German military brothels in World War II

Military brothels (German: Militärbordelle) were set up by Nazi Germany during World War II throughout much of occupied Europe for the use of Wehrmacht and SS soldiers.

[3][4] According to records, a minimum of 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.

[1] In many cases in Eastern Europe, teenage girls and women were kidnapped on the streets of occupied cities during German military and police round ups called łapanka in Polish or rafle in French.

[5] In Brandenburg, two Polish Ostarbeiter teens who returned home to Kraków in advanced stage of pregnancy, reported to have been raped by German soldiers with such frequency that they were unable to perform any of the worker's designated labour.

[5] The Swiss Red Cross mission driver Franz Mawick wrote in 1942 from Warsaw about what he saw: "Uniformed Germans ... gaze fixedly at women and girls between the ages of 15 and 25.

The women were often raped by up to 32 men per day; the visiting soldiers were allocated 15 minutes each at a nominal cost of 3 Reichsmarks per "session" between the hours of 2 p.m. and 8.30 p.m.[5] Those who were visibly pregnant were sometimes released, but would not go back to their families, so as not to shame them.

[12][13] Ruth Seifert, professor of sociology at the University of Applied Sciences in Regensburg, on the other hand, maintained that women were forced to work in these brothels by their German captors, as shown during the Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg in 1946, further confirmed by the 1961 book published by Raul Hilberg.