Standing on Infertile Ground: An Analysis of the Spectrum of Sterilization
Experiences under National Socialism
Nina Tripp M.A. History Thesis Holocaust and Genocide Studies Student Number: 12124486 Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Johannes Houwink ten Cate Second Reader: Dr. Karel Berkhoff 1 July 2019
Abstract:
During the Second World War, National Socialists used popular theories of eugenics and race science to control and manipulate the population of the Third Reich, in order to establish their ideal “Aryan” ethnic German nation. One method used to accomplish this goal was the establishment of forced sterilization programs, in which “undesirable” populations were persecuted through negative eugenics-based legislation, threat of deportation, and cruel medical experimentation. The groups most impacted by these policies and programs were people with hereditary diseases or disabilities; the Roma, Sinti, and Afro-German populations; Jews, and sometimes their “Aryan” partners. These groups all faced painful procedures, medical complications, social stigmas, loss of fertility, and in some cases death – but they all experienced the sterilization process differently based on several factors that distinguished their specific population from others. This thesis discusses the important elements of their persecution that share similarities and differences with the other victim groups and focuses on the things that make each group’s experience unique, including the scope of the victim group, the main method, settings, and actors involved, the transitional justice methods that have been put in place after the fact, and the reasoning and motivation behind their sterilization.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to all who assisted in the writing process for this thesis, particularly:
Dr. Prof. Johannes Houwink ten Cate for supervising, supporting, and guiding my writing process. Thank you for imparting some of your wisdom and stories into my life, they have been invaluable.
Dr. Prof. Nanci Adler, Dr. Thijs Bouwknegt, and Dr. Karel Berkhoff for the incredible education I have gained through this program, your expertise and passion for the subject is inspiring and has allowed me to learn more than I could ever have imagined in one year.
My family for always trusting in me and my decisions, for allowing me to pursue my passion for the subject of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, for always being on my team - even when I choose an unorthodox path, and for inspiring me to always set my goals as high as I can.
My incredible support system in Amsterdam, for being there for me through the highs and lows, to celebrate the victories of the past year and keep my spirit light while studying such a dark subject. Thank you for your tireless support and friendship, for being my family in a foreign country and making Amsterdam my new home.
My American friends who have kept me grounded, motivated, and reminded that I always have a home in the US, no matter how far I go. A particular thank you to Bobby, for his willingness to edit my work despite all of his own, and for being a constant presence in a life so full of change. And of course, my dearest Flavia, Aoife, and Phoebe, an unwavering force of light and love in my life, for sharing this incredible journey with me. I could never have anticipated that I would gain such fantastic friends from this program, and I could not be more grateful for the laughter and support you bring to my life each and every day.
Table of Contents:
Introduction 5 - 16
Background: 5 - 10
Historiographical Overview: 10 - 16
Chapter 1: People with Hereditary Diseases and Disabilities 17 - 34
1.1 Background: 17 - 18
1.2 Main Actors and Settings: 19 – 24
1.3 Experience: 24 - 32
1.4 Significance: 32 - 34
Chapter 2: Roma, Sinti, and Afro-Germans 35 - 50
2.1 Background: 35 - 36
2.2 Main Actors and Settings: 36 - 39
2.3 Experience: 39 - 47
2.4 Significance: 47 - 49
Chapter 3: Jews and Mixed-Race Couples 50 - 65
3.1 Background: 51 - 53
3.2 Main Actors and Settings: 52 - 58
3.3 Experience: 58 - 64 3.4 Significance: 64 - 65 Conclusion: 66 - 74 Findings: 66 – 69 Literature Review: 69 – 73 Impact: 73 - 74
Introduction
The Medical Practice of Forced Sterilization during the Holocaust
Medicine, as a profession, is tasked with the preservation of life, through the restoration of health, the curing of disease, the prolongment of survival, and the bringing of new life into the world. These sacred duties are enshrined in the codes of medical ethics throughout history, and the Hippocratic Oath, the promise to above all in medicine, do no harm. It is under these conditions that the 20th century became witness to one of the grossest manipulations of medical
ethics in human history: the forced sterilization of hundreds of thousands of individuals within the Third Reich during the second world war. The victims of involuntary sterilization by Nazi doctors namely belonged to a few major groups: people suspected to have hereditary diseases or disabilities, people of Roma and Sinti origins, Afro-Germans, Jews, and race or mixed-religion couples. Through the project of Nazi racial engineering, the medical profession became perpetrators of a massive plan to “cleanse” the German ethnic nation into a “purebred” society via the prevention of births by “racially inferior” individuals and groups.
The use of medical professionals and the medical establishment as agents of the racial engineering project of National socialism is “the most troubling example of highly educated professionals acting as perpetrators” in recent memory.1 The major influence of the eugenics
movement within Nazi Germany allowed for not only Nazi leaders to use medicine as a way to reach their goals for the racial purification of Germany, but also a way for curious and ethically questionable practitioners of medicine to advance their careers and make a name for themselves within the system of National Socialism.2 Their reasons for the betrayal of the typical medical
ethical model in exchange of the Nazified version are widely varied, but many scholars claim that the medical cooperation with Nazism came from a combination of loyalty to the SS, ideology, ambition, and greed.3 This paper will discuss the important actors in the sterilization
program such as Race scientist Dr. Robert Ritter, Nazi gynecologist Dr. Carl Clauberg, and Dr. Horst Schumann, another gynecologist operating within Auschwitz, all of whom would eventually be responsible for the sterilization of thousands.
1Francis R. Nicosia and Jonathan Huener, eds., Medicine and Medical Ethics in Nazi Germany: Origins, Practices,
Legacies (New York: Berghahn Books, 2002), 4.
2 Nicosia and Huener, Medicine and Medical Ethics in Nazi Germany, 5.
The process of mass sterilization began as a means to control the reproduction of “undesirable” groups within Germany and progressed over time to encompass the Nazi’s intention to destroy these groups through not only direct systems of isolation, deportation, and mass murder, but also through future-oriented methods like the destruction of a group’s ability to repopulate for the next generation, leading to a “delayed genocide.”4 For some, it can be difficult
to understand where the moral universe of German medicine shifted so abruptly from the attempts to save individual human beings in order to allow a long and healthy life for them and their offspring, to instead the preventative destruction of life through involuntary sterilization orders by the government. This policy, which began in response to the growing rise of eugenics theory in medical sciences, emphasized the importance of the German people as a group, a concept known as Völkish theory. During the Third Reich, the concept of medicine shifted from focusing on individual wellness to focusing on group health, where “there was a corruption of the concept of care (Sorge) in terms of caring for (Fürsorge) towards preventive care (Vorsorge) instead.”5 This meant preventing the suffering of the German people by preventing the passing of
disease, and for doctors of this time, this became preventing those already determined to be afflicted with hereditary diseases from having any chance of reproducing. Many doctors and nurses “believed that scientific progress had identified certain people as health hazards to the German race and they had a professional duty to separate these people from the health [that was] contributing to a healthy and strong Germany.”6
Not only was it the goal of medicine to determine individuals to be sterilized, as was the case under the 1933 Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring (also referred to as the Sterilization Law), but it was also intended to perfect the sterilization process on a much larger scale, in order to create highly efficient systems for “mass sterilization of Nazi enemies.” The sheer amount of involuntary sterilizations that took place during the period of National Socialism is astounding. By 1945, between 200,000 and 350,000 people had been sterilized in
4 Ludvvig Eiber, "Ich wusste es wird schlimm": Die Verfolgung der Sinti und Roma in München (Munich: Buchendorfer, 1993), 94. in Guenter Lewy, The Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 397.
