Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II (32 page)

If ‘good’ women were pushed aside by this sudden reassertion of French masculinity, then ‘bad’ women who had ‘cuckolded’ the nation were treated much more harshly. In the immediate aftermath of the liberation, the FFI turned upon these ‘horizontal collaborators’ en masse. In most cases the punishment they meted out was head shaving, which was often conducted in public in order to maximize the humiliation for the women involved. After the liberation, head-shaving ceremonies were carried out in every
département
of France.

A British artillery officer described a typical ceremony when he wrote about his experiences in northern France after the war:

At St André d‘Echauffeur, where people showered us with flowers as we passed, others proffering bottles, a grim scene was being enacted in its market place – the punishment of a collaborator said to be
une mauvaise femme.
Seated in a chair while a barber shaved her head to the crown, she attracted a crowd of onlookers, among them, as I learned later, some Maquis and a Free French officer. The woman’s mother was also present and as the barber cropped her daughter, she stamped, raved and gesticulated frantically outside the circle of watchers. The woman was of some spirit. For, with her head fully cropped, she jumped to her feet and cried
‘Vive les Allemands,’
whereupon someone picked up a brick and felled her.
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Lieutenant Richard Holborow of the Royal Engineers witnessed a similar scene at the hands of a mob in a small town near Dieppe, ‘many of whom had obviously been celebrating their liberation all day, mostly from the neck of a bottle’. About eighteen women and girls were paraded to a makeshift stage, where each of them was made to sit before the local barber:

Drawing a cut-throat razor from his pocket, he opened it, pulled up the woman’s hair and, with a few deft strokes, cut it off and threw the severed ends into the crowd. She gave out a scream as the barber proceeded to dry-scrape her scalp until it was completely bald, and then she was lifted up and displayed to the now howling and jeering mob.

This was not the end of the women’s ordeal. A couple of days later, as his unit moved out of the same town, Holborow witnessed the second part of their punishment when he was delayed in the main street by yet another chanting crowd.

They were watching with considerable glee a group of shaven women, all with placards tied round their necks, who were busily engaged in filling buckets of horse shit with their bare hands. As a bucket was filled so it was kicked over and the process ordered to be started again. It was evident that the women of the town were still getting their own back on the girls who had misbehaved with the German soldiers.
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In dozens of towns women were forced to undergo their ordeal either partially or completely naked. According to an article in
La Marseillaise
in September 1944, a group of young men in Endoume forced a woman to ‘run through the streets completely naked in front of innocent children playing outside their houses’.
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Likewise in Troyes, the FFI rounded up women, stripped them and displayed them before the crowd while they were having their heads shorn. According to a leaflet of the local Comité Départemental de la Libération:

With hardly any clothes on, branded with the sign of the swastika and smeared with a particularly sticky tar, after having received cutting jibes, they would go and have their heads shaved in the regular way and would then look like so many strange convicts. Begun on the evening before, this merciless hunt would go on throughout the day, much to the great pleasure of the local people who would form ranks in the streets to watch these women walk past wearing Wehrmacht caps.
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According to Fabrice Virgili, probably the foremost expert in this field, women were stripped in at least fifty major towns and cities across France.
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Such scenes were by no means unique to France. Similar events took place all over Europe. In Denmark and Holland a combination of wounded national pride and sexual jealousy at the behaviour of local women resulted in thousands of women having their heads shaved.
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In the Channel Islands, the only small corner of the British Isles that Germany had managed to invade, there were several cases of women having their heads shaved because they had slept with German soldiers.
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In northern Italy they even sang songs about shaving the heads of women who slept with fascists, such as this one sung by partisans in the Veneto:

The immense popularity of such punishments, as well as the ritual that surrounded them, seems to point to a deep need amongst the liberated people to express their disgust for collaboration. Historian Peter Novick, who pioneered the objective study of this period in France, makes the point that the shearing of these women gave local communities an emotional outlet that helped to prevent widespread bloodshed of more serious collaborators, almost as if they were a ‘sacrificial offering’.
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Often during the first weeks of the liberation the sight of shorn women in the market square resulted in a perceivable drop in local tension, and a reduction of bloodshed against other collaborators.
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While some historians have questioned this notion, the shearing of women undeniably brought communities together – as a relatively safe and non-permanent form of violence, it was the single act of vengeance in which everyone could be involved.
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The practice may now be seen as a shameful episode in European history, but at the time it was celebrated with pride. Resistance newspapers in 1944 describe a carnival air at shearing ceremonies, where spontaneous renditions of patriotic songs were sung by the crowds. In at least one area of France, the local people presented those who carried out the ceremony with knives and razors as a ‘souvenir’ of their day’s work.
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With hindsight, it is obvious that patriotic vengeance was only one side of the story. The shearing of women’s hair is not a new phenomenon - even before the war it was a time-honoured punishment for adulteresses - but at no other time in European history has this punishment been meted out on such a comprehensive scale. It is therefore significant that the majority of French women who were punished for sleeping with Germans were not married: their ‘adultery’ was not to their menfolk but to their country. In a subtle way, therefore, France was being rebranded from an effeminate, submissive entity to a masculine, vengeful one.

