Today’s Sterile Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
On October 18, 1935, a major ordinance regulating sterilization and the issuing of marriage licenses followed directly upon the notorious German Nuremberg Laws (September 15), which prohibited marriage or any sexual contact between Jews and non-Jews. The Nuremberg lawmakers described themselves as “permeated with the knowledge that the purity of the German blood is a precondition for the continued existence of the German people, and filled with the inflexible determination to make the German nation secure for all future time.”
There were revealing discussions of methods. The favored surgical procedures were ligation of the vas deferens in men and of the ovarian tubes in women. Professor G. A. Wagner, director of the University of Berlin’s Women’s Clinic, advocated that the law provide an option for removing the entire uterus in mentally deficient women. His convoluted argument was based on the principle of “hereditary health”: mentally deficient women, after being sterilized, were especially likely to attract the opposite sex (who need not worry about impregnating them) and therefore to develop gonorrhea, which is most resistant to treatment when it affects the uterine cervix; the men who would then contract gonorrhea from these women would, in turn, infect other women with desirable hereditary traits and render them sterile. Other medical commentators, making a less genetic and more specifically moralistic argument, favored removal of the uterus in those candidates for sterilization who showed tendencies to promiscuity. Still more foreboding was an official edict permitting sterilization by irradiation (X-rays or radium) in certain specified cases “on the basis of scientific experiments.” These experiments, ostensibly in the service of improving medical procedures for specific cases, were a preliminary step toward later X-ray sterilization experiments conducted extensively, harmfully, and sometimes fatally on Jewish men and women in Auschwitz and elsewhere.
Culled from: The Nazi Doctors
Grim Chicago!
I have added a new entry to my Grim Chicago page (the feature in which I travel to the site of Chicago tragedies and revisit them from the pages of the newspapers). It’s the strange story of a pregnant woman, a poor boob, and a man in love with the Army! Please take a gander.
