From Sexual History of the World War,

edited by Magnus Hirschfeld

(www.eric.stamen.com/ww1/sexualhistory)

Chapter 12

GENITAL INJURIES, WAR EUNUCHS, ETC.

Gun Wounds in the Testicles—The Eunuchs of the World War—Steinach's Experiments to Restore Virility —Transplanting of Testicles—Literary Use of Such Material—Woman's Relation to War Cripples—Sexual Pathology—Disappearance of Libido, Erection and Ejaculation—Examples of War Perversion—Sexual Regression and Infantilism—War Neurosis and Sexuality—Sadistic Methods of Treatment—Kaufmann's Shock Cure—Its Terrible Tortures—Cruelty in Psychiatric Wards—Soldiers Deliberately Wound Themselves—Venereal Diseases Self-Inflicted—The Shadow of Death

FOR four and a half long years the war machine whirred and whirled, constantly demanding more human flesh to stuff into its insatiable, cruel maw. Those who fell into its merciless wheels came out, if not dead, at least crippled or undone. It was given to only a few to remain in the "steel bath" for any length of time without sustaining injury of body or soul. A Sittengeschichte of the World War cannot omit these victims of war for the problem of war injuries and war cripplings has numerous connections with questions of sexual life as will appear presently. We shall confine ourselves to an investigation of the problem: how far sexual life was influenced by physical and psychical wounds.

Above all, it was shot wounds in the testicles and also injuries to the spinal marrow which induced a complete disappearance of the sexual functions. Injuries of this sort were not uncommon during the war which explains their frequent occurrence in literature. Yet it appears that poetry gave much more attention to this problem of emasculation during the war than did science. One of these cases became famous in medical literature because the patient became a subject for transplantation experiments. The following report was given by Dr. Robert Lichtenstern: "On June 13, 1915, a twenty-nine-year-old soldier sustained a gun wound on the left thigh which inflicted grave injuries upon the scrotum, both testicles and the urethra. When the patient was brought to the hospital, he noticed that in urinating most of the urine ran out through the wound in the scrotum, only a small portion being voided in the natural way. He was suffering from gangrene of both testicles and serious wounds in the urethra. The next day both gangrened testicles were excised because there was danger of a generalized infection. A few days after this operation, the fever declined and the suppuration as well. The patient voided most of his urine through the perineal wound. As a result of his injuries, the patient's libido had declined tremendously, but in the first two weeks dur ing erotic conversations, he had erections on two occasions.

"On July 7, 1915, he was admitted to the surgical department of the Vienna Hospital and submitted to another examination. He was a large, powerful man with normal internal organs. His whole conduct was distinguished by an indifference to the outside world. There was no trace of testicles and on both sides of the wound there were the granulated stumps of both ligated seminal vesicles, in the middle of which the urethra lay free. The prostate showed, upon rectal examination, a normal size and consistency; the bladder emptied by a catheter was clear. In order to close his urethral wound, a temporary catheter was introduced; in the course of the next fourteen days, his wound became perfectly clear and began to form scar tissue. The opening of the fistula closed so that the catheter could be removed; the patient got up and urinated in the normal way. But he still showed a complete indifference toward everything that happened in the hospital and towards his comrades; he read nothing and manifested no interest whatever in the war. In answer to questions he replied that he had absolutely no libido and no erections. Close observation showed that for practically six weeks until the last day of August, he had no erections at all and that, despite various devices calculated to arouse him, he felt no libido whatever. For the most part the patient sat near his bed or at the window, ate voraciously, slept a lot, and busied himself with absolutely nothing at all. The loss of both testicles resulted in a remarkable increase of adipose trsue, especially around the neck which gave the patient a peculiarly stupid appearance. His facial hair, especially his mustache, fell out completely, and his bodily hair decreased too, especially at the linea alba which became almost hairless so that the pubic hairs were set off horizontally from the abdominal epidermis."

As has been mentioned, this case became famous because, as a result of certain experiments that Steinach had made upon animals, an attempt was made to transplant upon this patient a testicle which had been removed from a case of cryptorchism that had been operated upon for this ailment. The result of the transplantation aroused considerable attention in medical circles for the patient showed marked improvement. Various castration symptoms, such as adiposity, altered trichosis, loss of libido and psychic indifferentism, all receded temporarily so that the patient actually entertained the idea of marrying.