5 Maria Berghs, Bernadette Dierckx de Casterlé, and Chris Gastmans, “Practices of Responsibility and Nurses during the Euthanasia Programs of Nazi Germany: A Discussion Paper,” International Journal of Nursing Studies 44, no. 5 (July 2007): 849, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijnurstu.2006.05.003.
6 Marla Berghs, et al. “Practices of Responsibility and Nurses during the Euthanasia Programs of Nazi Germany,” 849.
occupied Germany.7 This incredibly wide range of victim statistics comes from the lack of
consistent medical accounts, particularly of groups like the Roma and Sinti and those that otherwise perished during the war. The statistics on sterilizations from the official Reich Chancellery recorded that there were 84,252 applications for involuntary sterilization in 1934 under the Sterilization Law, during which time 31,002 of these resulted in sterilizations performed by the end the year, sixty-nine of which were fatal to the patient.8 In the Altona
region of The Third Reich alone, 15,816 sterilization orders were given between 1934 and 1945 during the implementation of the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring. While many of the victims of forced sterilization were adults at the time, with an age range between eleven and sixty-nine years old in Hamburg, the majority of those sterilized were between the ages of fifteen and seventeen.9
The sterilization project was considered to be a prolific achievement of modernity. One American reporter named Marie E. Kopp from the American Sociological Review wrote a report in October of 1936 using the data and files of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology. Marie Kopp praised the sterilization process as “a constructive social measure so far as it helps the afflicted person to avoid increasing responsibility which he and society have already found burdensome,”10 and argued that “if the social and cultural standards of the nation are to be
maintained,” then the individual desires must be subsumed by what is best for the community, even in the case of something as personal as a person’s ability to reproduce.11 Kopp claimed in
her interview that the institute’s willingness to allow her investigation is evidence of the fairness and civility of the involuntary sterilization process, although history has shown otherwise. Despite the modern understanding of this sterilization process as one of the early steps towards genocide of “undesirable” peoples, at the time of this publication in 1936, Kopp explicitly states that, “the law is administered in entire fairness and with all considerations for the individual to be sterilized and for his family, and that discrimination of class, race, creed, political or religious belief does not enter into the matter, regardless of whether health, social welfare, or legal
7 Friedemann Pfäfflin and Jan Gross, “Involuntary Sterilization in Germany from 1933 to 1945 and Some Consequences for Today,” International Journal of Law and Psychiatry 5, no. 3–4 (January 1982),
https://doi.org/10.1016/0160-2527(82)90035-8, 419.
8 Pfäfflin and Gross, “Involuntary Sterilization in Germany from 1933 to 1945,” 419. 9 Ibid.
10 Marie E. Kopp, “Legal and Medical Aspects of Eugenic Sterilization in Germany,” American Sociological
Review 1, no. 5 (October 1936), https://doi.org/10.2307/2084135, 768.
procedures are involved.”12 This claim would, of course, prove to be untrue throughout the
coming years.
Throughout the past decades of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, there has been an increasing divergence from the emphasis of the uniqueness of the Holocaust to its so-called “unprecedentedness.”13 Sterilization of unwanted populations has been occurring for most of
human history, with particular occurrences cited by the Nazis as their inspiration, such as the rapid expansion and implementation of eugenic policy in the United States during the beginning of the 20th century. As Garland E. Allen discussed in his work “Ideology of Elimination,” the
forced sterilization laws, primarily the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring, that “was based on the 1932 Prussian proposal that has been approved by some of the Weimar Germany’s most influential eugenicists,” and additionally that the “Prussian law was itself an extension of Laughlin’s ‘Medical Sterilization Law,’ establishing a direct connection between American and Nazi Eugenic Legislation.”14 And while this law did not explicitly call for
sterilization of people based exclusively on race, it was used as a justification for the sterilization of so many individuals beyond the original scope of the legislation. As Allen says, the Nazi sterilization system acted as a manifestation of Nazi era eugenics, and was quite all-encompassing, as “the Nazis carried their sterilization program far beyond any level reached in other countries, sterilizing over 400,000 people by 1940.”15 The Nazi eugenicists even went so
far to rebuttal criticism for their extreme policies with reminders of the actions of others, using posters and slogans like “Wir sind nicht allein” (We are not alone), in reference to the sterilization and anti-miscegenation laws of the United States during this time.16
Many historians of the Nazi medical model claim that the sterilization policy of the Nazis was not only a “breeding” policy but also a clear indication of genocidal intent to destroy a population in whole or in part, through introducing policies of racial hygiene in order to prevent the births of new members of the undesired populations. As Robert N. Proctor explained in his dissection of these policies, “Racial Hygiene: The Collaboration of Medicine and Nazism” in
12 Ibid, 770.
13 See Yehuda Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust, Yale Nota Bene (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2002), and Alan Rosenberg “Was the Holocaust Unique? A Peculiar Question?” in Isidor Wallimann and Michael N. Dobkowski, eds., Genocide and the Modern Age: Etiology and Case Studies of Mass Death, Contributions to the Study of World History, no. 3 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987), 157.
