In the months and years following ratification of the Versailles Treaty, the Allied occupation of the Rhineland became a focal point of German nationalist propaganda. The campaign against the so-called “black shame on the Rhine” (schwarze Schmach am Rhein), a racist slogan referring to the stationing of soldiers from northern Africa, Senegal, and Madagascar in the French zone of occupation, was one of the ugliest outgrowths of German opposition to the peace treaty.Footnote ¹ Support for the movement against France's African troops was disquietingly broad. An interpellation to the Reich government of May 1920 launched by the Majority Social Democrats (SPD) and endorsed by all parties in the national assembly except the Independent Socialists (USPD) is illustrative of the racist fears motivating “black horror” protests: “Even after the armistice, the French and Belgians continue to use colored troops in the occupied territories. … For German women and children, men and boys, these savages pose a horrifying danger. Their honor, health and life, purity and innocence are being destroyed. … This situation is disgraceful, humiliating, and insufferable!”Footnote ²

Initial scholarship on the black shame movement focused largely on the political history of post-World War I diplomacy and German nationalism. Only recently have historians begun to explore in depth how anxieties about gender and sexuality contributed to the campaign's popular appeal.Footnote ³ This change in analytical perspective has led to a reevaluation of a central feature of black horror propaganda, its obsession with African soldiers' alleged sexual crimes. While earlier studies emphasized the strategic and manipulative nature of German nationalists' use of a highly sexualized racist imagery, recent literature has added another interpretive layer by taking seriously the gender and sexual fears surfacing in fabricated reports about mass rapes purportedly committed by French colonial troops.Footnote ⁴ The main focus of this latter approach has centered on the links between racism, misogyny, and the acute crisis of masculinity in early Weimar Germany.Footnote ⁵ Black shame propaganda, Sandra Maß has argued, simultaneously served to strengthen “the racist mobilization against the Versailles Treaty and the battle against France” and provided an opportunity “to talk about psychological and physical fragmentations of the male body without having to mention explicitly” men's traumatic experience of technological warfare.Footnote ⁶ In complex ways, discourses about French colonial soldiers' alleged sexual violence against German women enabled German veterans to express their own fears of violent physical dismemberment and project their resentment onto African men and female German “fraternizers.” Similarly, Anja Schüler and Christian Koller underline the centrality of male anxieties about the loss of colonial territories, national sovereignty, and patriarchal control over women as key concerns driving black horror agitation.Footnote ⁷

Recent investigations into the links between black horror propaganda and the crisis of masculinity in post-World War I Germany have enhanced significantly our understanding of the campaign's strong resonance among German men. This literature, however, is decidedly less helpful in explaining why German women joined the black shame movement in such large numbers. Particularly striking is the absence of detailed analyses of liberal feminists' role in the black horror campaign, presumably due to widespread acceptance of the view that “women did not play a central role in the German propaganda efforts.”Footnote ⁸ This essay aims to address this important historiographical blind spot. To highlight the complexity of feminists' motivations, special attention is paid to a hitherto often neglected aspect of black horror propaganda, the protest against the brothels for African soldiers established in the French zone of occupation.Footnote ⁹

The controversy over the occupation brothels (Besatzungsbordelle) shows that feminists shared many of the nationalist anxieties and racialist prejudices characteristic of the larger black shame campaign. At the same time, the battle over the Besatzungsbordelle illuminates the ways in which concerns over women's rights contributed to feminists' rejection of French occupation policies. As we will see, attacks on the brothels for African soldiers often entailed a more general critique of the sexual double standard directed simultaneously against Germany's own system of state-regulated prostitution (Reglementierung, or regulationism). During the early 1920s, liberal feminists closely collaborated with women of the “moral” Right in the effort to link the nationalist uproar over the occupation brothels to broader demands for the repeal of Reglementierung. Analysis of the campaign against the brothels for France's colonial troops sheds vital new light on gender relations and feminist politics after World War I. It also reveals some unexpected twists in the highly tension-ridden relationship between women's rights and the Weimar-era “moral” agenda.Footnote ¹⁰

Before turning to the controversy over the brothels for colonial French occupation troops, it is helpful to gain a better sense of women's larger role within the black shame movement.

Women as Agents and Objects of Black Horror Propaganda

The black horror campaign began in earnest during a period of virtual civil war following the Kapp-Lüttwitz coup of March 13, 1920.Footnote ¹¹ In response to German troops' entering of the demilitarized Ruhr area to suppress workers' uprisings there, the French army temporarily extended its zone of occupation eastward. During the occupation of Frankfurt am Main in early April, Moroccan soldiers fired at a mob and killed several German civilians. The Frankfurt incident was followed by an outpouring of nationalist and racialist German complaints about the “savagery” of France's African soldiers. In April 1919, the German delegation to Versailles had insisted unsuccessfully that “colored troops should not be made a part of the army of occupation.”Footnote ¹² By the spring of 1920, France's deployment of colonial troops to the Rhineland drew growing international criticism.Footnote ¹³

Especially England became a major center of international agitation against the black shame. In a series of articles written during March and April 1920, Edmund Dene Morel, the Labor politician and cofounder of the Union for Democratic Control, “exposed” the violent and sexual crimes allegedly committed by French colonial soldiers.Footnote ¹⁴ Morel accused “French militarists” of recklessly exacerbating racial tensions through their occupation policies. His most extensive treatment of the topic was The Horror on the Rhine, a pamphlet first published in August 1920 and so successful that by spring 1921, it had gone through eight editions, not counting foreign-language editions issued in Germany, France, the Netherlands, and Italy.Footnote ¹⁵ In Horror on the Rhine, Morel attacked the French government for its determination “to use the manhood of Africa … for the pursuit of Imperial ends in Europe and elsewhere.”Footnote ¹⁶ Within Europe, the “African mercenaries” formed a praetorian guard for the suppression of domestic opponents.Footnote ¹⁷

Morel expressed compassion for Africans “who have been torn from their homes, separated for years from their kinsfolk, subjugated to every kind of hardship, and used as mere cannon-fodder for the benefit of” French capitalist and imperialist interests.Footnote ¹⁸ Yet, such assertions of sympathy were dimmed by his reliance on racialist stereotypes of Africans as insatiable sexual predators. “Nature opposes such obstacles to man in tropical Africa that strong sex instinct is essential to racial survival.” Morel believed that “among the more primitive—or the more natural, if that word be preferred—races inhabiting the tropical and sub-tropical areas of Africa, the sex-impulse is a more instinctive … more spontaneous, fiercer, less controllable impulse than among Europeans hedged in by the complicated paraphernalia of convention and laws.”Footnote ¹⁹ While Africans' exaggerated sexual drives fulfilled a beneficial function in the African context—among other things, they helped to counter the devastations wreaked by the slave trade—they had horrific consequences in occupied Germany. Morel warned his readers “that the sexual requirements of the North and West Central African troops which French militarism has thrust upon the Rhineland must continue to exist, and that in the absence of their own women-folk [sic] must be satisfied upon the bodies of white women.”Footnote ²⁰ The pamphlet included military regulations pertaining to Rhenish brothels for African soldiers as well as a detailed list of rapes reputedly committed by French colonial troops.