Other organic injuries also induced a whole series of grave disturbances of the sexual function. Thus Boenheim has described a case where as a result of a gun wound in the vicinity of the second lumbar vertibræ, there supervened the loss of ejaculation, orgasm and libido.

As has been said, the psychological side of this problem was seized upon by literature and treated by many writers. The sensations of the unfortunate eunuchs of the World War and their conduct of life which entailed a total reorganization of their life pattern, offered poets and writers elaborate material for literary treatment. One of the most moving representations of this sort we quote from Bruno Vogel's magnificent war book:

"Pushing myself along the ground with my arms and my right foot, I crawled over on my belly. I drank greedily and wanted to finish the whole bottle. I crawled further, making my way slowly over limbs writhing in their death agony and flaming fever, beyond large heaps of charred coal in the form of human beings, gazed into eyes torn wide open as though they could not realize that they were already dead, fell over wounded men who were groaning as loudly as though they were lying with a woman in passion. Soon both of my canteens were empty. I saw Sczepczyk again. With amazing precision his generative organs had been shot from his body. 'Herr Leutenant,' he whispered, a little bit ashamed and in deep confidence, 'Herr Leutenant, and I have never yet had a girl.' He gladly accepted the cigarette I gave him and I softly stroked his hair and forehead. Finally I slipped my hand over his eyes and, as a little smile of pleasure curled over his mouth, I pushed my mercifully brutal sword into his side. There passed over him a movement as though he wanted to sneeze, and that was all. He was saved. I had committed a murder."

The devastating reaction which occurs when one realizes that for the rest of one's life one will be unable to enjoy the highest pleasure of this mortal life, has been well depicted for us in the famous Siberian diary of Edwin Erich Dwinger entitled, The Army Behind Barbed Wire. The young author lay in a Russian hospital for prisoners-of-war with an abdominal wound. One evening, after supper, where they had again been served black kascha, a heavy groat which none of them was able to accommodate in his weak stomach, he saw that the man who had sustained an injury of the testicles was getting up from his bed for the first time. This man came right up to the author and looked at him as though he had just awakened from a frightful dream.

"I say," he began, "please tell me—you are an educated man and must know it—will it go without?"

"What do you mean, comrade?" Dwinger asked dismayed.

Thereupon he opened his drawers and made a short cutting movement and said painfully, "They cut it off for me. It isn't there any more. Isn't that so?" Dwinger didn't know whether to tell the truth or not. He really wasn't able to do it. So he muttered something to the effect that he believed that it was possible. . . only that . . . there wouldn't be any children.

"So," mumbled the unfortunate man, "so there won't be any children." He was silent for a moment, breathed with difficulty and then drew a picture from his shirt which he held before my eyes. It showed a broad, buxom girl, a perfect child-bearing machine. "My wife," he said briefly. "Until now we weren't able to have any children because there wasn't any money for them." However, it was his wife's fondest wish to have at least six children, for she held that without children life was nothing. Having said this he turned around slowly and walked to his bed, stretched himself out painfully and never spoke to anyone else until they sent him to Siberia. It is significant that we meet the tragic figure of this emasculated man further on in the novel, but at this later stage, he rejoices that he does not have to suffer the sexual hunger which the others are being plagued by.

Finally, let us cite for the reader a similar incident found in the war book, Nothing New on the Eastern Front, by Carl Agiotto. A certain Schwarz, who had been in the hospital for some time, was now cured and sent home on furlough. His young wife—this was one of those war marriages—could hardly wait for his return. "Kurt never wrote what sort of wound he sustained," she once said to a friend of hers. "He never told me more in his letters than that it was a light gun wound. You can scarcely believe how happy I am that he is coming home. I've been yearning for him so." Two days later Kurt was welcomed home by his wife in the most hearty fashion. They kissed and embraced each other as warmly as though they had just fallen in love. The young wife whispered to her husband, "Tonight I shall fix everything for you." As she said this he looked at her very curiously but kissed her on the mouth quickly and intensely. "What is it?" she asked. He merely said that it was nothing and stroked her forehead. Evening came and the young wife prepared the sleeping chamber for their night of love. Her heart danced with glee in anticipation of the happiness that would be theirs. Suddenly she fell upon her husband's neck and whispered passionately, "You've gotten so sunburnt and you look so vigorous. Have you any notion how supremely glad I am that you've come home? I love you so much." With that she sat down on the edge of the bed. Kurt suddenly became very red in the face. His wife noticed his apparent help lessness, a condition she had never before seen in him.

