The Sisterhood of Ravensbrück
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Heroines of the French Resistance were deported to Ravensbrück concentration camp. An important new book tells their story.
In the aftermath of World War II, French President Charles de Gaulle formally named people who’d been part of the French Resistance, fighting Nazi rule with incredible bravery. He listed 1,030 heroic men – along with six women. An important new book shows just how wrong this was.
Women were some of the most active and effective members of the French Resistance. The Sisterhood of Ravensbrück: How an Intrepid Band of Frenchwomen Resisted the Nazis in Hitler’s All-Female Concentration Camp (Random House 2025) by Lynn Olson documents a group of close-knit French heroines who continued their clandestine Resistance activity inside Ravensbrück, one of the Nazis’ most fearsome yet least known concentration camps.
Ravensbrück
Established in 1938 before World War II broke out, the Ravensbrück concentration camp was one of the largest concentration camps inside Germany and was the largest one dedicated entirely to imprisoning women.
Romani (Gypsy) inmates stand at attention during an inspection of the weaving mill, site of forced labor at Ravensbrück. This image is from an SS propaganda album.
Unlike many other Nazi camps, prisoners who were sent to Ravensbrück weren’t predominately Jewish. The Nazis burned the camp’s records before it was liberated by the Soviet Army in 1945, but it’s estimated that approximately 20,000 Jewish women were murdered at Ravensbrück, out of a total of about 132,000 who perished there. Polish women made up the largest share: about 36%. About 21% of Ravensbrück’s prisoners came from the Soviet Union; 18% came from Germany and Austria. Only 6% of Ravensbrück’s tens of thousands of prisoners came from France, though Olson’s book shows that French prisoners had an outsized influence in the camp.
Women were sent to Ravensbrück for a range of activities. Many were political prisoners (including French Resistance members and Soviet POWs); these prisoners were forced to wear red triangles on their ragged prison uniforms. Gypsies and gay people were forced to wear black triangles. Jehovahs’ Witnesses wore purple triangles. Criminals wore green triangles. Jewish prisoners were the most despised and were designated by a yellow triangle.
Female prisoners at Ravensbrück
In 1941 the Nazis built a gas chamber at Ravensbrück to increase the number of women they murdered to an industrial scale. Those who escaped death for a few weeks or months were forced to work as slave labor in factories and workshops in the camp and elsewhere in Germany. The electronics firm Siemens & Halske operated 20 factories near Ravensbrück, staffed by prisoner slaves. They were subjected to horrific medical experiments and were also killed to satisfy the sadistic whims of the camp’s commanders.
Lynn Olson describes arriving at Ravensbrück:
Struggling with their luggage, the women were herded down a dusty road lined with pine trees. After half an hour or so, they approached a high gray wall, topped by electrified barbed wire. As a gate slowly opened, they saw before them an enormous square…Facing the women were female SS guards in hooded black capes, gripping the leashes of lunging, howling dogs. German soldiers pointed machine guns at them.
But those weren’t the images that burned themselves into the minds of (the new arrivals). It was the sight of emaciated, wraithlike figures, dressed in shapeless rags, who were creeping around the square, some staggering under the weight of vats of soup, others pushing immense wagons overflowing with garbage….it was like something from a horror movie: “I barely noticed their skeletal forms or their shaven heads. What shocked me to the core was the sight of their dead, vacant stares. They were living zombies.”
Among the tens of thousands of wretched prisoners there, The Sisterhood of Ravensbrück focuses on a tightly-knit group of French Resistance members who continued their resistance throughout the war and beyond.
Women and the French Resistance
After Nazi troops marched into Paris on June 14, 1940, women became some of the most active agents who organized clandestine resistance to the new Nazi overlords. “At the time of the great French collapse in June 1940, there were very few men left in Paris,” recalled Germaine Tillion, one of the founding members of the Resistance. “There were a million prisoners of war, and the men who weren’t prisoners were mobilized, dead, or in hiding. Women had to respond immediately to the situation, and they took control of it… In essence, women kick-started the resistance.”
In 1940, Germaine Tillion was a 33-year-old doctoral student who’d already spent years living amongst remote tribes in the mountains of Algeria, taking notes for her Ph.D. in Anthropology. After the Nazis took over Paris, Tillion joined forces with a 37-year-old librarian named Yvette Oddon to help start a resistance movement under the noses of their new Nazi rulers.
