A series of fascinating photographs showing how German Nazi soldiers would dress up in women's clothing and put on cross-dressing shows on the front line, has been compiled in a new book.
Artist Martin Dammann had intended to research soldiers' lives in the Third Reich, and ended up stumbling across a surprising number of amateur photographs of Nazi conscripts dressed as women.
They show Nazi soldiers in everything from bras and dresses to home-made crop-tops and skirts created from blankets.
Cross dressing during times of war was not isolated to the German Nazis, and notably also took place during World War I.
It is thought it served as a way to lighten the mood of soldier life, and to provide entertainment to tired and bored soldiers, a large majority of them heterosexual men starved of female company.
Many of the photographs in the book appear to have been taken during celebrations or parties, at which point the soldiers had to do the best they could to make each other laugh and raise their spirits.
Sociologist Harald Welzer rejects the notion of interpreting the images of these German soldiers as something unusual and restricted to World War I and the Wehrmacht.
'As paradoxical as it may seem, these photographs of Wehrmacht soldiers in female underwear, on first glance so exotic, actually corroborate the normality of the situation, and not its exceptionality, precisely in times of war.'
This article has been adapted from its original source.
