When Allied forces liberated France in the summer of 1944, a wave of retribution swept through towns and cities across the country. French citizens turned on those they accused of helping the German occupiers — and women bore some of the most visible and violent punishments. The practice that became the defining image of this period was the public shaving of a woman’s head, known in French as the “tonte.” It was a deliberate act of humiliation, carried out in front of crowds, designed to mark these women visibly and permanently in their communities.
The scenes were not quiet or private. Crowds gathered to watch and jeer as women had their hair cut off in town squares and on street corners. Some women were beaten. Others had swastikas painted or smeared in tar on their faces. Many were stripped partially or fully and marched barefoot through the streets. The atmosphere in these photographs is not one of justice — it is one of spectacle and mob rage.
In Paris on August 27, 1944 — just days after the city’s liberation — women were paraded through the streets with shaved heads, swastikas painted on their faces, and their clothing torn from them. Crowds lined the roads to watch. French soldiers stood nearby and did not intervene. The photographs from this period capture the raw cruelty of the moment with disturbing clarity.
The accusations leveled at these women varied enormously. Some had been in romantic or sexual relationships with German soldiers. Others were accused simply of working for them — cooking, cleaning, doing laundry, or performing other domestic tasks. For many, that work was a matter of survival. During the occupation, ordinary French people had to find ways to pay rent and feed themselves. Women who took work wherever it was available were not necessarily making political choices, yet they faced the same public punishment as those who actively aided the Nazi regime.
Women who had children fathered by German soldiers were singled out with particular intensity. In Chartres in August 1944, a woman carrying her infant was followed through the streets by a taunting crowd after her head was shaved. Her mother, also shaved, walked with her. Neither the presence of the baby nor the age of the women stopped the crowd. These images from Chartres became some of the most widely reproduced photographs of the entire period.
The punishment was not limited to Paris. It took place across France — in Rennes, Marseilles, Chartres, and hundreds of smaller towns and villages. In Marseilles, crowds gathered to watch as women were shaved in public. In Rennes, a woman was led through the streets with her shaved head covered in iodine, flanked by civilians and members of the French Resistance. The Resistance, which had fought against the German occupation, took an active role in organizing and carrying out many of these punishments.
Not everyone in France accepted these public punishments as legitimate. Multiple Resistance cells, local committees, and French intellectuals spoke out against the tontes. They argued that women who had performed basic domestic labor for German troops were being lumped in with genuine collaborators. They also pointed out that the punishments were being applied almost exclusively to women, while many men who had actively worked with the Nazi administration faced no such public humiliation. These protests had limited effect. In only a small number of regions did local authorities manage to reduce the frequency of public shavings.
The practice continued well past the liberation of Paris. Photographs from January 1945 show women still being restrained and shorn by groups of men identifying themselves as French patriots. By that point, the immediate chaos of liberation had passed, yet the punishment continued in an organized fashion.
The photographs show women of all ages subjected to these acts. Some were clearly teenagers. In Rennes on August 6, 1944, a woman’s shaved head was doused in iodine before she was paraded through the streets — a detail that speaks to the ritualized and deliberate nature of the humiliation rather than any spontaneous outburst of anger.
Between 1943 and early 1946, an estimated 20,000 women across France had their heads shaved as punishment for alleged collaboration. They came from all ages and all walks of life. The accusations ranged from proven wartime treason to nothing more than having spoken to a German soldier. The scale of what these photographs document — taken together — is staggering.
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.
They were traitors to their nation. With the same logic the execution of nazis is “barbarism”
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 ?
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.
Thank you. That poster just hates men. And ignores reality.
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.
they captured something similar in band of brothers
In the Netherlands liberation scene (which looked 0% like the Netherlands)
That’s right. Many of these women prostituted themselves to German soldiers or were raped. Imagine being dragged into the street, shaved bald, and paraded naked in front of your neighbors because you took the wrong shortcut home from the market. It was also punishable to stop a person from talking on the street during occupation in Belgium, Italy, Norway and the Netherlands.
To be honest, I was reminded of the collaborators when I learned about them in school. At the time I lived with my elderly grandmother and disabled mother. If sleeping with a random German soldier meant staying out of the camps and having a semi-comfortable life during a war, I’d do it in a heartbeat.
They didn’t send random belgians or dutch to the camp like slavs or gypsies. Most Western europeans lived as before
The soldiers of Normandy and those involved in the battle of the bulge would have been counting their lucky stars they did not have to deal with this type of German offensive. They truly sacrificed for the greater good.
“Many” does not mean most. Do you really believe that french women gave birth to 200,000 german children because of rape? I have not seen any evidence that mass rapes took place at all.
I was wondering if there was a lot of misogyny behind this, because they don’t say anything about men accused of being collaborators being punished. Also, it sounded like they could just accuse any woman and then go shave her head and beat her without repercussion.
Bro, at least do a little research before jumping to the “misogyny” conclusion. The women were publicly humiliated while the men were publicly EXECUTED. Over 10,000 in France alone were executed – more detailed info: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pursuit_of_Nazi_collaborators#:%7E:text=The%20French%20Minister%20of%20the,the%20number%20executed%20was%20105%2C000.
I’m not saying that neither was A-OK or that the “punishers” were totally fair in what they did, but to suggest that male collaborators got away with lighter punishment because they were male is………. incorrect, to say the least.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_collaboration
This page states that they were allegations, so they didn’t actually have to prove that these women did anything to shave their head, beat them, and parade them through town. Also, it says many of the women only performed professional services, which may be difficult to avoid when your country is being occupied. Why are putting misogyny in quotes like it didn’t exist in the 1940s?
Your article never states that only male collaborators were executed, so it’s more than likely women faced the same punishments as men.
