The Children’s Room at Ravensbrück: Mothers and Babies in the Holocaust

In the shadowed pine-fringed shores of Lake Schwedt, just 90 kilometers north of Berlin, Ravensbrück stood as a monument to Nazi cruelty against women. Opened in May 1939, it began as a re-education camp for German political opponents and Jehovah’s Witnesses but swelled into a sprawling hell, imprisoning over 130,000 women from 20 nations by 1945. Run by female SS guards under Johanna Langefeld and Maria Mandel, it tested the limits of degradation through starvation, overwork, medical experiments, and executions. Nowhere was this more evident than in its treatment of pregnant prisoners and newborns, where the Kinderzimmer—a so-called “children’s room”—became a deliberate extermination ward disguised as care.

Ravensbrück’s early years set a brutal tone. The first transport of 867 women arrived in 1939, forced to build the camp themselves. Pregnancies were rare but met with savagery: forced abortions without anesthesia, performed by SS doctors like Rolf Rosenthal and nurse Gerda Quernheim. Survivors recalled crude instruments and women bleeding on straw mattresses. Live births were worse—newborns drowned, smothered, or thrown into ovens. Mothers often carried out the acts under threat. Jewish women faced immediate transport to Auschwitz. Sexual violence compounded the horror; rapes led to pregnancies, stigmatized and punished. Women resorted to desperate self-abortions with knitting needles or falls.

The invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 flooded Ravensbrück with Red Army women—nurses, partisans—treated as subhuman. By 1942, it became a medical experimentation hub. SS surgeon Karl Gebhardt tested wound treatments on Polish “rabbits,” infecting them with gangrene, breaking bones, and transplanting nerves. Pregnant women were sterilized surgically or via X-rays, leaving lifelong pain. Roma girls as young as eight were mutilated.

The tide shifted in late 1944. After the Warsaw Uprising, thousands of Polish women arrived, many pregnant from chaos or rapes. Evacuations from eastern camps swelled the population to 45,000, overcrowding barracks. Abortions became impractical. A new policy emerged: allow births but ensure deaths through neglect. In September 1944, the Kinderzimmer opened in Block 11—a long barrack with bare bunks and filthy mattresses. Newborns were ripped from mothers immediately, placed in freezing cold without food, water, or diapers. SS nurse Elisabeth Marschall hoarded Red Cross milk for herself. Babies, crammed 30-40 in a space for fewer, succumbed to diarrhea, pneumonia, and rats gnawing at fingers and toes. Lifespan: 2-4 weeks. Mothers, working 12-14 hour shifts, produced no milk from malnutrition. They pressed faces against barred windows, watching helplessly as their infants withered.

Yet, amid this calculated cruelty, resistance blossomed. Prisoners formed “camp families”—tight-knit groups sharing scraps. A Romanian Roma woman breastfed Polish infants with drops of milk. Russians stole potato peelings from kitchens. Polish nuns baptized dying babies with stolen water. Births occurred in secret: one woman labored during roll call, shielded by blockmates who passed the newborn hand-to-hand under clothing.

Individual miracles pierced the darkness. French resistance fighter Meline Elmer Ruben, deported pregnant in 1944, gave birth to Sylvie on March 21, 1945, in a dark corridor. A German “green triangle” prisoner risked death to steal forceps and chloroform. Sylvie survived, weighing 4 pounds. Polish prisoner Waleria Pich, battered and pregnant, delivered Michal on March 25 amid typhus. Shielded by Polish women, both lived. Guy Puo, born March 11 to a French mother, owed his life to “strangers who became my mothers.” Ingalore Proschnau, born in 1944, was nursed by women who had lost their own children. Jean-Claude Pasquier-Polack, born November 1944, survived smuggling onto farm details for vegetables.

These “miracle children”—perhaps 30 out of 522 births between September 1944 and April 1945—lived not due to Nazi mercy but prisoner solidarity. A secret register by a Czech doctor recorded the births; most died, but survivors carried the legacy of those who fought for them.

As the Red Army advanced in April 1945, panic gripped the SS. They built a gas chamber, murdering 5,000-6,000 women. Death marches westward killed thousands. On April 30, Soviet soldiers liberated Ravensbrück, finding 2,000-3,000 emaciated women and hidden children. Rooms held tiny corpses; mothers clutched rags-wrapped infants. Liberation brought grief—many babies died post-liberation despite aid. Survivors like Sylvie learned the truth late; Guy Puo speaks of his debt. Ingalore honors her “camp mothers” annually.

Ravensbrück’s mothers and babies reveal Holocaust’s darkest chapter: women stripped of everything yet protecting fragile life. In a camp designed to destroy humanity, they proved the instinct to nurture transcends ideology. Their stories, from memoirs and trials, remind us: even in hell, compassion endures.