WALLUS*: In WARSAW our troops formed a queue outside the front door. In RADOM the first room was full, whilst the L.K.W. [
The administrative framework wasn’t always clear, as emerged from a discussion between twenty-four-year-old Captain Wilhelm Dette and Lieutenant Colonel Wilfried von Müller-Rienzburg about the legal consequences of gonorrhea infection:
DETTE: There are the other ranks’ brothels. Gonorrhoea is a punishable offence. For quite a long time it wasn’t punished. When I had the first case of gonorrhoea in my Staffel I wanted to punish the fellow. They said: “No, no, that won’t do, you can’t do that.” A fortnight before I took off on my last flight, the chief N.O. came and called the whole Staffel together and delivered a short talk saying that there were always about forty-five thousand men in FRANCE suffering from venereal disease.
MÜLLER-RIENZBURG: As far as I know, cases of gonorrhoea were always punished.
DETTE: As a result of that it is now punishable again, with imprisonment: It wasn’t merely a military offence; it is because the man doesn’t get treated for it.329
Leaving aside the disciplinary complications they could have, bordello visits clearly were among the more pleasant aspects of warfare:
CLAUNITZER: In BANAK, that’s our most northerly aerodrome, there are still three or four thousand soldiers. As far as any conditions are concerned, they’ve got the best of everything there.
ULRICH: Variety shows and things like that?
CLAUNITZER: There’s something on there, every day. And there are girls there, they’ve opened a brothel.
ULRICH: German girls?
CLAUNITZER: No, Norwegian girls from OSLO and TRONDHEIM.
ULRICH: There’s a brothel car in every town, one for officers and one for other ranks? I know all about it. (Laughter.) Strange goings on.330
Historical research has thus far shed very little light on this everyday fact of warfare. That’s hardly surprising since soldiers didn’t mention such goings-on in their letters home to their loved ones, and postwar memoirs usually intended to justify the authors’ actions rarely include descriptions of whorehouses. Postwar prosecutors’ investigations were only concerned with rapes in the context of mass executions. Other forms of potential sexual coercion were legally irrelevant and thus do not crop up in the investigation files.
