block 10 auschwitz experiments

Carl Clauberg

A conference attended by Himmler, Professor Karl Gebhardt, and Richard Glücks (the inspector of concentration camps) entrusted the search for the best method of sterilization—one that would make it possible to sterilize an unlimited number of people in the shortest possible time, and in the simplest way possible—to Professor Carl Clauberg, an authority in the treatment of infertility who worked during the war as head of the department of women’s diseases at the hospital in Chorzów (then Königshütte, Germany).

Clauberg set to work in barracks no. 30, part of the hospital complex in the women’s camp (sector BIa) in Birkenau, at the end of 1942. In April of the following year, Rudolf Höss put  block no. 10 in the main camp at Clauberg’s disposal. Between 150 and 400 Jewish women from various countries were held in two upstairs rooms.

Clauberg developed a method of non-surgical mass sterilization. Under the pretext of performing a gynecological examination, he first checked to make sure that the Fallopian tubes were open, and then introduced a specially prepared chemical irritant, which caused acute inflammation. This led to the growing together of the tubes within a few weeks, and thus their obstruction. X-rays were used to check the results of each procedure.

These procedures were carried out in a brutal way. Complications were frequent, including peritonitis and hemorrhages from the reproductive tract, leading to high fever and sepsis. Multiple organ failure and death frequently followed. While some of Clauberg’s Jewish patients died in this way, others were deliberately put to death so that autopsies could be carried out.

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Made in Auschwitz: The Untold Story of Block 10

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iNTERNATIONAL PREMIERE

This chilling documentary uses intimate survivor testimonies, archival footage and legal records to tell the story of the over 400 young women who underwent medical experimentation in Auschwitz under Carl Clauberg, an enterprising, sadistic gynecologist. Clauberg, who had already made a name for himself as a research scientist who volunteered his services to Heinrich Himmler of the SS to both help eradicate future generations of Jews and to avail himself of a pool of captive research subjects. These experiments, which sterilized many of the women, was also what spared them from the gas chambers. Many of the women, who were deported to Auschwitz from across Nazi-occupied Europe, were so young that they did not understand their reproductive systems before suffering their destruction. This admirably crafted film traces the history of the survivors and the subsequent attempts to bring Clauberg to justice, which includes examining his -and these women's - enduring contribution to research on birth control and fertility and the role of German companies Siemens and Schering in profiting off the findings. - Ilana Sichel

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Made in Auschwitz: The Untold Story of Block 10

Documentary on Dr. Carl Clauberg's forced sterilization experiments on Jewish women at Auschwitz, using survivor accounts, archival footage, legal records, unethical medical research finding... Read all Documentary on Dr. Carl Clauberg's forced sterilization experiments on Jewish women at Auschwitz, using survivor accounts, archival footage, legal records, unethical medical research findings and his post-war pursuit. Documentary on Dr. Carl Clauberg's forced sterilization experiments on Jewish women at Auschwitz, using survivor accounts, archival footage, legal records, unethical medical research findings and his post-war pursuit.

• Sylvia Nagel
• Sonya Winterberg
• Leny Adelaar
• Carl Clauberg
• Renée Duering

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The Female Doctors of Block 10 in Auschwitz: Gender, Resistance, and Survival

• First Online: 11 July 2024

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• Dan Stone 4  

Part of the book series: The Holocaust and its Contexts ((HOLC))

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One of the most noteworthy yet little-known markers of what we would today call “Holocaust consciousness” in Britain in the 1960s was the Dering v. Uris libel trial, in which former Polish inmate-physician of Auschwitz, Władisław Dering, sued American author Leon Uris for libel for comments he made about the number of operations Dering had performed in Auschwitz in his novel Exodus . The trial, held at the Royal Courts of Justice in London in 1964, attracted a good deal of attention in the press. Not the least reason for this attention was the remarkable testimony given by three women who had been inmate-physicians in Auschwitz, albeit in very different circumstances to Dering: Dorota Lorska, Alina Brewda, and Adélaïde Hautval. This chapter analyzes their testimony in the context of the trial itself and asks what their cross-examination tells us about the state of knowledge about the Holocaust in Britain at this period. It then goes on to ask what we can learn from their writings prior to and following the trial, considering issues of gender, resistance, inmate society, and solidarity in Auschwitz, and the question—much debated in the 1960s thanks to the writings of Viktor Frankl and Bruno Bettelheim—of what facilitated survival.

