A young Polish man named Simon Rozenkier has
seen things a young man should never have to see. In the concentration camp where he’s imprisoned,
he witnessed Dr. Josef Mengele conduct a cold experiment on a Jewish man. The man did not survive his bath of ice. On another day in the camp, he saw the aftermath
of what happens when doctors removed the hump from a hunchback. Rozenkier could not believe what he was seeing. But something he saw on many occasions was
the Nazi sterilization experiments. These programs encompassed hundreds and thousands
of people, some of whom were subjected to powerful x-rays in their genital region. And then they came for him. Rozenkier was brought to the clinic one day
and told he was going to have vitamin supplements injected into him. When he asked one of the doctors what the
reason for this was, he got the response, “These shots will give you muscles to work.” The doctor then gave him a mean look and added,
“Do you understand that, you redheaded dog!?” It seems the doctor did not like Rozenkier’s
hair color, perhaps because it was thought to be a Jewish trait for some people in Germany. Maybe ginger wasn’t seen as Aryan enough,
although that’s disputable. Rozenkier survived the camp, and that’s
how we know about his story. In the 1950s, he and his wife tried to have
a child. They couldn’t, and they soon found out that
he was sterile. Many years later, he filed a lawsuit against
the German pharmaceutical companies, Bayer and Schering. The lawsuit accused them of supplying drugs
to the Nazis for sterilizations. “What they did to me is beyond right and
wrong,” Rozenkier told the New York Times in 2003. He might have survived the Holocaust, but
his parents and four of his siblings did not. To understand the Nazi sterilization experiments,
we have to look at what happened before the war. In 1933, the “Law for the Prevention of
Hereditarily Diseased Offspring” was passed. This meant that if the “Genetic Health Court”
said a citizen had some kind of genetic disorder, by law, they should be forcefully sterilized. It was actually similar to the USA’s “Virginia
Sterilization Act of 1924”, which ruled forceful sterilization was lawful on people
“afflicted with hereditary forms of insanity that are recurrent, idiocy, imbecility, feeble-mindedness
or epilepsy.” This hasn’t been a good look for the US,
since it was later said the program targeted minorities. The New Yorker wrote the story in 2018, “How
American Racism Influenced Hitler.” Anyway, moving on, the German law covered
many people, including the blind, the deaf, and even folks suffering from alcoholism. Then in 1935, after some amendments were made,
it included Afro-Germans, whom the Nazis referred to as “Rheinlandbastarde.” Adolf Hitler often talked about what he considered
“contamination” of German blood. As you’ll see today, this is why the Nazis
went to great lengths to stop many people from having children. Let’s now look at a letter that was written
by SS-Oberfuehrer Brack and addressed to Reichsfuehrer-SS Himmler. The date on the letter is June 23, 1942. This is how it starts:
“According to my impression there are at least 2-3 million men and women well fit for
work among the approx. 10 million European Jews. In consideration of the exceptional difficulties
posed for us by the question of labor, I am of the opinion that these 2-3 million should
in any case be taken out and kept alive.” Brack said that it goes without saying that
those who are kept alive should not be able to procreate. But, he added, it was too expensive to sterilize
people like they’d been doing for years to folks whom the Nazis said had genetic defects. He wrote, “Castration by means of X-rays,
however, is not only relatively cheap, but can be carried out on many thousands in a
very short time.” Himmler wrote back, saying, “I am positively
interested in seeing the sterilization by X-rays tried out at least once in one camp
in a series of experiments.” Soon after, a memorandum was written. It contained this paragraph:
“The Reich Leader SS has promised Brigadefuehrer Professor Clauberg that Auschwitz concentration
camp will be at his disposal for his experiments on human beings and animals. By means of some fundamental experiments,
a method should be found which would lead to sterilization of persons without their
knowledge.” On June 7, 1943, Professor Carl Clauberg wrote
to Himmler, providing what he considered some good news. In the second paragraph, he wrote, “The
method I contrived to achieve the sterilization of the female organism without operation is
as good as perfected.” He meant of course that it worked, but his
