Block 24 - just go through the big iron gates that read Arbeit Macht Frei and it's the first building on your left - was the Auschwitz brothel, commonly referred to as a Dolls House.
It was one of several such institutions established by the Nazis within their network of camps in order to reward and incentivise prisoners and, Himmler hoped, reorientate the sexuality of those wearing pink triangles [1].
The (non-Jewish) women obliged to work in these brothels came mainly from Ravensbrück, although Auschwitz recruited sex slaves from among its own inmate population [2]. Usually aged in their 20s, the women had sex with an average of six or seven men every evening between 8 and 10pm. They also had to work on Sunday afternoons. Some of the women underwent forced sterilization; those who didn't and became pregnant were forced to have abortions.
The (non-Jewish) male prisoners had to pay two Reichsmarks for a fifteen-minute session with a girl who was chosen for them. They were first examined to ensure they were (relatively) clean and healthy and were instructed that only vaginal intercourse in the missionary position was permitted (the doors of the girls' rooms had peepholes so that SS guards could keep an eye on proceedings and ensure there were no perverse or violent acts committed).
As might be imagined, there was a fairly high turnover of women, who were fucked until either too exhausted or too ill to continue, at which point their services - and sometimes their lives - were terminated [3].
Despite this, there were other women desperate to take their place, as they at least got to have a small room of their own within the brothel, wear clean clothes, and be given additional food from the SS kitchen. They were even given rudimentary medical care. Naturally, this caused anger and resentment amongst other female inmates, but it did make surviving the camp significantly easier - and survival was ultimately the name of the game.
After the War, the women rarely spoke of their experiences and they were not awarded any compensation - indeed, their existence was scarcely even acknowledged [4].
Notes
[1] Himmler conceived the idea of establishing concentration camp
brothels in October 1941. The first Dolls House was set up a year later, at Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria. Ultimately, the Lagerbordell did not produce any noticeable increase in prisoner productivity levels and I very much doubt they provided an effective form of gay conversion therapy. What they did do was further demonstrate the depth of Nazi corruption and depravity.
[2] It is worth noting that some of the women had previously worked as prostitutes; indeed, it was this anti-social
activity that had got them arrested and put in the camps in the first
place. The SS reasoned that it would help with the establishment of
their own brothels if they recruited professionals at least to begin
with. Of course, the fact that some of the women had already been involved in the sex industry doesn't in any way mitigate the cynical cruelty of Nazi sexual exploitation.
[3] After finishing their time in the brothels, some of the women were made camp functionaries and, according to recent research, those who withstood the hardship of brothel life did have an increased chance of escaping death in the camps. Indeed, almost all the women in forced prostitution survived.
Those interested in knowing more on this topic (and who read German) should see Robert Sommer, Das KZ-Bordell: Sexuelle Zwangsarbeit in nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslagern (Schöningh Verlag, 2009). A review of the book, by Thomas Kühne,
can be found in Central European History
Vol. 45, No. 3 (September 2012), pp. 593-595. Click here to read on JSTOR.
[4] There are some notable exceptions to this silence, first and foremost among them the French documentary Nuit et brouillard (dir. Alain Resnais, 1956), which acknowledged the existence of
concentration camp brothels based on interviews with survivors.
Mention might also be made of The House of Dolls (1953), a novella by the Jewish writer (and former Auschwitz inmate) Ka-Tsetnik 135633 (Yehiel De-Nur), which concerns the women who were kept for the sexual pleasure of German soldiers during World War II and known as the 'Joy Division' [Freudenabteilung].
Written in Hebrew, De-Nur's work tends to blur the line between fact and fiction and has been described as pornographic by some critics, who see it as paving the way for later Nazi-themed sexploitation movies such as Love Camp 7 (dir. Lee Frost, 1969) and Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS, (dir. Don Edmonds, 1975).
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