And just to be clear, I’m not talking about or defending the actual Nazi supporters. I have no sympathy for those people. I was just wondering about how this could have been abused because it’s not like this went through court and had to be proven before they did this to the women.
Initially, it seemed that you were trying to have a sincere discussion, but now it seems that you’re trying to discredit me by putting words in my mouth. Therefore, I must respond to this poorly written comment:
1) The word “allegations” can be used in a variety of contexts. It can be used in cases where no evidence exists that a person committed a crime, as well as cases where a person is undoubtedly guilty. You can read any news article. No matter how many times they are witnessed stabbing a victim to death, they are still “alleged” to be the murderer until they are proved guilty in court. So, your claim that the word “allegation” means that “they didn’t have to prove the women did anything” is nothing more than an attempt to make the punishers look like witch-hunters, using their power as males to attack poor women. The majority of the attacked women were almost certainly involved in a relationship with the Nazis that was considered inappropriate and “traitorous”. Did the retaliation (physical violence and shaming) make sense? Most likely not. However, do not portray it as some kind of manic witch-hunt where innocent women were assaulted. Be aware that both sexes were quite involved in this revenge act.
2) The word “misogyny” is in quotes because it comes before the word “conclusion”. I wrote The “misogyny” conclusion. This is how words can be written in such contexts. Such as The infamous “Bonnie and Clyde” couple or The “self defense” plea. It is not that misogynistic behavior occurred during those times; misogyny has always existed and only gets worse during times of war (as does most other negative behavior). There is no misogyny here, as women do not receive unfair treatment in this case. Nevertheless, yelling “misogyny!” here is ridiculous. History is not taken into account in this argument.
3) Since the article doesn’t state that women WEREN’T executed, it’s more likely that women faced the same punishments as men” – a horrendous instance of the “since A cannot be disproven, it must have happened” fallacy. You cannot find any historical evidence that women collaborators (who did nothing but sexual activities) with the Nazis were ever executed. History will never state that executions of women collaborators never happened, as that would be denying something without proper evidence. It is silly to expect them to do so, and it goes against historical documentation in general. Women collaborators may have been executed or murdered by someone with hatred against them – however, the lack of such case reports suggests that those cases were likely quite rare. Following the end of WWII, tens of thousands of male collaborators were tortured, battered, and murdered with pride. It was also common for them to be smeared with mud/feces and humiliated publicly.) If you find any historical evidence that many women “collaborators” suffered public executions at the hands of the “justice mob,” please let me know.
Some of the “collaborators” were wrongfully punished, or were coerced/forced to “collaborate” by German soldiers (what a soulless way to describe “sexual harassment/assault”…). There were plenty who voluntarily “cooperated” with the Nazi side, for a variety of reasons.
Here is a relevant wikipedia article discussing “horizontal collaboration”, basically “sexual” collaboration, during WWII. Please take a look if you have the time.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_collaboration
Here’s a Dutch wiki article discussing the women who (voluntarily or not) had relationships with the Nazis. Also a good read.
https://nl.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moffenmeid#
I was just discussing with the first person how misogyny could have contributed to the targeting of women, given that no proof was needed. After that, I was annoyed by your response. It came across as rude and dismissive of what I was saying. Whatever you think, I’m done.
Don’t you think we should listen to these allegations and believe them?
If there is adequate proof yes. I fully support punishing anyone who supported the Nazis. I was just wondering about how this practice could have been misused because it didn’t go through the courts (from what I can find). Mob mentality could easily lead to innocent people being subjected to this. That’s all I was trying to mention.
Right? “LISTEN AND BELIEVE!”
Oh…except for this sort of stuff. Don’t listen to allegations and believe the victims.
Despite this, these images portray absolute humiliation and degradation, whereas execution is more direct and brief. Certainly male collaborators were held accountable, but executing men while leaving women alive to drag out some prolonged violent public shaming seems misogynistic.
It’s not fair to compare public shaming and sexual assault to being beaten and executed. Particularly not to chalk it up to “misogyny” as if it were a “male” issue.
In other words, you call humiliation, torture, and death “direct and brief”. As if all male collaborators had just been tried and guillotined the next day. That’s not how things work.
I think more important to note that treachery is a worse crime than prostitution. Collaboration indicates helping the Nazi war effort…
Providing intel to benefit Nazis is worse than sleeping with them.
I mean, it’s cool if you disagree with me, I’m just saying I can see how misogyny could have played a role in the methods of punishment chosen.
You’re talking about Nazi sympathizers. I think worries about misogyny is probably misplaced here. Worry about the women they raped, killed and whose children were left for dead in rail cars.
So getting your head shaved and humiliated is really awful if you rat out your neighbor’s children who are sent to concentration camps and killed because of your complicity? What? Have some perspective here.
Executed. Men were sentenced to jail or executed. Not prostitutes or rape victimes for the women, but women who.had a love affair with a German soldiers… Or refused to have a remationship with a résistant or “late jour” résistant (Aka Nazi collaborators who changed side at the last moment). My mom, who was 7 at thé end of thé war in Belgium, still remembers a red hair young woman being executed without trial. What you see in this picture is soft.
There were tons of men who were publicly punished for collaborating. They were summarily executed instead of humiliated. I’m not sure the women had it worse.
Read this: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/25/opinion/simone-touseau-france-occupation.html
This was shockingly more tame than I thought it was.
Nevertheless, most women in Nazi-occupied Europe did not join them.
In my opinion, the women being punished were not simply rape victims, but people who actively slept with and/or collaborated with Nazis.
Sure, we can discuss the power dynamics between occupiers and occupied, and rape and coercion did occur. However, let’s not pretend that some women did not actively choose to take up with their occupiers. There is no doubt in the historical record about that.
