Forced Labor, Sterilization and Rape: nazi rape of jewish women

Women in the Lvov ghetto in spring 1942. (Wikimedia Commons)

Forced Labor, Sterilization and Rape

In ghettos and concentration camps, German authorities deployed women in forced labor under conditions that often led to their deaths. German physicians and medical researchers used Jewish and Roma (Gypsy) women as subjects for sterilization experiments and other unethical human experimentation. In both camps and ghettos, women were particularly vulnerable to beatings and rape. Pregnant Jewish women often tried to conceal their pregnancies or were forced to submit to abortions. Females deported from Poland and the Soviet Union for forced labor in the Reich were often beaten or raped, or forced to submit to sexual relations for food or other necessities or basic comforts. Pregnancy sometimes resulted for Polish, Soviet, or Yugoslav forced laborers from sexual relations with German men. If so-called “race experts” determined that the child was not capable of “Germanization,” the women were generally forced to have abortions, sent to give birth in makeshift nurseries where conditions would guarantee the death of the infants, or simply shipped to the region they came from without food or medical care. The Germans established brothels in some concentration and labor camps, and the German army ran roughly 500 brothels for soldiers, in which women were forced to work.

https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/women-during-the-holocaust/