Abstract
The dissertation examines the lasting impact of sterilization and castration experiments endured by Jewish and Romani victims in the National Socialist concentration camps of Auschwitz, Birkenau, and Lackenbach. It documents wartime atrocities but centers primarily on the postwar repercussions and the enduring physiological, psychological, and social effects these procedures had on survivors’ lives. To capture these extended harms, the dissertation introduces the concept of prolonged genocide, defined as the continuation of genocidal violence beyond the moment of survival through lasting bodily damage, reproductive loss, social marginalization, and silenced suffering.
Previous scholarship has established the political, legal, and medical dimensions of forced sterilization, largely through perpetrator-generated sources and war crimes trials. More recent work has emphasized the importance of centering victim experiences. Contributing to this emerging scholarship, the dissertation presents and analyzes dispersed and previously unexamined material relating to victims from Hungarian territories. By reconstructing this history through survivor testimonies and postwar documentation, the study revisits Raphael Lemkin’s original formulation of genocide with the hindsight afforded by survivor life histories. In doing so, it probes the relationship between reproduction, survival, and rehabilitation after genocide and situates Nazi medical crimes within the longer history of twentieth-century eugenics and reproductive politics.
The dissertation reconstructs the history of sterilization and castration experiments from their design by perpetrators to their wartime execution and long-term aftermath. It traces how experimental aspirations were translated into camp practices, including the identification of a sterilization program in Birkenau that targeted women from the 1944 mass deportations as they were transferred to forced labor sites. The timing and selectivity of these practices indicate that sterilization functioned not only as medical violence but also as an intervention shaped by wartime labor demands. Drawing on survivor testimonies, the study analyzes the immediate bodily effects of different experimental methods, including observed deaths, before turning to the postwar legal reckoning. A reexamination of the Doctors’ Trial demonstrates how the eugenic framework of the United States, among other dynamics, shaped the trial’s rhetoric and contributed to the marginalization of mass sterilization as a crime. The dissertation then documents enduring medical consequences—subfertility, infertility, and secondary infertility— alongside psychological effects, and concludes by examining the social and cultural aftermath of reproductive harm, including the silences that emerge in the archive and their expression through art and music.