8 Too Little, Too Late Compensation for Victims of Coerced Sterilization

Paul J. Weindling

During the twentieth century, perhaps a million, perhaps more, involuntary sterilizations were forcibly performed as a medically and psychiatrically justified “solution” for a range of inherited illnesses and behaviours. A second wave of coercive sterilizations then came about as a birth control measure. Medical professionals carried out these operations in violation of basic human rights and for reasons that were medically and demographically dubious. At the outset, there was considerable confidence in such modern surgical or radiological solutions to the presumed economic and genetic burden of the sick, disabled, and socially deviant on the healthy, and in the elimination of pathogenic genes from the gene pool. The criminality of coerced sterilization was slow to be recognized even after the Nuremberg trial prosecutions for the medical crimes under German National Socialism. The problem was simply that the German authorities declined to accept the criminality of the Nazi-era sterilizations. It was only in the 1980s that this criminality began to be accepted, opening the way to questions of compensation. Yet compensation, let alone the right to a compensatory pension, has been slow in being realized—so that many victims died before receiving even recognition of the injustice of the violation to their bodily integrity. In addition, in Germany as elsewhere, documents have been difficult to access and collections have been destroyed, making it challenging to render medical and state authorities accountable. Different countries and provinces adopted differing procedures, and compensation has been piecemeal and paltry.

ORIGINS

Turning to the origins of coerced sterilization, we find the coincidence of a new surgical technique and rationale for its large-scale imposition. The belief in cleansing the genetic stream of the nation or race was an overriding incentive. Tubal sterilization through the method of vasectomy was a surgical technique pioneered in 1890 and then used by Albert J. Ochsner (1858–1925) for so-called degenerates.¹ Another technique increasingly considered for sterilization was X-rays, newly discovered by Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen (1845–1923) in 1895 in Wurzburg, Germany, and by the time of the First World War proven to have sterilizing effects. Soon after 1900 came calls for sterilization of chronic alcoholics and other bearers of hereditary degenerative traits. Eugenicists rapidly saw how sterilization could be used to prevent the proliferation of unwanted progeny. They put themselves in the position of medical guardians of the nation and race and assumed powers over the capacity to father and bear children.

The rediscovery of the Mendelian laws of heredity around 1900 meant German biologists and doctors adapted the traditional pedigree to show “racial poisons” carried by both male and female lines—often by construing oversimplified monogenetic Mendelian inheritance sequels and charts (see also chapter 2). This broadened the potential carriers of pathogenic genes. Since the Dresden International Hygiene Exhibition of 1911, vivid representations of hereditary illness using pictograms and symbols were used to communicate genetic risks to a wider public. Charts using symbols and pictorial representations of statistics functioned as propaganda in exhibits on hereditary threats to racial health and on a shrinking population. These drew public attention to schizophrenics, the so-called “schizoid,” and epileptics (all deemed to be indicators of mental subnormality), who were to be identified, as well as the healthy “carriers.” The intensifying barrage of propaganda claimed that all of these mentally ill and hidden carriers posed risks to hereditary health. The apparently healthy were deemed carriers of recessive genes for schizophrenia and other mental disorders. Eugenicists attempted to raise the spectre of a severe threat to collective racial health so as to justify wide-ranging genetic screening of the population, especially prior to marriage, as well as a colossal program of sterilization.²

