The pain of tattooing the camp number was indescribable, recalls René Dühring. “But we had to be happy that we were getting a number - otherwise you go straight to the oven.” The Nazis made the woman choose - either to go to the Birkenau camp or to participate in medical experiments. “It won't kill you,” they assured her.
René Dühring (1921-2018) chose the latter and thus ended up as a guinea pig in the hands of the gynecologist Karl Clauberg. The Jewish woman from Cologne was one of hundreds of women who were subjected to sterilization experiments.
Karl Klauberg - an authority on hormone research
Klauberg graduated from medicine in Kiel in 1925, specialized in gynecology, and then began developing hormone preparations. His method of helping childless women become pregnant made him an authority on hormone research.
On May 1, 1933, Karl Klauberg joined the Nazi party organization - like many other doctors of the time, he hoped that the authorities would help him with his research. Under the Nazi regime, it was the duty of every German woman to give birth to as many children as possible - preferably blond and blue-eyed.
However, Klauberg also worked on a method for sterilizing women - in accordance with the Nazis' anti-human racial policy, the aim of which was to prevent Jews, Sinti and Roma from having children and being exterminated.
Hell in Block 10
In 1942, Klauberg sent a request to Heinrich Himmler, the second person after Hitler, with the request to implement his "new method for non-surgical sterilization of inferior women", for which he needed premises.
So in the spring, he was given a sector in Auschwitz - Block 10, where Klauberg set up his laboratory for experiments. The first Jewish women from the neighboring Birkenau concentration camp were also sent there.
According to Klauberg, the prisoners were faceless people to him, he was only interested in their wombs. “In the morning, after the census, our numbers were called to go downstairs. We waited outside in a line, then one after the other they were brought into a room and made us lie down on a black glass table - an X-ray table. While they injected liquid into our bodies, the X-ray was working, so the doctor could see what was happening to the liquid. These injections burned terribly”, Rene Dühring later recounted about the torture she had to endure.
Neither Rene nor the other women knew at the time what was happening to them. Klauberg experimented on them, as he had previously done with animals. His instruments were not sterile, the doctor used them repeatedly. There was no anesthesia - just the injection.
When the contrast material showed that the fallopian tubes were passable, after a week or two the women found themselves on the table again. There they were injected with a poisonous substance that would glue and burn the walls of the fallopian tubes. If it didn't work the first time, the procedure was repeated. "I had terrible pain for three days," says Dühring.
The women developed purulent inflammations in the abdominal cavity, blood poisoning, pains reminiscent of childbirth, and felt terrible burning sensations - the usual side effects of Clauberg's experiments. The women tried to hold back their screams because they were told that otherwise they would end up in the gas chamber in Birkenau.
Antihuman medicine
How is it possible for a doctor to abandon all ethical principles and treat people like animals? “Medical and human considerations play a subordinate role when someone decides that “these are no longer people, but subhumans”, explains historian Professor Dr. Andrea Löw from the Center for Holocaust Research in Munich.
There was also “boundless ambition” in Klauberg - he saw the chance to take advantage of the system to develop his career and achieve fame and honors. "Everything else was subordinate to that," says Löw.
Himmler asked how long it would take Klauberg to sterilize 1,000 women. The doctor replied that an experienced doctor with a dozen assistants would probably be able to sterilize several hundred, if not 1,000 Jewish women a day. It didn't get that far, though.
Is there retribution?
On January 27, 1945, the Red Army liberated Auschwitz. In the meantime, Klauberg had moved to the women's concentration camp Ravensbrück, where he continued his experiments. When Soviet troops approached this camp as well, he fled. Two months later, he was discovered, arrested, and sentenced in Moscow to 25 years in a penal colony.
But in 1955 he was released early from captivity and was welcomed with honors in Kiel, as the documents of the local prosecutor's office indicate. Klauberg began working again at the University Clinic in the city. The medical profession was not denazified and the colleague who had worked in Auschwitz was welcomed.
In November 1955, however, the Central Jewish Council filed a complaint against Klauberg - 100 people were ready to testify against him. He himself spoke of slander and felt like a victim of justice.
Klauberg claimed that he actually wanted to save the women from Block 10 - his laboratory helped them save their lives. But the doctor died on August 9, 1957, before his trial could begin.
The pill appeared in 1960
According to the camp records, the doctor sterilized between 500 and 700 women. Many of his victims survived - traumatized and infertile. However, Renee Dühring experienced a miracle: despite Clauberg's interventions, she gave birth to a daughter.
On August 18, 1960, the first hormonal contraceptive medication, called “Enovid”, was released on the US market. Clauberg's research contributed greatly to the development of the drug.
Author: Suzanne Cords