After meeting with professor Vider, I have been able to identify that one of the weak points of my research is my lack of specific thesis statement or guiding research question. I feel more emboldened to write about how prostitution was used by the SS in Nazi concentration camps and what it accomplished/contributed to within the camp. For instance, I could start with explaining the SS's original justification for camp prostitution vs what forced prostitution ended up doing to the prisoner stratification of Auschwitz I and Auschwitz Monowitz. Auschwitz I and Auschwitz Monowitz are two former concentration camps which had brothels. Most of my primary sources relate to the brothels at these places, so I plan to limit my historical analysis to these two camps.
I think I need to get a better grasp of what a history thesis is/can be. I have so much research that I'm struggling to detangle it and create a coherent argument from the historical fact. In a simple sentence without much academic depth, I want to write about how the SS intentionally used prostitution not just to encourage productivity, but to humiliate and control each party involved, leaving them the ones in the best position of power. For example, consider this question: how does the SS' treatment and use of sex/uality mean for each party within the concentration camp? A trip to the camp brothel is literally a reward given to highly-productive prisoners (so for male prisoners, sex is presented to them as a reward, not as a biological right). However, a trip to the brothel is reserved specifically for the higher-ranking prisoners, which denies sex to the male prisoners who don't qualify for the reward, like Jewish prisoners (which can also easily raise the point that by denying Jewish men access to sex, the SS are invalidating their humanity as much as their masculinity). For the forced prostitutes however, sex is expected of them. They are expected to produce sex in a constant and routine manner, which reminds me a lot of how female livestock are expected to produce quantities of milk, eggs, etc., for a farmer. Sex (and maybe more so the female body, is treated as a limitless/inexhaustible resource, unlike food which was always scarce for prisoners. The monotonous and systematic use of female bodies for sex acts as a way for the SS to demean, dehumanize, and devalue female prisoners while in the same breath, the sex their bodies provide is presented at a much higher value to the male prisoners (if that makes sense).
I'm struggling to create a specific guiding question for this summary. I really want to show the way the SS, using prostitution manipulated sex for male and female prisoners-- but was it to achieve a specific purpose? A higher production yield perhaps? But there's evidence that the brothels did not influence, much less encourage, the productivity of male prisoners. The SS would have discovered that early on which begs the question why they kept using prostitution as a reward or incentive. Was it to have control over the biological functions of their prisoners and exert even more control over them, dehumanizing the prisoners in the process?
Writing the research/thesis question is always the hardest for me and I'm 100% struggling here to form something coherent. Any more suggestions and advice would be very helpful. I've found plenty of primary documents but finding related secondary sources has been hard since this topic is so obscure, especially in non-German scholarship. I wonder if I could pull from scholarship about Korean Comfort Women in WWII for added secondary analysis? I added Herzog's Sex after Facism to my list of books.