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Founded: 1939Category: Miscellaneous historic sites in Germany
Historical period: Nazi Germany (Germany)
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Ravensbrück Concentration Camp was a Nazi concentration camp established exclusively for women. Located near the village of Ravensbrück in northern Germany, about 90 kilometers north of Berlin, it was opened in May 1939 by the SS under Heinrich Himmler’s orders. It became the largest women’s camp in the German Reich.
Initially designed to hold about 3,000 prisoners, Ravensbrück grew massively over time. More than 130,000 women and children, as well as around 20,000 men (mainly from a later-established adjacent camp), passed through it between 1939 and 1945. Prisoners came from over 30 countries, with many being political prisoners, resistance fighters, Jews, Romani people, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and others deemed 'undesirable' by the Nazi regime.
The conditions were brutal—overcrowding, forced labor, starvation, disease, and violence were rampant. The camp was also the site of medical experiments, particularly on Polish female prisoners, involving surgical procedures without anesthesia, infections, and bone transplants.
Ravensbrück had a crematorium installed in 1943 and later a gas chamber in early 1945, used to murder thousands of prisoners as the Nazi regime intensified its genocidal campaign.
The camp was liberated by the Soviet Red Army in late April 1945. Estimates suggest that at least 50,000 prisoners died there due to execution, malnutrition, medical abuse, and harsh conditions.
Today, Ravensbrück serves as a memorial and museum, preserving the memory of those who suffered and died there, and educating future generations about the horrors of the Holocaust and totalitarian rule.
The Pilgrimage Church of Wies (Wieskirche) is an oval rococo church, designed in the late 1740s by Dominikus Zimmermann. It is located in the foothills of the Alps in the municipality of Steingaden.
The sanctuary of Wies is a pilgrimage church extraordinarily well-preserved in the beautiful setting of an Alpine valley, and is a perfect masterpiece of Rococo art and creative genius, as well as an exceptional testimony to a civilization that has disappeared.
The hamlet of Wies, in 1738, is said to have been the setting of a miracle in which tears were seen on a simple wooden figure of Christ mounted on a column that was no longer venerated by the Premonstratensian monks of the Abbey. A wooden chapel constructed in the fields housed the miraculous statue for some time. However, pilgrims from Germany, Austria, Bohemia, and even Italy became so numerous that the Abbot of the Premonstratensians of Steingaden decided to construct a splendid sanctuary.