Gender-Based and Sexual Violence in the Holocaust: On the Importance of Writing this History Today

In the fall of 2021, when we first conceived of this special issue on gender-based and sexual violence in the Holocaust, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine was still several months away. It would be another two years before Hamas’ attack on Israel and the beginning of the war in Gaza on October 7, 2023. At that time, we did not know that soon gender-based and sexual violence would once again become a highly visible and politically contested topic. Nor did we know that statements about World War II and the Holocaust, particularly sexual violence committed during those years, would be invoked in these recent conflicts to make claims about the present, often drawing on simplistic assumptions and without regard to historical facts.

The instrumentalization of gendered and sexual violence to convey interest-specific narratives of war and genocide is not a new phenomenon. As Elizabeth Heinemann has observed, ‘Representations of sexual violence in war do not simply occur after the fact: rather, they are often part of the conflict itself.’¹ Depictions of sexual violence are used to construct and reinforce the warring factions as political dichotomies of ‘us versus them,’ ‘good versus evil,’ or ‘civilized versus barbaric.’ Which constellations of perpetrators and victims are made visible and which disappear from view; whose narratives are amplified and whose voices are silenced largely depends on the political and social perceptions of the conflict and its contributing factors.²

The actual victims largely vanish in these dominant framings, as do the real perpetrators. The situational dynamics of the actual physical acts are obscured, as are the questions about the ways in which gender norms, group perceptions, power relations, and physical and psychological reactions including violent and sexual affects are intertwined. Experiences that deviate from the main narrative, such as in-group sexual violence, which usually increases in times of conflict, or various forms of sexual barter and transactional sex, become difficult to articulate. Even when survivors are asked about their experiences by journalists and researchers, or are questioned during military investigations and tribunals, they often feel that they must follow socially sanctioned scripts, whereby their experiences are reduced to politically legible patterns.³ The reality of sexual violence and its profound individual, societal, and political consequences are ignored, misrepresented, and often intentionally obfuscated.⁴ Moreover, certain events and the meanings of specific incidents might be publicly debated at a given time, only to later disappear from public consciousness (and sometimes scholarship). Some individuals or groups may gain authority to speak and to define the terms of the discussions, while others are actively or tacitly silenced.

These patterns of visibility and erasure are also common in discussions about the Holocaust. For example, it is often assumed that sexual violence in the Holocaust has always been rendered taboo. However, a closer look at historical evidence reveals that the matter is more complicated. When World War II and the Holocaust were still ongoing, cases of rape and sexual torture by German soldiers and their collaborators were collected and published to draw attention to the horrendous crimes against Jews and to appeal for military support. An example is The Black Book of Polish Jewry, which was published in the United States in December 1943 by a group of exiled Polish Jews. The publication contained numerous eyewitness accounts describing Nazi crimes, including sexual torture, rape, and sexual enslavement. The editors sought to document the enormity of the atrocities, thereby drawing international attention to the relentless persecution of Polish Jews, denouncing the perpetrators’ ruthlessness, and advocating for Allied military intervention.⁵

They relied on familiar patterns since accounts of sexual violence and depictions of brutalized female bodies had long been particularly effective in gaining social, political, and military support. Such narratives powerfully symbolize the fear of intruders conveying the threat of community disintegration and the destruction of social order. To create a sense of urgency and to dispel doubts about the necessity of intervention, the cases of sexual violence described in The Black Book of Polish Jewry focused on scenarios where the victims were very young or where sexual violence was accompanied by excessive cruelty. While this tactic was persuasive and perhaps understandable when the genocide was unfolding, it came at a cost: ultimately, these representations made the manifold realities of sexual violence even less visible, and they obscured the multiple forms of harm suffered by the victims. Moreover, they shaped the spaces in which survivors could tell their stories, imposing regimes of unspeakability and silence.