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I discuss the Uris/Dering libel trial below but see also my “Female Inmate-Physicians of Block 10 at Auschwitz as Witnesses at the Dering v. Uris Libel Trial”, in Britain and Holocaust Consciousness in the 1960s , eds. Johannes-Dieter Steinert and Dan Stone (London: Bloomsbury, 2025); and Johannes-Dieter Steinert, Dering v. Uris: Britain Encounters the Holocaust in the Sixties (forthcoming).

Gisella Perl, I Was a Doctor in Auschwitz (New York: International Universities Press, 1948); Lucie Adelsberger, Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Story (London: Robson, 1996); Olga Lengyel, Five Chimneys: The Story of Auschwitz . See Sari J. Siegel, “The Past and Promise of Jewish Prisoner-Physicians’ Accounts”, SIMON: Shoah: Intervention, Methods, Documentation , 3:1 (2016), 89–103, for discussion.

Claude Romney, “Jewish Medical Resistance in Block 10, Auschwitz,” in Michael A. Grodin (ed.), Jewish Medical Resistance in the Holocaust (New York: Berghahn Books, 2014), 188.

R. J. Minney, I Shall Fear No Evil: The Story of Alina Brewda’s Survival in Auschwitz (London: Corgi, 1968 [1966]). See also Ross W. Halpin, Jewish Doctors and the Holocaust: The Anatomy of Survival in Auschwitz (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018), 91–97.

Emeric Pressburger, The Glass Pearls (London: Faber & Faber, 2022).

For a brief survey, see Romney, “Jewish Medical Resistance.”

Marion Kaplan, “Gender: A Crucial Tool in Holocaust Research”, in Larry V. Thompson (ed.), Lessons and Legacies, Vol. IV: Reflections on Religion, Justice, Sexuality, and Genocide (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2003), 163–170.

Kaplan (“Gender”, 166–167) refers to Victor Klemperer’s diary as an example.

Karyn Ball, Disciplining the Holocaust (Albany: SUNY Press, 2008), 195. See also Susannah Heschel, “Does Atrocity Have a Gender? Feminist Interpretations of Women in the SS”, in Jeffry M. Diefendorf (ed.), Lessons and Legacies, Vol. VI: New Currents in Holocaust Research (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2004), 300–321; Doris L. Bergen, “Sexual Violence in the Holocaust: Unique and Typical?”, in Dagmar Herzog (ed.), Lessons and Legacies, Vol. VII: The Holocaust in International Perspective (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2006), 179–200. Heschel writes (315), “Feminist theory has tended to portray women evil-doers as having entered a male realm” and argues instead (317) that “Volunteering at a concentration camp, then, would not be an indication of women as ‘male imitators’, but an expression of aspects of the peculiar femininity endorsed by the Nazi regime.”

Michael Nutkiewicz, “Shame, Guilt, and Anguish in Holocaust Survivor Testimony,” Oral History Review , 30:1 (2003), 5.

For a discussion of this problem in a different context, see Ruth Harris, “The ‘Child of the Barbarian’: Rape, Race and Nationalism in France during the First World War”, Past and Present , 141 (1993), 170–206.

See Sari J. Siegel, “Treating an Auschwitz Prisoner-Physician: The Case of Dr. Maximilian Samuel,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies , 28:3 (2014), 450–481; Adélaïde Hautval, Médicine et crimes contre l’humanité: témoignage (Arles: Actes Sud, 1991), 79–80, who says that Dr. Samuel obeyed the Nazis out of fear and in the hope that his daughter, who was also in the camp, would be saved.

de Wind, Last Stop Auschwitz , 114.

de Wind, Last Stop Auschwitz , 112.

de Wind, Last Stop Auschwitz , 115.

de Wind, Last Stop Auschwitz , 150.

de Wind, Last Stop Auschwitz , 166.

