One of the more gruesome legacies of Auschwitz-Birkenau is the “liquidation” of the Zigeunerlager (Gypsy camp) on the night of August 2, 1944. As many as 4,300 Sinti and RomaFootnote 1 prisoners who had not already died from starvation or disease were rounded up and forced into the gas chambers.Footnote 2 The focus of this article falls on a group of Sinti veteran soldiers that was spared the massacre but became the target of sterilization five months later. Still strong enough to serve the Nazis as slave labor or as cannon fodder against the advancing Russians, these veterans were promised release from captivity if they agreed to sterilization. Two hundred thirteen of them, all but fourteen German citizens, were transported along with their family members via Buchenwald to Ravensbrück, where some forty of the men and boys were sterilized in January 1945 by Franz Lucas, the SS camp doctor in the men's camp.
This event has long remained a footnote even in the major studies of Nazi sterilization policy on Sinti and Roma.Footnote 3 Nevertheless, except for Michael Zimmermann's groundbreaking study, which acknowledges that Lucas sterilized the Wehrmacht veterans at Ravensbrück after failing to do so in Birkenau, most accounts merely acknowledge in passing that sterilization occurred and that Lucas was the culprit, without referring in any detail to his victims.Footnote 4 Understandably, sterilizations on Sinti and Roma women and girls have drawn more lament, especially given girls as young as eight years old were forced to undergo excruciating “operation-less” methods carried out by Dr. Carl Clauberg and his colleagues.Footnote 5 Many such experiments were inflicted on family members of the veterans transported from Auschwitz. Although Lucas's gynecological training, as we will see, prepared him to sterilize women late in the war, my interest here remains on his sterilizations in the men's camp of Ravensbrück, where negative racial eugenics ran no less rampant.
Why has the forced sterilization of Sinti and Roma received so little attention? Is it possible to reconstruct the context of such crimes so long after the fact? How have Sinti and Roma been forced to relive their trauma during the postwar years? To answer these questions, I begin with a summary of how Nazi policies of sterilization and deportation affected the group of Sinti soldiers in question. I then report on how Lucas's training at the juncture of medicine and racial hygiene prepared him to perform sterilizations on some forty of the 213 men whose names we know.Footnote 6 Next, I turn my attention to the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial (1963–65). Despite its title, with regard to the defendant, Franz Lucas, this trial brought testimony of Ravensbrück survivors to the fore. The Sinti war veterans among them identified him as the sterilizing doctor at Ravensbrück, while others either downplayed or concealed his role in sterilizations. Not surprisingly, Lucas himself was too busy denying charges to bring much clarity to the question. Instead, to fill in the gaps of January 1945, one must consult such sources as depositions and interrogations from the pretrial investigation of Carl Clauberg in Kiel in 1956.Footnote 7 In my conclusion, I discuss reasons for the ongoing trauma of sterilization survivors and the reluctance of the German government to offer them compensation.
Forced Sterilization of Sinti and Roma
From the beginning through to the very end of the Third Reich, the biological war to purify the Volksgemeinschaft (ethnic community) of its impure elements was waged both within and beyond Germany's borders. The battle against internal enemies began with the Gesetz zur Verhütung erbkranken Nachwuchses (Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Genetic Diseases, GzVeN) on July 14, 1933,Footnote 8 and ended only with Germany's defeat on May 8, 1945. Eugenic experts, criminal police, and ministries under Hitler and Himmler used sterilization and deportation as weapons to eradicate all aliens of the Volk from German territory and the Aryan bloodline.Footnote 9 Eugenic policy turned aggressive on the eve of war, thanks to the Reichszentrale zur Bekämpfung des Zigeunerunwesens (Reich Office for Combating the Gypsy Menace), created in May 1938 as a division of the Reichskriminalpolizeiamt (Reich Criminal Police Office, RKPA) under Arthur Nebe, which joined forces in Berlin with the Rassenhygienische und bevölkerungsbiologische Forschungsstelle (Race Hygienic Research Branch, RHF), headed by Robert Ritter.Footnote 10 With branches in major cities, the criminal police enforced Ritter's research in Berlin. As his staff began assessments countrywide, the Kripo forced Sinti and Roma into containment camps. Registering them as criminals meant measuring, fingerprinting, photographing, and interrogating them.Footnote 11
Isolating Sinti and Roma in camps facilitated the first major deportations. Less than a year after Germany's invasion of Poland, the RSHA (Reichssicherheitshauptamt, Reich Main Security Office) deported Gypsies along with Jews into the occupied territory (General Government) in May 1940, with set quotas for deportees from major German hubs.Footnote 12 Ritter doubted that deportation alone could solve the “Gypsy problem” unless attached to sterilization and forced labor. As Karola Fings argues, Ritter's ideology framed the Gypsy problem as a “Mischling problem.” Some 90 percent of Gypsies were from mixed races, some with more German blood than others. Adamant that Mischlinge were predisposed to commit more crimes than pure-blooded Gypsies, Ritter put his staff to work to prove the pattern by assessing blood purity.Footnote 13
Racial assessments identified potential threats to the ethnic community, Ritter believed, and helped prove that crime “slumbered in the genes.”Footnote 14 Gypsy Mischlinge were the “criminal-biological” breeding grounds for crime.Footnote 15 Ritter supposed that dangerous criminals were born to parents who were both carriers of deviance. Gypsies became biologically dangerous when they had children with non-Gypsy Germans because they chose German partners who inhabited the lowest societal rungs. The asocial nature of both parents produced a volatile product in the form of Mischlinge who entered the criminal gene pool.Footnote 16 Ritter's genetic model explains his insistence on sterilizing “crime-breeders” and the zeal with which Kripo branches carried out the task.
