Waitman Wade Beorn
We sang over claret and liqueurs, vodka, and rum, plunged into intoxication like doomed men, talked drunkenly about sex and science, reeled by the railroad cars, sat outside over campfires, were made ill by the cheap spirits and the sudden rich diet, and carried on anyway, made grotesque speeches about war and peace, grew melancholy, talked about our lovelornness and homesickness, started laughing again, and went on drinking, whooped and skipped over the rails, danced in the cars, and fired into the air, made a Russian woman prisoner dance naked for us, greased her tits with shoe polish, got her as drunk as we were, and sobered up only when we reached Gomel after five days.
—Wehrmacht soldier Willi Reese, killed 19441
[SS Sturmmann] Blum beat and tortured the men who worked in the laundry and killed many with his own hand, likewise the women who he also sexually abused, in spite of the “Nurnberg Laws”; this was generally known by all.
—Zeev Porath, survivor, Janowska Camp, 19602
In May 1960, a fifty-one-year-old coal miner, Xavier H., appeared at the court building in Schwabmünchen, Germany. State attorneys deposed the former Army medic regarding the murder of ten thousand Jews in the eastern Polish town of Slonim in 1941, an action in which his Army unit had participated deeply. In the course of questioning, Xavier made the offhand comment that, on the morning of the massacre, he had left the company barracks and entered the Jewish ghetto because he was afraid that his Jewish “girlfriend” Ida had been caught up in the Aktion.3 Prosecutors, clearly not interested in this aspect of his testimony, refocused him on the killing events themselves, leaving us to wonder about this extraordinary statement and the nature of Xavier’s relationship with this Jewish woman.
This short vignette is in many ways indicative of the history (or lack thereof) of the sexual nature of Nazi criminality in the context of both the Holocaust and the war, particularly in the east. The story of sexual violence carried out by the Germans and their allies is often, like Xavier’s, hinted at and rarely pursued. At a scholarly level, these events have remained obscured or hidden and are only beginning to come to light thanks to the courageous work of a group of historians and scholars, some of whose work will be highlighted in this essay.4
Thus, I will attempt to sketch here the varied ways in which Nazi criminality, particularity in the east, delved into the realm of sexual and sexualized violence. Examining Nazi sexual crimes in the east against both Jews and non-Jews reflects a growing trend in Holocaust scholarship, which recognizes the centrality of Eastern Europe as the epicenter of the Nazi genocidal project: the home of the vast majority of its victims, and the site of its most ambitious (and lethal) projects of demographic engineering. This essay adds to this scholarship by examining in some detail the various kinds of nonconsensual sexual interactions that took place on the ground between individuals, for it is only in this way that one can truly begin to understand the complexity of Nazi policy and behavior during the Holocaust.
The forms of sexual abuse endemic to the Nazi east demand some definition. Relying solely on the concept of rape, which is very much conditioned by our contemporary understanding of the term, limits our ability to clearly view the landscape on which sexual exploitation took place. It creates a false dichotomy between consent and nonconsent in an environment in which unfettered consent was impossible, for the perpetrator almost always had complete power and the option to simply murder the victim. In discussing this topic, I will rely on several terms that add nuance to this discussion. First, I will distinguish between sexual violence and sexualized violence. I define sexual violence to mean any nonconsensual interaction that involves an actual sexual act. This is to be meaningfully distinguished from sexualized violence, which may be equally traumatic and brutal without sexual intercourse of any kind but that does have a clearly sexual component. As Brigitte Halbmayr rightfully notes, “The term sexualized violence makes it clear that male violence against females is not about sexuality but is a show of power on the part of the perpetrator and includes many forms of violence with sexual connotations, including humiliation, intimidation, and destruction.”5 Rape itself, then, generally falls under the former category and one could distinguish perhaps between violent physical rape and coerced rape.
I will also use the term “instrumental sex” to distinguish a specific form of behavior from rape, an act in which I consider the victim to be utterly powerless.6 I must preface this important distinction with the recognition that in almost all instances, the victim was powerless to grant consent; specifically, if they could not refuse consent, then they also could not give consent. However, in what are classic examples of “choiceless choices,” some victims may have had the ability to dictate in some way the manner of their own subjugation such that they were able to derive material benefits and, in this manner, survive.7 The literature on sexual exploitation under slavery can be helpful in this regard. For example, one historian has argued that while “no law or moral scruple prevented white men from forcing themselves on black females . . . some women negotiated this predicament by subjecting themselves to patrons, yielding to some white men who could protect them from the rest.”8 Such a description seems equally apt in the context of the Holocaust.
Much of the excellent scholarship on sexual violence during the Holocaust has focused on the experience of Jewish women being raped by men, particularly in camps and ghettos. This was an important part of the Holocaust experience given the special place that Jews held in the Nazi racist worldview. However, to obtain a full picture of sexual violence as a Nazi complex of crimes, we must also explore the rape of non-Jewish women by the Nazis and their auxiliaries.9 It is likewise essential that sexual and sexualized violence should not be viewed solely in a heteronormative context. Same-sex assaults occurred, although they are far more poorly documented.10 Taken together, all these permutations represent the Nazi complex of sexual criminality.
Holocaust scholarship has only recently begun to focus more directly on sexual violence for several important reasons. The first is that there is not a large body of survivors who can or will testify to sexual violence during the Holocaust. Many who survived the experience perished in the gas chambers or at a later period. In addition, perpetrators often murdered their victims immediately after the assault to hide the crime itself. Dual survivors of sexual violence and the Holocaust naturally have been reticent to discuss topics that would be considered taboo by most members of their generation. In addition to this general societal silence, many survivors may feel a sense of shame or guilt for their behavior if, for example, they engaged in instrumental sex in an effort to survive. One survivor recalled after the war seeing her fellow Jews question how she survived: “And in their eyes, a glimmer of suspicion: Kapo? Prostitute?”11 Nechama Tec noted sadly that “judging by the hesitation I encountered among interviewees to recount these coercive sexual experiences, I have to assume that most of these stories will die with the victims.”12 Scholars such as Christopher Browning have also suggested that many survivors carry repressed memories of traumatic events such as rape; this was as much a coping mechanism for survival as an intentional act of forgetting. Even in cases where survivors remember such particularly painful experiences, such memories often remain privately held or only shared among a small survivor community.13 Only recently has some of this information come to light likely as a combination of scholarly willingness to engage a once taboo topic and aging survivors’ willingness to part with some of their most painful memories. As oral historian Michael Nutkiewicz concludes, “there are memories that remain private, iconic incidents during the Holocaust that are banished into the territory of forbidden knowledge.”14 Scholars can assume with a good deal of certainty that the testimonies that exist represent only the tip of the iceberg in a much more widespread phenomenon, as even today rape and sexual assault go substantially unreported.
