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The Enemy Within: Regulating Prostitution and Controlling Venereal Disease in Cisleithanian Austria during the Great War

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2013

Nancy M. Wingfield
Nancy M. Wingfield*
Affiliation:
Northern Illinois University
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During summer 1917, civilians using the city baths in Olmütz, Moravia, demanded that soldiers stationed at the local Emperor Francis Joseph infantry barracks cease swimming nude in the March River opposite the city baths, especially during the women's swimming hour. In addition to those of soldiers, the bathing habits of other culprits offended the good citizens of the city. One resident complained that children, adolescent boys and girls, and even some grown-ups, among them “buxom” prostitutes, were swimming nude in the March and thus offending the morals of others. “Flashers” also caught the attention of the public and the police, including the unknown man who made “immoral,” but unrecorded, remarks and exposed himself to the women who frequented the promenade under the Freundschaftshöhe in the western Bohemian spa town, Karlsbad, during the summer. The offended women provided the police with a good description of this man, said to be between forty-five and fifty years old, of average size, with gray, grizzled hair, a graying mustache, and a goatee. They described his clothing, a dark suit with knee-length pants, knee-high stockings, hiking boots, and a panama hat. (Records do not indicate whether police apprehended the suspect.) In the Bukovinian provincial capital Czernowitz, an eighteen-year-old electrical technician accused a forty-seven-year-old man from Saxony who allegedly propositioned him on the city's Ringplatz one late summer's evening in 1918 of “crimes against nature.” The most common “morals” problem to preoccupy the police and the military during the Great War, however, was neither flashers nor nude bathers; it was prostitution.

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Central European History , Volume 46 , Issue 3 , September 2013 , pp. 568 - 598
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Copyright © Central European History Society of the American Historical Association 2013 

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References

1 Despite a plethora of laws and Imperial ordinances beginning in the eighteenth century, there was no uniform policy concerning language use for place names until the end of the Habsburg Monarchy. The regulation of names developed piecemeal through court rulings, Imperial and crown-land ordinances, municipal ordinances, and some new legislation. Thus, when there is no English-language version of a place name, for consistency I use only the German version, which was most often used in Imperial documents.

2 Státní okresní archiv Olomouc (hereafter SOAO), inv. č. 53, Archiv města Olomouce, Registratura 1874–1920, Politická, August 7, 1917.

3 Státní okresní archiv Karlovy Vary (hereafter SOAKV), Archiv města Karlovy Vary, Spisy, Polizeiamt Karlsbad, Laufzettel, August 4, 1915.

4 Derzhavnyi arkhiv Chernivetskoi oblasti (hereafter DAChO), Dyrektsia Politsii mista Czernivtsi (hereafter DPMC) 10/1/1484/1, Abschrift, September 20, 1918.

5 Estimates of clandestine prostitutes in large European cities at the turn of the century varied. In his classic volume, Prostitution in Europe, reprint ed. (Montclair, NJ: Patterson Smith Publishing Company, 1969 [1914]), 174, Abraham Flexner claims that on the eve of World War I, there were some 30,000 clandestine prostitutes in Vienna, in contrast to fifty to sixty tolerated prostitutes in six bordellos and 1,630 tolerated prostitutes living independently. On debates over the regulation of prostitution in the monarchy, see Jušek, Karin J., Auf der Suche nach der Verlorenen. Die Prostitutionsdebatten im Wien der Jahrhundertwende (Vienna: Löcker, 1994)Google Scholar. See Wingfield, Nancy M., “Echoes of the Riehl Trial in Fin-de-Siècle Cisleithania,” Austrian History Yearbook 38 (2007): 36–47Google Scholar, for officials in Austria's smaller towns who considered their regulationist practices relatively successful. In larger, urban areas with anonymous, transient populations and a decreasing number of bordellos, regulation was more often considered a failed policy.

6 The term, Cisleithania, refers to the lands represented in the Austrian Reichsrat, roughly the provinces west of the Leitha River, but also including Bukovina and Galicia, in the Habsburg east. Transleithania, in contrast, referred to the lands of the Hungarian crown, while the third element of the Dual Monarchy, Bosnia-Herzegovina (annexed in 1908), belonged neither to the Austrian/Cisleithanian nor the Hungarian/Transleithanian part of the monarchy.

