This chapter examines birth customs and bodily experiences and practices as an important but rarely considered dimension of private life under Nazism, setting them in the context of the complex racial and ethnic hierarchies created by Nazi occupation policy in Poland. It outlines the power relations and practices associated with women giving birth in the Nazi-annexed Polish territory of the ‘Reichsgau Wartheland’, and focuses in particular on the relationship between ethnic German (Volksdeutsche) women giving birth and the German and Polish midwives they sought out to assist them. Efforts by Reich German midwives to control events in the birth room sometimes faced fierce opposition on the part of the women giving birth, who asserted their right to privacy and to choose persons they trusted to be present at the birth. While the Nazi regime sought to exclude Polish midwives from attending German women giving birth, the supply of German midwives was inadequate. Polish midwives therefore continued to practise, though their precarious status made them vulnerable to harassment by the occupation authorities and accusations by Volksdeutsche of malpractice.

This chapter examines the home leave granted to soldiers during the Second World War as a fundamental dimension of private life for millions of Germans in wartime. It explores the topic from a number of different perspectives. It outlines the regime’s policies and propaganda regarding home leave as a privilege, focusing on the regime’s goals and its conflicting impulses both to control the time men spent away from their military duties and to allow some degree of undisturbed privacy. The chapter then examines personal letters between home and front in order to explore the expectations and experiences relating to home leave on the part of the men on leave and their wives or girlfriends and families. Finally, it uses cases from military and civil courts to show instances of marital conflict and domestic violence associated with home leave.

This chapter uses space as an analytical category to examine the living situation of inmates of ghettoes in occupied Poland, exploring the efforts by Jewish ghetto residents to secure and uphold vestiges of privacy under the conditions of dangerous overcrowding imposed by the Nazi authorities. Drawing on personal letters and diaries kept by ghetto inmates, it distinguishes between the initial phase of ghettoisation, involving radical upheaval and shock for those involved, and a subsequent phase of temporary relative stability, in which ghetto inmates developed a variety of social practices for coping with privation, including the deprivation of privacy.