Oddon was head librarian at the Museum of Man, a natural history museum in the center of Paris. She began sending clothes, food, and medicines to French prisoners of war. Before long, she started helping prisoners escape, hiding prisoners who’d managed to evade Nazi prisons in her own small apartment near the museum. Tillion knew Oddon from her Anthropology research and joined her efforts. Later on, Agnes Humbert, a 43-year-old art historian with two grown sons, joined what would later be called the “Museum of Man” French Resistance group.
They helped recruit other agents in the Museum of Man cell, both men and women. The group created newsletters, flyers, and posters carrying anti-Nazi messages. They pasted them onto walls in the city, left piles of them on park benches, and posted them into people’s mailboxes.
Within weeks, the Museum of Man group started establishing escape routes to help Allied soldiers, Jews, and others to escape from France over the Pyrenees Mountains into Spain. They gave the French Resistance its name, publishing an underground anti-Nazi newspaper called Resistance.
In time, the group also provided intelligence on Nazi troop movements and weapons to British and Free French intelligence. Other Resistance cells sprang up across France at the same time, many spearheaded by women.
The Museum of Man group was eventually compromised and its members sent to German prisons and concentration camps. Germaine Tillion escaped capture and began working for the “Gloria” Resistance group, alongside Anise Girard, a young Frenchwoman featured in The Sisterhood of Ravensbrück. Girard and her mother helped Jews escape France, and gathered military intelligence to send to London.
Ravensbrück concentration camp
The Gloria Resistance cell was betrayed in 1943 by Rev. Robert Alesch, a priest in a parish in suburban Paris. Unbeknownst to the Gloria operatives, Rev. Alesch was on the payroll of the Gestapo. He delivered fiery anti-Nazi sermons in his church and befriended Resistance members who assumed he detested the Nazis as much as they did. Each time he betrayed a Resistance member, the Gestapo paid him a large bonus. Both Germaine Tillion and Anise Girard were arrested and eventually sent to Ravensbrück.
Resistance in Ravensbrück
Ravensbrück prisoners found ways to maintain their humanity and to support their fellow prisoners in their hellish new environs. This was a form of resistance; simply maintaining one’s humanity was a victory. “I have never experienced such strong demonstrations of solidarity and sharing as among my fellow inmates,” a French prisoner recalled in Olson’s book.
Anise Girard described, “We absolutely needed to care for one another. Alone, you were finished.” She remembered Germaine Tillion giving her her bread ration: “‘Take it,’ she’d tell me. ‘You’re young, you’ll survive, marry, have ten children!’ She kept me going, raising my spirits.”
One French prisoner transcribed poems that she’d memorized and secretly obtained paper and a pen, risking her life to do so. She wrote down poems in minute handwriting and formed tiny secret books of poems, which she circulated to her fellow inmates. “These books were our escape from the ghastly reality of Ravensbrück, our oasis in the desert.”
French prisoners organized top-secret lectures in the bunks in the dead of night, wrote songs about their plight, and organized whispered religious services. One French prisoner even composed an entire opera; she circulated the words to it within the camp, raising prisoners’ spirits and giving them a way to transcend their brutal everyday reality for a time. French prisoners resisted in other ways too, refusing to work for Nazi factories, for instance, and planning escapes (which sadly never happened).
Saving Ravensbrück’s “Rabbits”
One of the greatest acts of resistance by the prisoners of Ravensbrück was their determination to save 63 maimed prisoners nicknamed the “rabbits.”
Ravensbrück “Rabbits”
In 1942, 74 Polish women inmates became subject to gruesome medical experiments. That year, members of the Czech Resistance fatally attacked Reinhard Heydrich, the architect of the “Final Solution” plan to murder all of Europe’s Jews. Reinhnard was treated by Dr. Karl Gebhardt, a high-ranking Nazi doctor. Grehardt chose not to use the new cutting-edge sulfa antibiotics that were being developed then to treat Heydrich, who later died from sepsis. Realizing that he was in trouble, Gerhardt appealed to top Nazi Heinrich Himmler, who suggested that he conduct experiments to prove that sulfa antibiotics were worthless. Himmler offered the Polish prisoners of Ravensbrück as Gerhard’s subjects.
Gerhardt and other German doctors operated on scores of young Polish prisoners, slicing open their legs and inserting all sorts of filthy objects into the wounds including glass, dirt, splinters of wood, and the like. They stitched up the wounds and divided the prisoners into two groups: half were given sulfa antibiotics, while half were given no medical help at all.
Women receiving antibiotics recovered, so Gerhardt repeated the experiment again and again, each time with more depravity. He smashed prisoners’ leg bones, removed muscles and tendons, introduced infected materials directly into their wounds, and deprived the women who received antibiotics of food and water so that he could claim antibiotics were worthless (and that his treatment of Reinhard Heydrich had been correct.)
