I know this is a controversial subject and I also know that many people will not even bother reading further than the title and the first line. They will have made up their minds without reading the full post. They will not realize that this post is just to highlight another crime committed by the Nazis, but one that is often forgotten.
Firstly let me explain how I got to the idea of writing this piece. It actually came about in a roundabout way. I was reading up on Willem van Otterloo a Dutch composer. I noticed he was the father of another Dutch composer, Rogier van Otterloo who composed several Eurovision song contest songs but also wrote quite a few film scores. Keetje Tippel is the story of a Dutch prostitute in the 19th century. The story is based on the memoirs of Neel Doff an author of Dutch origin living and worked in Belgium and mainly wrote in French.
She was one of the most important contributors to proletarian literature. On 14 July , Neel Doff, embittered by the horrors of the war and suffering from kidney failure, died in her house, 16 rue de Naples in Ixelles, Belgium. In order to secure her estate she only left the author rights of her work to her dear friend Mrs Helen Temersen, who being Jewish saw her welfare and worldly belongings in peril.
This made me look into the subject of prostitution in the concentration camps, I had done a post on it before but I just wanted to explore this a bit more. Maybe because it was too much of a taboo subject. Heinrich Himmler had ordered the creation of camp brothels in His logic was cold and calculated, male prisoners would work harder if offered the incentive of sex, and if only a few had this privilege it would crush solidarity. From to , female prisoners in a total of ten concentration camps had to perform forced sex labour.
There was also a camp brothel in Neuengamme. Sommer estimates around women inmates in total were forced to work in the brothels, initially offering the prospect of escaping the brutality of the concentration camps. Portrait of a woman with a cigarette in hand; Camp Neuengamme.
