An Intimate History of Nazism: Love, Marriage, and Sexuality in the Third Reich

By Elissa Mailänder

Published to great acclaim in French and now available for the first time in English, this groundbreaking book explores how the Nazi regime used sexuality to promote political loyalty, conformity, and cohesion among "ordinary" Germans. Beginning before the collapse of the Weimar Republic and continuing through the postwar American occupation of Germany, Elissa Mail nder's study highlights the complex and conflicted ways that sexual "liberation," repression, and violence were used and experienced in the everyday lives of citizens of the Reich. Her analysis draws on a vast array of sources, from legal dossiers to private photographs and letters, as well as public archives, magazines, and movies. Mail nder's findings are often uncomfortable; she demonstrates, for example, that a significant number of women who were not persecuted by the regime saw shifts in gender and sexual norms as positive developments--ones that some felt were lost under the American occupation, with its own routines of military sexual exploitation. What emerges is a portrait of a regime that was less interested in repressing sexuality than in reinventing it according to a racist, elitist, and homophobic agenda.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0299358208
• ISBN13: 9780299358204
• Release Date: October 2026
• Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
• Length: 424 Pages