Maren Röger's pathbreaking study makes an important contribution to the emerging and increasingly sophisticated scholarship on Poland during World War II. Mining the holdings of eighteen archives, analyzing an extensive memoir literature, and complementing this research with dozens of oral testimonies and interviews, this methodologically rigorous and interpretatively innovative work advances our knowledge of the complexities and contradictions of National Socialist occupation policy in Poland, as well as the everyday experiences of Germans, Poles, and Jews in that context.

Since 1945, Polish-, German-, and, more recently, English-language secondary works have analyzed the terror, repression, and murderous policies of the Nazi regime in Poland, but sexual relations between occupiers and occupied people, and especially sexualized violence, have remained largely unexplored. According to the author, this is the result of a variety of factors, such as the desire in pre-1989 Polish historiography to avoid discussion about sexual violence perpetrated by Soviet soldiers, the failure of the male-dominated historical profession to take sexual violence seriously as an object of inquiry, and the tendency to regard sexual violence as merely an attendant symptom of the broader violence that accompanied the occupation.

Röger emphasizes three main areas of sexual interaction between German men and indigenous women in Poland: commercial contact, consensual contact, and forced contact. Her analysis is driven by three theses: that National Socialist sexual policies in occupied Poland were central to the regime's Rassenpolitik and Volkstumspolitik; that investigation of commercial, consensual, and forced sexual contact reveals the range and diverse forms of German power; and that sexuality was an important “arena of negotiation” (218) between the institutions of occupation (e.g., the military, police organs, civil administration) and their agents, who were, at times, accorded certain concessions to maintain their loyalty. For example, the prohibition against intimate relations between German men and Polish or Jewish women (Umgangsverbot) was not always strictly enforced and bordellos were made available.

Röger's analysis of commercial contact focuses primarily on the institutionalization of prostitution under German rule. Despite the Umgangsverbot, the occupation regime saw a functional value in making prostitution accessible to German men—from Wehrmacht conscripts to the elite of the Schutzstafel (SS) and police. This revealed a contradiction between, on the one hand, Nazi Rassenpolitik and Volkstumspolitik, and on the other, the perceived need to provide sexual services to German men and, at the same time, to control the spread of venereal disease. Commercial contact between German men and Polish women was not limited to sanctioned and supervised houses of prostitution, but often occurred in other forms—for example, in unofficial bordellos or in the informal exchanges of Hungerprostitution common in an atmosphere of severe material deprivation.

Consensual sexual contact between German men and Polish women, though also in violation of the Umgangsverbot, could originate in a variety of locations and circumstances, such as in the workplace, in restaurants and cafes, or in the context of official interactions between Germans and Poles. While seemingly “normal” at first glance, these relationships were nearly always unequal in terms of their power relations, given that the German man (the occupier) could exert social, economic, or political control over the Polish woman (the occupied). Adding to the complexity of the story is Röger's argument that the boundaries between consensual relations, prostitution for survival, and sexual coercion were often vague. In addition, the author contends that, for German men, the punishments for violating the prohibition against contact were applied inconsistently. Some received a warning, others were transferred to the Eastern front, and, in rare cases, violators were sent to concentration camps, but the arbitrary application of these penalties makes it difficult to discern a coherent pattern.

In her treatment of consensual relations under the occupation, Röger's evidence appears at times limited and anecdotal, but this is not surprising, for consensual relationships did not, for obvious reasons, appear frequently in German records. Ego-Dokumente (e.g., letters and diaries) do not shed much light on such relations either, largely because the latter violated both German law and, just as significant, Polish social norms. Moreover, Polish women who had such relationships were sometimes marked and punished by the Polish resistance as traitors, and frequently carried the stigma of their past well into the postwar years.

Analysis of sexual coercion and rape in German–Polish relations presents both the researcher and the reader with great challenges. The source base, consisting largely of police reports and trial records, is limited, colored by linguistic and cultural inflections, moderated by formal legal language, and subject to the distortions of summary and transcription. Röger exposes the ways in which coerced contact and rape—crimes committed against both Jewish and non-Jewish women—took the form of a sexual “conquering” (178) of indigenous woman by the German Herrenmensch. Such crimes manifested German power, were tools of extortion, and were perpetrated frequently and brutally in prisons, ghettos, and camps. The author also explores the forms and extents of sexual violence in the context of the 1944 Warsaw Uprising—an important addition to the otherwise well-documented history of that event. Röger weaves into her narrative an analysis of how sexual violence was investigated and prosecuted—or not—by the German military courts and judicial system. Formal indictments were minimal, prosecutions were often initiated randomly, and punishments varied from case to case. Moreover, the postwar application of justice for these crimes, whether in Poland or Germany, remains largely uninvestigated.

Röger's study makes several contributions: it is an accomplished account of National Socialist policy, an administrative history, and, at its most compelling, a work of Alltagsgeschichte at the intersection of the history of sexuality, gender, and Polish and Jewish responses to the brutalities of German rule. As such, the work is not only a signal contribution to a more comprehensive understanding of the Nazi occupation of Poland—and thus essential reading for all specialists interested in that history—but also an important contribution to any comparative analyses of German-occupied Europe.