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.
[1] 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.
[6] 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[as of?]
[1] 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.
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.
[8] Jewish men also experienced, and continue to experience stigma around sexual abuse, rape, and, other acts that they also faced during the Nazi regime.
[2] 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.
[2][10] 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.
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.
It is often a struggle for survivors to recount their experiences and memories of sexual violence against Jewish people during World War II.
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.
[1] This sexual violence and dehumanization of Jewish people happened due to an abundance of reasons such as the culture of wartime, and misogyny.
[2] 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.
[2] The rape of Jewish men and boys during the Holocaust has been overlooked for years despite the presence of their stories in the Visual History Archive (VHA) housed at the USC Shoah Foundation.
In 2017, the USC Shoah Foundation interviewed Tommy J. Curry about his research into the rape and sexual victimization of Jewish men and boys during the Holocaust.
[17] 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.
[18][1] Masculinity has historically been associated with strength, aggression and power, and the gender norms associated with men during wartime caused some erasure of their experiences.
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.
[20] 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.
[18] 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.
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.
