Within the context of the discriminatory practices and ideologies of the Third Reich, the prostitute is "the most emblematic of deviants. A look to regulation will reveal that, while the Third Reich's policy on prostitution did represent a radical break from Weimar policies of venal sexuality, one need not look far into Germany's pre-democratic past to discover the historical antecedents of the Nazis' "brothelization" of prostitution.
What becomes apparent is that the ways in which prostitution was legally encoded in the Nazi state were in no way innovative; rather, it is the motivations behind regulation policy and sexual politics in general in the Third Reich that are horrifically revolutionary. The mobilization of prostitution for the sake of the Nazi war machine and racist and pronatalist policies is but one example of the ways in which sexuality was instrumentalized by Hitler to further the goals of the aggressively expansionist state.
The era of German history immediately prior to Hitler's appointment as Chancellor in is known as the Weimar period. Historians, and particularly those scholars writing in the first decades after the end of the Second World War, have traditionally characterized the Weimar government as sexually and socially permissive, particularly for women.
For example, the increasingly late age of marriage among couples, combined with the economic instability of Europe in the early twentieth century, necessitated in a new way the presence of working women in the public sphere, and particularly in Germany. Contemporary conservatives decried the rise of the "New Woman" as a cultural icon, a figure whose liberation and self-sufficiency was condemned as "self-serving, promiscuous, and unmotherly. Central to discussions of sexuality and prostitution in the Third Reich is the question of continuities between the Weimar government and the Nazi regime in terms of policy on state-regulated prostitution.
While earlier historians of sexuality under Nazism argued for the sexually repressive nature of the Third Reich, a radical break from the sexual liberality of the Weimar era, more recent historians have endeavoured to add nuance to this sharp distinction between periods.
