The Sisterhood of Ravensbrück

Ravensbrück, the only Nazi concentration camp designed exclusively for women, held an estimated 130,000 prisoners during World War II. Freed by Soviet troops and located in the Soviet zone of postwar Germany, it remained largely hidden from history. Lynne Olson's narrative centers on a group of French résistantes who defied both the Nazi occupation and their own patriarchal society, refused to behave like victims inside the camp, and spent the rest of their lives bearing witness to what they endured.

The story begins with Germaine Tillion, a young anthropologist who spent five years studying Berber tribes in the mountains of Algeria. Returning to France in May 1940 as the Nazi blitzkrieg swept across Western Europe, she was sickened by Marshal Philippe Pétain's call for an armistice and resolved that "something must be done immediately" (11). With retired military officers and her mother, Émilie Tillion, an art historian of noted wit, she formed an escape network for captured French troops and soon joined the Museum of Man network, the first major Resistance organization in occupied Paris. The network published the earliest underground newspaper in the occupied zone and collected military intelligence for Britain, but a double agent betrayed its leaders, leading to Gestapo roundups and executions. Tillion's cell escaped detection, and she took over leadership, forging an alliance with Gloria SMH, an intelligence network backed by Britain's Special Operations Executive (SOE).

Gloria SMH recruited Anise Girard, a high-spirited young woman raised by an unconventional mother who encouraged independence. Anise gathered intelligence on German military installations and delivered reports to the writer Samuel Beckett, whose identity she would not learn for decades. In 1942, a Catholic priest named Robert Alesch, secretly a Gestapo agent, infiltrated Tillion's network and betrayed her. Both Tillion and Girard were arrested and imprisoned, first at La Santé and then at Fresnes, where they communicated with fellow inmates through vents and broken windowpanes. On October 21, 1943, the two women met for the first time on a train platform at the Gare du Nord, forming an intense bond during the weeklong journey to Ravensbrück.

They arrived on October 31, 1943, to screaming guards, lunging dogs, and emaciated inmates. Stripped of possessions and identity, both were classified as Nacht und Nebel (Night and Fog) political prisoners, a designation meaning they were slated for secret execution with no record of their deaths. Tillion fell deathly ill with diphtheria; Czech inmates saved her life by hiding her in the contagious ward, which German guards never entered. During recovery, she launched an anthropological investigation of the camp, learning from informants about its structure, slave labor system, and the profits extracted by SS leader Heinrich Himmler. Girard's fluent German and outgoing personality helped her win the trust of inmate office workers, who became key sources of intelligence.

In November 1943, a young Polish prisoner named Nina Iwanska told Girard about medical experiments performed on 74 Polish women. SS doctor Karl Gebhardt had cut open their legs and inserted bacteria, dirt, and glass to induce infections, killing several and permanently disabling the survivors. The victims, called "rabbits" by fellow inmates, fought back: 16-year-old Krystyna Czyz devised a method of writing secret messages in invisible ink made from urine in censored letters, alerting the Polish resistance. Iwanska asked Girard to survive and tell their story. Girard and Tillion promised to do so, collecting evidence including undeveloped photographs of the victims' mutilated legs.

Geneviève de Gaulle, the 22-year-old niece of General Charles de Gaulle, arrived at Ravensbrück in January 1944. Forged by early tragedy, she had become managing editor of Défense de la France, the country's largest underground newspaper. Arrested by French criminals working for the Gestapo, she gave her real name, wanting the Germans to know a de Gaulle was opposing them inside France. Jacqueline d'Alincourt, a young aristocrat widowed at 21 when her husband died in a German POW camp, arrived in April 1944. She had worked for the Bureau Central de Renseignements et d'Action (BCRA), Charles de Gaulle's intelligence service, finding safe houses for agents and stranded Allied pilots. Arrested and tortured for five days, she never broke. At Ravensbrück, she and Geneviève became inseparable.

The four women anchored a broader community of French prisoners who resisted in every way they could. They shared food, smuggled charcoal, and staged forbidden lectures and songs. Tillion wrote a satirical operetta called Le Verfügbar aux Enfers ("The Verfügbar in Hell"), hiding in a packing crate to compose sketches that mocked their misery and sustained hope. Many Frenchwomen deliberately avoided work that aided the German war effort. In August 1944, intelligence agent Jeannie Rousseau led a rebellion at a munitions factory, declaring the women would not make bombs to kill their countrymen. Rousseau was severely punished, eventually sent to the brutal Königsberg camp in East Prussia, where only 10 percent of the French inmates survived.

As the war neared its end, a gas chamber was installed and SS squads hunted prisoners for selection. When authorities ordered the execution of the Polish rabbits, the entire camp rose in rebellion: French, Russian, and Polish inmates hid the victims, took their places during roll calls, and cut the floodlights to create chaos. The rabbits remained hidden until liberation. Geneviève, held by Himmler as a potential bargaining chip, spent months in solitary confinement before being released to Switzerland in late February 1945. In early March, Émilie Tillion was selected for the gas chamber. Despite Girard's desperate efforts, the older woman was taken away. Her death plunged Germaine into despair, but she chose to live and channeled her grief into documenting the camp's crimes.

In April 1945, Count Folke Bernadotte of the Swedish Red Cross persuaded Himmler to release all remaining inmates. White buses carried the women through Denmark and on to Sweden. The homecoming was brutal. The French public had no framework for understanding what the women had endured. Tillion returned to a ransacked house and crushing depression. Girard found her family shattered: her sister Claire, a farmer who had sheltered an American pilot, had been shot by Germans two days after Paris's liberation.

The survivors turned to one another. In July 1945, they founded ADIR (Association Nationale des Anciennes Déportées et Internées de la Résistance), an all-female organization that opened clinics, created convalescent homes, and provided support to thousands of survivors. In a country that treated resistance as an entirely male affair, their solidarity was revolutionary. The women also rebuilt their personal lives: Jacqueline married Pierre Péry, a Buchenwald survivor; Geneviève married Bernard Anthonioz, a Resistance supporter; and Anise married André Postel-Vinay, a decorated agent.

Tillion devoted decades to documenting Ravensbrück and testified at war crimes trials. A document she smuggled from the camp, a list of nearly 500 women sent to the gas chamber signed by commandant Fritz Suhren, sealed his conviction; he was executed by firing squad in 1950. Honoring her wartime promise to Iwanska, Anise launched a decade-long campaign, aided by New York socialite Caroline Woolsey Ferriday and former Nuremberg prosecutor Benjamin Ferencz, to win German compensation for the surviving Polish rabbits. In 1960, the German Bundestag, Germany's federal legislature, voted to compensate each victim.

In their later years, the women remained vigilant. Tillion became a leading public intellectual, condemning French torture during the Algerian war. Geneviève quit government to fight poverty through the international movement ATD Fourth World. Anise refuted Holocaust deniers and completed the documentation of Ravensbrück. American filmmaker Maia Wechsler, who befriended Jacqueline in 1987, produced the documentary Sisters in Resistance, broadcast on PBS in 2003. Tillion's operetta, hidden for 50 years, was published in 2005 and premiered at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris for her 100th birthday, receiving a standing ovation. On a warm day in May 2015, Anise sat in the front row as Tillion and Geneviève were ceremonially interred in the Panthéon, France's highest honor. Walking past afterward, Anise read aloud the inscription carved over its doors, "For Great Men, a Grateful Country," and told the journalist beside her: "Now, they must add 'For Great Women' too" (316).