Sometimes people are evil because they are ignorant. Other times people are evil because they can be, and the regime they follow has given them a carte blanche to do whatever they want. Dr Clauberg probably qualifies for both groups.
Dr Clauberg was a German gynaecologist who conducted medical experiments on human subjects (mainly Jewish) at the Auschwitz Concentration Camp. He worked with Horst Schumann in X-ray sterilization experiments at Auschwitz.
In 1945, near the close of World War II, he was captured by the Red Army and sentenced to 25 years in prison. Released in 1955 under a prisoner exchange agreement, he returned to Germany and continued to practice medicine.
Dr Clauberg developed a method of non-surgical mass sterilization. Under the pretext of performing a gynaecological examination, he first checked to make sure that the Fallopian tubes were open and then introduced a specially prepared chemical irritant, which caused acute inflammation. This led to the growing together of the tubes within a few weeks, and thus their obstruction. X-rays were used to check the results of each procedure. He was very proud of his achievements and boasted about them in a letter to Himmler.
June 7, 1943 letter from Professor Clauberg to Himmler, on his research concerning sterilization of women (Trials of War Criminals Before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals – Washington, U.S Govt. Print. Off., 1949-1953, Vol 1, p. 730):
Dear Reich Leader,
Today, I am fulfilling my obligation to report to you from time to time about the state of my research work…
The method I contrived to achieve the sterilization of the female organism without operation is as good as perfect. It can be performed by a single injection made through the entrance of the uterus in the course of the customary gynaecological examination known to every physician. If I say that the method is “as good as perfected” this means:
Still to be worked out are only minor improvements to the method.
Already today, it could be put to practical use in the course of our regular eugenic sterilization and could thus replace the operation.
As to the question which you, Reich Leader, asked me almost one year ago, i.e., how much time would probably be required to sterilize 1,000 women by using this method? Today I can answer you with regard to the future as follows:
If my researches continue to have the same results as up to now – and there is no reason to doubt that— then the moment is not far off when I can say:
“One adequately trained physician in one adequately equipped place, with perhaps ten assistants (the number of assistants in conformity with the speed desired) will most likely be able to deal with several hundred if not even 1,000 per day.”
He returned to West Germany, where he was reinstated at his former clinic based on his prewar scientific output. Bizarre behaviour, including openly boasting of his achievements in “developing a new sterilization technique“ at Auschwitz Concentration Camp“ destroyed any chance he might have had of staying unnoticed. In 1955, after the public outcry from groups of survivors, Clauberg was arrested. He died before trial on August 9, 1957, in Kiel, Germany.
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No matter how you twist or turn it, when you are complicit to a crime, you are just as guilty as the perpetrator, and perhaps even more guilty because you were an enabler of that crime.
Hermann Stieve was Director of the Berlin Institute of Anatomy from 1935 to 1952, which was from the early days of the Third Reich until 7 years after the war.
His research on the female reproductive system is controversial, as some of his scientific insights derived from histological investigations on the genital organs of executed women. These investigations were made possible by the sharp increase in executions during the “Third Reich.” Stieve’s research was methodologically accurate and contributed significantly to contemporary scientific debates. Nevertheless, his use of the organs of execution victims, some of them resistance fighters, benefited from the Nazi justice system. He thus indirectly supported this system of injustice.
Charlotte Pommer , a young physician, who had been an assistant to Dr Stieve, reported after the war.
“On 22nd of December 1942 eleven men were hanged and five women decapitated. Fifteen minutes later they were laid out on the dissection tables in the anatomical institute. [She] lay on the first table, […] on the third table the big lifeless body of her husband […] I felt paralyzed and could hardly assist Professor Stieve, who – as always- carried out his scientific exploration with great care and uncommon diligence […] After the impressions of that night I resigned from my position”
Stieve wanted to study human organs. He was able to get some donated uteruses and ovaries from the bodies of accident victims, or from surgeons who had removed them. One of the best historical sources of organs for research, the bodies of executed criminals, had not been available during the early years of his research as the Weimar government made very minimal use of the death penalty, and did not execute any women. In a 1931 letter Stieve complained that it was difficult to get a set of ovaries from a healthy woman.
