Determined to prevent an epidemic of venereal disease, moral corruption and prostitution, the police and welfare officials concentrated on picking up girls in parks, air raid shelters and near German military bases. In August 1940, one 14-year-old told police questioning her that it was unfair of them to pick up her and her friend and that she went with soldiers ‘because that’s what all girls did, now they thought it was fun, so why shouldn’t they?’ The pull of being taken to cafés, bars and restaurants became the stuff of peer-group envy and boasting about real or imagined exploits at school. One 13-year-old girl regaled her classmates with a tale of being locked in a room and given ice cream by the Germans. As fantasies of foreign abundance added to the allure of the conqueror, many young people were eager to kick over the traces which had constrained them in peacetime.12 Whereas the German occupiers did nothing to discourage sexual relationships in western Europe – indeed, in Norway, they were actively encouraged on racial grounds – the occupation of Poland began with prohibitions on contact with Poles, which were modelled on the Nuremberg race laws of 1935 forbidding all manner of relationships with Jews.
