title: Clauberg's eponym and crimes against humanity.
abstract: Scientific journals are ethically bound to cite Professor Dr. Carl Clauberg's Nazi medical crimes against humanity whenever the eponym Clauberg is used. Modern articles still publish the eponym citing only the rabbit bioassy used in developing progesterone agonists or antagonists for birth control. Clauberg's Nazi career is traced to his having subjected thousands of Jewish women at the Ravensbruck and Auschwitz-Birkenau death camps to cruel, murderous sterilization experiments that are enthusiastically described by incriminating letters (reproduced here) between him and the notorious Nazi Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler. The experiments were carried out in women's block 10 in Auschwitz-Birkenau where Clauberg's colleague Dr. Josef Mengele worked alongside. After Germany lost World War II in 1945 Mengele fled to South America, where he lived to an old age. Clauberg was caught by Russian soldiers, put on trial in the Soviet Union for his crimes against humanity, and imprisoned in 1948. In 1955 he was repatriated to Germany, once again imprisoned for his crimes, and belatedly expelled from the German Medical Association. To estimate the contemporary usage of the names Mengele and Clauberg, Internet hits were recorded for Clauberg C or Mengele J (with and without adding the term Auschwitz) with the Google and Scirus search engines. The ratios of hits for combinations of these terms reveal that relative to Mengele, Clauberg's name is barely known. We propose that journals and books printing the eponym Clauberg cite its derivation and reference to the convicted Nazi criminal. The present article can serve for such citations.
authors: Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, MO 63110, USA. sweetf@wustl.edu
authors: Frederick
authors: F
authors: Sweet
authors: Rita M
authors: RM
authors: Csapó-Sweet
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D004850:Eponyms; D005260:Female; D005858:Germany; D049673:History, 20th Century; D017767:Holocaust / Q000266:history* / Q000331:legislation & jurisprudence; D006805:Human Experimentation / Q000266:history* / Q000331:legislation & jurisprudence; D006801:Humans; D028683:National Socialism / Q000266:history*; D014858:War Crimes / Q000266:history / Q000331:legislation & jurisprudence; D047789:World War II