As historian Raul Hilberg discusses, “The road to annihilation was marked by events that specifically affected men as men and women as women.”[1] Both sexes were subject to similar forms of persecution and violence — abuse, forced labor, starvation, deportation , humiliation, and death, but only women had to cope with pregnancy, abortions, and invasive gynecological examinations.[2] Even though some Jewish men experienced various forms of sexual violence, the majority of rape victims and survivors are women.[3]
Despite the growing interest in women’s experiences in the Holocaust, the issue of sexual violence remains one of the under-researched topics. The war-time Ukraine could serve as a focus and lens through which questions of sexual victimization and sexual agency of Jewish women during the Shoah could be studied.
Sexual assault occurred in different locations, including Jewish homes, streets, and prisons, killing sites, and hiding places. In hundreds of ghettos and camps (e.g., concentration camps, forced labor camps) in occupied Ukraine during the Second World War, Jewish women were particularly vulnerable to various patterns of sexual humiliation and abuse.
Sexual violence during the Holocaust in Ukraine, like everywhere in Nazi-dominated Europe, was gendered first of all in terms of sexes of the perpetrators and the victims. The vast majority of victims/survivors were women, and perpetrators were mostly men - Germans and their allies, e.g., Hungarian, Romanian, Italian and local collaborators, and fellow Jewish inmates.
There is no convincing evidence that they were under orders to rape women, as it happened during genocides in Rwanda or former Yugoslavia. What drove those men to become rapists? Today, there are numerous ideas attempting to explain the motivations behind sexual crimes during wartime and genocide.