Dr Stephanie Wright, lecturer in Modern European History at Lancaster University and Dr Regina Mühlhäuser, Senior Researcher at the Hamburg Foundation for the Advancement of Research and Culture discuss what the history of sexual violence perpetrated by the German Wehrmacht in the Second World War can tell us about sexual violence in current wars, including the war in Ukraine. This podcast grapples with the challenges of studying the history of sexual violence, especially given the paucity of sources and the fact that many victims were shamed into silence. In conversation, Stephanie and Regina highlight the importance of being attentive to which stories of sexual violence we are willing to listen to, and which ‘constellations’ or ‘narratives’ of rape are given priority in historical and media accounts of particular wars.

Regina's expertise lies in the history of sex in warfare ranging from consensual or semi- consensual sexual relations in war to sexual violence committed in conflict. More specifically, Regina has explored these themes in her research on the German Wehrmacht during their campaign in Eastern Europe during the Second World War and her research on this topic was published in 2021 in her book, ‘Sex and the Nazi Soldier: Violent, Commercial and Consensual Encounters during the War in the Soviet Union, 1941-45’, published by Edinburgh University Press. Since the release of ‘Sex and the Nazi Soldier’, Regina’s book has come to resonate with present day developments in some very disturbing ways, most recently reflected in reports of rape, sexual assault and sexual torture in Ukraine.

Aside from helping us to make sense of such modern cases, Regina's work has been very important within the small but growing field of scholarship on the history of sexual violence in war. Regina is a key member of Sexual Violence in Armed Conflict (SVAC), an international research group which, as well as publishing an excellent recent edited collection on sexual violence in armed conflict, also hosts probably the most comprehensive bibliography of texts on this topic.

One of the main focuses of Regina’s research has been to better understand what it means when we refer to sexual violence or rape as a ‘weapon of war’. Within such debates, an important contribution of her work has been to highlight the limitations of this concept for actually understanding how and why sexual violence happens in war and who commits sexual violence against whom.

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