The Killing of Babies

“We were twenty nurses, two male nurses and eighteen girls. The hospital was on two levels.

 

We performed lots of operations there, complicated ones, and also a lot of abortions, because nobody was allowed to give birth to babies.

 

The women who found themselves pregnant, even from arriving pregnant into the ghetto, or became pregnant from their husbands while they were still with their husbands, had to have their pregnancies terminated.

 

So we had quite a lot of abortions. It so happens that one Latvian Jewish woman gave birth to a little boy who was called Ben Ghetto.

 

The “Kommandantur;” (Government German Military Administration), the SS Gestapo found out about it, and this baby and the mother were brought to our Hospital, and the baby had to be killed.

 

First of all there were SS men put in front of the room where the mother and the baby were, and at a certain time the baby had to be killed.”

 

In 1942 the SS in Ravensbrück established a program to recruit inmates to work as prostitutes for them and other army personnel.

 

Prostitution offered better treatment to women who participated and the possibility of early release.

 

Dozens of women “Volunteered” for brothel duty. The food, housing and other conditions were significantly better, and the women were promised release after six months.

 

In fact, none of the women were released early and many, who did eventually return to the main camp, did so with venereal disease.

 

Pregnancy was a death sentence in the Concentration Camps, where all visibly pregnant women (as well as women with small children) were immediately selected for the Gas Chambers.

 

If a pregnant woman escaped detection, she would have been selected for forced labour.

 

If she managed to survive the remaining months and to deliver secretly in the camp, she risked immediate death for both herself and the child.

 

To prevent both mother and child being Gassed, Jewish female physicians or Nurses tried to save the mother by drowning or suffocating the infant.

 

There were also Non-Jewish Victims in Nazi Camps such as Auschwitz-Birkenau and (Click Link) Ravensbrück.

 

Nazis Committed Systematic Killings of Roma (Gypsy) Women at (Click Link) Auschwitz-Birkenau and through (Click Link) Euthanasia Programs Murdered thousands of German women who had Mental and Physical disabilities.

 

German physicians used both Jewish and Roma (Gypsy) women as Subjects for Sterilisation and other (Click Link) Pseudo-Scientific Human Experiments.

 

To survive in these Camps, women Prisoners often Exhibited Gender-Specific Coping Skills.

 

They shared recipes to relieve hunger and formed relationships to support and sustain each other (Click Link) Lagerschwestern (Camp Sisters).

 

Sharing of recipes and cooking techniques in the face of deliberate starvation was far from a trivial matter.

 

It had a Powerful Psychological effect as it reflected a commitment to purposefulness, affirmed the will to live and assumed there would be a future.

 

In many cases women were blood relatives mothers and daughters, or sisters and sometimes pre-war friends.

 

Survival depended also on work allocation. Sorting clothes and personal possessions in the area of Auschwitz designated as Kanada, repairing clothes and working in kitchens or the laundry or having house keeping duties could mean the difference between life and death.

 

Women’s chances of survival were not equivalent to those of men.

 

At Auschwitz-Birkenau from 1942-1945 the SS deployed 381,455 deportees for forced labour; 67.5 per cent were men and 33.5 per cent were women.

 

During 1944, 405,000 forced labourers were tattooed with numbers, of whom one third were female.

 

Of the six Auschwitz warehouses that had been part of (Click Link) Effekenlager (Kanada), still intact at the time of liberation, Soviet troops found 348,820 men’s suits and 836,525 dresses.

 

On the ramp at Auschwitz the Ultimate purpose of deportation was enacted: to “deprive Jewry of its Biological reserves”; to “obliterate the biological basis of Jewry” and to eliminate the “Germ Cell of a new Jewish revival” to implement the ‘Final Solution.”

 

Life for the Ghetto inhabitants was filled with suffering and fear as they hoped to survive the war and the Nazis.

 

In the Warsaw Ghetto, as in other Ghettos, women’s efforts to obtain food and resources for their families exhibited enormous strength and resilience. Some turned to smuggling, taking great risks to feed their families.

 

German women and young girls in the Ghettos played important roles in resistance work, especially as members of the Socialist, Communist, Bundist and Zionist youth movements.

 

(Click Link) Zivia Lubetkin, was one of the leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto Underground Fighting Organization (ZOB), and a fighter in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in February 1943.

 

Likewise, (Click Link) Chaike Grossman was one of the leaders of the (Click Link) Bialystok Ghetto Uprising in August 1943.

 

Although women were regarded as less valuable than men to the German war machine, there were many examples of female courage.

 

Women such as (Click Link) Hannah Szenes, in Hungary and (Click Link) Gisi Fleischmann in Slovakia, gave their lives to aid and rescue Jews Nazi occupied Europe, and (Click Link) Sophie Scholl, a Student at the University of Munich and a member of the (Click Link) White Rose resistance group, was arrested and executed for Anti Nazi activities.

 

A group called the (Click Link) Rosenstrasse Frauen Non Jewish German women married to Jewish men, staged a one week demonstration against the Policies of the (Click Link) National Socialist German Workers Party, (Nazi Party.)