Sexual(ized) Violence and the ‘Non-Absent’ Male Body: Castration and Sterilization in Auschwitz

• In Event: Sexual Violence in the Holocaust: Language, Body and Power

Abstract

Focusing on Dr. Hörst Schumann’s sterilization and castration experiments in Auschwitz, this paper utilizes a combination of audio-visual testimony and post-war trial records to coalesce the voices of survivors whose embodied experiences have long remained overlooked. In doing so, this paper renders present the sexualized and gendered male body that is otherwise typically ‘non-absent’ in Holocaust history. It highlights our own failings of language, in that historians often cannot recognize men as victims because they do not discuss sexual violence in terms dominantly associated with sexual violation. Further still, in framing these experiments as sexualized in their motivation, that is as attacks on sexuality, this paper explicitly integrates men’s experiences into the history as ones of sexualized eugenic violence through the Nazi regime’s attempt to eradicate Jewish (and other ‘undesirable’ races’) procreational ability.

In their 2004 investigation of sexual and sexualized violence enacted against women and girls during the Holocaust, Helga Amesberger, Katrin Auer, and Brigitte Halbmayr utilized the term ‘sexualized eugenic violence’ to fold women’s experiences of sterilization, forced abortion, and other medical experimentation into broader understandings of sexual(ized) violence. While similar medical experimentation on men and boys in the camps have had their histories written, the same understandings of sexualized violence have not yet been applied to them.

Building on Björn Krondorfer’s concept of masculinity’s ‘non-absence’ in which “[t]he omnipresence of a male reality [blinds] us to the tangible presence of ‘maleness’ in history and its documentation,” this paper argues that it is not only that historians are blind to the tangible reality of being male, but men and boys themselves are also blind to their own gendered and sexualized body. Nevertheless, by analyzing what men say (or do not say) and how they say (or do not say) it, it is clear that these men and boys did not experience the experiments in profoundly different ways than women, rather they narrate their experience differently due to the diverging “social norms and expectations regarding masculinity and femininity” (Waxman, 2008).

Author

• William Jones