# UNITED STATES HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM

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## Women

The Nazis targeted both Jewish men and women for persecution and eventually death. However, women, both Jewish and non-Jewish, were often subjected by the Nazis to unique and brutal persecution.

Individual camps and certain areas within some concentration camps were designated specifically for women. In May 1939, the Nazis opened Ravensbrueck, the largest concentration camp established specifically for women. Over 100,000 women passed through Ravensbrueck by the time it was liberated in 1945. In 1942, a women's camp was set up at Auschwitz (where women deported from Ravensbrueck were the first prisoners). At Bergen-Belsen, a women's camp was established in 1944. Thousands of Jewish female prisoners from Ravensbrueck and Auschwitz were also transferred to Bergen-Belsen.

Neither women nor children were spared from Nazi mass murder operations. Women of all ages perished alongside men in German-occupied Soviet territories, victims of the Einsatzgruppe (German mobile killing unit) mass shootings. Women, especially those with small children, were often the first to be sent for gassing at extermination camps.

In ghettos and camps, the Nazis seized women for forced labor. Nazi doctors often used Jewish and Romani (Gypsy) women for sterilization experiments and other unethical human experimentation. In both camps and ghettos, women were particularly vulnerable to beatings and rape. Pregnant Jewish women frequently tried to conceal their pregnancies or were forced to submit to abortions.

Some women–such as Haika Grosman in Bialystok–were leaders or members of ghetto resistance organizations. Others were active in camp armed resistance. In the Auschwitz camp, Ella Gartner, Regina Safir, Estera Wajsblum, and Roza Robota supplied the gunpowder that was used to blow up a gas chamber and kill several SS men in an October 1944 prisoner revolt. Other women were active in the aid and rescue of Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe. Among them were Jewish parachutist Hannah Szenes (who was executed after being captured) and Zionist activist Gisi Fleischmann, whose Working Group (Pracovna Skupina) attempted to halt deportations of Jews from Slovakia.

Millions of women were persecuted and murdered during the Holocaust era. However, in the end, it was their classification according to Nazi racist hierarchy or their religious and political affiliations that made them targets, not their sex.

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