ABSTRACT
When the German army conquered Norway in April 1940, they found themselves masters of a genetically desirable country, according to Nazi racial theory, a belief underlined by high-ranking German officials’ early willingness to allow marriages between their soldiers and Norwegian women. German soldiers enthusiastically embraced their license to engage in romantic relationships with female Norwegians; by the end of the war, between ten and twelve thousand children would be fathered by Germans stationed in Norway. The picture this fact paints of an unbounded, Nazified sexual free-for-all, however, is misleading. This chapter explores male German soldiers’ marriages and sexual relations with Norwegian women in order to access several central tensions that characterized the occupation of Norway as a whole. First and foremost, it highlights the disparity between expectation and reality, juxtaposing the picture presented in the propaganda written by and for German men with the harsher realities of life in wartime Norway borne out by the records of the SS and Reichskommissariat. In addition, this chapter emphasizes the interference of practical, military concerns – particularly as resistance activities increased over time – with the racial and eugenic planning of officials such as Himmler. Examining the overtly gendered acts of sex, marriage, and child-bearing in occupied Norway reveals that Nazi propaganda and racial theory created certain expectations for male German and female Norwegian bodies in that space. And while these expectations were fulfilled to a surprising degree in many respects, the German occupiers’ everyday military concerns hindered the personal interactions of German men and Norwegian women to a perhaps equally surprising extent.
