Revisiting the Sterilizations at Ravensbrück Concentration Camp: A Victim-Based History
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Dr Tiarra Maznick is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern University. She defended her dissertation, “Jewish Women’s Wombs: The Holocaust and Postwar Pronatalism,” in July 2024 at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Dr Maznick’s work currently appears in
The Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, The Massachusetts Review, The German Studies Review, Feminist German Studies , andFilms for the Feminist Classroom . Dr Maznick researches histories of sexuality, reproduction, and medicine, during and after the Nazi Regime.
Abstract
Over decades of Holocaust scholarship, a similar narrative emerges on the sterilizations at Ravensbrück concentration camp: In January 1945, Professor Carl Clauberg experimentally sterilized between 120 and 140 Sinti and Roma women and girls in rapid succession. When survivor voices are included, they often reference one single interview: that recorded with Sintezza survivor, Wanda Pranden, for the 1982 documentary, Es ging Tag und Nacht, liebes Kind. What, however, do these narratives obscure? Drawing on a panoply of primary and secondary scholarship, this article seeks to paint a robust, victim-based history of the sterilizations conducted in Ravensbrück. When deepening scholarly understanding of the camp, both in terms of periodization and victim groups, it demonstrates that sterilizations were long practiced in the camp, and on victims other than Sinti and Roma. Generating an archive of survivor accounts, as have been published piecemeal in scholarship, in addition to complementing this corpus with survivor voices from various institutions, this article generates a bottom-up history of women’s experiences of forced infertility in Ravensbrück concentration camp. This includes a historiography in various Holocaust-related disciplines; a periodization of sterilization methods and perpetrators in the camp, drawn from survivors and witnesses; and alternate methods with which one can locate survivors.
1 Introduction
Across Holocaust scholarship, a similar narrative emerges on the sterilizations at Ravensbrück concentration camp: in January 1945, Professor Carl Clauberg experimentally sterilized between 120 and 140 Sinti and Roma[1] women and girls in rapid succession.[2] Witnesses recall the gruesome sight of girls as young as eight years old, screaming and writhing in pain on the floor and grounds of the camp as their mothers called out to them in desperation. Others questioned their mothers frantically as to what had happened to them. Yet others were simply found dead days later, either in carts or bunks (Ingmann 2023, 110, 150–151; Bruha 1985, FRVA; Pauporté-Eekman 1994, FRVA; Stojka and French 2022, 63–64). Regarding the fate of the girls, it’s often stated that all the girls perished as a result of the experiments or were sent to the gas chamber (Zörner 1971, 118; Martin 1994, 103; Bruha 1984, ÖM; Ingmann 2023, 109–111).
When survivor voices are included, they often reference one single interview: that recorded with Sintezza survivor Wanda Pranden[3] for the 1982 documentary Es ging Tag und Nacht, liebes Kind [It Went on Day and Night, Dear Child]. This testimony has since been the cornerstone account for the experimental sterilizations in Ravensbrück in various publications (Martin 1994; Anschütz et al. 1994; Krokowski and Voigt 1994; Hein and Krokowski 1995; Riechert 1995; Morrison 2000; Krokowski 2001; Strebel 2003; Saidel 2004; Sabisch 2009).[4]
Which survivors and methods, however, do these narratives obscure? Drawing from a panoply of primary materials and secondary scholarship, this article seeks to diversify this representation by painting a robust, victim-based understanding of the sterilizations conducted in Ravensbrück.[5] On whom and when applicable, how were these sterilizations conducted? Bringing survivor voices into dialogue with secondary scholarship on the camp, a periodization of the sterilizations at Ravensbrück comes into focus – an act that reveals both a variety of victim demographics (rather than only Romani women and girls), as well as the ongoing nature of the sterilizations throughout the camp’s existence (including the sterilization of Romani girls beginning in 1940). Moreover, building from Paul Weindling’s research, this article argues that Percival Treite’s experimental methods of sterilization preceded those of the infamous Carl Clauberg while at Ravensbrück.
Research on the sterilizations at Ravensbrück has faced significant obstacles, particularly in locating and accessing primary source material. From a scarcity of survivor accounts to prohibitive shame, from the destruction of camp documentation to the fatalities of prisoners, from the inaccessibility of compensation files to privacy laws, locating voices of experimental sterilization at Ravensbrück has proven a monumental task. Other challenges have proven to be the rapidity with which prisoners were relocated, transported, murdered, and marched; the destruction of camp materials; and at times the entangled nature of the sterilizations themselves. While both legal and extra-legal sterilizations took place, both were at risk of being conducted experimentally.
While the experimental sterilizations at Ravensbrück were conducted not only on Roma, this violence is nevertheless integral to the Romani Holocaust and demands historicization. As Ari Joskowicz writes, the “namelessness with which Roma appear in Jewish survivors’ narratives…is another symptom of the distance [between Jews and Roma]” (2016, 121). The invocation of “120–140 gypsy girls” is not only ambiguous, but deployed as a testament to cruelty, rather than a statement of experience. This article provides survivor narratives and archival locations for further research when and where names have so far evaded publication. While to name the victims remains desirable, it is in the ethos of Nothing About Us Without Us [6] that the wishes for anonymization of those impacted – made discernable by the decision to not vocalize their personal experiences of persecution – be respected.
These sterilizations are but some of many forcibly conducted on Romani peoples during the 20th century, and their integration warrants scholarly attention. While the Nazi regime sought the sterilization of Roma under the 1933 Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring as ‘asocial’ elements, they later sought sterilization under the patina of ‘choice,’ forcing a select demographic of Roma to choose between sterilization or imprisonment in Auschwitz under the 1942 Auschwitz-Erlass [Auschwitz Decree]. Meanwhile, many Roma already imprisoned in the camps were subject to sterilization in the camp Revier under the 1933 legislation, where it was unclear which procedure was deployed.
Alongside Nazi Germany, and for decades after, sterilization procedures on Roma have continued. Hungary and Germany both selected Roma peoples for infertility beginning in the 1930s (Szasz 2008, 42), while Sweden and Norway continued the practice until the 1970s and 1980s (Ministry of Culture Sweden 2015; Selling 2020, 28–45; Matache and Bhabha 2021, 264). In Czechoslovakia, social workers offered Romani women financial incentives to undergo sterilization – a practice that, while legally halted in 1991 with the dissolution of the shared state, continued on an ad hoc basis (Hrabanova and Albert 2020, 170; Matache and Bhabha 2021, 264). Since then, there have been at least 300 verifiable cases of forcibly sterilized Romani women in what is now the Czechia (ibid), as well as others in both Slovakia and Hungary (Savic 2015, 222; Kocze et al. 2020, 38–40; Gheorghe 2016, 5–9). In the latter, the practice continued, drawing international attention in 2006 for yet more instances of coerced sterilization (Kocze et al. 2020, 55–56).[7] Given the long and international history of eugenic sterilizations on Romani women, additions to and corrections of the historical record are imperative.[8]
2 Methods, Sources, and Outline
The primary sources for this research are multitudinous. This includes reparations applications (Nordrhein-Westfalen Landesarchiv in Detmold[9] and Münster; Burgenland Landesarchiv in Eisenstadt[10]) as well as witness testimony, perpetrator documentation, and transcripts from criminal trials (Ingmann 2023; Pasternak 2006; Schwarz and Szepansky 2000; Schnabel 1962; British Online Archives; Arolsen Archives; Harvard College Nuremberg Trials Project; Polish Institute at Lund).
Audiovisual materials include documentaries (Seybold and Spitta 1982, 1987; Klingenböck and Dewald 2003; Walz 2005), as well as testimonies, oral histories, and interviews (USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive; Die Frauen von Ravensbrück VideoArchiv; Österreichische Mediathek; United States Holocaust Memorial Museum).
