The First Serious Study of German Concentraton Camp Brothels

In the eighty years since World War II ended, few parts of its history have been researched, and written about, as extensively as the Holocaust. The Nazi establishment of concentration camps—beginning with Dachau in March 1933—and then the extermination camps during the war, has been the subject of thousands of books, articles, novels, movies and plays. But the existence of brothels, established by the SS for camp inmates, and staffed by female prisoners, is little known, and has never been thoroughly researched and described. Until now.

Robert Sommer, a German historian, published his exhaustive study of these brothels in 2009, Das Kz-Bordell: Sexuelle Zwangsarbeit in Nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslagern. Now, thanks to Fordham University Press and Dominic Bonfiglio, the translator, an updated edition is available to readers in English. The book covers every aspect of the bordellos, from the women who worked in them to the men who visited them, and from their furnishings to the buildings’ postwar fates. Sommer begins by banishing one of the more notorious myths associated with these brothels—that they housed Jewish women forced to service Nazis. None of these myths—propagated by books and films—contains even a morsel of truth. The brothels were suggested and implemented by Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, in 1942, as a method of improving the productivity of slave labor, which was by then a crucial component of the German war economy.

There were fifteen brothels in camps, and, with the exception of those in Auschwitz-Monowitz, in Poland, all of them were in the Reich (Germany and Austria) itself. By 1942 few of these camps had many Jewish prisoners and, in any case, the SS took Nazi race laws very seriously. Neither Jewish men nor women were permitted to engage in sex with any camp inmate, Jew or not. The women who worked in these brothels were overwhelmingly Germans who had been sentenced to concentration camps for criminal or political behavior. The prisoners allowed to patronize them were also mostly German, or certainly other “Aryans,” men from the higher “classes” within the camps, such as barrack elders and kitchen managers. The only exceptions were two brothels for Ukrainian male camp guards; they were allowed to use brothels staffed by Polish women. Germans could only sleep with Germans, and Slavs with Slavs. Sommer exposes the basic irrationality, or absurdity, of the brothels. Decently nourished prisoners with warm clothing would have been more productive in the quarries, arms factories and other workplaces in or around the camps, but abuse and near-starvation were essential ingredients for the Nazis’ conception of how the inmates ought to be treated. Providing an opportunity for sexual intercourse to a tiny percentage of the male prisoners—as an incentive to work harder—made no sense. And there is no sign that in fact the brothels did affect productivity.

One of the great ironies which Sommer reveals is the fate of the women who served in these “special buildings,” as the SS preferred to call them. By years of cross-referencing records from each camp, reading memoirs and court transcripts, Sommer was able to determine the identity of 88% of the roughly 200 women forced into sexual servitude there. None of them died during the war. To make them attractive enough to be sex workers, the camp commanders provided them with enough food, and clothing, to live tolerably well. This coincides with a fundamental truth about the camps: survival was the goal of almost every prisoner. These women—and most of the men who spent time with them—were privileged, and lived. The mortality rate for other inmates was very high.

Sommer and Fordham have done an excellent job with this book. The text is clear, the endnotes and appendices provide exhaustive documentation of every fact, and the extensive bibliography lists the hundreds of books, manuscripts and archival collections that Sommer used. Finally, there are 16 pages of photos and architectural drawings, including rare photos taken within the camps.

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Our Reviewer: Jonathan Beard is a retired freelance journalist who has devoted most of his life to reading military history. When he worked, he wrote and did research for British, American and Danish science magazines, and translated for an American news magazine. The first book he owned was Fletcher Pratt’s The Monitor and the Merrimac. Jonathan reviews regularly for the Michigan War Studies Review. His previous reviews here include Down the Warpath to the Cedars: Indians' First Battles in the Revolution, The Virtuous Wehrmacht: Crafting the Myth of the German Soldier on the Eastern Front, 1941-1944, Prevail Until the Bitter End: Germans in the Waning Days of World War II, Enemies Among Us, Battle of the Bulge, Then and Now, Mussolini’s War: Fascist Italy From Triumph to Collapse, Engineering in the Confederate Heartland, The Bletchley Park Codebreakers, Armada, Allied Air Attacks and Civilian Harm in Italy, The Collaborators, The Enigma Traitors, When Men Fell from the Sky, Midway: The Pacific War’s Most Famous Battle, When Men Fell from The Sky, The Lost Scientists of World War II, U.S. Battleships 1939–45, The Last Emperor of Mexico, Rain of Ruin: Tokyo, Hiroshima, and the Surrender of Japan, Convair B-36 Peacemaker, and Eagle Days: Life and Death for the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain.

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Note: The Concentration Camp Brothel is also available in hardcover & e-editions.

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