The Youth Concentration Camp for Girls and Young Women was built in 1942 in direct proximity to the Concentration Camp for Women Ravensbrück. Mostly girls and young women between the ages of 14 and 21 who were labeled "asocial" and thus discriminated were imprisoned there. From January to April 1945, the grounds became the extermination site for more than 5000 women from Ravensbruck.
The exhibition was developed in 2010 by the Hamburg-based group Initiative for a Memorial Site for the Former Concentration Camp Uckermark. It gives an overview of the history of the concentration camp and the continued history of the site Uckermark after the end of World War II. The exhibition documents not only the specific reasons for the imprisonment of the women and girls but also the biographies and testimonials from survivors of the youth concentration camp.
The exhibition also examines the role of institutions like child welfare services and psychiatric clinics under National Socialism and their structural continuance after 1945.
The catalog of the exhibition is also available in JIFE in Turkish, Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian, Hebrew, English and in plain language (in German).
* There are continual controversies within the Initiative about using the term "extermination camp" for the months of January to April 1945 in the concentration camp Uckermark because the term suggests a equation with places like Belzec, Sobibor, Auschwitz, etc. We therefore use the designation here only in the title of the traveling exhibition. Further information about the discussion (in German) you can find here.