The opportunities for the victims to articulate experiences of sexual harm were further curtailed by heteronormative patriarchal narratives of female sexual shame, which held women and girls responsible for protecting their chastity. One example was Hillel Bavli’s poem ‘The Martyrdom of the Ninety-Three Maidens,’ based on a fictional story of Beit Yaakov students who chose to commit suicide rather than be raped by the Nazis. The poem was widely circulated during the war and in the immediate postwar period.⁶ While these kinds of narratives may not have had direct impact on the victims of sexual violence, they expressed prevailing social attitudes and gendered expectations. As such, they influenced the social climate in which Holocaust survivors began to speak about, understand, and interpret their experiences.

Immediately after the war, many survivors felt the need to deal with the trauma and to process their experiences. Some of them made disclosures about sexual violence, although these mentions were often brief and matter of fact. Sometimes, witnesses also communicated rape with euphemistic phrases, such as ‘women were robbed.’⁷ Yet these initial opportunities to discuss experiences of sexual violence were foreclosed in the mid-1950s, partly due to the stigmatization and shaming of survivors. As Na’ama Shik has pointed out, contemporaries, including other survivors, accused women of immorality and ‘of using sexuality and prostitution in order to survive.’⁸ In postwar Europe and later in Israel and the United States, the patriarchal order of things was buttressed by the desire for normalization and remasculinization of the state, whereby respectable female sexual behavior became a signifier of a functional ‘civilized’ society.

The obverse consequence of such moral and political demarcation lines was the pervasive sexualization of representations of Nazi violence against women in popular postwar cultural productions, such as Men’s Adventure Magazines or Stalag booklets. The lurid depictions of Nazis’ sexual exploitation of helpless female victims vilified the perpetrators as the epitome of barbarism: inhuman, immoral, and degenerate. As Pascale Bos has shown, this crude simplification provided the audiences with the reassurance of their own decency and morality while deflecting the guilt of voyeuristic consumerism.⁹

As evidenced in postwar trials, German perpetrators also used narratives of sexual violence, or rather of its alleged absence and strict punishment of isolated cases, to convince the world that they were respectable men, who had acted according to the military ethos and had not violated the basic precepts of modern civilization. When the former Supreme Commander of the German Army, Erich von Manstein, testified at the Nuremberg Trials, he chose to tell the story of two soldiers from his corps who had been sentenced to death for raping a Russian woman.¹⁰ Whereas during the war German men may have perceived engaging in sexual violence as an expression of masculine strength and even masculine honor, postwar German narratives portrayed soldiers who had committed rape as individual offenders who had dishonored the military. Accounts of sexual violence thus became a potent vehicle for negotiating male honor or ignominy, as well as military and national respectability or barbarism.¹¹

The difficulty of breaking through these long-standing social perceptions of sexual violence is evident in how long it took for female survivors to be able to speak out about their experiences. When some survivors cautiously began to talk about sexual violence in the 1980s, they became part of a larger societal re-evaluation of this form of violence. Beginning in the 1960s, the notion of rape as ‘an instrument of terror’ and ‘a tool of war’ had begun to enter the vocabulary of the civil rights, women’s liberation, and peace movements. These developments also informed the proceedings of the seminal conference ‘Women Surviving the Holocaust,’ organized in 1983 by Joan Ringelheim and Esther Katz. At that conference, several survivors mentioned incidents of sexual violence, though only in passing and without providing much detail. It was not until the mid-1990s, following the wars and genocides in the former Yugoslavia and in Rwanda and its neighboring states, however, that feminist political interventions and research on sexual violence in conflict zones began to expand. The issue also gained wider recognition, albeit largely within a narrow understanding of rape as ‘a weapon of war and genocide.’¹² Since then, the number of publications on the subject has grown exponentially, as have the debates and controversies surrounding the different qualitative and quantitative findings and explanatory frameworks of this research.¹³

