Eroberungen: Sexuelle Gewalttaten und intime Beziehungen deutscher Soldaten in der Sowjetunion, 1941-1945

The importance of sexuality in war has become more prominent in the last few years, either through media reports of mass rape in the Congo or through the UN resolution that describes the exercise of sexual violence as a war tactics for the first time. However, the extent and significance of German soldiers' sexual contacts in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union are still largely unexplored. Mühlhäuser rejects the popular notion that the German military leadership had tried to punish any sexual activity of the soldiers in Eastern Europe in the face of the official Nazi rejection of sexual contacts of German men to women of "foreign peoples." She shows that sexual crimes committed by German troops were a widespread phenomenon in the USSR: soldiers victimized women through acts of sexual torture and committed rape. Mühlhäuser considers sexual violence, but also the entire spectrum of heterosexual activities of members of the Wehrmacht and SS members in the context of the conceptions of masculinity and sexuality.