Briefly surveys the existing literature, explains archival sources, and presents argument. POW history has too much focused on the "prison camp paradigm" that assumed that POWs were in an all-male, secluded environment. In reality, many rank-and-file prisoner of war had considerable freedoms in Germany and therefore interacted closely with the civilian population. Captivity became an alternative reality for them.

Given that the French authorities usually did not tell their families the real reason for their conviction, prisoners could claim after the war that they went to military prison for an act of resistance, which was technically not incorrect but either covered up an amorous relationship or gave it a functionality (such as facilitating an escape or undermining enemy morale) that it almost never had. Former inmates of the military prison of Graudenz formed an association in France and tried to get recognition as war victims. Women sentenced for a forbidden relation usually had to live with the stigma of the (often adulterous) relationship. While their sentences for the relationship were voided after the war, they never received any compensation for the injustice they suffered.

Describes the capture and treatment of the French, Belgian, and British prisoners of war in Nazi Germany as well as the increasingly stressful situation of German women, many of them separated from their husbands or partners. Briefly touches on other prisoners (Americans, Serbs, Italians, Poles, and Soviets).

Analyzes the military tribunals and special court trials. While the former became harsher in response to massive steering from the highest places (the High Command of the Army and Hitler personally), the latter became more lenient, partly in reaction to an intervention by Hitler in 1942 that denied women agency and therefore allowed the courts to be more lenient, especially if the woman had a forgiving soldier husband. While the military tribunals proceeded under international observation, the women were often interrogated and intimidated by the Gestapo. Their confessions counted almost always as proof even if the prisoner denied the charges.

Highlights how couples met – usually during work – and how they communicated. Discusses the range of relations, from sexual encounters to empathic relations and deep love with marriage plans. Analyzes the gender dynamics of the relationships between disarmed soldiers in captivity and in a foreign country and at least nominally free local women.

The discovery of the forbidden relationships often revealed much about the local communities, be it a factory or a village. Denunciations were common, although they were not always motivated by the fact that a foreign POW was seen with a local woman. Numerous denunciations resulted from outrage at indecent behavior, adultery, or excessive noise. Guards were perhaps the most frequent discoverers of forbidden relations (it was their duty to prevent them and to periodically search the prisoners' possessions), but a number of guards warned the couples or tacitly tolerated the relations.

The title of Theo Farrell’s excellent recent work – Unwinnable: The British Campaign in Afghanistan 2001–14 – sums up the NATO campaign in Helmand in suitably blunt terms.2 Responsibility for this unfortunate state of affairs, argues Farrell, lay at the hands of a number of seemingly insurmountable obstacles. Endemic corruption on the part of the Afghan government which denied it the legitimacy required to displace public support for the Taliban insurgency was one. The proximity of Pakistan, which allowed its Taliban clients the time and space to regroup and direct their campaign largely free from interference, was another. And then of course there was the Western public’s tiring of the war which eventually in 2010 led to NATO politicians setting a deadline to end the ISAF presence in Afghanistan by 2014 (an aspiration that was inevitably derailed). When compounded by what Farrell saw as the final critical weakness, namely a fundamental inability on the part of Western actors to properly understand the conflict dynamics at play in Helmand, coalition success became impossible. Farrell’s diagnosis of these fundamental causes of failure, particularly those relating to Afghan government corruption, the support provided to the Taliban by Pakistan, and Western public fatigue with a seemingly unending war, are supported by numerous other analyses.

Despite the advances made by social science as an aid to colonial control during the early twentieth century, one of the most revealing case studies of imperial ‘understanding’ in action during this period comes not from Africa, where trained ‘anthropologists’ had become part of the British colonial government’s administrative repertoire. Instead it came from the isolated and violent enclave of the North-West Frontier, where ‘classical’ forms of knowledge-gathering continued to dominate up to and post-World War II. Here was a hotbed of government activism, where officials sought to actively manipulate and shape local social and political structures in the pursuit of peace and stability.1 Ostensibly focused upon keeping tribal resistance to imperial rule at palatable levels through cost-effective administration, in reality these actions hid determined attempts by officials of the Indian Political Service – the so-called politicals – to effect transformative change upon aspects of native Pashtun society.

In 2006 a novel and highly publicised evolution in military affairs emerged at the hands of US military forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. Functioning under the moniker of the Human Terrain System (HTS), it promised a fundamentally different way of approaching the perennial problem of countering violent insurgency and so establishing the conditions required for security, stability and the sorts of political change ultimately envisaged by the United States and its coalition partners. Operating as part of a radically redesigned population-centric COIN doctrine, the HTS sought to present US forces (and those of its allies) with a highly informed understanding of the structures, sentiments, loyalties and designs of the local population among whom coalition forces operated. This, it was believed, comprised perhaps the most decisive audience when seeking to win the COIN battle. Anthropologists, ethnographers and other social scientists operating in the field would provide military commanders with the necessary insights to more surgically tailor their efforts to understanding the local population, thereby enabling that vital constituency to be more accurately factored into tactical actions and operational designs. The emphasis behind this evolution was clear. Understanding the environment one operates in and in particular its socio-political structures and its ‘human terrain’ is a fundamental ingredient of success in any COIN campaign, stabilisation operation or expeditionary intervention. As the celebrated COIN expert David Kilcullen stated, there could be no substitute for analysis provided by ‘extremely deep local area and cultural knowledge’.

The Human Terrain System. Modern population-centric COIN doctrine. The ‘Big Data’ phenomenon. All of these things reflect a similar preoccupation, namely the need to develop forms of understanding that can provide outsiders with influence and control over a resistant society or elements therein, and which allow relatively small numbers of counterinsurgents to deliver ‘stability’. Yet despite the modern terminology and the association with largely twenty-first-century conflict, these concepts are part of an intellectual trajectory that stretches from the high renaissance of European imperialism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, through the Cold War to today. On the British frontier of India, in the US-controlled Philippines or in colonial French Indochina and North Africa the task was similar to that faced in Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan: to push into unknown territory; to generate influence and understanding there; to defeat rebellion; to fundamentally change that which already existed or to build relationships with local elements who could support one’s own political or strategic objectives. The result was (and is) a series of developments and practices that have, over time, found their expression in the form of contemporary COIN and stabilisation theory and doctrine.

In 2007 General David Petraeus, commander of coalition forces in Iraq, addressed the US Congress on the matter of the highly successful battle then being waged against Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). Pointing to events the previous year in Anbar Province and the so-called Awakening there which had signalled the beginning of AQI’s demise, he noted the transformative effects achieved when US forces and local tribes had united in order to destroy their common enemy. While Anbar was unique, he stated, ‘it nevertheless demonstrated the dramatic change in security possible with the support and participation of local citizens’.2 Indeed such was the drastic change in American fortunes over a short period of time that the Anbar Awakening drew huge attention from policymakers and academic and military commentators keen to understand how the methods used might aid a revolution in COIN. The example of Anbar and the subsequent spread of the Awakening movement elsewhere in Iraq appeared to all and sundry to be a twenty-first-century counterinsurgency paradigm. It featured a new and sophisticated doctrine (FM 3-24), a renewed emphasis upon the importance of cultural intelligence, and a highly adaptive response by commanders to local political conditions that had allowed the transformation of a previously moribund politico-military effort into a war-winning design. Such was the apparent success of the model that the campaign in Anbar 2006–8 was hailed by many as the pre-eminent example of US counterinsurgency success in the post-war era.