Despite an increased knowledge of the subject, understanding accounts of sexual violence during the Holocaust continues to pose specific challenges. On one hand, researchers struggle to identify and interpret the gaps in historical records and to decipher the hints that are veiled in social taboos. On the other hand, they try to unpack the complexity of seemingly straightforward narratives or, conversely, parse out the hidden layers of narrative embellishments. The results of such multilayered research illuminate the dangers of reducing sexual violence during the Holocaust to simplified interpretive frameworks. As the articles in this special issue show, sexual violence was perpetrated by an array of actors: German soldiers, SS men, German civilians, and their collaborators, but also resistance fighters, rescuers, members of persecuted groups, and liberating soldiers. It also took different forms including rape, sexual slavery, sexual torture, sexual exploitation, and sexualized humiliation. Some of these acts were directed against the enemy, but others were committed against members of one’s own group, against the nationals of an allied country, or individuals who were under military or civilian protection.

While most of the victims were women and girls of different nationalities and religious affiliations, various forms of sexual violence were also perpetrated against boys and men, and as recent research has shown, against gender nonconforming persons.¹⁴ The increasing body of research on different gendered constellations of sexual violence during the Holocaust demonstrates that this form of violence acquires different meanings depending on whether it is perpetrated against women, men, or non-binary individuals. Whether certain acts were understood as sexual was also contingent on certain ideas about gendered bodies.¹⁵ In the concentration and extermination camps, for example, all prisoners were forced to undress, but the significance of forced nudity was different. For instance, forcing a woman to take off her shirt was usually perceived as sexual, while forcing a man to do the same was not.

During the Holocaust, sexual violence was ubiquitous. The contributors to this special issue discuss this within a broad spectrum of agency and vulnerability, drawing attention to forms of sexual harm that may not be legible within the framework of received narratives and socially sanctioned conceptions of gender. They ask about various manifestations of sexuality and gendered relations of power in the interactions between victims, perpetrators, and bystanders, that is, among historical actors situated within multiple constellations of precarity and coercion, of power and resistance to power. They probe how the knowledge about sexual violence was received in the decades after the war in distinct cultural contexts, exploring the factors that shaped the diverse and sometimes contradictory interpretations. They show that although studying this subject is imperative, doing so requires that we address complicated methodological, ethical, and political questions, all while scrutinizing our own ideological investments and ways of knowing.

We open this special issue with a conversation in which six scholars – Kenny Fries, Atina Grossmann, Anna Hájková, Björn Krondorfer, Joanna Ostrowska, and Zoë Waxman – take the pulse of the current state of debates about gender, sexuality, and sexual violence during the Holocaust. They reflect on the material conditions and different geographical and ideological coordinates within which they have conducted their work, and they recount the ideas and scholarly currents that have helped them develop their specific forms of understanding. They consider the challenges and obstacles to knowledge production they have faced at various stages of their work, showing how deep-seated assumptions about gender and sexuality influence research questions, research methods, and the ways in which their findings are interpreted, presented, and received.

In the following article, Carli Snyder analyzes Joan Ringelheim’s private papers and shows that understandings of sexual violence are shaped by historical contexts and political debates of the time. In the early 1980s, Ringelheim began to create spaces to discuss sexual violence and non-heteronormative sexuality during the Holocaust. At the time, she was subjected to harsh criticism, including from some female survivors. However, despite political and institutional objections, Ringelheim and other feminist activists and scholars maintained that these issues were part of the reality of women’s lives during the Holocaust. They held that these issues ought to be addressed regardless of moral and political considerations. Thus, Snyder concludes, they gradually began to expand the boundaries of what could be thought, said, and discussed, paving the way for our current knowledge and scholarship on the subject.

