Holocaust Studies Public Lecture: "'Sonderbauten' – The Story of Brothels in Nazi Concentration Camps," Featuring Robert Sommer (iba | University of Cooperative Education in Berlin)

“Sonderbauten” – The Story of Brothels in Nazi Concentration Camps

Annual HEFNU/CCHS Lecture in Holocaust Studies featuring Robert Sommer (iba | University of Cooperative Education in Berlin) 

Please join us!
In-Person Only | Open to the Public
Lunch Served at 12 | Lecture Begins at 12:30

In 1941, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler ordered the construction of brothels for concentration camp prisoners. While these camps were primary sites of terror and mass murder, they were also vast networks of forced labor. Facing low productivity due to catastrophic living conditions and systemic violence, Himmler sought to create labor "incentives" by opening camp brothels. By the end of the war, the SS operated these establishments across ten major concentration camps, including Mauthausen, Gusen, Flossenbürg, Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Monowitz, Dachau, Neuengamme, Sachsenhausen, and Mittelbau-Dora.

In this lecture, based on his seminal work The Concentration Camp Brothel, Robert Sommer reveals the hidden horrors of forced sexual labor within the SS camp system—a subject long overshadowed in Holocaust discourse.

Drawing on a rigorous examination of over seventy archives and poignant interviews with more than thirty survivors (including former camp brothel visitors, former forced laborers and camp prisoners), Sommer paints a vivid, harrowing picture of these atrocities. He will explore the integration of brothels into the camp system, the Nazi exploitation of bodies for control, the complex reactions of prisoner societies, and the desperate survival strategies employed by the women trapped within this system.

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