"What is the matter with you?" she inquired. "What makes you so very droll?

He replied that he was going out for a moment and that, upon his return, they would make a night of it. In the meantime, he urged her to get undressed so that she would be completely ready when he came back. She undressed and stretched out luxuriously over the bed in delirious expectation of the joy about to be shared with her loved one. In the meantime, he sat in the adjoining room, beating his head with his fists and drawing his breath in pain. She called out suddenly, "Kurt, Kurt, where are you? I'm ready for you and I've warmed the bed too."

He heard the call of his wife and breathing even harder than before, muttered out in great agony that he would be in presently.

"I don't understand what's the matter with you. You've never been this way before." But not a word of answer came. For a while there was a painful stillness from both sides. Finally she called out with a sob in her voice, "If you don't come in right away, I'm going to be very angry with you.

He arose and began to pace to and fro. Then muttering, "Well, it has to be some time or other," he made his way into the bed room.

"But you're still dressed," his wife called out in astonishment.

He came close, fell on his knees before her and, burying his head in her lap, sobbed out inarticulately, "I can no longer come to you for I am not a man any longer....The enemy...A bomb! "

She looked at him with terror for she now saw the meaning of it all.

This marriage was broken by the war, as were innumerable others. How many marriages did the war destroy in this fashion? Were there hundreds, were there thousands?

Before we turn to view the panorama of these most pitiful victims of the war, we must cast a glance at the women who were tied to such men and who indirectly were the victims of the mass insanity of war. It is the special merit of the poet, Ernst Toller, to have illuminated the tragedy of these women in their relations to their castrated husbands. Toller's Hinkemann may be regarded as the final literary formula of the emasculated soldier who returns home from the wars, and the inability of his wife to continue a veritably inhuman sacrifice in his behalf. In many cases, the wife of the war eunuch was animated by the best and most noble motives, just like Hinkemann's wife; but all of these pathetically noble resolves were shipwrecked on the rocks of our workaday, all-too-human life. If we are going to lend our pity to any of the marriages ruined by the war, we certainly should expend it here, for in this case we are dealing with a group of men who will never be able to find their lost happiness by the side of a woman. From every outcry of Toller's hero, we hear the whole dismal and appalling tragedy of a creature who has gone through the vast hell of war, and it is a cry which can never be silenced. How brutal is the reply to Hinkemann by his wife's seducer, Paul Grosshahn, who rebukes the cripple for seeking to keep his wife a nun. Hinkemann is informed by the seducer that he is in reality nothing more to his wife now than a ground for divorce!

How little the war mentality was able to take cognizance of the actual needs of human beings, appears from the demands made upon women in connection with the invalidism of their husbands. It was held to be quite natural that women should remain chained for the rest of their lives to crippled men, and that they should be willing to live this sort of sacrificial existence. In regard to this class of human beings, it was expected that not only would the spirit be willing, but also that the flesh would be free of all weakness. For a little while, it appeared that all the evils of war would be abolished if only there were the certainty that the cripples and invalids who returned from the battlefield would not have to remain without their wives or live unmarried. In this sacrifice of her own happiness, the preachers of this gospel saw the essential patriotic duty of every woman—and, of course, no further ground was necessary than this. From every newspaper and pulpit this message was shouted at women. The Hungarian archbishop, Johann Csernoch, preached in this fashion as early as the second month of the war. This vogue waned, however, as early as the end of the very first year of the war. It turned out that the solicitude of those responsible for the war toward the welfare of the victims of the war, was only a part of war propaganda. Even in England, where this artificial ideology could show its greatest triumphs and where this vogue went so far that parents and wives looked with pride at their sons and husbands who returned from the battlefield crippled, the propaganda nature of this whole ideology was just as apparent.