Pascale Bos also addresses the ways in which our understanding of historical events is shaped by time-dependent discussions and concerns. She examines the descriptions of sexual exchanges in the accounts by two female Holocaust survivors, Olga Lengyel’s Five Chimneys and Molly Applebaum's Buried Words, in the context of North American scholarly debates. Bos argues that scholars impose their own historically determined moral and political frameworks when they analyze the sexual encounters described by Lengyel and Applebaum. At present, most scholars construe sexual encounters involving unequal power relations to be inherently and unambiguously sexual violence. Also, many tend to overlook scenarios of non-heteronormative sex. As a result, survivors’ own perceptions of their experiences are sometimes disregarded. Moreover, scholars’ implicit moral and political judgments may come at the expense of a more careful and nuanced understanding of the situational conditions and the recognition of the victims’ agency.

William Jones also intervenes in ongoing scholarly debates about the difficult issues of violence, agency, and consent. Analyzing more than forty survivor narratives, they describe the experiences of so-called ‘pipels,’ boys and young men in concentration camps who were coerced into sexual relationships by older, more privileged inmates. For decades, ‘pipels’ were perceived as actively engaging in same-sex encounters and were often portrayed as vicious sexual servants of a Kapo or block elder. Unsurprisingly, these veiled homophobic depictions made it difficult for surviving men to talk about their experiences. In contrast, Jones proposes the concept of ‘exploitative sexual relationships,’ which they define as violent, non-consensual, and characterized by repeated and/or continuous exploitation. They emphasize that these relationships should be understood as ‘sexual slavery’ rather than ‘sexual barter.’

Christin Zühlke shows that the reactions of fellow prisoners to the various forms of sexualized and sexual violence in the concentration camps were also gender specific. She analyzes the text ‘De 3000 Nackerte,’ (‘The 3000 Naked Ones’) written in secret by Sonderkommando prisoner Leyb Langfus, in which he describes the empathy but also the helplessness and the sense of emasculation of the men in the face of the naked, vulnerable women who knew they were just about to die. He also documents how some of the women reacted with empathy to the situation of the Sonderkommando men. Focusing on these interactions between the male and female prisoners, Zühlke challenges the common notion that the Sonderkommando prisoners were numb and devoid of emotions, arguing that even in that extreme situation their reactions were complex as well as shaped by gendered perceptions.

The challenge of understanding the various constellations of sexual violence becomes apparent not only with respect to camp experiences but also in the larger context of war, genocide and liberation. In the next article of the issue, Justyna Matkowska draws attention to violence against Romani women and girls, which, in her view, was exacerbated by the long-standing patterns of exoticization and sexualization of Romani women in Europe. Drawing on oral history interviews, Matkowska shows that Romani women and girls in Poland were raped not only by German Wehrmacht soldiers, SS-men, and Ukrainian collaborators, but also by the Soviet soldiers in the course of the liberation. According to survivors, sexual violence perpetrated by Soviet soldiers was particularly widespread and brutal. As Matkowska concludes, this relatively strong emphasis may also have been influenced by the contexts in which the interviews were conducted: the survivors were questioned after the end of the Cold War, when the Soviet occupation was still fresh in the minds of many of those affected, while German atrocities were beginning to recede into the past.

The fact that sexual violence was perpetrated not only by soldiers of the aggressor armies, but also by the liberating forces was largely silenced after the end of the war. Allied accounts of the liberation of survivors of Nazi camps and death marches at the end of World War II emphasized the long-awaited release of prisoners from captivity and the threat of extermination. As Daina Eglitis shows, however, the voices of women whose victimization did not end with the arrival of their liberators were missing from these accounts. To fill this ‘memory void,’ Eglitis analyzes the testimonies and memoirs of Jewish survivors who address sexual violence perpetrated by Soviet liberators: what they experienced and witnessed, how they perceived the perpetrators’ motivations, and how they described acts of response and resistance. Adding women’s voices to the conversation on liberation violence shows, according to Eglitis, that survival itself was perceived by Soviet troops as evidence of complicity with the Nazis, which fostered a thirst for revenge.