After the National Socialist regime came to power in January 1933, one of its first goals was the reorganization of the universities. Leadership of the universities was taken away from the individual German states and centralized within the Ministry of Education in Berlin, which was also responsible for the anatomical institutes. This included research funding, recruitment of faculty, and the professional society, the Anatomische Gesellschaft. In terms of the body procurement, the Ministry of Education shared this responsibility with the Ministry of Justice, when bodies from prisons and executions were concerned. All science was to be aligned with NS doctrine and to be utilized for war purposes.
Stieve, who had accepted a professorship at what is now Humboldt University of Berlin as well as the directorship of its anatomical institute, reached an agreement with administrators at Plötzensee Prison outside the city to accept all bodies of those shot, hanged or beheaded, many of them political prisoners. Others were “Polish and Russian slave laborers executed for such acts as socializing with German women,” according to Seidelman. Over the entire Nazi era that came to around 3,000 victims, many more bodies than Stieve needed for research purposes. It is alleged that during his research he claimed the corpses of 182 victims of the Nazi regime, 174 of whom were women at the age rank from 18 to 68, two thirds of victims were of German origin.
I just want to focus n 2 of his subjects.
Liane Berkowitz, a German resistance fighter and was most notable for being was a member of the Berlin-based pro-soviet resistance group that coalesced around Harro Schulze-Boysen, that was later called the Red Orchestra by the Abwehr. Arrested and sentenced to death, she was executed shortly after she gave birth to a daughter in custody.
The young mother was executed in Plötzensee Prison at 7.45 p.m on 5 August 1943, two days before her 19th birthday.
Liane’s daughter Irina was born on 12 April 1943 in the women’s prison on Barnimstraße.[The grandmother took care of the child from July 1943. As the Reichskriegsgericht pronounced the sentence recommendation when checking with Adolf Hitler to dismiss the pregnant Liane Berkowitz from prison, he expressly rejected any reprieve. The death sentence was confirmed by Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel and countersigned. Her body was delivered to Hermann Stieve to be dissected for research. Her final resting place is unknown. Her daughter Irina died on 16 October 1943 in hospital in Eberswalde under unclear circumstances.
Mildred “Mili” Elizabeth Fish-Harnack was an American literary historian, author, translator, and resistance fighter, born in Wisconsin. After marrying Arvid Harnack, she moved with him to Germany, where she began her career as an academic. Fish-Harnack spent a year at the University of Jena and the University of Giessen working on her doctoral thesis. At Giessen, she witnessed the beginnings of Nazism. In 1930, the couple moved to Berlin and Fish-Harnack became an assistant lecturer in English and American literature at the University of Berlin. In the early 1930s, the couple became increasingly interested in the Soviet communist system. Harnack established a writers’ group that studied the Soviet planned economy, and the couple were able to arrange a visit to the Soviet Union during August 1932 and by 1933 they were fully committed to Soviet ideology. Through contacts at the American embassy, Fish-Harnack became friends with Martha Dodd, who became a part of her salon where they discussed current affairs. In 1936, Fish-Harnack’s translation of Irving Stone’s biography of Vincent van Gogh, Lust for Life, was published.
In 1938, the couple began to resist Nazism. They became friends with Louise and Donald Heath, who was First Secretary at the embassy, and to whom Harnack passed economic intelligence from his position at the Reich Trade Ministry. By 1940, the couple came into contact with other anti-fascist resistance groups and cooperated with them. The most important of these was run by German air force officer Harro Schulze-Boysen. Like numerous groups in other parts of the world, the undercover political factions led by Harnack and Schulze-Boysen later developed into an espionage network that collaborated with Soviet intelligence. Fish-Harnack became a resistance fighter as a member of a Berlin anti-fascist espionage group, later called the Red Orchestra (Rote Kapelle) by the Abwehr. The couple were arrested in September 1942 and executed shortly after.
On 7 September 1942, the Harnacks were arrested by the Gestapo at the seaside village of Preila on the Curonian Spit.
Harnack was sentenced to death on 19 December after a four-day trial before the Reichskriegsgericht (“Reich Military Tribunal”), and was executed three days later at Plötzensee Prison in Berlin. Fish-Harnack was initially given six years in prison, but Adolf Hitler refused to endorse the sentence and ordered a new trial, which resulted in a death sentence on 16 January 1943.She was beheaded by guillotine on 16 February 1943. While she was imprisoned, She was the only American woman executed on the direct orders of Adolf Hitler.
