Blood in the Snow, Blood on the Grass (38 page)

With clippers and scissors, the self-appointed justiciars started cutting hair – blonde hair, dark hair, red hair, Renée remembers it clearly – until the women were standing on a carpet of their own hair, symbolising their deprivation of the femininity they were accused of soiling. Long afterwards Renée recalled:

I walked back to the hotel through the crowd. It was not far, but it seemed a long way. My little daughter Mylène was there with my parents. There was no need for her to see that.

Renée had been
16
when she fell in love with Mylène’s father. Posted elsewhere, he left his signet ring as a token and departed, unaware that she was pregnant. His daughter Mylène, now a middle-aged woman herself, wonders:

Will people ever understand that that not all Germans were swine who raped women, and that not all French women who slept with them were sluts? My mother has felt guilty all her life.
⁸

The standard punishment for sleeping with the enemy in twentieth-century Europe seems to have begun in Belgium after the German withdrawal of 1918, and was widely used during the occupation of the Rhineland after the First World War, when German women suffered the same fate for relationships with French soldiers. It also occurred during the Spanish and Greek civil wars.
⁹
The victims were being humiliated for having enjoyed preferential treatment in terms of food, clothes, make-up, but there is more to it than that.

Young girls naturally fall in love with young men, especially those in uniform, which is seen to endow them with all the masculine virtues. If tens of thousands of young Frenchwomen flirted with, or had affairs with, young German soldiers during the occupation when most Frenchmen of their own age were locked away in POW camps, on the run with the Maquis or in Germany with the STO, was that treason? Estimates are that between 49 per cent and 57 per cent of the women punished were accused of no other crime,
¹⁰
so for what exactly were they being punished?

The only theory that rationalises the shearing of women’s hair in liberated Denmark, Belgium, Holland, the British Channel Islands, Italy, France and elsewhere is that the child-bearing potential of women’s bodies is regarded as national property, so that the woman who uses hers against the common will must be shown the error of her ways – as continues to happen in peacetime to girls of strict religious or racial communities who dare to ‘marry out’ or have a relationship with a man unacceptable to their ethnic or religious group.

Perhaps also, the collective need to punish anybody vulnerable after the humiliation of the defeat and occupation seized upon women during the liberation as victims because the act of shearing is a physical and psychological act of violence with a strong element of fetishist pleasure and yet is generally sanctioned – few people of either sex spoke out against it at the time – because it seems less permanent than retributive violence directed against guilty men, who have to be beaten, injured or killed. The catharsis felt by the crowds watching after women had been shorn – there were catcalls and spitting on the victims, but little overt physical violence – seems to indicate that all of these explanations are partially true.

Since the act of punishment was always decided and usually executed by men – although with women approvingly present, some with small children in their arms – it can be seen as their way of reclaiming the masculinity lost in military defeat. By disciplining the vulnerable ‘guilty’ women, the males of the herd consider themselves back in control and no longer subjugated to a more potent, male, enemy.
¹¹
That the act of shearing the head hair was inflicted for many other offences on women,
¹²
but very rarely on men, is taken to mean that shearing was a sexual punishment for a crime rather than a punishment for a necessarily sexual crime. One victim was popular singer Vera Valmont, who was accused of only one known ‘crime’, which was that she had accepted professional engagements on Radio Paris during the occupation.
¹³
The humiliation and the assumption that her broadcasting contracts concealed something more shameful destroyed her professional life, while Maurice Chevalier, Yves Montand and many other male singers who had performed for German audiences went on to have successful post-war careers.

Illicit affairs with German personnel during the occupation resulted in only 30,000 declared births according to French records although, in the northern zone, by mid-1943 80,000 French women had applied for child benefit from the German authorities, asking that their offspring be given German nationality because they were fathered by a German soldier.
¹⁴
Taking the lower figure of 30,000, to this must be added all the children who were ‘fathered’ on paper by a subsequent unwitting or consenting French partner of the mother.