Among the protagonists of sterilization for alcoholics was the pioneer of psychiatric eugenics, Ernst Ruedin (1874–1952), who claimed from 1916 that schizophrenia was inherited on a Mendelian basis.³ Swiss-born, Ruedin was influenced by Alfred Ploetz (1860–1940), whose first wife was Ruedin’s sister. Ploetz was the founder of the Gesellschaft fuer Rassenhygiene (Society for Racial Hygiene) in 1905 (which was the first eugenics society), while its designation as the German Society for Racial Hygiene was later added in 1910.⁴ Ploetz advocated some form of what he called “chromosomal engineering” as (again, in his jargon) a “humane” form of eugenics.⁵ Rather than measures based fully in scientific evidence, the faith in sterilization was more a utopian expectation than any objectively proven technique of diminishing what was called the “genetic burden” on society. Ruedin had originally proposed sterilization as a means of combatting the hereditary effects of alcoholism in 1903. In 1916, he published a ground-breaking paper applying Mendelian genetics to what was known as “dementia praecox” or “schizophrenia.”⁶ He pioneered large-scale “genealogical-demographic” or hereditary studies into the genetics of schizophrenia and other conditions at the German Institute for Psychiatry, founded in 1917 in Munich by the psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin (1856–1926) and, from 1924, affiliated as a Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. Ruedin advocated systematic screening of populations over generations for psychiatric and physical diseases and defects. The German Research Institute for Psychiatry provided increased opportunities for research on patterns of inheritance.

NAZI STERILIZATION

Ruedin remained a dedicated advocate of sterilization. He was largely responsible for the medical scope of the compulsory German sterilization legislation rapidly drafted after the Nazi takeover. The new Nazi ministerial director of the Prussian Medical Department, Dr. Arthur Julius Guett (1891–1949), wanted all sterilization records centrally archived and available to researchers.⁷ This research element was also distinctive in Germany. Following the scientific conviction that psychiatric illness was genetically caused, persons designated schizophrenics became the largest group among those compulsorily sterilized. German sterilizations under National Socialism occurred on a larger scale than anywhere else in Europe or North America. Indeed, while sterilization in Germany increased, North American rates were diminishing (see table 8.1). Ultimately, roughly 65,000 sterilizations were performed in the United States and approximately 3,500 in Canada, according to the existing literature to date.⁸ The United Kingdom saw very few sterilizations—six are known to have taken place in Leicester, of blind children. Sterilization legislation was proposed there initially, but it was rejected by the House of Commons in July 1931.

Table 8.1 Overview on global sterilization programs and subsequent compensation claims

Source: Table designed by Paul J. Weindling, based on information from Kathrin Braun and Svea Luise Herrmann (2011): The Long Shadow of Biopolitical Rationality: Coming to Terms with Nazi-Sterilization Policy in Germany (or not) and Paul J. Weindling, Victims and Survivors of Nazi Human Experiments: Science and Suffering in the Holocaust (London, Eng.: Bloomsbury, 2015).

The German law of 1933 was influenced by legislation in California, where the numbers of sterilizations were the highest in North America at around 10,000, but also by prior legislation in Denmark in 1929, the Swiss canton of Vaud in 1928, and Finland in 1930.⁹ The Nazi law was modelled on Prussian draft legislation of 1932 but added the element of compulsion that characterized earlier American (and especially Californian) legislation since 1907 in Indiana. The German law reflected Nazi enthusiasm for a biological “solution” to social problems and for purifying the race.

In July 1933, the newly instituted Nazi state passed legislation for compulsory sterilization of the sick and disabled. Between 1934 and 1945, roughly 350,000 persons were forcibly sterilized in Germany and Nazi-annexed Austria. In addition, there were approximately 1,000 sterilizations in the so-called Reichsgau Sudetenland (annexed from Czechoslovakia).¹⁰ Sterilizations also took place in the annexed former free city of Danzig and the eastern Baltic Memel peninsula. Questions arose regarding sterilization of the unfit in the German-annexed Warthegau area of western Poland and of repatriated ethnic Germans.¹¹ It can also be argued that sterilization was a key stage on the “slippery slope” to the mass killings of psychiatric and neurological patients. Sterilization could be imposed as a condition for discharge from a psychiatric hospital. What is clear is that as the rate of sterilizations in Nazi Germany diminished in 1940, that of killing psychiatric patients increased. In the case of Nazi-annexed Austria from March 1938, the number of sterilizations was proportionately lower, but euthanasia killings were at a high level.¹² Regional variations existed: compulsory sterilizations occurred at a high rate in the North German port city of Hamburg but were proportionately lower in the northern Bavarian region of Franconia, which was both Protestant in terms of its heritage and enthusiastically Nazi.¹³ For both sterilization and euthanasia, the diagnosis of schizophrenia was a major cause for falling victim to the procedures.¹⁴ The original sterilization law passed in July 1933 was aimed at a range of conditions believed to be inherited. These conditions included epilepsy, inherited (as opposed to acquired) blindness, and inherited deafness, and a link to feeble-mindedness was assumed. This posed questions as to how to distinguish supposedly inherited from acquired conditions (similar diagnostic categories were also applied in Alberta’s eugenics program, as chapters 1 and 4 demonstrate).

