spencer-shayy: sespursongles:cumbler-tumbler:theversatilist:art-of-anger:phil0kalia:art-of
spencer-shayy: sespursongles: cumbler-tumbler: theversatilist: art-of-anger: phil0kalia: art-of-anger: theweaponsrack: 36–degrees: sixpenceee: A French woman has her head shaved as punishment for having had personal relations with the Germans. Montelimar area, August 29, 1944. i hate to see how this man touches her They were known as Les Tondues - the shaved ones. They had their hair cut, and were tarred and feathered, for having sex with German soldiers. What really happened was these women needed to have relations with the Germans in order to get access to food for themselves and their children, and it was largely done out of survival with German occupation. Furthermore, a lot of them didn’t really have the option to refuse the German soldiers. The French shaving their women for this was horrible. They did what they had to in order to survive. And when they did, they were mistreated and abused for it. I hate men My mother tells me that soviet women who slept with German soldiers for survival reasons and then became pregnant were sent to concentration camps if they have an abortion/kill the child - yeah men are disgusting They also rampant raped women. They also might just kill the woman if she didn’t do what they want. It’s a tiny bit more complicated than that, and also, in some ways, worse. The fact that some women slept with German soldiers to feed their children is true, but many others didn’t do it out of need. You have to understand what people went through. During the first days of the invasion, people fled their homes trying to go south, a time that would later be called the Exodus. My maternal great grand-parents couldn’t go as far as a few kilometers. Indeed, the Axis’ aviation was shooting at refugees with machine guns, and she and her children almost got killed. My grandfather, who was 7, only survived because a man sacrificed himself to protect him. When they came back to their house, it had been reduced to a pile of rubble. They would live in a wooden shack for the next 15 years. So during the first days / months of the invasion, people really thought the German army would massacre them. And then, a coup placed Pétain at the head of the government, and he and his clique decided to sign an armistice with the Germans. The conditions were that the northern half of the country would be ruled by the Germans, while the southern half would be ruled by the government of Vichy. Ruled being a big word since that government happily collaborated with the Germans, even instating a French Gestapo, and a militia called La Milice (originally enough, meaning, The Militia). Since Vichy collaborated, the soldiers were not barbaric with French people like they were for example in Russia- French people who fit the Aryan ideal and were not communists or Résistants, obviously. So at a time when the country was still very rural, many villages and small towns saw the arrival or groups of very healthy and well mannered young men. You also have to consider that there was at that time, a rampant antisemitism, and many people considered that the German occupation could make France great again (yep). So some of them were happy to see the soldiers come. In the meantime, the young French men were soon enrolled in the STO, le Service du Travail Obligatoire or Obligatory Work Service, which was basically deporting a large number of French men to force them to work in Germany. So many women were left alone in their villages, with only old men and… young soldiers. So the fact that some women (and we’d say girls today, girls as young as 16, with soldiers as young as 18) fell for a soldier is not entirely surprising. Some of those women were also active collaborators. Some were just trying to feed their kids. But it didn’t concern many women. The thing is, meanwhile, many, many people were actively collaborating with the Nazis. Remember the French Gestapo? Entirely made of men. The Militia? Men. The French Police whose members actively collaborated, even to deport entire families to death camps? Men. It could go on. Back then, women didn’t have the right to vote and the whole state collaboration system was put in place by men. So when the country was freed by the Allies and the Résistance, many men felt emasculated. The revenge that was made on women was basically carried by people who had become résistants when the Germans had already lost the war, collaborators who wanted to hide their past, etc… It’s a collective vengeance on a very small part of the population to hide a collective collaboration, and a collective cowardice. This was a very high scale phenomenon, and a scar in our past, in my opinion. Because while we let women be publicly shamed, some high end collaborators like Maurice Papon, who deported children to death camps, remained in their functions after the war. Thank you so much for your excellent contribution, @theversatilist. I knew it wasn’t as simple as was being presented, but I didn’t know enough to say how. I think we must guard against a tendency to see history through the lens of what we think we know and then oversimplify. ^Yes thank you, I was going through the notes to see if someone had explained this a bit more. The total lack of nuance on this website is… annoying. As are all the Americans gleefully going “She fucked a Nazi! She deserved it!” (as if your country had any kind of moral high ground when it comes to WWII…)There were 15-year-old girls who were shaved. There were women shaved for having been prostitutes, for having been raped by Nazis, for having been a maid in a German household, for having a father / son / husband who collaborated, for having had an abortion (no matter who the father was), for having “loose morals” in general (including having sex with an American soldier, or cheating on their husband with another Frenchman), for having broken up with their fiancee who then used the wave of public shavings to take revenge, etc. There were lots and lots of reasons. And of course there were many French women who actively collaborated, and French women who were actual Nazis, and who deserved to pay for it, but being shaved and publicly spanked and paraded naked in the streets of your town is a very specific, misogynistic punishment that shouldn’t be celebrated… Literally no man was shaved, spanked, tarred and feathered, or paraded naked for having had sex with a German woman, because men’s sexuality is private and not something to be examined, controlled and punished by others. A lot of women had to go to the doctor to get a “virginity test” to prove that they hadn’t collaborated - men were obviously never subjected to that. France surrendering to Germany was often depicted in newspapers as France (a woman) being fucked by Germany (a man) and the wave of violence against women after the Liberation was definitely a way for many French men to reclaim their wounded masculinity. Some women (including some who deserved it) were shaved by men who had themselves had a less than heroic conduct during the war, and were hoping to divert attention away from themselves and salvage their patriotic reputation this way. (As theversatilist phrased it, “It’s a collective vengeance on a very small part of the population to hide a collective collaboration, and a collective cowardice”.) There were also German women shaved for having had sex with Jewish men when Hitler came to power, and Spanish women shaved by the Francoists during the Civil War for being Republican or having a Republican son / husband - men shaving women is about misogyny and controlling women’s sexuality, not politics. (To be clear, I’m glad that women collaborators were punished and I hate that many of them weren’t, but this particular form of punishment was not political, just woman-hating. I shouldn’t be surprised that so many people on tumblr approve of it.) Yup. This punishment is shown Dutch film Zwartboek, as it happened to women who affiliated with Germans in the Netherlands too. The main character is a Dutch Jewish woman named Rachel who joined the Dutch Reaistance and ends up falling in love with the German officer she had to seduce. She convinces him to defect and the two continue to support the Resistance until they’re captured by the Germans, who fool the Resistance into believing Rachel betrayed them. The Nazi affiliated women were paraded through the streets naked, get their heads shaved, and are even corralled into a building where buckets of literal shit are dumped on them. Guilty men were prosecuted through a legal system. Guilty women were publicly tortured and humiliated. The punishments were not equal. They were driven by misogynistic men cruelly punishing the women they considered their property. -- source link