BERLIN Reuters - In , the Nazis decided that forced laborers in concentration camps would work harder if they were promised sex — so they made female prisoners work in brothels for them. Beginning with the Austrian camp at Mauthausen in , the SS opened 10 brothels, the biggest of which was in Auschwitz, in modern Poland, where as many as 21 women prisoners once worked. The last opened in early , the year the war ended.
The chapter is separate from the annals of the Holocaust of European Jews. Jewish women were not recruited as prostitutes, and Jewish men were not admitted to the brothels. Sommer estimates around women inmates in total were forced to work in the brothels — initially offered the prospect of escaping the brutality of the concentration camps.
Tens of thousands of captured soldiers, political prisoners and people branded socially undesirable by the Nazis, including Roma and homosexuals, were held in camps alongside the millions of Jews who died in the Holocaust. Only a few people were actually in a physical condition to go to them. According to Sommer, the use of prisoners to provide sex to other prisoners was purely a Nazi phenomenon in the war.
The prostitutes, most in their early 20s, received more food and were treated less harshly than other women inmates. In return, they had to provide sex to selected prisoners every evening between 8 and 10 p. The brothels were strictly regulated, charging a fixed sum. And a Slavic prisoner only to a Slavic woman. Only privileged prisoners like Kapos camp supervisors had the means to afford frequent visits, and Sommer estimates less than 1 percent of the camp population ever went to the brothels.
Once the SS had issued a brothel permit, men were assigned a woman and medically examined. If their name was read out in an evening roll call they were marched to the building and had a medicinal cream applied to their genitals by a doctor. To research the book, Sommer visited all 10 camps — which included Dachau and Buchenwald — and interviewed 30 former prisoners, among them a number of men who used the brothels.