The Scandinavian and Baltic countries enforced sterilization in parallel with Germany: following the Danish precedent, Norway legislated sterilization in 1934, Sweden in 1935, and Estonia in 1936. Overall, one can see a pattern of support for sterilization in Protestant countries. The German law imposed sterilization on presumed hereditary schizophrenics, the so-called “feeble-minded,” sufferers of Huntington’s chorea or muscular dystrophy, persons deemed to be hereditarily blind or deaf (creating the necessity of distinguishing between acquired and congenital blindness and deafness), so-called “mental defectives,” and chronic alcoholics. Tribunals of two doctors and a lawyer decreed sterilization irrespective of the patient’s wishes. A person could appeal to a higher tribunal, but this was typically unsuccessful. The Nazi onslaught on civil law removed the legal basis for the inviolability of a citizen’s body, thereby undermining protection against vicarious experimentation. The medically unfit were increasingly vulnerable to invasive sterilization, as racial hygiene posited the need to cleanse the German hereditary stream as it flowed from generation to generation—these developments need to be understood in terms of emotive propaganda. The sterilization law was extended by Nazi legislation, to include castration of criminals and homosexuals from November 1933. By 1945 over two hundred “genetic health courts” had mandated the forced sterilization of over 400,000 persons. Most sterilizations under the 1933 law were carried out prior to 1940. Gerhard Wagner (1888–1939), leader of the Nazi Physicians’ League, opposed the sterilization law as insufficiently racial, and the outbreak of the war saw a shift to the forced killing of the mentally ill and disabled, with an estimated 220,000 victims. Ruedin saw eugenics and euthanasia as a research opportunity for studies of “idiocy” at the Heidelberg Psychiatric Institute, where a group of around fifty children were exhaustively studied and then their brains were dissected.¹⁵

Most sterilizations were surgical. Men underwent vasectomy, involving the cutting of sperm ducts. Castration was also possible, at times inflicted on homosexuals. Female sterilization was more complex and had a higher rate of fatalities: the recommended method was to sever the oviducts or Fallopian tubes. From 1935 X-ray sterilizations were permitted for older women. X-ray sterilization of Jews was trialled at Auschwitz during 1943, so as to produce a sterile workforce that could be worked to death. The Nazi slave labour force underwent sporadic forced sterilization and forced abortion.¹⁶

POSTWAR GERMANY

At the end of the war, the sterilization legislative and administrative machinery was only partially dismantled. Issues of compensation and care for victims were neglected. Given that the Allies were directly involved in Germany, both as regards war crimes measures and in denazifying German public health, the Allied responses to sterilization can be seen as illustrative of the extent that Nazism had damaged demands for negative eugenic measures, and for eugenics in general. A question arises: Did the Allies regard sterilization as an act of Nazi criminality or accept it as a legitimate component of public health and reproductive medicine? After the war, surgical reversal of sterilization was not offered by the German medical profession or state authorities. Allied efforts to prosecute doctors involved with sterilization were unsuccessful.¹⁷ Compensation in terms of a single 5,000 DM payment was granted only from 1980, and a monthly pension supplement of 300 DM (now approximately 1,200 euros) was approved. A full apology to the victims by the German state has yet to be made, although there have been a series of partial gestures. Compensation for victims of sterilization can be characterized as late and limited. After World War II, some German victim organizations requested that victims be operated on for “re-fertilization” to restore the capacity to have children. These demands were ignored by German medical officials. In fact, the reversal of sterilization would have had good chances of success in cases of vasectomy. It would have provided the most effective form of redress. The German medical profession did not (until 2012) accept responsibility for sterilization as a medical measure, thereby effectively endorsing the Nazi coercive sterilization.¹⁸

