After France was freed, French women who made friends with the Nazis, whether they wanted to or not, were picked out for terrible punishment.
French residents are shaving the skull of this woman, who is thought to have been a prostitute who serviced German soldiers, to mark her publicly. On August 29, 1944, this photo was taken in Montelimar, France.
At the close of World War II, a lot of French citizens who were accused of working with Germany had their heads shaved in public as a very humiliating act of retaliation.
Most of the people who were punished were women. Most historians have talked about how the Nazi Occupation made people sexually anxious and how women’s sexual activity was seen as a way to “cleanse” the society after freedom.
Groups would come together to judge women by parading them in the public square, just like vigilante gangs punished males who worked with the occupiers.
This event in French history still makes people feel ashamed and uneasy, hence it has never been thoroughly studied.
The punishment of shaving a woman’s head came from the Bible. The practice in Europe goes back to the dark ages, when the Visigoths were around.
In the Middle Ages, this mark of shame, which took away a woman’s most attractive feature, was often used as a punishment for cheating.
In the 20th century, it became common again to shave women’s heads as a way to punish and humiliate them.
From 1943 to the beginning of 1946, nearly 20,000 women of all ages and professions in France had their heads shaved because they were accused of working with the Germans who were invading the country. The people who did this job were different, and so were the ways they did it.
For example, some of the people who did it were members of the Resistance, people who fought during the Liberation, neighbours who came down onto the street after the Germans left, and individuals whose power came from the police and the courts.
After being publicly humiliated by having their heads shaved, the tondues, or shorn ladies, were typically paraded through the streets on the back of a truck, sometimes to the beat of a drum, as if it were a tumbril and France was reliving the revolution of 1789. Some had tar on them, some were half-naked, and some had swastikas painted or drawn on them.
Jock Colville, Churchill’s private secretary, wrote down how he felt about one of these scenes in Bayeux. “I saw an open lorry drive by with a dozen sad women in the back. The French people booed and catcalled as it drove by. All of the women’s hair was shorn off.
They were crying and hanging their heads in shame. I was disgusted by this cruelty, but I thought about how the British hadn’t been invaded or occupied in about 900 years. So we weren’t the best judges.
American historian Forrest Pogue said that the victims “looked like hunted animals” in the hands of their tormentors.
Colonel Harry D. McHugh, who was in charge of an American infantry unit near Argentan, said, “The French were rounding up collaborators, cutting their hair off, and burning it in huge piles that could be smelled from miles away.” Also, ladies who worked with the enemy had to run the gauntlet and were badly beaten.
The implementation of punishment with a pronounced sexist connotation, exemplified by branding or labelling, has eclipsed its application for all forms of collaboration.
Since the war, pictures of women with shaved heads have been the only proof of the practice that those who did it have stayed silent about. The focus has been on the victims and the act itself, while what came before and after it (collaboration, accusation, arrest, judgement, and condemnation) has been ignored.
Lee Miller, one of the photographers who covered the event, writes on how easy it would be for this change to happen: “I noticed four girls being escorted through the streets and ran to them to capture a picture.
I was suddenly at the front of the procession, and the locals thought I was the female soldier who had captured them or something like that. At the same time, the poor ladies were being loved and congratulated while being slapped and spat on.
Women were accused of collaborating in three ways: politically, if they had belonged to a group that worked with the enemy or, more modestly, if they had opinions that were against the Resistance and allied forces; financially, if they had made money through professional or business contacts; and personally, if they had relationships with members of the occupying forces.
They could even be charged for reporting someone to the occupying authorities.
Being from one of the Axis countries was another reason to be detained and have your head shaved. This didn’t always mean you were working with them, but it did make people suspicious.
About 23,500 persons had their heads chopped as punishment for being collaborators.
(Photo credit: US Army Archives / French National Archives).
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