Women's Sexuality: Social Change Tool for Survival...Tool for Oppression

INTRODUCTION: The French documentary film Night and Fog mentioned the existence of concentration camp brothels as early as 1955. This film, by director Alain Resnais, included extensive original footage of the camps and was based on interviews with survivors. German concentration camp brothels were also re-enacted in fictional Nazi exploitation films made in the 1970s such as llsa, She Wolf of the SS, Last Orgy of the Third Reich, Love Camp 7, SS Experiment Camp, and Nazi Love Camp 27. Examples of Israeli literature on the subject include writer’s Yehiel De-Nur alias K. Tzetnick’s book The House of Dolls and Stalag fiction genre. Czech author Arnost Lustig wrote a novel Lovely Green Eyes (ISBN 1559706961) which tells a story of a 15-year-old Jewish girl forced to serve as a prostitute in a German camp brothel during World War II. In an Australian television drama, A Place Called Home (season 2) current events bring painful memories of war for the Australian-born Jewish convert Sarah Adams. The audience learns that not only was she an internee at Ravensbruck concentration camp but she was forced into a camp brothel; willing herself to survive the ordeal solely because of her love for her French husband, Rene. After liberation, on being told erroneously that he'd died, she had a mental breakdown. The dramatic revelation that he was not dead, followed.

Ten years after the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps, filmmaker Alain Resnais documented the abandoned grounds of Auschwitz. One of the first cinematic reflections on the horrors of the Holocaust, Night and Fog contrasts the stillness of the abandoned camps' quiet, empty buildings with haunting wartime footage. With Night and Fog, Resnais investigates the cyclical nature of man's violence toward man and presents the unsettling suggestion that such horrors could come again.

This paper will focus on aspects of women's sexual nature in concentration camps, looking at how the camps drew out what Johanna Micaela Jacobsen, in an Oral History Project for UC Berkley’s English 1B, Section 2 labeled, “the dual nature of 'femaleness'" in WWII-ridden Europe. Used as tools for oppression on the part of the SS men and as tools for survival on the part of the women, feminine identity served a dual purpose.

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ASPECTS OF THE SITUATION: First, this paper discusses the use of female sexuality as a tool for degradation by looking at hair-shearing, menstruation, rape, brothels, pregnancies, and force-sterilizations. All of these facets targeted feminine identity in a way that spoke of denigration, pain and humiliation. Secondly, this paper focuses on femininity used as a means of survival in the camps, in light of both the constant, desperate effort to keep up appearances, and the self-imposed prostitution.

THE USE OF FEMALE SEXUALITY AS A TOOL FOR DEGRADATION: Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen and Ravensbrueck were concentration camps, set up by the Nazi regime as part of the "Final Solution" which called for the extermination of the Jews in Germany, systematically tortured and killed not only Jews but political prisoners, homosexuals and other "undesirables" by means such as gassing, execution-style killing, and medical experiments. Perhaps the most notorious of the concentration camps, Auschwitz claimed the lives of over two million Jews from all over Europe during the course of WWII. Bergen-Belsen, a work and transfer camp for those Jews who had relatives in Palestine, did not fit the mold of most concentration camps, as death came not from gassing or mass executions, but rather from starvation, malnutrition and the rampant diseases that hit the camp in the final stages of the war. Ravensbrueck was the largest concentration camp for women in all of the German Reich, in which over 100,000 women from over 20 countries were imprisoned, and where 5-6,000 women died in the gas chambers.

HAIR SHEARING: Upon arrival in most of the camps, women selected for work-detail instead of immediate gassing were led into a room where they underwent a systematic procedure of shearing and hair-cutting. Informed that this served as a means of preventing lice, the prisoners were shorn by both male and female Kapo's and SS alike; although lice as a reason seem plausible, shearing also served as a means of degrading and humiliation the women. Using a rusty razor blade, the Kapo's or the SS did their work quickly, shaving pubic hair as well. Considerations to feelings of shame and humiliation were ignored: A French prisoner who survived Ravensbrueck recalls: "...undress[ing] hastily (one's clothes were torn piece for piece off of the body), [and getting] onto a table where one was held down by another woman while another inspected all the natural bodily openings. An outright humiliation.

MENSTRUATION: Due to both the physical and psychological shocks received from entering the camp, including the shearing-ordeal, most women did not menstruate. Frequently interpreted as a mechanism of self-protection, as even the most primitive feminine hygiene articles were not obtainable, women associated not menstruating with great amounts of stress. However, the very few women that did menstruate would bleed freely. Yet, despite this uncomfortable situation, those bleeding on a monthly basis counted themselves as lucky because it assured them of their continued fertility. However, despite the relief granted from this knowledge, those that did bleed were put down for their uncleanliness: the Nazi's believed that Jewish women could not keep themselves clean, and thus consequently made them the butt of many lewd jokes. The fact that some women menstruated was used by the Nazi's as a way of putting down the women to a level of animals. Thus, one cannot easily state whether menstruation in the camps was positive or negative: women suffered if they did menstruate through the verbal and physical abuses by the Nazi's relating to their "uncleanliness," and suffered if they did not by the self-imposed psychological fear brought about by being in the camps of not being a true female.

