The Faculty of Medicine’s Dr. Peggy J. Kleinplatz suggests synthetic steroids were slipped into daily rations of female captives of Nazi concentration camps in a bid to stop their menstrual cycles and perhaps impair their ability to have children altogether.
The horrific toll of the Holocaust, with
its crimes against humanity amid the state-sponsored mass murder campaign that
killed six million Jews and millions of others during World War II, has been
scrutinized in numerous academic studies, books, films, and other works over
decades.
But one aspect of the extreme cruelty
and suffering during this rock-bottom point of human history was never fully
examined: Why did roughly 98 % of women imprisoned at Nazi concentration camps
experience amenorrhea—or the absence of menstruation—shortly after their
arrival?
In a highly compelling new
paper published in Social Science & Medicine, lead author Dr. Peggy J. Kleinplatz of the
University of Ottawa Faculty of Medicine suggests the sudden cessation of
menstruation among Jewish women at concentration camps was too uniform to
be effected only by trauma and malnutrition—a set of explanations readily
accepted by the late 1940s and rarely investigated further.
Her study, blending historical evidence
and the testimony of Holocaust survivors, submits an additional
hypothesis: synthetic steroids were being administered in the daily rations
given to female captives in a bid to stop their menstrual cycles and perhaps
impair their ability to have children altogether.
“In other horrible mass atrocities in
history, this sudden onset of amenorrhea either didn’t occur, or occurred
slowly in combination with starvation and trauma over a 12- to 18-month
period,” says Dr. Kleinplatz, a full professor in the
uOttawa Faculty of Medicine.
“So, my question was: What was happening
to these women in the death camps that was distinctive, causing it to occur
immediately, and couldn’t be explained fully by the hypotheses of either
trauma, or malnutrition, or both? That was when I began to investigate whether
there was some deliberate attempt to cause cessation of menstruation in these
Jewish women.”
Evidence for the theory put forth by Dr.
Kleinplatz and co-author Paul Weindling, a historian and professor at
Oxford-Brookes University, is backed up by interviews with female Holocaust
survivors across the globe. From 2018 to 2021, Dr. Kleinplatz conducted
interviews with survivors in four languages: Yiddish, Hebrew, English and
French. Ultimately, 93 complete testimonies were collected from female survivors—their
average age 92 ½—or their offspring who could provide complete reproductive
histories for the survivors.
The Holocaust survivors told Dr.
Kleinplatz they suspected that something in their food rations caused them
to suddenly stop menstruating at the camps.
One woman, who had worked in the kitchen
at Auschwitz for months when she was a teenager, even described packets of
chemicals that were brought each day under armed guard and dissolved into foul
soups the female captives were fed so that “women don’t get their periods.”
This narrative of tainted rations is corroborated by findings in a 1969 report
that questioned cooks at Auschwitz, the most notorious of the Nazi death camps.
There was long-term impact for the
survivors. Nearly all the interviewed women—98 %—were unable to conceive
or carry to term their desired number of children. The findings report that of
197 confirmed pregnancies, at least 48 (24.4%) ended in miscarriages, 13 (6.6%)
in stillbirths and 136 (69.0%) in live births.
“The rates of primary infertility,
secondary infertility, miscarriage and stillbirth were disturbingly high and
not in keeping with the general population, or even the general population of
Jews during those baby boom years,” Dr. Kleinplatz says.
Dr. Kleinplatz says the sex steroids,
which would have produced immediate amenorrhea, existed in abundance at the
time in Germany during the WWII era. This is not a well-known fact. In
contrast, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration only approved a hormonal
birth control pill in 1960.
The study reports that exogenous sex
steroids—which cause an immediate cessation of menstruation—were first
synthesized and manufactured in Berlin in 1933 and were available as
over-the-counter drugs for the treatment of infertility in Germany. A German
pharmacologist and chemist, Adolf Butenandt, was awarded a Nobel Prize in
chemistry in the 1930s for his work synthesizing sex steroids.
The researchers say they obtained
evidence that large amounts of sex steroids were being produced by German factories
during 1943–45, ostensibly to treat infertility. “However, such large
quantities of sex steroids would have exceeded dramatically the needs of German
women seeking infertility treatment. It seems striking that the manufacture of
large amounts of exogenous hormones would have been considered a priority
during the scarcities of wartime when plainly, their alleged purpose could have
easily been filled with much smaller quantities,” the study says.
Evidence at the Nuremburg war crimes
trial over half a century ago demonstrated that Nazis sought methods of mass
sterilization of Jewish women. And it showed that Nazi leadership instructed
those tasked with the plan to “sterilize Jewesses” to stop keeping written
records.
After roughly 75 years and over 10,000
testimonies of Holocaust survivors in various oral history projects, it took
Dr. Kleinplatz and her co-author to connect the dots and provide a fresh
examination of this hidden history.
As the living memory of the Holocaust
fades with each passing year, Dr. Kleinplatz urges others to investigate
further.
“At this juncture, we are left with more questions than answers,” she wrote in the study’s conclusions. “It is incumbent on medical researchers, other scientists and historians to continue the search for the answers deserved by each of the women interviewed in this study.”
Journal article: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0277953622005561
Photo credit: Karsten Winegart via
University of Ottawa
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