| The Experimental Impulse |
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| 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: |
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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 |
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