Sexual violence during the Holocaust

During World War II, Jewish men and women in concentration camps faced sexual violence, due to the wartime discrimination, antisemitism, and genocidal beliefs held by Adolf Hitler's Nazi Regime. This sexual violence and discrimination happened throughout Nazi-occupied Europe, including in Jewish people's homes and hiding spaces as well as in public and at designated killing sites.

There were more than 44,000 camps and sites for incarceration which were under the control of the Nazi regime between 1933 and 1945. The origins of the sexual abuse and segregation of Jewish men and women was primarily due to their race. The Nazis used these sites for a variety of reasons such as forced physical and sexual labor from their prisoners. There are many accounts from both male and female survivors, but many accounts remain private due to the topic's nature and stigmas surrounding rape. Gender-based violence, sexual violence, and antisemitic viewpoints contributed to the maltreatment and violence against Jewish men and women during the Holocaust.

Origins

Most Jewish men and women were targeted by the Nazi regime during World War II due to the regime's belief that the Jewish race was inferior in comparison to the so-called, Aryan race. Racial antisemitism arose in Europe due to the Nazi regime, but its origins can be traced back throughout history to biblical Christianity, the Medieval times, often as a result of provocation, the propagation through to the World wars, and is still seen in contemporary times.

The origins of the sexual violence perpetuated against Jewish people during the Holocaust are multifaceted, and when multiple factors are combined it has the potential to create sexually violent behaviors, specifically in men (and women but men were the primary perpetrators). Germany and their allies, (which includes Hungary, Romania, and Italy) were the primary perpetrators of the sexual violence against Jewish people during the Holocaust in concentration camps, but sexual violence also occurred from other prisoners as well.

The motivations for sexual abuse include but are not limited to potential political and ideological factors against the Jewish body, the wartime factor, which accustomed people to violence and killing, the culture of the military, which put physical strength and hegemonic masculinity on a pedestal, misogynistic views, which was part of the Nazi beliefs, and personal motives such as a need for power. These factors in combination with one another could have perpetuated a culture of abuse and maltreatment during the Holocaust.

Stereotypes and stigmas

There were lots of assumed stereotypes surrounding Jewish people and their sexuality that still persists across the globe today. Some of these stereotypes have been brought to light post-war around the women who engaged in acts of sexual service or prostitution during the war, even if it was for survival purposes and non-consensual. The Nazi regime during the war viewed their own bodies as superior to those of the Jewish people as they thought of the Jewish body as subhuman. The regime would use caricatures with disfigured body parts in public media as propaganda to spread their message of the Jewish subhuman body. These caricatures could often be seen with disproportionately large noses and big curly hair.

Jewish men also experienced, and continue to experience stigma around sexual abuse, rape, and, other acts that they also faced during the Nazi regime. The modern Jewish man is often portrayed as kind, gentle, sensitive, and delicate. These traits are often associated with femininity rather than masculinity. This gives off the message that Jewish men are inferior to the traditional Western stereotypical man. This belief was reinforced in the Holocaust by the Nazis by the shame and humiliation inflicted on the Jews.

Withheld and erased histories

It is often difficult to collect research on the sexual violence in the Holocaust due to its sensitive and taboo topic. There are many difficulties in collecting testimonies such as a number of the victims of sexual violence that did not survive. This along with difficulties in collecting survivors' experiences due to the subject matter has caused some historians to stray away from touching on sexual violence during wartime.  This has caused some framing of the Holocaust to be incorrect as the narrative has been changed and watered down to not include the sexual violence faced by the Jews.

After World War II, a large number of Jewish survivors fled Europe. More than 150,000 of these Jewish people ended up coming to America. Despite this large number of Jewish immigrants to the United States, most of the survivors did not initially tell their stories. In interviews that took place in the 1990s, often holocaust survivors would say that they rarely spoke about their wartime experiences and the violence that they faced for decades after the war. This is due to plenty of reasons such as placing traumatic burdens on survivors to tell their stories. It is often a struggle for survivors to recount their experiences and memories of sexual violence against Jewish people during World War II. Some survivors proclaim difficulty in discussing and remembering due to the heightened emotions associated with their experiences. Several survivors thought their accounts were too much for most people to listen to and believe so they stayed silent. Often times survivors did not tell their stories due to the shame and stigma of the events that happened during the war. These reasons and more have caused several survivors to water down their stories or not share them at all.

Most media that came from America from the time was centered along the liberation of the Jews and was dramatized and meant to be inspiring media. This media did not reflect the true hardships and sexual violence that occurred. This gave off an improper framing of the Holocaust to its American audience consuming media around the Holocaust. Because of the framing of the media, along with the racial purity laws prohibiting intercourse between Aryans and Jews at the time, among other reasons, some believed these sexual violations did not occur.

Eugenics and sterilization

Nazi eugenics is at the root of the classification of people based on race. The Nazi regime created persecutory policies which were based upon principles from eugenics. The movements belief systems were based on racial discrimination of traits that were said to be unfavorable. These arguments in regards to who was deemed valuable and who was not, was used as a way to explain eugenic sterilization of people with mental disabilities. These theories of racial hygiene, influenced Hitler’s way of thinking and effected policy making. The primary victims of this way of thinking were people with disabilities. But, Jewish people were also heavily affected by eugenic sterilization. Hitler thought Jews were wrecking the German 'Aryan race', and that they should not be allowed to reproduce with Germans. Historical evidence have shown that there may have been mass sterilization of Jewish women in concentration camps, with the possibility of unknowingly administered exogenous hormones which resulted in 98% of women losing their ability to menstruate upon arriving at the camps. There was also similar evidence found in Hungarian camps where 94.8% of female camp prisoners lost their ability to menstruate upon entering the camp.

