Abstract
Focusing on a number of case studies, this chapter shows how a Nazi regime haunted by the memory of World War I tried to prevent and punish relationships between German women and foreign prisoners of war in the “Third Reich.” Both groups frequently mingled in factories and on farms, and these contacts led to tens of thousands of amorous liaisons. Many German women showed a high degree of independence and assertiveness in their interactions with the prisoners, and local communities and German employers often tolerated them. If there was public outrage, it often centered on perceived immoral actions such as adultery rather than on contact with foreigners. With many communities and marriages under stress due to the war, gender norms were challenged, and numerous women refused to fulfill their assigned role as guarantors of the home front and the German nation.
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Notes
- 1.
On the larger question of “sexual treason” in World War I, of which the relations between German women and foreign prisoners were only one aspect, see Lisa M. Todd, Sexual Treason in Germany During the First World War, Gender and Sexualities in History (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 101–135.
- 2.
For a sample, see Niedersächsisches Staatsarchiv Oldenburg, Best. 135 B, especially the brochures “Feind bleibt Feind” and “Kriegsgefangene” edited by the OKW (High Command) in 1939 and sent to the government of Oldenburg on 13 November 1939.
- 3.
Original: “die bewußte Absicht der Verbastardierung des deutschen Volkes, Störung seines Familienlebens und Zerstörung deutscher Sitte.—Sittensabotage.” In “Kriegsgefangene,” p. 16.
- 4.
Article 45 of the 1929 Geneva Convention stated that the laws valid in the army of the detaining state also applied to its POWs: Geneva Convention on Prisoners of War (1929), in The Avalon Project, Yale Law School, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/geneva02.asp, accessed November 1, 2020. See also Georg Dörken and Werner Scherer, Das Militärstrafgesetzbuch und die Kriegssonderstrafrechtsverordnung, 4 ed. (Berlin: Verlag Franz Vahlen, 1943), especially §92 (pp. 77–82) and §158 (p. 152).
- 5.
For a full description of the (evolving) legal situation, see Raffael Scheck, Love Between Enemies: Western Prisoners of War and German Women in World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 53–92.
- 6.
The first protecting power for the French, British, and Belgian POWs was the United States. Vichy France took over that role for the French POWs in December 1940, and Switzerland replaced the United States for the British POWs a year later. Germany did not accept a new protecting power for the Belgians after December 1941, but a royal Belgian military commission fulfilled a similar role. Serbian POWs did not have a protecting power, but they seem to have been treated in similar ways as western POWs. For an overview, see Rüdiger Overmans, “Die Kriegsgefangenenpolitik des Deutschen Reiches 1939 bis 1945,” in Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg, vol. 9/2, ed. Jörg Echternkamp (Munich: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2005), 729–875 (especially 749), and Rüdiger Overmans, “The Treatment of Prisoners of War in the Eastern European Theatre of Operations, 1941–1956,” in Prisoners in War, ed. Sibylle Scheipers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 127–128. See also Thomas Muggenthaler and Jörg Skriebeleit, Verbrechen Liebe: Von polnischen Männern und deutschen Frauen. Hinrichtungen und Verfolgung in Niederbayern und der Oberpfalz während der NS-Zeit (Viechtach: Ed. Lichtung, 2010).
- 7.
Scheck, Love Between Enemies, 1–21, 203–205.
- 8.
Matthias Reiss, Controlling Sex in Captivity: POWs and Sexual Desire in the United States During the Second World War (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 18–38, 46–47.
- 9.
König was a well-known name brand for honey cakes and other sweets in Prussia until 1945. See Manfred Lutzens, “Süße Düfte nicht nur zum Fest,” in MOZ.de, December 17, 2017, https://www.moz.de/artikel-ansicht/dg/0/1/1625548/ (accessed August 30, 2018).
- 10.
In accordance with privacy laws, I have changed the last names of all women and POWs who had to stand trial.
- 11.
Brandenburgisches Landeshauptarchiv (BLHA) Potsdam, Staatsanwaltschaft 12C Berlin II, vol. 6845.
- 12.
The original: “sobald Krieg fertig sein Bordeaux sagen ich ja Leni fortgehen nach France, Leni gluckich mit ich. ich Wenig mehr Sie Vergessen/tausend Kuss Leni” [sic].
- 13.