Likewise, for Germans and other potential perpetrators, few are willing to admit to committing acts of sexual violence or extortion due to similar issues of shame but also to avoid legal troubles if their statements were taken when prosecution was still a possibility. Even after legal punishment for sexual violence was impossible, almost all perpetrators were reluctant to discuss this behavior as they likely recognized it to be degenerate and socially unacceptable in a way that “simply” murdering was not. Much of what we know of sexual violence against Jews and others during the Holocaust comes from survivor testimony itself. Recent discoveries of candid recordings of soldiers and Nazi prisoners after the war have brought to light some of these actions as has, again, a scholarly focus on them.15 Still, there is much we do not know and scholars are only now beginning to treat this delicate topic with more openness and dedication. Ironically (or perhaps not so ironically) the best-documented and studied example of sexual violence in the east remains the very real mass rape of German women by Soviet soldiers in which Germans are the unquestioned victims.16
All historical evidence suggests that war and sexual violence have been interconnected likely from the earliest days of state-sanctioned violence. Historically, there have been many reasons for this breach of accepted morality; the vulnerability of a defeated people, the lapse in social norms that accompanies sanctioned killing, and the promise of sexual gratification (along with looting) as a reward for military service are all explanations for this phenomenon. As Rhonda Copelon points out: “War tends to intensify the brutality, repetitiveness, public spectacle, and likelihood of rape. War diminishes sensitivity to human suffering and intensifies men’s sense of entitlement, superiority, avidity, and social license to rape.”17
After the modern genocides in the Balkans and in Rwanda, however, sexual violence in the context of war and genocide has taken on a new importance in the realm of international law.18 In these two instances, international criminal tribunals found rape and sexual violence to be an integral and intentional part of the genocidal and military strategies of the perpetrators. In this way, rape came to be seen in these contexts as a weapon of war rather than simply a criminal consequence so often associated with war itself. In this line of reasoning, the enemy’s women become another target for conquest and, in some cases, the means to biologically eradicate the enemy through unwanted pregnancy as a result of rape. In more modern genocides such as those in Rwanda and the Balkans, rape and the resulting pregnancy were often intended by the perpetrators to facilitate ethnic cleansing by forcing the victim to bear a child of the opposing ethnicity.
Such discussions have led scholars to question whether this reasoning applies to the Holocaust. We must then ask two related questions of the evidence. First, how prevalent was sexual violence and, second, was the sexual victimization of civilians, particularly in the east, an intentional weapon of Nazi policy wielded against the local population? There has been recent debate about the frequency of sexual violence, particularly against Jewish women during the Holocaust. Na’ama Shik concisely summarizes the two historiographical approaches to this topic. The first “concludes that there is little evidence of harsh sexual abuse, particularly of incidents of rape, in the various camps. Scholars taking this position argue, correctly, that this is mainly due to strict prohibitions in Nazi ideology, in short, the interdiction against sexual relations, by consent or by force, between members of the ‘supreme race’ and inferior races [sic], particularly Jews.”19 Auschwitz survivor Kitty Hart went so far as to term “these sexual fantasies of postwar literature and television: ‘ridiculous misconceptions’.”20 This position presupposes a strict adherence to lofty Nazi sexual and racial ideals even at the periphery of the Nazi empire. The second approach, Shik continues “has emerged over the last few years and asserts quite an opposing argument: harsh sexual abuse, including many cases of rape, did in fact take place in various Nazi camps.”21 To this, we must also add that sexual and sexualized violence also took place in a variety of other locales such as homes, ghettos, brothels, and so on. The preponderance of the evidence strongly suggests that this second position is closer to the truth, that sexual assault of all kinds was a common occurrence in the east and certainly not limited to exceptional cases.
To the second question of rape as a Nazi weapon of war, there remains a healthy scholarly debate that demands a highly nuanced and precise approach. Elizabeth Wood argues, in general, that “rape is an effective strategy of war” and Regina Mühlhäuser concludes that “far from destabilizing Nazi power or disrupting the pursuit of the war of annihilation, the ambiguities and flexibility of the system served precisely to facilitate its maintenance.”22 Mühlhäuser in particular seems to lean toward the position that the Nazis used rape as a conscious weapon in the war in the east. Yet, it can be difficult to find solid evidence of this from a Nazi policy standpoint. Birgit Beck suggests a middle ground as well as a path to perhaps answering this question of the intentional use of rape by the military (but really this applies to the regime as a whole.) She contends that “in order to find clear proof, it is necessary to examine the question of whether sexual violence was ordered by the military leadership, whether silent toleration constituted giving the soldiers permission to commit such acts, or whether there were any attempts to prevent such crimes by prohibiting and punishing them.”23 In short, we can find no orders or explicit policies directing German soldiers, Schutzstaffel (SS) men, and other authorities to utilize sexual violence as a tool of military conquest, though, particularly in the camps, it did become a tool of humiliation, torture, and repression. Indeed, Nazi ideology by definition precluded any possibility of “breeding out” the Jews by its very nature. So, at this moment in the scholarship, we simply cannot prove that the Nazi war machine intentionally sought to coordinate sexual violence into its campaigns of ethnic cleansing and murder.
On the other hand, it seems clear that while the Nazi authorities did not order or openly condone sexual assaults, they did create an environment in which such behavior was ignored and rarely or lightly punished. One can trace the origins of this environment to the racist Nazi image of eastern peoples generally and to the Criminal Orders specifically, which explicitly created a permissive culture in the east that tolerated criminality. The most important of these, the so-called Jurisdiction Decree, clearly stated: “Punishable offenses committed against enemy civilians do not, until further notice, come any more under the jurisdiction of the courts-martial and the summary courts-martial.”24 The only limitation was that any prosecution of crimes was to be considered only if “necessary for the maintenance of discipline or the security of the troops.” This decree effectively removed enemy civilians from the protection of military law, giving German soldiers legal impunity in their treatment of civilians. Some effects of this order can be seen in the prevalence of rape and its relatively lenient punishments, which were rarely meted out. Indeed, these punishments, when given, were usually based on damage done to the reputation of the Wehrmacht or to discipline and were often weaker than punishments for the same crimes given on the western front.25 Thus, behavior often punished harshly in Western Europe was almost explicitly condoned in the east.
