Love between Enemies

Love between Enemies explores the forbidden relationships which formed between foreign prisoners of war and German women during the Second World War. From the desire to have fun to deep love commitments, this study examines the range of motivations which lay behind these relationships, tapping into new documents and drawing on thousands of court cases to offer a transnational analysis of personal relations between enemies. Highlighting gender roles, the contradictory reactions of the communities surrounding the couples, and the diplomatic tensions resulting from the severe punishments, this is a history of everyday life which throws light on this subversive aspect of intimacy in wartime Nazi Germany. Comparing the 'transgressing' couples to other groups persecuted for their cultural or private choices, Scheck demonstrates how the relationships were silenced or justified in the post-war memory of prisoners, while the German women, who had been publicly shamed, continued to live with the stigma, and even illegitimate children, for the years that followed.

Raffael Scheck is Audrey Wade Hittinger Katz and Sheldon Toby Katz Distinguished Teaching Professor of History at Colby College, Maine. He is the author of six books including Hitler's African Victims: The German Army Massacres of Black French Soldiers in 1940 (2006), and French Colonial Soldiers in German Captivity during World War II (2015). He is currently working on a new book project on the meaning of the German victory in the West in 1940.