The growth of foreign opposition against France's African occupation troops was both cause and effect of intensified German propaganda efforts.Footnote ²¹ Individuals and organizations involved in the black horror campaign received logistical and financial support from the German government.Footnote ²² In their attempts to achieve revision of the Versailles Treaty, German officials and nationalists placed a premium on popular mobilization.Footnote ²³ For the international dissemination of black shame propaganda, women's networks seemed particularly valuable.Footnote ²⁴ To coordinate more effectively women's protests against the black shame, a semi-official organization, the League of Rhenish Women (Rheinische Frauenliga, or RFL), was founded in the Reich ministry of the interior during June 1920.Footnote ²⁵

Margarete Gärtner, the RFL's founder and first administrative director, strove to weld Rhenish women's organizations into “a mouthpiece for propaganda directed at foreign countries” (Sprachrohr für eine Auslandspropaganda).Footnote ²⁶ Gärtner, a bureaucrat with no prior personal experience in the women's movement, managed to synchronize black horror activities among an impressively broad range of German women's associations. Before traveling to the Rhineland to meet with women's groups there, the Berlin-based Gärtner consulted with leading representatives of the major Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish women's organizations, who pledged their support and provided her with contacts in the occupied territory. The RFL also collaborated closely with non-denominational women's associations such as the Federation of German Women's Clubs (Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine, or BDF), the national umbrella organization of a broad range of middle-class women's associations, and the Stadtverband Kölner Frauenverbände representing thirty-six women's clubs in British-occupied Cologne.Footnote ²⁷ Among the RFL's standard activities were the collection and publication of evidence of French colonial soldiers' alleged crimes, the organization of public demonstrations against the black shame, and the invitation and hosting of sympathetic foreign visitors such as E. D. Morel, whom Gärtner accompanied during parts of his fact-finding trip to Germany in summer 1920.Footnote ²⁸ Gärtner enlisted numerous female delegates to the Reichstag and Prussian state parliament to lecture around the country on the black horror and provided them with facts and blueprints for their speeches.

The RFL's greatest propagandistic coup was the pamphlet, Farbige Franzosen am Rhein. Ein Notschrei deutscher Frauen (Colored Frenchmen on the Rhine: German Women's Desperate Appeal) published in summer 1920.Footnote ²⁹ The brochure, distribution of which was subsidized by the German foreign office, represented “the most successful of all the German propaganda publications.”Footnote ³⁰ It was translated into five languages and widely disseminated in Europe and North and South America. The bulk of Farbige Franzosen am Rhein was made up of detailed reports of rapes and, to a lesser extent, non-sexual violent crimes allegedly committed by colonial occupation troops. Later editions included a list of all the brothels established for French soldiers in the Rhineland. How did the brochure justify honorable middle-class women's decision to publicize such repulsive, sexually explicit information? The preface stressed that “only the sense of complete powerlessness and despair” had led Rhenish women to “shout into the world” their “shame.” It called for racial solidarity among the whites of all nations: “Filled with pain, we cover our heads and lead the way for you all, you women and men of the white race. Walk with us in spirit on our way of the cross [unsere Leidensstraße], which is lined with monuments of eternal shame for all of us, the memories [Erinnerungsbilder] of the crimes committed by African savages … against the white women on the Rhine.”Footnote ³¹

That such racialist rhetoric could be quite effective in mobilizing women against the black shame is evinced by a petition to the League of Nations submitted in October 1920 and signed by more than seventy women's associations from Germany, Austria, Holland, and Sweden. The petition, which had been launched by the German People's Association “Save the Honor” (Deutscher Volksbund “Rettet die Ehre”) in close consultation with the foreign office in Berlin, called for the removal of all African occupation troops from German soil.Footnote ³² According to the Volksbund, what made the presence of colonial French soldiers especially “unbearable” to the German population was “that Germany, a great European people of culture [Kulturvolk] with a history spanning almost one and a half millennia finds itself subjected … to the violent rule [Gewaltherrschaft] of coloreds from the lower and lowest levels of civilization.”Footnote ³³

The Volksbund accused the French government of pursuing a policy of “the basest form of revenge.” By putting “uncivilized blacks” in a position of power over a white people, France simultaneously undermined the collective efforts of other western colonial powers “to educate the coloreds to overcome their base instincts and elevate them onto a higher cultural level.” Detailed lists of sexual abuses reputedly perpetrated by African soldiers “documented” the extent of moral and physical destruction wreaked by France's troops in the occupied Rhineland. Ominously, the appeal concluded with the rhetorical question whether it was “really necessary to remind you of what other white peoples do when coloreds violate their women, girls, and boys? The German people would do the same if it had not been rendered defenseless [waffen- und wehrlos gemacht] against the black hordes whom France has equipped with the most modern weaponry.”Footnote ³⁴

The Volksbund petition highlights the centrality in black shame propaganda of themes of female sexual victimization. Real and reputed rapes of German women by African French soldiers became quintessential metaphors for Germany's humiliation and “repression” through the Versailles Treaty.Footnote ³⁵ The document also attests to the potency of a nationalism infused with anxieties about (male) sexual violence to unite at least temporarily otherwise extremely diverse groups of women.Footnote ³⁶ The political heterogeneity among the petition's supporters was stunning. On the extreme right end of the political spectrum, the petitioners included organizations such as the German National-Socialist Women's League for German Austria (Deutscher nationalsozialistischer Frauenverein für Deutsch-Österreich) and the New Land Bible Circle (Neulandbibelkreis).Footnote ³⁷ Germany's more mainstream nationalist Right was represented, among others, by the national women's committee (Reichsfrauenausschuß) of the German-National People's Party (DNVP) and its counterpart from the German People's Party (DVP). The right-wing German-Evangelical Women's League, the morally conservative Catholic Women's League of Germany, and the liberal League of Jewish Women (Jüdischer Frauenbund) all had endorsed the appeal. Other signatories from the liberal camp included women's groups affiliated with the German Democratic Party (DDP) and the German branch of the International Abolitionist Federation, an organization dedicated to combating state regulation of prostitution. The Federation of German Women's Clubs had also signed. Furthest on the political Left was the radical feminist League for the Protection of Mothers (Bund für Mutterschutz).Footnote ³⁸

What gave rise to this remarkably broad alliance of women against the black horror? Protests against the black shame had only a very limited empirical basis. Police reports and testimonies from victims prove that some colonial soldiers indeed perpetrated violent and sexual crimes against German civilians, though evidence exists suggesting that European French soldiers were involved much more frequently in such assaults.Footnote ³⁹ In fall 1921, the Reich commissar for the occupied Rhenish territories compiled a list of serious criminal offenses committed by “colored troops” between September 1920 and June 1921. More than two thirds of the twenty-seven reported incidents represented rapes and attempted rapes; most of the rape victims were women.Footnote ⁴⁰ In an official response to the German report, the French government stressed that the standard size of France's army of occupation during the ten-month period had been 85,000 men, a figure that dwarfed the number of recorded attacks on civilians.Footnote ⁴¹ The reply did not specify how many African soldiers were stationed in the Rhineland, but it is reasonable to assume that they made up between a quarter and a third of all French occupation troops during this time.Footnote ⁴²

Clearly, only a small minority of non-European French troops stationed in the Rhineland committed crimes against civilians. Where perpetrators were identified and convicted of a serious felony, French military courts handed down severe punishments.Footnote ⁴³ Thus, of two Moroccans convicted of brutally murdering a male German worker in Hoechst during May 1921, one was sentenced to death and the other to life in prison.Footnote ⁴⁴ In June 1921, an Algerian soldier received a one-year prison sentence for the attempted rape of a woman in Bischofsheim.Footnote ⁴⁵ French authorities claimed that convictions often failed due to German victims' inability to identify the perpetrators. Racial stereotypes could complicate the investigation of crimes committed by African soldiers. Two sisters who had been ambushed by French colonial soldiers in the vicinity of Darmstadt in spring 1921 stated in their affidavit that they would not be able “to recognize the brown soldiers, because they all resemble each other so much.”Footnote ⁴⁶

The limited number of verified crimes committed by African soldiers underlines the importance of racial anxieties in generating mass support for the black shame campaign. Female black horror activists shared many of their male counterparts' nationalist resentments and racialist prejudices. At the same time, however, conflicting gender-specific viewpoints introduced a greater amount of tension into black horror discourse than historians generally acknowledge. Iris Wigger has suggested that constitutive of all types of black shame propaganda was a “unifying racist consensus … grounded in a racial threat to white womanhood.” This consensus reduced

In fact, the notion that white women represented innocent victims of African men's sexual aggression was not unanimously shared by all proponents of black shame propaganda. Misogynist strands in German nationalist discourse offered an alternative reading, according to which German women betrayed their country by giving way to their own lascivious desires for enemy soldiers. The conflict within the black horror campaign over allegations of German women's supposed “immorality” and “patriotic unreliability” adds an important facet to our understanding of the movement's gender politics.

