Jewish women in the Holocaust

Jewish women in the Holocaust

Of the six million Jews killed during the Holocaust, two million were women. Between 1941 and 1945, Jewish women were imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps or hiding to avoid capture by the Nazis under Adolf Hitler's regime in Germany. They were also sexually harassed, raped, verbally abused, beaten, and used for Nazi human experimentation. Jewish women had a sizable and distinct role in the resistance and partisan groups.

Sexual abuse

Jewish women during the Holocaust were especially vulnerable to sexual abuse by their Nazi captors.  80  Women were immediately violated upon entering as "the tattooing, the removal of their hair, the invasion of their body cavities" was part of a systematic process of degradation, humiliation, and commodification." Women's reproductive abilities were negatively impacted as a result of the genocidal conditions. Several women Holocaust survivors noted that they developed amenorrhea, which reduced their chances of having children.  82  Rape was one of the major risks faced by women in the Holocaust.

They were sometimes raped, then murdered: 83  One SS officer was reported to have "had the custom of standing at the doorway… and feeling the private parts of the young women entering the gas bunker. There were also instances of SS men of all ranks pushing their fingers into the vaginas of pretty young women."

It was reported that "50%–80% of the SS troops and police units that operated in Eastern Europe were guilty of the sexual assault on Jewish women,"[11] not only for sexual pleasure but also to exert dominance and dehumanize them. This was in spite of the Nazi law that forbids sexual relations between ethnic Germans and Jews which was punishable by jail or death. There were instances of SS unit parties where defenseless Jewish women were repeatedly sexually assaulted until they fell to the floor bleeding. Some historians conclude that because SS officers and soldiers were male, Jewish boys and men faced less risk of sexual assault and abuse than women.

Childbirth also endangered women's survival in the concentration camps, affecting them physically and emotionally. Once a baby was born, women were vulnerable to being killed along with their newborns. One memoir describes some of the sadistic acts: "SS men and women amuse themselves by beating pregnant women with clubs and whips, [having them] torn by dogs, dragged around by their hair and kicked in the stomach with heavy German boots.

Then when [the pregnant Jewish women] collapsed, they were thrown into the crematory – alive."   376  Rape, unwanted pregnancies, forced abortions, medical experimentation and/or examination, and sterilization were also common and contributed to the sexual violations and abuse many Jewish women faced during the Holocaust.