It is known
that the Holocaust was the genocide of European Jews during World War II.
Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically
murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe, around two-thirds
of Europe's Jewish population.
The Lviv
pogroms were the consecutive massacres of Jews living in the city of Lwów (now
Lviv, Ukraine), perpetrated by Ukrainian nationalists (specifically, the OUN),
German death squads (Einsatzgruppen), and urban population from 30 June to 2
July, and from 25 to 29 July, during the German invasion of the Soviet Union.
At the time
of the German attack on the Soviet Union, about 160,000 Jews lived in the city;
the number had swelled by tens of thousands due to the arrival of Jewish
refugees from German-occupied Poland in late 1939.
A full-blown
pogrom began on the next day, 1 July. Jews were taken from their apartments,
made to clean streets on their hands and knees, or perform rituals that
identified them with Communism. Gentile residents assembled in the streets to
watch. Jewish women were singled out for humiliation: they were stripped naked,
beaten, and abused.
Read more: 6 reasons why Hitler hated Jews
According to
the Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945, the first pogrom resulted in
2,000 to 5,000 Jewish victims. An additional 2,500 to 3,000 Jews were shot in
the Einsatzgruppen killings that immediately followed.
In ghettos
and concentration camps, German authorities deployed women in forced labor
under conditions that often led to their deaths. German physicians and medical
researchers used Jewish and Roma (Gypsy) women as subjects for sterilization
experiments and other unethical human experimentation.
In both
camps and ghettos, women were particularly vulnerable to beatings and rape.
Pregnant Jewish women often tried to conceal their pregnancies or were forced
to submit to abortions. Females deported from Poland and the Soviet Union for
forced labor in the Reich were often beaten or raped, or forced to submit to
sexual relations for food or other necessities or basic comforts. Pregnancy
sometimes resulted for Polish, Soviet, or Yugoslav forced laborers from sexual
relations with German men. If so-called "race experts" determined
that the child was not capable of "Germanization," the women were
generally forced to have abortions, sent to give birth in makeshift nurseries
where conditions would guarantee the death of the infants, or simply shipped to
the region they came from without food or medical care. The Germans established
brothels in some concentration and labor camps, and the German army ran roughly
500 brothels for soldiers, in which women were forced to work.
Sexual assault occurred in different locations, including Jewish homes, streets, and prisons, killing sites, and hiding places. In hundreds of ghettos and camps (e.g., concentration camps, forced labour camps) in occupied Ukraine during the Second World War, Jewish women were particularly vulnerable to various patterns of sexual humiliation and abuse.