A final argument made against the widespread nature of sexual assault on the eastern front, in ghettos, and in camps is the Nazi’s own obsession with racial purity and the accompanying laws against Rassenschande, or race defilement. These laws, dating back to the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, prohibited sexual relationships between Germans and “ethnically inferior peoples,” particularly Jews but also Slavs. Nazi ideology and official party propaganda threatened dire consequences for the race and the individual if such activities were to take place. Yet, as more and more historians study the behavior of actual individuals on the ground, we find that Rassenschande did not act as a meaningful deterrent to sexual activity, consensual or otherwise. Mühlhäuser has argued that Wehrmacht and SS members took the prohibition on sexual relationships “less seriously in the east than within the borders of the Reich.”26 Another scholar has noted that “it is clear that what took place on the ground during the Holocaust did not always match the directed racial policy.”27 On February 25, 1942, eight months after the invasion of the Soviet Union, the Security Service Reichsführer-SS (Sicherheitsdienst Reichsführer-SS; SD) noted that Wehrmacht orders “to ban any kind of sexual intercourse with Russian women and girls have up to now been without any noteworthy effect.”28 In June 1942, the Army High Command was forced to publish a bulletin reiterating that “sexual relations with Jews violated the racial laws and would lead to judicial penalties.”29 At a conference of SS and Police Judges in 1943, one participant estimated that “50 percent of all members of the SS and the police violated the ‘ban on undesirable sexual intercourse with ethnically alien women.’”30 Indeed, even those not directly associated with the regime appear to have violated these prohibitions. For example, one survivor of the Janowska camp accused the wife of the German commandant, Fritz Gebauer, of the Deutsche Ausrüstungswerke, of having an affair with his Jewish chauffeur while Gebauer himself slept with a Jewish prisoner.31 One should not conclude that Nazi racial theory and its prohibitions against miscegenation did not prevent some Germans from engaging in sexual activity with “inferior races.” Indeed, knowledge of such behavior could be used as a weapon in larger disputes between German personnel and as a way to settle scores. However, the bulk of the evidence strongly suggests that Rassenschande or the threat of punishment for it had very little influence on the decisions of men to rape in towns, ghettos, and camps. On the other hand, Rassenschande and the worst-case scenario of a pregnant Jewish victim did likely lead to the increased likelihood of the victim’s murder.32
In short, while Nazi authorities did not actively or explicitly encourage sexual assaults, they did create a permissive environment in the east, which allowed moral transgressions of all kinds from torture to theft, murder, and rape. Combined with more primal associations of the right to conquer women’s bodies by soldiers, the setting of the wild east also became an area where sexual crimes could become commonplace. Yet, in attempting to understand how these sexual crimes manifested themselves, we must distinguish between the spaces in which they took place, for these spaces often helped to determine the purpose and kinds of acts that occurred. One can generally divide these eastern spaces into the following: (1) a general category that includes towns and villages, the front, open-air shooting sites and areas in which Jews and non-Jews were relatively free, (2) ghettos, and (3) camps of all kinds, from extermination to factory to labor. These spaces represent areas of increasing control by the Nazis and increasingly circumscribed freedoms of the victims.
German men exercised sexual violence not only in the combat zone. Rape was a form of aggression that structured the everyday life of occupation in the military rear.33
Beginning in 1939, the Nazis became masters of eastern territory that formed a crucial part of their larger fantasies of a German Empire in the east.34 Immediately after the defeat of Poland, they began a program of murder and demographic engineering that would be exported further east in 1941. With the war against the Soviet Union, Hitler took even more drastic actions to realize his dream of a German eastern colony. The Führer himself stated that he would treat the people of the east “like a colonial people.”35 The Nazi desire to subjugate the east was not empty rhetoric but was accompanied by plans for lethal demographic engineering described in the “Hunger Plan” and its subsection, the “Green Folder.”36 The Nazi leadership openly estimated that “without a doubt umpteen millions of people will starve when we extract all our necessities from the land.”37 Some administrators predicted death tolls of up to 30 million.38 These figures represented non-Jews. The Einsatzgruppen began targeting the entire Jewish population of the western Soviet Union by the late summer of 1941.
In this region where human life counted for little, sexual violence and the license to commit it seem to have been widespread. Moreover, given that many men of military age had either been drafted into the Red Army or had fled, the Germans encountered in many places a population that consisted mainly of women, children, and the elderly. During the June–July pogroms in Lvov, instigated by Germans and carried out mostly by Ukrainians, sexual violence seems to have been a major component, as evidenced not least in the shocking photos from the event. The Soviet Union reported as early as January 6, 1942, that “thirty-two workers of the local clothes factory were raped and then killed by the German storm troopers” and that “the drunk German soldiers pulled Lvov girls and young women into Kostiuszko Park and brutally raped them.”39 During these pogroms, Germans also looked on with an approving gaze. A survivor reported the following to the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw in 1945: “And while the greedy killers [Ukrainians] took all the clothes of one of the women and were mercilessly beating her naked body with a stick, the German soldiers who were passing by and who we asked to get involved, answered: ‘Das ist die Rache der Ukrainer’ (This is the revenge of the Ukrainians), in a tone full of approval of their actions. They were passing by with a look of masters and taking pictures of the naked women who were raped and violently beaten.”40 Here it seems that the Germans openly sanctioned sexual and sexualized violence, which, given their own transgressions, is not surprising.
Accounts of sexual violence by German forces in the east are numerous.41 A survivor from Novogrudok in Belarus recalled a German doctor passing through who had been a “specialist” in entering (presumably Jewish) homes and raping the women.42 German sentries in Poland took two Jewish teenagers from their home at gunpoint and raped one of them in the Jewish cemetery.43 A German soldier in Slonim, Belarus remembered a Nazi functionary who would “pretend to be a friend to the Jews, win their trust and get different information out of them. He would lure young Jewish girls into his apartment where he would prey upon them sadistically. Afterward, any trace of them would disappear behind them.”44
The connection between sexual violence and murder is also made clear in the east. Quite often Jewish women were raped at the site of mass executions. Historian Stephen Katz sees in the Final Solution a “license to kill.”45 A witness at the Babi Yar massacre recounted that “[A]t the opposite side of the ravine, seven or so Germans brought two young Jewish women. They went down lower to the ravine, chose an even place and began to rape these women by turns. When they became satisfied, they stabbed the women with daggers, so that they even did not cry out. And they left the bodies like this, naked, with their legs open.”46 Some victims were not killed immediately but kept for a short period of time as sexual slaves, as Father Desbois discovered in his research in Ukraine. One witness told him that “the Germans kept 30 or so very pretty Jewish women that they put to work in the offices of the Gestapo but whom they also used as ‘sex objects’ for the police and the Germans.”47
This seemingly common sexual violence against Jews can, perhaps, be described as taking place in the context of the conquest period of the war in the east. It certainly was both a frontline and rear area phenomenon as soldiers and Nazi civilians took what they wanted from a conquered population, caring little for the racial characteristics of their victims, who they would kill anyway. The prevalent use of alcohol at these killing sites also likely contributed to the general depravity of these operations. For other German military personnel, sexual violence and torture became a method for interrogating female prisoners. One female prisoner who was caught in a failed escape attempt was led to the commanding officer “who tortured her with a whip and brutally raped her.”48 Captured female partisans were often forced to strip and then photographed naked by German authorities—a form of sexualized violence in its own right; male partisans did not suffer this.49
