Speaker: Alexandra M. Szabo, Department of History, Brandeis University - Academia.edu

Abstract: »The different sterilization and castration experiments in concentration camps were an integral part of Nazi genocide, yet they have hardly been recognized as such. While there was some reckoning with the genocidal intent of mass sterilization in the immediate postwar period, evidenced by historical research and criminal trials, an understanding of the centrality and significance of sterilization has only now begun to surface in the narratives of the Holocaust and the genocide of the Roma. This time lag is a consequence of several structural reasons, and when examining this question from the victim perspective, it becomes apparent that statements concerning the issues of sterilization and castration fade from victim testimony over time.
My presentation will address this marginalization and the structures that caused it by examining Jewish victims' responses to these experiences. Through the comparison of victim testimonies from the immediate postwar period and belated testimonies, I will point to the differences that surface between how men and women discuss sterilization and castration. The gradually evolving absolute silence about men’s surgical castrations juxtaposed to the more voiced women’s experiences of intrauterine injections in Auschwitz-Birkenau will show how gendered memory plays a role in this history, alongside the societal structures that muted this experience of young female and male survivors after late 1940s and 1950s. By presenting the immediate postwar impact on voicing such experiences that led to the more significant silencing on the question of infertility for the victims, I will argue that these structures were of a political nature.
Through the discussion of forced sterilization in concentration camps, the combination of gender dynamics and reproductive politics surfaces most clearly beginning with the so-called Doctors’ Trial at the Nuremberg Military Tribunal in 1946-47. My presentation will emphasize the fact that sterilization was a biopolitical tool that was part and parcel of the 20th century, even beyond the Holocaust.« (Source: Online Program)

Wikipedia: History of Europe: History of Germany / Nazi Germany | Gencoide: The Holocaust / Sexual violence during the Holocaust | Sex and the law: Sexual violence / Compulsory sterilization