technique was barbaric. We now know that he took women from the camps
and told them he was going to give them a routine gynecological examination. He would first check to see if the fallopian
tubes were open, and then he would inject a “chemical irritant.” This would cause swelling, and in time, the
tubes would grow together, thereby blocking them. This swelling could lead to something called
peritonitis, which every medical resource on the web says if left untreated, can infect
the blood and cause death by sepsis. It can also infect the organs and lead to
multiple organ failure and death. “A website dedicated to the prisoners of
Auschwitz wrote, “While some of Clauberg’s Jewish patients died in this way, others were
deliberately put to death so that autopsies could be carried out.” It’s said Clauberg sterilized 700 women
this way, with many or most of them suffering permanent damage to their organs if they survived. The number is just an estimate, with some
sources saying the number was much higher. As well as Jewish women, Romani women were
victims of Clauberg’s sterilization. After performing these simple but totally
unethical procedures, Clauberg concluded in a letter to Himmler:
“One adequately trained physician in one adequately equipped place, with perhaps 10
assistants (the number of assistants in conformity with the speed desired) will most likely be
able to deal with several hundred, if not even 1,000 per day.” Another man who sent and received letters
talking about sterilization was Horst Schumann. He sometimes worked alone, and sometimes with
Dr. Clauberg. We’ll let the New York Times introduce him
to you. On September 24, 1970, the newspaper wrote
this in its lead: “Dr. Horst Schumann, a Nazi concentration
camp doctor, went on trial in Frankfurt today, charged with the killing of 14,549 mental
patients under Hitler's so-called euthanasia program.” Before we talk about his sterilization techniques,
we should tell you a little about the “Aktion T4” program. The Nazis believed that some mentally ill
people were uncurable. Therefore, it was agreed that they should
be subjected to involuntary euthanasia, which basically meant killing someone. Adolf Hitler referred to this as a “mercy
death.” Hitler wrote that some mentally ill people
were beyond help. He said some of them “bedded on sawdust
or sand” and “perpetually dirtied themselves”. He said some of them even “put their own
excrement into their mouths.” This of course was a massive exaggeration
and also a dangerous one. It did not reflect at all on mentally disabled
people, nor the physically disabled. The mass culling wasn’t about mercy at all. It was about the Nazi’s obsession with a
master race and also about freeing up hospital beds and having fewer mouths to feed. It meant people who were sick, young and old,
male and female, in Germany, Poland, and other European nations, were put down like animals. It’s thought 300,000 people were killed
in total. Horst Schumann was one of many people involved
in this program, but he’s also notorious for his sterilization techniques. One of them was sterilization by radiation. In 1942, he set up a radiation station at
the women’s hospital in the Auschwitz camp. There, both men and women were told they were
going to have an x-ray, although they were not informed why. Reports say they usually stood five to eight
minutes where the machine was pointed at their genital area. The process would sometimes cause radiation
burns to the genital area and other parts of the body. At times, they would have surgery after to
remove a woman’s ovaries or a man’s genitals. Some of them died, while the survivors if
unfit for work would also usually be killed soon after. According to one report, “Roughly one thousand
male and female prisoners were subjected to X-ray sterilization with about two hundred
of them undergoing follow-up extractive surgery.” Another man who performed x-ray sterilizations
was Viktor Brack. Remember, he’s one of the guys whose letters
to Himmler survived. They were used against him when he stood trial. In one letter, translated from German, Brack
says a high enough dosage of radiation can make a man or a woman sterile. He wrote, “Castration with all its consequences”
will occur “since high x-ray dosages destroy the internal secretion of the ovary, or of
the testicles, respectively. Lower dosages would only temporarily paralyze
the procreative capacity.” He wrote that men needed to be hit with 500
to 600r, and women, 300 to 350r, each for about two minutes. He said that there was a problem, though,
in that the high dosage would cause burns. Remember that the victims were not supposed