The Federal German authorities drew a distinction between routine sterilization, for which there was no compensation, and experimental operations, notably at Auschwitz. From 1949 the United Nations pressed for compensation for victims of medical experimentation. On July 26, 1951, the Federal Republic’s observer informed the UN in New York City that West Germany would compensate all victims—not as an act of the Bundestag (Parliament) and thus subject to democratic scrutiny, but as an administrative declaration. This was possible under a decree by German Chancellor Adenauer in 1951 that victims of medical experiments should be supported.¹⁹ In practice, it meant single lump-sum compensation on a varying scale. In Block 10 at Auschwitz, gynecologist and hormone researcher Carl Clauberg (1898–1957) sterilized several hundred Dutch, Greek, and French Jewish women by means of experimental injections of a fluid designed to seal the Fallopian tubes. The formaldehyde-based fluid was often extremely painful. Clauberg also conducted sterilizations at the end of the war in the Ravensbrueck concentration camp. The Federal German authorities tried to argue that these sterilizations were routine, to avoid paying compensation, but this argument was based on Clauberg having persuaded Heinrich Himmler (1900–45) that his technique was already established. Victims of such experimental sterilizations received single lump-sum compensation rather than a pension. The compensation was calculated on the basis of loss of earnings, so if a victim had a prosperous husband, she was paid nothing.²⁰

The second group of those forcibly sterilized to be compensated were the mainly Polish and Greek male victims of X-ray sterilization. Most had then had one or two testicles removed so that the doctor in charge, a certain Horst Schumann (1906–83), could evaluate the effects of different X-ray doses. The Federal German authorities paid relatively low rates of compensation for such injuries. The Auschwitz surgical registers indicate at least 137 such victims. X-ray sterilization by Schumann at Auschwitz was mentioned at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. One Polish victim gave eloquent testimony in court at the Nuremberg Doctors Trials held from December 1946 to August 1947.²¹ Historian Aleksandra Loewenau has been reconstructing the experience of this victim group.²² As we know from studies of the fate of eugenicists—notably Ruedin, Fritz Lenz (1887–1976), and Otmar von Verschuer (1896–1969)²³—at the end of the war any comprehensive program to purge German medicine of its racial element was realized only very partially.²⁴ Remarkably, the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology was allowed to continue in the American sector of Berlin until 1948.²⁵ The geneticist Hans Nachtsheim (1890–1979) remained in office negotiating at various times with the Soviets and the Americans; Verschuer, who had left Berlin in February 1945 with part of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology’s equipment, attempted to secure an academic post, and Lenz was re-employed at the major British scientific centre of Goettingen in West Germany.²⁶