Alina Brewda, “A Jewish Woman-Doctor in the Clauberg-Block”, Wiener Holocaust Library, P.III.h (Auschwitz), No. 1061 (1959), 12. The title page is in English but the text is in German. Also “Dr. Dering Libelled”, BMJ (16 May 1964), 1321–1323.

Hautval, Médicines , 75.

Hermann Langbein, Against All Hope: Resistance in the Nazi Concentration Camps 1938–1945 (London: Constable, 1994), 169.

Louis J. Micheels, “Bearer of the Secret”, Psychoanalytic Inquiry , 5:1 (1985), 23.

See Cohen, Human Behaviour in the Concentration Camp , 100.

Dorota Lorska, “Block 10 in Auschwitz”, in Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung (ed.), Die Auschwitz-Hefte. Vol. 1: Texte der polnischen Zeitschrift “Przegląd Lekarski” über historische, psychische und medizinische Aspekte des Lebens und Sterbens in Auschwitz (Hamburg: Rogner & Bernhard Verlag), 212. See also Lorska, “My Time in Auschwitz”, trans. Łukasz Mrozik, Medical Review—Auschwitz (15 December 2022), orig. Przegłąd Lekarski—Oświęcim (1967), 206–208, online at: https://www.mp.pl/auschwitz/journal/english/313336,my-time-in-auschwitz

R. J. Minney, I Shall Fear No Evil (London: Corgi, 1967), 117.

See Hermann Langbein, People in Auschwitz .

Minney, I Shall Fear No Evil , 143–146. See also Dr. Alina Bialostocka (née Brewda) in Lore Shelley (ed.), Criminal Experiments on Human Beings in Auschwitz and War Research Laboratories: Twenty Women Prisoners’ Accounts (San Francisco: Mellen University Research Press, 1991), 39.

Mavis M. Hill and L. Norman Williams, Auschwitz in England: A Record of a Libel Action (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1965), 15.

Adélaïde Hautval, Rester humain! Leçons d’Auschwitz et de Ravensbrück (Paris: Editions Ampelos, 2018), 38 (“C’était un procès civil qui virtuellement s’est transformé en procès de criminel de guerre”).

For example: Christine Schmidt and Dan Stone, “Exhibiting the Missing: The World Jewish Congress’ London Exhibition of 1947, ‘Search for the Scattered’”, Journal of Holocaust Research , 37:3 (2023), 297–316; David Cesarani and Eric J. Sundquist (eds.), After the Holocaust: Challenging the Myth of Silence (London: Routledge, 2012).

Hill and Williams, Auschwitz in England , 255.

Hill and Williams, Auschwitz in England , 193.

Minney, I Shall Fear No Evil , 121–123.

Minney, I Shall Fear No Evil , 129.

Hautval, Rester humain! , 39.

Minney, I Shall Fear No Evil , 132.

Minney, I Shall Fear No Evil , 134.

Hill and Williams, Auschwitz in England , 202.

Hill and Williams, Auschwitz in England , 186.

Hill and Williams, Auschwitz in England , 190.

My thanks to Hank Greenspan for this distinction.

Minney, I Shall Fear No Evil , 136.

Minney, I Shall Fear No Evil , 137. See also Hill and Williams, Auschwitz in England , 219–224; Hans-Joachim Lang, Die Frauen von Block 10: Medizinische Versuche in Auschwitz (Augsburg: Weltbild, 2018), 175–182.

See Isabel Wollaston, “Emerging from the Shadows? The Auschwitz Sonderkommando and the ‘Four Women’ in History and Memory”, Holocaust Studies , 20:3 (2014), 137–170, for a comparable project, although the women discussed by Wollaston were all murdered at Auschwitz. An exception to the tendency not to consider who the victims were is Paul Weindling, Victims and Survivors of Nazi Human Experiments: Science and Suffering in the Holocaust (London: Bloomsbury, 2015).

Ella Lingens-Reiner, Prisoners of Fear (London: Victor Gollancz, 1948), 22.

Langer, Versions of Survival , 74 (emphasis in original).

Micheels, “Bearer of the Secret”, 27.

