Excerpt from Bella Pree's medical report

During criminal proceedings against the intersex Bella Pree in the 1950s, a medical assessment was forced onto her. This is an excerpt from the medical report prepared by Prof. Dr. Walther Schwarzacher and his assistant doctor Dr. Walter Franke at the Institute for Judicial Medicine at the University of Vienna. Bella described to the doctor that during her imprisonment in Natzweiler concentration camp in 1943, a yellowish liquid had been injected into her genital area as part of a so-called “voluntary emasculation treatment”.

In most cases, however, there could hardly have been any voluntariness involved. If those affected refused sterilization, they were threatened with further imprisonment and thus had to fear life threatening risks. Despite previous promises, even after sterilization, some were not released. At the same time when Bella was imprisoned in Natzweiler concentration camp, Adele Haas, who was also intersex, was imprisoned there as well. Later, after the Nazi regime had come to an end, Adele reported on her knowledge of the administering of injections in barrack 5 of Natzweiler concentration camp, where she had temporarily been held. It is proven that cruel human experiments took place in this barrack.

The perception that intersexuality was a “serious physical deformity” and that those affected had to be sterilized or removed from the marriage market of “desirable fellow citizens” was held by many German doctors during the Nazi regime. They wanted to avoid intersex people producing children, because they did not consider these children to be valuable for the "Volkskörper" (national body).

With the attribution of having a body that deviated from medical gender norms, not only intersex people were declared sick and undesirable. Intersexuality was also used to defame certain groups of people. Motives behind this could have been antisemitic, racist, trans- and homophobic and even anti-communist, some of which were interwoven. The Austrian doctor Robert Stiegler tried, amongst others, to defame Jewish people, emancipatory women and leading figures of Marxism and Bolshevism this way. He created the hypothesis, that many of these people were most likely intersex.