Another form of more systematic sexual violence was the forced prostitution of eastern women by the Army and the SS. The research on military brothels is growing ever more complete and gives a clear picture of the ways in which most of the women working in them were forced to do so. In Kovno, Lithuania, a female doctor noted in her diary that young women were scared to leave their houses in the evenings for fear of being abducted and forced to work in a brothel. There, she wrote, “women who come down with venereal diseases are not treated but are simply shot; after all, they belong to ‘inferior races’—Jews, Poles, and Russians.”50 These military brothels were set up officially by the Army and Armed Forces High Commands (OKH and OKW) ostensibly “in order to ensure military discipline, prevent sexually transmitted diseases, and reduce sexual violence as well as homosexual activity.”51 Scholars estimate that at least 500 of these brothels were set up both in the east and west and that “it is safe to assume from the evidence available that the Germans enslaved at least fifty thousand women into sexual slavery during World War II, but it is likely that the number is far higher.”52
A third form of sexual violence carried out in the east in general can be termed that of instrumental sex. Here, women, facing the all too common choiceless choices of the Holocaust, sought to gain the means for survival (food, shelter, protection) by offering sex to their victimizers. This, also, appears to have not been an uncommon phenomenon. Soldier Xavier H., mentioned at the beginning, as well as other members of his unit testified that they had kept Jewish women as “girlfriends” during their stay in Slonim.53 While these relationships seem to have offered protection and survival for a while, the fates of these women rarely differed from others in the area. As Anatoly Podolsky rightly notes, “We can only conjecture that the ‘household service’ sometimes included sexual slavery, yet almost all of these women were murdered during the second and the third actions of mass executions, which took place during 1942.”54
One of the most neglected aspects of Nazi sexual criminality in the east is homosexual rape. As homosexual behavior was punished with far more frequency than heterosexual rape, those who perpetrated sexual assaults on men were likely to be far more secretive and far more likely to murder their victims to conceal the act. Ironically, we know more about homosexual assaults on and relationships between fellow German soldiers than we do about such assaults on Jews or non-Germans.55 As one Jewish survivor of homosexual rape noted, “I heard many terrible stories but not like what had happened to me.”56 The Nazi state had many reasons to object to particularly male homosexuality in terms of masculinity and procreation; yet, punishments for homosexual behavior in Nazi organizations, even the SS, often appear quite lenient. Geoffrey Giles has shown both the somewhat surprising frequency of homosexual activity within the SS as well as the judicial results in his work.57 Given that there certainly were homosexual men serving in the east, we must assume that homosexual assault of the vulnerable population also occurred there, though the evidence is scant. Giles has, however, uncovered at least two instances in court records. In the first, “the twenty-three-year-old Lieutenant Rudolf T., who had forced a fifteen-year-old Russian youth, Alexander L., to perform oral sex on him in a farm building, was subjected to a court martial at the front, and sent to prison for nine months.”58 In another, a German soldier had “slept almost daily under a blanket with the sixteen-year-old Russian kitchen help, Baraschkow, causing him to ejaculate on at least three occasions.”59 Thus, we must add homosexual violence to the pantheon of Nazi crimes in the east, but far more research is needed on this subject for a variety of reasons. In these situations, more than perhaps any other, the victim was likely to be murdered as a matter of course by the perpetrator in an attempt to cover up the crime itself, for homosexual behavior was not tacitly accepted by Nazi authorities in the way that heterosexual violence was. Moreover, we face the same dilemma with victims of homosexual violence as we do with the others. Male victims, even more than women, would be far less likely to either report these attacks at the time or to discuss them in any form of postwar testimony.
The east, a larger space consisting of villages, cities, and the front with little oversight, was characterized by a proliferation of sexual crimes, many of which fell within the realm of military occupation and behavior. Also, from an historical standpoint, many of these crimes may be lost to history when they occurred out of the sight of witnesses and/or in the context of mass shootings where the victims of rape were also murdered. However, as ghettoization policy followed the Wehrmacht into the east, it created a new space for victimization, this time primarily a space of Jewish suffering but also one which impacted the nature of the assaults that took place.
As Nazi control over Eastern Europe was solidified, so too was the system of ghettos designed to confine Jews while their final fate was debated. The move toward ghettoization further isolated the Jewish population and placed them in an increasingly vulnerable position vis-à-vis sexual assault. First, Germans were free to enter the ghetto and attack the inhabitants. One of the more infamous of these rapists was Hans Biebow, administrator of the Lodz ghetto who frequently assaulted women and, in one instance, had the victim’s family deported, presumably to cover up his crime or as a further demonstration of his power.60 This phenomenon of the ghetto as the scene of sexual violence appears in both large ghettos and the very small. In the Piortkow Tribunalski ghetto, the Nazi mayor demanded that the Judenrat (Jewish Council) supply him with women for his sexual needs.61
The captive existence of ghetto Jews made the forced abduction of Jewish women yet another sexual threat and an agonizing choice for the councils. The German mayor or Oberbürgermeister Hans Drexel appeared at a Jewish Council meeting in the Polish town of Piotrkow Tybunalski in 1940. It was Rosh Hashanah. He demanded that the council supply what he referred to as “hostesses.” When he was rebuffed, Drexel left with some ominous words of advice for the Judenrat: “‘You Jews had better realize what’s good for you. After all, we’re here to stay and you must serve our needs.’”62 Clearly this man and many others viewed the ghettos as a ready supply of young women for sexual exploitation.
While there do not seem to have been brothels located within ghettos, some survivor testimony suggests that women were taken from ghettos to serve in German brothels. Girls were taken from the Tulchin ghetto to serve as sex slaves for Italian and Hungarian divisions stationed 15 km away.63 In another similar example, “German gendarmes in Grabowiec, Poland . . . were supplied by the Judenrat with housekeepers, cooks and servants who had to be young and attractive women. They were treated like slaves. Rape by two or three men was the order of the day.”64
The ghettos also served as the scene for what seem to be relatively frequent incursions by SS, military, and civilian officials (usually under the influence of alcohol) bent on the violent rape of any young women present. A rabbi from Pinsk remembered that three policemen broke into an apartment and raped the daughter of the family living there. When they were finished, they threatened the family that if they told anyone, the police would return in the morning and kill them all.65 As elsewhere, these assaults were not always heterosexual. A sixteen-year-old German Jewish boy deported to the Riga ghetto recalled being pulled from his home and raped by two SS men. Different SS men thereafter repeatedly raped him.66
The imprisoned population in Jewish ghettos faced increasingly dire circumstances that often coerced women into sexual exploitation. These overcrowded living spaces lacked sufficient food, sanitation, and medical supplies. In order to procure the basic necessities needed for survival, some women found themselves in the impossible situation of offering sexual favors to their captors in return for life. In some instances, this would have been food, but in others it often meant a valid work permit indicating that a critical German firm employed the holder and protecting them from ever more frequent deportations to extermination centers. In the Lviv ghetto, we have what appears to be an instance of a Jewish woman becoming the mistress of the German head of the Arbeitsamt, Heinz Weber.67 Some evidence suggests that she then abused her own position of power with regard to her fellow ghetto inhabitants seeking permits. The burden of instrumental sex for work cards fell almost exclusively on women as men were more likely to be forced to pay bribes in cash or valuables.
