What soldiers regarded as the legitimate exploitation of opportunity when foreign women were concerned becomes “repulsive” when practiced by German women—although no small amount of projection may also have been at play:
SCHÜRMANN: Most “Blitzmädels” say “yes” without much ado. Just think of those “Blitzmädels” in PARIS. They all run around in civvies and one is quite prepared to be accosted by one of them suddenly in German. It’s nothing unusual for them to behave promiscuously with the French. They really are some of the worst. They don’t give any points to the French whores in any way. The NO we had—I got on very well with him; he was from COLOGNE, and came to us from VILLACOUBLAY—was transferred to a general hospital in PARIS. He said it was nothing unusual to have more women there with V.D. than soldiers. It was an actual fact, he said, that it was not the soldiers who were infecting the girls but the other way round, and that some of the “Blitzmädels” had caught it from the French. He once had women suffering from V.D. in another institution in PARIS; he said twenty of them had gonorrhoea and more than ten of them had syphilis, five of them being already incurable. They then examined all the girls in PARIS and sent so-and-so many home right away; a certain number were infected without being ill themselves, they were carriers and were infecting the soldiers! It must be a scandalous state of affairs in PARIS. I’m inclined to think that the women who volunteer as “Blitzmädels” do so primarily for that one reason, some of them anyway.335
A twenty-four-year-old U-boat crewman named Günther Schramm reported on a particularly spectacular example of moral lassitude among German “girls”:
SCHRAMM: The things I saw myself at BORDEAUX were frightful. Once I had to go to the medical station and there I was taken through various departments and saw a lot of German girls in the corridors—it was a shocking sight! They were completely mad, there were three of them who bore the typical signs of syphilis in their faces and they were screaming—they were completely crazy. They made noises and cried: “Only by a nigger!” and so on. They had been associating with negroes. They behave worse than the French women.336
Sometimes, POWs acted like connoisseurs, boasting that they knew where to get value for money:
DANIELS: I paid 60 francs in a brothel at BREST.
WEDEKIND: Go on with you! At BREST, at GRÜNSTEIN’S, on the corner there, you don’t pay more than 25 francs—that’s the usual charge.337
On occasion, soldiers also mildly criticized the behavior of some members of their own units:
