Virtual Book & Author: The Concentration Camp Brothel — Forced Sexual Labor Under Nazi Rule 

For decades, one of the darkest chapters of Nazi persecution remained buried in silence, its victims erased twice: first by their tormentors, then by history itself. 

Beginning in 1942, Heinrich Himmler ordered the establishment of brothels in ten major concentration camps, including Auschwitz, Dachau, and Buchenwald. The SS recruited women prisoners from Ravensbrück and Auschwitz-Birkenau through false promises and coercion, forcing them into sexual slavery. In this landmark work, Berlin historian Dr. Robert Sommer breaks that silence, restoring name and story to more than two hundred women whose suffering went unacknowledged for generations. 

Drawing upon a decade of archival research across seventy repositories and interviews with survivors, Sommer has identified nearly eighty percent of the women trapped in this system. Few had been sex workers. The Concentration Camp Brothel is the first comprehensive examination of how forced sexual labor functioned as an instrument of Nazi biopolitics: bodily exploitation in service of racial ideology and prisoner control. 

Join Dr. Sommer as he confronts this long-suppressed history and reveals why understanding it remains essential to grasping the full scope of the Holocaust. A live Q&A will follow. 

Registration required.  Free to the public.