Background
Karl Clauberg was born in Wupperhof on 28 September 1898.
Karl Clauberg was born in Wupperhof on 28 September 1898.
After serving in the infantry during World War I, Clauberg studied medicine in Kiel, Hamburg and Graz, receiving his doctorate in 1925. Chief physician at a university women's hospital in Kiel, Clauberg joined the NSDAP in 1933 and fully subscribed to Nazi ideology, eventually rising to the rank of SS-Brigadefiihrer. Appointed Professor of Gynaecology and Obstetrics at the University of Königsberg on 30 August 1937, Clauberg published a large number of scientific works in his held. By 1940 he had written over fifty research papers and several books.
Appointed Director in 1940 of a gynaecological clinic in Upper Silesia, Clauberg had himself approached Heinrich Himmler, knowing of his interest in ‘negative demography' (i.e. sterilization without operation), and asked to be allowed to sterilize women by the injection of irritating chemicals into the uterus. He was put to work by Himmler in Ravensbrück concentration camp in July 1942 and then offered the facilities of Experimental Block 10 of Auschwitz to continue his diabolical experiments.
At his disposal was placed a large retinue of internee doctors, including the Polish camp doctor, Wladyslas Dering (subject of a famous libel case in England in 1964 concerned with medical experiments at Auschwitz). From 1942 to 1944 Clauberg conducted his quick-fire mass sterilization injections without anaesthetic on Jewesses and sometimes gypsies, causing untold suffering and death to his victims. On 7 June 1943 he proudly reported to Himmler: “The time is not far distant when I shall be able to say that one doctor, with, perhaps, ten assistants can probably effect several hundred, if not one thousand sterilizations on a single day.’
At the end of the war Clauberg was deported by the Russians and tried in 1948 for the part he had played in the ‘mass extermination of Soviet citizens'. Sentenced to twenty-five years' imprisonment, he was amnestied after ten years as a prisoner of the Russians. He returned to the North German town of Kiel under the Adenauer-Bulganin agreement for the repatriation of German prisoners. On his return to Germany, Clauberg showed no contrition for his crimes, even boasting of his ‘scientific achievements’. In October 1955 the Central Council of Jews in Germany filed an action with the West German authorities for the prosecution of Dr Clauberg. He was accused of ‘repeatedly inflicting grave bodily injury' on the Jewish women inmates he used in his sterilization experiments in Auschwitz. On 22 November 1955 he was placed under arrest by the Kiel police. On 9 August 1957 he died in a Kiel hospital, shortly before his trial was due to begin.
Innere Sekretion der Ovarien und der Placenta
(The book was translated into Spanish and English.)
1937