At the end of World War II, French people accused some women for being collaborative with the occupying Germans were punished with humiliating acts, such as their heads where shaved in public and they were beaten. Some women were marched through the streets and shamed. The humiliating scenes often took place in front of jeering crowds as you can see in the photographs below.
A lot of committees, Resistance cells and French intellectuals protested against these public shaving because they were also punishing women, who did simple jobs like cooking, laundry, cleaning or other housemaid jobs for the Germans staying there. Some of these women had to pay the rent and food themselves to survive during wartime. Unfortunately, the resistance cells and committees only managed to keep these public shaving low in few regions of France.
In France, if everyone who served the Germans shaved their heads, they would run out of razors, the women were an easy target, and it allowed others who were no better to feel superior. Ninety percent of the Gestapo in France were French, don’t see any men shaving, and they had done much worse than fall in love with a handsome German soldier.
This is the most simplistic take I’ve seen on this issue. Each woman who had her head shaved was accompanied by ten men who were simply dragged out of their homes and shot. 9,000 were executed summarily after DDay, 1,500 after Liberation. A total of 40,000 people were imprisoned. Most of them were men.
Ah! The famous feast of July 14, which takes place on August 12!
What if, after defeating barbarism, you behaved like savages?
And today, we also know that about half of the women who have been shorn have been shaved on simple rumours and not facts. Not to mention what some have suffered from the liberators in addition to mowing, I am not drawing you a picture. Not the best aspect of the Liberation.
The French collective shame for having surrendered after 6 weeks of war, in order to preserve their cities and their absolute horror at the state their country was left in after its liberation by their, so called allies, had to find an outlet somewhere.
The vast majority of the French collaborated with the occupying Germans, how else would they have survived the war ?
Shame Coco Chanel got off without facing any repercussions
Exactly, West Germany’s bureaucracy was filled with ex-Nazis. Operation Paperclip is a good example of how the West viewed Nazis post war.
It was in response to the Soviets hiring technical experts from Nazi Germany. It was a technology race between the America and the Soxiet Union. Geez, people tend to make things one-sided.
They were usually liquidated afterwards, Operation Paperclip brought Nazis into actual positions of power in organizations across Western Europe and in the U.S.
Not really comparable more than an extremely surface level analysis
So much misinformation in the new Cold War
t’s because she was well aware of how much antisemitism pervaded the perspectives of plethora members of the UK government. She spent a lot of time with them socially prior to the war. Churchill explicitly instructed not to prosecute her because she likely would have testified to that
My elderly Belgian mother in law added some details: she said they would hack off your hair with like a kitchen knife then put mustard on your head (get it: Germans = mustard) which would also hurt like hell in the fresh hack cuts in your scalp…..
“get it: German’s = mustard” ???
I absolutely do not get it. What am I missing? 🤦🏻♀️ ELI5 maybe?
Bratwurst, sausages usually eaten with a good mustard.
A small price to pay if you’re cheering when your neighbors are carted off to a concentration camp.