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10 Gonorrhea, the most widespread sexually transmitted infection among the soldiers of Austria-Hungary and other belligerents, along with syphilis, and chancroid or Ulcus molle, were subsumed under the term “Geschlechtskrankheiten” in Habsburg military and civilian vocabulary. See Beretvás, Ladislaus, “Beiträge zur Behandlung der Haut- und Geschlechtskrankheiten im Felde,” Der Militärarzt 17, no. 50 (July 1, 1916): 401Google Scholar; and more generally, Councell, Clara E., “War and Infectious Disease,” Public Health Reports 56, no. 12 (March 21, 1941): 547–73Google Scholar. Státní okresní archiv Liberec (hereafter SOAL), k.k. Statthalterei für das Königreich Böhmen (signed k.k. Statthalter: Coudenhove), Runderlaß, Prague, November 26, 1916.

11 Working-class female sexuality in urban environments was the object of surveillance and stereotyping among European health and police authorities, according to Davidson, Roger and Hall, Lesley A., “Introduction,” in Sex, Sin, and Suffering: Venereal Disease and European Society since 1870, ed. Davidson, Roger and Hall, Lesley A. (New York: Routledge, 2001), 10.Google Scholar

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18 The peacetime strength of the Austro-Hungarian Armed Forces was 450,000, excluding the reserves (and roughly 1.4 million with reserves), according to Ellis, John and Cox, Michael, The World War I Databook: The Essential Facts and Figures for All the Combatants (London: Aurum Press, 2001), 245.Google Scholar

19 The Medical Chief of the k.k. Army High Command during wartime Johann Steiner noted that despite the military's best efforts, sexually transmitted infections were more widespread during the war than previously; Steiner, Johann, “Der Militärärztliche Dienst des österreichisch-ungarischen Heeres während des Weltkrieges im Hinterlande und bei der Armee im Felde,” in Volksgesundheit im Krieg, ed. Pirquet, Clemens (Vienna: Carnegie-Stiftung für Internationalen Frieden, 1926), 103.Google Scholar

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21 The most common combination of sexually transmitted infections Beretvás observed was chancroid and gonorrhea; Beretvás, “Beiträge zur Behandlung der Haut- und Geschlechtskrankheiten im Felde,” 401.

22 Veress, Fr., “Die Behandlung der geschlechtskranken Soldaten im Felde,” Der Militärarzt 17, no. 50 (July 1, 1916): 333–34Google Scholar. By summer and autumn 1915, the Habsburg army, with the support of Germany, had occupied parts of Russian Poland as well as Serbia, and in early 1916, Montenegro. On Habsburg occupation policies, see Scheer, Tamara, “Österreich-Ungarns Besatzungsregime im Ersten Weltkrieg zwischen Medizin, Moral und Kriegsnotwendigkeit,” öt kontinens, no. 2010 (2011): 365–80Google Scholar; Scheer, Tamara, Zwischen Front und Heimat. Österreich-Ungarns Militärverwaltungen im Ersten Weltkrieg (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang GmbH, 2009)Google Scholar; and Kerschnawe, Hugo et al. , Die Militärverwaltung in den von den österreichisch-ungarischen Truppen besetzten Gebieten (Vienna: Carnegie-Stiftung für Internationalen Frieden, 1928).Google Scholar

