Auschwitz was not only the epicenter of industrialized mass murder—it was also a place where some of the most sickening atrocities were committed against the most vulnerable: pregnant women. In the twisted ideology of Nazi racial policy, Jewish life was considered a threat—not just in the present, but for future generations. And nowhere was this more horrifyingly evident than in the brutal treatment of pregnant women in Auschwitz.
No Mercy for Mothers-to-Be
For pregnant women arriving at Auschwitz, hope was short-lived. SS doctors at the ramp, like Josef Mengele, would immediately classify pregnant women as "unfit for labor." This meant immediate death in the gas chambers. Nazi policy saw no value in these women or the lives they carried. A mother and her unborn child were a double target for extermination.
In some rare cases, pregnant women tried to hide their condition, clinging to survival. But if discovered, they were either killed outright or subjected to unspeakable medical experimentation.
Josef Mengele’s Horrific Experiments
One of the most infamous figures in Auschwitz, Dr. Josef Mengele, known as the “Angel of Death,” conducted monstrous experiments on inmates—including pregnant women. He performed forced abortions, sometimes late-term, without anesthesia. These were not acts of medical care, but cruel experiments to study the reproductive system or fetal development.
There are testimonies of Mengele injecting chemicals into women’s wombs to test how long the fetus would survive, or dissecting newborns immediately after delivery. Mothers were sometimes forced to watch their babies die slowly, all in the name of twisted pseudoscience.
Starvation, Beatings, and Death
Pregnant women who managed to avoid immediate selection were still condemned to a slow and agonizing fate. Starvation diets, freezing conditions, and brutal beatings by SS guards made miscarriage and death common. Medical care was nonexistent. The camp infirmary was a place people went to die, not to be healed.
Some women gave birth in secret, on filthy wooden bunks, without medical help. In most cases, if the infant survived birth, it was murdered on the spot—often drowned, thrown into fires, or smashed against walls by guards.
Nazi Nurses and the “Birthing Barracks”
In Auschwitz and other camps, there were reports of “birthing barracks” where non-Jewish prisoners—especially Poles or those deemed “racially acceptable”—were sometimes allowed to deliver babies. But Jewish women were offered no such reprieve. For them, pregnancy was a death sentence, and even female SS guards or Nazi nurses participated in killing newborns or reporting pregnancies for execution.
Resistance and Silent Acts of Defiance
Despite the horrors, some women resisted in small but powerful ways. Inmates who were midwives or nurses risked their lives to deliver babies in secret. Some hid pregnancies for months. A few mothers managed to smuggle their babies into safer parts of the camp, though such stories are incredibly rare.
Every successful hidden birth in Auschwitz was a miracle of courage and defiance, even if survival after birth was tragically unlikely.