I've just finished Maus (again) and in the part where Vladek Spiegelman is in Auschwitz, he tells he was able to communicate with his wife via a female prisoner who had privileges because she was the lover of an SS guard. The woman in fact was an Hungarian Jew.
This seems very odd to me. If you wanted to be a guard in a concentration camp, I would assume you have to be very or extreme antisemetic, and be able to kill or torture without any hesitation. Because if not, honestly what use do you have as a guard in an extermination camp? You are a part of the Aryan master race. For years you have learned to view the Jews as Untermenschen. Even less than humans. Less than animals.
I want to point out that I'm not antisemetic but I'm trying to get into the mind and thoughts of an SS guard at that place, at that time, but why in heaven's name would I, a proud Arian be willing to have sex with an Untermensch? Why would I degrade myself by having repeatedly having sex with somebody whose race is million times more inferior than mine? I would understand it if guards would put up with non-Jewish female prisoners, like political prisoners. I would "understand" it - but certainly not approve it, again just trying to get into their mind - if guards would rape and afterwards kill Jewish woman. But regular sexual contact with Jewish woman? It seems very strange to me? Besides that, what would the other guards think? And their officers?
How often did such relations occur between guards and Jewish woman? How were these guards viewed by their fellow guards? Were they branded as a race-traitor or wasn't it a big deal? How were these woman viewed by their inmates? And when the camps were liberated did these woman suffer retaliation? How did they deal with it after the war?
Are you referring to any recorded relationships? Or perhaps mislabelling relationships of sex abuse, or sex for food/leniency?
First of all, I would like to point out that nowhere in Maus does it say that this Hungarian prisoner is Jewish. She might also have been a political prisoner. I cannot at the moment recollect reading anywhere about long-term relationships between Jewish inmates and SS guards at Auschwitz, though that is not to say that it never happened.
It would have had to be kept under cover, though, as an open relationship was against the Nuremberg racial laws. But among the Einsatzgruppen who were tasked with executing Soviet communist officials and Jews in the occupied part of the Soviet Union, and in labour camps and ghettos in the East in general, there were certainly brief sexual relations between German soldiers and Jewish women, ranging from rape to a woman offering herself in the hope of survival. A good source for this is Sonke Neitzel's Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing and Dying, which is based on transcript of covert recordings made by the Allies of German POWs talking amongst themselves. Here are a couple of examples.
In Kraków, Poland:
FELBERT: What happened to the young, pretty girls? Were they turned into a harem?
KITTEL [military commander at Kraków]: I didn’t bother about that. I only found that they did become more reasonable. At least they had concentration camps for the Jews at CRACOW. At any rate, from the moment I had chosen a safe place and I built the concentration camp [Plaszów, made famous by Schindler's List], things became quite reasonable. They certainly had to work hard. The women question is a very shady chapter.
Vilnius, Lithuania:
HARTELT: Were you watching when the pretty Jewess was there?
MINNIEUR: No, we weren’t there then. All we know was that she was shot.
HARTELT: Did she say anything beforehand? Had you met her before?
MINNIEUR: Yes, we met her the day before; the next day we wondered why she didn’t come. Then we set off on the motor-cycle.
HARTELT: Was she working there too?
MINNIEUR: Yes.
HARTELT: Making roads?
MINNIEUR: No, she cleaned our barracks. The week we were there we went into the barracks to sleep so that we didn’t … outside—
HARTELT: I bet she let you sleep with her too?
MINNIEUR: Yes, but you had to take care not to be found out. It’s nothing now; it was really a scandal, the way they slept with Jewish women.
HARTELT: What did she say, that she—?
MINNIEUR: Nothing at all. Well, we chatted together and she said she came from down there, from LANDSBERG on the WARTHE, and was at GÖTTINGEN university.
HARTELT: And a girl like that let anyone sleep with her!
