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.
Did any of you read the article? The resistance, the resistance that fought and died for France to be free did not want this to happen. Lots of these women were people who cooked, cleaned, did laundry, to ya know survive.
I know a lot of us like to think we would be the resistance, but history shows that is not the case. This was a whole bunch of people trying to show that they were anti Nazi by turning on the vulnerable, turning young women into scape goats that they got to play with and abuse all the while ‘showing’ how much of an patriot they were.
Did they actually shave some actual true collaborations? Sure, but is that worth it? Hundreds of women humiliated, for doing the laundry?
This is the same France in which thousands upon thousands of people claimed to be part of the resistance after the war was over, people who had either activity of passively supported what was happening the Jewish people in Europe.
That is why this is awful, it’s just a bunch of people trying to either assuage guilt or hide what they did, and doing so by focusing all there sins onto people who could not fight back.
Perhaps someone should have shaved Petains head, he deserved it far more the perhaps any of these woman.
I wish this comment was higher. War is hell. A lot of privileged keyboard warriors, whose hardest struggle has been when their Starbucks runs out of oat milk, running around here sanctimoniously declaring superiority to people of the past (and some in the present) who endure the worst that humanity has to offer.
There is seldom clear good-guy and bad-guy behavior in war. There is history as told by the victors and that told by the defeated. Often horrors are justified by triumph, not by reason. Millions of innocents are ground up in the mechanism of fear that results when populations are put under this kind of terrible strain.
Who knows how many of these women were actually “collaborators,” and how many were just trying to survive and protect their children by not resisting, and how many were just innocent scapegoats with the wrong last name or wrong look or wrong ethnicity.
Shame on anyone who looks at these photos with glee or satisfaction. No one was aided by humiliating survivors of war.
My dad is disabled and my mom and sister are nuts. I shudder to think what I would have to do as the “adult” in the family to keep them safe during war.
What they did to the men likely included a bullet or a rope.
My dad and his brothers were born in ’39, ’41, ’43 in a tiny village outside Paris, where my grandfather (who was 42-43 years old when the German’s invaded in ’40) worked as a blacksmith for the farmer that owned most of the land there. My grandmother was in her late 20s, I think, in 1940. The family lived in a one-room house (dirt floor, no electricity or indoor plumbing) that was attached to the stables. These details are only germane for background context: they were not destitute, but were a very poor family with very young children and limited options.
I have minimal details, but I know that my grandfather drove a truck for the Germans for some period of time during the occupation, and that my grandmother cooked and did laundry for them on occasion. By many definitions, that’s “collaboration”. My dad never shared that he had the sense either of his parents were actual sympathizers nor that they volunteered these services. I like to imagine that maybe he drove just a little bit slower, and that maybe she made soup just a little bit thinner, but I’ll never really know.
I’ve always wondered if they were subjected to any similar reprisals after France was liberated. Or if anyone else in the village was. I somewhat suspect that everyone there did the same thing, which was probably any logistics support that was demanded of them. I also know there likely were not very many younger women in the village, which sadly adds another potential layer of violence and moral ambiguity.
To truly fight back requires a certain courage, and willingness to risk everything, and not only for yourself. My hat’s off to those who did resist. But sitting at a computer more than three-quarters of a century later, I cannot easily condemn those who did not.
I wasn’t there. I don’t know what it was like. And I’ve no idea what I’d have done in their shoes. I’m very glad I’m unlikely to ever find out.
On point. Some of the most cruel act of torture i heard have been made after algeria war with france , when they left , and some backward villager not involved in the conflict wanted to show to the victor how anti france they were. So they took some people that worked with french administration and start being extra creative. I cant remenber how its called this kind of extreme compensation but it’s relatively known.
I’ll bet $20 that your nuance for context and sympathy for the outcast is not exactly evenly distributed among the general population. Maybe I’m wrong and you’re Jesus Christ, but I’ll put $20 down just in case you’re not, lol
In some of those pictures the girls look like 14 to 15 yo..sad.
Makes me wonder what they made of my (Jewish) cousin in Romania. At 14, she married a Nazi officer so he’d protect her and her family… by only sending the male family members to a concentration camp where they died.
This was nothing more than sour grapes carried out by locals who wanted to entertain themselves and their friends.
Why no men? Are you telling me only girls were working with the nazi’s?
Where is the public humiliation of the church leaders, priests?
The men who collaborated were shot.
Ah yes…well documented that women were spared from anything more brutal than a head shave for treason during WWII….the Gentleman’s War.
I stand by my claim these were locals interested in shaming and controling and isolating women and girls who were trying to survive while their homeland (and homes) were invaded by enemy forces.
I never said that they only had their heads shaved, you asked why there were no punished men in these photos, I told you they were dead.
Isn’t treason STILL punishable by death today? Being shaved and beaten for collaborating with the fucking nazis doesn’t sound that bad (considering they actually collaborated with them)
By collaborating they meant a lot of times having slept with a German. If it was just a rumor or if it was rape did not matter. The good citizens of every town wanted their act of revenge. On the other hand if you had made massive amounts of money on the black market on the back of desperate people during the war you had a good chance of becoming maire or a higher politician, some high profile ones even got medals!
A lot of the time these women were accused (rightfully and wrongly) of having sex with Nazis. This was “horizontal collaboration” and many women were providing professional services and not even in romantic relationships with them.
The children produced from these encounters were also often treated poorly. Prime Minister Erna Solberg (from Norway where they had something similar as did other countries) publicly apologized to the “tyskertøser” and their children for the treatment they received.
So I think that says something. War is hell and cruelty is wrong and it can be easy for justice to turn into injustice. Like when the USA made concentration camps and forced 100,000 plus Japanese people and Japanese descendents into them after Pearl Harbor.
Sometimes things do go too far even though at first it is a valid and legitimate reaction to something awful. I think before people comment or react they should read more deeply into what actually was happening and going on and then make up their mind.
Some of them are children, some of them were just cooks and housekeeping who happened to work in places where Germans stayed. Some of them were victims of rape
Some of them earned this treatment, I’m sure, but many were just working their job so that they could pay bills and feed themselves, and many others were victims as much as anyone else in those times
Last I checked there was still only one known cure for Nazis.
They had sex with German soldiers, that was their crime. How the fuck is an 18 year old peasant girl or metropolitan teenager meaningfully going to collaborate with the Wehrmacht?
Giving up locations of jews, blacks, disabled people, filling out papers, sewing uniforms….
You’re acting like all a women was good for is sex.
Local intelligence. Every intel analyst in the world knows pretty girls in an occupied/conflicted territory at least know somebody who knows something.
The article says collaborated, it’s not a conclusion I jumped to myself. Also the fuck you mean by “peasent”? These aren’t medieval times.
1940s agrarian Europe was pretty antiquated.
People targeted like this were often rape victims of German soldiers. It’s literally just accusations of having been friendly.
If someone actually had the ability to safely choose not to collaborate with the Nazis but collaborated anyway, they should have been punished, but I doubt these mobs of gleeful men made fair decisions with an appropriate level of scrutiny.
Just seems like a bunch of dudes happy to degrade women.
Can concur. This happened in the NL too. Except we liked to shave them bald too.
People theorised that a substantial amount of women prosecuted this way actually just had an at random romantic encounter with innocent German conscripts who were forced into their non-combat or guard roles, or worse, were straight up raped by armed invaders.
Yeah, this is very witch-hunt like. Any man could accuse a woman he was angry with of it and get her humiliated.