14 Nicosia and Huener, Medicine and Medical Ethics in Nazi Germany, 32. 15 Ibid, 33.
Medical Ethics and the Third Reich: Historical and Contemporary Issues, “Three main programs
formed the heart of the Nazi program of medicalized ‘racial cleansing:’ the sterilization law, the Nuremberg Laws, and the euthanasia program. These programs cleared the path for subsequent mass killings.” But beyond simply acting as a tool of the Nazi regime, racial engineering became a legitimate field of the medical profession in Germany, one that under the Law for the Prevention of the Hereditarily Diseased Offspring would thrive. “Medical supply companies designed sterilization equipment. Medical Students wrote more than 180 doctoral theses exploring the criteria, methods, and consequences of sterilization.”17 There was even a medical
journal dedicated entirely to the science of sterilization.18 The medical industry was embracing
sterilization as a way to improve the overall health of the German nation, and doctors would soon be competing amongst themselves to determine the most effective form of mass sterilization first. In 1943, Carl Clauberg, a German gynecologist, “announced to Heinrich Himmler that, with a staff of ten men, he could sterilize as many as 1,000 women per day.”19
With the raging antisemitism of the Nazi party influencing the course of sterilization research, doctors such as Gerhard Wagner determined that in the course of preventing the spread of hereditary disease it would be most effective to sterilize those most pre-disposed to certain disease, as he determined that many diseases were more common in Jews than non-Jews and would use this as a medical justification of Jewish and Mixed-race couples under the law. This logic was extended beyond simply likelihood of disease contraction and became a way to personify the death of society through claims that “Judaism is disease incarnate.”20 The solution
to this societal disease? Doctors of the Nazi school of thought had many suggestions involving destruction of the Jews entirely and various calls for mass sterilization, justified by “saving” the health of the ethnic German population. Dr. Philip Bouhler, one of the Nazis responsible for the T4 Euthanasia program, proposed all Jews be sterilized in groups by x-rays, while Dr. Viktor Brack was more concerned about the ability of the nation to use Jews as a stable (and infertile) workforce, thus he suggested that rather than sterilizing all of the Jewish population, it would be best to sterilize those two to three million that were fit to work in German factories.21 This
17 Ibid, 37. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid.
20 John J. Michalczyk, ed., Medicine, Ethics, and the Third Reich: Historical and Contemporary Issues (Kansas City: Sheed & Ward, 1994), 39.
process, of creating legal structures under which to “accustom the German people to honor the need expressed in Mein Kampf of discontinuing the proliferation of persons deemed ‘unfit,’” in order to shift from reproductive regulation for the health of the society, to outright mass murder of whole populations, shows that the sterilization of populations was not simply one small part of the destruction process but in reality an essential step in creating the connection between the increasing the health of the society through the destruction of the “outsider.”22
Historiographical Overview
Due to the proliferation of the study of this topic, Holocaust and genocide scholars have expanded the literature on forced sterilization during the Holocaust, emphasizing various subtopics ranging from the religious role of motherhood in Judaism, to the widely differing effects on different victim groups, to the importance of the implications of genocidal intent contained within the prevention of birth in targeted minorities. The topic of forced sterilization in Germany surrounding the Second World War was first explored as a subsection of Holocaust studies, and Jan T. Gross was one of the first to discuss the significance of the practice in his 1985 work “Involuntary Sterilization in Germany from 1933 – 1945 and Some Consequences for Today” in the International Journal for Law and Psychiatry. The 1980s was also a time of advancement within the study of women’s roles during the second world war, exemplified by Claudia Koonz’s 1986 book “Mothers in the Fatherland, Women, the Family, and Nazi Politics” in which the important roles of women were examined through the lenses of religion, religion, and patriarchal expectations.
During the late 1980s, additional work was being put into the collection of oral, visual, and written testimonies from the second world war. The Steven Spielberg collection at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is filled with life histories and important contributions from survivors that were previously neglected. This massive collection contains many survivors’ entire life histories, and in several cases, these histories include their experiences with forced sterilization. Representing some of the different targeted groups for sterilization, this thesis will discuss the oral testimony of survivors such as Helga Gross, Franciscka Mikus, and Israel Nadjari, all of whom were sterilized against their will during the second world war. These testimonies provided a unique perspective, as not only did they allow
the victim to relieve themselves of the shame and stigma previously attached to sterility, but it also provided them a platform to explain their personal experiences before, during, and after the war, and how the sterilization affected them in the long term.23 Because so many survivors of the
second world war started over with new lives in a new place with a new family, it is essential to see the ways in which those who are now unable to reproduce compensate for their inability to cope through the creation of new life in the face of so much death.
However, it was not until the 1990s that the study of involuntary sterilization began to grow more important in academic circles.24 One of the primary scholars to delve into the
complex topic of forced sterilization in The Netherlands specifically was filmmaker Mirjam Bartelsman, whose collaborative work with Hans Van Dijk in the 1990’s drew attention to the importance of this topic and the ways in which Dutch medical professionals in and around Westerbork and Amsterdam were complicit in the process. Her work primarily focused on Jewish and mixed-race couples in The Netherlands who were given the choice between deportation to the camps of the East or “voluntary” permanent sterilization. This work was later built upon by scholars focusing on the various forms of genocidal complicity by Nazi medical professionals, such as Philip Ball’s piece “Naming the Victims of Nazi Medicine” which focused on bringing back dignity to those who had their lives and bodies damaged by the Nazi medical system.25
The scholarship surrounding Nazi medical experiments and sterilization was most recently studied more closely in the context of specific victim groups, such as the studies focusing on the experience of sterilization for women in works such as Different Horrors, Same
Hell: Gender and the Holocaust edited by Myrna Goldenberg and Amy H. Shapiro, and on
physical or institutional violence against specifically Jewish women in Sexual Violence Against
Jewish Women During the Holocaust edited by Sonja M. Hedgepeth and Rochelle G. Saidel.26
Their work on sexual violence against specifically Jewish women provides a focused look on the
23 Gross, Helga. Oral History Interview with Stephen Stept. Harvard Law School Library - Nuremberg Trials Project. January 22, 2003., Himze, Irene and Rene Slotkin (Guttman Twins). Oral History Interview with Stephen
Stept. October 12, 2002, Mikus, Franciscka. Oral History Interview. Harvard Law School Library - Nuremberg
Trials Project. April 13, 1989.
24 Dagmar Herzog, Sex after Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2007), 250.
25 See Ball, “Naming the Victims of Nazi Medicine,”
26 Myrna Goldenberg and Amy H. Shapiro, eds., Different Horrors, Same Hell: Gender and the Holocaust, 1st ed., The Stephen S. Weinstein Series in Post-Holocaust Studies (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2013)., Sonja M. Hedgepeth and Rochelle G. Saidel, eds., Sexual Violence against Jewish Women during the Holocaust, HBI Series on Jewish Women (Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2010).
importance of the role of Judaism in this abuse and the impact on its victims but requires an academic understanding of sexual violence and Holocaust history to reach its full impact. This focus during the late 1990s and early 2000s was in line with the third wave of the feminist movement, in which more attention was paid to the ways in which women experience the world and its events differently than men through the prism of the patriarchal society. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that the shift from general to more specific experiences of women was also reflected in the academic area of Holocaust studies. The literature surrounding the effects and experience of sterilization for Roma and Sinti women as well as Afro-Germans came from Eve Rosenhaft’s Blacks and Gypsies in Nazi German: The Limits of the ‘Racial State,’ which drew heavily from G. Lewy’s earlier work “Gypsies and Jews under the Nazis” in an issue of Holocaust and Genocide Studies from 1999.27 This topic has been covered primarily in terms
of victim group experiences and sterilization’s place within the larger scheme of Nazi medicine, however, it is necessary to delve into this topic with a comparative focus on how the individual groups experienced sterilization in different forms and with different long-lasting impacts to their ethnic or religious group.
