Language:
English
Year of publication:
2012
Titel der Quelle:
Modern Judaism
Angaben zur Quelle:
32,3 (2012) 293-322
Keywords:
Jewish women in the Holocaust
;
Women Violence against
;
Sex crimes
;
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)
;
National socialism Philosophy
Abstract:
Notes that the rape of Jewish women during the Holocaust has not been properly appreciated in relevant scholarly analyses; proposes a primary analysis of evidence of this crime, which can be found in eyewitness accounts of the Holocaust. Rape took place in various circumstances - in ghettos, in labor and concentration camps, and even in death camps. The rapists included members of the SS, Wehrmacht soldiers, local collaborators, and fellow prisoners, including Jewish ones, in positions of authority in the camps. The sexual abuse of Jewish women by the Nazis was always a political declaration and aimed to stress the degenerate status of the victims and to humiliate both the individual victim and the Jewish people as a whole. Although rape was a concomitant phenomenon in all brutal wars of conquest and cases of subjugation, the rape during the Holocaust had its peculiarities. Given that the sexual intercourse between "Aryans" and Jews was regarded as "Rassenschande" by the Nazis, and that the reproduction of Jews, albeit through rape, was the most undesirable "crime", the perpetrators, in order to hide their transgression, almost always killed the women they raped, especially those who became pregnant. The circumstances of mass murder were especially conducive to rape: the perpetrators' awareness that the Jewish women would soon be corpses gave them a license to rape, sometimes in the face of gas chambers and massacre pits.
Note:
Appeared also in his collected articles "Holocaust Studies; Critical Reflections" (2019) 171-200.
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