Beyond Killing: Torture of Women during the Holocaust

Gitta Sereny, who interviewed the infamous commandant of Treblinka and Sobibor, Franz Stangl, asked him, “Why, if they were going to kill them [the Jews] anyway, what was the point of all the humiliation, why the cruelty?” If Hitler’s aspiration with the “Final Solution” was a state-sponsored plan to annihilate all European Jews, how did sexual violence and other forms of torture advance the ultimate goal? Stangl replied, “To condition those who actually had to carry out the policies. To make it possible for them to do what they did.” Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi elaborates with his own explanation in The Drowned and the Saved (1986): “Before dying the victim must be degraded, so that the murderer will be less burdened by guilt. This is an explanation not devoid of logic but it shouts to heaven: it is the sole usefulness of useless violence.”

Hitler understood the challenges of getting Germans from all walks of life, ordinary Germans, including policeman who are supposedly protectors, to kill innocent human beings. The propaganda machinery was a major and relentless operation from the very beginning of the Third Reich, whose mission it was to distin-

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guish the Jews as “the other,” and therefore (as psychohistorian Robert J. Lifton put it) “life unworthy of life.” Adolescents in the Hitler Youth Movement were taken on weekend retreats to learn how to shoot animals. Animals were equated with Jews. This process of dehumanization is the first stage in stripping a person of his or her identity and community. Social psychologist Herbert Kelman explains that individuals lose empathy and compassion for the people whose identity and community they undermine as subhuman.

No one psychological theory explains the capacity of human beings to torture women and children, which went beyond just killing them. Women in particular were tortured sexually. It has been suggested by Kirsty Chatwood, an independent researcher, that rape is a “by-product of the dehumanization process of genocide” (“(Re)-Interpreting Stories of Sexual Violence: The Multiple Testimonies of Lucille Eichengreen” in Esther Herzog, ed., Life, Death and Sacrifice: Women and Family in the Holocaust, 2008, 162). What is of interest is that during most genocides (except the Nazi Holocaust and in Cambodia), rape was used as a weapon. Rape was not as rampant or pervasive during the Holocaust as it was in Bangladesh, or in the former Yugoslavia (particularly in Croatia and Bosnia), or in Rwanda, among other genocides; but sexual humiliation by the guards in the concentration camps was ever present. This was despite the 1935 Nuremberg Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor, Rassenschande, whereby German or kindred blood could not have social or physical contact with Jews. This law did not prevent rape of Jewish women, men, and children in public or in private spaces.

With all the recent research that has been done on rape, it has become common knowledge that rape is not a manifestation of sexuality, but rather an aggressive act which is fueled by rage, violence, and dominance over the victim. Without a doubt, the social, political, and cultural contexts play a role in the manifestation of this form of torture. For example, during the Holocaust, when sexual torture was performed in a public place, it enhanced the humiliation and dehumanization of the victim.

Dagmar Herzog, a historian who writes about sexuality and gender in the 20^th century, summarizes torture of victims—specifically of rape and sexual violence in the Nazi concentration camps—in a volume edited by Carol Rittner and John Roth, Rape: Weapon of War and Genocide (2012). It was a way for the perpe-

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trators “to compete and entertain each other. Outdoing each other in a spiral of ever greater grotesquerie was the goal” (39). This was particularly prevalent among guards in the camps who were bored. Also, the sharing in “excess cruelty” or “gratuitous cruelty” solidifies bonds between the culprits.

Herzog goes on to describe how, when women were stripped of their clothes and with heads shaved as they were on the selection line for murder by Zyklon B gas or for life, they were abused with riding crops jabbed into breasts, deflowered with fingers, and subjected to verbal ridicule. Sexual violence was a way to rob the women of their dignity, self-worth, and their humanity. Hence, the perpetrators can have less emotional angst about killing. In addition, historian Doris Bergen suggests that “taboo-breaking sexual violence” such as carrying sexual dismemberment of both men and women, intimidates the victim population and the perpetrator exerts a power hierarchy over the victim.

Motivation to rape Jewish women was not monolithic. The least torturous was what I called “entitlement rape” – the perpetrator feels entitled to rape a woman because he has done or will do her a favor, or has proclaimed his sexual desire for her. In the labor or concentration camps, women were forced to do sexual favors for an extra piece of bread, a spoon, shoes, or information from the men’s side. Many of these interactions took place in the latrine poignantly described in Gisella Perl’s memoir, I Was a Doctor in Auschwitz (1948).

The second motivation, though neither are mutually exclusive, is “sadistic rape”—when the act is not consensual. Omnipotent feelings of the perpetrator are often accompanied by worthless feelings of being “a powerless cog in a vast machine controlled by unseen others” (Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide, 1986, 127). These “polarized feelings” are explained in terms of the Nazis doctors with “sadism” as “an aspect of omnipotence, an effort to eradicate one’s own vulnerability and susceptibility to pain and death” (The Nazi Doctors, 449). From this one can conclude that omnipotence increases exponentially with more harm to the victim.

The “sadistic rape” is often accompanied by a kind of sexual perversion described by psychoanalyst Louise J. Kaplan. She explains in Female Perversions: The Temptations of Emma Bovary (1991) that “every perversion is an effort to give some expression

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to, while yet controlling, the full length of potentially murderous impulses to chew up, tear apart, explode, hack to pieces, burn to ashes, rip through to create one hole out of mouth, belly, anus, and vagina” (127).

The third motivating factor I call “masculine ego-gratification rape.” This kind of rape is often identified with gang or mass rape. The act of rape adds to the enhanced self-esteem ordinary individuals felt in being a part of the Nazi machinery when their new positions came with increased professional advancement and having power and privileges. The situational factor of committing the atrocity with a group of others often amplifies the barbarity. Sigmund Freud explains in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921) that when an individual is part of a group, they will tend to give up their own power and feel in harmony with the group by joining group efforts rather than acting in opposition to the group. Freud explains, “The individual gives up his ego ideal and substitutes for it the group ideal embodied in the leader” (78). Additionally, the group stimulates behavior that an individual might not consider doing on his or her own.

Social psychologist Stanley Milgram (well-known for his studies on submission to authority) explains in Obedience to Authority (1974) that “the conscience, which regulates impulsive aggressive action, is per force diminished at the point of entering a hierarchical structure” (132). Milgram calls such altered attitudes an “agentic state,” whereby a person “sees himself as an agent for carrying out another person’s wishes.” This is the opposite of feeling like an autonomous person and an individual feels that they are not responsible for their own actions. Rather, one defines oneself as “an instrument in carrying out the wishes of others” (132-134).

From another social psychologist, Philip Zimbardo (known for his prisoner-dilemma experiments), we learn that when laboratory situations replicate prisoners and guards, one third of the guards went overboard in their treatment of the inmates; they insulted and humiliated them to the point that the experiment had to be stopped.

If this is what happens under controlled conditions with specific instructions, one can only imagine what inmates of concentration camps had to endure with guards who did not feel they were responsible for their actions, were getting ego gratification from torturing their prisoners, and were preparing themselves for the ulti-

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mate goal of mass extermination.

Unfortunately, the end of World War II did not mean that women were safe from sexual abuse. Liberating forces, particularly the Russians, were raping women. Although the sadistic torture was not prevalent, the sexual violence was unexpected from those who were supposed to be liberators, hence, protectors. Even more shocking were the incidents where girls and women received refuge with families where the men molested them. The tendency to devalue and blame the victim, particularly in violations of sexuality, has limited our understanding of the severity and extent of this problem.

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