Each type of primary source used in this study presents distinct methodological limitations that must be considered in historical analysis. Statements provided for criminal trials, for example, were drafted in order to prosecute perpetrators rather than illuminate survivor voices. Reparations files and claims were created to evidence damage, rather than livingness and postwar life. Interviews and oral histories, similarly, are not necessarily an objective recollection of experiences – they impart what the witness, interviewer, and at times institution seek for the viewer to know. Nevertheless, these mediums serve to document experiences of sterilization and chart new paths for future research.
To address the challenge of missing camp documentation, I use a methodology whereby I form constellations in which different forms of evidence, including perpetrator documents (e.g., transportation lists), memoirs, oral histories, and testimonies, are brought to inform one another. Brought into dialogue, these materials reveal histories that would otherwise be dismissed in favor of either/or, generating a constructive power in the face of both destroyed documents and the fallibility of memory.
The first section of this article, “Historiography of scholarship,” presents an overview of research from three, at times imbricated, relevant subfields in Holocaust studies. Scholars have located individual survivors of sterilization at Ravensbrück in disparate yet interrelated subfields, the findings of which I bring together and complement. These subfields are scholarship (1) on Ravensbrück, (2) in Romani studies, and (3) on Nazi medical crimes. Lastly, I look at the specific articles that have centrally addressed sterilizations at Ravensbrück as their point of focus. Drawing women’s experiences into dialogue is imperative not only for the “fuller picture” on the history of Ravensbrück, but to serve as a foundation for future scholars who also seek to engage with this complex site in Holocaust history.
In the following section, “Sterilization of Women at Ravensbrück, 1941–1944,” I paint a more nuanced history of the period preceding Carl Clauberg’s successive sterilizations in January of 1945. While Clauberg arrived at the camp in January 1945 – a period which takes precedence in most research – the years prior to that are rarely integrated into scholarship.[11] Led by survivor voices, this includes a periodization of both experimental and conventional sterilization methods as practiced by camp doctors Percival Treite and Walter Sonntag between 1940 and 1944.
Lastly, in the conclusion I propose new approaches to the women Carl Clauberg sterilized in January 1945 at Ravensbrück, moving beyond the frequently cited testimony of Wanda Pranden. Looking at the Romani women from the Burgenland who were deported to Ravensbrück in June 1939, I present alternate methods of locating and engaging with reparations files for women, we surmise, were sterilized in Ravensbrück.
3 Historiography of Scholarship
3.1 On Ravensbrück
The women who had survived Ravensbrück began mobilizing directly after the war. As early as 1945, 11 of the political persecutees from Austria published one of the first edited volumes by survivors, entitled Frauenskonzentrationslager Ravensbrück (Bruha et al. 1945 [12]) (Amesberger and Halbmayr 2022, 136). A short year later, Ravensbrück survivors gathered publicly for the first time to protest a memorial erected in Berlin for its exclusion of women (Fischer 2022, 101).
On 6 January 1947, less than two years following the war, the (International) Ravensbrück Committee (IRK) was established. It was through this association of survivors that both the Lagerarbeitsgemeinschaft Ravensbrück (East Germany, aka DDR/GDR) and Lagergemeinschaft Ravensbrück (West Germany, aka BRD/FRG, 1966) came into existence, further serving as models and partners for the Österreichische Lagermeinschaft Ravensbrück (Austrian Women’s Concentration Camp Association, aka ÖLGR) which was founded in May 1947 in Vienna – in part by some of the survivors involved with the aforementioned 1945 publication, Frauenskonzentrationslager Ravensbrück.
While it’s clear that the women joined Ravensbrück survivor-led associations after the war, it’s important to note that they were “politically active long before the establishment of survivor-groups” (Fischer 2022, 103). Central figures in the East German Lagerarbeitsgemeinschaft Ravensbrück, such as Erika Buchmann, Gertrud Müller, and Emmy Handke were pivotal figures who had been active in the KPD (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, or Communist Party of Germany) before their imprisonment in the camps, and whose political engagement shaped the nature of survivor groups after the war. The networks that political persecutees formed in the camps were revisited, establishing the foundation for survivor groups. “It was clear,” Fischer writes, that members were “oriented to the politics of the KPD” (2022, 115).
Breslau-born Emmy Handke, for example, joined the KPD in 1925. After the war, Handke was a leading figure in the East German Lagerarbeitsgemeinschaft Ravensbrück while also the General Secretary of the International Ravensbrück Committee. Similarly, Erika Buchmann played a particularly influential role between survivor groups and their respective states, communicating with fellow political persecutees, the KPD, the VVN (Vereinigung der Verfolgten des Naziregimes, or Association of Persecutees of the Nazi Regime), tribunal staff, the priest of the internment camp in Ludwigsburg, and the Ravensbrück Committee in Berlin (Fischer 2022, 104). Intensive exchange took place between Ravensbrück survivor groups and survivors themselves; transversing divisions between East and West, women leaders in these organizations demonstrated aptitude and flexibility as they pivoted between these otherwise restricted spaces (i.e., Emmy Handke, Doris Maase, Erika Buchmann) (Fischer 2022, 118).
Between 1945 and 1949, survivors of Ravensbrück began publishing on their experiences in ways that underscored their political engagement. First-hand accounts emerged from France (Dufournier 1946; Tillion 1946 [13]), Poland (Dobaczewska 1946), Norway (Salvesen 1947), Austria (Buchmann 1946), American Occupied Germany (Buber-Neumann 1949), and East Germany (DDR) (Sprengel 1949 [14]). In addition to these memoirs, survivors also contributed testimonies and statements to support the prosecution of camp perpetrators. Many of these survivor-authors were deeply involved in political activism before and after their imprisonment. Their memoirs often emphasized themes of political resistance and collective solidarity, reflecting both their own convictions and the priorities of the emerging postwar states. In East Germany, for example, the group’s identity increasingly coalesced around the image of the anti-fascist fighter.
It was only through the model of the East German Lagerarbeitsgemeinschaft Ravensbrück, in addition to other Ravensbrück central survivor groups in France, Poland, and (the former) Czechoslovakia, that the Österreichische Lagergemeinschaft Ravensbrück, after 11 years, drafted a statute to define the nature, goal, and activities of their entity in 1958. Specifically, they defined themselves as an unbiased organization (literally Überparteilichkeit, or ‘above political parties’) that was comprised of female, anti-fascist resistance fighters (Amesberger and Halbmayr 2022, 142); an eschewal of party lines that proved hollow amid sustained interactions between the ÖLGR and other resistance-centered, anti-fascist organizations (i.e., the International Democratic Women’s Organization; the International Federation of Resistance Fighters) (Ibid 154).
With support of their East German counterpart, as well as the ÖLGR, Ravensbrück survivors formed their own association in Frankfurt am Main, West Germany, on 4 June 1966. Twelve years after their founding, faced with the continued state-sponsored denial of victimhood to political persecutees, various members of the Lagergemeinschaft Ravensbrück contributed to the first West-German collection of women’s experiences in Ravensbrück, Frauen im deutschen Widerstand, 1933–45 (Women in the German Resistance, 1933–45) (Elling 1978).
