Malnutrition, illness, medical treatment, or psychological trauma, among other reasons, can cause a woman’s menstruation to stop, known as amenorrhea. But there was an exceptional situation in the history of humanity in which a huge group of women suffered from this condition at the same time and until now its cause was not well known: about 98% of the women who were imprisoned in concentration camps Nazis stopped menstruating shortly after their arrival.
The cause of this aspect of the barbaric situation to which millions of people were subjected had not been studied until now, and Dr. Peggy J. Kleinplatz of the University of Ottawa School of Medicine suggests that this should be because their executioners introduced synthetic steroids into the daily rations of the prisoners to stop their menstrual cycle and probably end their ability to have children, since one of the objectives of Nazism was to exterminate all those they considered inferior to the race Aryan, like the Jews.
Dr. Kleinplatz has combined historical data with testimonies from survivors of the Holocaust – as the systematic extermination of millions of people (including six million Jews) by the Nazi German regime during World War II has been called – and has come to to the conclusion that the sudden cessation of menstruation experienced by Jewish women in concentration camps was too uniform for traumatic shock and malnutrition alone to explain the phenomenon, although these were the accepted reasons in the late 1940s and Since then, it has hardly been studied.
“In other horrific mass atrocities in history, this sudden onset of amenorrhea did not occur, or occurred slowly in combination with starvation and trauma over a period of 12 to 18 months,” said Dr. Kleinplatz, Senior Lecturer at the Ottawa Medical School. “So my question was: What was happening to these women in the death camps that was distinctive, that caused it to happen immediately and couldn’t be fully explained by the hypotheses of trauma or malnutrition, or both? It was then that I began to investigate whether there was any deliberate attempt to cause the cessation of menstruation in these Jewish women.”
Holocaust survivors suspected there was something in the food
Kleinplatz and Paul Weindling, a historian and professor at Oxford-Brookes University, and co-author of the paper, have supported their theory based on what they were told by women around the world who survived the Holocaust and who Dr. Kleinplatz interviewed in four languages. –Yiddish, Hebrew, English and French– between 2018 and 2021. They thus collected 93 complete testimonies from female survivors, with an average age of 92 and a half years, or from their descendants, who could provide complete reproductive histories for the survivors.
Every day packages of chemical products arrived at the Nazi camps that were dissolved in disgusting soups with which they fed the prisoners so that they “would not have the period”
Holocaust survivors told Dr. Kleinplatz that they suspected something in their food rations caused them to suddenly stop menstruating in the camps. A woman who had worked in the Auschwitz kitchen for months as a teenager went so far as to describe the packages of chemicals that arrived daily under armed guard and dissolved into disgusting soups that were fed to the prisoners so that “the women would not They had their period.” This account of contaminated rations has been confirmed by the findings of a 1969 report that questioned cooks at Auschwitz, the best-known of the Nazi death camps.
The impact of the consumption of these substances was maintained in the long term, since almost all the women interviewed – 98% – were unable to become pregnant or give birth to the number of children they wanted to have. The findings show that of 197 confirmed pregnancies, at least 48 (24.4%) ended in miscarriage, 13 (6.6%) in stillbirth, and 136 (69.0%) in live birth.
“The rates of primary infertility, secondary infertility, miscarriage and stillbirth were worryingly high and not in line with the general population, or even the general population of Jews during those baby boom years,” says Dr. Kleinplatz .
Mass sterilization of Jewish women
This scientist explains that sex steroids, which would have caused immediate amenorrhea, existed in abundance at the time in Germany during the Second World War, something that is not a well-known fact. However, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) did not approve a hormonal birth control pill until 1960.
The study reveals that exogenous sex steroids that cause the immediate cessation of menstruation were first synthesized and manufactured in Berlin in 1933 and were over-the-counter drugs in Germany for the treatment of infertility. Adolf Butenandt, a German pharmacological chemist, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in the 1930s for his work synthesizing sex steroids.
The researchers say they found evidence that German factories produced large quantities of sex steroids during 1943-1945, in theory to treat infertility. “However, such large amounts of sex steroids would have significantly exceeded the needs of German women seeking treatment for infertility. It seems surprising that the manufacture of large quantities of exogenous hormones has been considered a priority during the shortages of war when, clearly, their supposed purpose could easily have been fulfilled with much smaller quantities, “says the study.
During the Nuremberg war crimes trial more than half a century ago it was shown that the Nazis were seeking methods of mass sterilization of Jewish women, and that Nazi leaders instructed those responsible for the “sterilization of Jewish women” scheme to stop to keep written records. But after 75 years and thanks to the more than 10,000 testimonies of Holocaust survivors collected in various oral history projects, Dr. Kleinplatz and Paul Weindling have managed to connect data and provide a new analysis of this hidden history.
The living memory of the Holocaust is fading with the passing of time, which is why Dr. Kleinplatz insists that it be investigated further. “At this point, we are left with more questions than answers,” she wrote in the study’s conclusions, which have been published in Science Direct. “It is up to medical researchers, other scientists and historians to continue the search for the answers that each of the women interviewed in this study deserves.”
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