Exhibition exposes sex slavery at Nazi camps February 26, 2009
"They told us we were in the camp brothel, that we were the
lucky ones. We would eat well and have enough to drink. If we
behaved and fulfilled our duties nothing would happen to us." So
begins the wrenching account of Frau W., a prisoner of the Nazi
concentration camp Ravensbrueck north of Berlin who between
mid-1943 and December 1944 was forced to work as a sex slave for
her fellow detainees. Her story forms the centrepiece of a new
exhibition at Ravensbrueck about the fate of women pressed into
prostitution between 1942 and 1945, like Asia's "comfort women"
during World War II. But rather than servicing soldiers, the
camp prostitutes were the brainchild of SS chief Heinrich
Himmler to increase productivity among forced labourers and try
to keep homosexuality from "breaking out" among their ranks.
Their numbers were far smaller than the tens of thousands of
"comfort women" kidnapped across Asia to serve Japanese troops.
But Ravensbrueck centre d