Rassenschande, genocide and the reproductive Jewish body: examining the use of rape and sexualized violence against Jewish women during the Holocaust

Rape and sexual violence against Jewish women is a relatively unexplored area of investigation. This article adds to the scant literature on this topic. It asks: how and why did women's reproductive bodies (gender), combined with their status as Jews (race), make them particularly vulnerable during the Holocaust? The law against Rassenschande (racial defilement) prohibited sexual relations between Aryans and non-Aryans. Yet, Jewish women were raped by German men. Providing a more nuanced account than is provided by the dehumanization thesis, this article argues that women were targeted precisely because of their Jewishness and their reproductive capabilities. In addition, this piece proposes that the genocidal attack on women's bodies in the form of rape (subsequently leading to the murder of impregnated women) and sexualized violence (forced abortions and forced sterilizations) must be interpreted as an attack on an essentialized group: woman-as-Jew

The Atrocity of Hunger: Starvation in the Warsaw, Łódź, and Kraków Ghettos during World War II

During World War II, the Germans put the Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland into ghettos which restricted their movement and, most crucially for their survival, access to food. The Germans saw the Jews as \u27useless eaters,\u27 and denied them sufficient food for survival. The hunger which resulted from this intentional starvation impacted every aspect of Jewish life inside the ghettos. This book focuses on the Jews in the Łódź, Warsaw, and Kraków ghettos as they struggled to survive the deadly Nazi ghetto and, in particular, the genocidal famine conditions. Jews had no control over Nazi food policy but they attempted to survive the deadly conditions of Nazi ghettoization through a range of coping mechanisms and survival strategies. In this book, Helene Sinnreich explores their story, drawing from diaries and first-hand accounts of the victims and survivors. Chapters: The Nazi Invasion: Violence, Displacement, and Expropriation -- Jewish Leadership -- The Supply and Distribution of Food: Strategies and Priorities -- The Physical, Mental, and Social Effects of Hunger -- Hunger and Everyday Life in the Ghetto -- Socioeconomic Status and Food Access -- Relief Systems and Charity -- Illicit Food Access: Smuggling, Theft, and the Black Market -- Labor and Food in the Ghettos -- Deportations and the End of the Ghettoshttps://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_tome/1002/thumbnail.jp

The supply and distribution of food to the Lodz Ghetto: A case study in Nazi Jewish policy, 1939--1945.

This dissertation explores the German use of starvation as genocidal policy through a case study of the Lodz Ghetto. A detailed analysis of food supply and distribution in the Lodz Ghetto reveals that the Nazis, who ultimately controlled the amount of food that entered the ghetto, did not provide adequate sustenance to the Jews of the ghetto. Through the reduction of access to food, the Nazis perpetrated a slow genocide against the Jews of Europe. The Nazis were aware of the murderous effects of their food policies, and allowed those policies to continue resulting in the mass execution of the Jewish people in the ghettos. The basis for denial of sustenance adequate for survival was the low position of the Jews within the Nazi racial hierarchy. The mass starvation of the Jews of the ghetto, who were deemed by the Nazis to be "useless eaters," led to various coping methods, including a complex system of distributing what little food was allocated for the Jews in the ghetto. The various licit and illicit food entitlement schemas, however, that were manipulated by the German authorities ultimately failed to save the Jews from mass death from starvation. This dissertation examines Nazi and Jewish food entitlement, and the physical and mental effects of hunger and Nazi starvation policy on ghetto inhabitants. It concludes that although there might not have been an explicit order for mass extermination in the initial period of the ghetto, the result of Nazi food policy was a man-made famine leading to mass death, and thus it was de facto genocidal policy.Thesis (Ph.D.)--Brandeis University, 2004.School code: 0021