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:
“If you complain of people being shot down in the streets, of the absence of communication or social responsibility, of the rise of everyday violence which people have become accustomed to, and the dehumanization of feelings, then the ultimate development on an organized social level is the concentration camp.... The concentration camp is the final expression of human separateness and its ultimate consequence. It is organized abandonment.”
—Arthur Miller (b. 1915)
“Usually the scenery about them is drear and savage enough; and the logger’s camp is as completely in the woods as a fungus at the foot of a pine in a swamp; no outlook but to the sky overhead; no more clearing than is made by cutting down the trees of which it is built, and those which are necessary for fuel.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)