A Dangerous Game: The Forbidden Relationships between French POWs and German Women During World War II

Abstract

The term ‘forbidden relationships’ refers to contact between German civilians and prisoners of war present on the Reich’s territory during World War II. Any unnecessary contact was banned, both for military security reasons and in the name of the National Socialist racial ideology. Drawing on a substantial body of court files related to these ‘crimes’, this article analyses the romantic and sexual relationships between German women and French prisoners of war. It sheds a light on the gap between prescribed behaviours and the social reality during this period. At the intersection of gender and law during World War II, this article reflects the difficulties of controlling the civilian population during times of conflict and the agency of these actors.

KEYWORDS:

• French prisoners of war
• World War II
• Franco-German relationships
• German Women
• Nazism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The ‘phoney war’ refers to the period at the beginning of World War II between the declaration of war on 3 September 1939 and the German offensive on 10 May 1940.

2 The STO was the forced enlistment and deportation of an estimated 600,000 to 650,000 French forced laborers. It was established in February 1943 by Vichy France due to pressure from Nazi Germany. On the history of the STO see Arnaud (2010).

3 The Third Reich implemented various racist and hierarchical policies and laws, the most notorious of which is the Nuremberg Laws of 1935. They were based on the myth of the superiority of the ‘Aryan’ race, which asserted scientific legitimacy.

4 Lebensborn e. V. was an association initiated by the SS in Nazi Germany in 1935 with the aim of increasing the number of births of children meeting the Nazi criteria of ‘racially’ and healthy ‘Aryans’. See Lilienthal (2003), Thiolay (2012).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Gwendoline Cicottini

Gwendoline Cicottini achieved a bi-national PhD in history from the Aix-Marseille University and the University of Tübingen in 2020. In June 2021, she won CIERA's Michael Werner Prize for her doctoral theses. She researched the relationships between French POWs and German women during the Second World War. Her research interests are the history of Nazism, the history of forced labour, the history of sexuality and the history of childhood. She published two articles based on her research while the publication of her doctoral thesis is planned for 2023 by Editions de la Maison des sciences de l'homme. She has been working at the Buchenwald Memorial on a project about the subcamps of Buchenwald since May 2021.