Elsewhere, survivors and survivor-led advocacy groups, motivated by campaigns for reparations and acknowledgement of victimization, continued publishing on their experiences. This includes groups, some of which were anti-fascist and/or pro-Communist in nature, located in Czechoslovakia (Haiková et al. 1963); Slovenia (Muser and Zavrl 1971); France (L’amicale de Ravensbrück et l‘association des deportees et internees de la resistance 1965); Soviet Union (Nikiforova/Никифорова 1957, 1967); Poland (Połtawska 1962; Klimek 1968; Kocwa 1969; Półtawska 1969); and Italy (Noce 1952; Rolfi and Bruzzone 1978; Arata 1979).[15]
Without access to what would become the archival documents of Ravensbrück, however, these early postwar memoirs could only contain an indeterminate combination of personal experience and information from various criminal trials (i.e., Nuremberg trials, Hamburg Ravensbrück trials, and French Rastatt Trials[16]). Epistemologically, these works exemplify the challenges for survivor scholars, particularly when they are seeking to produce scholarship objectively. It’s unclear in Erika Buchmann’s Die Frauen von Ravensbrück (1959), for example, when she herself enters the camp or where verbiage is drawn from criminal trials.[17] Legal witness statements from imprisoned medical personnel in early scholarship often included that of Mlada Tauferova, Johanna Sturm, Zdenka Nedvědová-Nejedla, Doris Maase, Gustawa Winnowska, Ilse Reibmayr, and Annette Eekmann – central sources when scholars sought to mention Ravensbrück sterilizations in their research.[18]
There existed “very little [scholarship] about Ravensbrück” in the 15 years following the war (Strebel 2003, 16). There were only three scientific studies written about Ravensbrück until the GDR’s dissolution, all of which originated from outside East Germany altogether: Wanda Kiedrzyńska, Ravensbrück – kobiecy obóz koncentracyjny (1961, Poland), Germaine Tillion, Ravensbrück (1973, France), and Ino Arndt’s article “Das Frauenkonzentrations-lager Ravensbrück” (Women’s Concentration Camp Ravensbrück) (1970, West Germany). As Arndt was unable to access “important sources… [her research] could only provide a glimpse” of the camp (Strebel 2003, 16). Seventeen years later, when Arndt published a slightly revised version of the article, it still reflected the state of research (ibid).
In East Germany, publications on Ravensbrück were dominated by narratives of communist resistance and political persecution, built from criminal trials, perpetrator documentation and state-approved Holocaust publications.[19] This approach reflected the broader priorities of the East German state, which sought to foreground anti-fascist and communist resistance as central to its official memory culture. In February 1953, the GDR “declared that the roots of fascism had been eradicated” and that the VVN was now obsolete (Pastor 2022, 174). Sponsored by the state, the Committee of Anti-Fascist Resistance Fighters (Komitee der Antifaschistischen Widerstandskämpfer der DDR) took its place. In addition to their efforts to develop memorial sites in line with state priorities, this state-sponsored collective published Frauen von Ravensbrück (Women of Ravensbrück) (Buchmann 1959 [20]), SS im Einsatz (The SS in Action) (1960), Ravensbrück (1960), and Frauen-KZ Ravensbrück (Women’s Concentration Camp Ravensbrück) (Zörner 1971).[21] Essential camp documents remained inaccessible, as did the camp more broadly; the site had become a Soviet military post – the second largest in the GDR – until 1993 (Morrison 2000, ix; Pastor 2022, 173).[22]
Outside of East Germany, survivors of Ravensbrück began to write about their experiences prolifically during the 1980s – a decade characterized in Holocaust Studies by a “craze for ethnological life stories” (Strebel 2003, 16; Wieviorka 2006, 97): (Müller 1981, East Germany; Sturm 1982, Austria; Bruha 1984, Austria; Catala 1984, Spain; Winska 1985, Poland; Stojka 1988, Austria; Lundholm 1988, Norway;[23] and Bejarano 1989, West Germany; Gavrič 1984).
Nineteen eighty-seven marked a turning point with the publication of significant collective memoirs by Ravensbrück survivors, both within and outside of East Germany. Lieselotte Thoms-Heinrich edited a collected volume of women’s experiences at Ravensbrück with the (then) soon to be director of the Ravensbrück Memorial Museum, Sigrid Jacobeit (Kreuzweg Ravensbrück. Lebensbilder antifaschistischer Widerstandskämpferinnen 1987 , East Germany). Simultaneously, women who were engaged politically with the ÖLGR contributed to ,,Ich gebe dir einen Mantel, dass Du ihn noch in Freiheit tragen kannst,”…Widerstehen im KZ. Österreichische Frauen erzählen (“I’m giving you a coat that you can wear when you’re free” …Resistance in the Concentration Camp. Austrian Women Share their Stories) (Berger 1987, Austria).
Drastic change soon followed the dissolution of East Germany. The year 1993 was especially pivotal for the archive and for survivor-groups of Ravensbrück; German unification ushered a merger of their respective Ravensbrück survivor-groups and in 1993, due to dwindling membership, re-identified as the Lagergemeinschaft/Freundeskreis Ravensbrück to include non-survivors and allies alike (Fischer 2022, 102).
As for the site of the former camp, it had taken nearly three years post German-unification for Ravensbrück to open – if not create – its archival doors; academic inquiry, once stifled, proliferated quickly following archivalization in 1993 (Füllberg-Stolberg 1994; Philipp 1999; Strebel 1998a, 1998b). Seven years after the Ravensbrück Archive was founded, the first monograph on the camp, entitled Ravensbrück. Everyday Life in a Women’s Concentration Camp by Jack Morrison, emerged in a unified Germany (2000). Shortly thereafter, Bernhard Strebel published his comprehensive monograph on the camp, Das KZ Ravensbrück (2003).
Survivors and their affiliated survivor-groups continued to publish with the same political undertones that had previously defined their activism – though now bolstered by access to archival material and the assistance of staff (i.e., directors) at the Ravensbrück Memorial Museum: Sigrid Jacobeit, director from 1992 to 2005 and Insa Eschebach, director from 2005 to 2020 (Eschebach 2020, 93) (Jacobeit 1995a, b; Jacobeit and Philipp 1997). Meanwhile, the women who had been previously engaged with anti-fascist resistance continued to do so in their own memoirs, even after German unification (Sprengel 1994; Schulz 1995; Hozakova 1995).
Subsequent publications took various departure points on victim groups thus far unacknowledged, including but not limited to those categorized as ‘asocial’ (Schikorra 2001) or Jewish (Terwilliger et al. 2001; Apel 2003; Saidel 2004; Buber Agassi 2007; Dublon-Knebel 2009) – a necessity given that the Ravensbrück memorial “from the outset…excluded the history of Jewish genocide from the memorial texts” (Jacobs 2010, 70). Other specialized areas of research in the last two decades include shifting camp priorities (Erpel 2005); camp transit (Steinke 2009); medical crimes and birth (Devulder 2023; Docking 2021; Santis and Wickert 2017); survivor art (Heβ 2024); historical narrativization of camp life (Helm 2015), camp representation in film (Baumgärtner 2022); institutional histories of the IRK, ÖLGR and/or Lagergemeinschaft(en) Ravensbrück (Amesberger and Halbmayr 2022; Fischer 2018; Amesberger and Lercher 2008); memory cultures of the camp (Hogervorst 2010); camp photography (Laurenzi 2015); and Eastern European accounts of Ravensbrück (Plachá 2021).[24] The political and national narratives of the camp, including that of resistance, have continued to be a focal point for researchers (Amesberger and Halbmayr 2022; Pastor 2022; Fischer 2020; Jacobs 2010).
One of the most significant agents in the memory of Ravensbrück was and remains Loretta Walz. For 30 years, from 1980 to 2010, she recorded over 200 interviews with women formerly imprisoned in Ravensbrück – now held in the “Die Frauen von Ravensbrück VideoArchiv” (The Women of Ravensbrück Video Archive). In 2005, these interviews were edited to create the award-winning documentary film Die Frauen von Ravensbrück. What’s more, these interviews formed the foundation of the volume “‘…und dann kommst du dahin an einem schönen Sommertag’” (“…and then you arrive there on a beautiful summer’s day”) (2005). In 2006, Walz received a Grimme Prize and the Bundesverdienstkreuz (Federal Cross of Merit) for these decades-long contributions.
