Sexual Desire in Enemy Hands: The Sex Lives of German Prisoners of War in the UK, 1914–1919

This chapter focuses on the reasons why the more than 130,000 German military prisoners in Great Britain during the First World War pursued intimate emotional and physical relationships with local women. As labor demands increased in Britain after 1916, the German prisoners of war (POWs) found themselves working in close proximity to female civilians. Both were often open to flirtations or possibly even sexual relationships, even though British women faced public ridicule and legal punishments when fraternizing with the enemy. Feltman argues that the POWs pursued women on the enemy home front not only to remedy their sexual frustrations, but to allow them to repair their masculine identity which had been called into question through surrender, an action that many considered to be an act of cowardice or disloyalty.