Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

The Enemy Lurking Behind the Front: Controlling Sex in the German Forces Sent to Eastern and Western Europe, 1914–1918

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
Expeditionary Forces in the First World War

  • 247 Accesses

Abstract

Sexual encounters between soldiers and civilians on the fighting fronts became frequent and sustained as the German Army shifted from expedition/invasion to occupation/colonization. The tendency among all authorities was to equate “foreignness,” female sexual promiscuity and threats of venereal disease to military efficiency. Women who could infect soldiers and remove them from the fighting for medical treatment were seen as analogs to snipers and saboteurs, an enemy “lurking” behind the lines. Even worse, they could send the infections homeward with soldiers on leave. This chapter discusses both the issues raised by soldier–civilian sexual liaisons away from the homeland and the efforts by military and civilian authorities to deal with them.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 109.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 139.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD 139.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Bibliography

Archival Sources

  • Archiv des Diakonischen Werkes der Evangelischen Kirche in Deutschland (ADW).

    Google Scholar 

  • Bayerisches Haupstaatsarchiv, Abteilung IV – Kriegsarchiv München (KAM).

    Google Scholar 

  • Bundesarchiv Berlin-Lichterfeld(BAB).

    Google Scholar 

  • Landesarchiv Berlin – Helene-Lange Archiv (LAB HLA).

    Google Scholar 

  • Staatsbibliothek München, Handschriftenabteilung.

    Google Scholar 

Other Sources

  • Audoin-Rouzeau, Stéphane. L’enfant de l’ennemi (1914–1918): Viol, avortement, infanticide pendant la Grande Guerre. Paris: Aubier, 1995.

    Google Scholar 

  • Becker, Annette. “Life in an Occupied Zone: Lille, Roubaix, Tourcoing.” In Facing Armageddon: The First World War Experience, ed. H. Cecil and P. Liddell, 630–41. London: Cooper Press, 1996.

    Google Scholar 

  • Becker, Annette. Les Cicatrices Rouges 14–18: France et Belgiques occupies. Paris: Fayard, 2010.

    Google Scholar 

  • Belsen, Dorothea von. “Report on Moral Standards in Germany.” Unpublished Transcript, 5–6. Landesarchiv Berlin, Helene-Lange Archiv (LAB HLA), Microfilm Reel 3400, Gegen die Prostitution, für sittlich gefährdete Mädchen und Frauen, Schutz der Jugend.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bernstein, Laurie. Sonja’s Daughters: Prostitutes and Their Regulation in Imperial Russia. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.

    Google Scholar 

  • Chickering, Roger. The Great War and Urban Life in Germany: Freiburg, 1914–1918. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

    Google Scholar 

  • Chickering, Roger. Imperial Germany and the Great War, 1914–1918. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

    Google Scholar 

  • Chickering, Roger, and Stig Förster, eds. Great War, Total War: Combat and Mobilization on the Western Front, 1914–1918. Washington, DC: German Historical Institute, 2000.

    Google Scholar 

  • Clark, Anna. Desire: A History of European Sexuality. New York: Routledge, 2012.

    Google Scholar 

  • Corbin, Alain. Women for Hire: Prostitution and Sexuality in France after 1850. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

    Google Scholar 

  • Crouthamel, Jason. An Intimate History of the Front: Masculinity, Sexuality, and German Soldiers in the First World War. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.

    Google Scholar 

  • Daniel, Ute. The War from Within: German Working-Class Women in the First World War. Oxford: Berg Publishers, 1997.

    Google Scholar 

  • Darrow, Margaret. French Women and the French World War: War Stories of the Home Front. Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2000.

    Google Scholar 

  • De Schaepdrijver, Sophie. La Belgique et la Première Guerre mondiale. Brussels: Peter Lang, 2004.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dickinson, Edward Ross. Sex, Freedom, and Power in Imperial Germany, 1880–1914. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fell, Alison S., and Christine Hallett. First World War Nursing: New Perspectives. New York: Routledge, 2013.

    Google Scholar 

  • Feltman, Brian. The Stigma of Surrender: German Prisoners, British Captors, and Manhood in the Great War and Beyond. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fischer, H. C., and E. X. Dubois. Sexual Life During the World War. London: Francis Aldor, 1937.

