The savage abuse of women by Nazi's during WWII will be highlighted in a Hamburg Exhibit---the German SS which ran the camps set up Brothels in 10 camps, the aim was to reward prisoners who had shown high productivity in the forced labor camps.
At Ravensbruck Concentration Camp, around 220 women were forced into prostitution between 1942-1945 some 132,000 women and children, 20,000 men and 1,000 girls were held at Ravensbruck an estimated 40,000 prisoners were murdered or died of mistreatment and disease during that period.
Corrie & Betsy ten Boom were taken to Ravensbruck, and upon their arrival the first 2 days they slept out in the open in the rain, they then were packed into a barrack room of 1,400 women that was built to house 400 and slept on straw mattresses filled with choking dust and fleas. Roll call each morning was at 4:30 am where 35,000 women were counted, if any were missing the Nazi guards recounted, often times the recounting went on for hours.
Their work was very hard, Corrie & Betsy were forced to load heavy sheets of steel on to carts and push them for a certain distance and unload them while the Nazi guards shouted at them to work harder and faster. Their diet consisted of potato soup at lunch time and turnip soup for dinner with 1 piece of black bread.
German Sociologist Christa Paul, Ph.D. a researcher at Hamburg University, who has studied the abuse of women during the Nazi period, Dr. Paul's work will be on exhibit at a special memorial to the Neuengamme Concentration Camp which opened today through January 18, 2008
