Part 1

So, this CNN article cited here suffers from the usual problems of science reporting in a lot of media, chiefly that some of the things stated there are a bit overstated.

First of all, Lawrence Langer has written a lot about Holocaust memory and survivor testimony but to call him a preeminent Holocaust scholar is a bit too much in my opinion. As a PhD and professor of English he has contributed to the field of commemoration and testimony but his contributions as far as historical research into the topic per se go are not that prominent.

Secondly, Sonja Maria Hedgepeth and Rochelle G. Saidel's book "Sexual Violence against Jewish women in the Holocaust" has indeed been an important contribution to the field but also wasn't as revolutionary as the article makes it out to be. Studies in German on the camp in Uckermark for teenage girls or more generally a wave of studies of the female SS personnel from the mid-2000s forward have dealt a lot with sexual politics and sexual violence and Nazi oppression as have a number of more recent and more groundbreaking studies of Anna Hájková who wrote "Sexual Barter in Times of Genocide: Negotiating the Sexual Economy of the Theresienstadt Ghetto," in: Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, (vol. 38, no. 3) spring 2013, Recipient of the Catharine Stimpson Prize for Outstanding Feminist Scholarship 2013 or Doris L. Bergen who frequently wrote about the topic as far back as 2003 and Atina Grossmann.

Also, Langer in his downplaying of sexual violence being part of the Holocaust experience is pretty much in the minority as far as I am aware because older scholars of generations from before the 1980s/early 90s have – as far as I am aware – largely ignored the subject despite at least virtual knowledge that it was something that occurred. The most likely reasons for that I will go into later but I want to go into what Langer says above first a bit.

Langer says. "To make rape a significant part of the narrative, the numbers would have to be in the thousands or tens of thousands. We will never know how often it happened."

While the second part of that statement is true – as in we might never know how often it happened – in terms of the first part, we can get at least an initial estimate. Not only does the article mention at least 17.000 memoirs that point to sexual violence but as I have gone into in this post, the frequency of sexual violence enacted by the Wehrmacht especially in Poland and the Soviet Union is just staggering, not just in the face of what little numbers we can construct with certainty (traveling and camp brothels e.g.) but also in terms of how newer scholarship deals with the issue of consent, namely that consent as a process between two adults of roughly equal power within the relationship was massively curbed by the general situation surrounding a war tie occupation that by its very nature creates an imbalanced relationship of power between men with arms and women forced to navigate a physically, socially and other wise extremely hazardous environment. So, while we may never know the exact number, many scholars speak of at least 3-4 million cases of rape committed by the Wehrmacht in the Soviet Union, many of which certainly involved Jewish and other women (and potentially men though that is even harder to research) as part of the process of victimization during the Holocaust.

Now, as I wrote above, from my reading of the scholarship, the issue of sexual violence is one that starts to appear in academic literature on the Holocaust and Nazi persecution as a subject of research in the 1980s at its earliest and is before that largely not addressed by scholarship but rather simply ignored (at least that is my strong impression of German language scholarship, maybe /u/kieslowskifan might know more?).

And it is not like the issue was completely unknown at the time – there is a whole Israeli genre of literature called "Stalagim" that heavily deals with sexual violence in the camps – albeit in a very pulp manner – which goes to show that the subject was out there and had to be dealt with at least somehow. But I'll start with the most obvious reason why this subject has been ignored for such a long time:

The vast majority of academic historians of earlier generations of Holocaust scholars – and all academic historians really – were men – a dynamic that has recently made progress in terms of new PhDs but has still not caught up in terms of institutional representation (as in professorships and so forth) overall. Now, men, whether in academia or not, were back then and are still today massively socially conditioned to regard their own life experiences as the default, both in terms of the society that surrounds them and also, as is relevant in this case, in terms of looking back into and researching history. As I said, this is still the case today but was even more so before the rise of feminist and women's studies perspective and theories in academia and hence, sexual violence, the experience of which is strongly socially coded female (because it is an experience that is in fact an overwhelmingly female one when it comes to being the victim of sexual violence), simply didn't figure into their thinking as an experience that existed and that is worthwhile researching. You can even see this in Langer's position: The fact that he can't – despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary – not imagine there having been thousands or even tens of thousands of cases of sexual violence speaks volumes as to how he views a male perspective as the default one in history.

And it also bears mentioning in connection to this point that the issue of sexual violence as a part of history of social experience of women overall and not just in terms of the Holocaust, had been ignored by academia for a long time and basically until feminism and women's studies as theoretical frameworks and approaches came along.

