On the brothel at Auschwitz and the fragility of history

[nancylebov]

http://liz-marcs.livejournal.com/328621.html

An account of how the recent ill-named rpg mess led to researching the brothel at Auschwitz and establishing that most of what people thought they knew about it was porn fiction myth wrong.

It doesn't surprise me that there are wrong bits and missing pieces in the historical record-- it's hard to find out what's going on, and wishful thinking and preconceptions make it harder.

Link thanks to rm.

Addendum:: twistedchick told me that the male brothel was mentioned in Uris' Exodus (pub. 1983), a very popular novel about the founding of Israel.

Comments

[autopope.livejournal.com]

The bit about the brothel full of pretty boys?

That figures. The Nazis were more than a bit fucked-up about sex in general, with their exaggerated machismo and the suppression of Ernst Rohm's more flamboyant Brownshirts. That they were sending gays to the camps at the same time they were raping boys should be no surprise.

Except that whenever I think I've got a handle on how twisted they are, it turns out that the truth was even worse ...

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

If I understand your question, that wasn't what I was thinking of. I was thinking that the idea that the brothel was full of beautiful non-Jewish women chosen for the job by high-ranking Nazis was nonsense if you thought about it, but it sounded so cool (and lowered the embarrassment factor for Jews) that no one thought about it.

[lpetrazickis.livejournal.com]

It would be consistent with American prison rape dynamics. It's similar to Roman notions (http://www.obscure.org/obscene-latin/vocabulary.html) and is outlined quite lucidly in the second Harold & Kumar movie.