Soldier Studies: Cross-Dressing in the Wehrmacht

In the course of his researches into war photography and the impact of images on how history is written, the German artist and collector Martin Dammann came across numerous amateur photographs of German soldiers dressed up as women. Dammann’s discoveries are now presented for the first time in , with pictures that provide surprising insights into the everyday lives and desires of German soldiers in World War II—from playful scenes of young recruits clowning around, to improvised disguises among close friends at the front, to carefully prepared performances in Allied POW camps. Essays by Martin Dammann and the renowned sociologist and author Harald Welzer classify the photographs into various categories.