to know what was happening to them, so the burns obviously gave it away. The Nazis did not want their enslaved workers
to know just how awful things were for them in this respect. Brack wrote that he had one way to deal with
this problem. He said they should, “let the persons to
be treated approach a counter where they could be asked to answer some questions or to fill
in forms, which would take them two or three minutes.” The person behind the counter was actually
the operator of the radiation machine. He or she would switch it on when the victim
was filling in those questions. Brack said he believed one such installation
could sterilize 150 to 200 people per day, but with 20 installations, that would be 3,000
to 4,000 per day. The victims would not know what had happened
to them, at the time at least. Although, Brack wrote in another letter that
in all likelihood, the victims would “sooner or later realize with certainty that they
have been sterilized or castrated by x-rays.” During the Nuremberg trials, Brack was asked,
“You were very interested in the question whether the people going to be sterilized
would know whether they are sterilized or not, would gain knowledge of this procedure;
is that correct?” He replied, “No, that was Himmler's wish.” It seems that Brack had to concede back in
the day that it was just not possible to perform the secret x-rays without the person finding
out at some point what had happened to them. There are of course many survivors of the
forced sterilizations like the man we mentioned at the start of the show. One very outspoken survivor is Klara Nowak,
who became a nurse in Germany after the war. She was also the activist behind the League
of Victims of Compulsory Sterilization and Euthanasia. In 1991, she was asked how being sterilized
had affected her in later life. She said, “I still have many complaints
as a result of it. There were complications with every operation
I have had since. I had to take early retirement at the age
of fifty-two—and the psychological pressure has always remained.” On top of that, she said it hurt all her life
to see friends and neighbors talking about their kids and grandkids when the Nazis had
ensured that could never happen to her. She said her union had 88,000 people in it
who had suffered from sterilization and attempted euthanasia. Another victim was the writer and sculptor
Dorothea Buck. In 2019, she died aged 102, but many, many
years before, when she was just 19, she became a victim of Nazi sterilization. She was the daughter of a German pastor, and
while the Nazis didn’t deem her to be essentially non-German, she had a breakdown in her teens
when she heard about the advent of another war. She was diagnosed with schizophrenia. In an asylum, she was treated to what we now
call torture, although back then, doctors said they were curative measures. This included drenching her daily with ice-cold
water as if that would suddenly make her better. One day she woke up with a scar on her abdomen,
which she and her parents were told was from an appendectomy. She actually still had her appendix. The doctors had cut into her and sterilized
her. This was terrible, but she could so easily
have been a victim of euthanasia. Ima Spanjaard also survived. She talked with the BBC in 2005 when she was
aged 80. She said with little food and hard work, it
was hard to survive for long in the camp. In her own words, she said:
“Auschwitz was an enormous terrain, 40km on the ground, so you had to work there, building
roads or barracks. To do that for 10 hours a day and stand up
for an hour in the morning and in the evening, especially with the kind of food we ate, made
it impossible to survive for longer than a few weeks.” She said she met many girls who were sterilized
at her camp. She called them “beautiful young Greek girls,
virgins, whose ovaries were x-rayed.” She said they all suffered burns, and she
was the nurse who treated those burns. Some of them died from their injuries, especially
when radiation treatment was exchanged for chemicals being injected into their ovaries. She told the BBC, “Around 80 women were
operated on like this. I remember them well because I was told to
administer their anesthetic. At that moment, I was not so afraid to do
this, but later on, after the war ended, I thought to myself: ‘What have I done?’” It’s now believed anywhere from 300,000
to 450,000 people were sterilized by the Nazis from 1933 to 1945, although we can’t be
sure just how many people survived and how many died. Now you need to watch, “The WWII Nazi Breeding
Plan.” Or, have a look at, “The Nazi House of Shutters.”
