Soldier’s Morale and War Wife’s Morality: Gendered Images of Righteousness and Citizenship in Nazi Germany

Abstract

While the theme of German women’s involvement with prisoners of war during the Second World War is not new to historians, how the families of incarcerated female convicts responded to this specific gendered crime in Nazi Germany, has not been a subject of critical and historical inquiry so far. The article for the first time makes a case for soldier husbands as compassionate partners who came to the rescue of their wives languishing in police custody, prisons or penitentiary due to their intimate relations with prisoners of war. The criminal proceedings of local, regional and special courts against these newly created female criminals contain clemency appeals filed by their kith and kin as well as soldier husbands. While most of the appeals filed by defendants’ relatives fell on deaf ears, the appeals of soldier-husbands presented a challenge to the regime. Through a discourse analysis of these clemency appeals and the real circumstances of the involved couple – as far as they can be reconstructed through the case files – the paper reaches in inner realms of a soldier’s conjugal life and unveils his notions of home and fatherland, morality and propriety, duty and patrio- tism vis-a-vis the Nazi state’s disciplinary stance towards his partner and the female criminal in general. These judicial proceedings offer us a unique archive to write the history of love, war and sexuality from a perspective, which has so far remained invisible in contemporary ego documents such as diaries and autobiographies.