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Wed 24 March
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    10:45
    14:15
    16:30

Thu 25 March
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    14:15
    16:30

Fri 26 March
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    10:45
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    16.30

Sat 27 March
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Wednesday 24 March 2004 16:30
J-4 ORA04 Sexual Violence under National Socialism and its Ideological Intersections
Room J
Network: Oral History Chair: Ela Hornung
Organizers: - Discussants: -
Helga Amesberger, Katrin Auer : Sexualised Violence and Its Ideological Intersections
Sexualised violence during persecution by the Nazi regime is hardly discussed in public and within the scientific community. The study is about women who were persecuted and imprisoned by the Nazi regime and who had to experience or witness sexualised violence. During persecution women were subjected to various forms of ... (Show more)
Sexualised violence during persecution by the Nazi regime is hardly discussed in public and within the scientific community. The study is about women who were persecuted and imprisoned by the Nazi regime and who had to experience or witness sexualised violence. During persecution women were subjected to various forms of sexual harassment, abuse, and violence – beginning from insults to forced prostitution.
We want to point out the issue of in how far the interactions between Nazi ideology and repression and its links to anti-Semitism, racism, sexism, hetero-sexism and eugenics led to qualitatively specific forms of sexualised violence. By additionally factoring gender into this context, the thesis follows that the kind and course of the act of sexualised violence depended crucially on the interaction of Nazi ideology on the one hand and the victim’s and perpetrator’s gender on the other hand.
But we will not only have a look at the ideological intersections, the intention of the Nazi regime and the victimisation of those women, we will also focus on their coping-strategies during and after persecution. For victims of (sexualised) Nazi violence suffering did not end with their liberation. Therefore our focus lays also on the short and long term impacts of these tortures and on the ways how women handle these experiences.
The basis of this research project are 42 life story interviews with Austrian female survivors of the Ravensbrück concentration camp. Those women have different (social and political) backgrounds and were persecuted for different “reasons”. Among them are Roma and Sinti, Jews, resistance fighters, a Jehova’s witness and women who were imprisoned because of a relationship with a forced labourer. (Show less)

Brigitte Halbmayr : Communication – Power - Gender: Differences in talking about sexualised violence within interviews of male and female survivors of Nazi-concentration camps.
For many decades the recollection of living in and surviving of concentration camps has been dominated by reports of male witnesses. Just during the last years also female witnesses have been encouraged to talk about their experiences (and have got a broader audience). At the same time more and more ... (Show more)
For many decades the recollection of living in and surviving of concentration camps has been dominated by reports of male witnesses. Just during the last years also female witnesses have been encouraged to talk about their experiences (and have got a broader audience). At the same time more and more researchers are interested in ‘female history’ and therefore in topics of which women were concerned of in a broader extent – sexualised violence is such an example.
The paper deals with the questions, whether, in which extent and how sexualised violence is mentioned in the life stories of male and female survivors of Nazi-concentration camps. Not just massive physical forms of violence like rape, forced sterilisation and forced prostitution will be discussed but also deliberate, sexually connotated trespasses of the borders of one’s personal integrity in different forms (verbal humiliation, lewd remarks and glances, forced nakedness etc.).
The paper will especially focus on the possible differences in mentioning but also tabooing sexualised violence. The material of analysis will be interviews of survivors of the concentration camps Mauthausen and Ravensbrück. In the centre of the paper lies the analysis of talking about self experienced sexualised violence, codes for disguising sexualised violence (experienced or witnessed) and a comparison of narrations about routines within a concentration camp (registration procedure, accommodation in barracks, food, relationships within inmates etc.) (Show less)

Éva Kovács, Júlia Vajda : Abused Past - Broken Future: Sterilized Women's Narratives on the Shoah
In the framework of the Mauthausen Survivors Documentation Project (Austria) we have conducted narrative biographical interviews with women, who were sterilized by the Nazis in concentration camps of Auschwitz and Ravensbrück. In analysing the interviews we found different ways in which the life-stories are told in terms of the sterilization ... (Show more)
In the framework of the Mauthausen Survivors Documentation Project (Austria) we have conducted narrative biographical interviews with women, who were sterilized by the Nazis in concentration camps of Auschwitz and Ravensbrück. In analysing the interviews we found different ways in which the life-stories are told in terms of the sterilization experience and its memory. In our presentation we show the consequences of sterilization for the whole life of our interviewees, for their narrative identity and also for the language itself, in which they thematise their body. (Show less)