BLHA Potsdam, Frauenzuchthaus Cottbus, 29 ZH Cottbus 1294.
- 14.
Scheck, Love Between Enemies, 322–327. On this tendency to make an example, see also Ulrich Herbert, Hitler’s Foreign Workers: Enforced Foreign Labor in Germany Under the Third Reich, trans. William Templer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 125.
- 15.
This case rests on the files of two trials before the Sondergericht in Vienna, each dealing with two women: Stadt- und Landesarchiv Wien, Akten Staatsanwaltschaft beim Sondergericht, vols. 6368 and 6532.
- 16.
The court martial sentences for the prisoners have not yet been available for this chapter. The Archives nationales (AN) in Pierrefitte-sur-Seine hold the most extensive collection of trial documents involving French POWs (série F9, vols. 2360–2561 and 2747–2794), but access is severely restricted because the paper is disintegrating. The military records of the implicated prisoners are available at the Service historique de la Défense (SHD) personnel archive in Caen, especially folders 22 P 424, 89; 22 P 641, 133b; and 22 P 424, 89.
- 17.
It is not clear whether she had been carrying the child of Friedrich Deckler or Alphonse Charpentier.
- 18.
On Jewish prisoners from Palestine, see Yoav Gelber, “Palestinian POWs in German Captivity,” Yad Vashem Studies 14 (1981).
- 19.
The correspondence is in Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amtes (PAAA), R 40866 and 40867, and the judgment against Louis A. in R 40869 (8 May 1941). He was sentenced to one year in prison on dubious grounds, mostly because he had German money, civilian clothes, cigarette lighters, and razor knives. The military tribunal argued that he must have either stolen these things or refused to hand them over when he was captured—both punishable offenses. He was also accused of two other crimes, including doubting a German victory, but the tribunal acquitted him on these charges. See also Raffael Scheck, “Collaboration of the Heart: The Forbidden Love Affairs of French Prisoners of War and German Women in Nazi Germany,” The Journal of Modern History 90, no. 2 (2018): 378.
- 20.
An example of an attorney who balked at defending a Jew was Dr. Kolbe in Liegnitz, with respect to the trial of Abraham B., a Jew born in Riga (Latvia ) in 1920 and accused of having tried to seduce a 14-year-old girl in a sand pit. Another local POW attorney, Dr. Wabnitz, finally received official permission to defend B., even though he, too, had initially refused. B. was sentenced to one-and-a-half years in prison, a slightly harsh sentence based in part on the rebellious reputation of the prisoner: Feldurteil, Liegnitz, August 4, 1944, and related correspondence, in Schweizerisches Bundesarchiv (BAR) Bern, Vertretung Berlin, Schutzmachtangelegenheiten, vol. 78a. For an example of an engaged German defense attorney, Dr. Kirsch from Kattowitz, see below.
- 21.
Feldurteil, Memmingen, January 9, 1942, and related correspondence in PAAA, R 40908.
- 22.
Feldurteil, December 16, 1944, Teschen, in BAR, Vertretung Berlin, Schutzmachtangelegenheiten, vol. 81b.
- 23.
The German army formed some all-Jewish work detachments with British POWs from Palestine, and it also grouped some French Jewish officers and some American Jewish POWs together. This was not illegal because Article 9 of the Geneva Convention requested a separation of POWs “of different races and nationalities,” but Article 4 forbade discrimination in the treatment of POWs. This clause was clearly violated in the last months of the war during the internment of American Jews in Berga, a brutal labor camp: Flint Whitlock, Given Up for Dead: American GIs in the Nazi Concentration Camp at Berga. (Cambridge: Westview Press, 2005). But the separation of Jews and non-Jews from the western armies was never consistent. See also Rüdiger Overmans, “German Treatment of Jewish Prisoners of War in the Second World War,” in Wartime Captivity in the Twentieth Century: Archives, Stories, Memories, ed. Fabien Théofilakis and Anne-Marie Pathé (New York: Berghahn Books, 2016), 45–53.
- 24.
The folder is in Schweizerisches Bundesarchiv Bern, Vertretung Berlin, Schutzmachtangelegenheiten, vol. 80a.
- 25.
The prisoner Victor Leslie, for example, received two years in prison for a very similar offense by the court martial in Danzig on 17 October 1944; only his good conduct prevented a Zuchthaus sentence. See Schweizerisches Bundesarchiv Bern, Schweizerische Vertretung Berlin, vol. 81a.