Whether for good or ill, women are human beings with agency.
Exactly, I’m sure they outed a lot of Jews who died as a consequence
Many of them were educated women who spoke more than one language. The soldiers usually forced women who spoke English, French, and/or German to translate when they invaded. The question is whether they willingly had sex with their bosses or if they did so out of desperation.
And to be frank, they got off easy. The men were shot.
Funny how they still complain that being tortured and shamed publicly is worse than being fking dead.
“They”? You definitely don’t have a bone to pick with women as a collective group, you lil war hero you.
Well, well, well, it looks like the tables have turned 😂
Ah, yes, because every woman has to be a victim and cannot possibly have voluntarily chosen evil.
You are made of stupid.
Bs. There were love affairs. In fact, there were more râpes being commited by thé Allies than by the Germans, who were specifically instructed NOT to act against civilians (not Jewish, of course)
Men shaming and torturing women victims of rape during war? Shocking
Collaborators with Nazis are victims now if they’re women apparently.
Considering that male collaborators were shot, this is doubly stupid since women were not specifically targeted.
Shot Vs dragged through streets, beaten publicly, and/or raped. Oh yes, they sure got off easy
Yes dragged through the streets is easy compared to being killed
Id rather be shot than raped.
If someone pointed a gun at you I’m sure you would change your tune quick.
Many of the women often ended up dying by suicide afterwards anyway because of the shame/stigma. So it’s a just a longer route to the same end.
I’m not a female but I personally know 2 people who have been raped, one was pregnant because of the rape. They can personally tell you and i’m inclined to agree that being simply lined up and shot (as horrible and severe as it may be) is better than being brutalized, extremely humiliated and raped by the community I lived in. Some collaborators absolutely deserved to be punished or even executed for the crimes they committed but much like the Korean war women were forced to sleep with communists or fascists to even get food to eat.
For some reason people keep seeming to ignore this little fact: the punishment for collaboration was not rape. Being paraded through the streets is not rape
So you’re denying that collaborators, guilty or not, were raped? You’re delusional.
Rape was not a punishment. If they did get raped it wasn’t the punishment.
Do you care to give a single reference to these claims that they were raped so much by the French resistance?
When I heard about how they executed Quisling I was really sad and stuff :(.
Oh wait, he’s a man. And as we all apparently agree, only men have agency and women are weak and easily manipulated by oppressors. Therefore men are responsible for their a
Yes, comparing a high-ranking politician to a woman in the ’30s and ’40s is a totally equal and good argument, well done you.
If Quisling was a street sweeping bum who collaborated with the Nazis by ratting out Jews instead of by running Norway for them I would still condemn him. Just as I condemn Leni Riefenstahl for advancing her career by creating Nazi propaganda machine and a random French woman for sleeping with the oppressors of her people in order to advance hers.
They very well had a choice. It may have been a horrible choice with no good options, but they certainly had a choice. Just as the White Rose and other resistance movements had their own difficult choices.
People commenting in here are such an embarresment, all entangled in a mindset not compatible with actual historical facts. Fraternizing and sucking up to power and fame is what a lot of women do.
What’s with this sentimental view of women as these powerless little wisps? There were Nazis of both genders. Women who helped out their neighbors. Anne Frank may have been outed by a woman employee. Did she get her head shaved? She should have.
Men were shot, anything to say about this ?
Victims? No, collaboration isn’t victim hood.
If you can’t understand the complexities of coercion, grooming, and submission with momentary releases of pain being mistaken for pleasure beneath the pressures and stresses of everything you know being upturned if not destroyed or mutilated, you aren’t equipped for this conversation of a post.
“They’re all innocent. I decided 80 years later than none of them voluntarily were involved with Nazi’s”. You are the problem.
if they were collaborators they should have been punished the same way as the men
Women usually didn’t “collaborate” the same way as men, hence the different methods of “punishment”. While men who “collaborated” usually assisted the Nazis in their violence and murder (one way or another), women who “collaborated” usually had sexual relations or activities with Nazis. Different actions, different results.
Despite the fact that what they did was morally (and possibly legally, if their collaboration involved assisting the Nazis in their violence, such as outing a Jewish neighbor to your Nazi boyfriend), we must acknowledge why women were punished differently than men. They simply had different methods of “collaboration”.
(Of course, the act of group humiliation and punishment is not one to be encouraged – it often leads to innocent victims being falsely punished and is really an inhumane thing to do. Groupthink can lead to terrifying results.)
What would you say about Abu Ghraib I wonder. Not a slight on you, just curious.
Ah, yes, because every woman has to be a victim and cannot possibly have voluntarily chosen evil.
You are made of stupid.
Bs. There were love affairs. In fact, there were more râpes being commited by thé Allies than by the Germans, who were specifically instructed NOT to act against civilians (not Jewish, of course)
I’ve laughed at men’s jokes when I felt uncomfortable and scared as I didn’t want to deal with a physical encounter if they got mad at me. Who’s to say these “love affairs” weren’t also performances put on by people who were fearing death or even rape?
Why are you feeling sorry for Nazi collaborators? Serious question.
I’m 57. My parents were both kids during WWII, one of my grandfathers was a POW and a résistant. To paraphrase the French movie star Arletty, who arrested and shaved for a love affair with a German soldier: “Mon coeur est français mais mon cul est international”. There is a lot of confusion between how the Nazis treated Western and East European civilians. Once again, I’ve said that rape as a weapon was seldom in Western Europe, but love affairs did happen. Or happened in Vietnam, Korean etc between US soldiers and locals. Was there a threat there? Of course there were women who took a German lover to have a better access to ressources, the same happens all over the world. But claiming that all these women were victims of rape, no, it’s false. A lot of them were raped during arrest or in détention, but by the last hour résistants or just jealous men they had refused before. In my mom’s village Hornu, there were several women who had affairs with soldiers and among the one that survived, a lot of them came back to offert marriage. My mom went to school with one of these love children. His mother refused to marry his father when hé came back because she would have had to leave her family in Belgium to move to Germany. The kid kept contact with his father and they visited often.