MINNIEUR: Yes. You couldn’t tell that she was a Jewess; she was quite a nice type, too. It was just her bad luck that she had to die with the others. 75,000 Jews were shot there.
German historian Andrej Angrick has established in his Besatzungspolitik und Massenmord: die Einsatzgruppe D in der südlichen Sowjetunion 1941-1943 that the Einsatzgruppen often raped Jewish women before they shot them.
As to your question how they could sleep with women they considered inferior: this has happened throughout time, from slave owners sleeping with their slaves in the Americas, to European colonisers sleeping with African, Asian, and indigenous Australian women.
There is a reference to a sexual relationship involving a guard from reserve police battalion 101 (a ghetto patrol group). This man received a year in a "punishment" camp. Another member contracted a std from a Jewish prisoner but the relationship was covered up. The fact that there was a law forbidding relationships points to the prevalence of such relationships.
Source: Ordinary Men by Christopher Browning
I am not a historian, but just wanted to point out your misconception where you phrased it "if you wanted to be a guard at a concentration camp." Those weren't volunteer only staffs. They didn't all choose to be on that duty. Possibly not even a majority were volunteer, but that would have to come from someone actually educated in the topic. I just know that at least some people were just assigned there without choosing it.
It's covered quite a bit in Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing and Dying: The Secret Second World War Tapes of German POWs. It says that often the guards would kill the Jewish women that they had sex with in order to avoid getting found out etc.
Relationships or more likely the case, sexual abuse of female prisoners was rampant, as others have suggested almost a norm. Abuse of women was encouraged by SS. There are many counts of women who has their breast nearly flogged off by the SS for the pervese sexual pleasure of seeing it happen^1.
Dr. Gisella Perl was know as the Angel and Abortionist in the Auschwitz death camp^1 survived the camps and spoke extensively on the subject after the war(she remains one of my personal heroes and one the most important advocate for women's sexual reproductive rights in the 20th century).
In her 1948 book "I Was a Doctor in Auschwitz." (North Stratford: Ayer Company, Incorporated,) she stated pregnant women "...were beaten with clubs and whips, torn by dogs, dragged around by their hair and kicked in the stomach with heavy German boots. Then, when they collapsed, they were thrown into the crematory - alive."
When she first arrived she was told by Dr. Josef Mengele^2 that if any women found themselves pregnant that they were reported to him immediately because "he would send them to another camp, for milk, for better nutrition ^3"
She later learned they were send directly to the gas champers or to be [experimented on only to be burned alive ^4] (http://www.nytimes.com/1982/11/15/style/out-of-death-a-zest-for-life.html) afterwards throwing two lives into crematorium. She decided after learning this that there would never be another pregnant women at Auschwitz^4.
Dr. Perl performed countless abortions (thought to be in the 3000 range) during her time in Auschwitz. She did this so that the women would live and be able to bare further children. If the babies were too far along she broke the amnionic sac and manually dilated the cervix to induce labour and delivered the premature infant which then usually died. In cases where the infant didn't die, it was often smothered or held in a pail of water until it stopped breathing in order to keep it hidden from the SS. This was much better than watching the child starve to death (Source^5 & Source^6)
So we know that many, many women were raped and otherwise abused in concentration/death camps. The number of true relationships are unknown. Abuse of women was often celebrated among the Nazi and the SS, while love was hidden as it would have been forbidden(as other users have spoken to). Rape is about power and what greater power did the Nazi's have over women then to rape them, impregnate them and then torture and kill them for being pregnant?
I hope this gives you a better picture of the horrors of the camps for women. While I know personal antidotes are discouraged I have provided enough evidence to add this. I had an elderly female client who was in a concentration camp during the war(I never got exactly which one, but she had a number on her arm). By the time I met her she was quiet confused, and used to cry and beg us not to hurt her when she had to change her diaper. Her husband (also a concentration camp survivor) later told me that she had be raped "Almost every day" while she was imprisoned in the camps and us touching her would bring back those memories.
