Were there child brothels in germany before WW 2

1. The context: booming sex markets in Weimar Berlin and shifting policy

Post‑World War I urbanization and social upheaval produced a visible sex economy in cities like Berlin, where red‑light districts, regulated brothels and an expanded market for paid sex were well documented by historians studying the era’s cultural life and public health reforms ^{[1] [3]}; the Weimar sex‑reform movement even produced laws aimed at decriminalizing and medically supervising prostitution, such as the 1927 Law for Combatting Venereal Diseases that shifted policing and medical treatment away from punitive measures ^[3].

2. Reports of underage sex work: claims, sources, and their limits

A handful of secondary and popular accounts assert the existence of “telephone girls” allegedly aged 12–17 and other forms of child prostitution in Weimar Berlin — vivid claims appear in popular histories and compilations that describe chemists pimping young prostitutes or phone‑ordered minors ^{[2] [4]} — but the supplied materials do not include archival prosecutions, police registers or systematic contemporary municipal records that would conclusively document organized child brothels on a national scale ^{[2] [1]}.

3. Academic scholarship, propaganda and sensationalism: separating evidence from myth

Academic work stresses that debates about prostitution in the 1920s were shaped by reformers, public hygiene campaigns and also by propagandistic discourses about sexual danger and the victimization of women and children; historians caution that wartime and interwar propaganda often amplified fears of child sexual victimization for political ends, complicating claims drawn from sensational press or polemical sources ^{[5] [1]}.

4. The Nazi period and concentration‑camp brothels: different abuses, not clear evidence of child brothels

During the Nazi era there are documented instances of brothels established in camps and regulated military brothels, and scholarship documents the forced prostitution of tens of thousands of women under the Third Reich’s systems of control ^{[6] [7]}; survivor testimony and later studies note extreme degradation including very young‑looking, emaciated women, but the supplied reporting does not provide archival proof that Nazi or military brothels systematically recruited or operated as child‑specific brothels prior to or during WWII ^{[6] [8]}.

5. Biased and ideologically driven narratives must be treated cautiously

Some online and polemical sources included in the set advance conspiratorial or antisemitic framings linking sexual “decadence” to specific groups and political outcomes; these sources (which frame Weimar sexual life as proof of moral collapse) mix moralizing claims with dubious generalizations and are not reliable on their own without corroborating archival scholarship ^{[9] [10]}.

6. Conclusion — what can responsibly be stated from the supplied reporting

The supplied reporting supports the conclusion that child prostitution was reported and discussed in Weimar Berlin and appears in both popular and some secondary accounts (notably stories about “telephone girls” and street‑level exploitation), but it does not deliver definitive archival documentation of widespread, institutionalized child brothels across Germany before World War II; the historical record presented here is a mix of verified reforms and public health records (adult prostitution), compelling but uneven eyewitness and popular claims about minors, and scholarly warnings about propaganda and exaggeration ^{[3] [1] [2] [5]}.