The same, in an even more specific manner, is true for what kind of testimony of survivors of Nazi oppression were socially privileged – as in heard and noticed by society at large – for a long time. In the immediate aftermath of the war, continuing a tradition started during the war where there was public knowledge of the killing of the Jews but it was relegated to the back pages of newspapers – so much so that the NYT issued an apology for that in 2001 –, it was male political victims that the public focus was on, who wrote memoirs, and whose narratives became the default victim of the Nazis narrative in post-war Europe (and stayed that in the socialist countries). The Holocaust, as in the experience of Jews in being relegated to Ghettos, systematically killed in camps and so forth only really started to get public attention with the Eichmann trial and only really became part of the public Western conscious at large with the 1979 TV miniseries Holocaust.

And with that came another important shift in academia: The focus on every day lives and individual experiences of both perpetrators and victims of the Holocaust. Before this point in time, academic history had been extremely structuralist in its approach, meaning it focused on social and political big structures rather than individual experiences of actual humans. The functionalist-intentionalist debate of the 70s and early 80s is a perfect example for this: It almost treats individual historical actors not as actual human beings with choice but rather as either slaves to an ideology with a single minded purpose or automatons within a structural system. But once academia at large underwent methodological and theoretical innovations along the lines of micro-history or cultural history started, victims' and perpetrators' individual experiences started to become more important in the overall focus of research. Christopher Browning's works and Saul Friedländer's writing on integrated history were really what set this in motion.

And what also changed was the way the public started to engage with survivors and their testimonies themselves: It was in the 80s and 90s that such a thing like survivor testimonies outside of courtrooms – in schools, memorial sites and so forth – really started to become a thing. The linked article mentions that it was the Bosnian wars and the public reporting on sexual violence as a weapon of war that changed what survivors were able to discuss – and this is absolutely true. There had been a long standing taboo surrounding public testimony about sexual violence for survivors because the social context around them regarded this topic as controversial and taboo. But it also needs to be taken into account that such a thing like survivor's testimony as a social and political project on a grander scale only started in the 80s and 90s – before that neither academia nor the public had been willing or interested to listen really.

Part 1

So, this CNN article cited here suffers from the usual problems of science reporting in a lot of media, chiefly that some of the things stated there are a bit overstated.

First of all, Lawrence Langer has written a lot about Holocaust memory and survivor testimony but to call him a preeminent Holocaust scholar is a bit too much in my opinion. As a PhD and professor of English he has contributed to the field of commemoration and testimony but his contributions as far as historical research into the topic per se go are not that prominent.

Secondly, Sonja Maria Hedgepeth and Rochelle G. Saidel's book "Sexual Violence against Jewish women in the Holocaust" has indeed been an important contribution to the field but also wasn't as revolutionary as the article makes it out to be. Studies in German on the camp in Uckermark for teenage girls or more generally a wave of studies of the female SS personnel from the mid-2000s forward have dealt a lot with sexual politics and sexual violence and Nazi oppression as have a number of more recent and more groundbreaking studies of Anna Hájková who wrote "Sexual Barter in Times of Genocide: Negotiating the Sexual Economy of the Theresienstadt Ghetto," in: Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, (vol. 38, no. 3) spring 2013, Recipient of the Catharine Stimpson Prize for Outstanding Feminist Scholarship 2013 or Doris L. Bergen who frequently wrote about the topic as far back as 2003 and Atina Grossmann.

Also, Langer in his downplaying of sexual violence being part of the Holocaust experience is pretty much in the minority as far as I am aware because older scholars of generations from before the 1980s/early 90s have – as far as I am aware – largely ignored the subject despite at least virtual knowledge that it was something that occurred. The most likely reasons for that I will go into later but I want to go into what Langer says above first a bit.

Langer says. "To make rape a significant part of the narrative, the numbers would have to be in the thousands or tens of thousands. We will never know how often it happened."

