Subcamp Neubrandenburg

The city of Neubrandenburg in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania was an important armaments production site during the Nazi era. In the Mechanischen Werkstätten (Mechanical Workshops MWN), around 6,000 prisoners had to perform forced labor for German military production. As part of the inclusion of female concentration camp prisoners from Ravensbrück, the first subcamp was built on Ihlenfelder Strasse in 1943. In 1944, a second underground camp was built in the forest south of Neubrandenburg's city limits so as not to endanger production during bombing raids. In the confined space of the "Waldbau," there were six to seven factory buildings, some above-ground structures and about five prisoner barracks, some of which were dug into the ground, in which about 2,000 female concentration camp prisoners had to live and work.

© Photo: Carsten Büttner, zeitlupe | Stadt.Geschichte & Erinnerung

Dr. phil. Constanze Jaiser
Literature scholar and theologian

Publications on the subject, include:

Poetische Zeugnisse. Gedichte aus dem Frauen-Konzentrationslager Ravensbrück. Stuttgart/Weimar 2000

Europa im Kampf 1939-1944. Internationale Poesie aus dem Frauen-Konzentrationslager Ravensbrück. Berlin 2009

Ein Schmuggelfund aus dem KZ – Erinnerung, Kunst und Menschenwürde. Berlin 2012

Violette Lecoq

1912 - 2003 France. Worked for the Red Cross as a nurse from 1939 on. She was active in the French Resistance and helped French soldiers to escape, but she was betrayed and arrested by the Gestapo, and then deported to the Ravensbrück concentration camp in 1943. Because she spoke German, she worked as a nurse at the Tbc-block. In April 1945 she could be evacuated by the Swedish Red Cross. The drawings she had made in Ravensbrück were used as evidence in court after the war, for example in the Ravensbrück Trials in Hamburg in 1946/47 against members of the security staff of the Ravensbrück concentration camp.