Sexual Violence against Jewish Women during the Third Reich

Nazi propaganda that translates to, "The Jews are our misfortune."

Sexual violence against Jewish women occurred in various forms during the span of the Third Reich (1933-1945) as a result of institutional circumstances and World War II. Sexual violence towards Jewish women intersects at different social locations. Jews were persecuted for the duration of the Third Reich as enemies of the National Socialist Party. Discriminatory Nazi policies culminated into the Final Solution, which led to the murder of 6 million Jews and 5 million other persecuted groups in Europe. Women were subject to more frequent sexual abuse during the Third Reich. For Jewish women living at this time, these identities intersected to form overlapping oppressions. The experience of such intersecting identities led to grotesque forms of sexual violence perpetrated by Nazis and Nazi collaborators. Additionally, this page only refers to oppressions of Jewish women. This is not to deny that what is described here occurred to other groups during the Third Reich.

Defining sexual violence

Sexual violence is defined as: any sexual act, attempt to obtain a sexual act, against a person’s sexuality using coercion, by any person regardless of their relationship to the victim, in any setting. Acts of rape, sexual humiliation, or any sexual acts conducted under duress are considered sexual violence.

Rassenschande

Rassenschande can be interpreted as racial disgrace, pollution, defilement, or treason. In the context of Jews, certain measures were implemented to prevent Jews from ‘contaminating’ the German race.

Deviations from Rassenschande endangered Jewish sympathizers to labour camp sentences. However, this did not protect Jewish women from sexual abuse. Illustrated by Holocaust scholar Beverly Chalmers,

“Holocaust scholars have been hesitant to examine sexual violence, believing for decades that the Rassenschande laws protected Jewish women from this aspect of immorality and abuse... It has also often been proposed that Jewish women, particularly in camps, were subhumans, shorn, dirty, emaciated, and unthinkable as sexual objects. This description, however, does not apply to the hundreds of thousands of women taken from their home environments, or living in the villages and towns that were overtaken by the Einsatzgruppen and the German armies as they moved across Eastern Europe. These Jews were no different in appearance than their non-Jewish neighbours and were viewed as sexual objects.”

File:Deutsches Historisches Museum Der Stürmerplakat.jpg

From the Berlin Historical Museum 1935. This poster is titled "Rassenschande" and demonstrates a woman of 'Aryan features' that Nazi racial pseudoscientists contrast to the face of a Jewish man as a representation of 'inferior' racial characteristics.

See below on how Rassenschande instituted a covert policy for sexual violence.

Sexual violence against Jews as an ideological strategy

Sexual violence against Jewish women perpetuated the notion that Jews were dirty and subhuman. The motivation for sexual violence stemmed from consequences of humiliation, dehumanization, disrespect and fear of the Jewish enemy. Although Rassenschande legally prohibited sexual relations among Jews, policy implications of a racial and patriarchal hierarchy determined the covert abuse of Jewish women. Thus sexual violence served in part as a weapon in an ideological war.

Rape

Numbers vary on the incidence of rape of Jewish women. For scope, approximately 1000 of the 52,000 interviews conducted by the Shoah Foundation mention rape.

Helene Sinnereich describes labour camp Skarzysko-Kamienna as a place where German officers regularly raped Jewish women. She recounts a survivor stating it as a place where the ‘rites of manhood’ were expressed in gang rapes of Jewish girls.

Nazi officers were not the only perpetrators of rape and sexual violence. Nazi collaborators and fellow victims also raped Jewish women. The Jewish leader of the Judenrat in the Lodz Ghetto, Chaim Rumkowski is reported to have raped many young Jewish girls from his position of power inside the ghetto. Nazi policy and ideology created a malignant environment in which Jewish women were vulnerable to patriarchal abuse and cruelty.

Sexualized humiliation

Jewish women were forced to commit sexually humiliating acts, especially in labour and concentration camps. By sexually humiliating women, these acts served to break the psyche of victims, and reduce women to the ascribed roles of Nazi ideology. Examples of humiliating sexualized acts range from forced nudity, naked inspections, forced hair shaving, and more. Beverly Chalmers describes,

“forcing women to wash floors with their underwear and then to don them… being made to clean toilets and eat what was in them, dipping their heads in lavatories and being made to walk around wearing the remaining excrement without being allowed to clean it off, thereby justifying the epithets hurled at them as Dirty Jews.”

Sex for survival

In concentration and labour camps, women were reduced to begging food in exchange for sex. The circumstances demanded desperate exchanges for survival, which resulted in the sexual exploitation of women prisoners. A survivor testimony states,

“At first I was deeply shocked at these practices. My pride, my integrity as a woman revolted against the very idea… But later, when I saw that the pieces of bread saved lives, when I met a young girl whom a pair of shoes, earned in a week of prostitution, saved her from being thrown into the crematory, I began to understand - and to forgive.”

Decisions to exchange sex for food, clothes, or any items in order to survive are decisions made under duress. Exchanging sex for survival is a form of sexual exploitation.

'Scientific' experiments on Jewish women

Infamous Auschwitz physician, Josef Mengele, who conducted pseudoscientific experiments on prisoners. Also known as, "The Angel of Death."

Pseudoscientific experiments were conducted in grotesque manners to many victims of the Third Reich. Nazi eugenics policy (Lebensborn) was pursued through forced abortion and the sterilization of Jewish women.

Intersectionality

The sexual violence orchestrated at Jewish women was executed within the institutions of the Third Reich. Rassenschande did not necessarily shield Jewish women from sexual violence. The institutions (SS and army) and anti-Semitic policies of the Third Reich initiated a system that enabled the harrowing sexual violence against Jewish women to occur.

Intersections of the Jewish woman's identity during the Third Reich led to interlocking forms of oppression. As a result of official Nazi policy, conditions that exposed Jewish women to abuse put them at risk of sexual violence by perpetrators, bystanders, and fellow victims.