RAPE: Rape, too, prevailed in the lives of many women. Sexual abuse, another means by which the Nazi's attempted to degrade women, was especially brutal, as it often had the effect of shaming a woman to a point where her identity became unrecognizable. The women that returned after the rapes, described by a survivor from Auschwitz as "pitiful creatures," came back "in an awful, indescribable state. This abuse had the effect of breaking the spirit of the women: their bodies no longer their own, the women had no control over their lives. The survivor remembers several instances in which "...the SS men appear[ed] in ... [the] block", and "without shame, ... pull[ed] the girls out of their beds, Jewish girls they took ... to rape. The SS men justified these rapes by saying that raping Jewish women did not violate the taboo of marrying them, and therefore was an acceptable action. This argument, not only weak but useless, illustrates arguments used by the Nazi's to push their will onto others.

ORGANIZED BROTHELS: Some camps, including Auschwitz and Ravensbrueck, had organized brothels set up mostly for the perusal of the SS, but occasionally for select prisoners as well. Literally, hundreds of female prisoners forced to work there became victims of what can aptly be called "organized rape." Interestingly enough, brothels originally were set up by the SS as a means of prohibiting and stopping the spread of male homosexuality within the camps. However, sexually abusing women can also be seen as a means of control: Usually, unwillingly, the women had to give up their bodies and their rights to them, and frequently suffered from humiliation and shame. Mostly Germans, but also some Polish, Hungarian and Czechoslovakian women were chosen for the brothels on the basis of their physical appearance, in a selection process not dissimilar to selections for transports in the main death camps. A political prisoner from Ravensbrueck recalls that the "...medium good ware would be sent to the concentration camps, the better to the Wehrmacht, and the prettiest and strongest girls into the homes for the officers and the SS. The "ware", females ranging from their mid-teens the to early thirties, would frequently be "tried out" in what can only be called gang rape: a political prisoner from Ravensbrueck recalls from personal experience that "...the women and girls, after having been inspected for physical appearance, would be taken into an operating room and 'tried out.' Although humiliating enough, once the brothel selection process had taken place, the women's daily routine caused further heartache and misery. The women had most of the daytime off; however, the evenings consisted of "working" for two hours, in which they had to serve up to and sometimes exceeding eight men.

Thus, brothels instituted by the male SS, even by high-ranking commanders such as Heinrich Himmler, inflicted immediate as well as long term pain and suffering upon women. Though not necessarily planned, brothels still served as a means for making the women prostituting their bodies feel like nothing.

Heinrich Luitpold Himmler (7 October 1900 – 23 May 1945) was Reichsführer of the Protection Squadron; SS), and a leading member of the Nazi Party (NSDAP) of Germany. Nazi leader Adolf Hitler briefly appointed him a military commander and later Commander of the Replacement (Home) Army and General Plenipotentiary “full powers” for the administration of the entire Third Reich. Himmler was one of the most powerful men in Nazi Germany and one of the people most directly responsible for the Holocaust.

As a member of a reserve battalion during World War I, Himmler did not see active service. He studied agronomy in university and joined the Nazi Party in 1923 and the SS in 1925. In 1929, he was appointed Reichsführer-SS by Hitler. Over the next 16 years, he developed the SS from a mere 290-man battalion into a million-strong paramilitary group, and, following Hitler's orders, set up and controlled the Nazi concentration camps. He was known to have good organizational skills and for selecting highly competent subordinates, such as Reinhard Heydrich - whom many historians regard as the darkest figure in the Nazi elite. From 1943 onwards, Himmler was both Chief of German Police and Minister of the Interior, overseeing all internal and external police and security forces, including the Gestapo (Secret State Police). Himmler had a lifelong interest in occultism, interpreting Germanic Neopaganism and V?lkisch beliefs to promote the racial policy of Nazi Germany, and incorporating esoteric symbolism and rituals into the SS.

On Hitler's behalf, Himmler formed and built extermination camps. As facilitator and overseer of the concentration camps, Himmler directed the killing of some six million Jews, between 200,000 and 500,000 Romani people (Gypsies), and other victims; the total number of civilians killed by the regime is estimated at eleven to fourteen million people. Most of them were Polish and Soviet citizens.