To learned A LOT more about Dr. Gisella Perl I recommend visiting Source 1 written by Anne S. Reamey as part of the Holocaust history projects.
I'd like to respond to the part of your question that asks why a "proud Arian" would willingly "degrade" themselves by having sex with an inferior race.
As estherke mentioned above, this happens regularly throughout time: slave owners raping their slaves, European colonizers raping indigenous women, etc. The mentality of Victorian travellers to the Middle East may partially help illuminate the reasoning behind this kind of activity for you. Edward Said writes in Orientalism about English men travelling to foreign countries, particularly Egypt, and indulging in sex tourism. The Victorian mindset, generally, was such that English society believed (or liked thinking) that English women were chaste and unsullied, not sensual; in Victorian society, the sole function of intercourse was, ideally, to fulfill the intentions of a Christian union (i.e. have children), and was not meant to be pleasurable. "Orientals," as Middle Easterners were then called, were understood by the Victorians to belong to societies that not only permitted sex for pleasure, but actively encouraged it. Both Oriental men and women were licentious, highly sexual, and depraved, indulging in sexual activities that weren't limited to straightforward intercourse but included orgies, homosexuality, anal and oral sex, and all kinds of "depraved" acts. This was their nature, a nature inferior to the English character. Many Victorian men travelled to North Africa and Western Asia under the pretence of becoming educated and developing their careers-- Benjamin Disraeli referred to the Orient as a "career," which Said takes a great deal of time to illuminate-- but took time apart to visit brothels and indulge in varying degrees of consensual sex and rape. This was a sort of "sowing wild oats" for Victorian men: Oriental women were already godless and totally lewd, so no harm done there, and one could marry a chaste, respectable English woman upon returning to England with the desire to debase her extinguished.
The depiction of Middle Eastern people as totally sexually depraved came up a lot in Victorian popular fiction and pornography (the novel The Lustful Turk is a good example, as is Richard Marsh's The Beetle, the villainess of which is the priestess of an orgiastic, human-sacrificing Egyptian cult; The Beetle was much more popular in its time than Dracula), and the volume of horror literature at the turn of the century that locates its anxieties within social degeneration and terrifyingly sensual Oriental villains, or characters experiencing sexual trauma in the Orient, speaks to just how many Englishmen were having sex with members of an "inferior" race and what Victorians were afraid the consequences of this might be. (A really fascinating read on Orientalism, sexual depravity, and horror is Kelly Hurley's The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the Fin de Siécle, which discusses The Beetle at length.)
My point here is to show the mindset of men who believe themselves superior to their sexual partners and/or rape victims: debasing those women doesn't matter, because they are inferior; might as well take out your depraved desires on them, because they are already worthless, and so your actions will have no effect on the purity of women of your own race. This is not sex in the sense of physical intimacy between equals, but an expression of perceived differences in physical power. The idea of having a "favourite," or in other words, a woman who one repeatedly visits for sex and perhaps does favours for-- doesn't change that.
Did guards volunteer or were they drafted to be guards at prison camps?
Because sex through force or coercion is rape. Rape is not about sex. It is about power. The power to take what would never be given willingly or to show dominance over the inferior.
There is a book written on the topic. It's called 'Whispering Birches'. It describes a character called Franz Wolff and Elena Prikaznova. The story seems to have the inside track as the guard saves the Elena's sister from the gas chamber. It also said that he saved her by hiding her when she contracted typhus fever. It seems that the inmates were sent to an infirmary where the chances of survival were pretty low. The guard apparently hid several members of Canada???
Has it occurred to you that not all SS officers chose to go to the camps. When men signed up for SS, they believed that they were joining an elite army force. When these men were wounded they ended up in the camps. Only then were they confronted with the horror of shows like Auschwitz. It's all very well to tell everybody you hate Jews, but when they were confronted with killing such people some revolted against the system.