Virtually unexplored until recently, sexualized violence in the Holocaust took many forms, faces, and insidious paths. Among the more than 6 million Jews killed were an unknown number of women, probably thousands, who were raped—in camps, in hiding, in ghettos. The perpetrators were Nazis, fellow Jews, and those who hid Jews. There are few records of this particular form of suffering for many reasons, including no records being kept of rape, that few women survived, and that Nazis were specifically forbidden from sexually touching Jewish women because of race defilement laws called
Rassenchande—hence, some scholars have been loath to believe sexualized violence was extensive.
But individuals didn’t always follow the higher ranks, secretly raping Jewish women against policy—in camps, in private slavery in their homes, and in brothels set up for fellow prisoners. And we know this form of violence was rampant from testimonies of survivors and their relatives, as told in the 2010 book
Sexual Violence Against Jewish Women During the Holocaust, edited by Sonja M. Hedgepeth and Rochelle G. Saidel (referred to below as
Sexual Violence).
