But without doubt, sex was part of soldiers’ everyday existence—with a whole series of consequences for the women involved:
SAUERMANN: The Reichskanzleiführer, I don’t know how it was, in any case the Gestapo were involved. We took [funds] from the credit the Reich gave us for the construction of… facilities to build a bordello, a whorehouse. We called it a “b barrack.” When I left, it was done. All that was missing were women. The guys were running around town hitting up every German girl. That was to be avoided. So they got their Frenchwomen, their Czechs, the entire spectrum of peoples came there, all those women.331
Excerpts of this sort contain more information than may be immediately apparent. Sauermann’s reference to “their Frenchwomen, their Czechs” implicitly makes it clear that the women in question were not voluntarily prostituting themselves to German soldiers.332 Conversations about “bordellos” and “girls” are always about forced prostitution and sexual violence, but those concepts are never directly addressed in the protocols. From the soldiers’ perspective, it was simply a given that foreign women were at their sexual disposal, especially considering that they weren’t allowed to “hit up German girls.”
Clearly, sexual violence in war is not always spontaneous and unregulated. Sometimes, as in the example of the “sanitary salons,” it was officially administered. In any case, sex was one of the central aspects of soldiers’ experience of war—all the more so since it can be safely assumed that the U.S. and British officers who made the protocols had no interest in recording the endless discussions on the topic of women. As neither the British nor the Americans likely thought the subject to be of much use in the war, the surveillance activities tended to concentrate on discussions more relevant to military strategy, conversations about aircraft, bombs, machine guns, and miracle weapons. But it seems entirely plausible that groups of mostly young men would have been just as interested in women as technology, and that the POWs would have talked just as much about sex as about military hardware. One excerpt from the protocols speaks volumes:
18:45 women
19:15 women
19:45 women
20:00 women333
Moreover, we can speculate that intervals identified only as “idle talk” would have been partly about women and sex as well. There’s no way of verifying this, but the proportion of sex talk that did find its way into the protocols suggests that the subject was very important to the POWs.
Conversations of this nature tended to revolve around where the action was, i.e., where one could find the prettiest girls and the most sexual opportunities. Often the tone is reminiscent of tourists discussing attractions they had seen:
GÖLLER: I’ve been to BORDEAUX. The whole of BORDEAUX is one big brothel. There is nothing to beat BORDEAUX. I always said to myself, wait till you get to PARIS; it’s supposed to be still worse in PARIS. It can’t be worse in any other place, I thought. But the contrary is true. In BORDEAUX the reputation of Frenchwomen is worst of all.
HERMS: In PARIS you only need to sit down in a bar where there’s a girl sitting at a table, and you may be quite sure that you can go home with her. The place is appalling, you find girls in thousands. You don’t have to take the slightest trouble. It’s just the right sort of life for many people.334
Ironically, POWs often complained that the so-called blitz girls,
