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 Dr Robert Jay Lifton THE NAZI DOCTORS:
                        Medical Killing and the
                            Psychology of Genocide ©
 
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The Experimental Impulse 
 
Descriptions by women experimented upon begin to tell us in human terms what Clauberg was really up to. A Czech Jew named Margita Neumann told of being taken into a dark room with a large X-ray machine: 
 
Dr. Clauberg ordered me to lie down on the gynecological table and I was able to observe Sylvia Friedmann who was preparing an injection syringe with a long needle. Dr. Clauberg used this needle to give me an injection in my womb. I had the feeling that my stomach would burst with the pain. I began to scream so that I could be heard through the entire block. Dr. Clauberg told me roughly to stop screaming immediately, otherwise I’d, be taken back at once to Birkenau concentration camp …. After this experiment I had inflammation of the ovaries. 
She went on to describe how, whenever Clauberg appeared on the ward, women were "overcome with anxiety and terror," as "they considered what Dr. Clauberg was doing as the actions of a murderer."6

Survivors also mentioned his crude and cynical “jokes,” as well as the resentments of him among other Nazi camp authorities who would like to have done away with Block 10, his protection of experimental subjects being seen by some as a way of maintaining his own enterprise.

Dr. L., who for a time took care of women in Block 10, observed Clauberg closely and described him as “short, bald, and unlikable.” He was in fact about five feet tall, and several inmates referred to him as a kind of “caricature.” In addition he had a history of violence: as a student, later toward his wife, and on still another occasion toward a mistress. As Marie L. said, in understatement, “I think that with him there was something quite unbalanced.” Similarly, Dr. Tadeusz S. invoked Clauberg as evidence for his principle that “the greatest murderers were the greatest cowards,” and described him as “fat and unpleasant looking, . . . a small, ugly, funny-looking, more or less deformed person. He wanted to imitate Prussian officers but he looked like a salesman in a general’s hat .... He was absurd.”

Yet Clauberg, was also a teacher and a gynecological researcher and a practitioner of considerable distinction. Long associated with the University of Kiel, his gynecological work there led to his Habilitation (qualification for lecturer-professorial status on the basis of advanced research and dissertation) in 1937 at the age of thirty-nine. The hormonal preparations Progynon and Proluton that he developed to treat infertility are still used today (in a letter written as early as June 1935, Clauberg discussed the former as useful for both maintaining and terminating pregnancy),7 as is the “Clauberg test” for measuring the action of progesterone.

Clauberg’s personal and ideological history, however, followed a familiar course. The oldest son of a rural craftsman who later established a weapons business, Clauberg was called to the military in 1916, saw action in France, and spent the last part of the war as a prisoner of the English. He joined the Nazi Party in 1933, became a committed Nazi who wore  
 
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical Killing and the
Psychology of Genocide

Robert J. Lifton
ISBN 0-465-09094
© 1986
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