Despite this robust historiography, the inability for scholars/survivors to access camp documentation and write against political and national prerogatives meant that the sterilization of Roma was marginalized in the field for decades. Between 1945 and 1990, there were sparse mentions of sterilizations at Ravensbrück, experimental or otherwise; witness statements derived from criminal trials, compounded with witness accounts as found in (few) memoirs outside of East Germany, had predominated (Bruha 1984; Lundholm 1988; Stojka 1988). After German unification, even fewer emerged (Kohlbrugge 2003). It was not until Frauen in Konzentrationslagern: Bergen-Belsen und Ravensbrück (Füllberg-Stolberg 1994), possible with the archivalization at the Ravensbrück Memorial Museum, that sterilizations in the camp were studied through a scientific lens – mentioned in “On Sterilizations in Ravensbrück,” below.
3.2 On Nazi Medical Crimes
For years, research on Nazi Germany’s medical crimes demonstrated one overarching approach towards the experimental sterilizations at Ravensbrück: that those conducted in the women’s camp were simply an extension of what happened at Auschwitz-Birkenau – negating the former as a site worthy of separate investigation. As it was framed, Ravensbrück was simply the site of continuation.
While scholarship on the medical crimes in Nazi Germany largely began to appear in the 1980s, they centered on the role of physicians, psychiatrists, and scientists rather than survivors (Müller-Hill 1984; Proctor 1988; Klee 1986). Exceptionally, Robert Jay Lifton’s cornerstone work, The Nazi Doctors (1986) does address the sterilizations at Ravensbrück, though with only one sentence dedicated to the matter. Lifton writes simply that “Like Clauberg, Schumann continued his experiments in Ravensbrück, there victimizing thirteen-year-old Gypsy girls” (Lifton 1986, 283).
Since the 1980s, four noteworthy works on Nazi-era experimental sterilization have been published.[25] Drawn from her dissertation and grounded in Claims Conference files, Ruth Jolanda Weinberger’s Fertility Experiments in Auschwitz-Birkenau: The Perpetrators and their Victims (2009) is an exclusive publication. The relationships Weinberger cultivated with survivors enabled her to document the long-term effects of the procedure in exceptional detail. The following year, Hans-Joachim Lang published Die Frauen von Block 10 (The Women of Block 10) narrativizing a history of the block based on survivor statements and reparation files. Neither, however, investigate the procedure (or experiences thereof) as conducted at Ravensbrück.
Paul Weindling contributed most recently to scholarship on the sterilization crimes at Ravensbrück in his book, Victims and Survivors of Nazi Human Experiments: Science and Suffering in the Holocaust (2014). Here, Weindling contextualizes the fervor with which Nazi doctors continued until the end of the Reich, framing the continuation of Clauberg’s procedure as routinization. Drawing on reparation files for survivors of medical experimentation, Weindling contends that Percival Treite could have used experimental methods prior to Clauberg’s arrival (137). Moreover, he introduces the experiences of four women – two of whom are Roma, one Jewish, and one Hungarian – not yet publicized (187).
The most recent contribution on Nazi-era experimental sterilizations is that of physician and medical historian Sabine Hildebrandt et al. Presenting a periodized history of Clauberg’s fertility research and sterilization methods in their article, “Forgotten Chapters in the History of Transcervical Sterilization: Carl Clauberg and Hans-Joachim Lindemann” (2017), their descriptions of the transcervical method of sterilization is commendably rich. Based on the scope of their focus, the medical technique, rather than the practices of implementation at select sites of sterilization, becomes central.
3.3 Genocide of Sinti and Roma
Scholarship on the Nazi persecution of the Roma surfaced the Ravensbrück sterilizations as early as the 1963 – far earlier than scholars of Ravensbrück. Selma Steinmetz, a survivor of Nazi persecution and a central figure in the establishment of the Dokumentationsarchiv des Österreichischen Widerstands (DÖW) in Vienna, was an early scholar of the Romani Holocaust. Drawing on witness accounts, criminal trial documents, and her own work at the DÖW (founded in 1963), Steinmetz published her pioneering work Österreichs Zigeuner im NS-Staat (Austria’s Gypsies in the Nazi State) in 1966.[26] This was the first scholarship, beyond criminal trials and books containing perpetrator documentation, to introduce the public to the extent of experimental sterilizations in the camp. Six years later, in the United Kingdom, Donald Kenrick and Grattan Puxon published The Destiny of Europe’s Gypsies (1972). Much like Steinmetz, the authors drew from trial transcripts, perpetrator documentation, and survivor statements. Working closely with WO criminal trial documents,[27] Kenrick and Puxon painted a multifaceted picture of the extent of genocide of Romani peoples under Nazi German rule – including sterilization, whether experimental and conventional, as a form of genocide.
The Roma Civil Rights Movement of the 1980s, compounded by “forgotten victims” campaigns for Romani survivors as well as sterilization survivors, at times with imbrication, ushered an abundance of research on the Romani Holocaust. Most centrally, select activists and scholars advocated for the Nazi persecution of Europe’s Roma to be classified as genocide. This shifted the focus from the deportation and murder of Roma to the systematic and targeted nature of genocidal persecution – including sterilization. Influential actors included Romani Rose, a Sinti, whose activism for Roma civil rights and role in the Dachau Hunger Strike would lead to his election as head of the Central Council of German Sinti and Roma – a post he has held since its inception in 1982. In the scholarly realm, this included Austrian-born Gabrielle Tyranauer, whose 576-citation bibliography, Gypsies and the Holocaust (1989), in addition to various interviews[28] with Romani survivors, has made an impressionable mark in the field.[29]
In the 1980s, for the reasons highlighted above, surviving Roma began to share their experiences with increasing frequency. Philomena Franz authored Zigeunermärchen (Gypsy Tales) (1982) and Zwischen Liebe und Hass (Between Love and Hate) (1985), much like the aforementioned Ceija Stojka composed Wir Leben im Verborgenen (1988). Documentary films, such as Melanie Spitta’s Schimpft uns nicht Zigeuner (Don’t Curse Us as Gypsies) (1980), Wir sind Sintikinder und keine Zigeuner (We are Sinti Children, not Gypsies) (1981), Es ging tag und nacht mein Liebes Kind (1982), and Das Falsche Wort (The Lie) (1987) also emerged, providing first-hand accounts of anti-Roma discrimination, experiences from Roma survivors, and the shortcomings of West Germany’s reparations to Romani victims. The activism and research of Gisela Bock was also especially impactful during this period as she bridged the campaigns of “forgotten victims” for both Roma and survivors of sterilization.[30]
The Roma Civil Rights movement of the 1980s, compounded by campaigns for the recognition of overlooked victim groups, resulted in a decade marked by a considerable increase of scholarly interest in the Nazi persecution of the Roma. Michael Zimmerman’s Rassenutopie und Genozid (Racial Utopia and Genocide) (1996) emerged, alongside scholarship from Romani studies scholars, Sybil Milton (1991; 2003), Hein and Krokowski (1995), Krokowski (2001), Hansjörg Riechert (1995), Joachim Hohmann (1990; 1995; 1996),[31] and Erika Thurner (1998). Romani activists and victim groups continued to publish about the crimes committed against the Roma, although sterilization became an increasingly peripheral topic; it is thematized as but one of many forms of genocidal injustices conducted against Roma, sidestepping further analysis (Rose 1999; Engbring-Romang 1997; Niedersächsischen Verband Deutscher Sinti e.V. 1994; Rose and Weiss 1991).
Over the last two and a half decades, scholarship on the Romani Holocaust has taken multiple directions. This includes the genocide of Europe’s Roma in the longue durée (Margalit 2002); cultural histories (Fings 2019); sterilization compensation (Rauschenberger 2025; von dem Knesebeck 2011); comparative memory frameworks (Joskowicz 2023); ethnomusicology (Costache 2021); and new directions until research (Weiss-Wendt 2025); while others re-emphasize the nature of Romani persecution (Sierra 2024; Weiss-Wendt 2013; Lewy 2000).