To have sex while being cooreced is still rape though
The entire govt was Nazi.
Its wild how many comments are in here just saying this was okay. Wasn’t aware of how many incels were.
I think the collaborators should have been shot, man or woman.
They’re terminally online everywhere because they can’t find a woman who wants to build a meaningful relationship with them.
>you’re wrong because you don’t have bitches
Women say this and wonder why they are being objectified lol
They said the catchphrase guys. Pack it up, it’s over.
Do you get angry and seethe when you see the word because you heavily relate with it? You’ve spent too much time on Twitter if you think I’m using this word as a catchphrase. If anything I’m using it correctly here.
Cope and seethe xoxo
Projecting? Unfortunate
>throws an insult first
>why are you seethe?
Women moment
>woman
>instantly throws “incel” when she has no argument
Why are women always like this?
umans. 🤷♂️
This isn’t that shocking. It’s well known that collaborators had consequences and given that they weren’t put on trial and executed I’d say they got off easy.
Yeah…but were they even willing collaborators? Germany occupied France…a lot of those soldiers were having a hay day and using their power horribly. They were raping women, terrorizing people, and stealing. The French just had to put up with it. History is filled with instances of women being punished for things that forcefully happened to them, especially rape. Even American soldiers raped French women during the “French Liberation” towards the end of WW2. Then many of these women became single mothers and social pariahs.
If these women felt threatened to be at the beck and call of German soldiers, it wouldn’t be fair for them just to be punished later when they were just trying to survive.
Most of them were willing . The nazis weren’t as wild in France as they were on the eastern front, as long as you weren’t jewish/gypsy etc. Hell, they gave birth to 200,000 children by German soldiers, hardly most of them were raped.
Collaborators could be the wrong word here. By “collaborator”, they most often meant “had sex with” nazis occupying France. Many of the women didn’t have a choice, that is, many of these women who were tortured by their own neighbours after the war were raped by the nazis, or forced into relationships against their will. They certainly did not get off easy. But tale as old as time, when men feel weak they take it out on women…
My great aunt was forced to sleep with the nazi(s) next door to keep the family surviving. She was punished and exiled after we were liberated. A relative tried to find her in the 90s and she freaked out so much she disappeared again.
So sorry that this happened in your family. This is the exact kind of situation I’m talking about. Many of these were either fully forced into relations with nazis, or it was the only way to provide for their families. Not an easy decision to make. Definitely not fair to call them collaborators, and I’m sickened that the person I first replied to is getting any upvotes, their comment should be deleted.
Reminds me of the movie “Malena”. Its literally the plot. I feel so awful for the women who had to face such levels of cruelty. Especially the ones who had no community, no friends, no family, no one they could turn to for help.
No it’s the right word. I think it’s a slap on the wrist. Were some coerced? Of course. Was Vichy a disgusting racist state that was sustained by good Germans/ French? Absolutely
You disgust me.
Sorry if I don’t want to join in the bandwagon of letting the Pétainists off the hook. Nazis disgust me but à chacun à son goût, hein?
Ya, bandwagon. Whatever you need to tell yourself. You’re just like all of the other pathetic man babies who want to see women punished.
Some of those women were Nazis, and so yeah, they should’ve been punished.
Women collaborators were shamed, usually assaulted. Male collaborators were dragged to the edge of town and shot or hung….
Although neither is okay or justified, there is a reason there aren’t as many photos of what happened to the men who collaborated
Female “collaborators” were/are often just rape victims.
My parents come from war. The women who were raped, are all just seen as having had sex outside of marriage. People hold that against them as a reason to call them wh***s. And the women just accept that it’s shameful it happened to them and them losing their worth.
Many of the female “collaborators” were prostitues who serviced the Nazis, regular women who were coerced into sleeping with them lest the Nazis kill their families, or straight up rape victims. The Coco Chanel types who actually shared the ideology were rare (and mostly consisted of wealthy women, like Chanel, who escaped harassment or trial).
On the other side of the coin, while there probably were male collaborators who were raped or otherwise forced, most of them willingly betrayed their country in hopes of attaining power or money. While it could be argued that both the female and male collaborators did what they did for personal gain, “don’t kill my kids” is a different reason than “give me a good job”.
Nobody threatened to kill their families, you fool. The nazis were very restrained on the Western front, the life of the average french hardly changed during the occupation
This is actually mild. Many women who collaborated with German soldiers, and especially women who betrayed other French, were, after liberation, dragged out onto the street and shot, without trial.
I get the feeling that many of these woman were prostitutes and didn’t have much choice, or possibly didn’t even know in some cases.
Most of them were average citizens caught up in larger circumstances far outside of their control. Some saw opportunities to move up in life. Some were simply trying to make the best of the circumstances they were in. Some were coerced.
The ones whose heads were shaved were beloved to be sexually involved with the Germans.
It has been theorized that the women -and- men who collaborated with Germans counterbalanced the French Resistance. The French Resistance was critical to the Allied forces reclaiming land from the Germans.
Men who collaborated were executed.
Horizontal collaboration
So like… There weren’t any male collaborates to also punish in a similar manner??? At all??
The woman in the photo: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/25/opinion/simone-touseau-france-occupation.html
pay wall
Sorry – here it is
In August 1944, in a city near Paris, Robert Capa took a photograph of a woman cradling a baby in the middle of a jeering crowd, her head shaved and her forehead marked with a swastika.