Late in World War II, Hitler briefly appointed him a military commander and later Commander for the administration of the entire Third Reich. Specifically, he was given command of the army groups created to fill the gap openings in German defenses. He failed to achieve his assigned objectives and Hitler replaced him in these posts. Realizing the war was lost, Himmler attempted to open peace talks with the western Allies without Hitler's knowledge, shortly before the end of the war. Hearing of this, Hitler dismissed him from all his posts in April 1945 and ordered his arrest. Himmler attempted to go into hiding, but was detained and then arrested by British forces once his identity became known. While in British custody, he committed suicide on 23 May 1945.

Reinhard Heydrich was critically wounded in Prague on 27 May 1942 as a result of Operation Anthropoid (The code name for his assassination during World War II). He was ambushed by a team of Czech and Slovak agents who had been sent by the Czechoslovak government-in-exile to kill him. The team was trained by the British Special Operations Executive (A British WW II organization formed for the purpose of conducting espionage, sabotage, and reconnaissance in German-occupied Europe - with the aid of local resistance units). Heydrich died from his injuries a week later. Nazi intelligence falsely linked the assassins to the villages of Lidice and Le?áky. Both villages were razed; all men and boys over the age of 16 were shot, and all but a handful of the women and children were deported and killed in Nazi concentration camps.

GERMAN MILITARY BROTHELS: German military brothels were set up by Nazi Germany during World War II throughout much of occupied Europe for the use of Wehrmacht and SS soldiers. These brothels were generally new creations, but in the West (France Belgium, The Netherlands) they were sometimes set up using existing brothels as well as many other buildings. Until 1942, there were around 500 military brothels of this kind in German-occupied Europe. Often operating in confiscated hotels and guarded by the German military these facilities served traveling soldiers and those withdrawn from the front. According to records, at least 34,140 European women were forced to serve as prostitutes during the German occupation of their own countries along with female prisoners of concentration camp brothels. In many cases in Eastern Europe (Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia), the women involved were kidnapped on the streets of occupied cities during German military and police roundups called ?apanka or rafle.

A ROUNDUP: (?apanka or rafle) was a widespread German World War II security and economic exploitation tactic used in occupied countries, especially in, German-occupied Poland, whereby the SS, Wehrmacht (German military), and German police took captive at random thousands of civilians on the streets of subjugated cities. The civilians were captured in groups of unsuspecting passers-by or kidnapped from selected city quarters that had been surrounded in advance by German forces. Those caught in roundups were most often sent to slave labor in Germany but were also taken as hostages or executed in reprisal actions; imprisoned and sent to concentration camps; or summarily executed in numerous ethnic cleansing operations.

PREGNANCIES: Not infrequently, pregnancies resulted from some of the aforementioned rapes and even from some of the sexual intercourse that occurred in the brothels. Although the distribution of "anti-baby" shots to prevent pregnancies was implemented in the brothels, some women nonetheless found themselves with child; however, minimally few pregnancies were carried to term. Pregnancies, though not directly denigrating, nonetheless had the effect of victimizing the women further, inasmuch as they had no control over the happenings over their own bodies. Nazi's decided whether or not the fetus would be aborted, whether the mother could keep the child, and even whether the woman herself would live. In other words, pregnancies in the camps instilled a realistic fear in the women of not surviving; in that way, the SS managed to grip onto a feminine sexual trait, and used it to increase the pain and fear present amongst the women.

STERILIZATIONS: Force sterilizations, feared by many women, constitute a further hit on femaleness. Especially prevalent in death camps such as Auschwitz, two types of sterilizations as means to wipe of the birth-giving ability in Jewish females took place. One method consisted of mixing highly toxic chemicals such as sodium into the already unfit food, causing excruciating pain, internal hemorrhaging, itching, the formation of holes in the mouth cavity, as well as the desired result of the permanent stop of menstruation. A woman who survived Auschwitz-Birkenau, recalls that "...during the whole time in the camp, we feared that we were getting "something" [mixed] in the food. The fear concerning this issue drove many over the edge, prompting many women to refuse the life-giving food. This paradox is a great one: women wanted to survive, but also wanted to retain the ability to bear children. By refusing to eat, their fertility was assured; their life, however, threatened by starvation, was not. The "surgical" removal of the ovaries constituted the second type of forced-sterilization found at Auschwitz and consisted of the "surgical" removal of the ovaries, in which the female reproductive organs were literally burned out by X-rays. This process of destroying a female’s ability to reproduced caused extreme pain, as recalled by eye-witness from Ravensbrueck: "...screaming with pain, the ovaries burnt through the x-ray, the twelve and thirteen-year-olds threw themselves onto the streets. Sterilization constitutes another big attack on femaleness by the SS because it literally stamped out that property unique to women: the ability to bear children.