With a confined population and an often bored and cruel German administration, sexualized violence seems to have been more prevalent. Regina Mühlhäuser notes that supervisors of ghettos or work columns would often force women to swim, dance, sing, or play sports naked.68 In another instance, survivors testified that Jewish women were forced to undergo “gynecological examinations” as part of the search for valuables.69 This sexualized violence seems aimed at humiliating the female inhabitants of the ghetto in particularly sexual ways. Many survivor testimonies speak of women afraid to leave their houses for fear of being accosted on the street by Germans or their non-German allies and sexually assaulted.
The ghettoization of Eastern European Jews created a captive population from which the Nazi authorities and their collaborators could choose victims. Jews were now physically confined within a geographic space where their movement and behavior was circumscribed. As such, they often provided a pool of victims for sexually criminal practices that had already begun prior to ghettoization, such as sexual slave labor. Conversely, it also allowed for more survivor witnesses of these events while limiting access to a smaller cross-section of the Nazi apparatus. One can, then, perhaps view the camps system as the final step in both confinement and sexual victimization.
A multitude of camps grew in the Nazi east, from extermination centers like Auschwitz to factory camps like those in Starachowice. These locations also became sites for both sexual and sexualized violence. Of course, there were important quantitative and qualitative differences between the dizzying varieties of forms that camps took. However, some generalizations can be made with regard to sexual and sexualized violence. In the camps, women (and boys) were also vulnerable to other prisoners. This is not the subject of this chapter, but has become an additional sexual threat to be recognized within the camp system.70 The camps were the most constrained of the settings discussed here, places where victims’ attempts to hide or avoid targeting were the most circumscribed. They were at the mercy of the guard force and camp administration in ways not experienced before. In many camps, attacks on women seem to have been commonplace and not condemned.
Survivor Felicja Karay describes in detail some of the sexual violence that took place in the Skarzysko-Kamienna labor camp. She characterized the camp as a place where “the ‘rites of manhood’ were expressed in orgies of drunkenness and gang rapes of Jewish girls.”71 As happened often in the east, many of these girls were murdered afterward. Indeed, in the intimate space of the camp, sexual transgressions like those of a German SS man raping a Jewish woman could not be secret and therefore necessitated the elimination of the victim. In the Janowska camp outside of Lvov, survivor Leon Wells recalled a blond Jewish woman named Hilda who “was known to have affairs with SS men.” He went on to note that “Hilda has something on them and because of it she must be silenced.” She was murdered shortly thereafter.72 Wells also wrote of a party in the camp where the SS had brought (presumably Jewish) girls. “In the morning,” he remembered, “to rid themselves of any witnesses, the SS men brought them to the ‘sands’ [the execution site at Janowska].”73 Even at Auschwitz, the centerpiece model of the Nazi camp universe, some SS men raped Jewish inmates. Na’ama Shik relates the story of one survivor who recalled: “And all of a sudden, the door opened and three Nazis came and they dragged us on the floor, they violated us, sexually violated us. They smelled like beer, you know. They raped us.”74 It is important to remember that not all of this sexual violence was heterosexual, though, as we have seen, the evidence of homosexual assaults is very sparse. Perhaps the most famous example is Irma Grese, a female guard at a variety of camps including Auschwitz, who was bisexual and allegedly took sexual pleasure from her abuse of prisoners.75 However, other cases of homosexual victimization likely occurred. An anonymous memoirist survivor recalled a “[camp] commander was panting with excitement, and masturbated wildly in his trousers until he came” as he ordered a guard to whip a homosexual prisoner.76 Certainly, these and other instances of homosexual exploitation occurred and remain mostly absent from the historical record.
A phenomenon that appears to have been more widespread in the camp system than elsewhere was that of public rape. An Auschwitz survivor recalled a “show” in which the Germans raped twenty Jewish women prisoners in public and ordered the men to applaud. A German administrator in the Starachowice factory publicly raped a young woman. Christopher Browning characterizes this rape as “a ritual of humiliation aimed at degrading the entire camp population, which was forced to stand by and witness helplessly.”77 This form of sexual violence is an indication of the level of impunity with which the SS and Nazi officials were able to operate within the closed camp setting, an impunity that exceeded that of the ghettos and certainly of the eastern landscape in general. These public displays also demonstrated the complete power of the SS over the prisoners under their control and sometimes was expressed in proxy via sexualized violence. Samuel Drix, a survivor from the Janowska camp, recalls the SS forcing a married couple to have sex while the “the SS men were beside themselves with laughter. Fantastic fun.” He continued, “for some moments they enjoyed this funny view. Finally, the game became boring for them, and with shots in the necks of both spouses the entertainment was finished.”78 In the Skaryosko-Kamienna camp, a prisoner couple caught having sex in secret was forced to “perform” again in front of the entire camp.79 Beyond the sadistic nature of this humiliation, one could perhaps see here the SS choosing this form of torture because they could not carry out the rapes themselves, at least not in a public arena. These public sexual violations served the purpose of both humiliation and physical abuse while reinforcing the god-like power of the camp authorities. As Stephen Katz rightly concludes, “the rape of Jewish girls and women was perceived, within the totality of the Shoah, not only as a discrete, individual, localized sexual performance, but as an assault on the collective body, the communal being, of the Jewish People.”80 Moreover, in the hidden world of the camp, where most of the prisoners were never expected to leave, such performances seem to have been more common than elsewhere.
As in the other spaces already discussed, brothels also appeared in the camp settings. Current research indicates that the most official of these brothels were established in camps within Germany, though Auschwitz established two in 1943. As in other places, selection was mostly forced and at best coerced. As Robert Sommer notes, “during roll calls, SS officers would walk down the columns of the lined-up prisoners and pick out women they found ‘suitable’ for a brothel Kommando.” Contrary to some popular belief, these brothels were intended to be used by privileged, non-Jewish prisoners, though there is at least circumstantial evidence that occasionally Germans and their non-German collaborators partook. Typically, non-Jews were forced into this sexual slavery and their “clients” tended to be mostly non-Jews. It is also likely that more informal such arrangements existed in other smaller camps in the east (and included Jews). Regardless, the camp brothels constituted another form of sexual assault on the subjected people of the east. And while the sexual acts concerned most often occurred between non-Germans and non-Jewish prisoners, SS men did take advantage of the camp brothel system to further humiliate and antagonize their victims. As Sommer notes,
Not only was control one of the SS men’s preferred expressions of power, but they never missed an opportunity to humiliate the prisoners in the Sonderbau. Voyeurism especially seems to have been one of the favourite games of the camp officers. A survivor of Auschwitz-Monowitz, Hermann Leonhardt, who was the block elder of the camp infirmary, stated that at the opening of the Monowitz Sonderbau at the end of October 1943, he saw how a group of SS officers appeared in the barrack to watch what was happening inside the single brothel rooms. It was obvious to Leonhardt that they were enjoying it because they continuously made dirty comments.81
These brothels were sometimes used as a way to “correct” homosexuals. This kind of behavior follows a general pattern in which Nazi officials degraded and terrorized their victims in sexual ways. A homosexual survivor recalled being forced to visit the camp brothel as part of his “rehabilitation.”82 This, of course, was also a form of sexual humiliation specific to homosexuals who already were singled out for additional abuse in the camps.
Sexualized violence, that is violence of a sexual nature that did not include actual sexual relations, also appears to have been endemic to the camp experience. Camp authorities at all levels and in all categories of camps often consciously or unconsciously gravitated toward forms of sexualized violence as a further tactic to abuse the prisoners. The most obvious form of this was the enforced nudity, both for those selected for death and for forced labor. The shaving of all body hair including pubic hair was a humiliating event remembered by many new arrivals in the camps and can certainly be seen as a form of sexual humiliation, particularly for female prisoners. Many survivors speak of being leered at by German personnel (and male prisoners) as well having to endure sexual comments. Often, this sexual humiliation turned violent. As Mühlhäuser notes, “the practice of beating women on the breasts and genital area seems to have been used more often as a form of intimidation or torture.”83 For men, too, the genitals were a frequent target of abuse. In the Janowska camp, this physical abuse turned fatal. One guard, Friedrich Heinen, forced two attractive female Jewish prisoners to undress and then shot one of them in the vagina. After watching her writhe in pain for a bit, he then shot her in the mouth. Heinen then shot the other woman and left the bodies lying there.84 There could be multiple explanations for such a brutal and sadistic display, but clearly it was intended as an act of sexualized violence. This is but one of many examples in the literature of specifically sexualized assault and perhaps is a performance of the ultimate in sexual degradation or an expression of frustration that these women were unavailable as sexual “partners.” Here might be a case where Nazi prohibitions against sexual contact with Jews impacted the attitude of the guards, particularly in an environment where such taboo activities would be more difficult to conceal.
Camps seem to be a space where sadism, boredom, and absolute control combined to create an environment in which all kinds of sexual and sexualized violence could escalate. As the purpose of confinement changed from simple concentration to forced labor to places where death was a welcome if not desired outcome, it seems that sexual assaults and violence increased in magnitude and perhaps frequency. In addition, the camp environment, controlled as it was primarily by the SS establishment, paradoxically offered both total control over prisoners and a high degree of surveillance even over those same SS men. This may account for the argument that some of the sexualized violence resulted from a frustration on the part of guards at not being able to fully exploit their victims without exposing themselves to self-serving condemnation from their peers. On the other hand, in some camps, sexual violence including intercourse seems to have been a phenomenon that was tacitly approved by the authorities concerned.
As this relatively short chapter has attempted to show, the issue of Nazi criminality in the form of sexual and sexualized violence in the east remains a complex topic that demands nuanced and in-depth research. We have seen that, from the outset, the very historical source material necessary for such a study is sparse or underexplored. In addition, homosexual violence and sexual violence against children is almost completely absent from the literature, particularly when we are looking at Germans committing these acts against non-Germans.85 It is vital to recognize that sexual violence was not solely the result of heterosexual encounters but also likely encompassed other forms that are even more difficult to uncover based on the dearth of sources, as has been discussed above. In addition, more work must be done on non-German sexual criminals who were allies of the Nazi state. Finally, while we are beginning to better understand the frequency and circumstances of German/Nazi sexual violence, it remains difficult to parse out potential motivations for this behavior by the perpetrators based primarily on their own reluctance to admit to let alone explain these actions. This is also true of responses and resistance by victims and potential victims. Yet, it seems that we can draw some important preliminary conclusions about the nature of these phenomena.
First, we must conclude that the sexual and sexualized abuse of both Jewish and non-Jewish inhabitants of the east was far more widespread than previously imagined. The (relatively) numerous accounts of these atrocities suggest the tip of an historical iceberg remaining to be uncovered. Second, it seems relatively clear that the Nazis did not use sexual violence, in particular rape, officially or consciously as a weapon of war in the manner seen in more recent genocides in the Balkans and Rwanda. This does not negate what appears to have been a Nazi culture that accepted and even condoned such behavior; it is merely to recognize that we have yet to find the kinds of orders and policies that would support such a conclusion. Third, evidence from survivors and German sources themselves indicates that the ideologically strict prohibitions against sexual interaction with “inferior” races (Rassenschande), particularly with Jews, may have figured prominently in Nazi propaganda but had little effect on the actual behavior of individuals on the ground in the world of sexual interaction. Such a conclusion importantly demonstrates the not uncommon disconnect between ideology and human behavior on the ground. Finally, I have sought to suggest a new perspective from which to analyze sexual violence against subject peoples in the east. I examine this deviant behavior in the context of the physical spaces in which it occurred and ask how these spaces themselves mediated the frequency, nature, and motivation for sexual assault in the Nazi east. Such a methodology draws heavily on some of the newest analytical approaches that seek to incorporate geographical theory and approaches in our study of the Holocaust.86
The study of sexual violence during the Holocaust adds a vital component to our understanding of this event, particularly because it was never an explicit dictate of the Nazi regime itself in the way that the physical extermination of Jews and other “inferior” races was. Therefore, from the outset, sexual assault and exploitation was a voluntary act. Exploring this choice by perpetrators, then, is an important step in understanding the sexual violence that continues to this day in the context of war and genocide.
WAITMAN WADE BEORN is Lecturer in the Corcoran Department of History at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Marching into Darkness: The Wehrmacht and the Holocaust in Belarus, which received the Thomas J. Wilson Memorial Prize from Harvard Press and the Honorable Mention for the Sybil Milton Prize from the German Studies Association. His second book, The Holocaust in Eastern Europe: At the Epicentre of the Final Solution, was published by Bloomsbury Press in 2018.
1. Willy Peter Reese and Stefan Schmitz, A Stranger to Myself: The Inhumanity of War: Russia, 1941–1944, trans. Michael Hoffmann (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), 149.
2. Porath Letter, November 30, 1960, (StAL: EL 317 III, Bü 1505), fol. 505.
3. H., Xavier Statement, May 30, 1960 (BA-ZS: B162/5102), fol. 194. It should be noted here and throughout that while the term Freundin in German can mean both female friend and girlfriend, in almost all cases we should assume that the relationship was at a minimum less than consensual unless facts show otherwise.
