Exhibition exposes sex slavery at camps

AFP: Exhibition exposes sex slavery at Nazi camps

"They told us we were in the camp brothel, that we were the lucky ones. We would eat well and have enough to drink. If we behaved and fulfilled our duties nothing would happen to us."

So begins the wrenching account of Frau W., a prisoner of the Nazi concentration camp Ravensbrueck north of Berlin who between mid-1943 and December 1944 was forced to work as a sex slave for her fellow detainees.

Her story forms the centrepiece of a new exhibition at Ravensbrueck about the fate of women pressed into prostitution between 1942 and 1945, like Asia's "comfort women" during World War II.

"The sex work was organised very bureaucratically," said Sommer, showing prisoner files with the code 998 signifying a prostitute and vouchers used by men allowed to visit the camp brothel.

No Jews worked at the brothels or were allowed to patronise them, and separate facilities were created for camp guards.

"The irony was that while the Nazis tried to regulate prostitution in German cities, they institutionalised it at the camps," Sommer said.

After the war, most of the German sex workers kept their trauma silent out of shame, while foreign victims feared being seen as "collaborators".

None received recognition from the German state as victims of sex slavery or compensation for their ordeal. Few, if any, are still alive today.

 

Horrible, but is interesting that people were not comparing this to Japanese practices until now even though the existence of camp brothels are well-known. I did recall one camp or an other had a similiar system but it was set up to serve the capos and there were Jewish victims.

 

Joy Divisions

AN anonymous prison number, a date of birth and, in black ink in the right-hand corner, two words: "brothel woman". The faded brown index cards discovered inside a garage at Ravensbrck concentration camp are the only record that these tragic women ever existed.

Today, on Holocaust Memorial Day, more than 60 years after the end of the Second World War, the concentration camps are giving up their last unspeakable secret - for three years, hundreds of women inmates were forced to work as prostitutes for male prisoners. The Nazis nicknamed these forced brothels Joy Divisions.

"No other part of concentration camp history has been so repressed and so tainted with prejudice and distortion," says camp historian Insa Eschenbach.

"The women prisoners who were forced to work as prostitutes remained silent after 1945. Hardly any applied for compensation because talking about their experiences was too degrading for them."

Now the women's story is being told for the first time at a shocking exhibition being held at Ravensbruck, now a Holocaust museum, 50 miles north of Berlin. It includes first-hand accounts from the women and the men who used them.

In 1942 SS chief Heinrich Himmler hit upon the idea of setting up brothels in 10 concentration camps within the Reich, with the women supplied from the predominantly female RavensbrŸck.

To Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Hoess in 1942, Himmler wrote: "I consider it necessary to provide in the most liberal way hard-working prisoners with women in brothels."

Of all the concentration camps set up by the Nazis, RavensbrŸck stands as perhaps the cruellest.

Smaller than Dachau and less well-known than Auschwitz, it was the scene of countless horrors that claimed the lives of 90,000 of its 130,000 inmates.

Those who were not shot, gassed, strangled, buried alive or worked to death were subject to unimaginable medical experiments.

But it is only now that one of the camp's darkest secrets has come to light. When they arrived, RavensbrŸck's inmates were divided into categories, each identified by a colour-coded triangle sewn on to their overalls. For Poles, the patch was red, for Jews it was yellow and for criminals it was green.

But there was also another type of prisoner, "anti-socials", recognisable by a black triangle. These included the unemployed, beggars, the homeless, prostitutes, Roma and anyone the Nazis decided was non-conformist.

ESCHENBACH, the director of Ravensbruck's museum, says: "Women who often changed their employment, stood out because of their individualistic lifestyle, did not conform to National Socialist norms of behaviour, or whose sexual behaviour was considered conspicuous, were also subject to persecution.

"After serving a prison term, many of these women were taken to RavensbrŸck."

And these women worked in the brothels set up from 1942 at 10 concentration camps, including Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Dachau.

Built using plans drawn up by the Inspectorate Of The Concentration Camps, they included waiting rooms for visitors, a guard room, toilets, a common room and dorm for the female prisoners and tiny "copulation cells".

The doors of each of these were equipped with spyholes, allowing guards to check sex was taking place in the prescribed manner - lying down - and ensure prisoners observed the ban on talking.

Each session lasted 20 minutes with every woman expected to sleep with eight men a day and up to 40 at weekends.

Inmate Antonia Bruhn recalls how the women were coerced into the job with promises of fresh food and vitamins and were tanned with sun lamps to improve their looks.

Crucially, they were also promised their freedom after six months of servitude.

"After they were primped up, they were all tried out by a group of SS guards in the camp operating theatre," she says. "Then they were sent off to the concentration camps to work. Of course none of them were set free as the SS had promised."

Although the Nazis forbade prostitution, Himmler justified his plan saying the sex would discourage homosexuality among inmates.

He also reasoned it would encourage the camps' slave labourers to become more productive, with bonus vouchers giving access to the brothels awarded to the hardest working.

Ryszard Dacko, a Polish political prisoner and member of the Auschwitz fire brigade, was one of the men who used the women. "If I wanted to get a voucher, I had to sort things out with an SS man. And they only gave vouchers to healthy prisoners. They wouldn't give them to prisoners who were on their last legs," he says.

"Prisoners who worked as cooks for the SS, as hairdressers for the SS, the special prisoners got those vouchers. I got two vouchers.

"I wanted to cuddle up to her as much as I could, because it was three-and-a-half years since I'd been arrested, three-and-a-half years without a woman."

THE brothel at Auschwitz was housed in Block 24 and was known to prisoners and guards as The Pleasure House.

Former RavensbrŸck inmate Charlotte Kroll says: "The prostitutes always stood out from the other women prisoners. We were all forced to have our heads shaved, but they were allowed to keep their long hair.

"They serviced up to eight men a day. Sunday was worse' the guards were off and expected their favourites to perform for them all the time. These poor, half-starved women were brutalised without mercy.

"The SS men were pigs. They watched the slave labourers making love to these women in the week and took their turns at weekends."

Inmate Irma Trksak still remembers the devastating effect on the women: "They came back as wrecks. God knows how many men they had had to sleep with. They were ruined, sick and many died afterwards."

In a sickening twist, the camp's guards would delight in forcing known lesbians to work in the brothels and compel gay men to have sex with the women.

The sheer shame of what the hundreds of women were forced to do was so great that very few have ever dared to speak of it. Eschenbach says: "The female prisoners forced to work at the concentration camp brothels suffered severe physical and mental damage.

"Male witnesses hardly ever mention the sex-slave labourers and, if they do, they frequently talk about them with contempt."

But within the exhibition is the lone voice of an unidentified woman who, before committing suicide at Auschwitz, left a heartbreaking note.

It reads: "I was a teacher of music' a mother to a daughter' the wife of a loving husband. Now I am alive but I am dead inside because of what they made me do."

FOR further information about the exhibition, goto Stiftung Brandenburgische Gedenkstätten

Source: http://www.mirror.co.u (I lifted this from another site. I see the original "mirror" link is no longer active.)