page_title: Women in Nazi Germany
section_title: Female members of discriminated minorities
hierarchical_section_title: Women in Nazi Germany / Female members of discriminated minorities
caption_attribution_description: Female forced laborers wearing "OST" [Ostarbeiter] badges are liberated from a camp near Lodz.
context_page_description: Women in Nazi Germany were subject to doctrines of Nazism by the Nazi Party, promoting exclusion of women from political life of Germany along with its executive body as well as its executive committees. Although the Nazi party decreed that "women could be admitted to neither the Party executive nor to the Administrative Committee", due to numerous cases and extreme lack or organisation and skill this did not prevent numerous women from becoming party members. The Nazi doctrine elevated the role of German men, emphasizing their combat skills and the brotherhood among male compatriots.
  Women lived within a regime characterized by a policy of allowing and encouraging them to fill the roles of mother and wife and excluding them from all positions of responsibility, notably in the political and academic spheres. The policies of Nazism contrasted starkly with the evolution of women's rights and gender equality under the Weimar Republic, and is equally distinguishable from the mostly male-dominated and conservative attitude under the German Empire.
context_section_description: Under the same threats as men who were Jews or Romani, women belonging to these communities were equally discriminated against, then deported and for some exterminated. In many concentration camps there were sections for female detainees (notably at Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen) but the camp at Ravensbrück, opened in May 1939, distinguished itself as a camp solely for women, by 1945 numbering about 100,000 prisoners. The first women's concentration camp had been opened in 1933 in Moringen, before being transferred to Lichtenburg in 1938.
  In concentration camps, women were considered weaker than men, and they were generally sent to the gas chambers more quickly, whereas the strength of men was used to work the men to exhaustion. Some women were subjected to medical experiments.
  Some took the path of the Resistance, such as the Polish member Haika Grossman, who participated in the organization for aid for the ghetto of Białystok, during the night of August 15 to 16, 1943. On October 7, 1944, members of the Sonderkommando, 250 prisoners responsible for the bodies of persons after gassing, rose up ; they had procured explosives stolen by a Kommando of young Jewish women (Ala Gertner, Regina Safir, Estera Wajsblum and Roza Robota) who worked in the armament factories of the Union Werke. They succeeded in partially destroying Crematorium IV.
caption: Female slave worker wearing an Ostarbeiter badge at the former SS Osti Arbeitslager camp in occupied Poland, January 1945.
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