'The Most Unkindest Cut of All': Castration, Homosexuality and Nazi Justice

Abstract

During the course of the Third Reich some 400,000 people were deemed unworthy of having children and sterilized. Recent research has begun to uncover the extent of these appalling abuses committed not by nazi thugs, but by respectable physicians.2 In the University Clinic at Freiburg im Breisgau, over one thousand women were forcibly sterilized during this period.3 These 'crimes against humanity' are not such that can be blamed on a relatively small number of fanatics in the SS. Sterilization was widely viewed, and not just in Germany, as an acceptable tool of eugenic control. Already in the 1920s, government officials were discussing the desirability of sterilizing all the so-called 'Rhineland bastards', the coloured children of German women and black post-war occupation troops, a measure which the nazis later put into practice.4 The government of Hitler created the legal basis for compulsory sterilization with the notorious Law for the Prevention of Hereditary Diseases of 14 July 1933, which covered, among other categories, the congenitally blind, deaf, physically handicapped or feeble-minded, as well as schizophrenics and manic-depressives. The law was applied unevenly from the very beginning (a disproportionate number of its victims coming from the lower classes), and this was aggravated by the absence of clearly formulated and unanimously accepted guidelines on what constituted an incontrovertibly congenital or hereditary illness. In order to sidestep possible charges of impropriety, doctors strove as far as possible to obtain the patient's written consent to the operation. Though they were successful in doing this in 61 per cent of the Hamburg cases, for example, the methods used to obtain the signature were often less than scrupulous.5 Furthermore, it proved impossible to convince the public entirely that sterilization entailed a