Sexual contacts as one of women's survival strategies in the Nazi-occupied Ukrainian territories

Abstract

The purpose of the article is to investigate the tactics and strategies of women who used their own bodies during the German-Soviet war in the sexual sphere for their own survival and the salvation of their relatives. The author tried to identify a number of reasons and factors of life in the occupation that prompted women to take appropriate actions. Scientific novelty. For the first time in Ukrainian historiography, the sexual sphere has been put at the center of the study as a strategy for preventing troubles for women in Nazi-occupied Ukraine. To achieve the goals of the article, the author used theoretical developments in gender studies, oral and everyday history, and a comprehensive and interdisciplinary scientific approach, which, in addition to assisting in research work, allowed to make a certain contribution to the history of military anthropology and daily life under occupation. The article applies the appropriate general scientific methods: comparison, historical and critical analysis, objectivity, microhistory, synthesis, systematization, logic.

The material analyzed by the author makes it possible to draw certain conclusions. First of all, it can be stated that in the occupation everyday life a certain part of women who found themselves on the verge of survival, the threat of being taken to work in Germany or death could provide sexual services to soldiers or local representatives of police forces in order to protect themselves and their relatives from this. It was these categories of men at that time who had all the necessary resources and could protect women in exchange for intimacy. In turn, as the narrative material shows, men often resorted to blackmailing women or their relatives by their political past (membership in the communist party, Komsomol, etc.), intimidating them with punishment for this, skillfully using their difficult financial situation to achieve submission in intimacy. In general, sex in occupied Ukraine could be a commodity that women sold in a militarized society in exchange for the resources they needed to survive, save themselves from starvation, and protect themselves and their families from misunderstandings with the “new authorities.”