23 The soldiers treated were from units in Cracow, Lemberg, and Przemyśl. ÖStA, Abteilung Kriegsarchiv (hereafter KA)/KM/14 Abt. (1906)/3402.3428 Venerie u. Syphilus bei 39–5 von 1907, Allgemeine Einführung von Präventivmassregeln gegen Geschlechtskrankheiten. An Alle Militärterritorialkommanden … Die Militärmedikamentendirektion an den kö.ung. Landesverteidigungsminister, Vienna, March 12, 1907. Magnus Hirschfeld provided data about the relative distribution of sexually transmitted infections; see Hirschfeld, Magnus, The Sexual History of the World War (New York: Cadillac, 1941)Google Scholar, 95. He claimed they remained true relative to one another although absolute numbers declined. Percentages of venereal disease cases per 1,000 soldiers were Germany, 25.5; France, 41.9; Austria, 61.0; Italy, 84.9; and England, 173.8. Gaston Bodart cited numbers from the British Army Medical Report (1910) that reflected similar relationships: Germany 19.8 (1905–1906); France (1906) 28.6; Austria 54.2 (1907); Russia (1906) 62.7; and Great Britain (1907) 68.4; see Westergaard, Harald, Bodart, Gaston, and Kellogg, Vernon L., Losses of Life in Modern Wars: Austria-Hungary; France (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1916), 195Google Scholar. Among the larger European states, Germany had done the most to control venereal disease.

24 The number of venereal disease cases among members of the military far outstripped all estimates, according to Veress, “Die Behandlung der geschlechtskranken Soldaten im Felde,” 333–34.

25 Sattler, Moritz, “Zur Bekämpfung der Geschlechtskrankheiten im Heere,” Der Militärarzt 24, no. 50 (October 28, 1916): 563Google Scholar; also Albert Neisser, “Der Krieg und die Geschlechtskrankheiten” (Politische Flugschriften) (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1915), 11; and Scheer, Tamara, “Austro-Hungarian Occupation Regimes in the Balkans (1916–1918): Organizing the ‘Health Front,’” in Medicine within and between the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires, 18th-19th Centuries, ed. Sechel, Teodora Daniela (Bochum: Winkler Verlag, 2011), 228–29.Google Scholar

26 BPWA, “Prostitution und Mädchenhandel” (hereafter P/M), 1915, k.k. Kommando der SW Front, July 28, 1915. Concerning the high number of married men in the Wilhelmine German military with venereal disease, Neisser pointed out that some of these men were already suffering from sexually transmitted infections at the war's outbreak; Neisser, “Der Krieg und die Geschlechtskrankheiten,” 13–14.

27 Hirschfeld, Sexual History of the World War, 195.

28 Viktor Hecht, , “Ein Vorschlag zur Sanierung der Prostitution,” Wiener Medizinische Wochenschrift 9, no. 67 (February 24, 1917): 467–68.Google Scholar

29 See numbers and examples of prophylactic brochures ordered, including “Merkblatt für Soldaten zur Aufklärung über das Wesen und die Gefahren der Geschlechtskrankheiten” and “Wie bewahrt ihr auch vor Syphilis,” in nine Habsburg languages in VÚA, 9 k.k. i. sborové velitelstvi, 1917, MA 46-12/1 to 46-23/4-115; and 1918–19, M.A. 46-12/3-3 to 46-58/1.

30 Dr. Moldovan, , “Bekämpfung der Geschlechtskrankheiten bei der Armee im Feld,” Wiener Medizinische Wochenschrift 14, no. 67 (March 31, 1917): 660Google Scholar. The AOK instituted military bordellos during World War I; see: Deák, Beyond Nationalism, 143.

31 On providing German soldiers prostitutes and condoms to prevent venereal disease, see Clark, Anna, Desire: A History of European Sexuality (New York: Routledge, 2008), 164Google Scholar. On French authorities' concerns about supplying their soldiers with prostitutes, see Fisher, H. C. and Dubois, E. X., Sexual Life during the World War (London: Francis Aldor Publisher, 1937), 324–25Google Scholar. Veress cited several specialists who proposed providing soldiers with condoms in Veress, “Die Behandlung der geschlechtskranken Soldaten im Felde,” 336, while police physician Moritz Sattler of Sarajevo proposed making them available in bordellos; see Sattler, “Zur Bekämpfung der Geschlechtskrankheiten im Heere,” 561–62.

