Holocaust: Loretta Walz Digitizes the Most Complete Collection of Voices of Women Survivors of Ravensbrück

Filmmaker and documentary filmmaker Loretta Walz has presented the memorial center located at the former Ravensbrück Nazi concentration camp for women with a collection of 207 audiovisual interviews , representing the most comprehensive documentation on the survivors of that internment center, to which more than 400 Spanish women were also deported.

This fully digitized collection , a treasure for the culture of memory and consisting of more than 800 hours of film, around 800 photographs and numerous written documents , will be available at the Ravensbrück memorial site – located about 90 kilometers north of Berlin – for educational and academic research purposes.

The documentary filmmaker, who delivered the material in several stages, interviewed 191 female prisoners from the Ravensbrück, Lichtenburg and Moringen concentration camps, as well as 16 survivors from the Ravensbrück men's detention center, over a period of 30 years, between 1982 and 2012 .

The collection offers a unique, multi-perspective view of everyday life at the internment center , the social structures within the main camp and its satellite camps, and the diverse processes of memory, the memorial center emphasizes.

At a press conference at the Potsdam Film Museum, director of the Ravensbrück Memorial, Andrea Genest, described Walz's interviews, conducted with great sensitivity and documented with highly expressive film media, as an "immeasurable treasure" for the memorial center.

"The fact that concentration camp survivors will one day no longer be able to recount what happened has characterized the debate over the educational role of memorial sites at former concentration camps for decades," he noted.

He emphasized that "audiovisual interviews have long been a proven opportunity not only to preserve survivors' stories, but also to retain them as a resource for future questions and research."

Not only the biographical accounts, but also the perspectives and attitudes of the survivors, then elderly and now deceased, captured by Walz, " offer a profound insight into the reality experienced in the camp and the different strategies for processing their experiences," he added.

"The many women and (few) men interviewed spoke about their lives and the terrible time they were confined because they wanted their memories to be preserved," the documentary filmmaker emphasized.

The collection includes, in addition to the audiovisual interviews, video footage of the memorial site and the former concentration camp grounds from 1993 onwards , as well as several satellite camps, and reunions of former prisoners in the 1980s and 1990s, while the photographs are mostly from documents and images belonging to the interviewees.

Ravensbrück was the largest Nazi concentration camp for women , established in 1939 and constantly expanded in the following years.

In April 1941, a smaller men's camp was established nearby, and a year later, in June, the Uckermark camp for young women and girls was established.

Between 1939 and 1945, around 120,000 women and children, 20,000 men and 1,200 adolescent women, from more than 30 countries, were registered at Ravensbrück , including more than 400 Spanish Republicans.

According to various sources, the Ravensbrück camp claimed between 20,000 and 30,000 lives due to deprivation or were victims of executions and gas chambers.