After months of surgeries, 63 of the original 74 prisoners selected for this sadistic treatment remained alive. They were nicknamed the “rabbits” by the other prisoners. In 1945, as it became clear that Allied troops were approaching Ravensbrück and Ravensbrück’s officials were busy destroying records and other evidence of the crimes they’d committed there. Prisoners had always been murdered at Ravensbrück, which had its own gas chamber, but now the pace of killings had increased. It seemed likely that the horribly disfigured victims who still survived would be killed and their bodies incinerated in Ravensbrück’s two large crematoria so that the world would never know their story.
Ravensbrück’s prisoners had other ideas.
Prisoners of Ravensbrück
Dziuba Sokulska, one of the survivors of the experiments, recalled how “an incredible, unheard-of thing happened. The whole camp decided we were to be saved.” Another Polish prisoner, Nina Iwanska, described: “Everyone at Ravensbrück seemed to agree on one thing: ‘The war is about to end, and there’s no way we’re going to let you die now.’”
Prisoners placed wooden planks above the ceilings of the barracks, forming makeshift hiding spaces. They helped the disfigured Polish prisoners hide in them. Prisoners in charge of the barracks stopped reporting the deaths of women who died so that others could impersonate them and collect their daily ration of watery soup to give to these victims. Other prisoners responded to their numbers during daily rollcall so their disappearance wouldn’t be missed.
For over three months, until liberation, the entire camp engaged in this breathtaking act of resistance. All 63 “rabbit” prisoners remained alive.
Documenting Nazi Atrocities
Germaine Tillion and Aise Girard, members of the Gloria Resistance cell who were deported to Ravensbrück concentration camp, drew on their academic backgrounds in anthropology and documented everything they could.
Germaine Tillion
Tillion’s notes captured a harrowing array of details: daily death tolls from gassing and other methods, the names of victims—especially those who suffered egregious brutality at the hands of the guards—and even the vast sums of money looted by the SS. Together, she and Girard meticulously recorded the names of women killed at Ravensbrück, the dates of their deaths, and the camp officials responsible. They tracked camp expenditures and staff assignments, writing these records on precious scraps of paper and hiding them throughout the camp to preserve them.
Ravensbrück was liberated by Soviet troops on April 30, 1945. Unlike the American forces, the Soviets did not publicize their liberation of Nazi camps as widely, and the guards at Ravensbrück had time to destroy many of the camp’s records before fleeing. As a result, Ravensbrück never gained the same level of public recognition as other camps. Even today, its scale and cruelty remain unfamiliar to many.
Yet in the aftermath of the war, Tillion and other survivors were determined that the world would not forget. In 1946, Tillion published her notes on Ravensbrück, and she joined other French Resistance survivors in founding a society dedicated to preserving the memory of those who suffered and died there.
Bearing Witness
Only a few Ravensbrück officials were ever tried for their crimes.
In 1946, a British military court tried 16 of the camp’s senior staff. The defendants were represented by German lawyers who aggressively cross-examined former prisoners, often attempting to undermine their credibility. Whenever a witness hesitated or couldn’t recall a specific detail, the defense seized the opportunity, accusing them—sometimes with derision—of fabricating their accounts.
The defense called nearly twice as many witnesses as the prosecution: 41 character witnesses testified on behalf of the accused, compared to just 22 former prisoners who were brought forward by the prosecution. Notably, the meticulously documented recollections of Germaine Tillion and Geneviève de Gaulle-Anthonioz were never used, and neither woman was asked to testify.
Eleven of the camp officials were found guilty and sentenced to death. Five others were found guilty and sent to prison. They were quietly released a few years later, long before their sentences were completed.
A recent survey found that half of young people in the United States can not name a single Nazi concentration camp. A fifth of young Americans feel that Hitler “had some good ideas.”
Germaine Tillion, Yvette Oddon, Anise Girard, and the many other French heroines described in The Sisterhood of Ravensbrück provide the antidote to this apathy and ignorance. They were ordinary Frenchwomen who refused to sit back and be silent in the face of atrocities. Their incredible bravery is a stark reminder to act when faced with evil.
“It’s this indifference that has affected us more painfully than any of the atrocities,” Tillion recalled after the trials of Ravensbrück officials. “Our comrades who died, of whom nothing remains had the right to get justice! We’re not talking here about hatred and revenge… It is this feeling of justice and indignation that we would like to see all the honest people of the world adopt.” Her words remain as true today as when she said them a generation ago.
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