Behind the Three Doors: The Untold Investigation Into a Secret Nazi Pregnancy Experiment in Occupied France

“My name is Madeleine Fournier. I am of an indefinite age, and there is something I must say before it is too late—before my voice falls silent forever. I saw pregnant women forced to choose between three numbered doors.”

At the end of an ice-cold, damp corridor stood three gray metal doors. No signs. No explanation. Just numbers.

A single bulb flickered overhead.

German soldiers gave no time to think. No time to pray.

“Choose now.”

This is not historical fiction. It is testimony—one of the few surviving first-person accounts alleging a covert wartime medical facility in southeastern France where pregnant civilian women were detained, studied, and, in many cases, never seen again.

For decades, the story remained buried. No official camp registry. No preserved transport logs. No prosecution transcripts referencing the site. Only fragments—whispers in regional archives, postwar interviews, and the trembling recollections of a woman who carried the memory for more than half a century.

This investigation revisits those claims through the lens of wartime occupation policy, Nazi medical experimentation programs, forced labor deportations, and the systematic erasure of evidence in 1944.

The location: a remote mountain region near the Vercors plateau in southeastern France.

The alleged facility: referred to in survivor testimony as “Camp Sud-Vercors.”

The victims: pregnant civilian women under German occupation.

The evidence: almost entirely destroyed.

Occupied France and the Targeting of Civilian Bodies

When Nazi Germany invaded France in 1940, occupation policy quickly extended beyond military control. Forced labor conscription programs, agricultural requisitioning, and civilian surveillance intensified between 1942 and 1944.

Under the Service du Travail Obligatoire (STO), thousands of French men were deported for labor in German factories. Madeleine’s husband, Étienne Fournier, was reportedly taken in April 1940 to work in a munitions facility.

With many men removed from rural communities, women became increasingly vulnerable.

By late 1943, according to multiple postwar oral histories, pregnant women in isolated southeastern villages were being monitored. Lists were compiled. Arrests followed.

No charges were filed.

No public records were created.

German patrol units reportedly arrived with names and transported selected women to an undisclosed site in the mountains.

The pattern is consistent with documented Nazi practices elsewhere in Europe: targeted detention under occupation authority, classified medical oversight, and intentional record destruction during retreat.

The Corridor and the Three Doors

Survivors who spoke decades later described the same sequence:

Transport by truck.

Processing without documentation.

A narrow concrete hallway.

Three numbered doors.

Each woman was ordered to choose one.

Behind the doors, according to testimony, were different experimental conditions designed to test the physiological limits of pregnancy under stress, malnutrition, and deprivation.

These were not therapeutic medical treatments.

They were controlled human experiments.

Historians have documented similar pregnancy-focused experimentation in larger concentration camps such as Auschwitz and Ravensbrück, where Nazi physicians conducted sterilization research, infection trials, and reproductive studies on women prisoners.

However, no official archive lists a facility called “Camp Sud-Vercors.”

That absence is not proof of nonexistence.

It may be proof of systematic erasure.

Why Target Pregnant Women?

By 1943, Nazi racial and medical policy had evolved into an extreme form of ideological biopolitics. The regime’s medical authorities were no longer focused solely on battlefield survival or soldier health. Civilian bodies—particularly reproductive bodies—became data sources.

Documents from the broader Nazi medical apparatus show interest in:

·         Stress-induced miscarriage thresholds

·         Malnutrition effects on fetal development

·         Labor endurance during late-term pregnancy

·         Controlled deprivation outcomes

While most known experiments occurred in major camps under SS oversight, occupied territories provided opportunities for smaller, deniable research operations.

Rural France, especially mountainous regions with limited Allied visibility, offered geographic concealment.

Pregnant civilian women under occupation authority were uniquely vulnerable: medically valuable, politically expendable, and socially isolated.

Liberation and Destruction of Evidence

In 1944, as Allied forces advanced and resistance movements intensified in southeastern France, German forces retreated.

Multiple confirmed sites across Europe show a consistent pattern during retreat:

·         Burning of medical records

·         Demolition of secondary facilities

·         Transfer or execution of detainees

·         Removal of identifying documentation

When the region was liberated, the alleged Sud-Vercors site was reportedly abandoned and partially destroyed. No intact files were recovered.

Postwar investigations focused on high-profile atrocities. Smaller, undocumented installations were rarely prioritized without physical evidence.

Survivors were often encouraged to rebuild their lives quietly rather than pursue formal accusations without documentation.

In legal terms, the burden of proof collapsed alongside the ashes of burned archives.

The Silence of Survivors

Madeleine Fournier did not testify publicly in the immediate postwar period.

She raised her surviving child.

She lived in relative obscurity.

Only in the early 2000s, near the end of her life, did she recount her experience to a regional historian documenting forgotten wartime detention sites.

Her testimony aligned with fragmented accounts collected from other women decades earlier:

·         Sudden arrest during pregnancy

·         Transport without paperwork

·         Isolation from known camp systems

·         Experimental conditions

·         Disappearances without records

No officers were definitively named.

No prosecutions followed.

No memorial was erected.

Legal Accountability and Historical Gaps

From an international law perspective, forced medical experimentation on civilians constitutes a war crime under the Geneva Conventions and later codified standards of crimes against humanity.

The Nuremberg Code, developed after World War II in response to Nazi medical trials, explicitly prohibits non-consensual human experimentation.

Yet legal systems require documentation.

When records are destroyed, prosecutions become nearly impossible.

This creates a dangerous historical phenomenon:

Atrocities that leave no paperwork often leave no justice.

The absence of archived proof does not equate to the absence of crime.

It often indicates the success of concealment.

Financial and Structural Incentives Behind Medical Exploitation

An often-overlooked dimension of wartime experimentation is economic incentive.

Nazi medical research was not solely ideological. It was also institutional. Research data informed military medicine, industrial labor planning, and demographic engineering.

Pregnancy studies had potential implications for:

·         Labor force sustainability

·         Birth rate manipulation

·         Occupational endurance projections

·         Population control strategies

In occupied territories, data extraction required minimal financial cost. Civilian detainees required no formal registration within main camp systems, reducing administrative visibility.

In economic terms, undocumented experimentation reduced both oversight and accountability.

Silence was efficient.

A Crime Without a Monument

There is no plaque marking Camp Sud-Vercors.

No publicly archived transport manifests.

No preserved medical logs.

There are only testimonies—fragile, aging, and once dismissed as too incomplete to prosecute.

The broader historical record confirms that Nazi medical experimentation targeted reproductive systems and vulnerable populations.

What remains uncertain is how many secondary or satellite facilities operated outside the documented camp network.

How many rural detention sites existed beyond the reach of postwar tribunals?

How many archives were intentionally burned to prevent future litigation?

These questions remain open.

Why This Investigation Still Matters

War crimes are often remembered through infamous names and large-scale facilities.

But systemic abuse does not require scale to qualify as atrocity.

When pregnant women were allegedly forced to choose between numbered doors without informed consent, without records, and without recourse, the crime extended beyond the individual.

It targeted the future itself.

The destruction of evidence was not incidental.

It was strategic.

And history still carries the gaps.

As long as testimonies like Madeleine Fournier’s are examined with legal rigor, financial scrutiny, and historical analysis, attempts at erasure remain incomplete.

The corridor may have been hidden.

The doors may have been unmarked.

But the questions remain—and unanswered questions are often where the deepest investigations begin.