Sexual violence during the Holocaust has long been the subject of the wildest fantasies or impermeable taboos. The latter were facilitated by the silence of surviving but ashamed victims of Nazi sexual exploitation. The former dominated popular culture, most prominently in K. Tzetnik's novella House of Dolls (1953), and generated everlasting myths about Jewish whores serving SS men in Auschwitz and elsewhere. Jewish prostitutes are not subject to Robert Sommer's meticulous study, however, for one simple reason: according to Sommer's evidence, there were no Jewish prostitutes in the brothels that the SS established from 1942 onward in the larger concentration camps, including Auschwitz.

In Das KZ-Bordell, Sommer is less concerned with readability or with engaging in the controversies that still surround the topic than with establishing accurate knowledge and comprehensive documentation. Sommer has examined an extraordinarily broad range of different types of mostly German and Austrian sources. Survivor testimonies, not least those produced in or for criminal trials and restitution processes, and thirty survivor interviews document the subjective perspective of the victims of the SS brothel system. The strength of this study is its precise investigation into the factual history; the motives and rationales of the planners, initiators, and organizers; and above all the biographical background of the victimized women (Sommer managed to identify almost all of the exploited women, 174 in total out of some 200). It also explores the settings and the practice of enforced prostitution within a genocidal environment. Although the quality of the archival material differs from camp to camp, Sommer was able to access huge stocks of revealing SS administrative documents, ranging from invoices and accounting statements to brothel visitor lists and the results of medical examinations of the prostitutes.

Sommer approaches his topic from the administrative and economic sides. Limited to those concentration camps that were controlled and supervised by the SS-Wirtschafts- und Verwaltungshauptamt and thus part of the vast SS entrepreneurial empire, the book covers the camps of Mauthausen, Gusen, Flossenbürg, Buchenwald, Auschwitz, Dachau, Neuengamme, Sachsenhausen, and Mittelbau-Dora but not the death camps of Chelmno, Sobibor, Belzec, and Treblinka. In the concentration camps, the brothels were established for one reason: to raise the economic productivity of inmates' enforced and slave labor. As such, the brothels served as “a crucial piece” (p. 85) of the bonus system that, in the camps, granted premiums and privileges to those groups of prisoners that the SS considered crucial for the effective operation of the camps and therefore not easily replaceable. Only a very small share of the prisoners made it regularly to a brothel; most of those who were admitted enjoyed their privilege only sporadically or exceptionally. Sommer leaves no doubt of the economic inefficiency of this system that drew some inspirations from the Soviet Gulag model; it simply further propelled the climate of corruption that ruled the camps.

Economically inefficient, the sexual reward system supported the Nazis' project of imposing a revolutionary new organization of power, one that deliberately aborted the western idea of individualism and instead relied on racial segregation and subordination. The principle of racial segregation was held in high esteem in the camp brothels. The brothels served to carry the camps' perfidious power structure to its extreme. On the one hand, the KZ brothels allowed a small number of men and women to regain what was systematically destroyed in the camps: sexual identity. Sommer uses the (somewhat overstretched) concept of “remasculinization” (p. 252) to address the male side of it, and he talks of “resexualization” (rather than, for good reasons, of “refeminization”) to describe the female aspect of this type of exploitation. In recruiting women for the KZ brothels, the SS relied on what it considered professional prostitutes. These had been imprisoned as such before or had been classified and imprisoned as “anti-social.” The SS lured them to “volunteering” for the KZ brothels by promising release after six months of brothel service. This promise was not kept, yet the women mostly did gain some sort of social capital (by selling physical capital, their bodies) that helped them, humiliated as they were, to survive the brothels and even, in most of Sommer's cases, the Third Reich. Categorized as “anti-social” under the Nazi regime, they still remain excluded from German restitution provisions.

Referring to Michel Foucault's ideas of social control in modernity, Sommer also draws attention to the spatial settings and rigorous sex regulations in the KZ brothels. The brothels did not establish a minimum of privacy for even the most privileged elite of the prisoners' society. Instead, they drew these inmates into a sophisticated system of complicity. The facilities were also built in a way that allowed permanent surveillance and absolute control over sexual activities. Spy holes in the door fed the guards' voyeurism. Fifteen or so minutes were the maximum allotted to “normal” sex; the missionary position was the only one that was allowed.

There is not much to criticize in this groundbreaking and impressively thorough study. Sommer is too solid a historian to overstate his findings about the absence of Jewish women in the camp brothels or to engage in the larger and heavily controversial discussion on whether, and if so to what degree, Jewish women were subjugated to rape or other forms of sexual violence by Germans or other men during the Holocaust. This controversy, propelled most recently by historians such as Monika Flaschka, Na'ama Shik, Regina Mühlhäuser, and Helene Sinnreich, will continue until more in-depth studies on sexual violence during the Holocaust in other camps or outside the camps appear. Sommer's book may serve as a model of how to proceed.