| Sterilization and the Nazi Biomedical
Vision |
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The story of Carl Clauberg reveals the inseparability of
the Nazi concepts of positive and negative genetics. A gynecologist who became
a professor, Clauberg’s early research on female hormones in collaboration
with the Schering-Kahlbaum Pharmaceutical Company produced, during the late
1920s and early 1930s, the preparations known as Progynon and Proluton, or the
treatment of infertility. After being introduced to Himmler in 1940, Clauberg
began to concentrate his research on the development of nonsurgical methods of
mass sterilization, eventuating in the notorious Auschwitz sterilization
experiments which will be discussed in chapter 15. And as late as the latter
part of 1944, Clauberg was back at research on sterility and reproduction as
chief of a new institution known as the “City of Mothers.”67
In another expression of positive
eugenics, doctors were active in research on people viewed as hereditarily
gifted, and in helping to enlist the medical profession for what was called the
“fostering of talent.”
They were also active in a criminal
aspect of positive eugenics known as Lebensborn, or “Spring of
Life.” Heinrich Himmler had created this institution as part of his plan
“to breed the SS into a biological élite, ... [a] racial nucleus
from which Germany could replenish an Aryan inheritance now dangerously diluted
through generations of race-mixing." Lebensborn administered welfare assistance
to SS families in the service of “racially valuable” children, and
extended maternity and childcare facilities to married and unmarried mothers.
But Lebensborn also engaged in the kidnapping of “biologically
valuable” children (those who met Nordic criteria) in occupied areas, some
of them fathered by German occupiers. The policy was explained plainly on one
occasion by Himmler himself: “I really intend to take German blood from
wherever it is to be found in the world, to rob it and steal it wherever I
can.”68
Doctors were central to
Lebensborn; its medical director, Gregor Ebner, was an “old medical
fighter” said to have been personally close to Himmler. Ebner was
solicitous of his Nordic babies (once boasting that “in thirty years’
time we shall have 600 extra regiments”); he applauded the kidnappings,
signed orders for sterilizing “nonvaluable” (insufficiently Nordic)
children, and supervised a “medical” sequence in which some of those
children judged “nonvaluable” were shipped to their deaths in
concentration camps.69
While it has been estimated that only about
350 doctors “committed medical crimes,” that figure represents a vast
wave of criminality, as Alexander Mitscherlich has written,70 and was perhaps only “the tip of the
iceberg” as he told me. Nor does that figure include the legions of German
doctors who slandered and extruded their Jewish colleagues; or who perpetrated
and acted upon vulgar and discriminatory racial concepts.
Thus, while a
few doctors resisted, and large numbers had little sympathy for the Nazis,
as a profession German physicians offered themselves to |
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