Dr. Beverley Chalmers’ latest book is not the kind people want to read. Yet, there is one they should.
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Titled, “Birth, Sex and Abuse: Women's Voices Under Nazi Rule,” it is filled from cover to cover with horrifying accounts of countless Jewish and non-Jewish women being raped and brutalized, experimented upon, forced into prostitution or compelled to undergo sterilization or abortion against their will. Some German women successfully gave birth and had their babies taken away for adoption. Jewish women had theirs ripped away and murdered in front of them.
These actions were all part of the Nazi agenda to create a master race, but until Chalmers set about writing this book, no single work had thoroughly examined and comprehensively consolidated evidence of this aspect of the Holocaust.
More than a decade of non-stop and singularly focused research on the subject took an emotional toll on Chalmers, a 65-year-old expert on pregnancy and birth in difficult social, political, economic and religious settings. She had previously published on women giving birth under Apartheid in South Africa and having babies in the former Soviet Union under Communism. Others of her books reported on women with prior experience of female genital mutilation giving birth in Canada, and on women giving birth in highly medicalized settings.
“It was emotionally draining. My children suggested I write about something happier, but I kept going because these stories needed to be told. “These women's experiences needed to be brought to light and honored,” the author told The Times of Israel in an interview from her home in Kingston, Ontario, Canada.
A professor at the University of Ottawa until a year ago, the South-African born and educated Chalmers read some 600 books and articles and combed the archives of Holocaust and World War II-related institutions in Israel, the US and the UK in search of documentary evidence and personal testimonies.