The American war crimes authorities received information from an agent code-named “Bruno.” On the basis of his information, a report, titled Report on Sterilisation in Germany and Occupied Countries had been written that was forwarded to the Americans by the UN War Crimes Commission; its Czechoslovak representative had received it through a Czechoslovak minister. As it turned out, “Bruno” was Dr. Theo Lang (1898–1957), who at the time was senior medical officer at the Kantonale Heil- und Pflegeanstalt Herisau (County Hospital) in Switzerland. Lang had worked at the German Research Institute for Psychiatry until 1941 and had been one of the founders of the Nazi Physicians’ League, done research on the genetic basis of homosexuality and had been a close associate of Ruedin. Lang now gave information on the political and SS affiliations of eugenicists, particularly those in Munich. The Americans referred to his “ ‘Black List’ of National Socialist criminals,”²⁷ which pointed out that a group of Ruedin’s assistants had been involved not only in X-ray sterilization and euthanasia but also in the assassination of the Austrian chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss (1892–1934). In a series of Swiss newspaper articles Lang suggested that Ruedin’s assistants were primarily SS doctors.²⁸ The KWI (then known as the DFA) for Psychiatry continued although Ruedin was arrested by the Americans and subjected to searching interrogation. In September 1945, Ruedin submitted a memorandum to US authorities outlining his contacts with leading Nazis concerning racial policy and psychiatry. His memorandum played up his tensions with the SS (the Nazi Defence Corps), while conveniently masking the fact that euthanasia was outside the sphere of competence of the SS—ultimately to cast himself in a better light. On June 16, 1946, eminent scientist Max Planck (1858–1947) even petitioned for Ruedin’s release, depicting him as a scientist devoid of political intentions.

Lang’s accusations were countered in a deposition to Rector Georg Hohmann (1880–1970) of the University of Munich on August 24, 1946. Lang was depicted as a grudge-bearing former SA General who in 1940 was excluded from Ruedin’s institute. After the war, Ruedin and his assistant Bruno Schulz (1892–1942) argued that this preeminent Nazi psychiatrist was an opponent of both the SS and euthanasia, as stated in a deposition to the denazification tribunal on May 9, 1949. This overlooked Ruedin’s joint project with the eminent psychiatrist Carl Schneider (1891–1946) of brain research on euthanasia victims in Heidelberg, carried out by Julius Deussen (1906–74), who had been Ruedin’s assistant.²⁹ A victim of forced sterilization and Lang gave evidence in December 1949. In the end, Ruedin was not prosecuted but was apprehended for a considerable period through the pursuit of the Counter Intelligence Corps by the Americans. He was deemed a Mitlaeufer (follower) and ordered by the denazification tribunal to pay costs of 37,500 DM. Ruedin’s detention showed that sterilization measures were regarded as an area of potential criminality.

Neurologist and medical intelligence officer Leo Alexander (1905–85) compiled a Combined Intelligence Operations Services report titled Public Mental Health Practices in Germany: Sterilization and Execution of Patients Suffering from Nervous or Mental Disease, August 1945.³⁰ Alexander here linked sterilization and euthanasia. He returned to his native Germany as medical expert for the prosecution at the Nuremberg trial of twenty physicians and three SS administrators. Certainly, for the Allied prosecution there was no inherent criminality in their previous eugenics programs. Alexander, the chief medical expert for the prosecution, had been a signatory of the American Neurological Society declaration of 1936 on human sterilization. This committee argued for a medically more rigorous eugenic approach to forced sterilization.³¹ Between 1945 and 1947, Alexander changed from regarding the Germans under investigation as former colleagues who could provide potentially valuable medical information on wartime research to viewing them in pathological terms as mentally deranged criminals.

In November 1946, the American prosecutors at Nuremberg collected details of drugs used for procreation and sterilization as well as of doctors involved in sterilization.³² A Staff Evidence Analysis included twenty-six letters from individuals sterilized as a result of verdicts by the hereditary health court for, for example, the remark by a sixteen-year-old girl—“What comes after the Third Reich—the fourth”—or for being part Jewish.³³ As the trial was being prepared, numerous victims of sterilization and racial policy wrote in. One case personally investigated by Alexander was that of a Holocaust survivor named Chaim Balicky, born February 28, 1920, at Dzialaszyoi, Kielce, now at a displaced persons’ camp at Konstanz. Balicky spoke to Alexander about his experiences in Auschwitz and Dachau, where he was sterilized and castrated. On November 22, 1946, he provided the office of the Chief of Counsel for War Crimes with a deposition including eleven photos. Alexander noted Balicky’s traits:

Emotionally this man was deeply hurt and humiliated by his mutilation. He has not yet been able to tell even his own sisters about it. Although all this happened through no fault of his own, he feels deeply ashamed about his castration. He is afraid that his increasing gain of weight and loss of male characteristics are bound to ultimately give him away for the wreck which he has become. He feels that he has no future and has nothing to live for and has had no real life so far, and nothing to really live for ahead of him. At times his thought and emotions overcome him, and he begins to cry when talking about what has happened to him.

