- 50,000 women murdered at German camp; 2,500 gassed in one weekend
- 'Undesirables'at the camp included gipsies, political prisoners, Resistance fighters and petty criminals
- Women 'rabbits' were injected with STI in heinous medical experiments
- Red Army soldiers raped many survivors who saw the camp's liberation
- Sarah Helm's new book features testimonies from prisoners
Katharina
Waitz stared at the 15ft wall topped by barbed wire, took a deep breath
and, undaunted, began to climb the last leg to freedom.
She
was one of the handful of inmates of Ravensbruck, the Nazi
concentration camp exclusively for women, ever to break out, and it took
the ultimate in daring high-wire acts for her to get away.
A
trapeze artist by profession, the crime that consigned her to this
grimmest of places was simply that she was a gipsy and therefore
classified by Hitler’s Third Reich as a degenerate whose very existence
polluted the pure Aryan gene pool.
Twice this brave young woman tried to escape and was caught, spending months of torture in the camp’s punishment block.
Undeterred,
she tried again. Under cover of darkness, she somehow slipped past the
SS guards and their vicious Alsatian dogs and up on to the roof of the
staff canteen.
From
there, she used all her circus skills to climb the electric fence,
wrapping a blanket round the live wires. Then she clambered over five
rows of barbed wire and a 15ft wall before fleeing into the forest.
Prisoners at Ravensbruck concentration
camp in Germany stand near barbed wire in 1945, the year 2,500 women
were murdered in one weekend as Russian forces approached
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