The sexual nature of the rituals themselves is also significant. In Denmark the women were frequently stripped naked during their head-shaving ceremonies, and their breasts and backsides painted with Nazi symbols.
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In many areas of France women also had their bare bottoms spanked, and their breasts daubed with swastikas.
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The fact that these rituals took place in market squares or on the steps of town halls sent a very clear message to the whole community: the FFI were reclaiming these women’s bodies as public property. They were also reclaiming them as
male
property – the hundreds of photographs taken during these punishments show that they were conducted almost exclusively by men.

Some French women were all too aware that they were being used in this symbolic way. They were also indignant that they should be condemned for a
private
act that they believed had nothing to do with the war. When the French actress Arletty was imprisoned in 1945 for her wartime liaison with a German officer, she reputedly justified herself at her trial by saying, ‘My heart belongs to France, but my vagina is mine.’
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Unsurprisingly such protestations fell on deaf ears. According to recent research, about 20,000 French women had their heads shaved as a punishment for collaboration, the largest proportion of them for sleeping with German soldiers.
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It is difficult to judge, at a distance of some seventy years, whether these women deserved to be punished in this way, in an alternative way, or not at all. Allied soldiers and administrators certainly did not feel qualified to judge: in the words of Anthony Eden, the British Foreign Secretary of the day, those who had not been through the ‘horrors of occupation’ had ‘no right to pronounce upon what a country does’.
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What is undeniable, however, is the fact that these women were scapegoats: shaving their heads was a symbolic way of cutting away not only their own sins, but the sins of the whole community. All of western Europe had, in the words of French journalist Robert Brasillach, ‘slept with Germany’, through the thousands of everyday actions that had made the German occupation possible. But in many communities it was only the women who had slept with actual Germans who were punished for it.
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The only consolation for the women concerned was the thought that it could easily have been much worse. We have seen how, in eastern Europe, the reassertion of a national sense of masculinity was partly carried out through widespread rape. In western Europe the cutting of women’s hair represented a much less vicious form of sexual violence to achieve the same political end.

The Ostracism of Children

If proof were ever needed of the widespread ‘horizontal collaboration’ that took place across Europe, then it exists in the form of the children who were born as a result of it. In Denmark 5,579 babies were born with a registered German father – and undoubtedly many more whose German paternity was concealed.
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In Holland the number of children born to German fathers is thought to have been anything between 16,000 and 50,000.
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In Norway, which had only a third of the population of Holland, between 8,000 and 12,000 such children were born.
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And in France the number is thought to be around 85,000 or even higher.
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The total number of children fathered by German soldiers in occupied Europe is unknown, but estimates vary between one and two million.
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It is safe to say that these babies were not exactly welcomed by the communities they were born into. An indiscreet relationship might be ignored, hushed up or forgotten, but a child was a constant reminder of a woman’s shame – and by extension the shame of the whole community. Shorn women might comfort themselves that their hair would soon grow back. A child, by contrast, could not be undone.

In some cases the local children of Wehrmacht soldiers were considered such an embarrassment that it was thought best to try to dispose of them straight away. In Holland, for instance, some eyewitnesses claim to know of many instances where children were killed shortly after birth, usually by the parents of the particular girls who strayed. Such actions were taken, presumably, to restore the ‘honour’ of the family – but occasionally they were more overtly political acts, made by people outside the family, in order to restore the honour of the wider community. According to an account by Petra Ruigrok, for example, a baby in northern Holland was snatched from its cradle by a member of the Resistance and dashed to the floor.
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Such events were thankfully rare, but they reflected a very strong feeling in European society that local children born with German fathers during the war were an affront to the nation in which they were born. Such strong feelings are summed up in an editorial in
Lufotposten,
a Norwegian daily newspaper, on 19 May 1945:

All these German children are bound to grow up and develop into an extensive bastard minority in the Norwegian people. By their descent they are doomed in advance to take a combative stance. They have no nation, they have no father, they just have hate, and this is their only heritage. They are unable to become Norwegians. Their fathers were Germans, their mothers were Germans in thought and action. To allow them to stay in this country is tantamount to legalizing the raising of a fifth column. They will forever constitute an element of irritation and unrest among the pure Norwegian population. It is best, for Norway as well as for the children themselves, that they continue their lives under the heavens where they naturally belong.
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The study of Norwegian attitudes towards what they termed the ‘war children’ of German soldiers is a particularly rich area because, unlike in other countries, these attitudes are so well documented. In the aftermath of the war the Norwegian authorities set up a War Child Committee to consider what to do with such children.
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For a short time, therefore, the problem was openly discussed here in a way that it was not anywhere else in Europe. The subject has also come under intense scrutiny more recently. In 2001, under political pressure from war child groups, the Norwegian government funded a research programme to discover exactly how these people had been treated in the aftermath of the war, what the effect had been on their lives, and what might be done to redress any potential injustice. The findings of this research programme constitute the most complete study of war children in any country to date.
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