A few topics within the literature have generally been agreed upon by the majority of scholars. For one, the significance of sterilization has overall been regarded as an essential first step in the genocidal process. This has been discussed not only as a factor within the sterilization of Jews and people with partially Jewish heritage, but also as an essential first step in the chronology of the murder of both Roma and Afro-Germans, as well as “Aryan” people with diseases or disabilities who were betrayed by the system that had promised to benefit them.28
There has also been a wide consensus on the use of sterilization legislation and practices as a way to establish a program for the implementation of eugenic ideology into society through medical practices.29 The connections between the eugenics movement of the 1920s and 1930s
and the implementation of sterilization of “undesirable” groups is nearly impossible to deny as its founders and advocates readily bragged of the important purpose of both programs, to create a
27 Eve Rosenhaft, “Blacks and Gypsies in Nazi Germany: The Limits of the ‘Racial State,’” History Workshop
Journal 72, no. 1 (October 1, 2011): 161–70, https://doi.org/10.1093/hwj/dbr023.
28 Claudia Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family, and Nazi Politics (New York: St. Martinś Press, 1986), 257.
29 Pfäfflin and Gross, “Involuntary Sterilization in Germany from 1933 to 1945 and Some Consequences for Today,” 419–23.
purified Germanic population through organized systematic control of the population’s reproduction.30
One point of dissensus within the literature has been surrounding the question of “why sterilize your victims if you are just going to kill them eventually?” This question has been answered in a variety of ways, primarily through claims of the functionalist approach to Holocaust Studies, in saying that the Nazi plans for annihilation of their victims were developed over a period of time, meaning that the decision to sterilize populations as early as the 1930s is a reasonable predecessor for the deadlier methods of population control that would be implemented later in history, such as outright murder of entire groups.31 Other scholars suggest
that there were different methods of sterilization and destruction amongst the different victim groups, thus accounting for the shifting methods over time. There are even those who suggest that the effects of the sterilization and murder of those with disabilities or hereditary diseases were so influential that they were an essential step in the application of similar methods to larger “non-Aryan” populations.32 For example, the same methods of “euthanizing” mental patients
during the T4 Euthanasia program were used to murder Jews later in the Holocaust. Beyond simply the paralleled methods of destruction, doctors outwardly praised the purpose of Auschwitz’s gas chambers, one even going so far as to connect the two destructive processes by saying, “Auschwitz was the logical extension of the sterilization and ‘euthanasia’; it became the racial clinic par excellence.”33
There is as well the argument that sterilization was used on victims rather than, or prior to, outright murder because of their necessity as a workforce during the war. This explanation can easily be applied to the Jewish victims of sterilization, who were often sterilized in mass groups without their consent or understanding, by doctors such as Dr. Clauberg and Dr. Schumann in Auschwitz’s Block 10, both of whom were working to perfect a method of mass sterilization that would allow for the sterilization of around “1000 women a day.”34 This
argument, however, does not as easily explain the decision to sterilize those outside of the Jewish victim group. Those interned at the “Gypsy family camp” of Auschwitz were not considered to be as much of an essential workforce, often Roma men were interned specifically because of
30 Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland, 241
31 Michael H Kater, Doctors under Hitler (Chapel Hill; London: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2000), 116. 32 Benno Müller-Hill, Murderous Science: Elimination by Scientific Selection of Jews, Gypsies, and Others,
Germany 1933-1945 (Woodbury, NY: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 1998), 33.
33 Kater, Doctors under Hitler, 182. 34 Müller-Hill, Murderous Science, 20.
their label as “work shy.” The Roma people add another level of complication to this question of “why” as they were distinguished even further into “pure-blood” and “mixed-race” “gypsies” and then treated differently as such.35 Particularly under Dr. Robert Ritter, who conducted
experiments on and categorized the ethnic make-up of tens of thousands of Roma and Sinti people, long before they were overwhelmingly deported to Auschwitz and liquidated.36
Additionally, the victims with disabilities were specifically being sterilized because of their so-called “burden” on the German society because of their inability to contribute to the workforce, disproving the accurate application of the workforce theory within that particular group.37
Another area of tension in the field is the discussion of how exactly did these three major
victim groups experience involuntary sterilization differently from one another? This is the
question that this thesis will focus primarily on. We know that, chronologically speaking, the sterilization project’s timeline has been somewhat established, in which the 1933 law for the prevention of diseased offspring went into effect with the intention of focusing on the non-reproduction of those with genetic defects, followed closely by the shift in the eugenic sciences to include not just disabilities as genetic defects but also undesirable racial identity as a “disease within the healthily German body.”38 This would include the importance of removing not just
Jews from society but also from the Germanic gene pool that they were “infiltrating.”39 Due to
the belief that Jewish men acted as a predatory disease within the German society, attacking and defiling the “Aryan” women, they could be removed from the gene pool under the guise of “ethnic health.”40 This was also extended to the other “non-Aryan” groups categorized as
criminal or asocial, soon encompassing the sterilization of the Roma, Sinti, and Afro-German people of the Reich.
There has also been some controversy over the influence of religious institutions during this process, particularly the role of the Catholic and Protestant churches. These groups reported a variety of views on sterilization and maintained a wide range of resistance and compliance strategies. For example, the resistance from the Catholic church was not necessarily against the sterilization as a general process but rather in using Catholic nuns and nurses to perform these procedures that they could not morally agree with, or within the Protestant leaders’ agreement to
35 Ibid, 63. 36 Ibid, 65.
37 Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland, 190. 38 Kater, Doctors under Hitler, 187. 39 Ibid.
follow the sterilization order within their medical facilities, but with the exception that they would not use force.41
Thereafter, the literature has turned to the future-oriented question, “What were the major impacts of the involuntary sterilization programs?” Did the different groups who were sterilized experience the impacts of this permanent process differently? For example, were “Aryan” victims of forced sterilization more likely to experience long term stigma on the basis of their status as “diseased” than the other victim groups who were otherwise further victimized by the impact of the proceeding annihilation? While it is largely agreed upon that women experienced sterilization differently because of their patriarchal obligation to fulfill a maternal role, it is unquestioned if women from the different victim groups felt differently oppressed depending on their ethnic or religious affiliation.42 Perhaps an “Aryan” Catholic woman would experience
deprivation of motherhood as a removal of status and religious purpose, while a Jewish woman who was sterilized but later survived the Holocaust may experience deprivation of motherhood as a reminder of the trauma she suffered under the Nazi antisemitic persecution.43 It is this
diversion of experience that this thesis will delve deeper into, in order to distinguish the various experiences and pains of those sterilized under the Third Reich, and to determine how their lives were impacted in both unique and universal ways.
This thesis will discuss the important role that medical sterilization played in the annihilation of people with hereditary diseases and disabilities, Roma and Sinti, Afro-Germans, Jews, and mixed-race couples. Each chapter will focus on one of the victim population groups specifically targeted by the Nazis for extermination in the second world war, and then within each chapter will discuss the important actors and settings of the sterilization process, the experiences of members of that group, and the significance of that experience. The progression of the thesis will follow a somewhat chronological order of persecution under the Nazis, as laws and medical practices developed over time, allowing for the expansion of victim groups, but occasionally overlap.
