In life, very rarely everything is simple and clear. As a rule, there is always at least one other side (opinion) of any event. Moreover, such a tragic one as war. Someone loses, someone gains. People are different and the situations in which they found themselves because of the war, too.
On the one hand, I don't like the fact that women in the occupied territories voluntarily entered into an intimate relationship with murderers and invaders. On the other hand, each case must be considered individually: those who did it just to have fun are probably blameworthy, those who cooperated and helped with this - punishment, those who simply survived - regret.
One thing is certain - in Europe, the occupation was very mild, they were not planned to be destroyed as a race. They were just used. And the overwhelming majority (regardless of gender) agreed with this, even more - joined, to one degree or another. At the same time, the weakest became the extreme ones….
Horizontal collaboration in Europe
The number of sexual relations between European women and Germans during the war is absolutely staggering. The number of women who cohabited with Germans in Western Europe is estimated in hundreds of thousands. For example, in Norway, occupied in 1940, up to 10% of women aged 15 to 30 had German cohabitants during the war (about 50 thousand).
The Resistance Movement in the occupied countries justified the behavior of their compatriots in different ways. For example, they were considered ignorant, poor, even mentally disabled, and claimed that women were raped or slept with Germans due to economic necessity. This has no doubt served as an excuse for some, but recent research shows that women who slept with German soldiers came from all classes of society and from different social positions.
In Denmark, for example, people conducting public opinion polls during the war were shocked to find that 51% of Danish women openly admitted that they found German men more attractive than their fellow countrymen.
Promotional video:
France is the punishment for communicating with enemies.
This situation was nowhere more acutely felt than in France. For a country where the German presence was contrasted with the absence of French men, two million of whom were held captive, worked in Germany, or fought (mostly for the Nazis), it is not surprising that the occupation itself was often viewed as a sexual act. France became a "whore" surrendered to Germany, and the Vichy government acted as her pimp. Jean-Paul Sartre remarked after the war: "Even the collaborationist press tended to portray the relationship between France and Germany as an alliance in which France has always played the role of a woman."
The rebuilding of French manhood began in earnest after the Allied landings in Normandy in June 1944, when de Gaulle and his "free French" troops finally returned to France. In the following months, they achieved a number of military victories. While hardened Resistance fighters tended to maintain a low profile by habit, new recruits were eager to flaunt their newly acquired masculinity. Soldiers of the allied armies often reported seeing them walking around "hung with machine-gun belts" or with "grenades hanging from their belts and shoulders" and "firing automatic bursts into the air." Unfortunately, the display of masculinity also had its dark side.
France - the former girls of the Germans.
Thus, "good" women were pushed aside by the sudden impulse of French men to reaffirm their masculinity. The "bad" women who "instructed the horns" of the nation were treated much tougher. Immediately after the liberation, resistance fighters attacked these "horizontal collaborators" en masse. In most cases, their punishment was shaving their heads, which was often done in public to maximize the humiliation of these women. After the release, shaving procedures were carried out in every department of France.
Such scenes were not unique to France. Similar events took place throughout Europe. In Denmark and Holland, a combination of wounded national pride and sexual jealousy due to the behavior of local women has resulted in thousands of women having their heads shaved. In Northern Italy, there were even songs about the shaving of women who slept with the Nazis.
Public ostracism in France.
The sexual nature of the rituals themselves also matters. In Denmark, women were often stripped naked while shaving their heads, and Nazi symbols were painted on their breasts and buttocks. Shaving your head was essentially a mild form of punishment. Some of the “beddings” were painted with a swastika on their faces or even burned out the corresponding stigma. And some of them had to endure brutal interrogations, accompanied by beatings, when details of their sex life were knocked out of women.
Most of these women were sentenced to imprisonment after a wave of bullying of the “bush bedding”. By a government decree in 1944, approximately 18.5 thousand French women were recognized as “nationally unworthy” and received from six months to one year in prison with a subsequent downgrade for another year. Often, harlots were shot, and sometimes they themselves, unable to bear the burden of ostracism, took their own lives.
When in 1945 the French actress Arletti was imprisoned for having an affair with a German officer during the war, she justified herself at the trial as follows: "My heart belongs to France, but my vagina belongs to me."
* German girls * were stripped, shaved and smeared with filth.
The fate of the Norwegian "German whores" was similar. After the war, more than 14 thousand of them were counted in Norway, of which 5 thousand were sentenced to one and a half years in prison. They were also publicly humiliated - stripped, smeared with sewage. Women were stripped of their citizenship, arrested or deported to post-war Germany with their children.
In the Netherlands, after May 5, 1945, about 500 "girls for the Fritzes" were killed during street lynching. Other women convicted of having ties with the invaders were gathered in the streets, stripped and doused with sewage or put on their knees in the mud, shaved their hair or painted their heads orange.
France - men's faces shine with enthusiasm….
As it was in the USSR
In the USSR, there were no public trials of "German whores" like European ones. The Kremlin could not wash dirty linen in public - it acted with a proven method: arrest and sending to Siberia. They did not look for a reason for a long time - the authorities considered all residents of the occupied territories as guilty a priori. The party leadership unequivocally recognized women who had sexual relations with Nazis, prostitutes and traitors.
At the end of April 1943, in a joint order of the People's Commissars of Internal Affairs, Justice and the Prosecutor of the USSR, an order was made to more actively apply repressive sanctions to women convicted of voluntary intimate or close domestic relations with the Wehrmacht personnel or officials of German punitive and administrative bodies. Most often, such accomplices were punished by taking away their children.
But they could have been shot without trial or investigation, and literally immediately after the arrival of Soviet power. First of all, those who served in the German police, worked in the occupation administration or other services were detained. In addition, there were frequent cases when women who had sex with the Germans, who were pregnant by the occupiers or who had children from them, were killed on the spot along with the babies. Three witnesses were enough to eliminate them.
And this is France - look at the joyful faces around …..
And this is also the outcome of the war …
The life of children born to Germans was also sad. In Europe, various restrictions were imposed on them and were labeled for life.
Such children were treated the worst in Norway - they were recognized as mentally disabled and forcibly interfered in homes for the mentally ill, where they were tested with new medications.
In many countries, children were taken away from their parents (including in the USSR), it was forbidden to give them German names, to learn German, and they made special entries in their personal files.
Everyone probably has their own opinion on the topic of this article …..