Women's Experiences of Forcible Sterilization under the Nazi Regime, 1933–1945

Abstract

Women's Experiences of Forcible Sterilization under the Nazi Regime, 1933–1945 Tiarra Cooper (bio) Situated at the intersection of German studies and women's, gender, and sexuality studies, my dissertation, "Women's Experiences of Forcible Sterilization under the Nazi Regime, 1933–1945," advances novel theorizations as to how sterilized women subsequently understood themselves and forged kin in the postwar world. Fashioning an archive that contains the voices of women sterilized under the law in medical facilities as well as those sterilized experimentally in concentration camps, my dissertation looks to women's shared affective responses in the wake of the Holocaust and World War II. Drawing on survivors' experiences in testimonies, interviews, and ego-documents, this refashioned archive of forced infertility understands bodily experience as valid knowledge, and victimized women as active agents in their own life stories. First, my dissertation includes the experiences of women who, under 1933 legislation, were deemed unfit to reproduce and forced to undergo sterilization. Summoned to hereditary health courts, candidates were often sentenced to infertility after a trial lasting fifteen minutes, on average.1 Those impacted were overwhelmingly "Aryan," though with a spectrum of abilities. Notably, this legislation included those of Sinti and Roma background—though only until more targeted legislation was created. Second are those who, transported to concentration camps Auschwitz-Birkenau and later Ravensbrück, were sterilized experimentally by Professor Carl Clauberg and Doctor Horst Schumann. Here, victimized groups of predominantly female subjects were sterilized in a larger effort to refine methods that could be used cheaply and quickly on Eastern European forced laborers en masse. Whereas Clauberg injected women with varying chemical concoctions into their uterus, Schumann used radiative and surgical means on female subjects. The women targeted for these experiments—sequestered initially in Block 30 of Birkenau and later in Block 10 of Auschwitz—were [End Page 141] all of Jewish or Sinti/Roma background. Meanwhile, other women were sterilized via established methods (i.e., non-experimentally) in the medical block of various Nazi camps as well. Looking toward the shared responses of women in the respective contexts, I ask, How has gender impacted women's experiences of forced infertility? Though we generally know the details of these procedures, we have yet to deeply investigate how survivors were impacted—let alone women. Thus far, scholars have only concluded that women were especially impacted by sterilization. Stefanie Westermann writes that "Insbesondere im Selbstverständnis von Frauen stellt die genommene Option einer Mutterschaft…die vorgesehene und anerzogene Rolle, die soziale Orientierung, die jeweilige Lebensplanung und bisweilen auch die eigene Identität in Frage."2 Given the gendered nature of reproduction, including gendered social and familial norms, the impact on women calls for further analysis and theorization. It is telling that one survivor of sterilization later recalled that the ability to bear children was "das heiligste [sic] was eine Frau besitzt."3 Centrally, my dissertation locates women's responses not only in gendered bodies, but within greater socio-historical and cultural contexts. I examine, for instance, the lived impact of the edict for Jewish women to replenish—if not avenge—an entire people. I also include the female survivors in a host of countries (i.e., Poland, Denmark, France, the Netherlands, and West Germany) who, in heightened claims for restitution, were repeatedly probed for damages in the form of infertility. These are but two of many situations in the wake of World War II and the Holocaust for which reproduction was the currency and from which sterilized women were precluded. Against the backdrop of postwar reproduction, my dissertation reveals that whereas some sterilized women found themselves illegible within resurgent pronatalism, others forged new ways of relating to other beings, such as bonding with animals and forging non-biological kin with other "forgotten victims." Under the mandate to reproduce, in which infertile women could not bring to bear the social currency of offspring, sterilized women experienced a range of porous responses, including a) gender dissociation, b) social exclusion, c) suicidal ideation, d) an increase in human-animal bonds and e) a disjointing of time. These findings are framed and complemented by scholars in queer theory, through which I illuminate the heterosexual underpinnings of (encouraged...