In recent years, scholars have shown considerable interest in the sexual relations between soldiers and civilians during World War II. Much of that literature has examined rape, sexual violence, and forced prostitution committed by American troops, Nazi soldiers, and the Japanese military against occupied populations. Maren Röger takes a different approach in Wartime Relations, focusing primarily on the consensual relationships that developed between German soldiers and Polish civilians (including Jews) in occupied Poland. Drawing on official military records, vital statistics, court files, ego documents, and oral history interviews, and ably translated from the German by Rachel Ward, Röger systematically examines the scope and breadth of consensual sexual relations to illustrate the dynamics of power relationships in a society under occupation. Although heavily focused on prostitution and its regulation in occupied Poland, Röger also discusses relationships based on mutual consent as well as sexual violence and coercion. She argues that sexual politics was a central element of Nazi policy in occupied Poland, and reflected the structures of power that privileged the occupiers both racially and within the gender hierarchy.

Röger begins with a discussion of the Nazi regulation of prostitution in occupied Poland. For medical-sanitary and political reasons, the Nazis organized brothels and criminalized fraternization. The occupation authorities forced Polish women suspected of illicit sex or fraternization into brothels, compelling them to become sex workers subject to discipline and surveillance. In addition, the Nazis trafficked women, moving prostitutes to different brothels within occupied Poland, into other Reich territories, and even to the Eastern Front. Not all prostitutes lived in organized brothels; some worked through private brothels and some as clandestine prostitutes, although this did not always allow women to escape government control. Recognizing that many women turned to prostitution as a means of survival, Röger notes that the experience of forced prostitution varied across occupied Poland, and even sometimes offered opportunities for resistance.

While many in the occupying forces engaged with commercial sex, Röger provides evidence that a considerable number of consensual intimate relationships developed between German men and Polish women. She argues that these relationships reflected complicated systems of interaction and exchange with asymmetrical power dynamics that guaranteed superiority to the occupiers as men and as racially superior to Polish women. In these circumstances, those Germans who could offer material benefits to their partners had an advantage in developing relationships with local women. Such relationships, Röger points out, contravened Nazi ideology (and also ideals of Polish nationalism), and often exposed both partners to disciplinary action. Polish women faced intense pressure, and often shaming punishments, to discourage fraternization during the occupation. Likewise, Nazi authorities issued fraternization bans and imposed penalties and threats against soldiers who disobeyed the rules. However, Röger points out that enforcement of the fraternization ban was arbitrary and inconsistent, leaving men uncertain about the rules. She finds that many opposed the fraternization ban because its ideological imperatives conflicted with the realities of everyday life in occupied Poland. More clear, however, were Nazi polices regarding marriage, which generally opposed unions between Germans and non-Germans based on racial, biological, and political priorities.

Finally, Röger explores sexual violence in occupied Poland during the war, unpacking it according to the racial hierarchies imposed on Polish society by the occupiers. She finds that increased levels of sexual violence perpetrated against Polish women by ethnic Germans reflected a new power dynamic as the Nazis considered this segment of the population as racially superior to other Poles. Likewise, Jewish women faced increased sexual violence as they fell at the bottom of the gendered and racial hierarchies. Röger concludes with a brief discussion of mass rape as an instrument of dominance, committed in public to further subjugate the occupied population while creating bonds of camaraderie among the perpetrators, highlighting the use of sexual violence as an element of occupation policy.

Wartime Relations takes prostitution as a starting point to discuss the central role that consensual sexual relationships played in the everyday life of Nazi-occupied Poland. Röger concludes that while sexual policy reinforced racial and gender hierarchies imposed through violence and coercion, realities conflicted with ideology, and sexual relations remained a matter up for debate, at least among the occupiers. Based on a wide variety of fragmentary evidence skillfully pieced together, this volume complicates the narrative of sexual relations in wartime. Although the argument is sometimes scattered, Wartime Relations seeks to give voice, as much as possible, to ordinary women and men as they negotiated everyday life under Nazi occupation.