Birth in the Shadow of the Gas Chambers: Pregnant Women, Camp Medicine, and the Hidden Maternity Barracks at Auschwitz

In 1943, inside the vast killing complex of Auschwitz-Birkenau, a decision was made that appeared, at least on paper, to signal a shift. Under mounting pressure and administrative strain, the SS authorized the creation of a so-called maternity barracks within the women’s camp.

To an outsider, the existence of a “pregnancy block” might have sounded like a concession—an acknowledgment of life amid systematic death.

In reality, it became something far more haunting.

Block 24, later designated Block C in Sector B, housed pregnant prisoners and newborns. The structure differed little from surrounding barracks: crude wooden bunks stacked three tiers high, damp straw mattresses, lice-infested blankets, and air thick with disease. Winter brought freezing temperatures without heating. Water was scarce. Sanitation was nearly nonexistent.

Though labeled a maternity ward, there were no sterilized instruments, no proper medical supplies, and no trained obstetric staff. Women labored on filthy straw. Fellow prisoners—teachers, shopkeepers, nurses stripped of equipment and authority—risked punishment to assist births with bare hands.

The word “ward” concealed a brutal reality: this was not a sanctuary. It was an administrative compartment inside a machinery of annihilation.

Selection, Racial Policy, and the Illusion of Mercy

The fate of pregnant prisoners depended heavily on Nazi racial classifications. Jewish women, Roma women, and others deemed “racially inferior” were rarely permitted to carry pregnancies to term in earlier years of the camp’s operation. Many were selected for immediate killing upon arrival.

By late 1943, policy shifted in limited ways. Some non-Jewish prisoners—particularly certain Polish political detainees—were occasionally allowed to give birth. Even then, survival was uncertain.

Newborns who met Nazi racial criteria could be removed from their mothers and subjected to examination under the racial policies tied to programs such as Lebensborn. Others were rejected after inspection.

Acceptance did not guarantee safety. Rejection often meant slow death through neglect, starvation, or quiet disappearance.

The maternity barracks thus became a place suspended between bureaucratic procedure and ideological violence—a fragile illusion of clemency within a genocidal system.

Medicine as Instrument: Experiments on Pregnant Prisoners

At the center of Auschwitz’s medical operations were SS physicians whose names became synonymous with cruelty.

Among them:

·         Josef Mengele

·         Carl Clauberg

·         Horst Schumann

Their activities were framed as research. In practice, they were acts of calculated harm.

Mengele, remembered by survivors as the “Angel of Death,” is often associated with twin studies. Yet pregnant women also fell within the scope of selections and examinations. Survivors described procedures carried out without anesthesia, forced terminations performed to observe physiological effects, and fetuses collected for anatomical study.

Clauberg, tasked with developing large-scale sterilization techniques, injected caustic substances—such as formalin-based compounds and silver nitrate solutions—directly into women’s reproductive organs. The intent was to induce scarring that would block fertility without surgical intervention. The procedures caused intense pain, infection, and, in many cases, death.

Schumann experimented with X-ray sterilization, directing radiation at the abdomen and ovaries. These exposures resulted in burns, internal injuries, and permanent infertility.

These acts were not rogue initiatives. They were embedded within the broader racial ideology of Nazi Germany, aimed at reducing or eliminating the birth rates of groups targeted for destruction.

Records were kept. Observations logged. Data compiled.

But the women themselves were denied recognition as patients. They were treated as experimental material.

Infants Born in the Camp

For those who carried pregnancies to term, childbirth marked the beginning of another ordeal.

Before 1943, most babies born in the camp were killed immediately. Methods varied, but survival was extraordinarily rare. After policy adjustments, limited numbers of infants were allowed to live temporarily, particularly in the women’s camp at Birkenau and in the so-called “Gypsy family camp.”

Conditions remained lethal.

There was no infant formula. No proper medical oversight. No diapers. No sterile environment. Mothers, weakened by forced labor and starvation rations, often could not produce sufficient milk. Disease spread rapidly.

Mortality rates were staggering. In Block 24, a vast majority of newborns died within days or weeks.

One of the most significant testimonies about this period came from Gisella Perl, a trained gynecologist imprisoned at Auschwitz. In postwar accounts, she described performing secret abortions to prevent immediate execution of pregnant women and certain death for infants. Her actions reflected an agonizing moral calculus shaped by camp realities.

Each birth in Auschwitz occurred within a system structured to extinguish it.

Policy, Documentation, and Historical Accountability

The presence of a maternity barracks does not indicate humanitarian reform. Rather, it reflects shifting administrative priorities during wartime—labor management, international scrutiny, and bureaucratic record-keeping.

The broader apparatus of the camp remained intact:

·         Forced labor exploitation

·         Mass deportation logistics

·         Gas chambers and crematoria

·         Medical experimentation programs

·         Racial classification procedures

The tragedy of pregnant women in Auschwitz underscores how ideology can infiltrate institutions traditionally associated with care—medicine, maternity, midwifery—and convert them into tools of control and destruction.

These crimes were later examined in postwar proceedings, including aspects of the Doctors’ Trial held under the authority of the International Military Tribunal. Evidence revealed how medical professionals participated in, documented, and justified abuses under a racial state.

Yet no legal proceeding can fully capture the intimate devastation of birth denied dignity.

The Question of Memory

Auschwitz is remembered as a site of mass murder. Less frequently discussed is its assault on future generations—the deliberate targeting of unborn children and the corruption of maternal care.

How should history record a place where birth itself could become grounds for execution?

For survivors like Gisella Perl, the moral wounds endured long after liberation. She later wrote of being ordered to prevent life, describing it as one of the deepest psychological torments she carried.

The maternity barracks at Auschwitz stands as a reminder that genocide operates not only through killing the living, but through the calculated erasure of those yet to be born.

In that erasure lies one of the most chilling dimensions of the camp’s history: the transformation of childbirth from a universal human event into an act shadowed by death.