    Google Scholar 

  • Galzow (Criminal Commissioner). “Die Deutsche Sittenpolizei in Belgien.” Deutschen Strafrechts Zeitung 6, no. 56 (1916). Reprinted in Archiv für Frauenkunde und Eugenetik, September 10, 1916, 278–79.

    Google Scholar 

  • German Atrocities in France: A Translation of the Official Report of the French Commission. London: The Daily Chronicle, 1914.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gibson, Craig. Behind the Front: British Soldiers and French Civilians, 1914–1918. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gibson, Mary. Prostitution and the State in Italy, 1860–1915. New Brunswick, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gillis, John R., Louise Tilly, and David Levine. The European Experience of Declining Fertility, 1850–1970: The Quiet Revolution. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992.

    Google Scholar 

  • Great Britain Committee on Alleged German Outrages. The Truth about German Atrocities—Founded on the Report of the Committee on Alleged German Outrages. London: Parliamentary Recruiting Committee, 1915.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gregory, Adrian. “A Clash of Cultures: The British Press and the Opening of the Great War.” In A Call to Arms: Propaganda, Public Opinion and Newspapers in the Great War, ed. Troy R. E. Paddock, 15–50. Westport: Praeger Publishers, 2004.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gullace, Nicoletta F. “Sexual Violence and Family Honour: British Propaganda and International Law during the First World War.” American Historical Review 102, no. 3 (1997): 714–47.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gullace, Nicoletta F. The Blood of Our Sons: Men, Women, and the Renegotiation of British Citizenship During the Great War. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gullace, Nicoletta F. “Representations of the ‘Hun’ in Britain, North America, Australia and Beyond.” In Picture This: World War I Posters and Visual Culture, ed. Pearl James, 61–78. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hall, Leslie A. “‘War Always Brings it on’: War, STDs, the Military and Civilian Population in Britain, 1850–1950.” In Medicine and Modern Warfare, ed. Roger Cooter, Mark Harrison, and Steve Sturdy, 205–33. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hallett, Christine. Containing Trauma: Nursing Work in the First World War. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010.

    Google Scholar 

  • Harris, Ruth. “The Child of the Barbarian: Rape, Race, and Nationalism in France during World War One.” Past and Present 141, no. 1 (1993): 170–206.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Harris, Victoria. Selling Sex in the Reich: Prostitutes in German Society, 1914–1945. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.

    Google Scholar 

  • Herbert, Ulrich. A History of Foreign Labor in Germany, 1880–1980: Seasonal Workers/Forced Laborers/Guest Workers. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990.

    Google Scholar 

  • Herwig, Holger. The First World War: Germany and Austria-Hungary, 1914–1918. 2nd ed. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014.

    Google Scholar 

  • Herzog, Dagmar, ed. Brutality and Desire. War and Sexuality in Europe’s Twentieth Century. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hinz, Uta. Gefangen im Groβen Krieg. Kriegsgefangenschaft in Deutschland, 1914–1921. Essen: Klartext-Verlags, 2006.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hirschfeld, Magnus. Sittengeschichte des Ersten Weltkrieges. Hanau am Main: Verlag Karl Schustek, 1929.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hirschfeld, Magnus. The Sexual History of the World War. New York: Cadillac Publishing, 1946.

    Google Scholar 

  • Horne, John, and Alan Kramer. German Atrocities, 1914: A History of Denial. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hull, Isabel. Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005.

    Google Scholar 

  • Jones, Heather. Violence Against Prisoners of War in First World War Britain, France and Germany, 1914–1920. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kampf, Antje. “Controlling Male Sexuality: Combating Venereal Disease in the New Zealand Military During Two World Wars.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 17, no. 2 (May 2008): 235–58.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Köhler, Ludwig von. Die Staatsverwaltigung der besetzten Gebiete. Bd. 1 Belgien. Wirtschafts - und Sozialgeschichte des Weltkrieges. Berlin: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1927.

    Google Scholar 

  • Köppen, Edlef. Higher Command. New York: J. Cape and H. Smith, 1931. Translation of Heeresbericht. Berlin-Grunewald: Horen Verlag, 1930.

