I was curious to know how the bathrooms were like at the Nazi concentration camps during the World War 2. Was there even any bathrooms and were they given toilet paper? Also were women given any sanitary products?
Ps: i am not a native English speaker so sorry for my broken English
This gets at a broader question of daily life in concentration camps, as well as how disease and forced lack of sanitation were used by the Nazis as a method of both torture and ultimately murder. Before I start I want to say that the conditions in each concentration camp, labor camp, death camp, and ghetto varied throughout the period of the Holocaust and were not uniform to start with.
To start with your question on sanitary products for women. These were not provided in Auschwitz, or in other concentration camps. Women who were menstruating on arrivial often faced humiliation as is recalled by survivor Noemi Ban in her book "Sharing is Healing." However, many women found that they quickly lost their menstrual cycle, and most of those who had been previously incarcerated in a ghetto had already stopped menstruating. There were rumors at the time that the Nazis gave women medication in their food to stop their cycles, however no evidence of this has been found and most scholars think it is most likely that women stopped menstruating due to a combination of malnutrition and extreme physical and psychological stress. In his paper "Togetherness and Isolation" Jonathon Friedman notes that women found losing their cycles quite traumatic, young women and girls in particular feared the starvation would render them sterile, and it is possible some were.
There were toilet facilities in most camps, however they were very very inadequate and things like soap and toilet paper were not provided. Sometimes toilets were essentially outdoor trenches, at other times they were rows of drop latrines as can be seen in some barracks of Auschwitz I. Latrines and toilets were often described as overflowing, and there were always more people waiting to use the facilities than there were facilities to use. For example in one section of Birkenau there were 4 toilet blocks of 58 seats each for a section of 62 barracks holding between a few hundred and 1000 people each.
These conditions were designed to be inhumane, dehumanizing, and deadly. Not only did people quickly lose sense of dignity and humanity, but it perpetuated the guard's belief about the inferiority of Jews. It also perpetuated one of the Nazis greatest weapons of extermination: disease. When we talk about disease and the Holocaust it needs to be talked about as a weapon because the conditions of camps and ghettos were designed to kill through disease, it was not accidental. Diseases like dysentery and typhoid were spread by unsanitary facilities, and typhus was spread by lice. The conditions in which prisoners were forced to live were designed to encourage both, and in the job of killing through disease they were enormously effective. For example in Bergen-Belsen some 13,000 people died after liberation because they were already deathly ill with typhus and/or dysentery and Allied medical care came too late.
http://auschwitz.org/en/history/life-in-the-camp/
https://www.theholocaustexplained.org/the-camps/ss-concentration-camp-system/
"Auschwitz: Not Long Ago, Not Far Away" Robert Jan Van Pelt