When he heard over the radio that the people responsible for the German medical atrocities are going to be tried, he decided that it was his duty to come here and to testify although he is afraid that, esp. if his name is printed in newspapers, his sisters might find out about his condition that way. However, he feels that it is his duty to be helpful in bringing those responsible for the atrocities, to which he and others have been subjected, to justice.

It appears that he is one of 100 young Jewish boys who were castrated for no reason other than to confirm the fact that they had been sterilised by sufficient X-ray radiation as if X-ray burns which resulted from a fifteen-minute exposure were not enough to prove that point. A great many of his fellow sufferers have in the meantime developed cancer of the irradiated skin. While his skin is severely indurated no evidence of cancer is yet discernible.³⁴

The Allied zonal administration found that sterilization was problematic. War crimes prosecutions in the Soviet zone took as their legal basis the notion of crimes against humanity. From November 12 to 14, 1946, a trial of the deputy chair of the National Socialist hereditary health tribunal took place at the court in Schwerin in the Soviet Occupied Zone in East Germany. Indicted were the director of the health office, a medical officer, a member of the sterilization tribunal, and a medical director of a local hospital. Seven doctors were prosecuted for sterilization as a “crime against humanity.”³⁵ The matter was by no means clear cut; after the initial convictions, the sentences were reduced or quashed by a higher court, and the case dragged on.

In the Western Zones, there was a noted lobby—including the public health expert Hans Harmsen (1899–1989), the geneticist Hans Nachtsheim, and the psychiatrist Karl Ludwig Bonhoeffer (1868–1948)—urging a new sterilization law, using the Weimar legislative proposals as a model. There were renewed calls for sterilization in the context of the family policy of the West German government under chancellor Konrad Adenauer (1876–1967). The initial ardour for prosecuting the perpetrators of sterilization and associated research in Nazi Germany dissipated rapidly.

GERMAN COMPENSATION COMPLEXITIES

Compensation for victims of medical experiments was first instituted in 1951.³⁶ At first, the German Federal Finance Ministry provided small amounts to the male victims of X-ray sterilization. A further phase of compensation came with funds provided by Germany to be administered on a devolved basis by the governments of victims’ countries. In contrast to the Federal German allocation, the French tribunal awarded X-ray sterilization victims the highest rate of compensation. The United Nations (UN) had already ratified declarations on genocide and human rights, in 1948, and the UN’s human rights division secured compensation for victims of Nazi human experiments.³⁷ Women’s organizations took up the case of the need for compensation for women victims of the experiments, with particular attention paid to the victims of Ravensbrueck sulphonamide experiments and Clauberg’s inter-uterine sterilization experiments. The UN’s section on women kept a watchful eye on the issue.³⁸ The French survivors’ organization Association nationale des anciennes déportées et internées de la Résistance had a number of women activists working on this issue. Victims had widely dispersed after the war and many nationalities were involved. The UN Commission on the Status of Women adopted at its fourth session in 1950 a resolution calling attention to the plight of women survivors of concentration camps who were subjected to medical experiments. The Economic and Social Council examined the report from the commission and stated that the UN would lend its support to negotiations between the Allied High Commission and the Federal German Government for compensation legislation in Germany for these victims. To this end, the Economic and Social Council adopted resolution 305 (XI) on July 14, 1950. The UN Secretary-General was asked to consider, with the competent authorities and institutions, the means for alleviating the plight of survivors of concentration camps who were victims of the so-called scientific experiments.