Gutachten (assessments) were the tangible instruments for carrying out the racial agenda, marked by five blood categories: Z (Zigeuner), ZM+ (Zigeunermischling with mostly Gypsy blood), ZM (equal parts Gypsy and German blood), ZM– (mostly German blood), and NZ (Nicht-Zigeuner, which applied to Gypsy-like vagrants or was used to denote sterilized Gypsies). Blood categories mapped onto Gypsy subgroups. Out of 18,904 racial assessments the RHF had made by November 1942 for Gypsies in Germany, 1,079 were classified as full or pure Gypsies, 1,017 as Lalleri, 1,585 as Roma, 211 as Balkan Gypsies, and 2,652 as non-Gypsies. This left 12,360 assessments for “Gypsy Mischlinge.”Footnote 17
The limited purge in May 1940 did not make use of Ritter's blood categories. Himmler's sordid Auschwitz decree of December 16, 1942, did, however. Roma, Balkan Gypsies, and Mischlinge were ordered deported to the Zigeunerlager in Auschwitz-Birkenau, where extinction through labor awaited most of them. Other “Gypsy persons” had a chance, along with their spouses and children, to escape deportation if they were either foreign nationals, married to a German, showed gainful employment and residency, or were needed in the munitions industry. For the purposes here, deportation exempted “Gypsy-like persons who are still in military service or were discharged from military service during the current war after being injured or decorated,” along with their spouses and children.Footnote 18 Nevertheless, sterilization was forced on Mischlinge twelve years and older who were allowed to stay in Germany. Refusing to sign consent forms for Unfruchtbarmachung (making infertile) meant joining those persons already deported. Exempted from both deportation and sterilization were only “pure” and “Lalleri” Gypsies.Footnote 19 As Fings has shown, there is reason to suspect that top officials involved in discussions of deportation and mass sterilization of Jews also lent their expertise to isolating Gypsy groups on the basis of racial purity assessments.Footnote 20
Along with the RKPA, the office with the authority of Hitler's chancellery for implementing the Auschwitz decree was the Reichsausschuß zur wissenschaftlichen Erfassung von erb- und anlagebedingten schweren Leiden (Reich Committee for the Scientific Registration of Severe Genetic Ailments).Footnote 21 After directing the euthanasia of children deemed unworthy of life, its responsibilities came to include carrying out sterilizations of Mischlinge inside and outside of the concentration camps.Footnote 22 Although some five hundred Sinti and Roma had undergone sterilization on the basis of referral in the years following the GzVeN, the number of victims jumped to a figure between 2,000 and 2,500 following the Auschwitz decree.Footnote 23
As mentioned, Sinti soldiers who had been in active service had a chance along with their families to avoid deportation. In practice, though, some local Kripo were as eager to rid their municipality of Sinti as commanders were to keep them in the Wehrmacht, despite directives ordering the discharge of “racial aliens.” Because soldiers with proven records of bravery were now considered incapable of bravery on the basis of race, it took the protection of their commanders to keep them in the ranks. In addition, as late as the end of 1942, Sinti who had enlisted without a racial assessment escaped the attention of authorities on the lookout for “Gypsy-like” traits. Directives in the summer of 1942 demonstrated a more serious effort to expel Sinti still in the field.Footnote 24
Following their discharge, Sinti soldiers returned to families now contained in camps meant to educate toward “labor, order, and discipline” and to protect the greater Aryan community against criminality and disease.Footnote 25 It was from such camps that entire families of Mischlinge were deported to the Zigeunerlager in Birkenau. A spotless criminal record, regular occupation, and stability decreased the odds of deportation. Still, even an assessment showing Gypsy blood purity, marriage to a pure-blooded German, or heroic service in the armed forces was inadequate if RKPA authorities considered deportation justified.Footnote 26 Hence, former soldiers were among those deported on the basis of minor misdemeanors. On the local Kripo level, racial assessments served as a nonbinding guide for assessing whether “good” blood predicted good behavior. The selection process also privileged personal relationships, the social status of the potential victims, and the conviction of the decision-makers. Kripo branches erred on the side of deporting more, not fewer real and potential criminals.Footnote 27
As a component of the “total war” that was waged on the internal front, deportations in early spring of 1943 continued what had begun with the May 1940 roundups and deportations.Footnote 28 Just because local authorities interpreted Auschwitz deportation exceptions in their best interests does not mean that they considered Himmler's decree arbitrary and irrational. On the one hand, a local Kripo official spared from deportation a family whose Mischling father was a veteran.Footnote 29 On the other hand, a group of a hundred Sinti soldiers, many of them recognized for their bravery during battles in Crimea and Crete, was transferred directly from frontline military units to the Birkenau Zigeunerlager.Footnote 30 The Sinti and Roma sent to the gas chamber on August 2, 1944, included Italiana Petermann and her son; she was married to a German fighting on the eastern front. The German Helene Hannemann was with her five children in the Zigeunerlager. Her Sinto husband, a sergeant on the eastern front, could not be extracted and sent to Birkenau. On the day of the Zigeunerlager roundup, Hannemann and her children tried to hide but were thrown in among the others.Footnote 31
In his memoir, Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss claimed that the Zigeunerlager Gypsies were too simple and trusting to see their end coming.Footnote 32 On the contrary, argue Helena Kubica and Piotr Setkiewicz, Sinti and Roma could not help but interpret an SS plan in early April 1944 to select young and strong Sinti and Roma for industrial labor in a camp in Germany as a planned murder on them as well. They had witnessed the murder of Jews in the Theresienstadt family camp (BIIb) on March 7, 1944, because the Zigeunerlager adjoined the crematoria.Footnote 33 Presuming that the deception deployed against the Jews was now directed at them, they passively resisted the order to leave for Germany.Footnote 34
Some 2,300 Sinti and Roma were selected in the second half of May 1944 for labor in Germany and were deported in early June. Earlier in the month, Arthur Nebe had broached with Himmler the idea of sterilization and war service for the Sinti soldiers in the camp.Footnote 35 Then, on May 17, 1944, prisoners who served as clerks in the Zigeunerlager began registering the men and their families who had served in the military or were still serving there.Footnote 36 Soldiers who agreed to be sterilized were relocated with their families from Birkenau to Blocks 10 and 11 of Auschwitz. Later in court, Franz Lucas, who had substituted for Josef Mengele as camp doctor of the Zigeunerlager for various periods after arriving at Auschwitz-Birkenau in mid-December 1943, took credit for the idea of relocating the veterans—“I counted it a success for me that they got pulled out at all”—but did not bother to mention that sterilization had been the stipulation. Lucas had long claimed that his requests to improve appalling conditions in the Zigeunerlager met with Commandant Fritz Hartjenstein's advice to stop fretting about issues involving “only Gypsies.”Footnote 37
