#UPMTC: Auschwitz and Underwear, by Lucy Adlington
This blog post – part of a series documenting the first Underpinnings Museum Twitter conference – details the presentation from Lucy Adlington, entitled Auschwitz and Underwear: the humanising power of clothes.
Underwear may be associated with structure, seduction and hygiene, but how often do we pay tribute to its humanising element? In extreme circumstances underwear provides dignity and even a sense of individuality. This is demonstrated in the harsh environments of Third Reich ghettos and concentration camps during World War II. Survivor testimonies bear witness to the degradation of being stripped of underwear… and the elation of making or acquiring it in adverse circumstances. An usual but important link between underwear and resistance to dehumanisation.
Lucy Adlington is a dress historian with 20 years’ experience lecturing on social history across the UK. She is author of Stitches in Time, the Story of the Clothes We Wear, Great War Fashion, and the YA novel The Red Ribbon, based on the true stories of the dressmakers of Auschwitz. She is currently working on a history book about women’s lives in the 1940s and researching the Holocaust and textiles.
1 #UPMTC ‘In Auschwitz her old self was stripped from her as surely as her clothing and her hair,’ wrote survivor Charlotte Delbo. Today I explore the deliberate tactic of forced public undressings in WW2 Nazi concentration camps & the humanising power of underwear for inmates pic.twitter.com/H0BFxhMwdy
— Lucy Adlington (@historywardrobe) January 12, 2018
2 #UPMTC Journalist Vassily Grossman wrote of victims
undressing at Treblinka: ‘A naked person immediately loses the strength to resist’.
Stripping of deportees was a calculated shock tactic & humiliation. Olga
Lengyl in Auschwitz recalled: ‘my shame was engulfed in terror’ pic.twitter.com/lWZ7IPpsYa— Lucy Adlington (@historywardrobe) January 12, 2018
3 #UPMTC For female new arrivals, public exposure had added
layers of sexual stigma & vulnerability. A seamstress in Ravensbruk testified:
‘Several women still held on to the last piece of clothing they had taken off …
and draped it over the lower part of their body’ pic.twitter.com/u09BrioLbI— Lucy Adlington (@historywardrobe) January 12, 2018
4 #UPMTC This terrorised Jewish woman from Lvov has no
protection from her anti-Semitic tormentors… or from the modern gaze. Her horror at exposure is made doubly public, even as we observe the image with compassion and anger. pic.twitter.com/VvzEdl5d94— Lucy Adlington (@historywardrobe) January 12, 2018
5 #UPMTC Clothing looted from murdered deportees was
re-distributed to the victims of bomb raids in Germany: perverse charity. One Reich Ministry of Economics document lists of 89,000 sets of women’s underwear plundered from Lublin & Auschwitz. 89,000 lost lives? pic.twitter.com/iHRpZR8nbf— Lucy Adlington (@historywardrobe) January 12, 2018
6 #UPMTC SS staff & Nazi wives in Sobibor and Auschwitz selected seamstress
inmates to make lingerie for them: literally sewing for their lives. The SS also
cherry-picked fancy lingerie from plunder in storage warehouses sometimes known as Department Stores pic.twitter.com/dJeW2eeqCv— Lucy Adlington (@historywardrobe) January 12, 2018
7 #UPMTC Most prisoners surviving selection were denied the
comfort and dignity of underwear. Auschwitz musician Fania Fenelon wrote that
bras, towels and nightdresses were ‘all forbidden things.’ One Jewish woman
risked a beating, sewing a rag bra with a needle made of straw— Lucy Adlington (@historywardrobe) January 12, 2018
8 #UPMTC As privileged prisoners the camp musicians later benefited
– with mixed feelings – from underwear looted from new victims, leaving them
'padding around in pink nightshirts and pomponned satin slippers' These pom pom slippers are on display at Auschwitz museum pic.twitter.com/kG91JyemLt— Lucy Adlington (@historywardrobe) January 12, 2018
9 #UPMTC Added humiliation: prisoners on laundry/sewing
duties had to wash & mend guards’ underwear such as long-johns similar to
this Wehrmacht-issue pair. Some freezing cold factory slave labourers attempted
to make underwear from mortar-bag paper. It was confiscated pic.twitter.com/SB24ASNWjy— Lucy Adlington (@historywardrobe) January 12, 2018
10 #UPMTC Liberated prisoners craved underwear for
re-humanisation. In Auschwitz, Russian soldiers distributed bras from looted
stock. Teenaged survivor Eva Schloss recalled, ‘We were all strangely pleased to be wearing bras after such a long time. We felt civilised again’ pic.twitter.com/UfjlRRFJKh— Lucy Adlington (@historywardrobe) January 12, 2018
11 #UPMTC Survivors returning home were greeted by post-war shortages.
300 women from Ravensbruk arrived in Paris in time to see the first new
underwear on sale in the Galeries Lafayette, which one woman called ‘vital
to a civilised reconstruction of Europe’. Here, 1947 styles pic.twitter.com/cgxmFXdLv0— Lucy Adlington (@historywardrobe) January 12, 2018
12 #UPMTC Over one million looted items of clothing were found in
liberated Auschwitz: mute evidence of mass murder. Garments out-lived their
owners. Holocaust museums now balance truth with respect by not displaying
underwear alongside other concentration camp garments pic.twitter.com/ykjYN060Gv— Lucy Adlington (@historywardrobe) January 12, 2018
We will share each of the conference presentations via its own blog post over the coming weeks. If you’re on Twitter, you can join the discussion via the Underpinnings Museum’s account and the conference hashtag #UPMTC
The header image for this post is of a ‘High Line’ CC41 cotton bra by Kestos (c. 1941), from the Underpinnings Museum collections. Photography by Tigz Rice.