After her execution, her body was released to Hermann Stieve to be dissected for his research into the effects of stress, such as awaiting execution, on the menstrual cycle. After he was finished, he gave what was left to a friend of hers, who had the remains buried in Berlin’s Zehlendorf Cemetery.
Unlike the research of Nazi scientists who became obsessed with racial typing and Aryan superiority, Stieve’s work didn’t end up in the dustbin of history. The tainted origins of this research, along with other studies and education that capitalized on the Nazi supply of human body parts—continue to haunt German and Austrian science, which is only now fully grappling with the implications. Some of the facts, amazingly, are still coming to light. And some German, Austrian, and Polish universities have yet to face up to the likely presence of the remains of Hitler’s victims, their cell and bone and tissue, in university collections that still exist today.
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I know that in recent months I have done several sexually themed blogs. But they were all in a historical context, as this one will be. The blog will contain a depiction of the female genitalia.
As the title suggests, a part of this blog will relate to medical science during the Third Reich. Thus was the involvement of the Nazi regime, that it could have affected sexual pleasure for generations to come.
However before I could into that. let me try to explain what the G-Spot is, or where it can be found. I know I am taking a risk here.
The elusive G-spot is one of the most hotly debated areas when it comes to women’s sexual health. But despite what you may have been told in your (less-than-great) seventh grade sex education class, the G-spot most definitely exists and is absolutely accessible.
Known as the Gräfenberg spot, the G spot was introduced by Dr. Beverly Whipple after she discovered that using a “come here” motion along the inside of the vagina produced a physical response in women. She believed that this region could be the key to women achieving orgasm during sex.
Instead of being its own separate spot in your vagina, the G spot is part of the clitoral network. This means that when you’re stimulating the G spot, you’re actually stimulating part of the clitoris, which is much larger than we’re led to believe. Turns out, the pea-sized nub where the inner labia meet is actually only the tip of the clitoris and divides into two “roots” that can be about four inches long.
(1) Clitoral hood and (2) Clitoris
As noted earlier, the G-Spot is an abbreviation for the Gräfenberg Spot.
Ernst Gräfenberg was born on 26 September 1881, in Adelebsen, close to the town of Göttingen, and began his studies at the clinic for Obstetrics and Gynecology at Kiel University. He studied medicine in Göttingen and Munich, obtaining his doctorate in 1905. In 1910 Gräfenberg started work as a gynecologist in Berlin, as well as beginning scientific studies at the Berlin University on the physiology of human reproduction.
During the First World War, he earned the Iron Cross he was a medical officer, and continued publishing papers, mostly on human female physiology. In 1929 he published his studies of the “Gräfenberg ring”, the first IUD( Intrauterine Device -copper coil- contraception) for which there are usage records.
17th-century, Dutch physician Regnier de Graaf described female ejaculation and referred to an erogenous zone in the vagina that he linked with the male prostate; this zone was later reported by Grafenberg. The term “G-Spot” was coined in 1981, named after Grafenberg, even though Grafenberg’s 1940s research was dedicated to urethral stimulation; In 1950, Grafenberg stated, “An erotic zone always could be demonstrated on the anterior wall of the vagina along the course of the urethra.”
When the Nazis assumed power in Germany, Grafenberg, a Jew, was forced in 1933 to resign as head of the department of gynecology and obstetrics in the Berlin-Britz municipal hospital. In 1934, Hans Lehfeldt attempted to persuade him to leave Nazi Germany; he refused, believing that since his practice included wives of high Nazi officials, he would be safe. He was wrong, and was arrested in 1937 for having smuggled out a valuable stamp from Germany. Margaret Sanger- an American birth control activist, sex educator, writer, and nurse -ransomed him from Nazi prison, and he was finally allowed to leave in 1940, whereupon he went to the U.S. Initially he worked as a Pathologist and opened a gynecologist practice in New York City in 1944.
The effects of Parkinson’s Disease forced Gräfenberg to close his medical practice in 1953. However, he did not give up his calling and actively worked at the Margaret-Sanger-Research Bureau till his death in 1957.
I am passionate about my site and I know you all like reading my blogs. I have been doing this at no cost and will continue to do so. All I ask is for a voluntary donation of $2, however if you are not in a position to do so I can fully understand, maybe next time then. Thank you.
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