3.4 On Sterilizations at Ravensbrück
At the nexus of research on Ravensbrück, Nazi persecution of the Roma, and medical crimes, exists targeted research on the experimental sterilizations conducted at Ravensbrück.[32] Beginning in 1994, three research articles are especially noteworthy: Dunja Martin, “Menschenversuche im Krankenrevier des KZ Ravensbrück” (Human Experiments in the Revier of Ravensbrück) (1994), Katja Sabish, “Die Katastrophe, krank zu werden” (The Catastrophe of being Ill) (2009), and Barbara Danckwortt, “Sinti und Roma als Häftlinge im KZ Ravensbrück” (Sinti and Roma as Prisoners in Ravensbrück Concentration Camp) (2012).[33]
The 1994 scholarship of Dunja Martin paved the way for those who followed. Unifying witness statements, the survivor statement of Wanda Pranden, and various perpetrator documents, Martin underscores the long history of sterilization at Ravensbrück. Looking at the experiments housed in the Revier of Ravensbrück – sterilization included – Katja Sabisch incorporates a wealth of witness statements throughout her article, “Die Katastrophe, krank zu werden” (2009). Commendably, she points to the fact that sterilizations were long practiced in the camp, and gestures towards the inconsistency that Horst Schumann is at times erroneously stated to have been at Ravensbrück conducting sterilizations alongside Clauberg. Most recently, writing on the persecution of Sinti and Roma at Ravensbrück, Barbara Danckwortt draws on many of the preceding statements in criminal trials, and in doing so, points to the ongoing nature of sterilizations in the camp. Bolstered by witness statements from both trials and memoirs, Danckwortt illuminates sterilization as one of the many means of persecution against Sinti and Roma.
These three articles are unified in their framing: sterilizations at Ravensbrück were not a cruelty developed only in the camp’s last months, but a long-standing practice. Moreover, all three draw on a wealth of witness statements, both from memoirs and criminal trials, to illuminate what transpired during and after the procedure. This article adds to this robust extant scholarship, reiterating these approaches while also providing additional survivor accounts and methods.
4 Sterilization of Women at Ravensbrück, 1941–1944
Sterilization had been prescribed in the Ravensbrück’s earliest service regulations, which prompted the administration to convert the sick block, Krankenrevier, into the hospital, Krankenhaus, pre-emptively in 1942 (Rübener 2013, 97).[34] After all, it was at Ravensbrück that Heinrich Himmler had hoped Professor Carl Clauberg would begin his sterilization experiments in 1942 – a location that proved too far when compared with Auschwitz (Anschütz et al. 1994, 123). As such, this chapter first endeavors to expand the narrative of sterilizations at Ravensbrück to include those most often omitted from scholarship: procedures conducted at the Gestapo’s behest that began in 1941 in line with racial laws – preceding Clauberg’s experiments in January 1945.
The depositions provided by physician Doris Maase and Johanna Sturm at the Ravensbrück Trials are most helpful in this regard, as they (1) link camp physician Walter Sonntag (Lagerarzt) specifically to sterilizations, and (2) ground sterilization in some of the earliest medical practices in the camp. In addition to killing patients with injections – for which he was executed in 1948 – Sonntag is reported by Maase to have “created lists of Poles and Czechs to be sterilized. If a Pole or Czech let on that they did not speak German, he would say ‘she has brain damage.’ Her name would then be placed on the sterilization list” (Schwarz and Szepansky 2000, 28–29). Prisoner Johanna Sturm corroborates these claims, adding that Sonntag sterilized 32 Sinti and Roma children while in a drunken state, after which they were found dead in their beds 1–2 days later (Ingmann 2023, 110).[35] Revisiting statements that were provided for criminal trials indicates that the lethal sterilization of young Romani girls took place in the camp earlier than had been readily recognized. Moreover, it establishes yet another occurrence (between May 1940–December 1941/early 1942) in which Sinti and Roma children were found dead after mass sterilizations – outside of that which is more commonly known from January 1945. Neither the victim’s identities nor the methods used (experimental vs. conventional) have been determined.[36]
Following in Sonntag’s footsteps were Percival Treite (Lagerarzt, Camp Doctor) (September 1943–April 1945) and Richard Trommer (Standortarzt, Site Doctor) (estimated Sep 1943 – May 1945)[37] – the former being subordinate to the latter during their shared time at Ravensbrück (Turek et al. 2020, 130). Trommer was identified for announcing that sterilization was a condition for freedom and insisting on unsanitary conditions for the forced sterilizations in the Revier (Wisely 2019, 661–662), and for conducting sterilizations himself (Walz 2005, 340).[38]
In contrast, Treite leaves a legacy punctuated with sterilizations, experimental or otherwise. He himself admitted during the Ravensbrück Trials that “I don’t deny that infertility experiments were conducted on masses of people” (Walz 2005, 347). All claims of sterilization at Ravensbrück between 1943 and 1945 (save for the first week of January 1945 during which Clauberg participated) must have, via process of elimination, been conducted by Treite and/or Trommer. The latter, however, is not openly accused of such. In addition to the accounts of Clauberg being present at Ravensbrück and participating and/or conducting the experiments, Treite himself is accused of “not protesting the sterilization of countless Jews and Roma children, among other instances, on Sunday 7 January 1945” (WO 309/419, p. 919).
Regarding Treite’s methods, they are suspected to have been both experimental and conventional. Legislatively, the experimental sterilizations at Ravensbrück that began during the fall of 1944 represent an interstitial point; many were grounded in the 1933 Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring[39] but were conducted experimentally (extra-judicial methods). Determining if the procedures were undertaken as an experiment is of importance not only vis-a-vis posterity, but also in the interest of compensation. Differing reparation programs were designated for each demographic of sterilization victims, the nature of which cannot be determined by witness statement alone. While it was often unclear to the prisoner, for instance, what procedure was undertaken and by what means, only sterilization via the intra-uterine injection of irritants was recognized as grounds for reparations (Baumann 2009, 77fn109).
Conventional female sterilization was most often in the form of tubal ligation via incision. This is confirmed not only by medical histories but supported by the statements of former inmates and medical assistants, Ilse Reibmayr and Gerda Schröder. In the 2005 documentary, Die Frauen von Ravensbrück, Reibmayr states that “all the SS doctors there took part. We weren’t allowed inside. We were shut out. Naturally that perplexed me. I was extremely interested in how they conducted their procedure. Otherwise, they would have had to make an abdominal incision, and I would have had to been present, because I was Treite’s assistant” (56:13–56:39). This method is further confirmed by Gerda Schröder who stated in a deposition that Treite either tied or excised portions of the fallopian tubes (Wisely 2019, 660) – standard methods practiced at the time.
In order to determine if a method was experimental, it then becomes crucial to examine the nature in which it was conducted. In doing so, it appears that there exists some ambiguity between the experimental methods practiced by Carl Clauberg at Auschwitz during this time and those begun by Percival Treite at Ravensbrück – as the former instructed the latter, among other doctors, in how to perform his sterilization method.[40] Later dubbed the “Clauberg Method” during the Nuremberg Medical Trials (p. 562, 17 Dec 1946, HLS), this consisted of (1) a salpingography with a contrasting solution to determine if there were any occlusions in the fallopian tubes, immediately proofed via X-ray, (2) the injection of caustic substances in order to facilitate scarring (i.e., occlusion, or closure) of the fallopian tubes, and (3) a second salpingography with contrasting solution, proofed again via X-ray, in order to gauge the efficacy of the procedure (i.e., to ensure the tubes were in fact scarred and therefore closed).[41] At this point in time, the standard method of sterilization had been that of tubal ligation (i.e., closure of the fallopian tubes by physical, chemical, or mechanical means) (Hildebrant et al. 2017, 276). That of transcervical sterilization, however, circumvents the opening of the abdominal wall and is conducted with an endoscope introduced via the vagina, after which the fallopian tubes are closed via the aforementioned means. Though Clauberg’s colleagues Carl Schroeder and Felix von Mikulicz-Radecki investigated an intrauterine method of electro-cauterization in 1927, Clauberg was the first to explore this method of sterilization using a chemical agent (Hildebrant et al. 2017, 278; 283). Given that reproductive science of the time was deeply invested in, and noticeably impressed by, the visualization of what was inside the female body,[42] this technique is distinctly Claubergian.
