Ausländerkinder-Pflegestätte

Nazi birthing centres

Commemorative plaque at the entrance to the former NSDAP home in Velpke where 76 Polish and 15 Soviet babies were killed by starvation in 1944

During World War II, the German institutions known as Ausländerkinder-Pflegestätte (literally "foreign children nurseries"), or Ostarbeiterkinderpflegestätten ("eastern worker children nurseries") for the so-called 'troublesome' babies according to Himmler's decree, also known as Säuglingsheim ("baby home") stations for the abandoned infants, were the new NSDAP facilities established in the heartland of Germany as the Nazi birthing centres, and the collection points, for the offspring born to foreign women and girls servicing the German war economy, including Polish and Eastern European female forced labour. The babies and children, most of them resulting from rape at the place of enslavement, were abducted en masse between 1943 and 1945. At some locations, up to 90 percent of infants died a torturous death due to calculated neglect.

Among the Polish and Soviet female forced labour (German: Zivil- und Ostarbeiter) unintended pregnancies were common due to rampant sexual abuse by their overseers. A staggering 80 percent of rapes resulting in unwanted births occurred on the farms where the Polish girls worked. The SS suspected the victims of "cheating their way out of work" by conceiving. Notably, the babies born inside concentration camps were not released into the communities. For example, of the 3,000 babies born at Auschwitz, some 2,500 newborns were drowned in a barrel at the maternity ward by the German female overseers. Meanwhile, by the spring of 1942 the arrival of trains with the girls from Poland turned into medieval slave markets in German towns and villages, as in Braunschweig among other locations, where the young women were beaten, starved, and prohibited from speaking to each other.

Abortion in Germany was illegal as far as German women were concerned, thus the law had to be altered. On 11 March 1943 the Reichsführer-SS signed a decree allowing for abortions "requested" by the young Zivil- und Ostarbeiter. Pregnant slave workers, who were forced to abort by the Germans, had to sign printed requests before surgery and were threatened with prison time and death by starvation. Abortions were enforced after determining whether the probable father was a German or otherwise Germanic in origin. Children were either born in, or brought into any one of the estimated 400 Ausländerkind-Pflegestätte homes as "parentless". When racially valuable, they were removed for Germanisation. In the event a foreign female worker was considered to be of Germanic blood, such as Norwegian, her child was kept alive, but this was rare.