Sexual violence was part of the camp regime. The official Nazi line was that intimate contact between Germans and Jews was forbidden under the Nuremberg Laws and the broader policy of racial purity. The official line did not describe what actually happened. SS guards raped women prisoners. Kapos used their authority to extort sexual access. The brothels established for non-Jewish prisoners as a privilege used women drafted from women’s camps under degrees of compulsion that ranged from simple force to manipulation. The full history of sexual violence in the camps was, for decades, largely absent from the survivor literature, partly because it was unspeakable and partly because the survivors who had lived through it had been told, often correctly, that they would not be believed. The recovery of this history began in the 1990s and is still incomplete.
The official prohibition and the actual practice
Rassenschande, racial defilement, was a crime under the Nuremberg Laws. It carried a prison sentence and was treated, at least in theory, as a serious offence. SS men were technically subject to the law in the same way as other Germans. In practice the law was not enforced inside the camps. SS guards raped female prisoners, frequently and openly, and the camp administration treated the question as either a non-issue or a private matter of unit discipline. There are documented cases of SS men being formally disciplined for taking advantage of Jewish women, but the discipline almost always concerned the act of fraternisation rather than the rape itself. The reasoning, when it was articulated at all, was that the Jewish woman was about to be killed anyway and the SS man’s career should not be ruined by an event of no consequence to anyone else.
The practical reality varied by camp and by SS personality. Some camp commandants tolerated extensive sexual abuse of prisoners by their men. Others did not. The cumulative effect, across the system, was that sexual violence was a standing threat to women prisoners that could be triggered by any individual SS man at any moment, with no recourse for the woman.
The kapos and the trade
Kapos and other privileged male prisoners also extorted sexual access from women prisoners. The mechanism was usually trade: a piece of bread, a position in the camp’s food sorting unit, a transfer to a less lethal work assignment, in exchange for sex. The prisoner’s consent in such circumstances is a difficult question to answer in conventional terms. The camp food ration was below survival level. A piece of bread was the difference between a prisoner who would last another month and one who would not. Many of the women who survived the camps describe relationships they had with kapos that they would not, by any normal measure, have called consensual.
The brothels
From 1942 onwards the SS opened brothels in around ten of the major concentration camps, including Mauthausen, Buchenwald, Dachau, Sachsenhausen, Auschwitz I, and others. The brothels were established by Himmler’s order as an incentive scheme for non-Jewish male prisoners with privileged status, particularly kapos and skilled labour prisoners producing useful output. The women who worked in them were drawn from the women’s camp at Ravensbruck, in most cases by Selektion: an SS officer would arrive in the women’s camp and ask for volunteers in exchange for better food, a release from labour, and a promise of release from the camp after a fixed period. Most of the women who volunteered did so under the pressure of starvation, illness, or the imminent prospect of being sent to Auschwitz. Several survivor accounts describe women being drafted without volunteering at all.
The brothel women were Polish, German, Czech and other non-Jewish prisoners; the SS would not assign Jewish women to the brothels because that would have crossed the Rassenschande line for the male prisoner clientele, who were also forbidden non-Jewish German women. The total number of women involved across the brothel system was around 200 to 300 at any time. Many were sterilised against their will before assignment. The promise of release after the assignment ended was, in most cases, not kept. Several surviving brothel women have given testimony in the post-war period; their accounts have only become widely available since the 1990s.
The post-war silence
For decades after the war, the experience of camp sexual violence was largely absent from public Holocaust discussion. There were several reasons. The survivor herself was usually unwilling to speak. The clinical and judicial frameworks for talking about sexual violence in any war or genocide context were undeveloped before the 1990s. Survivors who did speak were often dismissed as confused, as exceptional, or as morally compromised. The first generation of post-war Holocaust historians, who were mostly men, did not always know what to ask, and the women survivors did not always know how to begin to answer.
The shift came with the work of feminist historians from the 1980s onwards, and with the broader change in attitudes to sexual violence as a war crime that came out of the prosecutions of the 1990s, particularly the Yugoslav and Rwandan war crimes tribunals. Joan Ringelheim, Sara Horowitz, and other scholars opened the field. The 2010 conference at Remember the Women Institute on sexual violence in the Holocaust, and the resulting publications, were the moment when the topic entered mainstream Holocaust historiography. The literature is now substantial.
What the silence shows
The long silence on this subject is not unique to the Holocaust. Sexual violence in war has historically been one of the least-recorded aspects of any conflict, and the Holocaust is a particularly extreme example. The point is not that the historical record was always wrong, but that the historical record was always partial. The story of women in the camps cannot be told completely without it. The survivors who lived through it were carrying it in private for the rest of their lives. The work of historians since 1990 has been, in part, the recovery of what those women had to keep to themselves for so long.
See also
Sources
- Sonja Hedgepeth and Rochelle Saidel (eds), Sexual Violence Against Jewish Women During the Holocaust, Brandeis University Press, 2010
- Robert Sommer, Das KZ-Bordell, Schoningh, 2009
- Joan Ringelheim, Women and the Holocaust: A Reconsideration of Research, in Different Voices: Women and the Holocaust, Paragon House, 1993
- USHMM: Sexual Violence