    Google Scholar 

  • Krüger, Gesine. Kriegsbewältigung und Geschichtsbewusstein: Realität, Deutung und Verarbeitung des deutschen Kolonialkriegs in Namibia 1904 bis 1907. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1999.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kühne, Thomas, and Benjamin Ziemann. Was ist Militärgeschichte? Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2000.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kundrus, Birthe. Kriegerfrauen: Familienpolitik und Geschlechterverhältnisse im Ersten und Zweiten Weltkrieg. Hamburg: Hans Christians Verlag, 1995.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kuss, Susanne. German Colonial Wars and the Context of Military Violence. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017.

    Google Scholar 

  • Liulevicius, Vejas G. War Land on the Eastern Fron: Culture, National Identity, and German Occupation in World War I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

    Google Scholar 

  • Liulevicius, Vejas G. The German Myth of the East: 1800 to the Present. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

    Google Scholar 

  • Maß, Sandra. Weiβe Helden, schwarze Krieger: Zur Geschichte kolonialer Männlichkeit in Deutschland, 1918–1964. Köln: Böhlau, 2006.

    Google Scholar 

  • Majerus, Benoît. “La prostitution à Bruxelles pendant la Grande Guerre: contrôle et pratique.” Crime, History and Society 7, no. 1 (2003): 1–34.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Majerus, Benoît. “Sex in the city. La prostitution à Bruxelles pendant la Grande Guerre (1914–1918).” Cahiers de la Fonderie 32 (2005): 51–54.

    Google Scholar 

  • Majerus, Benoît. Occupations et logiques policières: La police bruxelloise en 1914–1918 et 1940–1945. Brussels: Académie royale de Belgique, Classe des Lettres, 2007.

    Google Scholar 

  • Makepeace, Clare. “Punters and Their Prostitutes: British Soldiers, Masculinity and Maisons Tolérées in the First World War.” In What Is Masculinity? Historical Dynamics from Antiquity, ed. John Arnold and Sean Brady, 413–30. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Makepeace, Clare. “Male Heterosexuality and Prostitution During the Great War.” Cultural and Social History 9, no. 1 (2012): 65–83.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Marks, Sally. “Black Watch on the Rhine: A Study in Propaganda, Prejudice and Prurience.” European Studies Review 13, no. 3 (1983): 297–334.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Michl, Susanne. Im Dienste des “Volkskörpers”: deutsche und französische Ärzte im Ersten Weltkrieg. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2007.

    Google Scholar 

  • Nelson, Robert R. German Soldier Newspapers of the First World War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

    Google Scholar 

  • Orzoff, Andrea. “The Empire Without Qualities: Austro-Hungarian Newspapers and the Outbreak of War in 1914.” In A Call to Arms: Propaganda, Public Opinion, and Newspapers in the Great War, edited by Troy R. E. Paddock, 161–98. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2004.

    Google Scholar 

  • Paddock, Troy R. E. “German Propaganda: The Limits of Gerechtigkeit” In A Call to Arms: Propaganda, Public Opinion and Newspapers in the Great War, ed. Troy R. E. Paddock. Westport: Praeger Publishers, 2004.

    Google Scholar 

  • Proctor, Tammy. Civilians in a World at War, 1914–1918. New York: New York University Press, 2010.

    Google Scholar 

  • Quine, Maria Sophia. Population Politics in Twentieth-Century Europe. London: University of London Press, 1996.

    Google Scholar 

  • Rachamimov, Iris. POWs and the Great War: Captivity on the Eastern Front. Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2002.

    Google Scholar 

  • Rhoades, Michelle. “Renegotiating French Masculinity: Medicine and Venereal Disease During the Great War.” French Historical Studies 29, no. 2 (2006): 293–327.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Richter-Nürnberg, Karl. Weiße Kreuz. Zeitschrift 3. Förderung sittlicher Reinheit unter jungen Männern aller Berufsstände Organ des Sittlichkeits-Bundes vom Weißen Kreuz für Deutschland und Osterreich 22, no. 4 (October 15, 1915): 66–69.

    Google Scholar 

  • Roberts, Mary Louise. What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013.

    Google Scholar 

  • Roolf, Christoph. “General Gouvernement Belgien.” In Online-International Encyclopedia of the First World War, edited by Ute Daniel et al., Last Updated April 23, 2015, https://doi.org/10.15463/ie1418.10871.