In a German essay of that time dealing with this question we read the following: "Many people will honestly desire an answer to the question of how anyone can propose to a normal woman that she marry a cripple. The answer is not very easy, but none the less science has given it. Our orthopedic surgery has gotten to the point today where it can take a man who has lost his arms or legs and render him capable of earning his own living; by teaching him proper exercises and giving him proper appliances, modern science can actually fit this man to do the most varied kinds of work....

“All that is necessary is that women and girls should learn to take the proper attitude to our honored war heroes. For this spirit must be learnt. In this new attitude to cripples the great power of love will be able to accomplish tremendous things; but the first thing that is necessary is to put oneself into the new relationship and to become accustomed to the fact that this or that man has no arm or leg."

Pious counsels such as these might have been taken to heart at a time when patriotic vanity spoke in favor of the invalids. But very soon, in this respect also, life demanded its own, and true to itself but merciless to its victims, it did not permit itself to be violated so that the crime of those who had demanded war would appear less grave because the consequences of the war were being glozed over in this fashion. And if even after the cult of the wounded ebbed, certain women in the early period of the war still continued to feel attracted to wounded men this was, to a large extent, due to a pathological condition. Sexual pathology has taught us that there is scarcely a single bodily deformity or abnormality which will definitely deprive its possessor of every possibility of woman's love, for disgusting as it may seem to the normal person, it is these very abnormalities which act as erotic attractions upon certain members of the opposite sex (varieties of fetishism and masochism). A short time ago the Berlin Institut fur Sexualförschung received a long communication from a man who lived in a rural German community, describing this kind of relationship between his own wife and a war cripple. The unhappy husband recognized and described very accurately the uncanny charm exercised by his rival upon his wife who had formerly been an exemplary partner. This case was typical of many others.

Let us now return to our original theme. We have already seen that injuries to the testicles and genitals resulted in the extinction of the sexual function, and insofar as they led to castration, resulted in all the sequelæ of eunuchism. But there was a whole series of other injuries which were also connected with grave disturbances of the sexual function. To this category of war injuries belonged all injuries to the head where the brain was affected, various contusions of the spinal marrow and similar wounds which resulted in a complete extinction of the sexual function.

Even without these injuries, many wounded men complained of disturbed sex function and there are statistics to bear out these complaints. Thus, Dr. F. Pick found among twenty-five officers and seventy-five soldiers who were in his service that ten of the former and seven of the latter complained of high grade disturbances of this sort. In more than half of these cases, libido, erection and ejaculation had completely disappeared and in the others, while the libido had not been extinguished, the erections were meager and unsatisfactory and the ejaculations completely absent. While in the majority of cases, sexual disturbances disappeared by the side of other symptoms of the disease, in the case of two convalescents ill from jaundice and arthritis, these erotic symptoms were regarded as the cause of their nervousness, and in one case led to ideas of inferiority and attempts at suicide. Pick saw the origin of this impotence primarily in the so-called "commotion neurosis" which induces changes in the lumbro-sacral marrow with consequent injury to the centrum genitospinale, and also in the enforced abstinence at the front. That the sexual hunger of the soldiers was in all respects calculated to produce these results, we have seen in our consideration of eroticism in the trenches.

In general, the purely psychic disturbances of the war could exercise a considerable influence not only on the intensity but also on the direction of the sexual impulse. This is a question concerning which there is a considerable difference of opinion. That perversions arose among soldiers, that there was a definite shunting of the erotic impulse to another direction, cannot be maintained in the strict sense of the terms. Wherever there were generated new sexual needs which tended in a direction different from the norm of sexual activity, we may see the coming to power of erotic notions which were present before, but which came to dominance only during the war, whereas previously they had been kept under strong control. We know that the soldier's manner of life, especially the atmosphere of the trenches, was all too prone to throw off inhibitions which had been accumulated in the course of human history and in the development of the individual. All this belongs to the phenomena which we shall consider in the chapter on Bestialization. Nothing is clearer than that, as a result of this process which was undergone by every soldier to a greater or less degree, unconscious motives of an animal-infantile-primitive sort were freed from their former subservience to the censorship of consciousness and civilization, and were given a tremendous opportunity for fulfillment.