There appears to be three methods by which Treite conducted sterilization: (1) tubal ligation (conventional), (2) hook insertion (experimental), and (3) intra-uterine caustic injection via the “Clauberg Method” (experimental). Though the time frame(s) in which prisoners were at Ravensbrück may reveal the agent of sterilization, the methods themselves are difficult to isolate due to their interspersed nature.
Both Polish Rita L and German Gisela M[43] were sentenced to concentration camp labor and sterilization, the actualization of which took place in Ravensbrück under the auspices of the 1933 law. Rita L was only 25 years old when she was arrested by the Gestapo in Bismarckhütte, and four months later, deported to Ravensbrück and sterilized. “I must admit, I am not psychologically happy to have been that young and unable to have children” (File #921, NRWD). Twenty-year-old Gisela M was arrested for having stolen a bicycle from a neighbor who had fled Germany. After a year’s imprisonment in Hamburg, she spent two years in Ravensbrück – the site of her 1942 sterilization (File #978, NRWD; Hamm 2005, 41–42).
Käthe Datz,[44] a German woman categorized as ‘asocial,’ was arrested in the winter of 1943. She was 21 years old when she was deported to Ravensbrück on 11 May 1944, and given a prisoner number. While she describes neither the medical technique nor the perpetrator of her sterilization, she explains the horror of seeing “a long row of boards. On them were fully naked women, on both sides of the room” (Schikorra 2001, 173). Given that her sterilization took place during Treite’s time in the camp, he is by power of deduction the culprit of her infertility. In closing, Datz emphasizes that it would have been nice to have children and grandchildren close to her, though she did marry a widower after the war, who in turn brought three children to their marriage (ibid).
There are currently two accounts of experimental sterilization via hook insertion that appear to be related to Treite’s earliest time at Ravensbrück. An unnamed survivor, as conveyed by Paul Weindling, had a “hook shaped needle…forced into the Bartholin glands; as a consequence, the thighs became swollen, and the entrance of the uterus completely blocked” (2014, 137). Another survivor, Tova R, experienced a similar swelling of the lower extremities after an undescribed procedure. Tova spent two weeks in Ravensbrück between November 19 and December 3, 1944, during which she was taken for medical experiments that were “humiliating and painful, causing [her] legs to swell up and causing her to be never able to bear children” (Agassi 2007, 101). While both were likely conducted by Treite, the similarity of symptoms suggests a common method or practitioner; whether these two are related, however, is ultimately unclear.
Many accounts of sterilization via intrauterine injection of caustic substances in 1944 – aka “Clauberg Method” – stem from Jewish, Russian, and Roma women sterilized at Ravensbrück during the fall of 1944 (ibid).[45] In these cases, the nature of the procedure is most easily deduced by the access route of bodily entry: intrauterine injection. Given that Clauberg traveled to Ravensbrück on at least two occasions (including January 1945), it is likely that Clauberg and/or Percival Treite – who unlike Trommer, was in the women’s camp daily, and was later trained in the eponymous method under Clauberg himself – administered these injections between August and December 1944 (WO 311/651, #2870–2872, 166).
Russian survivor Farida Saliksjanowa stated in the 2005 documentary Die Frauen von Ravensbrück:
The worst was that women received gynecological injections. And afterwards, I couldn’t have any children. And that was the worst. Everything else could be healed, but that stayed for life (55:45–56:13).
Saliksjanowa is listed in Arolsen Archives as having entered Ravensbrück on September 27, 1944, and having been transported to Buchenwald on October 4, 1944. According to this information, Saliksjanowa must have been sterilized via injection in the fall of 1944 during a one-week window at the age of 24.
Julia Kay, a 36-year-old Polish-Jew from Łódź, had a similar experience. In her oral testimony with the USC Shoah Foundation, Kay recalls that after she entered Ravensbrück in September 1944,[46] “they put us to see a doctor…and the doctor injected, we didn’t know what…with injections, in the vagina. They put injections” (Interview #7622, USC). She then shared that, after liberation, she attempted to become pregnant without success. “[I] went to a doctor, so he said “how could you? They sterilized you” (ibid). Although Kay could not bear further children, her sixteen-year-old son, Henry, did survive the war.
Reparation claims from Hungarian survivors provide extensive evidence for the widespread use of Clauberg’s sterilization method at Ravensbrueck, pointing to the routinization of Clauberg’s procedure for mass deployment (RG-39.024M, USHMM).[47] Hungarian Jew, Alice L, was 23 years old at the time when she, was led into the Revier along with approximately 20 women in November 1944. Here, “we were stripped entirely in front of a military doctor, who selected some of us to lay on the table. He gave me an injection through the uterus” (Reel 2, Microfilm Image 1224, RG-39.024M, USHMM). Elisabeth B, also a Hungarian Jew, reports being selected during morning Appell in September 1944, along with 10 other women, after which they were “evaluated by a (female) doctor…and received an injection in the uterus” (Reel 2, Microfilm Image 1673, RG-39.024M, USHMM). Jewish Gizella W., who was transported to Ravensbrück during November 1944, recalls “a group of women…were brought to the Revier, and we were laid on the gynecological table. A (female) doctor in uniform, with the help of the nurse with the needle…injected me in the uterus” (Reel 2, Microfilm Image 2522, RG-39.024M, USHMM). Elisabeth S., also a Jewish woman from Hungary, reported being selected along with “a troop [of women]” for the sterilization injection during November 1944 (Reel 2, Microfilm Image 2864, RG-39.024M, USHMM). These accounts evidence the Clauberg method being deployed on female prisoners, Romani and/or Jewish, between September and December 1944. If the 200+ accounts provided in these files prove accurate, there was a wealth more sterilizations conducted in the camp than the 100 instances previously estimated by scholars (Agassi 2007, 101, 130).
Other survivors provide much less information, but their experiences demand inclusion. Maria U for example, was transported to Ravensbrück, where “I was forcibly sterilized…I am 80 % handicapped from my time in concentration camps” (File 1218, NRWD). Drawing on camp documentation located in Arolsen Archives, one could estimate that the then 22-year-old Maria was in Ravensbrück from January 1942 until October 1944 (6.3.3.2./117072011, AA).
Moreover, as has been acknowledged, women who were subject to a forced abortion and/or birth in Ravensbrück were also routinely sterilized afterwards. Historians know that the sterilizations performed after forced abortions were conducted by Percival Treite (Santis and Wickert 2017, 63; Weindling 2014, 137); after the war, Treite himself admitted to conducting 15 sterilizations, though he claims they were conducted on “feeble-minded women” in line with racial hygiene laws (Strebel 2003, 259).[48] Treite’s engagement is corroborated by prisoner-nurse, Zdenka Nedvědová-Nejedla, who testified that while imprisoned at Ravensbrück, she witnessed 20 women receive forced sterilizations after forced surgical abortions by Treite (Pasternak 2006, 282). What has yet to be explored, however, is the method of sterilization conducted, if not the experiences alone.