Cohen, Human Behaviour in the Concentration Camp , 134.

Cohen, Human Behaviour in the Concentration Camp , 137.

Cohen, Human Behaviour in the Concentration Camp , 138.

Hautval, Médicine et crimes contre l’humanité , 42.

Paul Marcus, Autonomy in the Extreme Situation: Bruno Bettelheim, the Nazi Concentration Camps and the Mass Society (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999), 91–92.

Micheels, Doctor #117641 , 76.

Leo Eitinger, Concentration Camp Survivors in Norway and Israel (London: Allen and Unwin, 1964), 80, cited in Marcus, Autonomy in the Extreme Situation , 179.

Eitinger, “Auschwitz—A Psychological Perspective”, 475.

David Rousset, A World Apart , trans. Yvonne Moyse and Roger Senhouse (London: Secker and Warburg, 1951). “Les camps châtrent les cerveaux libres”: L’univers concentrationnaire (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1965 [orig. 1946]), 116.

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Stone, D. (2024). The Female Doctors of Block 10 in Auschwitz: Gender, Resistance, and Survival. In: Psychoanalysis, Historiography, and the Nazi Camps. The Holocaust and its Contexts. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-58010-9_3

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by Steve Walentik | Nov 11, 2019

“Made in Auschwitz: The Untold Story of Block 10” will be shown at 3 p.m. Sunday at Plaza Frontenac Cinema as part of the St. Louis International Film Festival. (submitted photo)

A new documentary film playing next week at the St. Louis International Film Festival shines a light on the sinister but largely forgotten story of Carl Clauberg , a German doctor who worked alongside Josef Mengele at Auschwitz .

Clauberg was a gynecologist noted for his research in birth control and fertility before World War II, but he went on to conduct experiments on women with the aim of uncovering an efficient means of mass sterilization during the Holocaust.

“Made in Auschwitz: The Untold Story of Block 10” deploys archival materials and interviews with experts and historians to reveal the details of Clauberg’s work. But the audience also hears testimony from a half-dozen survivors of the experiments, including a few who managed to have children after the war in spite of the inhumane and painful treatments.

A screening of the film is scheduled for 3 p.m. Nov. 17 at Plaza Frontenac Cinema .

“It is an untold story because really nobody is aware of it,” said Rita Csapo-Sweet , an associate professor of media studies in the Pierre Laclede Honors College at the University of Missouri–St. Louis who serves as the film’s American producer. “If you do a search for Mengele or Clauberg, everybody knows Mengele, nobody knows Clauberg.

“But the fact that the Nazis had this idea to not just do the genocide they were doing, but then to go ahead and perpetuate a kind of further genocide in mass numbers, that’s both scientifically and historically important.”

Csapo-Sweet and her late husband, Frederick Sweet , a longtime professor and researcher at Washington University in St. Louis, began investigating Clauberg more than a decade ago in the context of Sweet’s interest in doctors involved in genocide.

He had observed medical professionals at the center of major genocides of the 20th Century, starting with Armenia and continuing with the Holocaust, Bosnia and Rwanda.

“They were all, in a sense, masterminded by many medical professionals under the guise of ethnic cleansing,” Csapo-Sweet said. “He couldn’t get it out of his head how it was possible that a profession, where people take an oath to do no harm, could be involved in these horrific genocides.”

Csapo-Sweet and her husband published a paper about Clauberg in 2012 – a year before Sweet died – in the Israel Medical Association Journal.

German producer-directors Sylvia Nagel and Sonya Winterberg came across the paper a couple years after it was published while starting to conduct interviews with some of the few remaining survivors for the documentary project. It helped fill in some gaps in their own research.

They reached out to Csapo-Sweet in 2015, and she became part of the project as a producer.

The film debuted on television in Israel in May. It is being re-edited and will be shown in France and Germany. The film made its North American debut in late July at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival .

Csapo-Sweet is excited it will be playing as part of the St. Louis International Film Festival with sponsorship from UMSL Global and the Honors College.

“This is not an old story,” Csapo-Sweet said. “This is a story that unfortunately we can take lessons from to the present day.”

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