As historian Raul Hilberg argued, “The road to annihilation was marked by events that specifically affected men as men and women as women.”[1] Both sexes were subjected to similar forms of persecution and violence — abuse, forced labor, starvation, deportation , humiliation, and death, but only women had to cope with pregnancy, abortions, and invasive gynaecological examinations.[2] Even though some Jewish men experienced various forms of sexual violence, the majority of rape victims and survivors are women.[3]
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Despite the growing interest in women's experiences in the Holocaust, the issue of sexual violence remains one of the under-researched topics. The war-time Ukraine could serve as a focus and lens through which questions of sexual victimization and sexual agency of Jewish women during the Shoah could be studied.
Sexual assault occurred in different locations, including Jewish homes, streets, and prisons, killing sites, and hiding places. In hundreds of ghettos and camps (e.g., concentration camps, forced labor camps) in occupied Ukraine during the Second World War, Jewish women were particularly vulnerable to various patterns of sexual humiliation and abuse.
Sexual violence during the Holocaust in Ukraine, like everywhere in Nazi-dominated Europe, was gendered first of all in terms of sexes of the perpetrators and the victims. The vast majority of victims/survivors were women, and perpetrators were mostly men — Germans and their allies, e.g., Hungarian, Romanian, Italian and local collaborators, and fellow Jewish inmates.
There is no convincing evidence that they were under orders to rape women, as it happened during genocides in Rwanda or former Yugoslavia. What drove those men to become rapists? Today, there are numerous ideas attempting to explain the motivations behind sexual crimes during wartime and genocide.
One of the most productive theories is the multifactorial model wherein multiple factors, when combined, provoked sexually violent behavior in men.[4] Political and ideological factors significantly contributed to the proliferation of sexual violence during the Holocaust. Sexual humiliation of the Jewish body was an inevitable consequence of the dehumanizing Nazi racial theories.
The notion that sex with a Jewish woman (even coercive) would constitute “racial defilement” (Rassenschande) was not an effective mechanism for preventing rape by Germans because some of them did not consider this rape to be a crime. For many perpetrators, the myth of Judeo-Bolshevism justified violence against the Jews, who were accused of supporting the Soviet rule. Thus, rape could be but one way to punish and humiliate the Jews.
In this framework, rapists placed the blame for the rape on women themselves, believing they “deserved” it for their political choice. Consequently, women were raped not just because they were women, but specifically because they were Jewish women. The war factor meant that quite a few sexual offenders were perpetrators or witnesses of numerous violent acts, including killing, which made them accustomed to violence in general and enabled the extension of the range of violence as far as to include rape.
Furthermore, being far away from home, many men did not feel the social control that could be a deterrent before the war. In addition, the war of Germany and its allies on the Eastern Front was crueller in its attitude to civilians. In other words, soldiers' sexual crimes were much more likely to be prosecuted in France than those committed in Ukraine.
The military culture with its cult of physical strength, hegemonic masculinity and dominance over women highly contributed to sex crimes, especially when it came to gang rape. As feminist scholars pointed out, in some military groups gang rapes served as a tool for building military brotherhood. The presence of disinhibitors (alcohol, drugs, pornography) was undoubtedly a catalyst of sexual crimes. The memories of Holocaust survivors include plenty of mentions of “drunk” Germans, Romanians, police officers who “sought after young women” at night.[5]
Misogyny is one of the factors inciting gender-based violence both in peacetime and at war. Misogyny was an immanent part of the Nazi ideology, well put in practice in the Third Reich. The circumstances at war, namely, men's fear and frustration provoked aggression towards vulnerable groups, including women. Personal motives are connected with the offenders’ education, mindset and experience.
Some men believed in their “right” to force women to satisfy their sexual needs. But sexual drive could not be considered a dominant motive for rape because sexual violence is about power, not about sex. Rape is not about sex in its violent manifestation. Rape is violence in its sexual manifestation.