32 Tsentralnyi Derzhavnyi Istorychnyi Arkhiv Ukrayiny, u misti L'vovi, fond 146, opis 37, file 90, Zwalczanie chorób wenerycznych we Lwowie, May 15, 1916. Infected French soldiers were placed in venereological centers, established in April 1915, near the front so they could participate in battle despite their illness. See Corbin, Alain, Women for Hire: Prostitution and Sexuality in France after 1850, trans. Sheridan, Alan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 335Google Scholar; and Surkis, Judith, Sexing the Citizen: Morality and Masculinity in France 1870–1920 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 237.Google Scholar

33 ÖStA, Ministerium des Innern, Abteilung Allgemeines Verwaltungsarchiv (hereafter AVA), K. 2122 20/3 Mädchenhandel, Prostitution, 46210/1915, from the Christlichsoziale Landesparteileitung (Warnsdorf) to the Hohes k.k. Innenministerium Wien, June 1915; and VÚA, 9 k.k. i. sborové velitelstvi, 1918–19, M.A. 46-12/3-3 to 46-58/1, K.k. Statthalterei in Böhmen to K.k. Militärkommando, August 1, 1915.

34 Healy, Vienna and the Fall of the Habsburg Empire, 268.

35 The AOK was responsible for the army in the field, which comprised Operational and Etappe. The War Ministry and the Austrian and Hungarian Defense Ministries remained in charge in the hinterland. Upon mobilization, the Chief of General Staff together with the War Ministry delineated the border between army in the field and hinterland. Any later changes were made by the AOK in coordination with the War Ministry. The border between Operational Area and Etappe “could not be sharply separated.” Normally, the Etappe covered the area between the hinterland, where there was a clear division, and the support elements of the corps commands. ÖStA, Abteilung KA, Bestand Impressen, Kart. No. 478, Dienstbücher E-35 bis E-53 Vorschrift für die Höheren Kommandos der Armee im Felde, 1st ed. (Vienna: n.p., 1913). I thank Erwin A. Schmidl for this information.

36 Retired General of the Medical Service S. Kirschenberger provided detailed statistics on the Habsburg army's wounded and ill for the first three years of the war (through July 31, 1917) in Kirschenberger, S., “Beiträge zur Sanitätsstatistik der österreichisch-ungarischen Armee im Kriege 1914–1918,” in Volksgesundheit im Krieg, ed. Pirquet, 47–77Google Scholar. In contrast to diseases such as intestinal typhoid and dysentery, which decreased during the war, the number of cases of sexually transmitted infections, like those of Asiatic cholera, tuberculosis, and trachoma, increased between 1914 and 1918. On the Austrian Landwehr/Landsturm and the Hungarian Honvéd, see ibid., 60. Table II, “Übersicht der Zu- und Abgänge an Verwundeten, Wundinfektionserkrankungen, dann an den wichtigsten akuten und chronischen Infektionskrankheiten in sämtlichen Sanitätsanstalten während des 1., 2., und 3. Kriegsjahres” (“Overview of the inflow and outflow of the wounded, those with infections from wounds, as well as the most important acute and chronic infectious diseases in all medical institutions during the first, second, and third year of the war”), lists an inflow of 1,275,885 cases of sexually transmitted infections, with the following outcomes: recovery and fit for service, 569,210; request for leave, 1,273; the possibly long-term disabled whose future service was in question (Superarbitrierungsantrag) 3,898; deceased: 246; miscellaneous (auf andere Art): 11,742; for a total of 586,269 finally discharged from the hospital registry; and 517,172 transferred to other medical facilities; ibid., 68.

37 Veress, “Die Behandlung der geschlechtskranken Soldaten im Felde,” 334; and Neisser, “Der Krieg und die Geschlechtskrankheiten,” 11–12. See also Knežević, Jovana, “Prostitutes as a Threat to National Honor in Habsburg-Occupied Serbia during the Great War,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 20, no. 2 (May 2011): 316Google Scholar, who cited Habsburg occupation records concerning widespread regulated and clandestine prostitution in Belgrade and elsewhere in Serbia.

38 Blumenfeld, Anton, “Zur Bewertung der Geschlechtskrankheiten im Kriege,” Der Militärarzt 13, no. 50 (May 13, 1916): 248Google Scholar, detailed Austrian soldiers' descriptions of their sexual partners; and Brunner, Illustrierte Sittengeschichte, 41, described similar practices in German-occupied Belgium and France. Corbin, Women for Hire, 335; and Surkis, Sexing the Citizen, 237, noted that the medical examiner saw French soldiers before and after leave. On France, see also Balzer, Félix, “Prophylaxie et traitement des maladies vénériennes en temps de guerre,” Presse médicale 49 (October 14, 1915): 401–02Google Scholar. Baldwin, Contagion and the State in Europe, 456–57, describes other belligerents' attitudes toward venereal examinations, including the New Zealanders' “dangle parade.”