In 1935 a law that prohibited racial mixing in marriages was put in place. The Blood Protection Law criminalized sexual relations between Jews and non-Jewish Germans, this law did not mandate sterilization, but rather criminalized racial mixing.

Sexual violence against women

It was not uncommon for Jewish women in Europe to face heightened sexual violence during wartime efforts. This sexual violence and dehumanization of Jewish people happened due to an abundance of reasons such as the culture of wartime, and misogyny.

Documented histories of women in concentration camps

In World War II sexual violence was common in concentration camps from both guards and their fellow inmates. It wasn’t uncommon that Jewish women in the camps faced humiliation, physical assault, sexual assault, rape, and coercion into working in the Nazi brothels. If women became pregnant during their time in the camps they were either killed or forced to abort their child. Clothing was often taken from women as they were forced to spend their duration in the camps naked, and in unhygienic conditions. Often, prisoners were forced to do physical labour for the Nazis, unclothed. These conditions were unfavorable and contributed to the dehumanization of Jewish women in concentration camps.

Ava Dorfman is a survivor of the Holocaust who recounted her time at the Janowska camp, in Ukraine. She recounted the trauma she witnessed:

One time in the roll-call order there were young people, and the older people were sitting, and the Ukrainian took — her name was Bosha — took her out, and we thought maybe he was going to save her, but when she came back, she said he raped me, and then he came and shot her. I had all her blood, you could [imagine] everything from her brain. He shot her right here in the head. How can you have a very normal life when you think of that.

Bodily functions

While in the concentration camps, many women did not have hygienic living conditions. The Nazis controlled their bodily functions, taking away some women's agencies. Often women did not have privacy and were forced to urinate in front of the guards and their fellow inmates. If they were working, women would be often denied the chance to urinate. Most women in the camps lost the ability to menstruate due to malnourishment or sterilization efforts. When these women did get their periods, due to their lack of hygienic products and clothing, their blood would flow down their legs.

Brothels

Some Jewish women were taken from the concentration camps and put into Nazi brothels where they would work as "camp whores". Due to poor living conditions, some women were looking for a way out of the concentration camps. One way to leave the camps were to agree to join brothels where they were offered food and better sleeping conditions. Some of the women in the concentration camps were not given the option and were forced into trading sexual assault for their survival. In some accounts from survivors of the Auschwitz camp, it was clear that there were only two paths for women. These two paths were the gas chamber or the brothel. The brothels were typically put in place to stimulate the more privileged prisoners to work and to provide an opportunity for officers and guards to rape women. Some women have recounted their time in the brothels which often include stories of being threatened, beaten, and humiliated along with being raped. Most working as sex slaves were eventually killed.

Sexual violence against men

Men in concentration camps were exposed to similar forms of violence and humiliation as women, but their experiences are under-researched and sometimes concealed due to social, cultural and religious expectations. Masculinity has been historically associated with strength, aggression and power, and the gender norms associated with men during wartime caused some erasure of their experiences. Some authors have suggested that the erasure of Jewish men and boys stories of sexual victimization and rape during the Holocaust is also a function of how gender and genocide scholars have traditionally understood maleness's relation to dehumanization which focuses on lethal violence or gendercide rather than sexual victimization. A male-specific account of rape and made-to-penetrate violence shows that while the sexual violence Jewish men and boys experienced during the Holocaust has some similarities to that of women, their specific experiences require new theorizations of how the male body is sexually victimized. Tommy J. Curry suggests that there is an intimate connection between the hyper-masculine and effeminate tropes of Jewish men and boys that makes sexual violence and rape an expected outcome of genocidal events such as the Holocaust. Types of violence that occurred in concentration camps include but is not limited to; castration of men and young boys, non-consensual examinations of genitalia, sexual taunting, rape, assault, sterilization and more. Many of the Jewish men’s hair was forcibly shaved including their beards and sidelocks. Sometimes to add to the humiliation of shaving, the Jewish men were forced to shave one another's hair. These experiences were oftentimes found in diaries and memoirs of boys and men.

Nate Leipciger, a Holocaust survivor and sexual abuse survivor, comforting a young student during the March of the living Auschwitz in 2019. Picture from the Museum of Jewish Heritage.

Documented histories of men in concentration camps

Sexual violence against men during the Holocaust was common, and occurred more often than recorded, according to Holocaust survivor Sam Lubat in an oral history interview in 1998. Lubat described the sexual violence by men towards men as ‘shameful’. Literature and discourse surrounding camp survivors reinforced homophobic stereotypes and stigma around survivors.

A memoir that was published in 2015, written by Nate Leipciger, a Holocaust survivor in Poland, described his experiences of encounters with a room elder named Janek. His experiences were hidden from his father who was also imprisoned in the same camp as him. The encounters included visits during the night, forcible penetration, exploitative sexual bartering, and more.

Sidney Klein, a Holocaust survivor from Slovakia recounts his experience with sexual assault in the camp hospital by someone he referred to as a 'lab technician':

He took me to the office, and he was offering me all kinds of things, and he raped me, he raped me and then he wanted me to come and see him like every week … I was trying to get away from him, and a few times I was able to do it, but then he was threatening me that if I am not going to come, I will lose my job.

See also

• Judaism and sexuality
• Judaism and violence
• Jewish women in the Holocaust