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THE USE OF FEMALE SEXUALITY AS A MEANS OF SURVIVAL: Even though femininity and the female identity gave the Nazis an extra tool for humiliating and degrading, it gave the women themselves an extra method for survival. This may sound paradoxical or controversial; upon closer examination, however, one can see that women indeed, in certain situations, pushed and flaunted their feminine sexuality in order to survive. Not infrequently, the selection processes that picked women to send to a different camp or to the gas chambers chose women on the basis of their physical appearance. More specifically, women were chosen on the basis of whether or not they still had breasts. As another anonymous survivor reports: "You know, the most important thing here is that your breasts remain firm. My breasts have saved me more than once.... When the Germans look at you, they first glance at your breasts...because as long as your breasts are still good, a person still counts as a work animal. Although impossible to say that women would or even could care for their breasts especially, attention was nonetheless paid to the physical shape of the body. Thus, femininity and retaining as much of a stereotypical female body as possible could serve to save. Not only was the retention of as much of a feminine body as possible important, but doing anything within reach to look "good" on the outside proved equally crucial. Personal hygiene and care became an important survival strategy, as small wounds, sickness, or even grey hair frequently led to selection and death. Aware of this, it was not infrequent that women risked their lives for some articles of clothing which, in their minds, would help them survive at least one more day. Specifically, there is the story of an inmate who risked her life in order to obtain a "...long, dirty garment in rust-red and olive-green shades. Although initially not sure why, she recalls standing "...for a few seconds as if hypnotized.... [,] obsessed by the desire to cover [her] shorn head. Realizing that being caught could result in death, she nonetheless retrieved the scarf: necessity to hide her shame overwhelmed even the fear of death.

PROSTITUTION: Prostitution was yet another way that a woman could, on the basis of her sex and gender, promote her survival. A way to get extra food for oneself, one's child, one's husband, and one's friends, prostitution perhaps enabled the survival for one extra day. Survivors, though occasionally skeptical, do not blame the females that "...gave themselves away for a little bread and butter. As an exchange prisoner in Bergen-Belsen states: I don't think we can judge the women and girls too harshly because they gave themselves to the Kapos.... It was their will to survive, and often also the wish to save their husband and children, that made them take that path. Although seemingly paradoxical, femininity and female sexuality in Auschwitz, Ravensbrueck, and Bergen-Belsen and in many other concentration camps throughout Europe were not only used by the SS as a means of controlling and humiliating female prisoners but also by the women themselves as a tool for survival. The SS used aspects such as women's hair, their menstruation, rape and prostitution as a way to control, degrade and humiliate the female prisoners. However, by clinging onto the tattered rests of femininity that remained to them, some of which overlapped with the aspects the SS used to control them, many women survived.

NOTE: Much of this paper was compiled using material from the references below and from an article written by Ms. Jacobson as mentioned above and included in the references below. This author located Ms. Jacobson’s work while researching articles of this WW II genre previously published in LinkedIn and shared on Twitter. This authors attempt to locate Ms. Jacobson for commentary was proved unsuccessful. This authors work previously published in LinkedIn and shared on Twitter of this WW II genre include the following: (1) The Trial and Execution of Pierre Laval, (2) Inconvenient Jewishness, and (3) A Betrayal of Social Values.

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References:

Lucille was interviewed by Ellen S., Maria J.B., Brian P., on August 14th, 1990, for the Holocaust Oral History Project of San Francisco, California. Retrieved from https://remember.org/wit.sur.luc.html

Micheline Maurel's narrative can be found, excerpted, in Frauen in Konzentrationslagern: Bergen Belsen, Ravensbrück. (Bremen: Edition Temmen, 1994.) Edited by Claus Füllberg-Stolberg and Martina Jung.

Wolfgang Benz, Der Holocaust. (Munich: Verlag C.H. Beck, 1995) p. 43.

Petter Hellman, The Auschwitz Album: A Book based upon an Album discovered by a Concertation Camp Survivor, Lili Meier. (New York: Random House, 1981.) p. v11.

Eberhard Kolb, Bergen-Belsen: Geschichte des: Aufenthaltslagers? 1943-1945. (Hannover: Verlag für Literatur und Zeitgeschichte GmbH, 1962.) pp. 22-23.

Claus Füllberg-Stolberg and Martina Jung, et.al. Frauen in Konzentrationslagern: Bergen Belsen, Ravensbrück. (Bremen: Edition Temmen, 1994.) p. 13.

Jacobson, Johanna Micaela. (2000). Women’s Sexuality in WWII Concentration Camps. An Oral History Project for UC Berkeley's English 1B, Section 7. October 2000

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