While relatively little work has been done on constellations in which the perpetrators were Allies, rescuers, or members of one’s own group, research on sexual violence by Wehrmacht and SS perpetrators has become more detailed in recent years. New questions are being asked about why sexual violence seemed to be readily available for ordinary German men and how situational dynamics unfolded. In the next article, Ed Westerman argues that the basis for this violence was built by allegedly harmless forms of gender and sexual humiliation. The perpetrators’ voyeurism and their vulgar comments and sexualized jokes were central to the National Socialist exclusion of Jews from society from the very beginning, creating a context in which additional acts of sexual violence and sexual assault would become normalized. Ultimately, sexualized degradation and sexual violence became an integral component of the Nazi process of annihilation.

The perpetrators often used the tool of photography to capture their victims’ sexual humiliation and exploitation. In the final article of this special issue, Elissa Mailänder calls these snapshots, some of which were seemingly benign depictions of flirtation and amusement, trophy photographs. Drawing on images taken in different European World War II contexts, she examines the ways in which German soldiers visually and physically conquered and photographically appropriated local women and girls. In Mailänder’s view, these images, imbued with the power of the male gaze, do not simply represent or document sexually explicit and violent scenes. They also reveal the troubling conjunction of aesthetics, desire, and sexual pleasure, allowing a glimpse into cultural and affective configurations that shaped the dynamics of conquest.

Taken together, the articles included in this double special issue encompass a broad, though by no means exhaustive, range of phenomena that are now recognized as various forms of gender-based and sexual violence. The authors insist on the intricacy, ambiguity, and plurality of experiences that fall under that rubric, all of which require rigorous scrutiny, multivalent approaches, and innovative interpretive frameworks. We hope that engaging publicly with these difficult histories and acknowledging their complexity will increase awareness of the complicated dynamics of gender-based and sexual violence in conflict zones, while averting the dangers of simplification and instrumentalization that render the actual experiences of historical actors unrecognizable.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Elizabeth D. Heineman, “Introduction,” in Elizabeth D. Heineman, (ed.), Sexual Violence in Conflict Zones: From the Ancient World to the Era of Human Rights (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press, 2011), pp. 1–21.

2 E.g. V. Geetha, Undoing Impunity: Speech After Sexual Violence (New Delhi: Zubaan, series on sexual violence and impunity in South Asia, 2016).

3 E.g. Hyunah Yang, “Finding the ‘Map of Memory’: Testimony of the Japanese Military Sexual Slavery Survivors,” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique, vol. 16, no. 1 (2008): pp. 79–107.

4 On misrepresentations of this violence and the history and feminist critiques of the concept of sexual violence as a weapon of war see e.g. Doris E. Buss, “Rethinking ‘Rape as a Weapon of War’,” Feminist Legal Studies, vol. 17, no. 2 (2009): pp. 145–163; Maria Eriksson Baaz and Maria Stern, Sexual Violence as a Weapon of War? Perceptions, Prescriptions, Problems in the Congo and Beyond (London: Zed Books, 2013); Regina Mühlhäuser, “Reframing Sexual Violence as a Weapon and Strategy of War: The Case of the German Wehrmacht during the War and Genocide in the Soviet Union, 1941–1944,” Journal of the History of Sexuality, vol. 26, no. 3 (2017): pp. 366–401.

5 Jacob Apenszlak, Jacob Kenner, Isaac Lewin, Moses Polakiewicz, (eds.), The Black Book of Polish Jewry: An Account of the Martyrdom of Polish Jewry under the Nazi Occupation (New York: The American Federation for Polish Jews, 1943), pp. 25–29.

6 Sara R. Horowitz, “The Gender of Good and Evil: Women and Holocaust Memory,” in Jonathan Petropolous and John K. Roth, (eds.), Grey Zones: Ambiguity and Compromise in the Holocaust and Its Aftermath (New York: Berghahn Books, 2005), pp. 165–178.