The woman, Simone Touseau, would become infamous — first as a symbol of the brutality of post-occupation France and later, through painstaking scholarship, as an example of the Nazi sympathies among some of the French during World War II.
A novel released in France this summer has reinvented her once again, this time as a woman scorned. It’s a reinvention that is a disservice to the complicated truth about Ms. Touseau and her and other Frenchwomen’s deliberate collaboration with the Nazis.
Women collaborated out of cowardice, self-interest and a whole range of ideological fervor. A reality we should contemplate frankly if we’re to have a proper accounting of the history of the war in France.
The photograph, “The Shaved Woman of Chartres,” with the young Ms. Touseau at its center, was understood for a long time as a document of the brutal purges that took place during the liberation of France at the end of World War II. Extrajudicial punishments were carried out all over the country, including shaving the heads of women suspected of sleeping with the enemy.
The truth was more complex. Historians were slow to take an interest in the wartime collaboration and resistance of women, but in the early 2000s, a groundbreaking work by Fabrice Virgili described how many women who were shaved in the purges were being punished not for their intimate relationships with Germans but for denunciations or working for the Germans.
Eventually we got a clearer picture of Ms. Touseau, too. In 2011 two historians, Gérard Leray and Philippe Frétigné, established that she was a Nazi sympathizer before the war started. She scribbled swastikas in the pages of notebooks she kept as early as the mid-1930s, admired National Socialism and claimed that France “needs someone like Hitler.” Fluent in German, she worked as a translator for the occupying forces and became a member of the nationalist Parti Populaire Français. She was accused of denouncing four neighbors who were deported to the Mauthausen concentration camp, two of whom never returned. The crime, which would have been punishable by death, was not proved, but Mr. Leray told me that he is adamant that she played at least some part in it.
When the Allied forces were in the process of freeing France, Ms. Touseau wrote to the German father of her child that if she was killed, he should raise their daughter “in hatred of the British.”
The infamous martyr of the purges was a committed collaborator. Mr. Capa’s image of the shorn woman was one of victimization but also accountability.
This was an important moment in our understanding of history. Memory of World War II in France is still mutable and fragile and underpins debates that we as a country are still having. (As recently as 2019, Eric Zemmour, a far-right pundit who ran for president, was still trying to spread the long-disproved idea that Maréchal Pétain saved French Jews rather than volunteered to send more to the death camps.) Understanding women’s role correctly is essential to an honest inspection of that history.
This August a new, fictionalized portrait of Ms. Touseau was published in France, in the shape of a novel, “Vous Ne Connaissez Rien de Moi” (“You Know Nothing About Me”), by Julie Héraclès, which renders Ms. Touseau, renamed Grivise, as a woman scorned.
In the novel Simone falls in love with Pierre, who is young and handsome and from a bourgeois family. He sexually assaults Simone, and when she falls pregnant, he abandons her to join the Resistance, leaving her to have an illegal abortion on her own.
Simone’s desire for revenge drives her to start working as a translator for the Nazis. She begins a relationship with a German officer, Otto, then falls in love with him. After he is injured on the Eastern Front, she joins the Parti Populaire Français to get a transfer to Germany to be with him, with little consideration for the political implications.
The Simone of the novel has a Jewish friend, lies to the Gestapo to help a member of the Resistance, is “revulsed” by the practice of reporting neighbors and gives food to a little Jewish girl — all “highly implausible facts,” Mr. Leray told me.
It makes for gripping reading, and the novel was on numerous award lists and won the Stanislas Prize for best first novel. Critics praised it as impressive and audacious, and readers shared their enthusiasm for it — “a beautiful love story,” a “real immersion in Simone’s life,” a story “that shows us that people are never angels or demons but a tangle of good and bad,” several wrote in online reviews.
But the book has also been the subject of criticism on the question of what fiction can allow itself when it comes to this part of history.
Ms. Héraclès told me in a phone interview that she was surprised by the debate. Her agenda was not to redeem Ms. Touseau, she said, but “to explore the human condition” by trying to imagine “how a young woman can commit criminal acts.”
The novel has an epigraph: “I’ve never seen a saint or a bastard. Nothing is all black and white; it’s the gray that wins. Men and their souls, it’s all the same.” But relegating Ms. Touseau to the role of a sentimental being buffeted by history does not enrich our understanding of her. It strips her of agency and impoverishes our sense of history at the same time.
The shaved woman of Chartres was a driven, ideological woman whom painstaking historical scholarship had liberated from our simplistic understanding of her. At any given time, people are a tangle of good and bad, and it is the prerogative of fiction to mold bare facts for artistic ends. But now fiction has put her back in the limited, familiar role of sacrificial mother that she inhabited in Capa’s photo and the world’s imagination.
Thank you. The ridiculous tone of the article made me feel even less sympathy for the Nazi sympathizers pictured.
Very many European women were Nazis. Very many American women were too; white supremacist pieces of shit. Fuck Nazis.
Still better than getting shot without any trial. This is what happened to the men, legit collaborators or not.
Please do not rank sexual assault as better or worse against something else. Some of us would rather be shot. Some would not. None of us would like to weigh the two
The female collaborators weren’t raped. Did you even read the article, or just come here to comment?
Also you kind of can compare atrocities. If anyone thought death was preferable to whatever punishment they had they could have killed themselves
Virtue signal said, conservative loser detected. Y’all are the biggest signalers around, can’t go a moment without telling everyone what you stand for.
