Germans may have drugged women in concentration camps to prevent them from menstruating and having children, a University of Ottawa researcher believes.
Posted at 1:53 p.m.
An estimated 98% of women imprisoned in death camps stopped menstruating – a medical condition called amenorrhea – soon after arrival. The phenomenon has been attributed for decades to the ill-treatment and malnutrition of prisoners, but it has apparently never been questioned until today.
Study author Dr. Peggy J. Kleinplatz of the University of Ottawa’s Faculty of Medicine believes that the sudden cessation of menstruation among Jewish women held in concentration camps was too uniform to be attributable. only to trauma and malnutrition.
“If you look, for example, at the women who arrived at Auschwitz from Hungary in the summer of 1944, they weren’t yet malnourished because the war had just entered their lives,” she said. They immediately stopped menstruating, along with the women who arrived from Poland in the summer of 1944, even though the Polish women had been traumatized and emaciated for a long time. »
“So it wasn’t just about trauma and it wasn’t just about malnutrition. What else was going on that could have caused an immediate cessation of menstruation? And did it have a long-term impact? »
The study authors found that between 1943 and 1945, German factories produced large quantities of sex steroids―quantities that would have far exceeded the needs of German women seeking treatment for infertility. It is also surprising, they say, that the production of these steroids was given priority in the context of the shortages that prevailed towards the end of the war.
Dr. Kleinplatz therefore raises the hypothesis that the rations provided to the inmates possibly contained high quantities of these synthetic steroids intended to almost instantly interrupt their menstrual cycle, and thereby prevent them from having children. Her research is based on historical evidence and testimonies from Holocaust survivors.
Testimonials
Dr. Kleinplatz and co-author Paul Weindling, who is a historian and professor at Oxford-Brookes University, collected testimonies from 93 Holocaust survivors or their children. Survivors reported suspecting that something in their food had caused their periods to suddenly stop.
A woman who worked in the kitchens of the Auschwitz camp said that chemicals were added to the soup served to inmates every day to prevent them from menstruating. A report published in 1969, and for which Auschwitz cooks had been questioned, corroborates this hypothesis of contaminated rations.
It was also demonstrated during the Nuremberg trials that the Nazis were looking for methods of mass sterilization of the Jews.
Almost all of the women surveyed (98%) were unable to conceive or carry to term the number of children they wanted. The results indicate that of 197 confirmed pregnancies, at least 48 (24.4%) ended in miscarriages, 13 (6.6%) in stillbirths and 136 (69.0%) in live births.
“So during the ‘baby boom’ years in North America, these women were unable to have as many children as they wanted,” Dr. Kleinplatz said. In 1960 or 1965, nobody asked them how many children they had tried to have, how many miscarriages, how many stillbirths… They were not asked if, in the end, they were able to have as many children as they wanted. »
The United States Supreme Court recently overturned Roe v. Wade, recalls Dr. Kleinplatz. Chinese authorities sterilize Uyghur women against their will. In Canada, aboriginal women suffered the same fate.
“If we take ‘never again’ seriously, we have to look very seriously at the impact of removing reproductive control from people around the world,” she said in conclusion. Who owns the choice, freedom and control of reproduction? »
Dr. Kleinplatz’s findings are published in the scientific journal Social Science & Medicine.