Even during the war, right-wing propaganda had depicted the female home front as “frivolous” and “unpatriotic,” and the widespread suspicion of women's dedication to the war effort found expression in local communities' attempts to penalize soldiers' wives' for alleged “immoral” behavior by denying them support.Footnote ⁴⁸ Discourses blaming Germany's defeat on women's “promiscuity” continued after the armistice, as a complaint voiced by Aachen's police commissioner during January 1920 illustrates:

In April 1921, the right-wing nationalist organ, Der Tag, decried that “parallel to the ‘black shame’ there exists a ‘white disgrace’ on the Rhine personified by that category of German women of all classes who, driven by greed or perverse sexual desires, throw themselves into the arms of the officers and soldiers” of France's colonial troops.Footnote ⁵⁰

Frequently, black horror propaganda combined graphic depictions of sexual violence against women with vicious attacks on female Germans accused of fraternizing with the “enemy.” The Black Pest in Germany, Hans Alexander's rabidly racist condemnation of the Rhineland occupation, shows that the obsession with French colonial soldiers' alleged sexual excesses became a vehicle for the expression of violent misogynist fantasies as well as deep-seated resentments about German men's political and symbolic emasculation through the Versailles Treaty.Footnote ⁵¹ Using language that was simultaneously inflammatory and quasi-pornographic, Alexander provided detailed accounts of numerous reputed rapes and sexual murders:

Alexander attacked the German government for tolerating the assaults on German women in the occupied Rhineland and called for a united, “manly” resistance against the “black pest.” What Germany needed was “men who still can blush when a white German girl is raped by a black creature; men who must blush even when a white prostitute is bought by a black brute.” While Alexander sharply criticized male politicians for their lack of virility and courage, he expressed particular hatred of female “race traitors.” To the “German women and girls of the occupied and unoccupied territories” he addressed an ominous warning: “You should be ashamed before yourself, your conscience, your German heritage (Deutschtum), and the white race of the whole wide world if you possessed the abominable shamelessness to yield willingly to the black beasts' sexual advances. You are not worth being spat at! I value every whore more highly than I do you!”Footnote ⁵³

German officials, journalists, and pamphleteers were not the only ones attributing the perceived deterioration in public morals and national pride to women's lasciviousness. French counter-propaganda often resorted to similar arguments.Footnote ⁵⁴ Thus, Echo du Rhin, the official newspaper for the French-occupied Rhineland, claimed in an article of March 1922 that German complaints about African soldiers' sexual excesses were largely “provoked, if not fabricated outright. Most often, these complaints originate with young girls who want to hide their infidelity from their German boyfriends.” The paper stressed the extremely low number of French colonial soldiers convicted of crimes against the civilian population. The real reason for sexual contacts between German women and African soldiers lay in “the lax attitude (Leichtigkeit) of certain German women, who in most cases accost our natives on their own initiative, because they have a marked preference for them.”Footnote ⁵⁵ While voluntary romantic relationships between Rhenish women and French colonial soldiers certainly existed, the article insinuated that German women's behavior was motivated by “dishonorable” sexual proclivities and desires.Footnote ⁵⁶ A cartoon titled “Disgrace” (Infamie) and published in the French satirical magazine, Le Rire, on July 10, 1920, was more explicit. It depicted a German sow adorned with flowers and jewelry displaying her swollen teats and greedily eyeing a passing African soldier. The caption read: “We came to guard an eagle and have to protect ourselves from a sow.”Footnote ⁵⁷

How did German women involved in the black horror campaign respond to broad accusations of immorality directed against female Rhinelanders? The nationalist nature of the conflict meant that German women's criticisms focused disproportionately on French proponents of the “white disgrace.” The main argument raised against German representatives of this misogynist view emphasized the ways in which the latter, by besmirching the honor of Rhenish womanhood, aided enemy propaganda. Colored Frenchmen on the Rhine, the pamphlet issued by the League of Rhenish Women, blamed the moral campaign against German women on “representatives of French militarism and imperialism.” The claim that “not the white woman on the Rhine needed protection against the French republic's black and yellow soldiers, but rather the Negroes from the island of Madagascar needed protection against the immoral influence of the white women” was a lie disseminated by the French government.Footnote ⁵⁸ Similarly, the Dresden feminist, Katharina Scheven, argued that attempts to tarnish Rhenish women's reputation were a key feature of Allied propaganda devised to divert attention away from colonial soldiers' “atrocities.”Footnote ⁵⁹ In a speech delivered at a women's rally against the black shame in her home town during June 1921, Scheven stressed that only prostitutes “who in their moral degradation do not differentiate between friend and foe, a white man and a black man” willingly engaged in sexual relations with occupation soldiers. In Scheven's view, German men who corroborated Allied claims about colonial troops' exemplary behavior and German women's alleged promiscuity were guilty of “betraying their fatherland.”Footnote ⁶⁰

By emphasizing the coerced nature of German women's sexual encounters with African soldiers, black horror propaganda addressed at women and international audiences complicated misogynist accounts of Germany's “humiliation”: the innocent German maidens “violated” by French colonial troops were themselves victims of national defeat, not beneficiaries, as some right-wing nationalists claimed.Footnote ⁶¹ To some extent, women activists could use the nationalist rhetoric of black horror to refute blanket allegations of immorality leveled against female Rhinelanders. Yet, even liberal feminists such as Scheven drew a sharp line between “honorable German women and girls” on the one hand and “prostitutes” voluntarily entering relationships with non-European French soldiers on the other hand. The former deserved sympathy, the latter were morally and politically suspect. Right-wing female black shame crusaders such as Käthe Schirmacher went a step further and openly defended cutting the hair of German women accused of sexual relations with occupation soldiers.Footnote ⁶² Women's participation in the black horror movement thus had a very mixed impact on attitudes toward female “fraternizers.”