While the German authorities could award up to 25,000 DM (ca. 96,000 Euros today), most victims—especially sterilization victims—received a single payment of 3,000 DM (ca. 12,000 Euros today) or less. The UN wanted to compensate pain and suffering, but the Germans insisted on narrower criteria: medical damage to health and loss of earning capacity. This meant that victims of X-ray sterilization received only minimal compensation. Herein lay a bone of contention. Victims wrote about their state of mind and nerves, but this had no effect on the Federal Finance Ministry, which fixated on the earnings issue. Also, women deemed by the German authorities to be “housewives” were further disadvantaged. Victims felt that single, lump-sum payments were of little value. By August 1952, victims were already complaining about the meagre amounts. The UN’s lawyers felt let down and undermined by German bureaucracy. Victims also felt let down. Many victims of compulsory sterilization found that as claimants they did not fit the available categories. One was an Austrian socialist who had left Nazi-occupied Austria for safety in the Netherlands but, after German occupation, was sterilized in Amsterdam.³⁹

The four Allied occupying powers responded differently to sterilization, suspending the operations of the law. Only the Soviets abolished the law, on January 8, 1946, declaring it to be a crime against humanity and attempting to prosecute its perpetrators.⁴⁰ But even in the Soviet zone opinions were divided. Berlin psychiatrist Karl Bonhoeffer, at the Charité, argued that the sterilization law was medical rather than racial. In the Western Occupied Zones the situation remained complex. The British kept the law as valid but did not put it to actual use: this was out of a sense that it would allow victims to make claims for abuses. A renewed campaign for a sterilization law by Harmsen and Nachtsheim in the late 1950s and early 1960s, reflecting a strong alliance of sterilization advocates, aimed to keep sterilization as a eugenic measure in medical hands. In the Federal Republic of Germany during the same period, the 1933 sterilization law was viewed not as a Nazi law but as something comparable to US, Canadian, and Scandinavian laws. It therefore remained on the statute books but was not actively in operation. The League of Persons Damaged by “Euthanasia” and Compulsory Sterilization (Bund der “Euthanasie”–Geschaedigten und Zwangssterilisierten, or BEZ) was founded only in 1987. It has since campaigned for a full repeal of the law and a full apology: both aims have only partially been realized.

German victims of sterilization could from 1953 attempt to claim compensation under a general law for compensation of Nazi victims. This had certain advantages in that a lifelong monthly pension was provided. At first it was open to non-German residents but was rapidly changed to exclude them. All sorts of reasons for refusing any award were given. The first hardship compensation fund specifically for sterilized persons was established by the German Federal minister of finance in 1980, enabling victims of coercive sterilization to receive a one-off payment of 5,000 DM. Since 1988 victims could claim a regular monthly pension of 100 DM (today raised to 120 Euros after the introduction of the Euro in 1999, which is more than twice the amount of the original pension—excluding currency inflation). In September 2014 only 364 victims were claiming this pension.⁴¹ But it has not been just a matter of financial compensation. Victims of sterilization campaigned to be acknowledged as “victims of Nazi persecution,” in order to be included under the Federal German compensation law for Nazi victims. Victims campaigned for the annulment of the Nazi sterilization law. Their success was limited. The law has never been formally abolished. Only the rulings of the heredity courts were declared to be a Nazi injustice in 1988. Finally, in 2007, the Bundestag declared that the Nazi sterilization law of July 1933 was not constitutionally valid. By December 31, 2007, sterilization victims had submitted 3,696 applications for compensation. Of these, 2,100 were rejected—meaning that of the approximately 350,000 Nazi sterilization victims, fewer than 1 percent of cases were compensated. In 2011 compensation was extended to children of “euthanasia” victims. Clearly the compensation came late, and few were compensated. Moreover, the German situation remains unsatisfactory because of the lack of full acknowledgment that sterilization was a Nazi injustice.⁴²

