The Challenges of Including Sexual Violence and Transgressive Love in Historical Writing on World War II and the Holocaust

As I ponder how to introduce a collection of essays exploring the wide range of sexual contacts made possible for the adventurous or unleashed upon the unwilling during World War II, I cannot help but remember the reactions of senior scholars to such subjects in the days of my historical apprenticeship. Having just begun the research for my PhD dissertation in Berlin in the summer of 1993, I was seeking scholarly contacts and was introduced to one of the reigning doyens of German history, a professor at the Free University of Berlin. This person, whose identity is not important for my purposes, told me that I had just missed a visit from American historian of Germany Atina Grossmann. Sadly, my would-be advisor told me, Grossmann was working on “a very marginal topic”: the rape of German women by invading Soviet soldiers in the final days of World War II. My disappointment at having missed meeting a scholar whose work I already admired (and who would later write an influential and path-breaking article on this subject) was only exceeded by my frustration that such topics were so obviously considered unworthy of serious historical investigation and that a scholar of Grossmann’s caliber could be so easily dismissed.¹ This was certainly not the last time I would encounter such attitudes, which still persist in certain corners of the historical and other scholarly disciplines today. But I bring up this distant memory in order to highlight how far the field has come since then. As the articles in this issue demonstrate, investigating the relationship between sex and war is no longer a marginal enterprise. Scholarly investigations of fraternization, war brides, voluntary prostitution, and other forms of consensual sexual relationships have proliferated alongside detailed accounts of the role that rape, sexual slavery, sexual torture, and various opportunistic and targeted deployments of sexual violence, coercion, and public shaming have played in military campaigns throughout history.²

Many transformations have allowed the flowering of this research; one need only mention the diversification of history departments, the contributions of the fields of women’s history and the history of sexuality, the influence of anthropological and cultural approaches to historical research, and, most recently, the growing vitality of the field of the history of emotions.³ Without the space to do justice to the rich scholarship that these impulses have produced, I will just hint at a few ways that recent research on the effects of World War II on Europeans’ sexual lives has started to get integrated into the broader narrative of European history. The contributions to this issue demonstrate that war vastly increases both the opportunity for consensual sex and individual vulnerability to sexual attack. They concentrate on Germany and Britain, a limitation that the authors recognize but that is somewhat determined by the current state of research in this particularly morally sensitive and politically fraught field.

The inspiration for this special issue rests on the insight that since war’s effects on sexual lives are Janus faced,⁴ it makes sense to view the various forms of sexual activity that follow in its wake as dimensions of the same phenomenon. Since the stakes were particularly high for the victims of Nazi terror and the Holocaust, I will begin with a discussion of how recent developments in Holocaust scholarship have underlined the necessity to integrate a history of sexuality into the broader narrative of the European experience in World War II.

Sexual Violence in the Holocaust

For several decades after the war, the subject of sex and the Holocaust, or even sex in the Third Reich, was simply taboo.⁵ But both the explosion of scholarship on sexuality and the opening of Eastern European archives has brought about a transformation in Holocaust historiography. Historians now have the methodological tools to tackle sexual violence more directly,⁶ and they have become far more aware of the types of violence perpetrated in the less regulated killing fields outside of the more well...