Also speaking in court, the Sinto Bruno Stein remembered that Lucas was behind the sterilization-for-freedom proposal announced during a morning roll call in Birkenau.Footnote 38 Because Lucas's attention was directed toward other priorities such as ramp selections during his final two months in Auschwitz-Birkenau, the sterilizations had to be postponed until Lucas saw the same soldiers again. On July 31, 1,621 Sinti and Roma left Auschwitz-Birkenau on a transport.Footnote 39 Most were bound for Buchenwald, but 213 of them arrived at Ravensbrück, including the veterans slated for sterilization. Two days later, on the night of August 2, the 4,200–4,300 prisoners left behind in the Zigeunerlager were rounded up and murdered in the gas chambers.Footnote 40
It is unknown whether Lucas assisted his colleagues in the massacre, which came only four days before his marching orders to Mauthausen. At any rate, his name does not appear on the accounts.Footnote 41 After assignments in Mauthausen and Stutthof, Lucas arrived in Ravensbrück on December 15, 1944. He began sterilizing the Sinti men and boys two weeks later. Whether he was assigned to Ravensbrück to complete his Auschwitz task is open to question. If his plan had been to sterilize a larger number than the forty Sinti ascribed to him by witnesses, other distractions may have prevented him from doing so, just as selecting prisoners had demanded his attention in Auschwitz. By his own account, the order to select sick prisoners for extermination in the adjoining youth camp Uckermark was the main reason for the interruption. Lucas's transfer to Sachsenhausen on February 28, 1945 came three days before the transfer of Sinti veterans there. A month later, most of them were fighting in the outmanned Dirlewanger brigade against the Russians at the Oder River and in the woods surrounding Berlin.Footnote 42
Franz Lucas and the Disappearance of Sterilization from Postwar Courts
Sterilization disappeared from the postwar trial horizon because it was no longer covered by the statute of limitations after 1955. Murder, on the other hand, was prosecutable for twenty years after the war's end. Therefore, unless death resulted from forced sterilization, sterilization was rarely broached in the courtroom and all but disappeared from legal scrutiny. SS-Obersturmführer Franz Bernhard Lucas (1911–1994) was trained to both prevent and cause sterility.Footnote 43 In 1933, he began his study of medicine in Münster and entered the SA. In 1937, he transferred to Rostock and joined both the Nazi Party and the SS. After moving to Danzig in 1939, he wrote a dissertation, passed the state exam in July 1942, and received his medical license two months later. Upon joining the Waffen-SS, he received five weeks of training at its Military Medical Academy in Graz. In January 1943, he reported to Nuremberg to serve as a junior doctor for the troops of a Waffen-SS signal corps and an SS military hospital.Footnote 44 Orders from Berlin in October 1943 sent him to an SS paratrooper unit in Chlum, near Belgrade, to serve as a troop doctor. His camp duties began in mid-December 1943 when he arrived at Auschwitz. There his responsibilities included stints as camp doctor of the Zigeunerlager (BIIe) and the Theresienstadt family camp (BIIb) in Birkenau. In early August 1944, he was transferred to Mauthausen, from where he left in the second half of October for Stutthof. If scarcely any testimonies mention him at either Mauthausen or Stutthof, it may be because his transfer to each new camp always coincided with its transformation into a killing center.Footnote 45 His service in Ravensbrück occurred between mid-December 1944 and the last day of February 1945.
Lucas made use of his gynecological training in all camps, but especially at Ravensbrück. Care of prisoners was subordinate to concern for the German Volk, which demanded the SS doctor's full attention. The sterilization of prisoners contradicted the objectives outlined in Lucas's pro-eugenic dissertation, “Symptomatologie, Diagnose und Therapie der Extrauteringravidität” (Symptomatology, Diagnosis, and Therapy of Ectopic Pregnancy), which he completed at the Danzig Medical Academy in 1942. Although sterilization plays only a peripheral role, his conclusion, which proposes a “population-political” solution to the urgent social problems of gonorrhea and ectopic pregnancies, suggests the significance of his growing task of keeping Aryan women in prime gynecological health.Footnote 46 In the Nazi “battle of births,” treating sterility or fostering sterilization existed in tandem.Footnote 47
The Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial of 1963–1965 focused attention on Lucas's ramp selections at Birkenau, not on his sterilizations at Ravensbrück. For well over a year, Lucas denied the charge of selecting prisoners, until his quasi-confession on March 11, 1965, depicted him as carrying out orders under duress—a well-worn defense trope indicating the persistence of his deception. His sentence on August 19, 1965, for accessory to murder, three years and three months, was based on the charge of selecting four transports carrying one thousand prisoners apiece. In his appearance before a different trial court in 1970, he argued that fear for his life made it impossible for him to resist the criminal orders of his superiors in the spring of 1944. Claiming an inability to disprove Lucas's putative superior orders defense, the court authored a final statement stronger in its justification of obedience under duress than even Lucas himself had produced.Footnote 48 After acquittal Lucas returned to civilian life and private medical practice in Elmshorn.
Lucas's involvement in sterilization, which by 1963 had long ceased being prosecutable, received less attention.Footnote 49 Ironically, Lucas's sentence for accessory-to-murder crimes at Auschwitz was shorter than what he would have received for sterilizing prisoners had that particular charge been brought forward before the ten-year statute of limitations barred prosecution in 1955. Any sterilization information supplied by testimony fell under the rubric of prisoner selection. Although the trial was the catalyst for bringing sterilization into the open, the depositions that either identified or downplayed Lucas's role as sterilizer originated long before witnesses appeared in court. In practical terms, the prosecution used incriminatory testimony to dispute the character profile provided by exculpatory testimony from Ravensbrück survivors and to rebut the claim of the defense that Lucas had behaved in the same benevolent way at Auschwitz as he did later at Ravensbrück. Adjunct Prosecutor Christian Raabe suggested: “Should the witness's allegation be confirmed that he was indeed sterilized by Dr. Lucas in Ravensbrück, then the entire personality image we have received so far from Dr. Lucas would change, especially his admission about his attitude toward the prisoners in Auschwitz and in the later camps such as Ravensbrück, and the credibility of his admission would appear in a completely different light.”Footnote 50 Indeed, ethnic prisoners targeted by Lucas's eugenic actions gave the best rejoinders to political prisoners who had benefitted from Lucas's Hippocratic actions on their behalf. This dynamic of exculpatory praise followed by incriminatory testimony sets up the discussion that follows. Asking how Ravensbrück survivors have remembered sterilization helps balance news of Lucas's kindness toward some prisoners with discoveries of his ruthlessness toward others.