In other ways, as well, the theme of female sexual victimization so prominent in black shame rhetoric was deeply ambiguous. Ultimately, all variants of black horror propaganda tended to focus on women's bodies as endangered and/or dangerous primary conduits in the nation's “pollution.” This becomes particularly visible when we look at racist discourses about demographic “deterioration.” The Munich-based German Emergency Association against the Black Shame (Deutscher Notbund gegen die schwarze Schmach) warned that the Rhineland's “mulatoization” (Mulattisierung) was inevitable if African troops remained stationed there: “The most important reason for our fight against the use of coloreds on the Rhine is that our population will be saturated with mixed-racial offspring, which means it will be … rendered less valuable for generations to come.”Footnote ⁶³

Anxieties about the assumed link between “miscegenation” and national decline focused in particular on the breakdown of traditional controls on female sexuality. In a public lecture on “The Danger of the Black Occupation” delivered in June 1921, the Notbund's Dr. Rosenberger presented alarming “evidence” of the extent of the disintegration of the family and sexual mores in the occupied territory. According to Rosenberger, three hundred girls under fourteen recently had been hospitalized for syphilis in British-occupied Cologne. During the same period, Cologne officials allegedly had recorded 2,323 out-of-wedlock births to teenage mothers.Footnote ⁶⁴ When queried by the Reich commissar for the occupied territories about the veracity of Dr. Rosenberger's claims, Cologne's police commissioner replied in the negative: the morals police had not committed any girls under fourteen to the hospital; neither had it come to his attention that any “social intercourse” existed between German girls and “colored” soldiers.Footnote ⁶⁵ The director of the University of Cologne's hospital for skin diseases, Professor Zinsser, similarly asserted that “there is absolutely no truth to the whole story about three hundred syphilitic girls.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Such evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, claims about the occupied territory's “venereal contamination” resonated strongly with a German public already alarmed about their country's declining birthrate and “loosening morals.”Footnote ⁶⁷

For feminists and others concerned with the establishment of an equal moral standard for both sexes, the political uses of black horror propaganda were highly ambivalent. The quasi-pornographic nature of black shame discourse often produced its own powerful misogynist anxieties and resentments. To what extent were women able to challenge these anti-feminist strands within the black shame movement? The protest against the brothels for French colonial soldiers in the occupied Rhineland sheds more light on this question. To fully understand the significance of the campaign against the so-called French brothels requires a brief look at the larger trajectory of conflicts over state-regulated prostitution in Imperial and early Weimar Germany.

“Abolitionist” Opposition to State-Regulated Prostitution from the Second Empire to the Weimar Republic

In the course of the nineteenth century, numerous German cities adopted systems of state-regulated prostitution.Footnote ⁶⁸ While the details of local regulationist policies varied (for instance, only some cities condoned licensed brothels), they all shared certain basic features deeply offensive to feminists. According to Paragraph 361 Section 6 of the German penal code, only prostitutes registered with a special section of the police, the morals police (Sittenpolizei), avoided criminal prosecution. The price of toleration was high: registered prostitutes had to submit to regular medical screenings for sexually transmitted diseases (STDs); if found infected, they were subject to compulsory hospitalization and treatment. Registered prostitutes' personal freedom was restricted in a number of other important ways. Thus, for instance, they generally could not choose freely their place of residence, were barred from major public areas, and needed special police permission to travel. In contrast, no medical controls or criminal penalties pertained to men visiting prostitutes.

The first local German branches of the International Abolitionist Federation (IAF), an organization dedicated to the fight against state-regulated prostitution, were founded in Hamburg and Berlin in 1899; a national branch emerged in 1903.Footnote ⁶⁹ Shortly thereafter, the Federation of German Women's Clubs formally endorsed the repeal of Reglementierung. German abolitionists opposed state-regulated prostitution on the grounds that the system represented “a discriminatory law against the female sex,” violating key principles of social and moral justice. The statutes of the IAF's German branch stressed that “by establishing regulations aimed at securing man-safe opportunities for engaging in immorality and by penalizing only woman for this act committed by both sexes, [the state] … sanctions the inequality of the sexes before the law.”Footnote ⁷⁰

Despite support from the Social Democrats (SPD), Imperial-era feminists ultimately remained unsuccessful in their struggle against state-regulated prostitution. Divisions between liberal feminists and women of the religious Right over the issue of prostitution reform played a key role in abolitionism's defeat. During the Second Empire, Catholic women's associations either refrained altogether from taking a public stance on regulationism, or they gave the system their outright support.Footnote ⁷¹ Especially the Catholic Welfare Organization for Girls, Women, and Children (Katholischer Fürsorgeverein für Mädchen, Frauen und Kinder, or KFV) openly opposed abolitionist demands. Its president, Agnes Neuhaus, defended state-regulated prostitution as an indispensable means for the protection of public order. Neuhaus argued that Catholics had to accept the fact “that the state sanctions a serious sin.” After all, “even the Bible permits that one tolerates a lesser evil to prevent an even greater one.”Footnote ⁷² Protestant women's organizations such as the German-Evangelical Women's League (Deutsch-Evangelischer Frauenbund, or DEF) protested against police-controlled brothels, yet carefully distanced themselves from a feminist critique of men's exploitation of prostitutes. Rather than viewing prostitution as the result of profoundly unjust power asymmetries between the sexes, the DEF linked the problem to “moral decay” caused by the spread of atheism, socialism, and the “materialism” of modern mass culture.Footnote ⁷³

World War I witnessed major reversals in religious women's attitudes toward regulationism. The systematic distribution of condoms among the troops and the wartime expansion of state-regulated prostitution in Germany and the German-occupied territories united abolitionists and women of the religious Right in protest.Footnote ⁷⁴ Such permissive policies directed at men contrasted sharply with the parallel introduction of intensified repressive measures against a widening circle of women suspected of promiscuity.Footnote ⁷⁵ Army directives for the control of STDs implemented shortly after the outbreak of hostilities and effective within the entire German Reich marked an unprecedented radicalization of Reglementierung. Particularly outrageous in the eyes of feminists and many religiously conservative women was the military's decision to report any woman accused of infecting a soldier with venereal disease (VD) to the morals police for compulsory medical exams. This practice, abolitionists worried, put a large number of innocent women in danger of becoming victims of “jealousy, wounded vanity, or mere wantonness,” especially since the identity of their denouncers remained undisclosed.Footnote ⁷⁶

Historian Ute Daniel has found evidence showing that in the course of the war, the blatant discrepancy between “the different degree of sexual permissiveness granted to men and women began to garner attention primarily in connection with the constantly circulating rumors about the dissolute life behind the lines.”Footnote ⁷⁷ Disapproval of the pronounced inequity of wartime anti-VD measures certainly played an important role in mobilizing women of the religious Right against regulationism. In August 1918, the Catholic Women's League of Germany (Katholischer Frauenbund Deutschlands, or KFB) broke its long-standing public silence on the issue of prostitution and petitioned the Reichstag to abolish Reglementierung in favor of measures against STDs aimed at the population as a whole, not merely prostitutes.Footnote ⁷⁸ Woman suffrage put teeth into religious women's demands for prostitution reform. As a delegate for the Center Party during the Weimar Republic, Agnes Neuhaus actively supported passage of an anti-VD law that would repeal police-controlled prostitution.Footnote ⁷⁹

Protestant women also became more outspoken critics of the sexual double standard. In a speech on “The Social Origin of Prostitution” delivered in November 1916, Paula Müller-Otfried, president of the DEF and future Reichstag delegate for the German-National People's Party, refuted the view that prostitutes alone were responsible for their predicament. “The rigid, sweeping condemnation of the prostitute is neither fair nor compassionate, especially since those who condemn the woman earning her livelihood with prostitution are greatly inclined toward making all kinds of excuses for the man who seeks out the prostitute. Yet, it is his demand that produces the supply.”Footnote ⁸⁰ In a petition to the Prussian minister of welfare (Minister für Volkswohlfahrt) of October 1920, the German-Evangelical Women's League supported plans to replace state-regulated prostitution with a system of hygienic controls against STDs encompassing the entire population. Regulationism, the appeal stressed, “represents a grave injustice vis-à-vis women, whom it degrades. … It also confuses the conscience because the legal regulation of prostitution … suggests that vice receives official approval and protection.”Footnote ⁸¹

The introduction of woman suffrage in November 1918 enhanced abolitionism's momentum and facilitated cross-party collaboration. In October 1919, sixteen female delegates representing all parties submitted a motion to the national assembly calling for the abolition of Reglementierung. In regulationism's stead, the female parliamentarians demanded the introduction of comprehensive anti-venereal legislation and new social welfare programs aimed at morally endangered girls (Gefährdete).Footnote ⁸² Four months later, the Prussian state assembly voted to repeal state-regulated prostitution and establish social welfare offices for Gefährdete under female directorship.Footnote ⁸³ During the early 1920s, major cities such as Hamburg, Dresden, and Leipzig started to dismantle police-controlled prostitution by closing down previously tolerated brothels. Yet, abolitionism's postwar advances often seemed precarious. Support for state-regulated prostitution remained particularly strong among the police and male-dominated hierarchies of the Protestant and Catholic Churches.Footnote ⁸⁴ Until a national anti-VD law finally repealed Reglementierung in October 1927, Prussian police officials successfully held onto many of their established powers for the control of prostitutes. In 1923, abolitionist anti-venereal legislation already approved by parliament foundered in the Reichsrat, where Catholic Bavaria's delegation blocked it with a veto.

