Also, women collaborators were forced to run the gauntlet and were really beaten”. Colonel Harry D McHugh, the commander of an American infantry regiment near Argentan, reported: “The French were rounding up collaborators, cutting their hair off and burning it in huge piles, which one could smell miles away. The American historian Forrest Pogue wrote of the victims that “their look, in the hands of their tormentors, was that of a hunted animal”. Most of the women were accused of having consorted with German troops. While disgusted by this cruelty, I reflected that we British had known no invasion or occupation for some 900 years. They were in tears, hanging their heads in shame. “I watched an open lorry drive past, to the accompaniment of boos and catcalls from the French populace, with a dozen miserable women in the back, every hair on their heads shaved off. In Bayeux, Churchill’s private secretary Jock Colville recorded his reactions to one such scene. Some were daubed with tar, some stripped half-naked, some marked with swastikas in paint or lipstick. Just as the identity of those who carried this task out varied so too did the form it took.įor example, among those who carried it out can be found members of the Resistance, those who took part in fighting at the time of the Liberation, neighbors who came down into the street once the Germans had left and men whose authority depended on the police and the courts.Īfter the humiliation of a public head-shaving, the tondues – the shorn women – were often paraded through the streets on the back of a lorry, occasionally to the sound of a drum as if it were a tumbril and France was reliving the revolution of 1789. Throughout France, from 1943 to the beginning of 1946, about 20,000 women of all ages and all professions who were accused of having collaborated with the occupying Germans had their heads shaved. In total there were 2,315 people who had their heads shaved as a punishment for being a collaborationist. Shaving women’s heads as a mark of retribution and humiliation was reintroduced in the 20th century. During the middle ages, this mark of shame, denuding a woman of what was supposed to be her most seductive feature, was commonly a punishment for adultery.
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In Europe, the practice dated back to the dark ages, with the Visigoths. The punishment of shaving a woman’s head had biblical origins. This episode in French history continues to provoke shame and unease and as a result, has never been the subject of a thorough examination. Similar to the vigilante gangs that punished men who collaborated with the occupiers, groups would band together to judge women by parading them in the public square. Most historians have stressed the sexual anxiety created by the Nazi Occupation and how women’s sexual activity was judged as part of a public “cleansing” after liberation. This picture was taken in Montelimar, France, on August 29, 1944.Īt the end of World War II, many French people accused of collaboration with Germany endured a particularly humiliating act of revenge: their heads were shaved in public.
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The woman photographed here, believed to have been a prostitute who serviced German occupiers, is having her head shaved by French civilians to publicly mark her. A woman being shaved by civilians to publicly mark her as a collaborator, 1944.įrench women who befriended the Nazis, through coerced, forced, or voluntary relationships, were singled out for shameful retribution following the liberation of France.