European Infertility Studies Conducted Towards Nazi Reparations, 1946-1978.

Abstract

Following the Holocaust, many women rejoiced when able to reproduce; children represented a return to normalcy, a stake in futurity, and even reproductive revenge against the Nazi regime. The consequent baby boom in Displaced Persons camps demonstrably reaffirmed this return to life and resignification of values. In the following decades, however, this demonstrated fertility was cast aside in favor of reparation politics. Though amenorrhea (cessation of women's menstrual cycles) was a common occurrence during wartime, the discourse around infertility became a symbolic way to articulate a range of claims about gendered, bodily damage stemming from Nazi persecution. Concerned with national indemnification and national repopulation, physicians in the formerly occupied countries leaned into new roles as political-medical actors in varying degrees and contexts. Between 1946-1951, physicians from marginalized identities and formerly occupied countries opposed those who had been affiliated with the Nazi party, claiming that amenorrhea was a war-related condition worthy of compensation. From 1952-1967, sympathetic physicians seeking to counter West German rejections linked amenorrhea with psychic trauma - the latter of which the government denied as grounds for reparations. The last group of studies, 1963-1978, stemming exclusively from Poland, demanded reparations for the Polish people - research that gradually dovetailed with Poland's modernization efforts of the 1970s. None of the studies pointed to any singular consensus. This article seeks to illuminate how points of contention in the history of German reparations were met by physicians whose role, by virtue of West German reparations processes, was charged politically and whose findings, by virtue of this political valence, took definitive stances.