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Sexual Violence against Jewish Women during the Holocaust
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321 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2010
About the author
Sonja M. Hedgepeth
2 books2 followersDr. Sonja M. Hedgepeth is a Professor of German at Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU), where she has taught courses on the Holocaust since 1989.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
May 12, 2026
Sixteen rigorous essays on the systematic rape, enslavement, and sterilization of Jewish women by the Nazis. Editors Hedgepeth and Saidel gathered historians, psychologists, and human rights attorneys across six countries to document what Holocaust museums managed for sixty-five years to overlook.
Shulamit Reinharz, child of survivors, confesses in the foreword that she missed the epidemic of rape in Holocaust testimony because "no one had pointed it out." That sentence indicts an entire scholarly field and doubles as the most uncomfortable compliment ever paid to denial. The book begins its grim, overdue accounting.
Legal scholar Nomi Levenkron catalogs the methodology with bureaucratic composure: rape at gunpoint, sexual slavery, sex-for-food coercion in ghettos, and a brothel system across Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and six other camps, documented in official Nazi ledgers.
Emmanuel Ringelblum's diary records that Germans compelled Czestochowa's Jewish council to establish brothels; Warsaw's Judenrat head told his tormentors he knew how to mix poison. Ukrainian collaborators come drunk, dragging women from deportation carriages. Russian liberators contribute their own chapter, one Red Army captain, responding to rape complaints by suggesting the women come to his bed.
Robert Sommer's brothel essay is a corporate audit from Hell: 174 women identified by name, assembly-line intercourse capped at fifteen minutes, and Berta G., a Jewish woman selected as brothel bookkeeper because the SS trusted the stereotype of Jews as capable bankers. Jewish women were officially barred from camp brothels by racial law, which stopped nothing at extermination camps.
Monika Flaschka documents the phrase survivors used to explain selection: "only pretty women were raped." Eva Fogelman traces grandmothers dying in Toronto geriatric wards whispering "I was raped" with the instruction: "please do not tell my family." The silence lasted sixty-five years.
The book forces into the record what the record was designed to forget. Hedgepeth and Saidel produced the first English-language interdisciplinary anthology on rape and sexual violence against Jewish women during the Holocaust, published in 2010 under the Brandeis University Press imprint.
Jewish women were raped, enslaved, sterilized, and stripped of their bodies as a matter of policy and habit. The unimaginable horror remains valid. It became more valid on October 7, 2023, when Hamas systematically raped, mutilated, and sexually tortured Jewish women and girls, and a substantial portion of the international feminist establishment either went quiet or went looking for context. Many cheered, many still do.
The pattern the book documents, of violation followed by institutional silence, of victims dying with their secret because the world prefers its atrocities without the sexual fine print, repeated itself in real time. The women of the kibbutzim found out what the grandmothers in the Toronto geriatric wards already knew: being Jewish and female makes you doubly invisible, twice erased, once by the perpetrator and once by the people who write the reports afterward.
❤️ 🇮🇱
Shulamit Reinharz, child of survivors, confesses in the foreword that she missed the epidemic of rape in Holocaust testimony because "no one had pointed it out." That sentence indicts an entire scholarly field and doubles as the most uncomfortable compliment ever paid to denial. The book begins its grim, overdue accounting.
Legal scholar Nomi Levenkron catalogs the methodology with bureaucratic composure: rape at gunpoint, sexual slavery, sex-for-food coercion in ghettos, and a brothel system across Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and six other camps, documented in official Nazi ledgers.
Emmanuel Ringelblum's diary records that Germans compelled Czestochowa's Jewish council to establish brothels; Warsaw's Judenrat head told his tormentors he knew how to mix poison. Ukrainian collaborators come drunk, dragging women from deportation carriages. Russian liberators contribute their own chapter, one Red Army captain, responding to rape complaints by suggesting the women come to his bed.
Robert Sommer's brothel essay is a corporate audit from Hell: 174 women identified by name, assembly-line intercourse capped at fifteen minutes, and Berta G., a Jewish woman selected as brothel bookkeeper because the SS trusted the stereotype of Jews as capable bankers. Jewish women were officially barred from camp brothels by racial law, which stopped nothing at extermination camps.
Monika Flaschka documents the phrase survivors used to explain selection: "only pretty women were raped." Eva Fogelman traces grandmothers dying in Toronto geriatric wards whispering "I was raped" with the instruction: "please do not tell my family." The silence lasted sixty-five years.
The book forces into the record what the record was designed to forget. Hedgepeth and Saidel produced the first English-language interdisciplinary anthology on rape and sexual violence against Jewish women during the Holocaust, published in 2010 under the Brandeis University Press imprint.
Jewish women were raped, enslaved, sterilized, and stripped of their bodies as a matter of policy and habit. The unimaginable horror remains valid. It became more valid on October 7, 2023, when Hamas systematically raped, mutilated, and sexually tortured Jewish women and girls, and a substantial portion of the international feminist establishment either went quiet or went looking for context. Many cheered, many still do.
The pattern the book documents, of violation followed by institutional silence, of victims dying with their secret because the world prefers its atrocities without the sexual fine print, repeated itself in real time. The women of the kibbutzim found out what the grandmothers in the Toronto geriatric wards already knew: being Jewish and female makes you doubly invisible, twice erased, once by the perpetrator and once by the people who write the reports afterward.