4. See Jeffrey Burds, “Sexual Violence in Europe in World War II, 1939–1945,” Politics & Society 37, no. 1 (2009): 35–73; David Raub Snyder, Sex Crimes under the Wehrmacht (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 200; Regina Mühlhäuser, “Rasse, Blut und Männlichkeit: Politiken sexueller Regulierung in den besetzten Gebieten der Sowjetunion (1941–1945),” Feministische Studien 25, no. 1 (2007): 55–69; Regina Mühlhäuser, Eroberungen: sexuelle Gewalttaten und intime Beziehungen deutscher Soldaten in der Sowjetunion 1941–1945 (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2010); Sonja M. Hedgepeth and Rochelle G. Saidel, eds., Sexual Violence against Jewish Women During the Holocaust (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2010); Anatoly Podolsky, “The Tragic Fate of Ukrainian Jewish Women under Nazi Occupation, 1941–1944,” in Sexual Violence against Jewish Women During the Holocaust, ed. Sonja M. Hedgepeth and Rochelle G. Saidel (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2010), 94–107; Anna Hájková, “Sexual Barter in Times of Genocide: Negotiating the Sexual Economy of the Theresienstadt Ghetto,” Signs 38, no. 3 (2013): 503–533.
5. Brigitte Halbmayr, “Sexualized Violence against Women During Nazi ‘Racial’ Persecution,” in Sexual Violence against Jewish Women During the Holocaust, ed. Sonja M. Hedgepeth and Rochelle G. Saidel (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2010), 30.
6. Historian Anna Hájková has called this instead “sex for barter.” I choose the term “instrumental sex” here as I believe that barter indicates too much parity between victim and victimizer.
7. For the term “choiceless choices,” see Lawrence L. Langer, Versions of Survival: The Holocaust and the Human Spirit (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982).
8. Vincent Brown, The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 107.
9. More recently, some scholars have also begun to examine the rape of Jews by other Jews but, as this chapter is aimed at illuminating Nazi crimes, those experiences will not be explored here.
10. At the moment, historian Geoffrey Giles seems to be the only one who touches on the homosexual rape of non-Germans in the east.
11. Na’ama Shik, “Sexual Abuse of Jewish Women in Auschwitz-Birkenau,” in Brutality and Desire: War and Sexuality in Europe’s Twentieth Century, ed. Dagmar Herzog (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 238.
12. Helene Sinnreich, “The Rape of Jewish Women During the Holocaust,” in Sexual Violence against Jewish Women During the Holocaust, ed. Sonja M. Hedgepeth and Rochelle G. Saidel (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2010), 108.
13. See Christopher R. Browning, Remembering Survival: Inside a Nazi Slave-Labor Camp (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2010), 9–11.
14. Michael Nutkiewicz, “Shame, Guilt, and Anguish in Holocaust Survivor Testimony,” The Oral History Review 30, no. 1 (2003): 21.
15. For recent discoveries of secret recordings of German soldiers, see Sönke Neitzel and Harald Welzer, Soldaten: The Secret World of Transcripts of German Pows, trans. Jefferson Chase (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012); Felix Römer, Kameraden: Die Wehrmacht von innen (Munich: Piper, 2012).
16. See Helke Sander and Barbara Johr, eds., Befreier und Befreite: Krieg, Vergewaltigungen, Kinder (Munich: A. Kunstmann, 1992); Andrea Peto, “Stimmen des Schweigens. Erinnerungen an Vergewaltigungen in den Hauptstädten des ‘ersten Opfers’ (Wien) und des ‘letzten Verbundeten’ Hitlers (Budapest) 1945,” Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 47 (1999).
17. Anne Llewellyn Barstow, War’s Dirty Secret: Rape, Prostitution, and Other Crimes against Women (Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim, 2000), 8.
18. See “Security Council Resolution 1820 (2008)” (New York: United Nations Security Council, June 19, 2008).
19. Shik, “Sexual Abuse of Jewish Women in Auschwitz-Birkenau,” 225.
20. Shik, “Sexual Abuse of Jewish Women in Auschwitz-Birkenau,” 225.
21. Shik, “Sexual Abuse of Jewish Women in Auschwitz-Birkenau,” 226.
22. Regina Mühlhäuser, “Between ‘Racial Awareness’ and Fantasies of Potency: Nazi Sexual Politics in the Occupied Territories of the Soviet Union, 1942–1945,” in Brutality and Desire: War and Sexuality in Europe’s Twentieth Century, ed. Dagmar Herzog (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 197–220, here 213; Elisabeth Jean Wood, “Armed Groups and Sexual Violence: When Is Wartime Rape Rare?,” Politics & Society 37, no. 1 (2009): 132.
23. Birgit Beck, “Rape: The Military Trials of Sexual Crimes Committed by Soldiers in the Wehrmacht, 1939–1944,” in Home/Front: The Military, War, and Gender in Twentieth-Century Germany, ed. Karen Hagemann and Stefanie Schüler-Springorum (Oxford: Berg, 2002), 255–273, here 255.
24. “Decree for the Conduct of Courts-Martial in the District ‘Barbarossa’ and for Special Measures for the Troops, May 13, 1941” (Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, Washington, DC, US G.P.O., vol. III, 1946: Document 886-PS).
25. Beck, “Rape: The Military Trials of Sexual Crimes Committed by Soldiers in the Wehrmacht, 1939–1944,” 268. In this, Beck differs greatly with David Snyder, who claims that sentencing was not significantly less strict in the east than the west and did not encourage criminal behavior. Snyder, unfortunately, is working with an extremely limited data set, which, along with the obviously large number of unreported assaults, makes Beck’s position more compelling. For more see, Birgit Beck, Wehrmacht und sexuelle Gewalt: Sexualverbrechen vor deutschen Militärgerichten 1939–1945 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2004); Snyder, Sex Crimes under the Wehrmacht.
26. Mühlhäuser, Eroberungen, 88.
27. Sinnreich, “The Rape of Jewish Women During the Holocaust,” 109.
28. Mühlhäuser, “Between ‘Racial Awareness’ and Fantasies of Potency,” 198.
29. Mühlhäuser, Eroberungen, 125–126.
30. Mühlhäuser, “Between ‘Racial Awareness’ and Fantasies of Potency,” 88.
31. Leon Weliczker Wells, The Janowska Road (New York: MacMillan Company, 1963), 88.
32. See Steven T. Katz, “Thoughts on the Intersection of Rape and Rassenschande during the Holocaust,” Modern Judaism 32, no. 3 (2012): 293–322, here 303.
33. Mühlhäuser, “Between ‘Racial Awareness’ and Fantasies of Potency,” 201.
34. For more on Nazi fantasies of and plans for the East see Michael Burleigh, Germany Turns Eastwards: A Study of Ostforschung in the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
35. David Olusoga and Casper W. Erichsen, The Kaiser’s Holocaust: Germany’s Forgotten Genocide and the Colonial Roots of Nazism (London: Faber and Faber, 2010), 13.