You don’t know what a conservative is. I’m not a conservative.
collaborating with nazis should be punishable by death wtf
No matter who wins women always lose
The men were killed
If that shocks you, you dont want to know what happened to male collaborators
As many commenters on this thread seem to believe, the vast majority of these girls fell in love with german soldiers and were not raped by an occupying force.
This event in history illustrates how women can be suckers to men in power and unconsciously pursue the best possible future for themselves and their children. It is simply incorrect to claim that these girls were innocent victims of sexual assault in many occupied countries. A love affair often led to sympathy for the Nazis, and many examples demonstrate how they ratted out resistance armies and collaborated with Nazi occupiers.
Because of this, they are seen as traitors and humiliated publicly.
Source that a majority where in love? How would you even determine that? Sounds like you projecting your incel anger delusions.
Fraternizing is as old as age, and regarding women in wwII it has been subjected to various studies, here is one:
The girls they left behind : An investigation into the various aspects of the German troops sexual relations with Danish subjects (1946) af Grethe Hartmann.
To this day it continues to be a subject of interest, for the simple reason that it baffles the mind, why someone would collaborate with an occupying enemy.
A lot of these women had a tough upbringing, and opted for a way out, of whatever unfortunate situation they were stuck in. As did some men by collaborating and working for the nazis.
Yet, other women and men joined the resistance and are regarded as heroes.
But to call all women sleeping with the enemy victims, is historically incorrect.
It is sad if this historical fact comes of as triggering to some, resulting in downvotes and accusation of me having an incel mindset.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Plenty of documentaries talking about the women being raped and forced to serve Germans too. Do those not count?
Of course, it is completely unacceptable that women were treated as such, however; the treatment of women in occupied Europe, can’t even be remotely compared to the atrocities Korean women suffered while Korea was occupied by Japan.
I didn’t say it should be so I’m not sure why you’re stating that.
But you’re painting with a very broad brush there. There were absolutely women in Europe who are treated horribly as well. Meanwhile the comment was responding to and most of this thread that’s being downloaded is people acting with that broad brush to paint all women in Europe as collaborators in the sense that they eagerly took part and joining with the other side
It’s in numerous books and documentaries.
So is what others said.
True. And valid point well made. But do you have another narrative supported by anything?
Free haircuts are far from “shocking photographs”.
“Shocking” all they did was cut hair… they should have been arrested and tried
They dragged them naked through the streets for the crime of being raped by german soldiers
Not true. These were collaborators not just rape victims, not sure why there are so many people here deliberately lying and conflating the two.
Yeah I’m sure many thought they didn’t have a choice. But that’s what the word collaborator means. Other people resisted, they just helped the nazis
I thought you said they weren’t raped.
By the French post occupation, which they weren’t, what the hell are you on about?
Thank you for speaking the truth, people in here are embarrasing. I got called an incel for citing historical facts in my comment further up. For Christ sake.
I was expecting a lot worse. A beating and getting your hair shaved off isn’t too bad.
Never saw band of brothers?
It pays to be a winner.
It aint that shocking
you gave comfort to the enemy. if you were male, you would have been executed on the spot
Yeah, not that bad.
Humans. 🤷♂️
These women weren’t acting like it, giving up their neighbors to be carted away by the Nazis to concentration camps, spying on people, and otherwise collaborating with them.
Did the same in Denmark as well.
Norway also.
My grandmother was Norwegian, and even after 70 years, the hatred she had for the women who socialized with the Nazis was intense.
They lived very far north and weren’t under particularly strict occupation, but resources were still scarce.
Nazi soldiers could provide food, goods, and alcohol.
They essentially kept the local bar open, and she once admitted that some of the women who spent a lot of time with them were likely alcoholics.
Well as the saying goes.
If there’s a table with 10 people sitting at it and one is a nazi. Then that’s a table of 10 nazis.
I like this
And yet we have ~20% AfD voters. Curious.
My aunt was Czech. No love lost for Nazi f*ckers
This was done all over Europe not only to the women that collaborated but also women that where first raped by the germans and got pregnant or the women that where forced in to prostitution to survive.
Ahh yes and Bygonely, my first source for non sensationalized, historically accurate information that’s free of bias and propaganda.
The source they cited may not be fabulous but surely you aren’t denying this happened?
Are you wanting me to deny it happened? What are you trying to get me to say?! 😂
Found Nikki Haley’s burner account 😂
I read it in Eric Cartman voice. I do what I want
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.
France doing this while simultaneously occupying Algeria and committing all types of atrocities against its people
England still occupies the northern part of Ireland while protesting Israel.
England helped create israel, they’re all colonisers with no regard to human life
They’re lucky they weren’t summarily executed like the men who collaborated with the Nazis. Nobody commenting here has any idea what it’s like to live in a country occupied by an invading enemy during a World War, hilarious to see people trying to moral high ground their way into excusing these women.
99% of the French state ‘collaborated’ with the Nazis. Did they shave the heads of all the policemen, the politicians, the military leaders? These women were targeted cause they used sex to survive during war time.
What about the restaurants who served Germans food? Were they burnt down, or was it just viewed as doing what you have to and surviving?
If we’re talking about French people who deserved reprisals, these women are SO far down the list.
It wasn’t even collaborators who were humiliated and executed. Thousands of Germans or German speaking civilians in Czechoslovakia, Poland and Eastern Europe were executed, put into camps or drove out on death marches to Germany.
A lot of harm can come from a failure to question the validity of a source and a failure to question what might be left out of the story.
All we have here are pictures and vague claims that these women collaborated. It takes a lot of big assumptions to take that at face value.
And a lot of people don’t have the right to judge them for the exact same reason 🙄
“Comforting”, not “collaborating”. Basically for fraternising with the occupying soldiers.
Which includes being raped by them or even just rumours of being friendly to them.
Did the same in the Netherlands too.