Romani woman, Ella L,[49] for instance, was sterilized after the birth of her child in December 1944. In her application for reparations, she writes that: “I was pregnant and came to the concentration camp Ravensbrück. There I bore my child and was immediately sterilized. My child died. It was a horrible time. I never saw my fiancé, the father of the child, ever again – just like my mother, uncle, and aunts. They are horrible memories!” In a first draft included in her file, she adds the pretenses under which she was made infertile: “I was sterilized in the concentration camp Ravensbrück according to the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring” (File 148, NRWD).
Romani survivor, Sophie Wittich, gave birth to her daughter, Manuela, on September 24, 1944. An unspecified time later, she was led into the Revier with two other women. Wittich recalls being bound and turned around, instructed to put her head to the ground, while “a little man” did something behind her. Further described as “a gluttonous man,” she states that “his bag was [nevertheless] bigger than him!” (Walz 2005, 339). Hearing the hum of a machine, she felt waves of contractions, after which something exited her vagina. Later, she discovered that she had been sterilized by Clauberg.
Sintezza Lara F[50] experienced similar trauma. “I was forcibly sterilized in Ravensbrück 14 days after the birth of my daughter. My daughter died at only 3 months from starvation. I lost my entire family in the camps” (File #664, NRWD). In the 1987 documentary film, Das Falsche Wort, Lara F states that “At our age, it would have been beautiful to have children…and we would have had grandchildren…our family would look so differently” (51:50–53:00).[51]
Yet others, especially those who were children at the time of the procedure, have little to offer in regard to the time or perpetrator of the procedure. As victims of sterilization at Ravensbrück, however, their experiences warrant mention. In addition to the Sinti and Roma children made sterile under Sonntag, there exist others who were sterilized by Treite via unknown methods. At only 13 years old, for instance, Sonia Friedrich was “sterilized by SS doctors” at Ravensbrück (Rose 1999, 278). Documents housed with Arolsen Archives convey that Friedrich was imprisoned in the camp from 1944 (unspecified month) until her deportation to Mauthausen in March 1945 (1.1.26/130126532, AA). Neither the perpetrator nor the method was described/named.
Charlotte K, a Roma woman from Königsberg, was sterilized during the winter of 1944 (File ZK 25959, NRWW; von dem Knesebeck 2011, 142). In her application for restitution, however, she does not provide a detailed firsthand account. Doctor’s exams, reparation applications, and a letter from her husband comprise the file. She writes only that her uterus was unnecessarily removed during her imprisonment at Ravensbrück (March 1, 1943–May 1, 1945) for “scientific reasons.”
Similarly, Arolsen Archives document Sintezza Else Freiermuth (née Schmidt; aka Else Baker) in Ravensbrück in August 1944, before being released the following month as a result of the relentless appeals waged by her adoptive German father (1.1.35/129641264, AA). According to scholar Thomas Rahe, Freiermuth was only 12 years old when she was sterilized for being Roma. Rahe conveys from Freiermuth: “The physical and emotional damage makes you think that it can’t go on. Now that I’m older, it’s more readily felt that I don’t have children. I have to stop now, I can’t keep going, my heart is so heavy” (1995, 141; File #665, NRWD).[52] Further details in this case are challengingly sparse to locate.[53] It should be added that aforementioned Lara F is Freiermuth’s aunt, and that Freiermuth’s cousin, Marien S[54] was also just a teen (16 years old) when she was sterilized at Ravensbrück via injection for being Sinti (File #1178, NRWD). The entire family was both individually and collectively impacted by the procedure.
5 Conclusions
In closing, I incorporate lesser-known experiences of sterilization victims and propose methods with which scholars can approach archives in the future. In the oft-cited interview with the filmmaker Melanie Spitta, Wanda Pranden shares:
…and then we were sterilized in Ravensbrück. This was at the beginning of 1945 by a Professor Clauberg. This Clauberg made everyone exit our block. A tall blonde came out and the Professor Clauberg was [only] 1.54 m tall. [Clauberg] was from Königsberg and was a blonde [too]. And I introduced myself with my number and said, “I’m still so young, what are you doing?” “Lay down for the exam.” And then he sterilized us, [with] injected bleaching powder [orig: Chlorkalk], you know? Everything burned and we received 10 days’ rest. And there were also 12-year-olds there, including a cousin and two children. They didn’t care about themselves, they [just] looked for the children. They all stood in line like [they were] waiting for bread, and no child came out again. They were all injected. We [adults] all knew what was happening, [but parents] searched for the children and found [them] in a washroom. They were all laying on the tile [floor], blood on their hands between their legs, [and these] are children, right…And they were screaming. We gathered them, put [these children] onto a cart… and pushed them to their barrack. And then we were all x-rayed, hunched over, you know. They asked [each other] “did it work?” If it worked. And it didn’t, at least not with one orphan child. Then they cut her open and bandaged her with toilet paper. She died too…a child was 14 days old, and they did this to her. They were falling one after another…I was only 21 years old. I was a healthy woman (16:50–19:00).
In locating further experiences of sterilization at Ravensbrück, it appears that Luise Franz – unbeknownst to many – spoke again with Melanie Spitta in a later documentary, Das Falsche Wort (The Lie) (1987). Elaborating on how the sterilization impacted her life, Franz shares:
They said, “no,” they wouldn’t agree to sterilization, and then they went to Auschwitz, and we went to the Revier with blows. Herded in with strikes, we were sent out the same way. We had no idea what the word sterilization meant. What it really meant. If I had known that I would have gone with my siblings to Auschwitz. I would have preferred death through the gas chamber. Horrid (50:23–51:50).
Interestingly, the statement of another Ravensbrück victim of Clauberg has gone largely unseen by scholarship. Arrested after the Warsaw Uprising, Polish political prisoner Maria Jablonowska was brought to Ravensbrück in January 1945. In a report taken for the Central Commission for the Investigation of German/Hitlerite Crimes in Poland on 23 October 1964, she recalls:
We were called to the doctor individually in the Revier. I was the third, and the military doctor (probably Clauberg) commanded the woman (probably a prisoner-doctor) to take action. I had to lay myself on the gynecological chair. The woman placed a speculum and 10 cm of fluid with a thick, long needle inside of me. With this injection, she removed a thick, yellow fluid from my ovaries. After this violation, I was sent back to my block. I experienced light stomach pains. A week later, the procedure was repeated a second time, and I was injected with a little bit of unknown fluid. The speculum was used this time as well. They told me I should come for a third visit in a week. Since I was scared of this, I signed up for the next transport to escape. After the second visit, my pains were more intense – especially when walking (4.2/82226537, AA).
In light of the shame and silence that has accompanied sterilizations and the notion that all of Clauberg’s experimental victims at Ravensbrück perished, it becomes more necessary than ever to evidence or substantiate that the procedure took place – as unsatisfactory as this may be. Excerpting the statements of prisoners, such as Hanna Sturm, Zdenka Nedvědová-Nejedla, and Antonia Bruha, in which “gypsy girls” died as a result, can be misleading (Martin 1994, 103; Zörner 1971, 118; Ingmann 2023, 109–111).
Taking note of the survivors who witnessed the girls’ cries, alongside their periods of imprisonment, reveals how often the sterilization of Romani women and girls took place – before and after Clauberg’s string of sterilizations in January 1945. Annette Eekmann, for example, claims to have seen the girls succumbing to the procedure in January 1944 – around the time when Ceija Stojka was in Ravensbrück (Walz 2005, 58:20–58:35). Similarly, the first-hand accounts from Hanna Sturm and Doris Maase had to have taken place when they were in the Revier leading up to 1941. Sterilizations were interspersed atrocities that, alongside other horrors, were on-going from the onset. Only when read in tandem with the fact that young, Romani girls were sterilized on countless occasions over the life of the camp does it come into focus that this was but one of many cohorts of victims.
