Erwin Blumenfeld (1897-1969), became a world-famous fashion photographer, for American Vogue, Life and the fashion magazine Harper’s Bazar. His parents were Albert Blumenfeld and Emma Blumenfeld, born Cohn. He received his first camera in 1908. Erwin was a 19-year-old Jewish conscript in the German army in France in 1917. He was trained as an ambulance driver and later put to work as the administrator of Feldfreudenhaus 209, a brothel run by the German army in the French town of Valenciennes. His experiences are described in his wonderful autobiography Durch tausendjährige Zeit (1976), published in the Netherlands in 1980 under the title Spiegelbeeld .
A joyless alley. Windows nailed shut, a public house:Feldfreudenhaus 209. In front of the closed door, a sad queue of tired soldiers ,waiting in group formation. As the bookkeeper of the field brothel, he was behind an open cash book on a narrow lectern near the entrance. Eighteen ladies worked in the house, six of them exclusively for the gentlemen officers from the rank of lieutenant upwards. Whereas the soldiers ‘ wives’ were required to satisfy a minimum of thirty men, an officer’s wife’s daily work was limited to twenty-five. In addition, the officers were entitled to condoms, which were rare curiosities due to rubber scarcity (after use, they were blown up like balloons, dried on the clothesline and sold again as new). The business started very pleasantly at ten in the morning; the end coincided with the closing time of the pubs. Far from the battlefield, he received, because he was important for the front, double front rations: double booze, artificial honey and blood sausage. his work was simple, but like everything in the house not completely satisfying. He had to enter the name and number of the girl, the room number and the time of the beginning and end of each so-called fact after the serial number on the first page of the current account book, on which’ God be with us’ was written in decorative letters. After that the unit sum of four marks received and its distribution, debit and credit: one mark for the girl, one mark for the owner of the building, Madame Duval (la taulière) and the remaining two marks (in red ink!) for the Red Cross, which bore the medical moral responsibility for this military undertaking, for which the state-approved deputy field physician Hirschfeld pinched each girl’s buttocks every morning. From time to time, he also subjected the soldiers to a quick inspection, during which he gladly turned a blind eye.
Every evening ,the equivalent of over five hundred transactions in the book. A thousand marks to Madame Duval for further distribution, the rest was picked up by three men of the Ortskommandantur with the bayonet on their rifle. He was ike the manager of a department store, I felt more comfortable the higher the turnover.
He had a small side-line income by playing the first ten bars of Beethoven’s Overture Egmont on a piano with few’ strings for the waiting lovers, followed by Walter Kollo’s Pauline geht tanzen. And later on he even played the French song : Toutes les femmes de la rue des Juifs sont de belles cocottes.
Towels, were part of Madame Duval’s responsibility . She charged the girls ten cents per towel, which encouraged thrift. The other hygienic measures in this enterprise lay largely in the practised hands of the seventy-seven-year-old Madame Duranruelle For there was no water supply in the rue des Juifs. Instead, the village idiot commuted between the brothel and the public pump. On the pump hung a sign: ‘Eau non potable. Kein Trinkwasser.
The ordinary girls received clean water after the fifth customer, the officers’ wives’ after the third. Madame Duranruelle emptied the used buckets with a vigorous swing between the legs of the soldiers waiting at the door, who seemed to find this change amusing. One should not forget that these heroes had been standing face to face with death for months, but not with creatures of the female sex.
In order to increase the turnover, the military authorities, with good business sense, had turned the initially spacious rooms of the brothel into small love-houses with wooden walls. Not much bigger, but much dirtier than doghouses. The Ortskommandant quoted a teacher at the Kötschenbroda grammar school as saying, “Even the smallest hut has room for a loving couple. On the narrow iron bed lay a half-empty straw bag on an even more clammy sea-grass mattress, thin and damp, without bedclothes.
The water bucket stood in an ammunition box, which served as a bedside table, on which a candle was languishing. On the wall, a nail to hang the uniform, a statue of a saint (the girl’s patron saint), or a pornographic picture postcard, or both. Below the room number in the door was a peephole, through which one could check whether everything inside was as it should be.
In general, the men behaved better than the officers, who drank champagne and played the man of the world, which led to terrible things. While the men wanted to be alone with the girls, the sophisticated officers liked to play games. In case of an emergency, I had to warn the military police by means of a secret bell. Of course, the officers were always right.
Source : https://www.wereldoorlog1418.nl/