Worse thing is, a lot of men who helped with taking the Jews to Germany never went to prison. Especially collaborators whose names were never recorded anywhere.
Awful they collaborated.
Their punishment is not particularly awful when you compare it to what punishment was given to men (i.e. execution)
Not when “collaboration” includes being raped or even just rumoured to be friendly to the occupiers.
You need to learn the difference between:
Collaborating (willingly cooperating)
Being Coerced (manipulated against your will)
When you’ve figured that out, come back and we’ll talk again
I…actually do know that?
My point was that the women being punished in this way were not necessarily willing to help the Axis but were victims of them, but were seen as collaborators despite that.
Am I supposed to feel bad for them?
Meanwhile, Coco Chanel nervously rolls over in her grave.
I had to search who that was, why is she rolling in her grave?
She was a huge Nazi collaborator and anti-Semite.
So was henry ford right?
Huge anti-Semite. Hitler actually looked up to Ford.
Sources for such a big statement?
I’m assuming she was punished harder than the woman in the picture?
LOL. No she was rich and famous and is still lauded today with the Chanel fashion label and Chanel No. 5 perfume being incredibly famous and desirable. Behind the Bastards did an interesting episode or two on her.
Ohh I get it. It was misleading when you said rolls over in her grave because rolling in her grave usually means you’re pissed off at something after death.
Yeah. You’re probably right about it being misleading. Though there isn’t much else one can do in a grave. It’s not like she’s going to sit up.
Nope. She became a famous fashion icon… Aka Chanel perfume.
Didn’t know Chanel was founded by a Nazi
Not many people do, but yeah she was a massive Nazi collaborator. “Behind the Bastards” podcast does a great episode (maybe series- can’t remember) on her.
The BTB episodes on her are really good.
At the risk of sounding like I’m in the “cult of Robert,” I really enjoy 90% of episodes. It kept me going during the pandemic.
I’ve never heard it referred to as a cult. It’s not MAGA or anything.
Oh they make jokes all the time on the show about Robert starting a cult or being a cult leader. Satire of course. Lol
I could kind of see him being able to pull it off if he actually wanted to though.
AS someone commented in the post, 90% of the Gestapo in France were French. Meanwhile, the actual resistance pre-1944 were a vanishingly small proportion of the population, then suddenly in 1944 everyone was or had been ‘fighting’ the Nazis all along. The hypocrisy is strong, even if the justice is reasonable.
What terrible grammar and form. Is this the state of journalism nowadays?
Sadly, yes. Writing well is a skill learned mostly through reading quality material for hundreds of thousands of hours. That is no longer happening so this is the result.
Don’t collaborate with nazis. Simple.
Meh. Can’t feel bad for nazis
They were collaborating? Fine, I have no sympathy for Nazis. Is this article trying to get me to feel sympathy for Nazis?
No, they often weren’t actually collaborating, they were often coerced. These things were wrongly conflated.
Then the headline shouldn’t try and conflate the things, either. Again: Is it trying to get me to feel sympathy for Nazis?
“Shocking”. Many innocent men, women and children were killed because of these traitors.
They are lucky. The men who collaborated are being shot
Now… in the case of MTG and Bobert… they elect them to congress.
The article is weirdly sympathetic to Nazi collaborators, like vaguely justifying because one woman had a German father???
this happened in britain too – in the channel islands. jerry bags they were called – women who had relationships with German soldiers.
If I remember correctly, a lot of German pows settled there after the war too.
They shot the guys
How much say do you think a woman had if Nazis entered her apartment and demanded sex. This is terrible! These women were abused multiple times!
I feel terrible for them. They did what they had to do to survive. Hardly collaborators. I also admire their toughness. Not one of them is crying they look tough as fucking nails. The people abusing them, crowding around and laughing are disgusting fucking jackals
Its not awful if they deserved it
is it shocking that they shaved heir heads or shocking that they collaborated with nazis?
The misogynistic comments on that website..
Did they do that to cops, solders, officers, judged and politicians too? No. Of course not.
Good. Nazi collaborators deserve WHATEVER happens to them. Principle works in modern times as well. Tar and feather these fascist cuckolds. Tattoo a toothbrush mustache on them while you’re at it.
And this attitude is how witch hunts start and innocent people are caught up in the frenzy. It happens over and over again and no one learns a damned thing.
They should have done this with the French soldiers and men who surrender within a month of invasion.
Did anyone actually read this shit? It’s actually deriding and insulting the French who held the Nazis among them accountable. Fuck that. It’s a propaganda piece. These people deserved everything they got and, probably a lot more. Know what happened to the identified male collaborators? I believe they were shot in the head and/or hung.
And the men?
They were killed
Eh, i mean i expected much worse but still not a lovely sight to woman abused, i am not sure it’s deserved expect if there inpasable evidence to collabation with the nazis.
Check out the movie “Malena”. This kind of thing wasn’t uncommon. Also, Malena is a great movie.
For a second, I read that as “Melania”, and was wondering what the hell Trump’s wife had to do with Nazis.
That was awfully written. Also, what should their punishment be? Public head shaving is really not so bad… if it were men, they’d have been beaten or killed 🙄
Very lienent punishment for treason.
All the men were tortured and shot but I bet this was pretty traumatic. They were traitors in total war. They should have been hung. This was a kindness for the time. Again the presence of testes was a death sentence for doing far less than succking an ofstiffers cork.
They made them look like modern day liberals 🙂
They got a slap on the wrist compared with male teenagers who were forced to clean minefields
What happened to the man that were accused ?
You know the sad part about this is knowing that people would do this all over again look at the way people acted towards the unvaccinated they were vilified worse than murderers.
