Medicine4

“That’s how I felt too, except that you can’t show it to the outside world. They can’t make their pain and the reason for this pain, that it was forced sterilization, clear to the outside world. Because there is such a stigma attached to being forcibly sterilized as inferior, to being labeled as inferior for life. That’s an incredible thing. Just imagine if that were you!”

RBB, 27.05.2010:"Forgotten victims of National Socialism - Forcibly sterilized people fight for their rights"

Dorothea Buck (1917-2019) was a German author and sculptor. Under Nazi rule, she was classified as mentally ill and forcibly sterilized. She gave critical lectures, wrote essays and, among other things, a play about the hundreds of thousands of murders of mentally ill and disabled people during the Nazi era. In 1992, she founded the Bundesverband Psychiatrie-Erfahrener (Federal Association of People with Psychiatric Experiences) together with other people affected.

During the Nazi regime, hundreds of thousands of people fell victim to human experimentation by doctors, as well as to inhumane medical treatment and the murder of the sick. The Nazis sought out their victims in psychiatric wards, concentration camps and prisoner-of-war camps. After the Nuremberg trials against the main war criminals, twelve follow-up trials were held between 1946 and 1949. In the doctors' trial of 1946-1947, the American military court indicted 23 doctors, administrative staff and a lawyer on charges including Crimes against humanity. Seven of them were sentenced to death. The most famous war criminal, Joseph Mengele, camp doctor in Auschwitz 1943-1945, was never caught and died in a swimming accident in Brazil in 1979. For decades, victims of human concentration camp experiments on both sides of the Iron Curtain fought for compensation and recognition. Colonial injustices can also be identified here, as the Nazis saw their colonial project in Eastern Europe (Zimmerer 2003). After the war, Eastern European survivors were excluded from all benefits for a long time. "This only changed when international attention was drawn to the persecution of the group of Polish women who became known as the Ravensbrueck Lapins. Their case contributed significantly to the gradual softening of the radical exclusion of Eastern European victims of Nazi persecution" (Baumann 2009). Picture: The bronze statue "Mother with Child" (Hamburg) created by Dorothea Buck.

*Stefanie Michaela Baumann 2009: Human Experiments and Reparation: The Long Dispute over Compensation and Recognition of the Victims of National Socialist Human Experiments. Berlin, Boston, Oldenbourg: De Gruyter. *Jürgen Zimmerer, Holocaust and Colonialism. Beitrag zu einer Archäologie des genozidalen Gedankens, in: Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 51/2003, pp. 1098-1119, here p. 1102. His contributions on the question of continuity were published once again as ders, Von Windhuk nach Auschwitz? Contributions on the relationship between colonialism and the Holocaust, Berlin 2011.

1936 (2010)