time when most other gas chambers were shut down by the Reich as Allied troops approached, the notorious SS supervisor Hans Pflaum—known for his extreme brutality, Germaine Tillion called him ‘the unspeakable beast’—and Dr Adolf Winkelman selected their victims for the gas chamber.

Through the eyes of the four Frenchwomen whose stories are at the heart of this narrative, relying on their books, interviews, memoirs and speeches, among other primary sources, Olson documents the unimaginable evils perpetrated in Ravensbrück and, in particular, the selfless and enduring bonds of friendship that enabled them to survive the iniquities of war and the tyrannical cruelties of the camp. But it is the second half of the book, which represents their rebirth post-liberation, that proves truly revelatory. Here we move from their wounds of war to the remarkable ways in which these women attempted to shape their lives, while giving acknowledgement and meaning to the horrors they had witnessed and endured. While their sisterhood sparked resistance and survival in war, after liberation their sorority encompassed a wider movement aimed at amending and healing the broken lives of others. It is here, as Olson records their emergence from the travails of war and their first tentative movements to re-frame their policies and missions for the greater good, that every page proves a fascinating chronicle of the human capacity for good in the face of unfathomable evil.

The book is evenly divided, the first half introduces the Frenchwomen’s stories, backgrounds and wartime destinies, while the second half focuses on their postwar passions, policies and activism. Together, the two vistas constitute a rare snapshot of human endeavour to relieve in so many heroic ways even a modicum of the gloom of history’s darkest chapters. For me, it was interesting to note how they moved so resolutely and compassionately beyond themselves to secure the salvation of others and to right the glaring wrongs, as much as it was in their power to do so.  Anise Girard, for example, condemned revisionist historians who, in the 1960s, raised doubts about the Holocaust, some claiming there were never any gas chambers in Germany or, for that matter, in Auschwitz, as Professor Robert Faurisson alleged. As Olson states, Anise was ‘outraged’ and, for several years, researched government archives throughout Europe, unearthing documents that testified to the existence of the gas chamber at Ravensbrück. ‘She added her evidence to that of historians from Germany, Israel and elsewhere, to debunk the claims of Faurisson and other deniers. Their work, published first in German and then in French… was one of the first books countering the deniers.’

There are illuminating cameo appearances throughout the book, including Benjamin Ferencz, the Jewish Harvard lawyer who was chief prosecutor for the United States Army at the Einsatzgruppen trial, one of 12 Nuremberg trials held by US authorities in Germany and who, in that capacity, investigated Nazi war crimes. In this book, his collaboration with the personable American Caroline Ferriday constitutes a little-known and extremely meaningful chapter in his postwar career, bringing to the US for medical treatment the Polish women subjected to brutal medical experimentation in Ravensbrück.

But it is ‘The Sisterhood’ that demands our own immersion in the act of witnessing their unflagging commitment to each other and to their wider circles, moving beyond the self to the selfless. Maia Wechsler, a young documentary filmmaker who knew the group and other Ravensbrück survivors, devoted years getting to know these women. What impressed her was their ongoing activism, compared to male veterans’ groups, who spent their time rehashing the past. As Olson concludes, ‘the survivors of Ravensbrück, while still bearing witness to their shared history, were also fighting for social and economic justice in the present and for the future’.

Olson has succeeded in combining the requirements of objective historical and archival research with the intimate lives of the women she portrays so compellingly. Her subjects—and this book—are deserving of respect and gratitude.

The Sisterhood of Ravensbrück: How an intrepid band of Frenchwomen resisted the Nazis in Hitler’s all-female concentration camp

Lynne Olson

Scribe Melbourne July 2025