The Viewpoint of Political Prisoners
The Frankfurt Auschwitz trial challenged the positive narrative of Lucas's character that Ravensbrück prisoners had established in early 1945 and that had remained untouched until complaints by Sinti and Roma survivor witnesses emerged in 1960. Political prisoners, both male and female, considered Lucas's crimes trivial when compared with the legacy of other SS doctors at Ravensbrück, especially Benno Orendi, Rolf Rosenthal, Adolf Winkelmann, Richard Trommer, and Percy Treite. Efforts to bring those doctors to justice coincided with efforts to shield Lucas from blame. Erika Buchmann, for example, block-elder for Block 10 in Ravensbrück during Lucas's work with tuberculosis patients, spoke out as one of the political prisoners to whom Lucas smuggled food and medicine in early 1945. Two months after the camp was liberated, eight Buchmann-led communist prisoners issued a press release that Lucas had resisted all efforts to harm prisoners and deserved treatment in accord with his courage.Footnote 51 Buchmann repeated this message in her influential small book Die Frauen von Ravensbrück,Footnote 52 which Kurt Hinrichsen of the Zentrale Stelle used to convince a district attorney that Lucas's actions in the men's camp would not have differed from his actions in the women's camp.Footnote 53
A year before Buchmann's book, the prominent Norwegian prisoner Sylvia Salvesen had published her memoir Forgive–But Do Not Forget, featuring a short adulatory chapter on Lucas: “A strong man had fought an inner battle between his conscience and that which had been implanted in his mind from childhood, namely a blind obedience to orders.”Footnote 54 Buchmann and Salvesen both argued that Lucas had brought hope to prisoners by refusing to continue the harm wrought by his fellow SS physicians. Their comrades who testified in Frankfurt—Louise Le Porz, Cäcile Neideck, Helene Schwesig, Margareta Armbruster, Johanna Dyer (and Karl Gerber from the men's camp)—were mostly wartime medical assistants who further strengthened the image of Lucas's resistance.
Nevertheless, Lucas's supporters made little mention in either books or trial testimony of his role in sterilization. In a deposition filed in 1946 against most of the Ravensbrück SS defendants standing trial in Hamburg, Gerda Schröder, the former Nazi nurse to whom Salvesen also devoted a book chapter, cited Carl Clauberg's role in sterilizing thirty to fifty Sinti children in late December 1944, along with “about thirty sterilizations” she helped Percy Treite perform during the months of 1944. Her deposition lists Lucas only in passing as one of the doctors on staff.Footnote 55 Under questioning in 1963 in Itzehoe, Schröder disclosed that she had assisted Lucas in his operations on women—not sterilizations—in the camp hospital, stating that he did not operate on male patients.Footnote 56 Nothing about his involvement in sterilizations emerged under interrogation. If Schröder was not just Lucas's assistant but also his lover, it is understandable that she would quietly divert attention from sterilizations toward benevolence.Footnote 57 In her role as a Nazi nurse, Schröder assisted at the sterilizations, according to Margareta Armbruster, a prisoner nurse and nun who cared for young girls after sterilization. But Armbruster insisted that Lucas participated only under pressure from Dr. Trommer and Dr. Treite.Footnote 58 “As far as I know, Dr. Lucas was not involved in experiments. On the other hand, he was present at sterilizations of women. How this was carried out, I cannot say. This [i.e., the sterilization of women] was carried out by the doctors and Nazi nurses.”Footnote 59 Predictably, during his own Itzehoe interrogation four months after Armbruster's, Lucas denied sterilizing women prisoners.Footnote 60
Like Armbruster, French ethnologist Germaine Tillion remembered Lucas as a good and honest doctor who nevertheless “personally practiced systematic sterilization of Gypsies, without discussion, without a murmur, and apparently without remorse.”Footnote 61 Her judgment is a reminder that a kind doctor was capable of sterilizing the women and men considered by the Nazis as “unworthy of life.” Armbruster and Tillion thus extended Lucas's sterilization role to encompass women prisoners, including Sinti and Roma. Still, few specific testimonies from Lucas's prisoner assistants support that charge because prisoner doctors and nurses were usually denied access to abortions and sterilizations in the women's camp at Ravensbrück.Footnote 62 There also appear to be no accusations from female Ravensbrück survivors who were forced to undergo operations by Lucas. With the exception of Armbruster and Tillion, then, most political prisoners in the women's camp at Ravensbrück offered positive testimony of their treatment at Lucas's hands, but downplayed his sterilization role if they knew about it at all.
The men's camp offers more specific information about the sterilization of male Sinti prisoners. Two of its political prisoners, Conrad Finkelmeier and Karl Gerber, highlighted Lucas's resistance and shifted the blame for Sinti plight onto the prisoners themselves. In his memoir Die braune Apokalypse of 1947, Finkelmeier, a communist secretary for the men's hospital, mentions Lucas only as the one who resisted selections for the newly constructed gas chamber. He recalls that after Ravensbrück commandant Fritz Suhren and chief doctor Richard Trommer announced sterilization as the condition for freedom, Sinti veterans were harder to dissuade from the operation than their children: “Only three of them had the courage to accept the consequences of refusal … among them a fifteen-year-old, who explained to the doctor that he would never submit to sterilization and would kill anyone who attempted to force it upon him. The Gypsies were sterilized, including even children of the age of ten and twelve years.”Footnote 63 Finkelmeier did not name the doctor in question.