39 Státní okresní archiv Kutná Hora, Městský úřad Kutná Hora, spisová manipulace, 1850–1932, sign. XII, 1910–1922, kart. 409, Janos M., no date [1916]; see also Veress, “Die Behandlung der geschlechtskranken Soldaten im Felde,” 334.

40 Archiv města Ostravy (hereafter AMO), Okresní úřad MO, sig. Eb 44, kart. 160, inv. č. 143, K. Bezirkshauptmannschaft, Mährisch Ostrau, Leiter der Lazarett-Gruppe Mährisch Ostrau to k.k. Oberbezirkartz Dr. H. Kaan, to Troppau, January 13, 1916.

41 AMO, Okresní úřad Mährisch Ostrau, sig. Eb 44, kart. 160, inv. č. 143, k.k. Bezirkshauptmannschaft in Mährisch Ostrau to Landwehrstations-Kommand in Mährisch Ostrau, December 4, 1914. See also Neisser, “Der Krieg und die Geschlechtskrankheiten,” 18–19.

42 Finger, E. [Ernst], “Die soziale Bedeutung und die Bekämpfung der Geschlechtskrankheiten,” Wiener Medizinische Wochenschrift 22, no. 69 (May 24, 1919): 1069Google Scholar. The spread of sexually transmitted infections among married women during World War I was not limited to the Habsburg Monarchy; see Rhoades, Michelle K., “Renegotiating French Masculinity: Medicine and Venereal Disease during the Great War,” French Historical Studies 29, no. 2 (2006): 293CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sauerteig, Lutz D. H., “‘The Fatherland is in Danger, Save the Fatherland!’ Venereal Disease, Sexuality, and Gender in Imperial and Weimar Germany,” in Sex, Sin, and Suffering, ed. Davidson and Hall, 85Google Scholar; and Sauerteig, “Sex, Medicine, and Morality during the First World War,” 169.

43 Pick, Walther, “Ein Erfolg im Kampfe gegen die Geschlechtskrankheiten,” Wiener Medizinische Wochenschrift 41, no. 65 (November 10, 1915): 1528.Google Scholar

44 SOAO, k.k. Statthalterei-Präsidium für Mähren to alle Bezirkshauptmannschaften, den Stadtrat in Brünn, die Gemeinderäte in Olmütz, Iglau, Znaim, January 16, 1916.

45 von Hötzendorf, [Franz] Conrad, Private Aufzeichnungen. Erste Veröffentlichungen aus den Papieren des k.u.k. Generalstabs-Chefs, ed. Peball, Kurt (Vienna: Amalthea-Verlag, 1977), 80.Google Scholar

46 Glück, A., “Über die Bekämpfung der Geschlechtskrankheiten im Kriege,” Der Militärarzt 25, no. 49 (October 23, 1915): 412Google Scholar. In the years before World War I, the Habsburg Ministry of War had been sufficiently concerned about the spread of sexually transmitted infections among its married soldiers that it had Eugène Brieux's play, “Les Avariés” (“Damaged Goods”; “Die Schiffbrüchigen” in German), which addressed the issue of syphilis in marriage, performed at all of the monarchy's military schools. Quétel, Claude, History of Syphilis, trans. Braddock, Judith and Pike, Brian (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 158.Google Scholar

47 SOAO, k.k. Statthalterei-Präsidium für Mähren to alle Bezirkshauptmannschaften, den Stadtrat in Brünn, die Gemeinderäte in Olmütz, Iglau, Znaim, January 16, 1916; and Hirschfeld, Sexual History of the World War, 107. On the shortage of several hundred physicians in the field, who were never fully replaced, see Kassowitz, Karl, “Der Österreichisch-Ungarische Truppenarzt an der Front,” in Volksgesundheit im Krieg, ed. Pirquet, 138.Google Scholar

48 See, for example, DAChO, DPMC, 10/1/1470 (1918), doc. 14, June 24, 1918.

49 On Cracow, see von Krzysztalowicz, Franz, “Zur Frage der Vorbeugung der venerischen Erkrankungen in der Armee,” Der Militärarzt 6, no. 49 (March 27, 1915): 90Google Scholar; SOAO, Archiv města Olomouce (hereafter AMO), Registratura 1874–1920, Politická kart. 117, 52/10A, k.k. Stationskommandant in Olmütz to the Gemeinderat, July 11, 1916.

