Almost All Loose Girls Are Infected

Abstract

This chapter examines heterosexual encounters between German soldiers and enemy civilians at the fighting fronts, and in the occupied zones of Eastern and Western Europe. Men and women met in brothels, in cafés and bars, in private homes and on the street, encounters increasingly regulated by civil–military officials, who sought to halt the spread of disease. Debates around brothels, condoms and sexual abstinence exacerbated the links between military efficiency, patriotic duty and the social body of the nation. Allied propagandists used the sexual crimes of German soldiers in their campaigns against the ‘barbarous Hun’. Myriad discourses on sexuality illustrate the disconnect between military policy, Allied propaganda, home front rhetoric and the intimate decisions of men in women at war.