Shared Intimacies: Women’s Sexuality in Foreign Workers’ Camps, 1940–1945

Abstract

Abstract By examining judicial records as well as corporate archives, this article argues that the camp played an important role in the management of foreign workers’ sexuality in Nazi Germany. A means of housing foreigners or controlling the workforce, the segregation of workers along racial and gendered lines in barracks also ensured their reproducing bodies could be controlled to avoid their ‘settling down’ on Reich territory. This microhistorical study of French women living in Berlin between 1940 and 1945 argues that although camp housing was primarily intended to control heterosexuality, it also had profound consequences for queer relationships. In illuminating this previously unacknowledged aspect of biopolitics in Nazi Germany, the article addresses issues of spatial domination and agency in romantic and sexual encounters.