These chapters will draw heavily on the important secondary sources of the topic, as well as reflecting on testimony from sterilization victims through oral and written testimony,
41 Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland, 184.
42 Karola Fings and Donald Kenrick, eds., The Gypsies during the Second World War, Interface Collection 12–13 (Paris: Hatfield, Hertfordshire, U.K: Gypsy Research Centre; University of Hertfordshire Press, 1997), 94.
43 David Patterson, “The Nazi Assault on the Jewish Soul through the murder of the Jewish Mother” in Myrna Goldenberg and Amy H. Shapiro, eds., Different Horrors, Same Hell: Gender and the Holocaust, 1st ed., The Stephen S. Weinstein Series in Post-Holocaust Studies (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2013), 168.
supplementary photos, documents, and government orders, in order to create a well-informed interpretation of the circumstances surrounding this issue. While there has been significant debate within the discipline on the use of testimonies and photographs in order to accurately convey the history of the Holocaust, this thesis focuses on the experiences of victims and believes that these experiences cannot accurately be portrayed without the input of survivor testimonies.44
44 See Tony Kushner, “Holocaust Testimony, Ethics, and the Problem of Representation”, in: Poetics Today, vol.27, no.2 (2006), Henry Greenspan, “Collaborative Interpretation of Survivors’ Accounts: A Radical Challenge to Conventional Practice,” Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History 17, no. 1 (Spring 2011), and Susie Linfield, “A Witness to Murder”, Boston Review, (September-October 2005.)
Chapter 1: Sterilization of Persons with Hereditary Disease or Disability 1.1 Background
In this chapter, this thesis will discuss the process of developing the sterilization program for “undesirable” people under the rule of the Third Reich, and how it began with a law developed years prior to its implementation, with the intention to essentially criminalize and contain anyone who showed signs of difference from the Ethnic-German nation. The Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring was passed in 1933 and came into effect in Germany in January of 1934 and in annexed Austria in January of 1940. This occurred during the rise of National Socialism and in line with the Volkish theory of purifying and protecting “German blood” from an alien race via the sterilization of “unfit” individuals. The law established a connected process between the medical and legal realms, known as the Hereditary Health Courts. These courts consisted of three main actors: a presiding district judge, a medical officer, and a doctor considered to be an expert in the field. There could also be additional medical professionals present, as these courts did not respect the bind of confidentiality between patient and doctors, and any medical professional could be called to testify on the medical history of the defendant in question.45 There were eight specific diagnoses that would lead to a
forced sterilization order: inborn mental deficiency, schizophrenia, circular manic-depressive insanity, heredity Falling Sickness (epilepsy), Hereditary St. Vitus’ Dance (Huntington’s Disease), hereditary blindness, hereditary deafness, and severe physical malformation. Beyond these diagnoses, those determined to be afflicted with severe alcoholism could receive a sterilization order from the Hereditary Health Courts. This law’s jurisdiction would be extended throughout its existence.46
The Hereditary Health Courts would hear from medical experts and the doctors of the patient in question. Due to the lack of privacy regulations in this court, it was common for subjects to attempt to conceal their medical history from the court, however this practice was discouraged through threat of punishment and the knowledge that due to extremely well-kept records in German society, the court was likely to find out the hidden information regardless. The person whose medical history was being dissected was not required to be present in the court proceedings and was often simply given the passed down court decision. They were given a
45 Michael Burleigh, Death and Deliverance: “Euthanasia” in Germany c. 1900-1945 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 56.
maximum of two weeks to voluntarily report to one of the medical facilities, and if a patient did not report within this time period, police action was possible, whereby the subject could legally be sterilized by force.47
During June of 1935, an amendment was proposed for the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring in which pregnancy could be “interrupted” if the pregnant woman was “declared to be unfit for procreation by the Hereditary Health Court.”48 The
legalization of abortion was considered somewhat more controversial than the Sterilization Law’s initial plans, and therefore certain extra regulations were made “to counteract accusers of infanticide”49 For instance, the woman must consent to the abortion procedure, and if consent
was not given to end the pregnancy the woman was allowed to carry the baby to term and would then be sterilized after the birth of the child. The “interruption” of pregnancy could also technically not be performed after 6 months of gestation, or if it was at a period that would be at the risk of the patient’s life.50 This was often not the reality of the law in practice, and many
women have testified since to the horrors of forced abortion.51
Those that were decided by the Heredity Health Courts to have a hereditary disease or disability of some sort were referred to the hospital for examination by the state. The person in question was then subjected to a medical examination, including the Wassermann test for syphilis, urinalysis, and various blood tests.52 If the patient was found to have a previously
unknown condition that would cause serious harm to the patient, if given the sterilization procedure, such as tuberculosis, heart disease, kidney disease, or any type of disease of the pelvis, their procedure could be delayed by the medical institution they were under the care of. If the patient was declared fit for the sterilization process, there was a period surrounding the procedure, four days prior to the surgery and either seven to ten days after for men or twelve to eighteen days after for women, in which the patient was retained in the facility under medical watch.53
47 Kopp, “Legal and Medical Aspects of Eugenic Sterilization in Germany, 766. 48 Ibid, 764.
49 Ibid. 50 Ibid.
51 Franziska Mikus, “Franziska: A Silent Protest Against Sterilization” in The Other Victims: First-Person Stories
of Non-Jews Persecuted by the Nazis, ed. Ina R. Friedman (New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin, 1990), 73.
52 Kopp, “Legal and Medical Aspects of Eugenic Sterilization in Germany,” 767. 53 Ibid, 767 – 768.
Major Actors and Settings
Dr. Ernst Rüdin was a medical doctor and researcher, who focused his career primarily on the understanding the hereditary nature of disease, particularly “hereditability of serious physical defects and psychiatric genetic evaluation of schizophrenia with short, non-recurring attacks, and longer period of complete remission.”54 Rüdin was tackling the practical difficulties
of applying a law that required medical diagnosis of an under-researched disease. Rüdin was quoted describing his motivation and the motivation of other doctors as, “We may not have any interest in preserving the lives of incurable victims of heredity, nor in the reproduction of those humans who are carriers of the genes required for the development of serious genetic diseases. But in the case of the latter group of patients, we do have an interest in intervening in [the] course of the disease early enough to save at least those individuals who can be saved, in order to preserve at least their utility for society.”55 While many of his colleagues and former students
argue that he was “not so much a fanatical Nazi as a fanatical geneticist,” Rüdin did reign in a prestigious role at the Kaiser Wilhelm Society as well as playing an active role in Nazi medicine as a member of the National Socialist party since 1937.56 Rüdin’s mindset was that all of the
issues of contemporary importance – disease, scientific discovery, sterilization, race health, and national socialism; were all interconnected to the overlap and interaction between science and politics.57
This mindset was not at all uncommon, and just as sterilization was becoming a part of the booming medical industry, even medical textbooks began to reflect this belief. In the medical text developed and written by Franz Hamburger and Richard Priesel (Innsbruck), there is a section that states, “At all times should you be aware of the duties of the National Socialist physician, who keeps in mind not only the individual person, but the entire Volkskörper [literally, people’s body] in which the single person like the cell in the human organism is just a building block, just a cell of the people as a whole.”58 They were similarly quoted in another
section of the book as saying, “For the time being, you have still the duty as a physician to preserve the child’s life under any circumstances…” However, physicians would be commonly
54 Paul Hoedeman, Hitler or Hippocrates: Medical Experiments and Euthanasia in the Third Reich (Sussex, England: Book Guild, 1991), 62.