A later round of compensation payments became possible between 1998 and 2004. The German Foundation for Memory, Responsibility and the Future (Stiftung Erinnerung, Verantwortung und Zukunft) was founded primarily to compensate forced labourers with funds from industry and the state in Germany. Because of class actions against German pharmaceutical firms, the foundation provided compensation for victims who could make a “plausible” case as victims of what were called “other personal injuries.”⁴³ This allowed non-German victims to make claims; however, given that sterilization victims in Auschwitz were exclusively Jewish, it made only a marginal difference. One Jewish victim went public denouncing the initial payment for lifelong sterilization as an insult and as humiliating.⁴⁴ Other claims were challenged because locations such as Dachau and Majdanek were not known as locations of experimental sterilizations. Claims brought by the The League of Persons Damaged by “Euthanasia” and Compulsory Sterilization (BEZ) were for the most part rejected.

INTERNATIONAL FAILURES

The German and central European case can be put into a wider international perspective. In comparison, coerced sterilization continued in Sweden until the mid-1960s, but the law there was finally repealed only in 2012. The Canadian province of Alberta repealed its 1928 Sexual Sterilization Act only in 1972. Coerced sterilization found an echo in population control programs fuelled by the ideology of a global population explosion in the Cold War period. Certain Indian states have been the targets of programs that were nominally voluntary yet in practice have involved high levels of coercion. China’s one-child policy remains the most notorious biopolitical project. Social and ethnic minorities such as Indigenous peoples and the Nordic Sami (formerly known as Lapps) have also been vulnerable to sterilization. However, global population thinking has become less intervention-oriented since the late 1960s, and vasectomy has become an accepted form of voluntary contraception in the West. From the 1980s onwards, it has been increasingly realized, female education and career opportunities and rising prosperity resulted in many couples choosing to have one or two children or to remain childless. Disability rights campaigners have extended the positive acceptance of the variety of physical and mental states. The biological notion of schizophrenia was questioned by radical psychiatrists, and from the 1970s, medications have been found to be more effective than earlier in the management of mental disorders. Few countries have provided compensation apart from Sweden.⁴⁵ In the United States, only North Carolina has done so, for persons still alive to make a claim, and of the two Canadian provinces where sterilizations took place based on provincial law, compensation claims have succeeded only in the Alberta courts. In contrast, Austria has not had a specific scheme but has provided compensation under its generic Nazi Victims Law (Opferfuersorgegesetz) rather than specifically for sterilization victims. Switzerland decided not to compensate, despite the lobbying for it, and this appears to be the case also for Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. In any case, one can ask, what sum of money could possibly compensate for the loss of reproductive autonomy?

A major defect in all compensation schemes is that the authorities generally assess official documentation without taking into account doctors who simply went ahead to sterilize. An important study of an obstetric clinic in Finland found a large number of sterilizations in the clinic’s records for which authorization under the law had not been obtained.⁴⁶ In Switzerland there were cantons where sterilizations were carried out without any legislative framework.⁴⁷ Much of the debate on sterilization as a Nazi war crime was first shaped and then marginalized by the onset of the Cold War. Alexander, the neurologist, saw sterilization and euthanasia as manifestations of totalitarianism. In 1949 he commented, “The killing center is the education ad absurdum of all health planning based only on rational principles and economy and not on humane compassion and divine law.”⁴⁸ Indeed, he warned that “euthanasia and the belief in utility posed severe dangers to American medicine.”⁴⁹ The abuses concerning sterilization were inadequately addressed in the postwar period. For the most part, sterilization as a Nazi measure escaped scrutiny. It initially looked as though a serious effort might be made to mount a case against the German eugenicists, but this effort had dissipated by 1948.

In conclusion, the best redress was—where possible—operative re-fertilization. The medical and psychiatric neglect of victims meant that the medical profession effectively condoned the mass sterilizations. Where there was financial compensation, the delivery has been lamentably late, and the low sums hardly compensate for childlessness for those who would have wished to have children. One consequence is unfortunately that the uptake of the compensation program was and is by only a fairly small proportion of the original victims. Delays have meant victims have died—and by definition there cannot be heirs.