The story of a Gentile Holocaust scholar making up to his Jewish masters in two parts:
History Speaks (aka Matthew Cockerill) has been featured on this site many times before. He used to be noteworthy for actually debating Holocaust revisionists. However, doing so has put his career in jeopardy, so he can’t even do that anymore.
Enough about Cockerill. Let’s address the bold claim he made about systematic forced prostitution.
Yes, there were brothels in the camps. No serious revisionist denies this. However, there is no evidence of the women being abducted and forced into sex work. Let’s consider the following article from CODOH, “Forced Prostitution in State Brothels built by the National Socialists“ by Paul Amner. Amner has already done a lot of the heavy lifting for me. From his article:
Imagine for a minute that the economy of your country was booming so well that your government imported a few million young European men to work in the fields and factories and then, a major war broke out and you and your countrymen were sent off to fight that war and you had to leave your wife or girlfriend at home alone…
Well, not quite alone as there are still a few million good looking healthy young Italians, Frenchmen, Dutchmen, Poles etc. living up the road, only too willing to take your place. It was exactly this scenario that millions of young German men faced after being sent off to fight in WWII.
The German government knew only too well how their men felt about leaving their women, so they decided to offer young ladies-of-the-night the choice between just sitting around in a labor camp or concentration camp doing nothing (because prostitution had been outlawed by the National Socialists), or carrying on with the profession these ladies had chosen to follow before war broke out, i.e., work in a brothel.
The German Ministry for Labor and “Good Ideas” set up brothels for the foreign Laborers in the labor camps and in most concentration camps in order to keep the inmates occupied, satisfied, and away from German women.
You may personally find the idea of government-sanctioned prostitution distasteful, but that doesn’t change the fact that Germany was being pragmatic in their duty to German women. One must also remember that the NSDAP party ended child prostitution. The following is from a Tel Aviv-based website and the title of the article is “17 Reasons Why Germany’s Weimar Republic Was a Party-Lovers Paradise.” Seems that there are Israelis that thought child prostitution was a good time.
There’s also the fact that a country’s military tolerating or supplying prostitution is nothing new or unique to WW2 Germany. In America, the practice went all the way back to the 1800s (see image below). I’m not here to say whether the practice of legalizing prostitution is moral or immoral, but let’s not pretend like this is something only Nazis did.
So where are these claims of kidnapping and forced prostitution even coming from? First, we do have German documents calling for the implementation of brothels. Women that were already in the camp system were assigned to this work detail. According to the German documentation I have access to, there is no indication one way or the other on whether they were forced into this line of work or not. There is also no documentation on how the women were selected for this duty. Unlike Holocaust affirmers, I am not going to assume that the women were forced into sex work and were punished or killed if they did not comply.
This leaves the accusers to rely on dubious reports from the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission and Polish government-in-exile (two organizations known for blatant lies) and post-war testimony. Both the reports and the testimony have no corroborating evidence.
Check out this image and caption from Wikipedia. This is a classic example of deceptive Holocaust-affirming captioning. Presumably they don’t have a photo of the thing they’re talking about so they show you something else and hope that you don’t notice that there are no women on that truck.
Now let’s look at an interesting passage from the orthodox book Hitler’s foreign workers : enforced foreign labor in Germany under the Third Reich, by Herbert, Ulrich (page 220):
The Nazi authorities themselves had given every encouragement to pimps by setting up official brothels for foreign workers. By the end of 1943, there were some 60 such bordellos in Germany with about 600 prostitutes all told, and 50 more were in the course of construction. The SD reported on conditions: “Prostitutes are recruited voluntarily in Paris, Poland or the Protectorate without any special obligations. The earnings of the prostitutes are generally quite substantial, because some of them service up to 50 clients a day.” Illegal prostitution was, however, far more widespread, and could be found in almost every larger camp.” (my emphasis added)
So according to Herbert’s source, the woman were volunteers and were paid. This document from Amner’s article substantiates the fact that they were paid. Amner also brings up the following point: “If the Nazis had decided to force these women to prostitute themselves, they had the power to do it without the women being paid.”
In the end, we have an unsubstantiated claim that is comprised of the same building blocks as most Holocaust claims. They took the existence of the camp brothels and spun them into a narrative held together by government propaganda, and the testimony of those with every reason to lie.
As a little experiment I asked ChatGPT if Cockerill’s statement was true and this is what I got:
Then I asked the same thing after I had spent a good deal of time asking for the evidence and grilling ChatGPT over the provided evidence. It just goes to show that you can’t blindly accept the AI answers. However, unlike with most humans, the AI will accept new information and change its answers accordingly.