55 Hoedeman, Hitler or Hippocrates, 64.
56 Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 2017), 28.
57 Hoedeman, Hitler or Hippocrates, 65. 58 Ibid, 140.
tasked with explaining to the parents that “it would be better for the respective child to die, that it must be sterilized to prevent hereditary-defective progeny.”59 If this insensitive and assertive
language was used in textbooks, one can imagine the implications for patient care in practice. Dr. Rüdin was also part of a larger group working under the DFG (German Research Foundation) who would later provide support for the studies of infamous gynecologist Dr. Horst Schumann, wherein Dr. Rüdin worked alongside professors and doctors such as Dr. Otmar Frieherr von Verschuer, a human biologist and geneticist. In 1934 the study of the implications and logistics of the Sterilization Law were becoming more prominent within the medical field, and so the institute created five positions for researchers to work with and process “scientific material” in relation to the studies surrounding sterilization.60 These researchers began to call for
more and more intensive actions to be taken in relation to the scope and extremity of the laws and began to deal with the practical issues of putting these laws into effect.61 For example, in
March of 1935, at a medical conference, Dr. Ernst Rüdin is recalled as demanding the sterilization of all people diagnosed as psychopaths, although decades later his daughter would deny these reports.62 German-American Psychiatrist Dr. Franz Joseph Kallman revealed a plan
to sterilize not only all people who were diagnosed with schizophrenia but also “all carriers of schizophrenic genes,” which would amount to roughly 18% of the population.63 This plan was
not implemented because of the massive scope of money, time, and materials that would be required to fulfill this goal. And yet, for many physicians involved with the project, this widened scope was precisely the goal. One National Socialist geneticist, Dr. Fritz Lenz, stated that, for him, the goals of this law’s implementation and a key step in the entire eugenics project was to establish “a certificate of hereditary biology for every citizen and inhabitant.”64
The process of implementing the sterilization process was intentionally kept quiet by lawyers and doctors. In particular, Dr. Herbert Linden, a race scientist in charge of state hospitals and nursing homes, specifically suggested that for proper implementation of the law, in some cases the person in question should not be altered to the reason behind their summons until the
59 Ibid.
60 Müller-Hill, Murderous Science, 11. 61 Hoedeman, Hitler or Hippocrates, 62.
62 Müller-Hill, Murderous Science, 130. Ibid, 11.
63 Ibid, 31. 64 Ibid.
trial began.”65 The legal process also included many other illegitimate practices, such as denial of
the subject’s right to inspect court documents, as well as the court’s ability to deny a subject a legal advisor without appeal.66 Around ninety percent of the applications submitted to the
Hereditary Health Courts led to a sterilization order, and with minimal success in the case of appeals, even those who fought against the legal sterilization were likely to succumb to the sterilization order eventually.67
An expansion of the law was in development as the war approached, and Dr. Ernst Rüdin once again took center stage in the debates. Dr. Rüdin advocated for the sterilization of “valueless individuals, all those who were socially inferior psychopaths on account of moral confusion or severe ethical defects, and the great mass of serious and incorrigible constitutional criminals.”68 While this intended expansion was never successfully placed into law, the ability to
punish and sterilize people for traits that were outside of the initial scope of the legislation was exercised. Dr. Rüdin praised the medical implementation of Hitler’s ethnic visions through the expanded Nuremberg laws in a medical journal from 1943, a move he apparently thought “necessary” at a time when the Füherer’s vision was perfectly aligned with the eugenics movement he so deeply believed in.69 Dr. Rüdin even went so far as to push back against
suggested exemptions to the Sterilization Law throughout debates on the subject. In response to the question of patient exemptions, Dr. Rüdin reportedly enforced the need for “clear instruction to discuss matters with the person to be sterilized, in as humane a manner as possible, once the decision is reached.”70 Holocaust scholar Benno Muller-Hill defined this as being a clear
demonstration that Dr. Rüdin, and other doctors enforcing the sterilization law, had no intentions of reducing the rate of sterilization applications or cases, and if anything they were looking to expand the radius of their implementation.71
In practice, there was minimal formal resistance to the sterilization legislation. However, one of the groups who reacted most publicly to the Sterilization Law was the religious authorities of the time. Catholic women, in particular, began to ask questions about the effectiveness of sterilizing social outcasts such as prostitutes, as they were concerned that this sort of punishment
65 Ibid. 66 Ibid.
67 Lifton, The Nazi Doctors, 27. 68 Müller-Hill, Murderous Science, 33. 69 Lifton, The Nazi Doctors, 28. 70 Müller-Hill, Murderous Science, 34. 71 Ibid, 34.
for their moral depravity would remove their motivation to seek a different path. This potentially could hamper the church’s ability to enforce adherence to religious values as a path to salvation.72 The religious response to the process was complicated, as they were often not willing
to resist the concept of sterilization as a whole, as it would require them to too heavily argue against the National Socialist leadership but would instead argue against specific methods or instances of its application. While there was some reported resistance to the laws from the Protestants during this time, there were also cases of religious group cooperation. Groups such as the Protestant Standing Committee for Racial Hygiene and Racial Protection produced reading materials in the 1920s urging the public to place the Volk above their own reproductive desires and submit to sterilization if they possessed genetic defects that could damage the German race.73
Hans Harmsen, the Chairman of the Inner Mission’s Standing Conference on Eugenic Questions, prominent Protestant voice, and medical director of the Protestant Asylum Network, claimed that sterilization was “a moral duty, which can be explained as love of one’s neighbor and responsibility towards future generations.”74 After the Protestant leadership’s support for
previous sterilization legislation calls, the Protestant church accepted and supported the Sterilization Law, with the only exception being that within their own facilities they would not use force.75 However, from the numerous applications their facilities sent to the government for
permission to sterilize their own patients in their own institutions, it is unlikely that this minor resistance took any effect in practice.76 This redirection of religious love and sacrifice for the
“Aryan” race as a whole not only subsumed the love one has for another individual but intended to replace it. This was only one of the ways in which religious leaders justified the abandonment of their people and principles in favor of the so-called “race science” of the era.