The campaign against France's African occupation troops erupted at a crucial moment in the Weimar-era struggle over prostitution reform. To strengthen popular support for their respective positions, abolitionists as well as pro-regulationists tried to appeal to the nationalist and racist anxieties unleashed by the black horror campaign. Feminists believed that the focus in black shame discourse on themes of female sexual victimization offered them a potent weapon for discrediting simultaneously French and German systems of regulationism. What follows is an examination of the successes, pitfalls, and limitations of their strategy.

The Occupation Brothels and the Myth of a United German Opposition

In summer 1921, the League of Rhenish Women and its affiliates began planning a concerted campaign against the brothels for French troops in the Rhineland. This initiative followed on the heels of the treasury's (Reichsschatzministerium) second report on the costs of the Rhineland occupation, which included expenses for the maintenance of the military brothels. In a memo, representatives of the RFL underlined the need to rejuvenate the black shame campaign, since propaganda about African soldiers' alleged sexual crimes had become “rather worn out [reichlich abgegriffen] both within Germany and abroad.” In contrast, propaganda about the brothels promised to produce “an exceptionally positive echo especially among the Anglo-Saxon and Nordic countries.”Footnote ⁸⁵ And indeed, unlike the often dubious reports about sexual violence allegedly perpetrated by French colonial soldiers, the existence of the brothels was a fact. From a propagandistic perspective, the focus on the Besatzungsbordelle had the added advantage of implicating the French government more directly in African soldiers' purported “sexual abuse” of German women: “The French and Belgian authorities have ordered the establishment of public houses … in front of which droves of colored troops are jostling: there, German women are being offered up to them!”Footnote ⁸⁶ Since France was the only major Allied power officially practicing state-regulated prostitution in its own country, German attacks on France's use of brothels in the occupied Rhineland aimed to appeal to the strong abolitionist sentiments prevailing in England and the United States.

E. D. Morel's Horror on the Rhine testified to the propagandistic potential of the issue of the Rhenish brothels. Morel claimed that the French army pursued the establishment of occupation brothels with a mixture of brutal force and cold-hearted cynicism. “Many a small German town which never boasted a brothel has been compelled to set one up. In the great majority of cases the civic authorities of the town must pay for their upkeep.” Morel reported that compulsory requisition of private homes had led to great hardships, as in the case of Ludwigshafen, where “the inhabitants of the selected houses were turned out to live in cubicles in the school gymnasium.”Footnote ⁸⁷ He related the story of a mayor “of a certain town in the Palatinate” who had been threatened with a court-martial because he “demurred when requested to set up a brothel.” French authorities allegedly also told the mayor “that if a brothel was not established ‘German women, girls, and boys would suffer the unavoidable consequences.’ ”Footnote ⁸⁸ How much truth was there to the accusations raised by Morel and other opponents of the Besatzungsbordelle?

According to a memorandum by the minister for the occupied territories submitted to the Reichstag in May 1922, during the first two years of the Rhineland occupation the French military had ordered the establishment of nineteen brothels. By December 1923, fifteen of these were still in operation.Footnote ⁸⁹ This number did not include German brothels predating the occupation and later set aside for the exclusive use by French military personnel (six such brothels existed in Mainz alone). Of the fifteen brothels for French troops reported for 1923, ten were situated in towns with populations smaller than 15,000. Among the latter were the small rural communities of Idstein, Langenschwalbach, and Diez, each of which had fewer than 4,000 inhabitants. Expenditures for establishment and upkeep of the Besatzungsbordelle formed part of the costs of military occupation to be covered by the German Reich; between January 1919 and October 1921, German authorities reported spending more than 800,000 marks on brothels introduced by order of the French Army of the Rhine.Footnote ⁹⁰

After April 1921, Ordinance 83 of the Inter-Allied Rhineland Commission became the basis for the regulation of prostitution in the French-occupied zone.Footnote ⁹¹ Ordinance 83 proceeded from the premise “that the control of prostitution and the measures for the prevention of venereal diseases pertain to the safety of the armies of occupation.” It stated that “the orders for the prevention of the spread of venereal diseases issued by the commanders-in-chief of each of the armies of occupation … have the force of official decrees of the Inter-Allied Rhineland Commission.” The French guidelines for the implementation of Ordinance 83 were by far the most detailed. They were also most openly pro-regulationist. In fact, a major goal was the expansion and improvement of the German system of police-controlled prostitution. Article 1 of the guidelines stressed that in the French zone of occupation, “German laws and decrees concerning the supervision of prostitution and … the prevention of the spread of venereal diseases are strictly enforced.” Article 2 declared German officials responsible for all administrative, hygienic, and judicial aspects connected to the control of prostitution; French military authorities supervised the proper execution of these tasks. According to Article 3, all garrison towns had to hire a German physician specializing in the treatment of STDs who would examine licensed prostitutes and women accused of prostitution. The French guidelines on Ordinance 83 presupposed the existence of Reglementierung. Thus, Article 5 required regular updating of the lists of registered prostitutes and specified the information to be included on prostitutes' identity cards. Article 6 stipulated that women arrested for streetwalking and convicted of professional prostitution had to register with the German morals police. One of the potential problems arising from French prostitution policies in the occupied territory was linked to the fact that a number of German garrison towns had no prior history of state-regulated prostitution.Footnote ⁹²

Black horror propaganda emphasized the heroic, if ultimately futile, resistance Rhenish officials and citizens put up against the introduction of the occupation brothels. Yet, a closer look at conflicts over state-regulated prostitution in individual garrison towns reveals a decidedly more complicated and varied pattern of German reactions. In some small towns lacking a homegrown system of Reglementierung, public officials and citizens indeed united against the military brothels. This was the case in Diez north of Wiesbaden, where municipal authorities tried to prevent the establishment of a brothel for French soldiers. Their protests failed, and in 1919 a brothel was opened in the former residence of one of the managers of a local marble factory. The company first rented and subsequently sold the building to “a German who owned several brothels … in the occupied territory.”Footnote ⁹³ Given Diez's small size of 3,100 inhabitants, it is hard to see how the brothel could have been hidden away from the public eye. The designated building was situated in close proximity to a public recreational area and playground (Sport- und Spielplatz) and a youth hostel.