From 1946 to 1948, Karl Gerber reconstructed events from notes he had taken in Ravensbrück. He recalled that because the Gypsies had been tricked in the past, they were skeptical of well-meaning advice from the SS leadership. Instead, they kept trusting that their German status left them better off than Jews. “They waited and waited until one day the camp leadership again promised their release, and then had only to declare themselves willing for their sterilization.”Footnote 64 Suhren, in charge of recruiting them to fight, described the life of the soldier in glowing colors. Despite being admonished by prisoner doctors such as Dr. Frantizek Šíl, hospital aides, Finkelmeier, and Lucas to wait three months until the war was over, and instead of considering themselves immune from the GzVeN, “the skeptical Gypsies acted out of fear, in effect giving their signature to request their own infertility.”Footnote 65
Gerber must have been unaware of the eugenic sterilizations Sinti and Roma were forced to undergo in the wake of the GzVeN. If in 1934 they were among the so-called “feebleminded” who were referred to the genetic courts, a decade later criminal police were hunting down Sinti and Roma to assess, register, and sterilize them. Such a distinction was lost on Gerber, who considered Lucas a rare SS supporter of communist prisoners caught between confused Sinti prisoners and his impatient boss, Dr. Trommer. In a letter to the Frankfurt State Attorney's Office that expressed gratitude to Lucas, Gerber noted that the Gypsy prisoners had expressed hope that an incised seminal duct could be restored with a tubal insert.Footnote 66
Finkelmeier, whom Gerber recommended as a witness, recalled that Lucas had resisted Trommer and ordered him, Finkelmeier, to administer a declaration in triplicate for the Gypsies to sign testifying to their voluntary submission. A young Sinto had threatened to strike any doctor who dared touch him, drawing Lucas's praise for being brave enough to refuse the procedure. According to Finkelmeier, pressure from the Sinti below and from Trommer above forced Lucas's hand.Footnote 67 It cost Lucas enormous effort: “While he could not prevent the voluntary sterilization of the male Gypsies due to their expressed willingness, he did strictly refuse to sterilize children.”Footnote 68 In saying so, however, Finkelmeier reversed an assertion from his memoir. At that time, in 1947, he had listed children among the sterilization victims; by 1964, however, he was exempting Lucas from responsibility for their sterilization.
Gerber appeared before the Frankfurt court in January 1965 to testify that one day he had witnessed Lucas perform six sterilizations. “But I have to say that we sabotaged this with all possible means. First, there were no beds or means for sanitization there. And I know that Dr. Trommer was the one who insisted on it [i.e., the forced sterilizations under unsanitary conditions], that there were differences [i.e., of opinion], and that neither Lucas nor Šíl wanted it, nor did we.”Footnote 69 The claim that Commandant Suhren pressured the Sinti to sign the sterilization release forms was also made by Helena Gustawa Winkovska, Lucas's prisoner secretary in the Ravensbrück women's hospital.Footnote 70 Before a French court in Rastatt in early 1950, Suhren not only denied any role in sterilizations, but maintained that the sterilizations at the end of 1944 were carried out by Professor Clauberg on no more than twenty-five to thirty men and women. Suhren's absurd estimate falls far short of Clauberg's own figures. Suhren also tried to absolve Ravensbrück chief doctor Richard Trommer, whose job description included reporting on the steps he was taking to sterilize erbkranke (genetically sick) prisoners.Footnote 71 Whether Trommer's purview extended to large-scale sterilization campaigns is unknown.
Under questioning by State Attorney Albrecht in Kiel beginning on August 31, 1956, Clauberg attributed the sterilization orders to Dr. Enno Lolling, head of the Medical Office D-III of the SS-WVHA (Wirtschaftsverwaltungshauptamt, SS Main Economic and Administrative Office). Clauberg claimed that he agreed to sterilize seventy women because Lolling had assured him of their release afterward. In his view, the women had refused sterilization out of fear, leaving their extermination the only option for the SS. He proudly announced that his method would save their lives, just as it had in Auschwitz.Footnote 72 Clauberg thought that the number seventy included the women's spouses in the men's camp, making around thirty-five in each camp who were sterilized.Footnote 73 He was not prompted to say anything more about the men. Clauberg admitted only to watching his colleague Dr. Goebel perform the first few of forty transcervical procedures on Sinti and Roma women on a weekend in early January 1945, before driving himself back to Berlin.Footnote 74 Clauberg claimed not to have met Lucas's colleague Dr. Percy Treite or to have spoken with any doctors at Ravensbrück about his special method. Whatever else is true, it at least appears that Clauberg, Suhren, and Treite all agreed that the January sterilizations were not based on GzVeN health edicts.Footnote 75 The orders likely originated in the Zigeunerlager at the time when able-bodied prisoners were selected for labor and service and thus escaped the fate of the feebler prisoners. Ravensbrück camp leaders expedited their sterilizations just before ordering them to Sachsenhausen.
I have argued that a cohort of mostly political prisoners assisted Lucas in the women's camp at Ravensbrück. They paid back the kindness he showed them by offering testimony on his behalf. Functionaries in the men's camp were more forthcoming about Lucas's sterilization activity but considered it less important than the benevolent deeds that earned him the respect of the communist prisoners. Postwar interrogation testimony from Nazis such as Carl Clauberg and Fritz Suhren passed off the responsibility for either ordering or carrying out the orders for sterilization, and neither named Lucas. In all of these considerations, the most important voice proved to be that of the Sinti prisoners, whose charges I address now in tandem with Lucas's responses.
Incriminatory Testimony by Sinti Prisoners
Sterilization measures reassured Nazi leadership that their internal enemies would be infertile even if lucky enough to survive deployment as suicide commandos. For Sinti to avoid sterilization required a mixture of cunning, luck, appeals, service in work details, or capitalizing on the distractions facing Lucas and his staff. For Bruno Stein, who had avoided sterilization in Birkenau and Ravensbrück, the memory was still vivid twenty years later in court, when he named two brothers in Bavaria who had not escaped the operation.Footnote 76 After identifying Lucas from the lineup of defendants, Stein continued weeping into the witness microphone—as the audiotape reproduces vividly—long after Raabe began questioning Lucas.Footnote 77 Stein's appearance in the last full month of the trial verified that sterilization left psychological scars on the entire Sinti community, not just on the immediate victims.
