The practice of armies relying on women to satisfy the sexual needs of their soldiers is as old as warfare itself. From the armies of Alexander the Great to the camp followers of medieval and early modern Europe, women had always accompanied military campaigns, sometimes supplying troops, sometimes providing comfort. But nowhere in history was this grim reality turned into such a planned, systematized, and bureaucratized operation as in Nazi Germany during World War II. When the Wehrmacht and the SS launched their aggressive campaigns against neighboring states, the Nazi leadership faced a practical problem.
Millions of young, healthy men were now in uniform, and their commanders worried about the consequences of uncontrolled sexual activity. The German Ministry of the Interior under Wilhelm Frick issued an order on September 9, 1939, aimed at preventing homosexuality and venereal disease among military personnel. The solution was to establish brothels for the Wehrmacht and SS, and the Germans approached the matter with characteristic precision. Nothing was left to chance.
The amount of time a soldier could spend in a brothel was measured and regulated. The expected throughput of each woman was calculated, and even the uniforms were prescribed. A prostitute assigned to an air force establishment had to receive pilots decently dressed, with negligence strictly prohibited. Bedding and underwear had to be fresh, changed for every new client.
In the ground forces, a girl could meet officers already in her underwear, lying in bed. Even the brothels themselves were segregated by rank, with separate establishments for officers, senior non-commissioned officers, and ordinary soldiers. In the soldiers’ brothels, for instance, bed linen was allowed to be changed only after every tenth client. The social hierarchies of the German military were reflected even in the conditions under which women were forced to serve.
At first, only German women and representatives of related European nations were recruited for these establishments—Swedes, Dutch, Belgians, French, Danes, and Finns. But as the war expanded, particularly after the attack on the Soviet Union in 1941, the Germans allowed the use of the local population in brothels in the occupied territories. Baltic women, Belarusians, Ukrainians, and Russians were pressed into service. Women deemed to belong to what the Nazis called lower races—Jews and Gypsies—were categorically barred from working in the brothels.
In Western Europe, the Germans had simply expanded and reorganized existing establishments. On the territory of the Soviet Union, they had to build the system from scratch. Initially, there were problems with personnel. But the threat of being deported to Germany and ending up in a concentration camp was enough to compel Soviet women to cooperate with the demands of the occupation authorities.
German women received money for their work, but Soviet women often worked for food. Much depended on the level of the client and the position of the woman herself. Some were allowed to receive clients at home. But registration was mandatory.
Every woman involved in prostitution had to register with a special department and undergo regular medical examinations. Illegal prostitution was severely punished. At the front lines, the Germans did not stand on ceremony. Violence against local women was not uncommon.
The level of restraint depended entirely on the character of the unit’s officers. Where officers were ruthless and corrupt, they allowed their subordinates to commit any outrage. Wilhelm Lepage, a German artilleryman, recalled in his memoirs that soldiers in his regiment took advantage of the hunger of local young women to satisfy their sexual needs. With a loaf of bread in hand, they would go two or three kilometers behind the front line, where they got what they wanted.
Some women who worked in the brothels maintained connections with underground fighters and partisans, passing on information they managed to extract from their clients. The registered women were held to strict performance standards. A prostitute serving ordinary soldiers was expected to handle 600 clients per month. In the Luftwaffe, the number was reduced to 60.
Women assigned to please officer-pilots were required to accept only 20 clients per month. In the occupied territory of the Soviet Union, a prostitute received 500 rubles per month, as the Soviet ruble remained in circulation alongside the German mark. But as already noted, this rule was not always observed, and many women worked only for food. German soldiers were entitled to five visits to the brothel per month.
Additional visits had to be earned. Soldiers who distinguished themselves in service were given special incentive coupons indicating the number of preferential visits. The field brothels moved with the military units to which they were attached, using buses to transport the women and trucks to carry the brothel property. A special place in this system belonged to the brothels located inside the concentration camps.
Prisoners were sent there, selected on the basis of appearance and physical health. Jewish and Gypsy women, of course, could not enter these establishments. They, along with the camp police drawn from loyal prisoners and junior camp staff, were used unofficially. These camp workers had no rights at all.
They lived only as long as they remained of interest to the numerous clients. At any moment, for any offense, they could be returned to the barracks on a general basis or sent to their deaths. The situation of the women in the camp brothels was nevertheless significantly different from that of ordinary prisoners. They were fed more or less adequately, conditions for personal hygiene were provided, and they were subjected to weekly medical examinations.
But they enjoyed all of this only as long as they satisfied the desires of their captors. Camp brothels officially existed in ten large concentration camps, but in others, women were also used unofficially to satisfy the intimate needs of the Nazis. Initially, the camp brothels were staffed with convicted German women and women from other Western European peoples. But after 1942, Slavic women were also forced into them.
Beyond the camps, there were also privileged brothels in the Reich itself, reserved for foreign guests and Nazi leaders. All the brothels in Germany operated, as the saying went, under the watch of the departments of Müller and Schellenberg. Many prostitutes were actively recruited by the SD and the Gestapo. In addition, the stationary brothels could be subjected to periodic wiretapping.
In this way, unreliable military personnel and overly talkative officers were identified and dealt with. It was, in effect, a gigantic factory where sex was put on an assembly line to meet the needs of Hitler’s army. In terms of the level and discipline of the process, only the Hungarians in Europe could be remotely compared to the Germans. Among the other armies of the German bloc, none reached this level of organization.
But there was also Germany’s ally in Asia. The Japanese are sometimes called the Asian Germans, and with good reason. During World War II, the Japanese Army also maintained a highly organized system of intimate services for its soldiers and officers. Here, too, mass production was established.
At first, the Japanese planned to rely solely on Japanese women, but they quickly abandoned that idea. There were not enough Japanese women for the huge army, and they were not willing to become prostitutes. The Japanese military authorities then turned their attention to local women, and the brothels began to be filled with Koreans, Chinese, Vietnamese, and others. Special hunting brigades were formed within military units, tasked with rounding up attractive women and girls from villages and settlements.
The goal was to take them by force, sometimes offering to ransom them from relatives. If a ransom was not possible, the girl could simply be kidnapped. The Japanese called their brothels by a romantically evocative name: comfort stations. But the comfort they provided was strictly one-sided, intended only for Japanese soldiers.
In the Kwantung Army alone, located on Chinese territory, there were more than three hundred such stations. The women assigned to the category of service personnel lived in extremely difficult conditions. They were forced to serve between fifty and sixty clients a day. It was monstrous exploitation, and the women in these establishments were held in a position of outright slavery.
There is an interesting detail from the Japanese system. For soldiers, visiting a brothel, unless it was an incentive, was more expensive than for officers and sergeants. In this, an old Asian tradition seemed to hold: those lower on the social ladder had to pay more for their pleasures, while those higher in rank received more privileges. What unfolded across the occupied territories of Europe and Asia was a form of organized mass crime.
It consisted of the violent coercion of indigenous women, or the creation of a system of forced choice in which survival itself depended on submission. The fascist states exploited not only the resources and labor of the citizens of the lands they occupied. They also ruthlessly exploited the women themselves.