❤️ 🇮🇱
May 23, 2019
This is actually the second time that I’m reading this book. The first time I read it while doing research for my Holocaust novel which deals with the same subject and I remember how profoundly it affected me back then. The subject is still taboo. No one wants to talk about it - neither the victims nor the perpetrators. Most of the writers shy away from it. Even the majority of historians prefer to deal with “general” Holocaust positively refusing to acknowledge the painful truth: sexual violence against Jewish women was committed, it left multiple victims who had to deal with their pain silently and on their own, and it’s about time we talked about it openly.
In this meticulously researched study different scholars and historians investigate such subjects as rape itself, different aspects of sexual violence (such as having to undress in front of male officers, forced “personal searches,” selections during which women had to undress in front of SS doctors etc), forced prostitution, medical experiments including forced abortions and sterilization, sex in exchange for survival, and the representation of the subject in literature and in the movie industry. The book doesn’t deal solely with concentration camps; it also brings to light the testimonies of those who suffered in hiding, who had to submit to the partisans in exchange for shelter and safety, who suffered from the hands of the police, their own compatriots, and even fellow Jews.
What I also appreciated was the fact that the authors brought up such important matters as PTSD and the victims’ ways of dealing with their trauma; reasons why most of them chose to remain silent (due to patriarchal cultural views of society which still in our days chooses to victim-blame instead of blaming the perpetrator) and reasons why few rare ones chose to tell their stories.
I would highly recommend this book to everyone who is interested in the Holocaust and would like to learn all aspects of it, even such an uncomfortable one as this one. It’s not an easy read by all means but it’s a must-read nevertheless.
In this meticulously researched study different scholars and historians investigate such subjects as rape itself, different aspects of sexual violence (such as having to undress in front of male officers, forced “personal searches,” selections during which women had to undress in front of SS doctors etc), forced prostitution, medical experiments including forced abortions and sterilization, sex in exchange for survival, and the representation of the subject in literature and in the movie industry. The book doesn’t deal solely with concentration camps; it also brings to light the testimonies of those who suffered in hiding, who had to submit to the partisans in exchange for shelter and safety, who suffered from the hands of the police, their own compatriots, and even fellow Jews.
What I also appreciated was the fact that the authors brought up such important matters as PTSD and the victims’ ways of dealing with their trauma; reasons why most of them chose to remain silent (due to patriarchal cultural views of society which still in our days chooses to victim-blame instead of blaming the perpetrator) and reasons why few rare ones chose to tell their stories.
I would highly recommend this book to everyone who is interested in the Holocaust and would like to learn all aspects of it, even such an uncomfortable one as this one. It’s not an easy read by all means but it’s a must-read nevertheless.
March 18, 2012
Not what I had hoped it would be. Many of the articles are rather esoteric about pieces of literature that I have never read. Many of the articles try to discuss the frequency of sexual violence, but all conclude that there is no way to really know. I was hoping to get more information on the long-term effects of sexual violence on post-Holocaust PTSD and recovery. It is an ok book - and admirable in broaching the topic - but I hoped that it would have been more in-depth on more applicable topics.
January 19, 2011
This is a new book that will be considered groundbreaking. As far as I know, this is the first collection of essays by a group of scholars to address this topic and should serve as a catalyst to future research.
March 26, 2020
Harrowing as expected. However it is about time we researched and uncovered the taboo subjects of rape and enforced prostitution amongst other gender appropriate crimes. Many victims will not acknowledge it as having happened because of the stigma and victim shaming that still goes on. A lot of memoirs skirt over the issue and we need to document these issues for future generations. They need to know the full story of war and the atrocities committed in the holocaust.
May 8, 2022
"Sexual Violence Against Jewish Women During The Holocaust", Hedgepeth and Saidel, editors (2010, 308 pages).
Sixteen chapters researched and written by a group of renowned scholars explore and give voice to a taboo and dark topic.
Sixteen chapters researched and written by a group of renowned scholars explore and give voice to a taboo and dark topic.
June 3, 2025
Like any anthology some essays will be better than others, but as a whole, this is a solid, harrowing collection.
January 3, 2020
Over the last few months I’ve read a lot of Holocaust literature, and this is easily one of the most brutal and disturbing books of them all. I wish I could write a longer review, but I don’t feel up to it. I had to pace myself because article is so draining. The Flaschka, Sinnreich, and Amesberger chapters stand out in particular. Horrific and unfathomable. Reaffirms the importance of studying women & gender history and paying attention to what Waxman called the “gendered nature of lived experience” (131).
October 18, 2013
The idea to study in particular sexualized violence against women in wartime and even more particularly during the Holocaust is an honorable idea and I don't want to rate the book as such, more like a general rating for the interested reader. It's "too scholarly" (well, that's the point of the book) for casual reading, and the extremely depressing subject doesn't help. But I'm glad I have this in my shelf.
January 27, 2013
Interesting book, but a little to heavy on the feminist agenda and a little too light on survivor's experiences.
March 19, 2015
Congratulations on undertaking this challenging subject.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews