Margarete Mewes

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Margarete Mewes was a female overseer at Ravensbruck, a Nazi concentration camp during the whole period of World War II.

Margarete Mewes was born in Fürstenberg/Havel, Germany on February 14, 1914. The town of Furstenberg is approximately fifty miles north of Berlin along a lake, the Schwedt-See. In November 1938, across the lake from Furstenberg, the Nazis sent 500 male inmates from Sachsenhausen to begin construction of a new concentration camp called Ravensbruck. In early 1939, Margarete applied to be a female guard at the emerging camp across the small lake from her home town. She was accepted and began training on July 1, 1939. Margarete graduated from her courses and served as an Aufseherin in Ravensbruck, while bouncing back to her home town after her duties were done each day. Though female guards were not allowed to talk about what happened in the camp, sometimes information slipped out.

Mewes served in her position until the Soviets closed in on Ravensbruck, then accompanied the death march west. Eventually she was caught by British troops and sent to an internment camp for German war criminals. Mewes stood accused at the first Ravensbruck Trial along with Dorothea Binz, her boss after 1943, and Greta Boesel. She received a sentence of ten years imprisonment for war crimes.