Abstract Over decades of Holocaust scholarship, a similar narrative emerges on the sterilizations at Ravensbrück concentration camp: In January 1945, Professor Carl Clauberg experimentally sterilized between 120 and 140 Sinti and Roma women and girls in rapid succession. When survivor voices are included, they often reference one single interview: that recorded with Sintezza survivor, Wanda Pranden, for the 1982 documentary, Es ging Tag und Nacht, liebes Kind. What, however, do these narratives obscure? Drawing on a panoply of primary and secondary scholarship, this article seeks to paint a robust, victim-based history of the sterilizations conducted in Ravensbrück. When deepening scholarly understanding of the camp, both in terms of periodization and victim groups, it demonstrates that sterilizations were long practiced in the camp, and on victims other than Sinti and Roma. Generating an archive of survivor accounts, as have been published piecemeal in scholarship, in addition to complementing this corpus with survivor voices from various institutions, this article generates a bottom-up history of women’s experiences of forced infertility in Ravensbrück concentration camp. This includes a historiography in various Holocaust-related disciplines; a periodization of sterilization methods and perpetrators in the camp, drawn from survivors and witnesses; and alternate methods with which one can locate survivors.
Tiarra Maznick (Tue,) studied this question.