“They had also been locked up for years and were happy to have human contact,” she said. said the men who visited her were by and large decent. “But you know, we were so numb that we just thought, ‘Get stuffed, you bastards’.”Īlthough the months in the brothel left her permanently scarred, Frau B. “There was a spy hole and sometimes the guards would peek in and sneer,” she said. Others only learned of their fate when the first patrons were ushered in.Īnother woman whose testimony is featured in the exhibition, identified only as Frau B., said each woman worked in a small room where she received up to 10 men in two hours. Some women volunteered for service in the brothels, which were heated and had slightly better hygienic conditions, after being promised early release from the life-threatening conditions of the camps. “The irony was that while the Nazis tried to regulate prostitution in German cities, they institutionalised it at the camps,” Sommer said. Pregnancies were compulsorily ended by abortion. Prostitutes were regularly tested for sexually-transmitted diseases to prevent outbreaks at the camps. No Jews worked at the brothels or were allowed to patronise them, and separate facilities were created for camp guards.
“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. Those prisoners who had a privileged place in the camp hierarchy – exhibition curator Michael Sommer estimates about one percent of the forced labourers – could buy up to a quarter of an hour with one of the women for two Reichsmarks from the pittance they earned in the Nazi-run factories.Ī fraction of that amount was credited to women’s camp accounts which they could use for food when it was available. The vast majority had been imprisoned for ‘anti-social’ behaviour – a crime arbitrarily defined under Hitler to include prostitutes but also women with suspect political ties or relationships with Jews. Most of the sex workers were taken from the women's camps at Ravensbrück and Auschwitz to ‘brothels’ at 10 camps in Germany and the Nazi-occupied eastern territories. Their numbers were far smaller than the tens of thousands of ‘comfort women’ kidnapped across Asia to serve Japanese troops.īut Ravensbrück centre director Insa Eschebach said the at least 200, predominantly German women who were enslaved also endured paralysing trauma, shame and scorn in an until-now largely taboo chapter of European history. SEE ALSO: Five things to know about prostitution in Germanyīut rather than servicing soldiers, these women were made to have sex with the forced labourers – an idea from SS chief Heinrich Himmler to increase productivity try to prevent homosexuality from ‘breaking out’ among their ranks.
Her story forms the centrepiece of a new exhibition at Ravensbrück about the fate of women pressed into prostitution between 19, like Asia's ‘comfort women’ during World War II. So begins the wrenching account of Frau W., a prisoner of the Nazi concentration camp Ravensbrück north of Berlin who was forced to work as a sex slave for her fellow detainees. If we behaved and fulfilled our duties nothing would happen to us.” We would eat well and have enough to drink. “They told us we were in the camp brothel, that we were the lucky ones.