War against “Internal Enemies”: Dr. Franz Lucas's Sterilization of Sinti and Roma in Ravensbrück Men's Camp in January 1945

Abstract

AbstractFollowing the passing of the “Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Genetic Diseases” in July 1933, sterilization became a means to tighten the borders of the German ethnic community against outsiders, including Sinti and Roma. For a while, Sinti soldiers were spared sterilization. After Himmler's Auschwitz decree of December 1942, they were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. They escaped the extermination of other Sinti and Roma in the Zigeunerlager on the night of August 2, 1944, only because they represented a human shield deployable against advancing Russian troops. Still, the Reich insisted on sterilizing them and their families before placing them in front of enemy guns because they were still considered “internal enemies.” As a result, some forty Sinti men and boys were sterilized by Dr. Franz Lucas in the men's camp in Ravensbrück in January 1945. Focusing on their story challenges Lucas's portrayal as the victim of SS practices, a narrative that long benefitted from the testimony of non-Sinti prisoners. In addition, compensation agencies in Germany underestimated the ongoing effects of psychological trauma resulting from sterilization. Sinti victims who were subjected to an “expert assessment” of their blood purity before war's end underwent a renewed assessment of their productivity for German society after the war.