The Hidden history of prostitutes in military brothels in Europe with pics

Military brothels were set up by Nazi Germany during World War II throughout much of occupied Europe for the use of Wehrmacht and SS soldiers. These brothels were generally new creations, but in the west, they were sometimes expansions of pre-existing brothels and other buildings.

 The German generals realized they would never prevent their soldiers from having sex. Instead of trying to stop sexual activities, they decided to control them. So, the German army established a vast network of military brothels throughout the occupied territories. Until 1942, there were around 500 military brothels of this kind in German-occupied Europe, serving travelling soldiers and those withdrawn from the front.

According to records, between 34,000 and 50,000 young girls and women were forced into prostitution during the German occupation of their own countries along with female prisoners of concentration camp brothels. In many cases in Eastern Europe, teenage girls and women were kidnapped on the streets of occupied cities during German military.


Conditions in brothels were brutal. The women were often raped by up to 32 men per day; the visiting soldiers were allocated 15 minutes each at a nominal cost of 3 Reichsmarks per "session" between the hours of 2 p.m. and 8.30 p.m. Those who were visibly pregnant were sometimes released, but would not go back to their families, so as not to shame them.

In March, 1942, the commander-in-chief, Jerez, gave the order to create brothels in the occupied territories of the USSR. The Nazis were afraid of partisans and sexually transmitted diseases. The girls were strictly selected. Particularly welcome Latvians, Lithuanians and rooted Germans. These girls selected for the brothels were injected with calcium, forced to wash in disinfection baths, irradiated with ultraviolet lamps and fed better than other prisoners.

The camp brothels were usually built as barracks surrounded by a barbed-wire fence, with small individual rooms for up to 20 female prisoners, controlled by a female overseer. The women were replaced frequently due to exhaustion and illness, and were usually sent away to their deaths later. The brothels were open only in the evenings.

The Foreign Ministry of the Polish Government in Exile issued a document on May 3, 1941, describing the mass kidnapping raids conducted in Polish cities with the aim of capturing young women, as young as 15, for sexual slavery at brothels run by the German military. On top of that, Polish girls as young as15 classified as suitable for slave labor and shipped to Germany were sexually exploited by German men. In Brandenburg, two Polish Ostarbeiter teens who returned home to Kraków in advanced stage of pregnancy, reported to have been raped by German soldiers with such frequency that they were unable to perform any of the worker's designated labour.


Read more: The worst mass rape in European history

It is clear that the results of such employment appeared. Many women reluctantly went for an abortion and preferred to have a child anonymously in the so-called Nazi de-hostel - “Lebensborn”. The Nazis themselves welcomed the connections of the soldiers with the women of the fraternal Aryan peoples. Norway, Denmark, Belgium and the Netherlands were the breeders of "children of good blood." Only registered children were born to 100 thousand, and these children could be adopted, taken away from their mother and taken away to Germany.