The Uckermark concentration camp was a small German concentration camp for girls near the Ravensbrück concentration camp in Fürstenberg/Havel, Germany and then an "emergency" extermination camp.
The camp was opened in May 1942 as a detention camp for girls, aged 16 to 21, who were considered criminal or difficult. Girls who reached the upper age limit were transferred to the Ravensbrück women's camp. Camp administration was provided by the Ravensbrück camp. In its early years, the head overseer at Uckermark was a woman named Lotte Toberentz, and one other Aufseherin (female warden) is known today by name, Johanna Braach. Both these women were tried by a British court at the Third Ravensbruck Trial.
In January 1945, the juveniles' camp was closed and the infrastructure was subsequently used as an extermination camp for "women who were sick, no longer efficient, and over 52 years old". Over 5,000 women were murdered there; only 500 women and children survived. Though it was shut down in March 1945 the Soviets liberated the camp on the night of April 29–30, 1945. Today only very few structures of the camp lie in ruins, barely recognizable.
Some of the responsible SS wardens of the camp, amongst them chief warden (Oberaufseherin) Ruth Neudeck, were tried in the Third Ravensbrück Trial, called the "Uckermark trial".
Famous quotes containing the words concentration camp and/or camp:
“We have our difficulties, true; but we are a wiser and a tougher nation than we were in 1932. Never have there been six years of such far flung internal preparedness in all of history. And this has been done without any dictator’s power to command, without conscription of labor or confiscation of capital, without concentration camps and without a scratch on freedom of speech, freedom of the press or the rest of the Bill of Rights.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)
“Some of the taverns on this road, which were particularly dirty, were plainly in a transition state from the camp to the house.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)