Yes, Virginia, Human Beings Can Be Raped by Dogs

(Or so it would appear, least if you're inclined believe the witnesses who are Jews.)

On Facebook, a professor I know with family in Israel, a morally exemplary person as best I can tell—except, as so often is the case with the otherwise-liberal, on this one particular subject—expressed his rage at Nicholas Kristoff’s recent expose of the epidemic of rape by Israeli prison guards against Palestinian detainees, in particular his choice to publish the accounts of those he interviewed concerning “a feat that would be unprecedented in human, nay terrestrial, history, since dogs hitherto have never been successfully trained to rape people, or at least not a single verifiably documented such case exists.”

So, I checked it out.

I learned, very quickly, that there are many accounts of this happening from sources that people of this ilk tend to consider rather unimpeachable: Holocaust survivors. Here’s testimony from a prisoner at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Olga Lengyel, that you can read via the Internet Archive from a 1993 book entitled Different Voices: Women and the Holocaust, on page 129:

“I shall never forget the agony of one mother who told me that she was forced to undress her daughter and to look on while the girl was violated by dogs whom the Nazis had specially trained for this sport. That happened to other young girls. They were compelled to labor in the quarries for twelve or fourteen hours a day. When they dropped from exhaustion their guards' favorite form of amusement was to urge the dogs to attack them."

A Jewish resistance fighter who also ended up in Birkenau, known as Bronislawa Limanowska before she emigrated to Israel and changed her name Bela Ya’ari Hazan, made one of the first testimonies about concentration camp life, in 1945. (Here’s a BBC documentary on her; here’s a Jerusalem Post profile.) Her witness, published in 1991 as the book They Called me Bronislawa, included this account:

“Once while we were laboring in the field, an S.S. man approached one of the girls and dragged her to the nearby forest. She didn’t come back again. They forced her to have sexual relations with a dog. The girl couldn’t stand it, she begged afterwards that they kill her. We heard her screams. The male and female S.S. staff guffawed sadistically about what went on in the forest and added, ‘The dog found itself an excellent pleasure-object.’ We trembled at the thought: who would be the next in line? Scenes like this happened over and over. We began to fear going out to work lest we too would be put to that terrible test. We decided among us, that if another instance of that sort would occur, then our entire Kommando would revolt. We wouldn’t allow them to use the girls for these brutal acts; better we should die than live a moment like that. After the third incident of rape, when they just started dragging the girl away, we began a terrible screaming. We were some twenty girls. Immediately the SS staff who were with us in the field came and hauled us off to punishment in the ‘punishment cell.’ This was a cellar divided into small cells. At the center of each was a crate to use for our bodily wastes. Four girls were shoved into each cell. The space wasn’t sufficient for us to sit down, so we had to remain standing day and night. Once a day we were given food. They kept us like this for four days and four nights. But we had some consolation: that we didn’t allow such acts to happen with us.”

I’ve transcribed also testimony of a survivor named Rachel Hanan, imprisoned at the Duderstadt and Theresienstadt camps, gave this video interview with the USC Shoah foundation. Here is what she says at 1:26:20, right after she describes summary executions for prisoners stealing potatoes:

“Besides that, you know, there were other punishment that they can do to you. Especially, you know, there were those dogs. There were those dogs in the camp, you know, very huge dogs, we were afraid of those dogs more than the Germans, because they were trained, you know, trained to make sex with girls. So if they want to punish you, they will take these horrible big dogs, and they force you, there, to make—whatever. In [one case] it happened that it was a French lady, and she had a beautiful daughter of sixteen. She was really beautiful. And then, you know, they force the girl—I don’t know what she had done wrong—to do that with the dog. The mother was watching. The girl died before the dog was [finished]—was vicious, and big, and whatever. She died on the spot. And the mother, she couldn’t stand it any more. She went and chained herself to the barbed-wire, you know, the electric—and, you know, she died as well.”

**

Then there were the victims of the infamously Nazi known as the “Butcher of Lyon,” for the French city where he was Gestapo commander, infamous in the eyes of history for his sadistic methods of torturing Jews. In Unhealed Wounds: France and the Klaus Barbie Affair (1985) we read on page 94:

"Barbie kept two German shepherd dogs. One was trained to lunge and bite. The other was trained to mount naked women who had first been ordered on their hands and knees. A humiliation that cut deeper than the whip, than having one’s fingernails pulled."

Two years after that book came out, on trial in Lyon for crimes against humanity, Barbie was forced to face his accusers, one of whom, Mario Blardone, according to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s dispatch, “told the court he had seen one defendant try to have a young girl raped by a huge Alsatian dog.” (Blardone “recoiled at the sight of Barbie. ‘This face…I want to look at his eyes, those eyes. Yes, Mr. President, he is the man I testified about.’")

Are these accounts “verifiably documented”? They are, at the very least, strikingly consistent, and at least somewhat convincing. Unless, that is, you want to impute a conspiracy of Holocaust survivors to make them up. Folks claiming not merely that Israeli guards didn’t train dogs to rape prisoners, but that dogs could not possibly have raped prisoners: is that really the hill you want to die on, after reading them?