Vera Salvequart

Who was Vera Salvequart?

Vera Salvequart was a Czech-born nurse at Ravensbrück concentration camp from December 1944 to 1945.

Born in Czechoslovakia in 1919, she moved to Germany sometime afterwards. She was first arrested in 1941 for having a relationship with a Jewish man and for refusing to divulge his whereabouts to the Gestapo. She served 10 months in a prison in Flossenbürg concentration camp for that, and then in 1942, she was again arrested for another relationship with a Jew and served another two years in prison. On December 6, 1944, she was arrested on charges of helping five detained officers escape, and was then sent to Ravensbrück, which had become a death camp for female prisoners at that point in the war.

Due to a shortage of personnel the SS frequently used German prisoners to supervise other inmates, and Vera was among those chosen to serve, likely due to her pre-war training as a nurse. She served in the camp's medical wing as a nurse during her stay, and oversaw the gassing of thousands of women. Vera's job was to fill out death certificates for the dead, and inspect their cadavers for gold teeth, which were kept to finance the war effort.

By February 1945, she was reportedly taking a more active role in the killings; now she was poisoning the sickly in the medical wing to avoid the effort of having to transport them to the gas chambers. Though former prisoners testified about this active role, Vera herself would only confess to her earlier duties filling out death certificates at her trial.