Lamia
December 15, 2009, 3:08am
61
This is just another uncited anecdote, but when I was in high school a Holocaust survivor visited our class and told us about her experiences in a concentration camp. She told us that she remembered four girls in their teens or early 20s who were raped repeatedly by Nazis at the camp – IIRC she described them as being two Jewish girls, one Catholic, and one gypsy.
Kimstu
December 15, 2009, 3:12am
62
This source sez :
Although we have little documentation about rape, forced sexual slavery, sex for survival/ bartering for food or other necessities from which to draw conclusions, we do have isolated reports. For example, Vera Laska observed that rape and forced prostitution of Jewish women in camp brothels were rare because, if caught, the SS would risk severe punishment or transfer to the Russian front. “Most SS,” she said, “cherished their camp job which was a sinecure with power.” One exception she cited was the case of a Ravensbrueck SS doctor Rolf Rosenthal who performed an abortion on his nurse/ mistress Gerta Quernheim. Rosenthal was sentenced to death but committed suicide before the sentence could be carried out (Laska 265; Tillion 73). A report from the Russian section of Auschwitz says that SS guards raped young, pretty, and healthy girls “until they were half dead. From there they went to the ovens.” […]
Felicia Karay also reported “known cases of individual and collective rapes of Jewish women” by “German commanders [who] were reluctant to deprive themselves of any of life’s pleasures” even in forced labor camps. […] A few months later, at another party/orgy that included high ranking officers, such as the SS commander of Radom, the guests raped and then murdered three other Jewish women (Karay 290-91).
Though we might expect otherwise because rape was a serious racial purity issue, rape happened, but was and, to some extent, still is—ignored or neglected.
It sounds as though rape of Jewish women by Nazis was rare compared to the typical incidence of rapes in wartime, because intercourse with Jews fell into the category of Rassenschande or “race defilement”, punishable by imprisonment or death. But it did sometimes happen, especially if the rapist could immediately make away with the victim to minimize the chances of detection.
It’s not a matter of balking at rape. Extramarital sexual intercourse between Aryans and Jews was forbidden by the 1935 Nuremberg laws. From the Nazi point of view, killing Jews purified the Aryan race; raping them contaminated it.
Actually, I was just reading Daniel Goldhagen’s “Worse than War”, his look at genocide, and he talks about it. From Page 457:
This points to another of the Holocaust’s unusual features. Germans rarely raped Jewish women. Why, given the Germans’ total demonization and dehumanization of Jews, their unsurpassable thirst for vengeance, their ready and steady infliction of virtually every kind of horror upon them, did they desist in this one cruel practise that is eliminationist assults’ virtual hallmark, which perpetrators appear to need little more than Conradian opportunity to widely practice? The Germans’ sexual restraint vis-a-vis Jews is still more noteworthy as it differed from their ready sexual use and abuse of non-Jewish victims, including the dehmanized (but not demonized) Russians and others.
The Germans did not rape Jewish women for powerful and mutually reinforcing reasons. The German regime outlawed sexual relations with Jews, severely punishing offenders, sometimes by death. While this may seem to demonstrate regimes’ power to prevent excess cruelty, in many, perhaps most settings, individual or small groups of Germans could do whatever they wanted with Jewish women with de facto impunity, as the German authorities deemed a Jew’s testimony, as a matter of definition, mendacious and without value, especially against a German’s word. And according the Germans’ security service’s own report in 1942, similar German army attempts “to ban any kind of sexual intercourse with Russian women and girls have up to now been without any noteworth effect.” This included widespread rape. So probably a second reason far more powerfully inhibited Germans from raping Jewish women. Germans genuinely feared that these enemies, deemed biologically potent and demonic, would pollute them. They wanted to expose themselves to this danger no more than to intimate contact with a leper, or, more precisely, a demonic leper. The Germans genuinely held that sexual relations with a Jewish woman would racially (i.e., biologically) endanger the German race. The act evoked such horror it had a German name, Rassenschande , meaning race defilement, which was also the punishable legal offense’s name.