Wulffen has brought to our attention the following case which illustrates the general set-up in cases of reversion. A certain officer who returned home from the war made the following strange request of his wife: That she put a dog's collar around his neck and then whip him with a dog-whip as he crawled around the room on all fours. It is obvious that this is a case of zoo-masochism, the roots of which extended into this man's past and all that the war did was to liberate the abnormal impulse from its inhibitions. It may be remarked in passing that Wulffen has also expressed an opinion shared by many others, that the impotence of many men who returned home on a furlough was attributable to unconscious homosexual components which had become strengthened on the battlefield and which now on their return home expressed themselves in an aversion to woman. This was certainly true of a number of such cases.

We wish to cite another case of "war perversion" which has been investigated by Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld. This case is especially interesting as an illustration of the aberration of infantilism which was especially favored by the whole environment of the war and came to expression in such phenomena as the aversion to work and dreaminess of many soldiers insofar as these conditions were expressions of the pathological state of infantilism. This case concerned a young officer who had been wounded in a bomb explosion. He had been left with a very active tic convulsif. The patient admitted that, long before this time, he had had numerous sexual compulsive notions but he had always been able to exorcise them. However, after his war experiences, he was completely dominated by these painful sexual imaginings which had a very strongly infantile character. The strongest erotic feelings were aroused in him when he saw little children, especially little boys, chastized and beaten on their bare posteriors and it gave him the greatest pleasure to imagine himself in the place of the punished child. He was also excited when he saw children attending to their natural needs but he could never become active with them; the very thought made him feel disgusted. At the sight of such spectacles he would feel sexual excitation and then when he got home he would recall the whole situation and satisfy himself. The patient, who was twenty-five years old, admitted that various childish phrases continually ran through his mind and that he preferred to wear boys' clothing.

The discussion turns at this moment in the chapter to war neuroses.... So I conclude my quotations from the book here

Moved to be a continuation of the same thread, rather than beginning a new one.

––––JA

Chapter 18

SADISM, RAPE, AND OTHER ATROCITIES

Modern vs. Past War Atrocities—Violation of All International Agreements—Poison Gas Horrors—Poison Gas for Civilian Population in Future Wars—Atrocities Committed by Turks, Kurds, Slavs, Etc.—Eroticism Behind Numerous Cruelties—Mutilation of Corpses—Primitive Savagery of Black French Warriors—Amputating Ears, Fingers, Etc.—Castration of the Enemy—Examples of Feminine Degeneracy—Their Mutilation of Soldiers' Genitals—Other Examples of Sadism and Torture—The True Story of the Armenian Massacres—Atrocities in Eastern Prussia—Rape During the World War—The Problem of War Babies

.... Mutilations such as castration of the slain enemy were thoroughly sadistic. In previous wars, especially revolutionary struggles, this practice was not infrequently perpetrated by women but it was not always attributable to sexual passion. It was Wulffen's opinion that the dominant motivation for this type of brutality was not lust, but political fanaticism. The reason why violence is exercised upon the sexual organs of the dying or dead enemy springs from some obscure desire for vengeance. This mania drives these degenerate women to destroy that very member of the helpless man which had formerly been responsible for so much unhappiness to women. Yet there can be no question that in the execution of these sadistic acts, sexual excitations are aroused and gratified. Wulffen asserted that even in the World War such degenerate females frequently castrated dead or gravely wounded soldiers who were Iying on the battlefield. Still, this was not a typical phenomenon and literature has reported no such case. On the general theme of the mutilation of genitals, Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld wrote as follows during the war:

"At the beginning of the war, when the inflamed minds of people were inclined to exaggerate the actual atrocities of the war, there was considerable talk not only of eyes that had been torn out, hands that had been cut off, but also of the excisions of genitals. As far as I have been able to trace, I have not discovered a single proof. That such criminal mutilations did take place in previous wars is certain. The mutilation that was practiced against women, such as cutting off the breasts, were the gory deeds of the Russian pogroms.

