Title: 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 specifi...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.Read More