50 SOAO, AMO, Registratura 1874–1920, Politická, kart. 117, inv. č. 52/10A, k.k. Stationskommandant in Olmütz, April 4, 1916.

51 Pick, “Ein Erfolge im Kampfe gegen die Geschlechtskrankheiten,” 1525 (to the end of August 1915). I have found no mention of this particular method being duplicated elsewhere; Veress, “Die Behandlung der geschlechtskranken Soldaten im Felde,” 336–37, summarized Pick's findings without comment.

52 Pick, “Ein Erfolge im Kampfe gegen die Geschlechtskrankheiten,” 1525; and AMO, Okresní úřad MO, sig. Eb 44, kart. 160, inv. č. 44, July 23, 1916.

53 Glück, “Über die Bekämpfung der Geschlechtskrankheiten im Kriege,” 410–11.

54 See documents in Derzhavnyi arkhiv L'viv oblasti, fond 350, opys 4, file 4012.

55 BPWA, P/M, 1917, “Referat”; and Neue Freie Presse, October 12, 1916, 11.

56 In contrast to the annual average in Lemberg of 100 women during peacetime, following the Russian occupation of 1916, the police turned over 1,340 women to the hospital for treatment of venereal disease: Dr. Lukasiewicz, , “Bekämpfung der Geschlechtskrankheiten in Galizien,” Wiener Medizinische Wochenschrift 14, no. 67 (March 31, 1917): 661Google Scholar. Francine L. Freeman wrote that venereal disease reached “‘epidemic’ status” in Russia during the first decade of Soviet rule, prompting “the development of an entire subfield of sanitary propaganda, known as sexual enlightenment.” See Freeman, Francine L., “Envisioning Health in Revolutionary Russia: The Politics of Gender in Sexual Enlightenment Posters of the 1920s,” Russian Review 57, no. 2 (April 1998): 192.Google Scholar

57 Derzhavnyi arkhiv L'vivs'koi oblasti, 350/4/4012.

58 DAChO, fond 350, opys 4, file 4012. See the protocols of four waitresses placed under police supervision in August 1918.

59 SOAO, K.k. Statthalterei-Präsidium für Mähren to alle k.k. Bezirkshauptmannschaften, den Stadtrat in Brünn, die Gemeinderäte in Olmütz, Iglau, Znaim, January 16, 1916; and AMO, Okresní úřad MO, sig. Eb 44, kar. 160, inv. č. 44, November 26, 1915.

60 SOAO, AMO, Registratura 1874–1920, Politická kart. 117, inv. č. 52/10A, k.k. Statthalterei-Präsidium für Mähren, Brünn, July 23, 1916, Geschlechtskrankheiten, Bekämpfung.

61 SOAKV, Spisy, B-XIV-188, mravnostní policie - 1915, March 3, 1916.

62 SOAKV, OUKV, kart. 147, 1916, Boj proti prostituci v K. Varech, Abschrift, Karlsbad, February 18, 1916.

63 SOAKV, OUKV, kart. 147, 1916, Boj proti prostituci v K. Varech, letters of March 3, 1916. Klauber, Erwin, “Das Schutzbesteck gegen Geschlechtskrankheiten,” Wiener Medizinische Wochenschrift 43, no. 66 (October 21, 1916): 1617.Google Scholar

64 SOAKV, OUKV, kart. 147, 1916, Boj proti prostituci v K. Varech, k.k. Bezirkshauptmannschaft in Karlsbad to the Gemeindeamt in Dönitz, March 31, 1916.