"Of course, the purpose of robbing men of their testicles, was not only to destroy the possibility of reproducing one's kind, but also the more or less conscious purpose of making the injured men unfit for war service. Of all the castrates that I have seen, not one scemed capable of meeting the rigorous demands of war."

It appears that among the Southern Slavs sadistic murders, mutilations, castrations and rapes were very frequent. Of course, we are dealing here with peoples whose history, even in the twentieth ccntury, is one long, breathless fight for existence and whose bloody Balkan wars, notorious for their cruelty, constituted a sort of experiment for the World War. What is more, these peoples have remained behind the rest of Europe in civilization and have retained their primitive traditions. Only during the Great War did they enter the stage of world history. At this point we wish to insert an account of their war practices, based upon their century old traditions, from the pen of the eminent sexologist and ethnologist, Professor Frederich S. Krauss:

"For fifty-three months and eighteen days I worked in the war hospitals of Vienna as teacher to the south-Slavic wounded, and from their mouths I heard first-hand accounts of unspeakable atrocities committed by them during the war. This material would make a large work and here I wish to give only a few extracts from the extensive material I have collected. I should like to preface my account with the statement that the Balkan Slavs no less than the Slavs of the north and the west are kindly and peaceful in their peasant and middle-class groups, but their minds are more easily poisoned. There was spread among the people various terrifying tales concerning the cruelty of the enemy which aroused in these simple gullible folk such a hatred of the enemy that for the welfare of the Fatherland, whose highest and dearest achievements were being threatened, it was thought necessary to extirpate the enemy root and branch.

"The whole educational system of the southern Slavs was used for arousing and propagating this brutal hatred. The majority of these peasants are illiterate and derive what little they know of the world from Guslar songs which, for the most part, celebrate the fame of great destroyers, murderers, executioners, vandals and founders of states. Thus a Bosnian Guslar ballad tells how the Christian champion, Lukas, was ambushed by the Moslem knight, Rustan, and his horde in the mountains and how he killed them and took Rustan's head along as a trophy of victory. Even at that time, it was a common practice not to kill hated enemies, whom one had captured alive, but to tear the skin from their bodies. Lukas varied (and accelerated) the effects of the latter process by cutting off, to quote the words of the song, 'the life' or the penis (in French also one says, la vie). And so, before Lukas left the field of battle, he cut off the organ of every one of his fallen foes. Why? For two reasons. First, because he believed that by carrying around this booty of his enemy, the life of the conquered, which means their power and might, would be transferred to him, the conqueror; secondly, because in this way, even if the enemy should come to life or recover, it would be impossible for him to propagate any more enemies or avengers; and thirdly, because with these trophies one could show off before one's friends, much as Occidental warriors take pride in their medals, crosses, orders and high sounding titles.

"One day when there were about 120 wounded in my barrack schoolroom, one of my men arose and began to sing a ballad denouncing war. After this was completed another one of my pupils, a man of forty, said the following: 'Now I am in the barracks for the venereally diseased. At home I have a wife and three children. I was so happy with them. How will I be able to show myself there? There were four of us in Serbia together one evening and suddenly a Serbian girl approached us and begged for a piece of bread, saying that she hadn't eaten all day. In return for this, she declared herself ready to give herself to us. Each of us gave her a piece of bread and a bit of wurst. All four of us were infected by her; I was brought to Vienna, but I don't know where the other three went to.'

"A Serbian who belonged to the academic class once told me how the Serbians had lived in Macedonia. They used to swoop down on a town, make all the men shorter by a head and then consort with the wives and daughters, with no regard to religious or national affiliations. As a matter of fact, veritable markets for women's flesh were established here. Whole groups of pretty women were sold to Greece and even to India, and this business flourished tremendously. On the soil of Macedonia, the Serbians, Bulgarians and Greeks fought out their feuds. The chief impetus to these was given by the Komitadzijes, bands of guerillas, desperate, violent men dedicated to avenging the atrocities perpetrated against the native population. The women of the oppressors were raped and, if boys and men were captured, they were raped in the same homosexual fashion as the enemy practiced.

There is more, but it is somewhat off message, and even more brutal.