Still, the most alarming testimony against Lucas had already appeared in the pretrial phase from a Sinto who bore the literal scars. In a statement offered to the Zentrale Stelle in Ludwigsburg in August 1960, Heinrich Schenk recalled being sent to the Political Division in Ravensbrück to sign a form, and a few days later not being ordered to work as usual:
The men were sent to the hospital and sterilized one after the other. My turn came on January 10, 1945. The surgery was performed by the SS doctor Lucas, Obersturmführer, who cut through my vas deferens from the outside. The operation clearly served Dr. Lucas as an experiment, because we were not given any local anesthetic. Once the wounds were healed, Dr. Lucas came to rip them apart again, in order to see how it looked now on the inside. When I protested and said that I was in pain, he answered me with, “Be quiet, you swine.” While the average surgery patient was released after a few days, I myself remained in sickbay for around six weeks.Footnote 78
Under questioning by Itzehoe state attorney Völker three years after his statement, Schenk indicated having known about Lucas in Auschwitz before being transported to Ravensbrück. He had not witnessed Lucas selecting for the gas chamber or beating prisoners, but insisted that his own sterilization without anesthetic was no exception to Lucas's merciless treatment of prisoners.Footnote 79 Shown Erika Buchmann's glowing vindication of Lucas from Frauen von Ravensbrück, Schenk conceded that Lucas had probably treated women less roughly than men like himself.Footnote 80 Seemingly without vengeance, Schenk's testimony identified a double standard in Lucas's behavior toward female functionaries versus the soldiers and their male relatives he was obliged to sterilize.Footnote 81
As early as the pretrial interrogations, Lucas had claimed that his few sterilizations were authorized by the Genetic Health Court.Footnote 82 He could not counter the objection that a verdict of the Genetic Health Court would not have applied to prisoners of a concentration camp.Footnote 83 To be sure, documents were likely involved—most likely RHF assessments or Reichsausschuß initiatives (which considered itself the highest tribunal for such decisions). What is indisputable is Lucas's reluctance, thanks to his prerogative as a defendant, to acknowledge the true number of his victims and the pain they suffered. Confronted with Schenk's testimony, Lucas admitted the possibility that he had sterilized him, but not without anesthetic—and certainly not while calling him a swine and later ripping apart his incisions.Footnote 84 Adamant that no scientific or medical knowledge came from ripping open a vasectomy scar, he ventured that Schenk was attributing brutality to the wrong doctor. Lucas also claimed not to remember the witness Margareta Armbruster, who in her statement had recalled Lucas's sterilization of women. Ultimately, Völker dropped the case against Lucas in Itzehoe on November 28, 1963, because the crime was no longer prosecutable twenty years later.Footnote 85
During his appearance in court on July 16, 1964, the Sinto Paul Morgenstern surprised the presiding judge by reporting that Lucas was the camp doctor in Ravensbrück and had sterilized him on January 4, 1945. “We went from Auschwitz to Ravensbrück in August, and in January 45 Dr. Lucas sterilized the men and children in the men's camp, and Carl Clauberg was in the women's camp. He sterilized the women and children.” Morgenstern included his then-wife among Clauberg's victims. He also recalled that Lucas, the sole SS doctor in the men's camp, spoke with the prisoners while operating on them.Footnote 86 Only after Adjunct Prosecutor Raabe read Schenk's 1960 statement for the court did Lucas respond to Morgenstern's charges. He admitted to only “two to three” sterilizations, recommending that the court focus on Dr. Treite, Dr. Trommer, and Dr. Šíl instead. As though it had just occurred to him, Lucas then insisted that his transfer to Sachsenhausen had happened in early January—that is, at the time of the sterilizations. With no memory of having sterilized Morgenstern, he appeared offended to hear accusations from the very Sinti and Roma prisoners he had helped during his two to three months of supervising the Zigeunerlager.Footnote 87
With the same polite directness that he had shown during earlier cross-examinations, Raabe pressed Lucas to become more forthright, in light of Morgenstern's memory that a twelve-year-old boy from the sterilized Höllenreiner family had screamed in his pain that Hitler could go to hell.Footnote 88 Lucas claimed that he had been in the men's camp only to perform his two sterilizations.Footnote 89 He had shown the two edicts to Šíl, whom he called the doctor responsible for the men's camp. Only after Morgenstern reminded him that Šíl was every bit a prisoner as Morgenstern himself did Lucas claim that he had meant to call Šíl a prisoner doctor.Footnote 90
The court had thus heard Lucas downplay his responsibility by the time Bruno Stein made his Frankfurt court appearance in 1965. Now, however, when Raabe chided Lucas about his poor memory of sterilizations, it was after having coaxed him on March 11, 1965 into confessing that he made selections on the ramp at Birkenau. Lucas now responded that the three sterilizations he could remember were “performed in a way that prevented the operation from being reversed. As far as the other sterilizations were concerned, those were fake operations. Incisions were made and a bit of connective tissue was removed, and that was about it.”Footnote 91 Lucas complained less about the pressure from his superiors than about the surge of Gypsy prisoners who insisted on receiving the operation that they had been promised would secure their freedom. When Dr. Trommer arrived with Genetic Health Court papers to remind him that it was something that the Gypsies wanted, Lucas found that resistance was no longer possible.Footnote 92 Thus, Lucas aligned himself with the claims of Finkelmeier and Gerber that freedom for Sinti prisoners was worth the price of sterilization.
As mentioned, the names of Lucas's victims are contained in a transport list of prisoners transferred to Sachsenhausen on March 3, 1945. Several of these names emerged from testimony compiled by Kiel State Attorney Albrecht during the pretrial hearings against Dr. Carl Clauberg in 1956 and 1957. Statements by Sinti women made references to other family members. From Ella S., sterilized on January 8, 1945, comes mention of her brother and of Max F., Alfred F., Adam S., Frank S., and Walter B., who were sterilized in the men's camp.Footnote 93 Karl D. of Offenbach listed among the victims himself, his son of eleven, and his daughter of twelve years, as well as entire families from communities in Munich, Nuremberg, and Mannheim.Footnote 94 He wrote: “I cannot say who sterilized me and my children. The name of the doctor I didn't learn at the time. I read in the newspaper that Prof. Glauberg [sic] was active in the KZ at the time, which is why I suspect that Dr. Glauberg undertook the operation on me.” He named Josef S. of Nuremberg, Bernhard S. of Mannheim, and Josef and Konrad Höllenreiner from the Munich area.Footnote 95
Josef Höllenreiner remembered being brought to the camp clinic, where Dr. Mengele and a Polish prisoner cut a piece from the vas deferens of Josef, his son Manfred, and his brother J. B. “Prof. Dr. Clauberg was not known to me personally and had nothing to do with my sterilization. Where Dr. Mengelein [sic] is living now I cannot say.”Footnote 96 Toby Sonneman, who describes the experiences of the Höllenreiner family at length, comments on the sterilization of Josef and his son Manfred: “Manfred's experiences also must have been wretched. He was just twelve, the age at which the Nazis required Gypsies to be sterilized. Though he had come to Ravensbrück with his father, who was also sterilized, it's doubtful that his father could have been by his side while he endured not just one, but four separate operations.”Footnote 97
In a 1991 interview with the brothers Walter and Erich Winter, Michael Zimmermann established that Lucas, not Mengele or Clauberg, was the operator.Footnote 98 Walter Winter wrote later in his memoir: “My brother Erich was sterilized in the hospital of the men's camp.… The camp doctor Dr. Lucas carried out the sterilizations. He sent his people into the barrack, and they always had to pick up five men at once and bring them to the hospital. Anyone who happened to be standing in the way was taken away.…”Footnote 99 This description of compulsion is more convincing than the claim that voluntary signatures of consent signaled eagerness for the procedure.
