Damairus Law

Professor Werz-Orbaugh

UWRT 1102-09

04/15/15

Research Review: The Holocaust Sexual Sins

For the research review I looked up information on prostitution and sexual obscurity

within the concentration camps. It is a story not often told full of shame, self-hate and means of

survival. The Holocaust was a traumatic experience to the Jews that lived in Germany in that

time period. We have all heard the stories of famine oppression and killing yet not many have

heard the stories of the corrupt SS officers raping women and forcing them into prostitution.

Two articles that I found useful in my writing were Sonja M. Hedgepeth. and Rochelle G.

Saidel. Sexual Violence against Jewish Women during the Holocaust and Steven T. Katz

Thoughts on the intersection of Rape and Rassenchande during the Holocaust.

One of the things that stuck out to me in Katz article was the sense of hopelessness that

the women had in the camps had turned into a means of survival. A woman from Dessau that

was interviewed that remains nameless was rapped on a nightly basis by a man whose face she

could not see. She absolutely hated him knowing the monster that he is. After a few months

she was able to get use to him. He kept her out of the gas chamber and gave her food. In the

interview she states, “I lived one day at a time. Whatever I did was my way of surviving” [295].

One of the things that I found most tragic about this event is that she never had her chance of

coping or grieving. She had to switch to an instinctive mindset of live or die knowing that she

was all on her own and that no one would help her.

Katz also enlightened me of how the woman were left feeling less than human. The

woman that were raped had siblings and other family members that could hear them being

raped, an event that in America would cause the family to attack the rapist and the rapist would

be sent to jail. In the camps, the rapist did not have a police force to fear for their actions, they

were that force. Katz goes on to say that the rapist “uncontrolled sexual satisfaction was a

power confirmation that the bodies of the women were there to be ravaged by whoever would

take them” [296]. The words that got me were “whoever would take them.” This made the

woman seem like as if they were no longer human, they were just some worthless objects of

sexual pleasure. This helped me to understand more of why females did not want to be

interviewed or say anything that happened to them while in being forced into sex. It would only

put them back in the mental state of the time they were considered less than human.

Hedgepeth’s article focuses more so on the women who were forced to work in the

brothels. Hedgepeth brought up an idea that seemed ironic to me, “The women were regularly

screened for sexually transmitted diseases” [51]. The reason this seems strange to me is that

they wanted the Jews to die yet they gave them constant STD screenings, yet they would not

give the people contraceptives that would stop the Jewish population from increasing and

decrease the amount of STDs that were spread.

Hedgepth also brought up another idea that helped to expand upon what I had

learned in previous readings. He goes on to say that women were considered to be a reward to

the hardest working workers that were in the camps [46]. I thought that this was incredibly

stripping of dignity that they would treat the women like as if they were just some prize to be

won for the hardest working male. The thing that confused me about the situation is there

connections with the people there and how the prisoners that attended the brothels were no

better than the officer rapist.

Person takes on more of the view of a feminist in her writing yet makes some good

points. She says that “the story of the Holocaust was at that point, and to a large degree still is,

the story of men. The life stories of Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi or Tadeusz Borowski were

analyzed and incorporated into scholarships by almost exclusively male scholars”[104]. I never

really noticed that in all of our classes we generally learn about things through the perspective

of a male about what goes on in the camps. I at first thought “Anne Frank is all that we hear

about while reading about the Holocaust, what could she be talking about?” but we never hear

the story of Anne within the camps, only her life before the camps.

Person also brings up a reason that we know little about prostitution in the camps or

any sexual violence that occurred. She say that the rape victims “silence was further reinforced

by the attitude of the researchers, who could not, or perhaps for various reasons did not want

to, ask directly about sexual abuse” [104]. She later adds that “we avoid listening to stories that

we do not want to hear” [104]. I found this to be a bit of an eye opener for me. I know that

women were afraid to be interviewed for fear of same yet it never came to mind that the

people interviewing them were trying to sensor the questions that they ask them to keep their

feelings in mind. Though I found this to be considerate I feel like this could lead to back

tracking. In saving the survivors feelings we are also cutting out a gruesome part of the story we

call the Holocaust and making seem like as if their struggle did not matter or even happen.

Sources:

Modern Judaism, Thoughts on the intersection of Rape and Rassenchande during the Holocaust

Vol. 32, No. 3 (October 2012), pp. 293-322

Sonja M. Hedgepeth. and Rochelle G. Saidel. Sexual Violence against Jewish Women during the

Holocaust.Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2010. Project MUSE. Web. 15 Apr. 2015.

Person, Sexual Violence during the Holocaust—The Case of Forced Prostitution in the Warsaw

Ghetto,