Christa Schikorra : Prostitution as Forced Labor. In the Case of Prisoners at the Women's Concentration Camp Ravensbrueck
Forced prostitution in the concentration camp brothels touches in many respects on taboos and assumptions that are closely linked to structures of prejudice. Both – in reports of survivors as well as in research on concentration camps, work in a camp brothel is often not acknowledged as slave labor. The ... (Show more)
Forced prostitution in the concentration camp brothels touches in many respects on taboos and assumptions that are closely linked to structures of prejudice. Both – in reports of survivors as well as in research on concentration camps, work in a camp brothel is often not acknowledged as slave labor. The assumption that prisoners volunteered to work in these commandos plays a significant role in this context. These women are generally referred to as prostitutes. Their status as prisoners and as victims is often lost or disappears behind this label “prostitution”, which in turn functions as a characterization of the women rather than of their slave labor.
In the beginning of 1942 when the first brothels in concentration camps were established, female prisoners in Ravensbrueck were chosen und “prepared” for this work. Ravensbrueck as the central concentrations camp for women in the German Reich, took on an important role in the “provision” of prisoners for such commandos. In the very beginning the women were “recruited” for the brothels with the promise that they would be released after six months. According to the reports from survivors, a significant number of prisoners with black triangles registered themselves and it was assumed that they had previously worked as prostitutes before they were imprisoned. (Prostitutes in the camps were given the black triangle, as were others such as “asocial” declared people and Sinti and Roma as well.) There are also reports that prisoners from the punishment block were especially chosen for the brothel commando. A few comments from women who were forced into prostitution have been recorded. Most of the information passed on to us is not from those concerned but from the perspective of political prisoners. In these descriptions, the outrage they felt about the fact that a brothel being set up and about the work done there is articulated just as clearly as in their attempt to disassociate themselves from that kind of work. (Show less)

Christl Wickert : Taboo subject camp brothel: on the treatment of an awkward topic
Camp brothels, i.e., prisoner brothels in National Socialist concentration camps, have for decades been a blank in the historiography of the system of concentration camps. The SS functioned as procurer of the camp brothels. The National Socialist state as brothel-keeper supported prostitution under the exertion of pressure. In the context ... (Show more)
Camp brothels, i.e., prisoner brothels in National Socialist concentration camps, have for decades been a blank in the historiography of the system of concentration camps. The SS functioned as procurer of the camp brothels. The National Socialist state as brothel-keeper supported prostitution under the exertion of pressure. In the context of “racial general prevention”, sexuality (including prostitution) had become a highly ideologised area of life in National Socialism. However, after the liberation, writing about and speaking of the camp brothels became a taboo for the survivors as well as for historians in both German post-war societies.

The “Sonderbauten” (“special buildings”), as the camp brothels were called in the SS jargon, were pulled down one after the other so that the places where prostitution had taken place became unrecognisable – like a material realisation of the taboo. In the first reports written by survivors after 1945, the existence of camp brothels had openly been described as part of the system of concentration camps. Those reports usually documented all experiences and observations in order to reveal the whole scale [= Bandbreite, alt. extent = Ausmaß] of persecution, humiliation and extermination. However, especially in legal proceedings and with regard to applications for acknowledgement as victims of persecution, the women were considerably degraded. The desexualisation of [‘woman’ as] wife and mother that was connected with a general social ostracism of prostitution, and not least the reduction of women to housework and family that was dominant in the Adenauer era contributed to the tabooing of the experiences of the women. The women concerned were not given any chance to come to terms with their experiences; they were left alone with them. We thus have to speak of a continual persecution until the end of their lives.

It was due to a number of reasons that the concentration camp brothels became a subject of research only in the beginning of the 1990s: 1) the existence of a widespread and continual taboo that prevented prosecution of as well as historical research on the crimes, 2) the fact that the topic was approached by men – jurists and survivors – who hardly ever put themselves in the place of the women and, last but not least, 3) the shame of the women who had been forced to sell their bodies und to live with a continual tabooing after their liberation. It was only after women’s studies had developed new perspectives on the history of sexual repression of women and after a reorientation of research on National Socialism that it became possible to make forced prostitution in concentration camps a topic of historiographical research.
In oral history projects such as those carried out in the late 1980s and early 1990s by the Concentration Camp Memorial Neuengamme in Hamburg, former forced prostitutes were among the witnesses who were interviewed. However, their testimonies are now kept under lock and key.

The taboo that makes it so difficult to deal with the topic of camp brothels is an expression of the problems that both German post-war states had in dealing with prostitution and especially of the domination of male voices in the discourse on prostitution. The early testimonies of concentration camp survivors were neither pursued further legally nor scientifically. The witnesses themselves have also contributed to the taboo to the present day. They often only speak about the camp brothels after insisting questions, and not unusually with disparaging judgements. It was only female historians who approached the topic only if they listened carefully to the witnesses. (Show less)



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