Conclusion
In the end, sterilization proved to be a preferred, if cumbersome method for ridding the Volk of non-German bloodlines. Sterilized Sinti soldiers who survived abuse as cannon fodder near the end of the war had to bear the shame of childlessness in the years following the war. Morgenstern, Schenk, and the Höllenreiner family stressed the pain of the vasectomies Lucas performed. As Helgard Kramer points out, it is possible that Lucas was unsettled by the mass murder of Jews—his role in their selection was his reason for standing trial—but could still proceed to sterilize prisoners stigmatized as eugenic and racial outcasts.Footnote 100 In Lucas the tension between doctoring the patient and doctoring the Volkskörper is especially vivid.
In both the law and in historiography, the culpability of SS doctors for sterilizing prisoners has long taken a back seat to their culpability for selecting them for extermination. There is little doubt, however, that Lucas's sterilizations refute the glowing character reports offered by prisoners who were neither Jewish nor Sinti. The Sinto Schenk imagined that Lucas was kinder toward women prisoners than the men he sterilized. Celebrating the risks that he took for the sake of some prisoners should not prevent us from decrying the crimes he committed on others. The “Stockholm syndrome” may have shielded Lucas from the incriminatory scrutiny that Ravensbrück survivors reserved for SS doctors such as Adolf Winkelmann.
Male political prisoners shifted the focus from Lucas the perpetrator to Lucas the reluctant follower of orders. In their view, he too fell victim to compulsory sterilization, albeit on the other side of the scalpel from his Sinti victims, ordered as he was to finish the dirty work of the real perpetrators in Berlin. Testimony of the sort given by Finkelmeier and Gerber thus turns into a patronizing attempt to blame the victim and makes the Sinti soldiers in their account come across as irrational and gullible. It is easy to forget, however, that after months or years of captivity, having been discharged from active service on the whim of racial edicts, Sinti soldiers were making decisions for themselves and their families that are hard to judge in retrospect.Footnote 101 When they had choices at all, prisoners usually chose one horrific option among many; even a thoughtful decision could guarantee no positive outcome. If parents refused to consent to their children's sterilization, the family suffered the potentially fatal consequences. If they granted consent, they invited almost certain social isolation for their children later in life.Footnote 102
The claim that Lucas drew the line at sterilizing children not only contradicts Sinti testimony; it also begs the question why such a line was necessary to draw in the first place. Just as repugnant as drawing such a line, if he did so, is Lucas's habit of describing his own alleged helplessness rather than acknowledging the plight of his victims. He justified his actions as either resistant to orders or as unable to escape them, depending on which explanation served him best. In this respect, he was no different than his fellow defendants in the Auschwitz trial.
It is unfair, however, that exculpatory witnesses should bear the entire blame for the lack of details about the sterilizations that occurred at Ravensbrück. After all, Sinti and Roma saw their wartime fate relegated to “the shadow of supposedly greater ‘civilizations’ and more ‘important’ international developments,” as Donald Bloxham has remarked.Footnote 103 The focus of Allied tribunals on certain crimes, criminals, war arenas, and didactic agendas meant that they missed myriad other areas worth adjudicating. For example, if the French and British prosecuted foremost the crimes inflicted upon their citizens, and the Soviets trumpeted the efforts of antifascist resistance, then less space remained for groups such as “Jews, homosexuals, or ‘gypsies.’”Footnote 104 The Nuremberg IMT trial from November 1945 to October 1946 set a precedent for removing sterilization from the crimes requiring the tribunal's judgement, largely because the judging countries themselves practiced it and the 1933 GzVeN was dissolved only in 1949, sixteen years after inception.Footnote 105
The delay in adjudicating German crimes against the Reich's “internal enemies” was understandable, given the urgency of the Allies to punish the chief perpetrators of more sinister war crimes committed on Germany's external front. In sum, Nuremberg delivered the glaring truth that cataloging Germany's crimes against its own “alien” citizens was not on the table. As a result, the Nuremberg doctors’ trial that began in December 1946 missed, as Michael Marrus writes, “an opportunity to elucidate eugenic and racist policies and to link them with the medical profession.”Footnote 106 Pressured to reach a verdict, the judges were not so interested in knowing the specifics of crimes as they were in garnering the evidence necessary to convict the criminals. Germany's most public trial, the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial, also failed to inspire historiography to pay attention to Gypsy persecution under the Nazi regime.Footnote 107 In general, the German press was reluctant to publish on a subject in which readers showed no interest.Footnote 108
Justice for internal victims of Reich policies was also delayed by a widespread ignorance of the role that polycratic organizations, beyond the purview of Nuremberg, played in isolating and removing enemies of the Volk. Because the SS and its branches became default symbols of the terror, the IMT failed to scrutinize organizations such as the RSHA and its RKPA department thoroughly, and Bloxham wonders what a trial of Arthur Nebe might have brought to the surface had Nebe not been hanged before war's end.Footnote 109 Even so, if the history of trials concerning Sinti and Roma is any indication, earlier awareness of Nebe's role in so-called “preventative” roundups of Sinti and Roma would not have brought closure for victims. The ledger of postwar investigations of crimes against Sinti and Roma that Guenter Lewy provides contains no record of convictions, as officials were either tried and released or escaped trail altogether. Lewy's list includes the trials of Robert Ritter (1948–1950) and Eva Justin (1959–1960) and their coworkers Ruth Kellermann (1989), Sophie Ehrhardt, and Adolf Würth (1981–1982), as well as Nebe's deputies Paul Werner (1961) and Hans Maly (1970, suspended for health reasons), and dozens of other Kripo officials and Ritter institute officials.Footnote 110
