Alcohol and Sexual Violence

Abstract

This chapter reveals the widespread sexual predation by German forces on women, especially Jewish women, in the occupied eastern territories. The issue of sexual violence offers one of the clearest expressions of the ways in which geography, war, and the colonial mentality of the perpetrators allowed for the transgression of Nazi racial strictures in the East. It assesses how the acts of sexual violence by SS and police forces were commonplace in spite of the Nazi regime's own prohibition against racial defilement (Rassenschande), an act punishable by death or imprisonment. The chapter unveils numerous examples of drunken SS personnel and local auxiliaries operating in the concentration camps, the ghettos of the East, and the killing fields who sexually brutalized women, both Jews and Slavs, on a large scale. Ultimately, the chapter explains how the intersection between alcohol consumption, aggression, and male bravado found repeated expression in crimes of sexual violence in the East.