She decided to seek an abortion and placed a formal request with the appropriate authorities. She may have expected her request to be granted, as she was poorly treated while living and toiling as a forced laborer in Würzburg, but the SS authorities denied her petition. They argued that they expected her child to be “racially valuable” and therefore her pregnancy would not be terminated. Their determination went further to outline that she would not care for the child but rather he or she was to be placed in a German home for “racially valuable” infants.
Koscielniak’s predicament shows the contradictions of the Nazi system: although she was regarded as racially and socially inferior, her offspring could be seen as biologically valuable. How might the child of a “subhuman” potentially belong to the “master race?” And how can it be true that a mother should have had no say regarding her child’s future? The state held all the power in determining both.
Barbara Koscielniak’s documents exemplify the practical reality of one woman and mother’s situation under a state that assumed the right to (re)define womanhood and motherhood. The party apparatus itself took charge of foreign laborers’ pregnancies and the resultant children through directives and instructions issued to subordinate offices of the Volkswohlfahrt (literally, the people’s welfare) organization throughout the Reich, as illustrated by another document included in the “Women under Nazi Persecution” supplement. This official Nazi memorandum outlined the rules to be followed regarding foreign laborers’ children. A “racially inferior” child who had been placed in a national welfare organization’s children’s home was to be released and accommodated in a nursery for the offspring of foreign laborers; babies in such nurseries often died within a few months. An Ostarbeiterin (literally, “Eastern” female worker; female Soviet laborer) who applied to terminate a pregnancy was to be granted automatic permission if the child’s father was determined to be “racially non-German.” The same rule applied to Polish laborers who sought an abortion, but if the child’s father was “racially German,” the child was to be examined for potential “Germanizability,” and if positively evaluated, he or she would be conditioned to enter German society.
Foreign forced laborers were thus stuck in the dialectics of Nazi logic: they were not permitted to have a “racially unworthy” child but were not allowed to keep a “racially valuable” one. German families faced another dilemma: they had to raise a “racially valuable” child but part with a baby Nazi authorities deemed unworthy. The state took absolute power over the lives and bodies, sexuality, children, and identities of its people.
The next in the series of ITS primary source supplement will present and contextualize “The Camp System,” to be followed shortly thereafter by one on Roma and Sinti and another with a focus on Displaced Persons.
“Women under Nazi Persecution” can be downloaded for free via this link.
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• Dr. Elizabeth Anthony, ITS and Partnerships Program Manager, Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, US Holocaust Memorial Museum ([email protected])
• Dr. Akim Jah, Research Associate, International Tracing Service ([email protected])
• Dr. Christine Schmidt, Deputy Director and Head of Research, The Wiener Library for the Study of the Holocaust & Genocide ([email protected])