Despite the manifest seriousness of the crimes and the availability of witnesses, a lack of advocacy for the victims and their plight encumbered the convictions of the perpetrators. Even after 1949, Germany insisted that if genetic courts had listed feeblemindedness as the justification for sterilization at the time, then victims were not entitled to compensation on the basis of racial persecution.Footnote 111 The reason given by the Stuttgart state attorney's office for halting the probe of Paul Werner in 1961 was that deportations of Sinti and Roma had been legal until the Auschwitz decree in December 1942, based as they were on “crime prevention” and not on race.Footnote 112 Furthermore, the courts heard little from those affected most directly because Sinti and Roma victims of sterilization were called upon only slowly to testify in postwar trials.Footnote 113 This is not surprising when one considers that ethnologists, jurists, and criminal police accepted reified images of Gypsies as criminals with no credibility in court. In perhaps the most infamous example, Frankfurt State Attorney Hans-Krafft Kosterlitz closed the case against Robert Ritter in 1950 by arguing that the court could disregard the statements of more than sixty Gypsies who testified.Footnote 114 Kosterlitz accepted the defendant's explanation that illiterate, “asocial elements” were unable to distinguish between experienced and imagined events.Footnote 115 For the shameful role that the Bundesgerichtshof played in extending such indignities, its president Bettina Limperg visited the Central Council of German Sinti and Roma in Heidelberg in 2015 to offer a long overdue apology.Footnote 116
Kosterlitz's marginalization, not Limperg's apology, has been the more typical postwar attitude. As perennial “asocial” outsiders, Sinti and Roma have been considered naturally and legally incapable of bearing witness.Footnote 117 For decades, German courts traded in this condescension. Sinti and Roma also lacked the forum that the Eichmann trial afforded for Jewish survivors to tell their stories, although one must grant that even a less hostile court environment is no guarantee of catharsis.Footnote 118 As Heike Krokowski discovered in her interviews of Sinti and Roma, talking about the trauma only brought it painfully to the surface.Footnote 119 The interview situation reinstated the trauma of being assessed by a racial expert whose pseudoscience was supported by criminal police.
Defeatism becomes a self-fulfilling outcome when survivors are forced to bear witness before courts convinced of their inability to do so. In their 1971 article in the medical journal Nervenarzt, Petersen and Liedtke ascribed to the long-term effects of sterilization a lingering mistrust of hospitals, doctors, and assessments.Footnote 120 They found that the degree of scrutiny required to qualify for injury compensation was too high for many victims. Many men pursued options for a reverse vasectomy in the United States instead of approaching German clinics. Understandably so: it is sobering to consider that if the town of Elmshorn had not suspended Dr. Franz Lucas's employment in late December 1962, he might well have been enlisted to assess the very Ravensbrück men and boys he sterilized.
A further indignity was receiving compensation on the basis of constricted work output, as though substandard productivity confirmed the inherent laziness of Sinti and Roma in the workforce.Footnote 121 Given the horrific connotations of Arbeitsfähigkeit (ability to work), imposing a test for productivity on persons denied the right of reproductivity could only deepen the wound. Many victims associated sterilization with the RHF's assessment of their Gypsy blood. Now they required an assessment of their productivity if they expected any compensation. The shame associated with sterilization, especially in communities with large families, was accompanied by taboos that discouraged discussion.Footnote 122 Anger that should be aimed against the perpetrator may become misdirected. Petersen and Liedtke insist that sterilization can lead to neurosis that cripples a victim well beyond the time he wants to start a family. He must also mourn the loss of community voting rights along with respect and prestige.Footnote 123 The authors thus conclude that independence from shame-based structures will encourage healing for the men they have examined. This finding will do little to aid Lucas's victims, however.
One cannot help but notice that the conclusion of the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial on August 20, 1965, came less than a month before the German Final Compensation Law on September 14, 1965. It is possible that Lucas's incriminatory witnesses took advantage of it, but most would have already received compensation for wrongful imprisonment and bodily harm, if they made the effort to claim the damages.Footnote 124 The compensation for damages included access to the same benefits, such as reverse vasectomies, that civil servants could access. As mentioned, however, the prospect of renewed scrutiny by German doctors after having been their earlier target prevented many Sinti and Roma from receiving the help and compensation they needed.Footnote 125
The reticence of sterilization victims to discuss their pain enrolls them in the malaise that Lawrence Langer has attributed to Jewish survivors. “A scar is a reminder of a curable condition, a past injury healed in the present. What we are really speaking of … is a festering wound, a blighted convalescence.”Footnote 126 Langer cites one Jewish survivor's description of how raising his second set of children after the war “contrasts sharply with the memory of his impotence in the ruin of his other family.”Footnote 127 He could do nothing to save them. If the joy of raising children offers at best an inadequate counterbalance to loss, even this possibility disappears for sterilization victims long after liberation.Footnote 128 The demise story of sterilization survivors, in which absence builds over time, features the melancholy that they are succeeded by no one.
Based on its own losses, one victim group may witness the losses of other victim groups with particular intensity. As Ari Joskowicz has shown, “parallel suffering” can create a symbiosis. Jews and Gypsies often occupied the same literal space—on trains, in ghettos and camps, and as scapegoats—and endured the same ravages of sterilization and deportation. Jewish prisoners who happened to survive selections at Birkenau were struck by the sight of Sinti and Roma prisoners allowed to remain with their families in the Zigeunerlager.Footnote 129 Sinti and Roma could watch selections from their camp, believing themselves immune from that slaughter—at least until the extermination of Theresienstadt family camp Jews on March 7, 1944. Ultimately, the Hungarian Jews who shared the space of BIIe were the nearest witnesses to the ultimate roundup of their camp companions on August 2, 1944. As Joskowicz suggests, “Jews and Roma gauged their position in the camps through the presence of the other, believing that the demise of another victim group and its treatment spoke directly to their own chances of survival.”Footnote 130
The most obvious affinity among Jewish and Romani survivors remains their subjection to events beyond their control. Both groups relive their losses through deep memory, which confounds the sense of meaning sought from chronological narrative. This is all the more reason to take the pain of all camp survivors seriously, whatever way their persecution was justified and whatever their position was in the prison hierarchy. It is also a reason to break the silence of shameful legacies such as sterilization, a crime inflicted before, during, and after the years of Nazi terror, on persons deemed unworthy of life.
