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.
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…