Who Was Sterilized?
Asylum inmates consisted of thirty to forty percent of those sterilized. So who were the others? The main reason for sterilization was so that the hereditary illnesses could not be passed on in offspring, thus "contaminating" the Volk's gene pool. Since asylum inmates were locked away from society, most of them had a relatively small chance of reproducing. The main target of the sterilization program were those people with a slight hereditary illness and who were at an age of being able to reproduce. Since these people were among society, they were deemed the most dangerous.
Since slight hereditary illness is rather ambiguous and the category "feebleminded" is extremely ambiguous, some people were sterilized for their asocial or anti-Nazi beliefs and behavior.
The belief in stopping hereditary illnesses soon expanded to include all the people within the east whom Hitler wanted eliminated. If these people were sterilized, the theory went, they could provide a temporary work force as well as slowly create Lebensraum (room to live for the German Volk). Since the Nazis were now thinking of sterilizing millions of people, faster, non-surgical ways to sterilize were needed.
Experiments
The usual operation for sterilizing women had a relatively long recovery period - usually between a week and fourteen days. The Nazis wanted a faster and perhaps unnoticeable way to sterilize millions. New ideas emerged and camp prisoners at Auschwitz and at Ravensbrück were used to test the various new methods of sterilization. Drugs were given. Carbon dioxide was injected. Radiation and X-rays were administered.
The End
By 1945, the Nazis had sterilized an estimated 300,000 to 450,000 people. Some of these people soon after their sterilization also were victims of the euthanasia program. While many others were forced to live with this feeling of loss of rights and invasion of their persons as well as a future of knowing that they would never be able to have children.
Notes
1. Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (New York, 1986) p. 47.
2. Michael Burleigh, Death and Deliverance: 'Euthanasia' in Germany 1900-1945 (New York, 1995) p. 56.
3. Lifton, Nazi Doctors p. 27.
4. Burleigh, Death p. 56.
5. Klara Nowak as cited in Burleigh, Death p. 58.
Bibliography
Annas, George J. and Michael A. Grodin. The Nazi Doctors and the Nuremberg Code: Human Rights in Human Experimentation. New York, 1992.
Burleigh, Michael. Death and Deliverance: 'Euthanasia' in Germany 1900-1945. New York, 1995.
Lifton, Robert Jay. The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide. New York, 1986.