7 Natalia Aleksiun, “Holocaust Testimonies in Eastern Europe in the Immediate Postwar Period,” in Kata Bohus, Atina Grossmann, Werner Hanak, and Mirjam Wenzel, (eds.), Our Courage: Jews in Europe 1945–48 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020), pp. 28–43.

8 Na’ama Shik, “Description and Silence. Sexual Abuse in Early and Later Testimonies of Survivors and the Emergence of the Israeli Narrative,” Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History, vol. 27, no. 4 (2021): pp. 481–494.

9 Pascale R. Bos, “‘Pulping’ the Holocaust: The Shape of Early American Holocaust Memory and its Global Reach,” in Alice Balestrino, (ed.), Past (Im)Perfect Continuous: Trans-Cultural Articulations of Postmemory of WWII (Rome: Sapienza Università Editrice, 2021), pp. 167–184.

10 Cited from the transcript of the Nuremberg Trials Against the Main War Criminals Dated November 14, 1945 to October 1, 1946, Nuremberg 1947, vol. 20, p. 665. Since the court never investigated the story, we do not know whether it was real or fabricated. Birgit Beck has shown, however, that the death penalty for Wehrmacht soldiers who had committed rape was an exception. See Birgit Beck, “Sexual Violence and its Prosecution by Courts Martial of the Wehrmacht,” in Roger Chickering, Stig Förster, and Bernd Greiner, (eds.), A World at Total War: Global Conflict and the Politics of Destruction, 1937–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 317–331.

11 Regina Mühlhäuser, “A Question of Honor: Some Remarks on the Sexual Habits of German Soldiers during World War II,” in Wolfgang Bialas and Lothar Fritze, (eds.), Nazi Ideology and Ethics (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014), pp. 149–174.

12 The production of knowledge in the field of sexual violence in armed conflict since the 1990s is discussed in a number of articles in Gaby Zipfel, Regina Mühlhäuser and Kirsten Campbell, (eds.), In Plain Sight: Sexual Violence in Armed Conflict (New Delhi: Zubaan, 2019).

13 The “Selected Bibliography ‘Sexual Violence in Armed Conflict’” currently lists about 2,800 titles in English and German, including 180 on sexual violence during the Holocaust and the German war in Europe; 250 on the “comfort women” of the Japanese army; and 160 on sexual violence by the Allied forces in Asia and Europe during and after World War II. See https://warandgender.net/bibliography/.

14 Regarding sexual violence against men, see e.g., Dagmar Herzog, “Sexual Violence against Men: Torture at Flossenbürg,” in Carol Rittner and John K. Roth, (eds.), Rape: Weapon of War and Genocide (St. Paul: Paragon House, 2012), pp. 29–44; Dorota Glowacka, “Sexual Violence Against Men and Boys during the Holocaust: A Genealogy of (Not-so-Silent) Silence,” German History, vol 39, no. 1 (2021): pp. 78–99; Tommy J. Curry, “Thinking through the Silence: Theorizing the Rape of Jewish Males during the Holocaust through Survivor Testimonies,” Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History, vol. 27, no. 4 (2021): pp. 447–472. On sexual violence against transgender and gender non-conforming individuals, see e.g., Laurie Marhoefer, “Lesbianism, Transvestitism, and the Nazi State: A Microhistory of a Gestapo Investigation, 1939–1943,” The American Historical Review, vol. 121, no. 4 (2016): pp. 1167–1195; Anna Hájková, “Between Love and Coercion: Queer Desire, Sexual Barter and the Holocaust,” German History, vol. 39, no. 1 (2021): pp. 112–133; and Zavier Nunn, “Trans Liminality and the Nazi State,” Past & Present, vol. 260, no. 1 (2023): pp. 123–157.

15 Kirsten Campbell, The Justice of Humans: Subject, Society and Sexual Violence in International Criminal Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), pp. 272–275.