In April 1941 a men’s camp was added to the camp complex at Ravensbrück. As part of the camp complex it was also under the authority of the women’s camp’s commander. The men’s camp was a labour pool for skilled trades before the concentration camp was fully completed. In August 1941 five accommodation huts and one manufacturing hall for the men’s camp were completed in the South-Eastern part of the site immediately next to the industrial yard. Although the number of detainees was constantly rising (up to 1500-2000 prisoners at the same time) no additions were made until the camp was liberated.

The male slave labourers served also for the ongoing expansion of the Ravensbrück camp and its satellite camps. So, for example, it was mostly male prisoners who built the “Uckermark concentration camp for girls and young women” which also was part to the Ravensbrück complex. They also built the SIEMENS workshops, carried out the expansion works in the SS estates and built roads.
More than half of the labour batallions were construction gangs that were assigned to civilian construction companies. During this hard labour the boys and men suffered brutal abuse. Until the end of 1942 about half of all male prisoners died from the consequences of the heavy physical labour, malnutrition, lack of medical care or were murdered.

From 1943 the majority of men outside of the camp were working for the arms industry.

Most of the prisoners aged 16 to 45 were from Poland, the Soviet Union, Germany and Austria and very often were transferred from other concentration camps. For the most part they were forced labourers who had been put into a concentration camp for various "offences" such as escape or sabotage.

Boys, some of whom had been of deported together with their mothers to Ravensbrück, were separated from the women as soon as they had completed their 12th year of age and were placed in a separate block inside the men’s camp.

Between 1941 and 1945 some 20,000 men were imprisoned in the men’s camp. The SS entered 13.490 prisoners in the registry of the men's camp with names, date of birth and type of imprisonment. Transfers to other camps and deaths were also registered. Additional lists feature further 6.519 names.

During the camp's evacuation in April 1945 camp registrar *Józef Kwietniewski *was able to smuggle these registers out of the camp.