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Examining the captivity of French and German prisoners of war in both world wars, this paper aims to assess how the sexual restrictions imposed upon the defeated combatant related to wartime societies’ overall reactions to the presence of the enemy prisoner within the metaphorical "body" of the nation. Exploring the sexuality of prisoners of war offers a particular way to analyze the radical but paradoxical experiences represented by the two world wars and to underline the unique nature of the Second World War in comparison to the First one. The themes discussed include: the appearance of peripheral, fantasy sexualities and sexual practices; polymorphous interventions of the State into the realm of sexuality which were intended to maintain the ideological coherence between the military and home fronts in view of the increasing contact between home populations and prisoners of war working as manual labor; the impact of the end of the war upon sexuality and the concomitant postwar redefinitions of masculine and societal identities. The pivotal question posed in the paper is whether sexual experiences during wartime can be reduced to a "sexuality of war."