["Well, it's not our fault that God made us so small". Opposition and self-will in women who suffered enforced sterilization].
Coercive sterilizations committed during the "Third Reich" were seen as a means of creating a Volksgemeinschaft (people's community) based on racial purity and hereditary health. While the physicians and attorneys who executed those actions emphasized the victims' sacrifice for the Volksgemeinschaft and stressed the benefits to the persons concerned and their families, the victims tried to escape the sterilization program. The "view from below" offers the possibility to observe victims as active agents who expressed their self-will in various ways: through escape, verbal protest and by refusing to be branded "inferior". In their attempts to reject the stigma of "inferiority", the victims often clung to the prevailing genetic ideas. The present article wants to highlight the also existing cracks inside eugenic thinking and shows, moreover, that other body concepts and ideas of illness existed, as the importance of eugenic thinking and the primacy of the Volksgemeinschaft were also called into question at the time.
Charité-Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Campus Charité Mitte, Charité Centrum 1 für Human- und Gesundheitswissenschaften (ZHGB), Institut für Geschichte der Medizin, Berlin. Susanne.Doetz@charite.de
Susanne
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Doetz
D049628:Body Size / Q000235:genetics*; D005053:Eugenics / Q000266:history*; D005260:Female; D005783:Gender Identity; D005858:Germany; D049673:History, 20th Century; D006801:Humans; D028683:National Socialism / Q000266:history*; D026684:Personal Autonomy; D013244:Sterilization, Involuntary / Q000266:history*; D047789:World War II