A French women and her mother was forced to shave their hairs as punishment for she had a baby with a German, 18-Aug-1944

A French women and her mother was forced to shave their hairs as punishment for she had a baby with a German, 18-Aug-1944

French women who befriended the Nazis, through coerced, forced, or voluntary relationships, were singled out for shameful retribution following the liberation of France. 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.

The French called it horizontal collaboration, which is pretty dark as is, making mutual love an act of treason or at the very least disowning women of their body. Some actually were in love, for others it was just a way to get by, since the French essentially carried the Wehrmacht in terms of food. It's also not entirely rational, considering that what these women essentially did was harming the war effort, by funneling rations away from the Germans, but yes, in many cases it was just a big spiel to distract from their own guild or in other cases senseless revenge. In some (rarer) cases women were actually persecuted for this which had big implications and children from these relationships had big issues with recognition. It's a pretty dark chapter for the French (or should be) but this sadly also happened in other places. Interestingly mixed-race children in Germany from black GIs were called something like "dark shame". Like I said: Not much of a feminist, but women were pretty much fucked no matter what.

France didn't experience an extended starvation like Greece in 1941-1942, or the Netherlands in 1945.

But food prices multiplied by 4 between 1940 and 1943, under the German occupation, while France had to supply 20% of its food production to Germany. Alongside significant disorganization, and a lot of its manpower being sent in Germany as prisoners or forced labour, food supply wasn't sufficient.

The situation wasn't that big of a problem in rural areas, where people could complete their food ration with their own production, but it was kind of difficult in the cities. 10 million people only had 1220 calories per day, which is about 40% of how much we eat currently in Europe. Well-off people ended up resorting to the black market, and others found help with their families in rural areas.

The most fragile population suffered a lot though. People without a roof over their head ended up starving, because they couldn't get their rations of food. 40 000 people died of starvation in French psychiatric wards during the occupation. Same thing happened in prisons. Which isn't nothing in a country where, unlike in India, starvation used to be a thing of the past. Historically, the last food crisis led to the Revolution 150 years ago.

Overall, not the same degree as the way the British treated India. And obviously, Germany didn't engineered food shortage in occupied territories in Western Europe. They just indirectly or directly created the conditions of a food shortage, looted a significant part of the food production, and didn't really care about the consequences for the local populations. But still closer to the way the UK treated India, than the way the US treated the UK.

This happened in The Netherlands too, many thousands of women fell victim to this practice. Later research showed that around 65-75 percent of these women never actually did anything 'wrong'. Most women were singled out because their families weren't liked, or distrusted, or (most often actually) because scorned lovers alleged the women had fucked nazis, while actually these guys were just 1940s incels looking for revenge.

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