While the second part of that statement is true – as in we might never know how often it happened – in terms of the first part, we can get at least an initial estimate. Not only does the article mention at least 17.000 memoirs that point to sexual violence but as I have gone into in this post, the frequency of sexual violence enacted by the Wehrmacht especially in Poland and the Soviet Union is just staggering, not just in the face of what little numbers we can construct with certainty (traveling and camp brothels e.g.) but also in terms of how newer scholarship deals with the issue of consent, namely that consent as a process between two adults of roughly equal power within the relationship was massively curbed by the general situation surrounding a war tie occupation that by its very nature creates an imbalanced relationship of power between men with arms and women forced to navigate a physically, socially and other wise extremely hazardous environment. So, while we may never know the exact number, many scholars speak of at least 3-4 million cases of rape committed by the Wehrmacht in the Soviet Union, many of which certainly involved Jewish and other women (and potentially men though that is even harder to research) as part of the process of victimization during the Holocaust.

Now, as I wrote above, from my reading of the scholarship, the issue of sexual violence is one that starts to appear in academic literature on the Holocaust and Nazi persecution as a subject of research in the 1980s at its earliest and is before that largely not addressed by scholarship but rather simply ignored (at least that is my strong impression of German language scholarship, maybe /u/kieslowskifan might know more?).

And it is not like the issue was completely unknown at the time – there is a whole Israeli genre of literature called "Stalagim" that heavily deals with sexual violence in the camps – albeit in a very pulp manner – which goes to show that the subject was out there and had to be dealt with at least somehow. But I'll start with the most obvious reason why this subject has been ignored for such a long time:

The vast majority of academic historians of earlier generations of Holocaust scholars – and all academic historians really – were men – a dynamic that has recently made progress in terms of new PhDs but has still not caught up in terms of institutional representation (as in professorships and so forth) overall. Now, men, whether in academia or not, were back then and are still today massively socially conditioned to regard their own life experiences as the default, both in terms of the society that surrounds them and also, as is relevant in this case, in terms of looking back into and researching history. As I said, this is still the case today but was even more so before the rise of feminist and women's studies perspective and theories in academia and hence, sexual violence, the experience of which is strongly socially coded female (because it is an experience that is in fact an overwhelmingly female one when it comes to being the victim of sexual violence), simply didn't figure into their thinking as an experience that existed and that is worthwhile researching. You can even see this in Langer's position: The fact that he can't – despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary – not imagine there having been thousands or even tens of thousands of cases of sexual violence speaks volumes as to how he views a male perspective as the default one in history.

And it also bears mentioning in connection to this point that the issue of sexual violence as a part of history of social experience of women overall and not just in terms of the Holocaust, had been ignored by academia for a long time and basically until feminism and women's studies as theoretical frameworks and approaches came along.

The same, in an even more specific manner, is true for what kind of testimony of survivors of Nazi oppression were socially privileged – as in heard and noticed by society at large – for a long time. In the immediate aftermath of the war, continuing a tradition started during the war where there was public knowledge of the killing of the Jews but it was relegated to the back pages of newspapers – so much so that the NYT issued an apology for that in 2001 –, it was male political victims that the public focus was on, who wrote memoirs, and whose narratives became the default victim of the Nazis narrative in post-war Europe (and stayed that in the socialist countries). The Holocaust, as in the experience of Jews in being relegated to Ghettos, systematically killed in camps and so forth only really started to get public attention with the Eichmann trial and only really became part of the public Western conscious at large with the 1979 TV miniseries Holocaust.

And with that came another important shift in academia: The focus on every day lives and individual experiences of both perpetrators and victims of the Holocaust. Before this point in time, academic history had been extremely structuralist in its approach, meaning it focused on social and political big structures rather than individual experiences of actual humans. The functionalist-intentionalist debate of the 70s and early 80s is a perfect example for this: It almost treats individual historical actors not as actual human beings with choice but rather as either slaves to an ideology with a single minded purpose or automatons within a structural system. But once academia at large underwent methodological and theoretical innovations along the lines of micro-history or cultural history started, victims' and perpetrators' individual experiences started to become more important in the overall focus of research. Christopher Browning's works and Saul Friedländer's writing on integrated history were really what set this in motion.

And what also changed was the way the public started to engage with survivors and their testimonies themselves: It was in the 80s and 90s that such a thing like survivor testimonies outside of courtrooms – in schools, memorial sites and so forth – really started to become a thing. The linked article mentions that it was the Bosnian wars and the public reporting on sexual violence as a weapon of war that changed what survivors were able to discuss – and this is absolutely true. There had been a long standing taboo surrounding public testimony about sexual violence for survivors because the social context around them regarded this topic as controversial and taboo. But it also needs to be taken into account that such a thing like survivor's testimony as a social and political project on a grander scale only started in the 80s and 90s – before that neither academia nor the public had been willing or interested to listen really.