- 26.
Although there is no evidence for this in Edelmann’s file, Jewish POWs did sometimes exchange information with Jewish forced laborers from various ghettos and camps: Gelber, “Palestinian POWs,” 118–119.
- 27.
National Archives, Kew, WO 416/141/257.
- 28.
National Archives, Kew, WO 344/120/2 (G).
- 29.
Robert Lewis Koehl, “The ‘Deutsche Volksliste’ German Nationality List in Poland, 1939–1945,” Journal of Central European Affairs 15, no. 4 (1956): 354–366.
- 30.
Scheck, “Collaboration of the Heart,” 377.
- 31.
See Feldurteil, Kassel, May 6, 1943, in BAR, 86a.
- 32.
BStA Nürnberg, Akten der Anklagebehörde beim Sondergericht, 2419.
- 33.
“Jeder Deutsche weiß, daß der Bolschewismus der Todfeind des Nationalsozialismus ist und daß der deutsche Soldat noch von keinem Angehörigen einer anderen kriegführenden Macht ähnliche Greueltaten zu erdulden hatte wie von den Bestien der russischen Steppe.” BStA Nürnberg, Akten der Anklagebehörde beim Sondergericht, 2423.
- 34.
BStA Nürnberg, Akten der Anklagebehörde beim Sondergericht, 2423.
- 35.
BLHA Potsdam, 12 C, Sondergericht Frankfurt an der Oder, 849.
- 36.
It is true that public disapproval of relations with Polish and, later, Soviet POWs was stronger, but even here, solidarity and acceptance did occur, especially in Catholic areas with respect to Polish prisoners. The files of the prosecutor’s office in Oldenburg contain a number of cases of German women and men displaying acts of compassion and solidarity, for example, by giving a Soviet prisoner bread or cigarettes, for which both could be severely punished. See Niedersächsisches Landesarchiv Oldenburg, Best. 136, Nr. 2886b. See also Birthe Kundrus, “Forbidden Company: Romantic Relationships between Germans and Foreigners, 1939 to 1945,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 11, no. 1/2 (January/April 2002): 201–222; Silke Schneider, Verbotener Umgang. Ausländer und Deutsche im Nationalsozialismus. Diskurse um Sexualität, Moral, Wissen und Strafe (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2010).
- 37.
Birthe Kundrus, Kriegerfrauen: Familienpolitik und Geschlechterverhältnisse im Ersten und Zweiten Weltkrieg (Hamburg: Christians, 1995), 382–383; Schneider, Verbotener Umgang, 212–214. An Austrian judicial report even warned that such shaming rituals were undermining the reputation of the NSDAP: Wolfgang Form and Oliver Uthe (eds.), NS-Justiz in Österreich: Lage- und Reiseberichte 1938–1945 (Vienna: LIT Verlag, 2004), 195–196 (report from Linz, 23 February 1940). See also Nicholas Stargardt, The German War: A Nation Under Arms, 1939–1945. Citizens and Soldiers (New York: Basic Books, 2015), 142–144.
- 38.
Lieutenant-Colonel Lescrauwaet to Baron de Guben, September 21, 1945, in Archives du Ministère des Affaires étrangères, Bruxelles, 11667:1, Prisonniers de guerre belges en Allemagne, film 408, Dossier général 1942–1948.
- 39.
File in PAAA, R 40884, Feldurteil Linz, September 9, 1941.
- 40.
One needs to consider that the relationships and marriages of POWs also were under strain due to years of separation. See, for example, Sarah Fishman, We Will Wait: Wives of French Prisoners of War, 1940–1945 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991).
- 41.
Hester Vaizey’s studies (like Fishman’s) emphasize that most marriages did survive the upheaval of war: Hester Vaizey, “Empowerment or Endurance? War Wives’ Experiences of Independence During and After the Second World War in Germany, 1939–1948,” German History 29, no. 1 (2011): 57–78; Hester Vaizey, Surviving Hitler’s War: Family Life in Germany 1939–1948 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
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Scheck, R. (2022). Community, Gender, and Race During War: The Amorous Relationships of POWs and German Women in World War II. In: Reiss, M., Feltman, B.K. (eds) Prisoners of War and Local Women in Europe and the United States, 1914-1956. Genders and Sexualities in History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83830-0_8
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