According to Bruha, the group of “gypsy girls” who were gassed after sterilization were from Burgenland, Austria (Bruha 1984; “Das Kolleg” 1985, ÖM; Berger 1987; Interview #45316, USC, 1998; Klingenböck and Dewald 2003; Walz 2005 [film]; Walz 2005; Bruha 1995, FRVA). Turning to the June 1939 transport of 440 women and girls from Austria’s Burgenland, and the subsequent Opferfürsorge-Akten (public welfare files for Holocaust victims) for the 50+ of the surviving women, presented me with new ways in which to engage with these legacies. These materials, however, are accompanied by limitations.
To begin, not all Romani survivors sought sterilization-based reparations. If they did, this required tackling Austrian bureaucracy which required state legibility in the form of birth certificates and other legal documents. Moreover, systematic and institutional anti-Roma sentiment on behalf of state officials is clear, for example, when viewing the applications for assistance (Opferfürsorge-Akten); repeatedly, the researcher locates a Romani Holocaust survivor who applies repeatedly for assistance and is consistently denied. Tucked in the file, as if it should belong, is a documented arrest for theft of food or otherwise vital resources. Assistance is denied once more, due to an alleged crime. For women in particular, this situation was worsened by the challenges of reading and writing, evidenced not least by the +++ present on the signature line of application forms. Looking at these materials for sterilization-related impairment is further limited by the parameters of the documents; given that physical injury which prohibited labor was the grounds on which survivors could apply for funds to support their living, rarely did doctors include women’s reproductive organs in their reports of ability to work.
On occasion, however, residues emerge. Romani survivor A.H. (File VIII-339-6-1977, BLA), for example, was in the 1939 transport of 440 Romani women and girls to Ravensbrück, where she remained until the end of the war. While it is not necessarily indicative of sterilization that she didn’t bear children, the symptoms she experienced are. Sifting through thousands of pages of administrative paperwork, a sheet of tissue paper, two inches by four, sandwiched between annual forms for state assistance, surfaced. As a supplement to the file, the note, dated December 1955, reads: “chronic infections of the fallopian tubes on both sides” – a sequelae that other Clauberg survivors reported experiencing after experimental sterilization. While I cannot share her name – much in line with both Austrian privacy laws and her own wishes – it demonstrates that not all Romani women succumbed to the procedure. They continued living. And in the case of A.H., she went on to adopt her nephew after her sister’s untimely death, forming a nuclear family of two.
About the author
Dr Tiarra Maznick is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern University. She defended her dissertation, “Jewish Women’s Wombs: The Holocaust and Postwar Pronatalism,” in July 2024 at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Dr Maznick’s work currently appears in The Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, The Massachusetts Review, The German Studies Review, Feminist German Studies, and Films for the Feminist Classroom. Dr Maznick researches histories of sexuality, reproduction, and medicine, during and after the Nazi Regime.
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Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- Introduction to the Themed Issue: Gender
- Dossier: Gender, edited by: Tiziana D’Amico, Alexandra M. Szabó
- Research Articles
- Taking the Road Less Traveled? – Jewish Modern Women Thinkers in 20th Century Croatia
- Revisiting the Sterilizations at Ravensbrück Concentration Camp: A Victim-Based History
- “Real Comrades in Struggle and Suffering”: Women’s Experiences in the Vapniarka Concentration Camp
- Surviving the Gender Matrix of the Holocaust: The Axis of Gender-Power in the Testimonies of Yugoslavian Holocaust Survivors
- Intimacy as Survival: Ambiguous Gendered Strategies in Sereď Camp
- Open Forum
- Introduction to Open Forum Gender Studies and the Holocaust
- Approaching the Holocaust, Communism, and Post-Communism in Eastern Europe from a Gender Perspective
- Andrea Pető on Hannah Szenes: Multilayered Memorialization
- Voices of Courage: Women and Heroism in the Holocaust
- The Contribution of Andrea Pető to my Research and Understanding of the Holocaust
- Open Forum Gender Studies and the Holocaust - Reactions by Helga Embacher
- Open Forum Gender Studies and the Holocaust - Reactions by Sue Vice
- Open Forum Gender Studies and the Holocaust – Reactions by Lori R. Weintrob
- Open Forum Gender Studies and the Holocaust – Reactions by Dalia Ofer
- Forgotten Women in Early Holocaust Research
- Eva G. Reichmann and Holocaust Scholarship
- Reviews
- Florian Zabransky: Jewish Men and the Holocaust: Sexuality, Emotions, Masculinity: An Intimate History
- The Question of Unworthy Life: Eugenics and Germany’s Twentieth Century
- Dossier: Kamianets-Podilskyi
- Introduction to the Thematic Section “Kamianets-Podilskyi”
- Interview
- Interview with Tamás Stark about his Book Hosszú út az első magyarországi deportáláshoz. (Magyar Történelmi Emlékek. Értekezések), Budapest: HUN-REN Bölcsészettudományi Kutatóközpont Történettudományi Intézet, 2023, 308 p. ISBN 978-963-416-404-3, ISNN 2063-3742
- Research Article
- “A Microhistory of the Hungarian Deportations in 1941 to Kamianets-Podilskyi: Lili Jacob and Her Village of Bilky”
- Reviews
- Kam’yanets-Podilskyy Mass Massacre of Jews, 1941
- Hosszú út az első magyarországi deportáláshoz. (Magyar Történelmi Emlékek. Értekezések)
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- Introduction to the Themed Issue: Gender
- Dossier: Gender, edited by: Tiziana D’Amico, Alexandra M. Szabó
- Research Articles
- Taking the Road Less Traveled? – Jewish Modern Women Thinkers in 20th Century Croatia
- Revisiting the Sterilizations at Ravensbrück Concentration Camp: A Victim-Based History
- “Real Comrades in Struggle and Suffering”: Women’s Experiences in the Vapniarka Concentration Camp
- Surviving the Gender Matrix of the Holocaust: The Axis of Gender-Power in the Testimonies of Yugoslavian Holocaust Survivors
- Intimacy as Survival: Ambiguous Gendered Strategies in Sereď Camp
- Open Forum
- Introduction to Open Forum Gender Studies and the Holocaust
- Approaching the Holocaust, Communism, and Post-Communism in Eastern Europe from a Gender Perspective
- Andrea Pető on Hannah Szenes: Multilayered Memorialization
- Voices of Courage: Women and Heroism in the Holocaust
- The Contribution of Andrea Pető to my Research and Understanding of the Holocaust
- Open Forum Gender Studies and the Holocaust - Reactions by Helga Embacher
- Open Forum Gender Studies and the Holocaust - Reactions by Sue Vice
- Open Forum Gender Studies and the Holocaust – Reactions by Lori R. Weintrob
- Open Forum Gender Studies and the Holocaust – Reactions by Dalia Ofer
- Forgotten Women in Early Holocaust Research
- Eva G. Reichmann and Holocaust Scholarship
- Reviews
- Florian Zabransky: Jewish Men and the Holocaust: Sexuality, Emotions, Masculinity: An Intimate History
- The Question of Unworthy Life: Eugenics and Germany’s Twentieth Century
- Dossier: Kamianets-Podilskyi
- Introduction to the Thematic Section “Kamianets-Podilskyi”
- Interview
- Interview with Tamás Stark about his Book Hosszú út az első magyarországi deportáláshoz. (Magyar Történelmi Emlékek. Értekezések), Budapest: HUN-REN Bölcsészettudományi Kutatóközpont Történettudományi Intézet, 2023, 308 p. ISBN 978-963-416-404-3, ISNN 2063-3742
- Research Article
- “A Microhistory of the Hungarian Deportations in 1941 to Kamianets-Podilskyi: Lili Jacob and Her Village of Bilky”
- Reviews
- Kam’yanets-Podilskyy Mass Massacre of Jews, 1941
- Hosszú út az első magyarországi deportáláshoz. (Magyar Történelmi Emlékek. Értekezések)
