Intimate Encounters and the Politics of German Occupation in Belgium, 1940-44/45
Throughout the German military occupation of Belgium in the Second World War, German troops and Belgian civilians lived alongside one another and interacted in everyday life, in spite of repeated efforts of the German High Command and Nazi party to incite German men in uniform to avoid contact with locals, and particularly women. Using a wide array of sources from archives in Germany, Belgium, France, Great Britain and the United States, including government and military documents, police reports, court records, draft laws and legislation and official correspondence, this dissertation explores one facet of the German-Belgian encounter between 1940 and 1944: the intimate.Domains of intimacy - including sexual violence, sex work, marriage and reproduction - were crucial in the shaping and management of German rule in occupied Belgium. The German and Nazi leadership sought to instrumentalize everyday contact and relationships between their soldiers and Belgian women as a means to secure military victory and construct the foundations for a racially based empire in Europe, the New Order. Belgian women's intimate labour offered a route to secure the morale of German soldiers through the promise of sexual reward; further, women's emotional, domestic and care labour as wives and mothers could maintain the stability of the occupation by binding Belgians to the occupation and the envisioned Greater Germanic Empire through the deep and lasting ties of the family. Yet even as the German authorities sought to use intimacy to cement occupation policy, they worried about its potentially destabilizing effects and the unwieldy nature of human contact; in particular, recalling the legacy of World War I and the first German invasion and occupation of Belgium, the German occupiers after 1940 worried about the threat posed by "dangerous women," such as the erotic female spy, the prostitute, the untrustworthy nurse and others. This study of intimacy in occupied Belgium - one of the "small countries" in Europe - demonstrates the multiple and uneven ways in which gender, sex, politics and race were entangled in official occupation policy.
Europe, Gender, Intimacy, Occupation, Sexuality, World War II
Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations