The Nazi regime targeted all Jews, both men and women, for persecution and eventually death. The regime frequently subjected women, however, both Jewish and non-Jewish, to brutal persecution that was sometimes unique to the gender of the victims. Nazi ideology also targeted Roma Gypsy women, Polish women, and women with disabilities living in institutions.
Certain individual camps and certain areas within concentration camps were designated specifically for female prisoners. At Bergen-Belsen , the camp authorities established a women's camp in The Germans and their collaborators spared neither women nor children—Jewish or non-Jewish—in conducting mass murder operations. Nazi ideology promoted the complete annihilation of all Jews, regardless of age or gender. Orthodox Jewish women accompanied by children were especially vulnerable, since people in orthodox Jewish dress were certainly more vulnerable to discovery in hiding or to particularly sadistic behavior in pogrom -like activities.
The larger number of children in Orthodox families also made women in those families a special target of Nazi ideology. Non-Jewish women were vulnerable as well. The Nazis committed mass murder of Romani Gypsy women at Auschwitz concentration camp, murdered females with disabilities in the T-4 and other euthanasia operations , and slaughtered women along with men as so-called partisans in many Soviet villages in 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.