For instance, Catholic nuns refused to assist with the sterilization procedures, and they advocated for sterilization exemptions for “racially unworthy” Catholics who “committed themselves for life to residential institutions,” showed some level of resistance to these laws on a religious basis.77 Still, the government ordered dismissal of any priests who advised against
72 Claudia Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family, and Nazi Politics (New York: St. Martinś Press, 1986), 284 – 286.
73 Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland, 241. 74 Burleigh, Death and Deliverance, 41 - 42.
75 Michael Burleigh, Ethics and Extermination: Reflections on Nazi Genocide (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 131.
76 Burleigh, Ethics and Extermination, 131. 77 Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland, 283.
sterilization combined with the inability for Catholic-run marriage counseling centers to advise couples on family law or eugenic policies, show that the church was oftentimes cooperative or compliant with the Nazi racial policy.78 Another very important aspect of the religious response
to the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring came from the Catholic emphasis on the sanctity of marriage, which, after the laws preventing the marriage of sterilized people, lost much of its power. If the importance of marriage was meant to encourage moral and pious behavior, then the inability to marry combined with the demoralizing stigma of being considered “diseased” would inevitably reduce the incentives for Catholicism-based morality, eventually causing many of those sterilized to feel abandoned or betrayed by the church.79 This
concerned many religious leaders and lead to slight resistance within the eugenics movement, particularly in regard to the prohibition of marriage.
Another influential actor in the politics of the eugenics movement was that of negative-eugenics based propaganda. During the Great Depression, the medical profession began to encourage public opinion to focus on the positive societal benefits of sterilization and to revitalize public policy surrounding the issue.80 The production of pro-sterilization propaganda
materials by both medical and scientific fields, in research publications, conference presentations, and popular news, shifted the public support to sterilize “undesirable” members of the Third Reich.81 Films such as Opfer der Vergangenheit: Die Sünde wider Blut und Rasse
(“Victims of the Past: The Sin Against Blood and Race”), were produced in order to remind the German citizens of their suffering under the Treaty of Versailles, and convince them that their taxes were now going to pay for the care of the chronically ill or disabled. This film claims that the average institutionalized hereditarily ill person will cost the Reich fifty thousand RM until the age of 60; “a luxury that Germany could not afford.”82 Propaganda films of the time also
feature important calls to action such as putting your full trust in geneticists, associating “non-Aryans” with disease and crime, and protecting your own healthy children through the isolation and destruction of others.83 Equally influential are the numerous images of propaganda
published under the National Socialist government, attempting to illustrate the burden that
78 Ibid, 283. 79 Ibid, 286.
80 James M. Glass, Life Unworthy of Life: Racial Phobia and Mass Murder in Hitler’s Germany. (London: BasicBooks, 1999), 36.
81 Glass, Life Unworthy of Life, 36.
82 Burleigh, Death and Deliverance, 36, and “Victims of the Past” Nazi Propaganda Film. 83 Burleigh, Death and Deliverance, 189 – 192 and “Victims of the Past” Nazi Propaganda Film.
hereditarily ill or disabled people place on the German people, and how they should personally desire to throw off this weight.84 While the victims of sterilization suffered greatly under the new
laws, the influx of medical advancement, employment, and ethnonational pride that came from the eugenics movement easily overshadowed any negative effects visible to the German general public.85
Emphasizing the general public’s welfare over that of a select few whom society was already deprioritizing, was a dangerous shift towards sterilization as a substitute for the costly process of lifelong institutionalization.86 One example of the integration of this way of thinking
into the daily lives of “Aryan” Germans was the exercise posed to students in a mathematics textbook, where students were “asked to calculate how many government loans to newly married couples could be granted for the amount of money it cost the state to care for ‘the crippled, the criminal, and the insane.’”87 This message of evaluating the worth of the individual over the
whole was an essential step in moving towards the implementation of negative eugenics. While the whole of the Third Reich was learning to reassess the worth of a human life in order to conform with the views and priorities of the National Socialist party, in the eyes of the “Aryan” society, the value of the disabled or hereditarily diseased individual dropped to nothing.88
1.2 Experience
The sterilization procedures as they were performed at the time were relatively un-invasive and fast for men, including only a six to eight-minute surgery and localized anesthetic.89
For women, because the procedure required a more invasive abdominal procedure, the process was longer and significantly more complicated and included general anesthetics.90 These
operations were specifically intended to prevent the ability for the patient to reproduce, but during the earlier phases of this medical development, there were efforts made to not permanently damage the reproductive system nor remove the organs entirely without very
84 “Informing the German Worker of the Cost of Maintaining a Hereditarily Ill Person” in Burleigh, Death and
Deliverance, 194.
85 Glass, Life Unworthy of Life, 43. 86 Burleigh, Death and Deliverance, 38.
87 Lifton, The Nazi Doctors, 48. and Adolf Dorner, lehrbuch der Mathematik für höhere Schulen (1935, rev. ed. 1936) Quoted in Heyde Trial, 33 – 36.
88 Mark P. Mostert, “Useless Eaters: Disability as Genocidal Marker in Nazi Germany” Journal of Special
Education Vol. 36, Iss. 3, (October 2002 - December 2002), 158.
89 Kopp, “Legal and Medical Aspects of Eugenic Sterilization in Germany,” 767. 90 Ibid, 767.
special circumstances.91 With later amendments to the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily
Diseased Offspring, the regulation of methods was modified to allow for the use of irradiation via x-ray exposure, (a method that would later be taken to extremes by doctors looking to perfect a method of mass sterilization within the extermination camps.)92 Other regulations of the
procedure include the need for a competent surgeon or gynecologist to perform the procedure in a specially equipped hospital.93 There was also an unusual exception made to the pool of
patients, in that those that were permanently incarcerated were not eligible, as medical professionals argued that the procedure should not be necessary if the incarceration or institutionalization process is effectively preventing them from procreating regardless.94 The
operation was not funded by the Hereditary Health Courts, and costs were either undertaken by the patient, their family, or the public “Sickness Insurance Fund.”95
By 1936, there were 205 active Hereditary Health Courts in Germany, with 26 Hereditary health Courts of Appeal.96 In 1934 alone, the Hereditary Health Courts received 84,525
applications for involuntary sterilization, and decided on 64,499 cases, roughly seventy-three percent.97 In 56,244 of these cases, the court passed down a sterilization order, with 28,286 of
these being men and 27,958 of them being women.98 In 3,692 of the applications, roughly two
percent, the sterilization was not ordered because the illness the person in question suffered from was not considered hereditary.99 4,563 of the applications were “otherwise disposed of.”100 The
Hereditary Health Court of appeals was also relatively active. Even after the second world war was over and the courts disbanded, the desire for appeal applications was somewhat common. The Hereditary Health Court of Appeals heard 8,219 cases by 1936, with appeals from both sides of the process.101 438 appeals were approved because the Hereditary Health Court determined
that the illness was not covered under the law, and in 179 of these cases, the appeal ended in a sterilization order for the patient in question.102
91 Ibid, 765. 92 Ibid. 93 Ibid.
94 Burleigh, Death and Deliverance, 59.
95 Kopp, “Legal and Medical Aspects of Eugenic Sterilization in Germany,” 767. 96 Ibid, 766. 97 Ibid. 98 Ibid. 99 Ibid. 100 Ibid. 101 Ibid, 767. 102 Ibid.