  • Roos, Julia. “Women’s Rights, Nationalist Anxiety, and the ‘Moral’ Agenda in the Early Weimar Republic: Revisiting the ‘Black Horror’ Campaign against France’s African Occupation Troops.” Central European History 42, no. 3 (2009): 473–508.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Roos, Julia. “Nationalism, Racism and Propaganda in Early Weimar Germany: Contradictions in the Campaign against the ‘Black Horror on the Rhine’.” German History 30, no. 1 (2012): 45–74.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Roos, Julia. “Racist Hysteria to Pragmatic Rapprochement? The German Debate About Rhenish ‘Occupation Children,’ 1920–1930.” Contemporary European History 22, no. 2 (2013): 155–80.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Sattler, Moritz. “Zur Bekämpfung der Geschlechtskrankheiten im Heere.” Der Militärarzt. Zeitschrift für das Gesamte Sanitätswesen der Armeen 50, no. 24 (October 28, 1916): 560–62.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sauerteig, Lutz. “Sex, Medicine and Morality During the First World War.” In War, Medicine and Modernity, edited by Mark Harrison and Steven Sturdy Roger Cooter. Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1998.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sauerteig, Lutz. Krankheit, Sexualität, Gesellschaft. Geschlectskrankheiten und Gesundheitspolitik in Deutschland im 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhundert. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1999.

    Google Scholar 

  • Schönberger, Bianca. “Motherly Heroines and Adventurous Girls: Red Cross Nurses and Women Army Auxiliaries in the First World War.” In Home/Front: The Military, War, and Gender in Twentieth-Century Germany, edited by Karen Hagemann and Stefanie Schüler-Springorum, 87–113. New York: Berg, 2002.

    Google Scholar 

  • Schulte, Regina. “The Sick Warrior’s Sister: Nursing During the First World War.” In Gender Relations in German History: Power, Agency, and Experience from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century, ed. Lynn Abrams and Elizabeth Harvey, 121–41. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Siefkes, Martin. “Discursive Traces of Genocide in Johannes Spiecker’s Travel Diary (1905–1907).” Journal of Namibian Studies 16 (2014): 83–114.

    Google Scholar 

  • Silvester, Jeremy, and J. B. Gewald, eds. Words Cannot Be Found: German Colonial Rule in Namibia: An Annotated Reprint of the 1918 Blue Book. Oxford: Brill, 2005.

    Google Scholar 

  • Simpson, David. “Morale and Sexual Morality among British Troops in the First World War.” In World War I and the Cultures of Modernity, ed. Douglas MacKaman and Michael Mays, 18–29. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2000.

    Google Scholar 

  • Smith, Angela K. The Second Battlefield. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000.

    Google Scholar 

  • Smith, Jill Suzanne. Berlin Coquette: Prostitution and the New German Woman, 1890–1933. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013.

    Google Scholar 

  • Solansky, Adolf. German Administration in Belgium. New York: n.p., 1928.

    Google Scholar 

  • Timm, Annette F. The Politics of Fertility in Twentieth-Century Berlin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

    Google Scholar 

  • Todd, Lisa M. “The Hun and the Home: Gender, Sexuality and Propaganda in First World War Europe.” In World War I and Propaganda, ed. Troy Paddock, 137–54. Leiden and Boston: Brill Publishing, 2014.

    Google Scholar 

  • Todd, Lisa M. Sexual Treason in Germany During the First World War. London: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2017.

    Google Scholar 

  • Walther, Daniel J. Sex and Control: Venereal Disease, Colonial Physicians, and Indigenous Agency in German Colonialism, 1884–1914. New York: Berghahn Books, 2015.

    Google Scholar 

  • Watson, Janet K. Fighting Different Wars: Experience, Memory and the First World War in Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ziemann, Benjamin. Gewalt im Ersten Weltkrieg: Töten – Überlebten – Verweigern. Essen: Klartext Verlag, 2013.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of History, University of New Brunswick, Fredericton, NB, Canada

    Lisa M. Todd

Authors
  1. Lisa M. Todd
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Portland, OR, USA

    Alan Beyerchen

  2. Knox College, Galesburg, IL, USA

    Emre Sencer

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2019 The Author(s)

About this chapter

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this chapter

Todd, L.M. (2019). The Enemy Lurking Behind the Front: Controlling Sex in the German Forces Sent to Eastern and Western Europe, 1914–1918. In: Beyerchen, A., Sencer, E. (eds) Expeditionary Forces in the First World War. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25030-0_4

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25030-0_4

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-25029-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-25030-0

  • eBook Packages: HistoryHistory (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation