Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow - The G Ring: How the IUD Escaped the Nazis

Prisoner #953/38previously known as Dr. Ernst Grfenberghad until recently been among the most sought-after specialists in Berlin. He had a thriving gynecology practice on the citys most glamorous boulevard, the Kurfrstendamm, where his patients included opera stars and the wives of wealthy businessmen and diplomats. He had also served working-class women as the head of obstetrics and gynecology at a municipal hospital.

He had always been scrupulous about hygiene and order. Even so, the conditions of the era meant that hed witnessed his share of tragedies as a gynecologist. These were the days before antibiotics, before epidurals. Abortion was illegal in most circumstances, and contraception was unreliable. For years, Grfenberg was forced to watch the anguish of his patients as they suffered through unwanted pregnancies, or tried to find a way to end them. At times, women came to him after botched quack abortions, or after gory attempts to do the deed themselves. He could remember women lying in pools of their own blood, women he had not been able to revive.

Before he landed in prison, his life had been dominated by his work, not only his private practice and his rounds at the hospital but also his research. His colleagues had marveled at the number of his publications, and their staggering eclecticismhed written journal articles on the anatomy of the hand, on thoracic gunshot wounds, on pregnancy tests, on syphilis. Not content merely to investigate problems, he insisted on devising solutions. As a medical officer in World War I, serving on the Eastern Front, he had improvised forceps to deliver the babies of Russian peasant women in their homes. More recently, he had invented a twilight sleepconsisting of ethyl chloride and a secret ingredientto ease the pain of childbirth. But the invention for which he was best known was not intended to facilitate childbirth but to avert it. In the early 1920s, he had begun to experiment with an idea. The insertion of a small object inside a womans uterus, he thought, might make it impossible for a fertilized egg to implant there. Hed rigged up a device and began testing it on his patients. If his hypothesis was correct, then the Grfenberg ring would be an astonishingly simple, elegant way to prevent pregnancy.

A 1955 portrait of Dr. Ernst Grfenberg by Richard Colin.

As far as he could tell, the ring had been a great success. Over the course of the decade, hed fitted more than two thousand patients with successive iterations of the device. As hed tinkered with the design, the efficacy improved, and the latest version had failed in less than 2 percent of cases. To Grfenberg, this invention was not only a potential lifesaver. He also believed it would liberate women from their fears of pregnancyfear of the discomfort that wracked their bodies as their wombs and bellies swelled; fear of the pain of childbirth without effective anesthetic, and of the risk of death; fear of the labor and expense of caring for another child, when some women already had six, ten, twelve. These anxieties, Grfenberg knew, intruded on intimate moments for so many women, depriving them of unalloyed erotic joy. The Grfenberg ring promised more than just a medical breakthrough. It could be the catalyst for a sexual revolution.

But now, he was not only in prison, his invention had been denounced. Colleagues who had tried the ring reported mixed results, and many were concerned that it could harm the women who used it. The last time Grfenberg had presented his ring, at a conference in Frankfurt in 1931, the physicians in attendance had roundly rejected it. It was too dangerous to leave a foreign object inside a womans body, his colleagues claimed. It could lead to infection, they said, or even, over the long term, cancer.

Some friends had stood by him at the time. Hans Lehfeldt, another Jewish gynecologist and birth-control advocate, had opened a birth-control clinic in a working-class district of Berlin, and published a pamphlet called The Book of Marriage: A Guide for Men and Women , with instructions on how to use pessaries and spermicidal jelly. The two had been part of a movement for birth control on wide-ranging grounds, from the medical to the economic to the sexual. Most members of this movement also believed in eugenicsthe notion that the management of reproduction could lead to improvements in the quality of the human race. Lehfeldt, like many of his peers, had endorsed the sterilization of people with hereditary diseases and disabilities.

Several prominent German Jewish doctors had been at the vanguard of this push for better birth control and freer sexual relations, and not only for married couples. Just a few kilometers from Grfenbergs clinic on the Kurfrstendamm, for example, was the Institute for Sexual Sciencean imposing mansion repurposed as a center for the study of sexuality in all its glorious multifariousness. The institute was run by Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, who offered popular public lectures on sex education and contraception, and lobbied for legalizing sodomy. Throughout the 1920s, this sex reform movement had grown, overlapping with other political factions, particularly the Communist party. Germany, in fact, had become the linchpin of the international sex reform movement and the global capital of sexology.

Then in 1933, the Nazis took power. Hitlers government wasted no time in targeting the sex reform movement, in part because it was largely Jewish, in part because the Nazis abhorred its philosophy of empowerment for women and homosexuals. In some ways, however, they didnt just crush the movement; they appropriated it. In their hands, eugenics would become increasingly coercive and racialized. They instituted compulsory sterilization for the unfit, while discouraging contraception for healthy Aryan women, who were expected to repopulate the Third Reich with a new generation of racially pure children. And instead of repealing the countrys ban on sodomy, as Hirschfeld had advocated, the Nazis expanded it, outlawing any sexual contact between men whatsoever. Hirschfelds institute was ransacked, his library plundered, and thousands of books burned in a sinister carnival while a Nazi brass band played.