Heinrich Himmler often drove out to Ravensbrück, even in atrocious weather like this. The head of the SS had friends in the area and would drop in to inspect the camp as he passed by. He rarely left without issuing new orders. Once he ordered more root vegetables to be put in the prisoners’ soup. On another occasion he said the killing wasn’t going fast enough.

Ravensbrück was the only Nazi concentration camp built for women. The camp took its name from the small village that adjoins the town of Fürstenberg and lies about fifty miles due north of Berlin, off the road to Rostock on Germany’s Baltic coast. Women arriving in the night sometimes thought they were near the coast because they tasted salt on the wind; they also felt sand underfoot. When daylight came they saw that the camp was built on the edge of a lake and surrounded by forest. Himmler liked his camps to be in areas of natural beauty, and preferably hidden from view. Today the camp is still hidden from view; the horrific crimes enacted there and the courage of the victims are largely unknown.

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Ravensbrück, fifty miles north of Berlin, on the southern edge of the Mecklenburg lake district, was, as Himmler identified in 1938, a good location for a concentration camp. Rail and water connections were good. Fürstenberg, cradled by three lakes, the Röblinsee, Baalensee and Schwedtsee, sits astride the River Havel, which divides into several channels as it flows through the town.

Another factor that influenced Himmler’s choice was the siting in an area of natural beauty. Himmler believed that the cleansing of German blood should begin close to nature, and the invigorating forces of the German forests played a central role in the mythology of the Heimat – German soil. Buchenwald – meaning Beech Forest – was sited in a famous wooded area close to Weimar and several other camps were deliberately located in beauty spots. Just weeks before Ravensbrück was opened a stretch of water here was declared an ‘organic source for the Aryan race’. Fürstenberg had always been popular with nature lovers who came to boat on the lakes, or visit the baroque Palace of Fürstenberg.

In the early 1930s the town was briefly a communist stronghold, and as the Nazis first sought a foothold there were several street battles, but before Hitler became chancellor, opposition had been eradicated. A Nazi mayor was appointed and a Nazi priest, Pastor Märker, took over in the town’s evangelical church. Hitler’s ‘German Christians’, strong in such rural areas, organised nationalist festivities and parades.

By the late 1930s the Jews of Fürstenberg had largely gone. Eva Hamburger, a Jewish hotelier, resisted expulsion, but after the pogrom of ‘Kristallnacht’, the ‘night of broken glass’, of 9–10 November 1938, she too moved out. In Fürstenberg that night the Jewish cemetery was destroyed and Eva Hamburger’s hotel was smashed up. Soon after the local paper reported that the last Jewish property at Number 3 Röbinsee was sold.

Like most small German towns, Fürstenberg had suffered badly in the slump, so the arrival of a concentration camp meant jobs and trade. The fact that the prisoners were women was not controversial. Valesca Kaper, the middle-aged wife of a shopkeeper, was an effective leader of the local Frauenschaft (Nazi women’s group) who often lectured women on the evils of make-up, smoking and alcohol, and explained the burden that ‘asocials’ placed on the state. Josef Goebbels even made a speech in Fürstenberg telling the townspeople: ‘If the family is the nation’s source of strength, the woman is its core and centre.’

In the spring of 1939, as the date of the camp opening came nearer, women were urged to ‘serve on the home front’ – which included working as concentration camp guards, but nothing official was said about recruitment; in fact, nothing official was said about the camp at all. Only a small reference in the Forest News to ‘an accident near the large construction site’ provided a hint that the concentration camp was even being built.

In early May a concert of music by Haydn and Mozart was performed and the local Gestapo hosted a sporting event of shooting and grenade-throwing. The cinema showed a romantic comedy. The paper reported that, after a hard winter, charitable donations were sought and bankruptcy notices appeared.

All this time, the lock on the river was opening constantly for barges bringing materials and the camp wall became easily visible from the town side of the lake. Several local women put their names down for a job, including Margarete Mewes, a housemaid and young mother. On the first Sunday of May Fürstenberg held its traditional Mother’s Day celebrations. Frau Kaper handed out Mother Crosses to those who had borne more than four children, thereby answering Hitler’s call to multiply the Aryan gene.