Possibly as a result of their initial objections, public authorities in Diez played only a subordinate role in the supervision of the brothel. In November 1921 Landrat Scheuern, the chief administrative official for the Unterlahnkreis, complained that in Diez and elsewhere in his district, “the operation of the brothels is considered a purely French matter. Military authorities resist any participation by the German police.” German police officers assisted in the transport of diseased prostitutes to the Wiesbaden hospital, yet were excluded from “any further control over inmates and owners of the brothels.”Footnote ⁹⁴ Hostility toward the Besatzungsbordell in Diez still ran high in the mid-1920s. In summer 1926, citizens' associations and church groups protested against the brothel's detrimental moral influence. Landrat Scheuern agreed with the citizenry of Diez that the occupation brothels represented “a disgrace (Schandfleck) for the small towns.”Footnote ⁹⁵

Further west, in the town of Düren near Aachen, the issue of the occupation brothels created certain divisions between citizens and administrators. Like their counterparts in Diez, Düren officials initially protested against the opening of a brothel for French troops. As a result, the French army directly negotiated with the German entrepreneur setting up the brothel; however, Düren officials' refusal to play a more active role in the establishment of the brothel seems to have been motivated more by concern over their public image than by principled opposition. In internal correspondence with their superior, administrators refuted French claims that the brothel had been their own idea. Yet, they admitted that they had welcomed the institution “for reasons of public hygiene and the safety of the population.”Footnote ⁹⁶ The citizens of Düren did not share their public officials' more sympathetic assessment of the brothel's beneficial functions. According to a representative of the Catholic dean for the Düren district, the “shameless carrying-on” associated with the brothel for French soldiers had created “great uproar” among Catholics in the city and surrounding countryside, especially since the establishment was situated close by the “Mutter Gottes Häuschen,” a deeply venerated pilgrimage site.Footnote ⁹⁷ Despite such protests, Düren's lord mayor continued to defend the necessity of the brothel to limit the spread of STDs and protect female citizens from sexual assaults by French soldiers.Footnote ⁹⁸

Other municipal governments in the French-occupied Rhineland also supported the occupation brothels. In Hoechst, an industrial town with a population of 28,000, no licensed brothels had existed prior to the arrival of French troops.Footnote ⁹⁹ In December 1918, a brothel was opened by order of the French military administration; the establishment was run by a private tenant, who rented the building from the municipality. The Hoechst morals police supervised the brothel in collaboration with the French military police and were responsible for all measures against unlicensed prostitution and STDs detailed in the French guidelines on Ordinance 83. In 1922, Landrat Zimmermann in Hoechst justified the brothel on racial grounds: “Under the conditions prevailing here, the existence of a brothel undoubtedly has advantages, since the occupation forces consist primarily of colored colonial troops. It can be assumed that the absence of such a public house would lead to the spread of moral dissolution [Sittenverderbnis] and venereal diseases.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Yet, a subsequent report by Zimmermann dated January 1926, however, reveals that the local police welcomed the brothel partly for reasons unconnected to the occupation. Police authorities in Hoechst, Zimmermann stressed, believed the brothel to be “absolutely necessary in the interest of the safety of the female population. They have based their argument especially also on the fact that the dangers to public health are already very severe in Hoechst with its strong industrial concentration … and the continuous immigration of all sorts of male and female elements.”Footnote ¹⁰¹

In some small rural communities, the occupation enabled the police to assume new powers in the control of public morality. In Biebrich in the Wiesbaden administrative district, local officials introduced Reglementierung in 1919. The Biebrich morals police relied on the French military administration to add muscle to their own disciplinary measures against non-compliant streetwalkers: in 1921, Biebrich officials approached the French authorities and requested that six registered prostitutes who had repeatedly missed their required medical exams be expelled from the occupied territory.Footnote ¹⁰² The examples of Düren, Hoechst, and Biebrich suggest that French demands for an extension of state-regulated prostitution found a positive echo among numerous Rhenish officials. In many instances, the latter effectively used Ordinance 83 to extend their own powers for the control of prostitution and STDs. In contrast, German officials in the American zone of occupation expressed frustration about the anti-prostitution policies implemented there. According to the Landrat in Montabaur, the Americans' opposition to regulationism was highly regrettable, since “the lack of brothels has greatly benefited the spread of prostitution.”Footnote ¹⁰³

To shore up support for Reglementierung at a time when police-controlled prostitution faced increased criticisms in Germany, pro-regulationist German officials did not shy away from appealing to racist fears unleashed by the “black shame” campaign. The city of Mainz provides an especially disturbing example of this line of argumentation. During the early 1920s, cooperation between German and French authorities functioned so smoothly in the Rhine-Hesse region (Rheinhessen) that a representative of the provincial administration in Mainz could boast that “German officials oversee the entire brothel system (das Bordellwesen) in the Hessian occupied territory.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Brothel regulations in effect in the city of Mainz served as a blueprint for the operation of French military brothels elsewhere in the province of Rhine-Hesse. Mainz's licensed brothels predated the occupation. After the war, the city restricted the use of its brothels to French military personnel.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ The German morals police retained their full control over the regulation of the brothels: they hired (and fired) madams, regulated rents and business hours, and organized prostitutes' medical supervision. Mainz's brothels were racially segregated: two buildings with a total of fifteen to twenty prostitutes were reserved for European French soldiers, while four others with a total of seventeen prostitutes were used exclusively by members of France's colonial troops.

Health officials in Mainz used the local brothels to “study” alleged racially determined differences in male sexual behavior. Kreisarzt Dr. Schaeffer was entrusted “with the difficult ascertainment of the volume of business in Mainz's public houses under special consideration of the number of brothel visits by white and colored members of the occupation troops.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ To obtain such knowledge, Schaeffer interviewed primarily madams and other “individuals familiar with the operation of the brothels”; prostitutes' own statements were considered unreliable. In an article published in 1921 in a major German medical journal, the head of the ward for skin and venereal diseases at Mainz's St. Rochus Hospital, Hugo Müller, presented an analysis of Schaeffer's “findings.” Müller claimed that each prostitute in the brothels for colonial soldiers received between forty and fifty men daily during the week, and between seventy and eighty daily on weekends. By comparison, the number of clients per prostitute in the brothels for European French soldiers ranged between ten and twelve daily on weekdays, and between twenty-five and thirty daily on the weekend. Müller arrived at the astronomical figure of close to 5,800 weekly instances of sexual intercourse reputedly occurring in the brothels for colonial troops. The comparative number for the brothels restricted to Europeans was less than 1,300. According to Müller, the extremely high volume of clients per prostitute in the brothels for colonial troops was attributable to African men's “machine-like performance [maschinelle Abwicklung] of the sexual act.” He believed that his study proved that “the presence of colored occupation troops with their uninhibited sex drive [ungehemmtes Triebleben] necessitates the use of brothels for the protection of the rest of the female population.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷

Müller's “study” of Mainz's occupation brothels was flawed not only by his own racial prejudices, but also by the lack of vital statistical information about the precise numbers of colonial and European French troops stationed in the city. His research methods were too murky and unsystematic to lend any credibility to his conclusions. The value of Müller's observations therefore does not lie in their (missing) scientific validity, but rather in what they reveal about the emergence of a racial justification for regulationism in the context of political conflicts over the Rhineland occupation. Müller's racism was matched only by his misogyny. He admitted that it was “humiliating … to see how in the brothels white women [Weiber] surrender themselves to the coloreds. … But it is better to allow the prostitutes to offer their services—the expression ‘sacrifice themselves’ would be misplaced—than to let the rest of the morally endangered girls do this! Due to her fundamental ethical defects, the average professional prostitute [Durchschnittsdirne] cannot be harmed any more by this intercourse.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸

Comments on the presumed moral apathy of registered prostitutes were a staple of regulationist ideology. In the context of the political controversy over the Besatzungsbordelle, however, Müller's efforts to diffuse concerns that German prostitutes could be damaged in any way by the frequent sexual intercourse with French colonial soldiers took on a special significance. For it was precisely the fact that German women serviced sexually European and African French soldiers in the occupation brothels that rendered the latter so offensive in the eyes of German nationalists. As it were, authorities in the occupied Rhineland had no choice but to employ German women in the brothels for French troops: Article 8 of the French guidelines for the implementation of Ordinance 83 stipulated that “the professional pursuit of prostitution in the French zone of occupation is forbidden to French and Allied womenfolk. Professional prostitution will lead to immediate expulsion.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ By presenting Reglementierung as the only effective means for containing “racial pollution,” German pro-regulationists hoped to benefit from the powerful racialist sentiments mobilized by black shame agitation. The fact that their position failed to dominate public debates about the occupation brothels attests to certain, politically highly ambivalent, achievements of feminists' strategy to turn nationalist discourse into a weapon against state-regulated prostitution.