Did you read this shit? It’s actually deriding and insulting the French who held the Nazis among them accountable. Fuck that. It’s a propaganda piece. These people deserved everything they got and, probably a lot more. Know what happened to the identified male collaborators? I believe they were shot in the head and/or hung.
One exception: no baby deserves to be paraded through the street and screamed at. Purposely inflicting preverbal trauma on an innocent being is not acceptable under any circumstances.
Well deserved, we need to bring back more shame. These 304s are getting out of hand
Funny thing is all these condemning these women during wartime are not only collaborating but condoning invaders slowly taking over their countries now
I’d be interested to know what became of the French men who collaborated with the Nazis.
Most were dead. Executed if they didn’t die fighting.
They were executed instead.
Almost an entire generation of French men died. So there weren’t many left and the ones that were were angry. Public shaming was probably the planet punishment at a time when the holocaust happened
Most of them were “collaborating” by getting raped by German soldiers.
This was my question… how many of them “collaborated” willingly?
Power shifts are hard to negotiate.
Not more shocking than what that collaboration did to Jewish people
If they really (!) were collarobators, the punishment was rather easy. I mean, the head shaved and dragged through the street, that’s rather harmless compared to what happened in WW2 to others that did the same. Like germans that did hide jews and got killed for this.
But also innoncent germans, like young teenagers, that were lynched and their families were displaced from the territories like the Sudetenland.
Some of the male teenagers in Germany, that were not (!) in the Wehrmacht or SS, were dragged away and accused of being part of the “Werewolf” project about hidden resistance cells, they never got any trial and were sent to the Gulags by Stalin. That happened in the Soviet zone of occupation right after the war, Stalin was still paranoid that there could be Germans that would resist.
In reality, the “Werewolf” project was just a thing on paper, it was never realized.
The ones doing the shaving thinking they’re so tough, I wonder what they were doing during the occupation of the Germans, probably not so tough back then.
Quite a few were resisting, but yes, not everyone is that brave to stand up to fascists.
Probably not collaborating with them lol
Public embarrassment was an adequate punishment for the crime. I could see where election Hitler got a few people but there’s definitely a point where you see him starting to get way to sketchy. Play a stupid game win a stupid prize.
The women would receive these punishments even if a nazi broke into their home and and raped them, or made them house him and cook for him under the threat that they and their children would get killed.
And also if they willingly worked with the invaders. It’s really hard to tell motivation after the fact.
Those who worked with the nazis were shamed by having their heads shaved. Pretty minor considering the alternative:
They weren’t beaten to death or hanged, like a soldier in an identical position would have been.
Mob justice. No trial, no oversight, no proof of anything, if you made an enemy of someone at some point they could just accuse you and you’d be humiliated publicly like this. And those who did this faced no consequences – they probably went to their graves feeling they acted justly in spite of having acted the opposite.
This is probably on the mildest end of the scale in terms atrocities committed during the chaos of the war and its equally chaotic aftermath.
When I see these pictures I always wonder how many of the jeering crowd made a pretty penny from the occupiers themselves.
Were they collaborating or just sex workers?
In the Netherlands some women were literally forced into working for the Germans no matter how much they tried to avoid it & were also punished after the war ended.
There was a big class difference as well. Daughters from higher class families weren’t punished, managed to get away for a while or were only briefly arrested. The lower class women got the full brunt of it. As a woman, if you managed to get away from your local village or town around the end of the war, you could escape relatively unscathed. The women who couldn’t afford to get away, well you can see the photos.
They weren’t sex workers. They were regular women who’d “collaborated” with Nazis through sex. But, could they have said no to the military men who occupied their town? They were most likely victims twice over.
To clarify, collaborating could entail trading sex for food to survive. They’re trying to allude to espionage but it’s simply casual dismissal of human rights.
I wonder if the men were beat in the streets for giving food to collaborating women? It’s an interesting thought when you reframe the question with the men at the forefront
And the men were summarily executed.
Indeed. The number of collaborators the Resistance summarily brought to justice after the war is very high. Most historians say around 10,000 were permanently corrected, while some estimates are many multiples of that figure.
These women got off easy in comparison
The tears being shed in this thread for collaborators are shameful and disgusting. The Nazis killed over 100,000 Resistance fighters during the occupation between combat and internment. And that’s not even factoring in the innocent civilians murdered in reprisal killings. Every act of collaboration spat in the faces of men and women who made the ultimate sacrifice.
“Scratch a liberal” indeed…
I’m sure the multiple young girls featured in the photos willingly or even understood what they were doing under occupation and deserved to be violently assaulted. Stripped to their underwear, jeered at and beaten. No matter what side of the political spectrum, people are willing to bend over backwards to defend violence against women. These photos get posted and there’s never a name to any of these women or a specific story to even justify what was done to them. Did they sell out their jewish neighbours or members of the resistance? Or were they polite to an occupying solider so they could eat that night? You can want collaborators punished post war without condoning a mass assault against women in a witch hunt.
It has nothing to do with their being women. I don’t shed any tears either for the over 10,000 (mostly male) collaborators who the Resistance dealt with in a much more final manner.
Your problem is that you see a woman and shift to an alternate moral framework. I see a fascist collaborator regardless of sex.
Listen, nobody is saying that collaborators are anything other than murderers. What is being discussed here is the fact that poor women had very little say in what happened back then. Their options were basically nonexistent. Does that justify anything? No. But I can tell you right now that if someone told me that I would have to run as fast as I could to another town, I’d probably not make it, let alone with a kid. It’s extremely important that we remember the Holocaust. It’s also important to remember that womens’ rights were, and continue to be, secondary to the rights of men.
Up next, maga women of the US…
I’m supposed to feel bad for people who collaborated with Nazis?