65 SOAKV, OUKV, kart. 147, 1916, Boj proti prostituci v K. Varech, to Bürgermeisteramt Fischern, April 6, 1916.

66 SOAO, Stadt Polizeiamt Mährisch Ostrau to the Stadtpolizeiamt in Olmütz, April 3, 1916; AMO, Okresní úřad MO, sig. Eb 44, kart. 160, inv. č. 44, January 14, 1916.

67 SOAO AMO, Registratura 1874–1920, Politická, kart. 117, inv. č. 52/ 10A, Zuschrift, April 6, 1916.

68 DAChO, DPMC, 10/1/1461 (1918), doc. 27.

69 DAChO, DPMC, 10/1/1290 (1917), docs. 39–43.

70 SOAL, Archiv města Liberce, kart. 7, k.k. Statthaltereirat to the Magistrat in Reichenberg, July 24, 1917.

71 AMO, Okresní úřad MO, sig. Eb 44, kart. 160, inv. č. 44, April 6, 1916; AMO Mor. Ostrava Gemeindeprotokoll, December 2, 1914. The protocol includes prostitutes, unemployed laborers, and thieves expelled for immoral conduct.

72 DAChO, DPMC, 10/1/1462 (1918), Protokoll (August 9, 1918).

73 DAChO, DPMC, 10/1/1460 (1918), doc. 24, Interview with Mathias E., spring 1918.

74 DAChO, DPMC, 10/1/1461 (1918), docs. 14–19, beginning June 11, 1918.

75 DAChO, DPMC, 10/1/1465 (1918), doc. 42, April 27, 1918.

76 Krzysztalowicz, “Zur Frage der Vorbeugung der venerischen Erkrankungen,” 89.

77 Lukasiewicz, “Bekämpfung der Geschlechtskrankheiten in Galizien,” 661.

78 On imperial Russian treatment of prostitutes, see Bernstein, Laurie, Sonia's Daughters: Prostitutes and their Regulation in Imperial Russia (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995), 15–17.Google Scholar

79 DAChO, Upravlenie Chernovitskogo politsmeister Chernovitskogo gubernskogo politskogo upravleniia, 705/1/85, docs. 12, 20, 74, 135.

80 DAChO, Upravlenie Chernovitskogo politsmeister Chernovitskogo gubernskogo politskogo upravleniia, 705/1/85, September 5, 1916.

81 On the Russian military's identification of prostitutes as vehicles for both venereal disease and espionage, see Sanborn, Joshua A., “Unsettling the Empire: Violent Migrations and Social Disaster in Russia during World War I,” Journal of Modern History 77/2 (June 2005): 300Google Scholar. On “brothels as veritable nests of espionage, particularly in the invaded territories,” see Fisher and Dubois, Sexual Life during the World War, 319–20.

82 DAChO, Upravlenie Chernovitskogo politsmeister Chernovitskogo gubernskogo politskogo upravleniia, 705/1/85, 1916, The Chief of Counterintelligence department of the headquarters of the Ninth Army, July 16, 1916.

83 Spongberg, Feminizing Venereal Disease, 4.

84 Hirschfeld, Sexual History of the World War, 109–10, mentioned a medical congress the Russians held in Kiev in 1916 to combat venereal disease at which the unsanitary conditions in the regions they occupied were described.

85 Schneider, Camillo Karl, Die Prostituierte und die Gesellschaft. Eine soziologisch-ethische Studie (Leipzig: J. A. Barth, 1908), 160–67.Google Scholar

86 On the challenges total war posed in Russia, see, for example, Gatrell, Peter, Russia's First World War: A Social and Economic History (Harlow, U.K.: Pearson, 2005)Google Scholar; and Gatrell, Peter, A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia during World War I (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999).Google Scholar

87 On wartime denunciation and letter writing, see Healy, Vienna and the Fall of the Habsburg Empire, 23–24, and 154.

88 Vice police also picked up young women who were not the subject of denunciations, among them teenagers, as young as fifteen years old, who sometimes still lived at home with their parents. They arrested some of them repeatedly, as was the case with nineteen-year-old Wilhelmine L. of Vienna, who was seized twice in one week in late September 1918, sentenced to three days' arrest, and then expelled from the capital. BPWA, P/M, 1918/1 and 1918/2.