Tainted by Association? The Nationalist Case against Regulationism and Its Limitations

Women played a key role in pushing the issue of the occupation brothels to the forefront of black shame protests. The leadership and affiliates of the League of Rhenish Women were aware of potential difficulties arising from this strategy. In 1921, a memo on the RFL's planned expanded campaign against the Besatzungsbordelle cautioned against launching the protest before the Reichstag had voted to pass abolitionist legislation. According to the memo, “[t]he conditions in Germany prior to the war, the regulation of prostitution along the German front lines during the war, and the disunity of German public opinion [on the issue of state-regulated prostitution] after the war and to the present day provide no basis for an effective protest against the establishment of brothels in the occupied territory.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ Yet, the interests of the semi-official RFL, whose main focus was on propaganda aimed at an international audience, and the domestic objectives of German abolitionists, who hoped to topple Reglementierung through its negative association with the “French” brothels in the Rhineland, diverged on the issue of the campaign's timing. Even before the German parliament passed anti-regulationist prostitution reforms in 1923, feminists and their abolitionist allies from the religious Right doubled their efforts to draw national and international attention to the problem of the Besatzungsbordelle. In doing so, they created a major dilemma for German defenders of state-regulated prostitution.

In July 1922 the German National Committee for Combating the Traffic in Girls (Deutsches Nationalkomitee zur Bekämpfung des Mädchenhandels), an organization supported by feminists as well as conservative social purity proponents, requested that the International Bureau for the Suppression of Traffic in Women and Children urge the French government to dissolve all occupation brothels.Footnote ¹¹¹ At a meeting of the International Bureau in London during early October, representatives of affiliated organizations in England, Germany, Belgium, Spain, Canada, Norway, Holland, Siam, Switzerland, and Austria all agreed that the Rhineland brothels should be closed down. The Swiss delegate's suggestion that “at the very least the French should employ only French girls and cover the costs of the brothels' upkeep themselves if they considered such houses indispensable for their troops” received unanimous support.Footnote ¹¹²

Yet, a letter by the French National Committee claiming that the brothels “had been established in the interest of the German population of the occupied territory to protect the Germans against harassments” complicated the matter. According to the French account, Germans' support for the occupation brothels attested to the policy's success: “The population in those towns where such houses exist has not raised any complaints.”Footnote ¹¹³ Because German and French portrayals of public reactions to the brothels diverged in significant ways, the assembled members of the International Bureau resolved to gather additional information before appealing to the League of Nations for abolition of the Besatzungsbordelle. They asked the German National Committee for more details concerning the operation and supervision of the Rhenish brothels, including answers to the questions, “Who supervises the brothels; are the persons in charge of French or German nationality?” and “What arrangements have been made for the black troops?”Footnote ¹¹⁴

In its efforts to disprove French claims that substantial German support for the occupation brothels existed, the Deutsches Nationalkomitee closely collaborated with government offices. The German embassy in London was informed about the outcomes of the International Bureau's October meeting and promised assistance in retrieving incriminating evidence against the French military administration. One year later, such endeavors apparently still had not produced the desired results. In a letter to the minister for the occupied territories of December 1923, the general secretary of the Nationalkomitee, Dr. Jung, complained that French officials tenaciously clung to a distorted account according to which the “houses for the use of French troops were established upon German authorities' express wish.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ Equally upsetting to Jung were French and Belgian claims “that Germany, if it had been victorious, also would have established brothels in the occupied territories, occasionally even by force.” To refute such “slander” more effectively, the German National Committee asked the ministry for official documentation disproving the French claims once and for all.

This, however, was difficult. As the previous section has shown, a considerable number of Rhenish officials did support the establishment of brothels for France's troops. At the same time, memories of the German army's wartime use of state-regulated prostitution in occupied France and Belgium were still vivid and did much to cast doubt on the claims of the German National Committee. In January 1919, military authorities in the Belgian zone of occupation issued a detailed directive for the supervision of prostitutes stipulating that “all women registered with the German morals police have to be handed an identity card [Personalausweis] based on the model introduced by the Germans in select Belgian towns during the occupation period.”Footnote ¹¹⁶ Along with the order, German administrators in Aachen received a copy of the bilingual Personalausweis for prostitutes previously used by the German occupiers in the province of Liège.Footnote ¹¹⁷ At the Sixth International Congress for Combating the Traffic in Women and Girls in Graz during September 1924, Dr. Jung conceded that the German army had relied on state-regulated brothels in the German-occupied territories. The president of the German National Committee distanced himself from these wartime policies. Yet, he also claimed that unlike the French in the Rhineland, German military commanders never had forced “French authorities to establish new brothels” or staff the latter exclusively with French women.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Jung's arguments failed to convince the International Bureau for the Suppression of Traffic in Women and Children to pass a resolution condemning the Rhenish brothels for French troops.Footnote ¹¹⁹

The contradictions riddling the international campaign against the occupation brothels offered feminists and other opponents of state-regulated prostitution a new opportunity to call for the repeal of Reglementierung. In a Reichstag speech on January 26, 1921, Marie-Elisabeth Lüders, the prominent liberal feminist and social welfare expert representing the German Democratic Party (DDP), sharply criticized the adherence to police-controlled prostitution in the draft of the new penal code.Footnote ¹²⁰ Lüders stressed the ways in which this policy undermined German protests against the brothels for French troops:

Feminists such as Lüders hoped that the surge in nationalist indignation over the Rhenish Besatzungsbordelle would help to undermine Germany's own system of state-regulated prostitution. To a certain extent, this was indeed the case. Especially licensed brothels and the confinement of prostitutes to specific streets or houses (Kasernierung) had become more objectionable in the postwar period. Thus, on March 3, 1921, the Reichstag passed a unanimous resolution calling on the government to abolish all existing brothels and systems of Kasernierung as incompatible with Clause 180 of the penal code.Footnote ¹²² Even though in many cities, local civil servants successfully resisted these reforms until the 1927 Law for Combating Venereal Diseases compelled them to dismantle police-controlled prostitution, major urban centers such as Hamburg, Bremen, Leipzig, and Dresden abolished licensed brothels and Kasernierung during the early 1920s. The controversy over the occupation brothels added important momentum to the postwar advance of abolitionism.

Yet, the silences in Lüders's Reichstag speech point to the ways in which the greater reliance on nationalist arguments limited abolitionists' ability to advance a consistent, principled critique of Reglementierung. Prior to becoming director of the War Office's Women's Bureau (Frauenreferat) and Headquarters for Women's Labor (Frauenarbeitszentrale) in 1917, Lüders had helped to coordinate social welfare services for unemployed women and prostitutes in German-occupied Brussels.Footnote ¹²³ In her memoirs, Lüders stressed that her collaboration with the German morals police in Brussels had put “great emotional strain” on her and that the work had confirmed her conviction that state-regulated prostitution represented “a manifestation of a general contempt for women.” She justified her decision to remain in Brussels with the argument that social work among prostitutes mitigated some of regulationism's hardships and helped to facilitate women's return to an “orderly life.”Footnote ¹²⁴ During her stay in the Belgian capital, Lüders had gained disturbing insights into the ways in which the conditions of military occupation exacerbated regulationism's sexual double standard. In her memoirs, she hinted at the fact that German men's sexual transgressions against Belgian women frequently went unpunished. “Despite the fact that the Belgian laws offered an excellent basis for the protection of the youth, German military and railway authorities shielded German men from prosecution …, and this even in cases that would have been punishable according to German law.”Footnote ¹²⁵ Although in her memoirs, Lüders suggested that her experience in Brussels had played a major role in raising her awareness of regulationism's injustice, she only made rather veiled allusions to the wartime radicalization of state-regulated prostitution in her Reichstag speech on January 26, 1921.