36. See Alex J. Kay, “‘The Purpose of the Russian Campaign Is the Decimation of the Slavic Population by Thirty Million’: The Radicalization of German Food Policy in Early 1941,” in Nazi Policy on the Eastern Front, 1941: Total War, Genocide, and Radicalization, ed. Alex J. Kay, Jeff Rutherford, and David Stahel (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2012), 101–129; Alex J. Kay, Exploitation, Resettlement, Mass Murder: Political and Economic Planning for German Occupation Policy in the Soviet Union, 1940–1941 (New York/Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2006).
37. Christian Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde: die deutsche Wirtschafts- und Vernichtungspolitik in Weissrussland 1941 bis 1944 (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 1999), 66.
38. Dieter Pohl, Die Herrschaft der Wehrmacht: Deutsche Militärbesatzung und einheimische Bevölkerung in der Sowjetunion 1941–1944 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2008), 66.
39. A. F. Vysotsky et al., eds., Nazi Crimes in Ukraine, 1941–1944: Documents and Materials (Kiev: Naukova Dumka Publishers, 1987), 33–34.
40. Podolsky, “The Tragic Fate,” 102.
41. Survivor and perpetrator testimony as well as the fragmentary court records of those few prosecuted make this clear.
42. “Kagan, Jack Interview, July 4, 2009” (Author’s Personal Archive).
43. Helene Sinnreich, “‘And It Was Something We Didn’t Talk About’: Rape of Jewish Women During the Holocaust,” Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History 14, no. 2 (2008): 8.
44. “H., Johann Statement, October 13, 1965,” (BA-ZS: B162/5092), fol. 5663.
45. Katz, “Thoughts,” 311.
46. Podolsky, “The Tragic Fate,” 99.
47. Patrick Desbois, The Holocaust by Bullets: A Priest’s Journey to Uncover the Truth Behind the Murder of 1.5 Million Jews (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 167.
48. Mühlhäuser, “Between ‘Racial Awareness’ and Fantasies of Potency.”
49. Mühlhäuser, Eroberungen, 119.
50. Wendy Jo Gertjejanssen, “Victims, Heroes, Survivors: Sexual Violence on the Eastern Front during World War II” (Doctoral Thesis, University of Minnesota, 2004), 213.
51. Mühlhäuser, “Between ‘Racial Awareness’ and Fantasies of Potency,” 207.
52. Beck, “Rape: The Military Trials of Sexual Crimes Committed by Soldiers in the Wehrmacht, 1939–1944”; Gertjejanssen, “Victims, Heroes, Survivors.”
53. For more see Waitman Wade Beorn, Marching into Darkness: The Wehrmacht and the Holocaust in Belarus (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), Chapter 6.
54. Podolsky, “The Tragic Fate,” 99.
55. Judicial records, while fragmentary, are available but focus almost exclusively on relationships between and assaults on German soldiers, not any potential assaults on subject populations. Records for homosexual violence against other groups, including Jews, appear to be almost nonexistent.
56. Nutkiewicz, “Shame, Guilt, and Anguish in Holocaust Survivor Testimony,” 6.
57. See Geoffrey J. Giles, “The Denial of Homosexuality: Same-Sex Incidents in Himmler’s SS and Police,” in Sexuality and German Fascism, ed. Dagmar Herzog (New York: Berghahn Books, 2005), 256–290.
58. Geoffrey J. Giles, unpublished manuscript.
59. Geoffrey J. Giles, “Good Comrades or Gay Degenerates? Homosexual Offenses in Military Courts During the Third Reich,” in German Studies Association Annual Conference (Denver, Colorado, 2013).
60. Sinnreich, “‘And It Was Something We Didn’t Talk About’: Rape of Jewish Women During the Holocaust,” 8.
61. Sinnreich, “‘And It Was Something We Didn’t Talk About’: Rape of Jewish Women During the Holocaust,” 10.
62. Sinnreich, “‘And It Was Something We Didn’t Talk About’: Rape of Jewish Women During the Holocaust,” 10.
63. Podolsky, “The Tragic Fate,” 102.
64. Gertjejanssen, “Victims, Heroes, Survivors,” 315–316.
65. Mühlhäuser, Eroberungen, 127.
66. Nutkiewicz, “Shame, Guilt, and Anguish in Holocaust Survivor Testimony,” 1.
67. See Tuviah Friedman, ed., Der Nazi Arbeitsleiter in Lemberg Hans Weber und Seine Sekretärin Sylvia Schapira (Haifa: Insitute for Documentation in Israel for the Investigation of Nazi War Crimes, 2002). This compilation of various documents and witness statements paints a somewhat conflicting portrait of Sylvia Schapira and her relationship with Weber, though there seems to be strongly suggestive evidence that the two had an intimate relationship at a minimum. Other witnesses in the collection argue instead that she used her close relationship with Weber to help Jews get permits.
68. Mühlhäuser, Eroberungen, 127.
69. Mühlhäuser, Eroberungen, 126.
70. See for example the work of Robert Sommer. Robert Sommer, Das KZ-Bordell: sexuelle Zwangsarbeit in nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslagern (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2009); Robert Sommer, “Pipel: Homosexual Exploitation of Young Men and Women in Nazi Concentration Camps,” in Eleventh Biennial Lessons and Legacies Conference on fhe Holocaust: Expanding Perspectives on the Holocaust in a Changing World (Boca Raton, FL, 2010).
71. Sinnreich, “The Rape of Jewish Women During the Holocaust,” 115.
72. Wells, The Janowska Road, 181.
73. Wells, The Janowska Road, 190.
74. Shik, “Sexual Abuse of Jewish Women in Auschwitz-Birkenau,” 232.
75. Shik, “Sexual Abuse of Jewish Women in Auschwitz-Birkenau,” 231.
76. Heinz Heger, The Men with the Pink Triangle (Boston, MA: Alyson Publications, 1980), 55.
77. Browning, Remembering Survival, 191.
78. Samuel Drix, Witness to Annihilation: Surviving the Holocaust, a Memoir (Washington, DC: Brassey’s, 1994), 147.
79. Gertjejanssen, “Victims, Heroes, Survivors,” 281.
80. Katz, “Thoughts,” 294.
81. Robert Sommer, “Camp Brothels: Forced Sex Labour in Nazi Concentration Camps,” in Brutality and Desire: War and Sexuality in Europe’s Twentieth Century, ed. Dagmar Herzog (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 173.
82. Gertjejanssen, “Victims, Heroes, Survivors,” 164.
83. Mühlhäuser, Eroberungen, 89.
84. “Urteil Gg. Friedrich Heinen, July 10, 1978” (BA-ZS: B162/14582), fols. 67–69.
85. One exception is that there is a growing body of work on the sexual exploitation of Jews in hiding by their would-be protectors (and sometimes by fellow Jews). Some judicial evidence exists of molestation but it usually concerns Germans molesting children in Germany. Of course, there is certainly no reason to assume that such behavior was limited to the home front. See Snyder, Sex Crimes under the Wehrmacht.
86. See, for example, Anne Kelly Knowles, Tim Cole, and Alberto Giordano, eds., Geographies of the Holocaust (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014).