Forbidden Company: Romantic Relationships between Germans and Foreigners, 1939 to 1945

The ever-increasing number of foreign laborers in Germany from 1939 to 1945 made lasting changes in the composition of civil society. The author examines how racial, gender, and nationalist precepts were reflected in the persecution of associations between Germans and foreigners during World War II. He explores whether it is possible to uncover a coherent hierarchy among the three categories of race, gender, and nation—a "primacy of race," for example—or whether their configuration varied according to the situation at hand. He also examines daily practices of persecution and punishment at the local level, since it was here that tensions between National Socialist policy and social reality, between the aims and pronouncements of the Nazi leadership and the patterns and effects of daily enforcement, were most clearly evident.