Selling Sex in the Reich

An interesting and instructive approach to German history in the first half of the 20th century, Victoria Harris’ book depicts the interplay between national legislation and the local agencies that sought to regulate a trade that is presented as driven essentially by economic need. Moreover she locates prostitution not in a hidden underworld milieu but as a central part of an economy that included many women, from landladies to dressmakers. Harris argues that prostitutes were not merely victims of male exploitation but, rather, were often relatively strong, independent females, many of whom had made a rational decision to avoid destitution. Both illegal and registered prostitutes appear, in general, to have stayed in prostitution for only a few years. Social welfare and policing were both brought into play by the authorities, for example incarceration in workhouses, a practice that developed in the early Weimar period. The Law for Combating Venereal Disease, passed in 1927, encouraged action. Harris argues that such behaviour continued into the Nazi period relatively unchanged, before pressing the idea of equivalence too far by arguing that ‘in many ways, the actions of social workers epitomised the process of repression, marginalisation, and eventual extermination connected with the Third Reich’. Harris’questioning of the extent to which there were significant breaks in social welfare policy in 1933 and 1945 is arresting, though this reader is unconvinced. Nevertheless her book is a wellresearched study that raises many interesting issues.