One element of particular importance to the individual experience is the sheer number of denunciations of victims that occurred under the implementation of this Sterilization Law.103
Henry Friedlander explained that of the 388,400 applications brought to the attention of the government between the years of 1934 and 1935, 35% of them were reported by the director of an institution, 21% by the patient’s physician, and 20% by other sources, meaning that about 75% of denunciations and applications for forcible sterilization came from a trusted medical professional.104 The extremity of the trust broken through this process meant that patients of any
kind who had sought medical treatment from a confidential medical provider were then at risk of forcible sterilization and or government sanctioned abortion. This lack of confidentiality carried through the entire legal process, and likely shifted the relationship between patient and provider throughout the Second World War.
During the early years of the implementation of this law, there was significant court documentation, although technically private, and relatively few cases with testimony. One of the court cases of 1940 wherein the patient underwent both sterilization and a forced abortion was the case of a single unemployed mother named Rosa S., who was recorded as having qualified for sterilization due to her epilepsy, which according to her medical records, supposedly improved after her forced sterilization.105 In 1935 there were two reported instances of women
dying from complications of the sterilization procedure, one in conjunction with forced abortion.106 There were underreported negative effects of the involuntary sterilizations, from
worsening of psychiatric issues such as a reported case of suicide shortly following the procedure for one man, and the self-mutilation reported in 1933 when a patient attempted to “castrate himself with a bread knife ‘out of fear of sterilization.’”107 Cases like these are not uncommon,
and yet the records of these side effects were drastically under-reported, if reported at all, and often vehemently denied being in connection to the procedure. Various respected medical journals at the time specifically reported that these sterilization procedures had no negative side effects, one in particular even going so far as to say that, “most of the hereditarily ill-regarded sterilization with indifference, and sometimes even euphorically.”108 This, of course, was not the
103 Henry Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 27.
104 Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide, 27. 105Burleigh, Death and Deliverance, 57.
106 Ibid, 57. 107 Ibid. 108 Ibid, 57.
case, and the trauma of many of the victims lasted for the rest of their lives, such as that of Klara Nowak, whose lifelong medical complications have prevented her from fulfilling her dreams of having a family, and countless others whose stories fit the same narrative.109
In the publicized testimony of deaf sterilization victim Franziska Mikus, the horror of the process becomes a reality. Franziska told the story of her family’s fight against her and her mother’s sterilization orders, how her Uncle Karl had argued for her in the hereditary health court by denying the hereditary nature of her deafness: “Deafness is not always inherited. I’m her uncle and I can hear perfectly well.”110 While the court’s function is to determine the genetic
nature of the disability, they were unconvinced by his arguments. Franziska recalled her screaming all the way to the hospital, being forcibly held down and operated on against her will and feeling as though she was unworthy of love or marriage from her boyfriend at the time. A little while later, despite her initial sterilization procedure, Franziska found out she was pregnant and went to a gynecologist for a checkup.111 When her mother revealed that Franziska had
previously been sterilized the doctor had them removed from the office and reported her to the government.112 When she responded to their hospital summons letter a few days later, they
locked her in a room for three days before a doctor came into the room, pointed at her pregnant stomach, and mouthed the word “out.”113 When she realized they were going to end her
pregnancy she tried to jump out the fifth-floor window of the hospital, but a nurse came and drugged her. When she awoke, she was devastated to find they had had “taken her baby” and left her with another sterilization order, which she threw away in anger.114 When she later applied for
a marriage license, it was denied until she had a second sterilization procedure. Her uncle Karl once again returned to argue on her behalf at the Hereditary Health Courts, but this time he was arrested for “slandering the Fuhrer” and, according to Franziska’s testimony, was beheaded. She eventually went for her second sterilization at the encouragement of her husband and was then married, living a relatively happy life contributing to the deaf community, “except for one thing: we could not have children. This caused us much pain and regret.”115 Franziska’s story is one of
109 Ibid, 58.
110 Mikus, “Franziska: A Silent Protest Against Sterilization,” 69. 111 Ibid, 72.
112 Ibid, 72. 113 Ibid. 114 Ibid, 74.
pain, loss, and betrayal of her basic rights, but it is only one of the thousands of people who suffered similarly under the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring.
While many Germans at the time supported the eugenics movement, the Sterilization Law in particular, there was a widespread discomfort with the risks associated. The liberal application of the law put almost anyone, including so-called “Aryan” Germans, at risk of sterilization. This discomfort was addressed in various ways, one of the more disturbing of which was through humor. The German term for a Caesarian Section, one method of delivering a newborn through surgical procedures rather than through vaginal delivery, was Kaiserschnitt, and it was used as a play on words to create the Hitlerschnitt, a crude term for the sterilization procedure so many would be subjected to.116 Another witticism within German society was
when a school teacher was telling her pupils about the laws and asked students to give examples of traits that would warrant sterilization. One student volunteered the example of a “club foot,” a trait shared by the propaganda director of the time, Dr. Josef Goebbels, who had recently revealed his crippled foot to the public but would not be subjected to the Sterilization Law.117
This demonstration of the hypocrisy of the laws in place was not lost on many of the German people, and the clear intent to manipulate the laws to destroy an intended group was becoming more and more obvious.118
What started off as a strict set of defined illnesses and disorders that warranted sterilization was expanded to include not only a medical diagnosis of these factors but also any patients who exhibited signs of these diseases, with or without an evidentiary medical diagnosis. Those who were institutionalized or were precious patients at a psychiatric institute were particularly vulnerable, as “approximately 30 to 40 percent of those sterilized between 1934 and 1936 were patients in asylums across Germany.”119 Asocial personalities, for example, could at
be diagnosed using symptoms as nondescript as mood swings, noncompliance with traditional gender roles, or indifference to housekeeping in women, as well as irregular employment in men.120 With the recategorization of people from human being to “hereditarily diseased” or
“disabled,” those selected for sterilization quickly became outcast from the “Aryan” society,
116 Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland, 150. 117 Ibid, 150.
118 Ibid.
119 Burleigh, Death and Deliverance, 55.
120 Herwig Czech “Nazi Medical Crimes, Eugenics, and the Limits of the Racial State Paradigm” in Beyond the
Racial State: Rethinking Nazi Germany, ed. Devin O. Pendas, Mark Roseman, and Richard F. Wetzell (Washington,