89 BPWA, P/M, 1917, Referat, December 22, 1916.

90 SOAO, An den löblichen Gemeinderat der königl. Hauptstadt Olmütz, March 28, 1916.

91 ÖStA, MdI, AVA, Mädchenhandel, Prostitution 20/3, Kart. 2122, 1473/1917, letter, October 10, 1917.

92 BPWA, P/M, 1918/1, k.k. Polizeidirektion, Abt.: Sittenamt from Egon B., n.d.

93 DAChO, DPMC, 10/1/1461 (1918), doc. 123, July 19, 1918.

94 DAChO, DPMC, 10/1/1461 (1918), doc. 36, June 1918.

95 NÖLA, Pol.-Archiv Wien 1917 St./27 #3414.

96 DAChO, DPMC, 10/1/1464 (1918), doc. 88.

97 Sorge, Wolfgang, Die Geschichte der Prostitution (Berlin: Verlag Dr. Potthof & Co., 1919), 431Google Scholar. In Bukovina, which became part of Romania at the war's end, vice police continued to employ Habsburg registration forms for prostitutes, which were not translated into Romanian until the 1920s.

98 Walter Clarke, “Venereal Diseases: A Challenge to the Red Cross,” Bulletin of the League of Red Cross Societies (October 1920-December 1921): 176.

99 BPWA, P/M, 1918/1 and 1919, documents dated as late as 1920. According to Brunner, Illustrierte Sittengeschichte, 91, among 2,374 women arrested for clandestine prostitution in Vienna in 1919, 804 were underage. According to Exner, Franz, Krieg und Kriminalität in Österreich (Vienna: Carnegie-Stiftung für Internationalen Frieden, 1927), 163Google Scholar, on average, 617 women had been arrested annually in Vienna for clandestine prostitution in the five years before the war, 860 annually during the war, and 2,530 annually in the first five postwar years.

100 City fathers in the northern Bohemian town of Bodenbach considered placing Animiermädchen (bar hostesses meant to encourage male patrons to drink; they sometimes also worked as prostitutes) under vice police control in autumn 1920, while Reichenberg vice police enforced gynecological examinations for sixty local women who were employed as barmaids in that city the following January. Indeed, Czechoslovak officials continued to administer physical examinations to “questionable” women, not only barmaids, for reasons of vice-police control. Státní okresní archiv Děčín, kart. 59, file 83, from the mayor to the Bürgermeisteramt, October 29, 1920; and SOAL, Magistrát města Liberce, G 1904–1907, and Bordellwesen, Schandwesen u. Dirnen, Polizeiamt Reichenberg to the Gesundheitsamt Reichenberg, January 5, 1921.

101 At the behest of Czechoslovakia's central government, the local garrison and political administration in Reichenberg cooperated on a vice police inspection of the bordellos. The inspection team included a military doctor, a garrison representative, and the head of the military police. The military members of the commission were to focus especially on general hygienic conditions. SOAL, Magistrát města Liberce, G 1904–1907, Band I Bordellwesen Regelung, Záložní nemocnice v Liberci.

102 Finger, “Die soziale Bedeutung und die Bekämpfung der Geschlechtskrankheiten,” 1069. Jušek, Auf der Suche nach der Verlorenen, 136, wrote that eugenic arguments had not played a significant role in prewar Austrian prostitution debates.

103 After 1918, an ethnically Hungarian prostitute in nationally mixed Transylvania was viewed as a eugenic threat to ethnic Romanian men, while an ethnic Romanian prostitute posed a dysgenic threat only if she actually infected a Romanian man with venereal disease. Turda, Marius, “The First Debates on Eugenics in Hungary, 1910–1918,” in Blood and Homeland: Eugenics and Racial Nationalism in Central and Southeast Europe, 1900–1940, ed. Turda, Marius and Weindling, Paul J. (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2007)Google Scholar, 34 note 16; see also Maria Bucur, “Fallen Women and Necessary Evils: Eugenic Representations of Prostitutes in Interwar Romania,” 337–38, in the same volume.