Lüders's failure at this earlier juncture to criticize explicitly the German army's use of regulated prostitution in occupied Belgium is telling. During World War I, feminists had protested against the sexual double standard characteristic of military measures for combating STDs, and memories of this battle were very much alive in the postwar years. In 1920, Dorothee von Velsen of the executive committee of the Federation of German Women's Clubs voiced sharp criticism of military policies for the control of prostitution implemented in German-occupied territories during the war.Footnote ¹²⁶ Yet, the powerful nationalist anxieties unleashed by the black shame campaign left little room for critical self-reflection. Right-wing women's attacks on the occupation brothels blamed the Allies for “moral decay.” In December 1922, the DNVP's Margarethe Behm expressed outrage “that the number of public houses in the occupied territory is still growing.” Behm stressed that the occupation brothels vitiated conservatives' efforts to protect Germany's youth against the moral and physical dangers of alcoholism, “indecent” publications (Schund und Schmutz), and “uncivilized and unclean theater and movie performances.”Footnote ¹²⁷ French and British support for regulated brothels in the occupied territory contrasted sharply with attempts in Hamburg and elsewhere in the Reich to abolish such institutions; they also contradicted the Reichstag resolution of March 3, 1921. Behm reminded her fellow parliamentarians of all political persuasions that it was their patriotic duty to defend the Rhenish youth against the brothels' demoralizing influence: “the Rhineland belongs to us, the Rhineland must not be taken away from us, the Rhineland has to remain eternally German! Let us prove our faithfulness toward the Rhineland by protecting the Rhineland's youth, our youth.” Following Behm's lead, the Reichstag majority passed a resolution sharply condemning France for the compulsory establishment of occupation brothels.Footnote ¹²⁸ When Communist delegate Wilhelm Koenen objected to the resolution's self-righteous tone with the reminder that during the war German generals also had established regulated brothels along the eastern front, right-wing parliamentarians denied this vehemently. Social Democrats told Koenen that the German military's actions during World War I were “no excuse for the French to do the same!”Footnote ¹²⁹

Black shame propaganda, which associated supervised brothels in the occupied Rhineland with the alleged sexual abuse of German women through African men, helped to discredit certain elements of Germany's own system of state-regulated prostitution. To a limited extent, liberal feminists and right-wing women could use nationalist arguments to draw attention to the misogynist sexual double standard characteristic of all forms of police-controlled prostitution. Ultimately, however, the appeal to nationalist anxieties proved a highly ambivalent political strategy for feminists. German feminists had a point when they criticized that French prostitution policies in the Rhineland contradicted important abolitionist reforms of the postwar years. Yet, French authorities also told the truth when they claimed widespread support for their pro-regulationist policies among Rhenish officials and politicians. A major flaw of the nationalist critique of regulationism emerging in the context of the black horror campaign was that it tended to obscure the significant extent to which Germans (and in particular male administrators, police officials, and medical experts) shared responsibility for the establishment of the occupation brothels. By casting the German nation en bloc in the role of the victim of foreign “oppressors,” black horror propaganda largely silenced feminist criticisms of the relationship between state-regulated prostitution and male domination.

Contemporary critics were aware of the ways in which black horror propaganda diverted attention away from women's subordination and other pathologies of European society. In spring 1922, radical feminist Helene Stöcker reviewed several publications discussing African soldiers' sexual behavior in the occupied Rhineland, including Hugo Müller's article on the Mainz brothels.Footnote ¹³⁰ Stöcker was appalled by the “inhumane and disgusting” conditions in Mainz's brothels for colonial troops; she was equally repulsed by Müller's racism. “We share the horror about the degradation of people, men and women, who engage … in prostitution. But this unethical and objectionable behavior is regrettable irrespective of the skin color of those who pursue it. And let us not forget that the brothel system and militarism have always and everywhere been connected closely—and that the German army also considered this ‘beneficial’ institution indispensable.” Through their promotion of war, mass murder, and state-regulated brothels, Stöcker stressed, Europeans had forfeited any legitimate claim to represent a superior civilization: “We white peoples should stand deeply ashamed before the colored peoples: our much-praised ‘civilization’ [Kultur] has proven itself only in one respect, namely in our superior ability to kill.”Footnote ¹³¹

* * *

What are the larger implications of women's participation in the racist campaign against France's colonial occupation troops? Analysis of the debate about the Besatzungsbordelle offers fascinating clues concerning important shifts in the “moral” agenda after World War I. Historians frequently comment on the pervasive sense of “moral crisis” in Weimar Germany.Footnote ¹³² This literature generally presents Weimar-era discourses about “immorality” as unequivocally backward-oriented. Examples of nostalgic rhetoric and imagery certainly abound. Julia Sneeringer has demonstrated that conventional gender roles remained virtually unchallenged in 1920s election propaganda. To discredit the new democratic state, the nationalist Right frequently relied on romanticized depictions of the Second Empire's alleged superior sexual mores and harmonious patriarchal family.Footnote ¹³³

And yet, this language was partially misleading insofar as it tended to obscure widespread disillusionment with major Imperial institutions for the control of gender and public morality. The campaign against the brothels for France's troops in the occupied Rhineland shows that many Germans, including important sections of the religious Right, did not desire an unqualified restoration of the prewar moral and gender order. Disturbingly, feminists' and right-wing women's attempt to use nationalist and racist arguments against regulationism's sexual double standard was partially successful. This points to a more complicated relationship between women's rights and the 1920s “moral” agenda than historians hitherto have acknowledged. Any undifferentiated view depicting the “moral” agenda as categorically inconsistent with efforts to redress inequities in gender relations needs to be revised.Footnote ¹³⁴

The close collaboration between liberal feminists and women of the religious Right on the issue of prostitution reform suggests that during the postwar years, many conservatives did believe the Weimar Republic offered them a workable (if in many ways distasteful and flawed) framework for the pursuit of moral reform—an attitude contrasting significantly with the more pronounced and unambiguous anti-democratic thrust of “morality” campaigns one decade later.Footnote ¹³⁵ Postwar debates about “immorality” were marked by a limited ability to incorporate select feminist ideas. Yet, the controversy about the brothels for France's colonial troops also points to a decidedly more sinister trend in the Weimar-era “moral” agenda. Historians have argued that one of the peculiarities of post-World War I German nationalism was its marked tendency to blame Germany's domestic problems on her foreign enemies.Footnote ¹³⁶ By accusing France—and, by extension, the Allies—of poisoning public morals and destroying the German family, the black horror campaign exemplified this new trend in Weimar-era nationalist discourse. The saturation of 1920s German nationalism with sexual and gender anxieties produced a new type of nationalist language that often bordered on the pornographic in its explicit, highly visual depictions of the twin specters of “moral chaos” and “racial pollution.” Given that social purity campaigners had vowed to combat modern civilization's corrosive impacts on Christian notions of sexual propriety and taboo, the religious Right's active participation in the proliferation of black shame propaganda was deeply ironic and points to important contradictions in the postwar “moral” agenda.Footnote ¹³⁷