On Wednesday, September 6, 2023 at 6:54:17 AM UTC-7, Peeler wrote:

< Gang rape >

In many cases, rape went hand in hand with looting of Jewish
properties. In such cases, rape was a method of terror and torture to intimidate women and find out the location of valuables, or the tool
of punishment if the offenders failed to get what they came for. Such
rapes often took place in Jewish homes or next to them with the
woman’s family present. There were also rapes taking place
independently of looting. Germans or their collaborators raped women
in barracks or in their homes or workplaces. To hide the crime, they
would often kill the women afterwards. According to the recollections
of Holocaust survivors, Volksdeutsche Florian Koch, who served as a
guard in the Bohdanivka camp in Odesa oblast, took teenage girls of
ages 17–18 from pigsties where they were staying with other Jews, took them to a barn, robbed, raped and shot them.[7]

Gang rape was not a rare phenomenon during the Holocaust. Groups of perpetrators would barge into barracks and rape young women right in
front of everyone present. Those who resisted could be beaten or
killed. Some girls and young women were chosen specifically for sexual abuse. They were selected among permanent residents of ghettos and
camps. Selections would take place in the barracks, in training yards, during recruitment, after the women came back from work, or before deportations. They would usually take several young women at once. A survivor of Stepan ghetto remembers: “At night, policemen would bring Germans, and they would grab young women and rape them. They really brutalized them… They took [the women] away, and then brought them
back and left them half dead.”[8] Golda Wasserman, survivor of the
Tulchyn ghetto, describes: “A Romanian gendarme who was the Commandant
of Tulchyn selected healthy young girls from the ghetto and took them
away, under the official pretence of working in the kitchen and bakery
of those [Italian and Hungarian] divisions located [15 kilometres from
the ghetto]. The girls returned having been raped and with venereal diseases. Many committed suicide back in the barracks, while some of
them were killed when resisting or attempting to flee. Then the
Commandant selected new girls for the ‘work.’ Selection was carried
out every fifteen to twenty days.”[9] Some rape victims were killed
with special cruelty. Irvin Szames, survivor of Trohenbrod ghetto near
Lutsk testified that the bodies of raped women had been massacred.[10]
The women were also immediately killed if, after a period of sexual exploitation, they contracted an STD or got pregnant.[11] Some of
those who did come back after rape died from the injuries or committed suicide.

https://ua.boell.org/en/2020/05/18/sexual-violence-holocaust-perspectives-ghettos-and-camps-ukraine

What a horrible atrocity this was! It was like what happened to Elizabeth Smart!


Michael

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