Conservative estimates currently put the total above 70,000, which compares with 5,500 known births to German fathers in Denmark, with a population one-tenth the size of France.
¹⁵
The true figure may well be higher: on 14 September 1942 the Propaganda Abteilung reported to Obergruppenführer Karl Oberg, Hoherer SS-und Polizeiführer Frankreichs, that some 3,000 children had already been fathered by German personnel in Normandy alone.
¹⁶
Whichever figure one takes, if pregnancy resulted in only 5 per cent of cases, there must have been several hundred thousand emotional liaisons between Frenchwomen and German men. Viewed by the French as the ultimate national shame, this is only now being discussed and written about openly, two generations later.

What strikes one on looking at photographs of the shorn women, whether clothed, semi-naked or, in some cases, completely so, swastika-branded on scalp or breasts or with a ‘confession’ pinned to their blouses, is the range of facial expression. Old and young, pretty and ugly, some show lip-biting anguish; others, submission or bewilderment; a few glare angrily at the camera or defiantly brush the hair clippings off their shoulders. Very few weep, and some have eyes downcast as if praying for the nightmare to end, blessedly unaware at the time that their hour of shame was frozen forever by an unforgiving camera lens. Photographs of the women shorn in Bergerac were even printed as a souvenir set of postcards for public sale.
¹⁷

But what was in people’s minds at the time? A personal acquaintance of the author was an 18-year-old girl at the time of the liberation of the town of Auch in south-west France, staying with her mother in the last of the borrowed homes in which they had hidden since November 1942. After several days of watching open Wehrmacht trucks heading north carrying wounded German soldiers, they heard on 19 August that the German garrison in the town had received orders to regroup further north. One imagines the civilians at moments like this huddled in cellars, to keep out of the way. Reality on that day was very different. Madeleine Martin’s
¹⁸
mother had packed her children off that day to the local swimming pool with a picnic, to keep them out of harm’s way. Learning just after midday that the last Germans had left Auch, Madeleine ran back into the town. Speaking perfect English – the formerly affluent Martin family had always employed British nannies before the war – she jumped aboard the first Allied jeep to enter the town and kissed a wounded British liaison officer sitting in the rear seat, Captain T.A. Mellows. Colonel Hilaire of the OAS and an American officer also got a kiss, as did the Polish driver, before Madeleine was told to get down and behave herself because they were there to kill Germans, not to be kissed by pretty girls.

Throughout her wanderings under false names, because the family was partly Jewish and her husband was an officer in l’Armée Secrète sought by the Milice and the Gestapo, Madeleine’s mother had kept intact her last packet of tea in the assumption that her liberators would be English and in need of a good cuppa. When she now proudly presented the officers in the jeep with her precious gift, the result was laughter all round: tea was one thing they had a-plenty.

Despite the public relief in Auch that the enemy had gone, Mellows warned the family that the war was not yet over. Retreating German forces had been halted at a barricade on the bridge at Isle-Jourdain manned by local Maquis units, from where the sound of gunfire was audible. Dusk came with a stalemate, the Germans unable to cross and the Maquis unable to prevail. After dark, the FFI Armagnac Battalion arrived and completely surrounded the German positions. At dawn, sporadic firing intensified until the arrival of an FFI formation known as Corps Franc Pommiès. Now outnumbered, the scattered groups of Germans on the wrong side of the river surrendered, one by one.

Since that left no armed enemy forces in the
département
of Gers, everyone congratulated themselves on having liberated their part of France without Allied intervention. Groups of musicians were playing in the streets of Auch, with people of all ages dancing from sheer joy. For Madeleine and her family the morning was tinged with sadness at the news that Captain Mellows had been killed in a nocturnal skirmish only a few kilometres away.

Elation after years of fear combined with a sleepless night to trigger one of those shameful scenes of the liberation in which people who had never lifted a hand in anger during the occupation exorcised their guilt by humiliating the most vulnerable members of their community. In Auch that morning, a number of
miliciens
and other male
collabos
were rounded up and forced to parade around the town with some forty women, most of whom had been shorn. Joining the crowd screaming at and spitting on its victims, Madeleine was so carried away by the general excitement that when someone accused a woman of having denounced her husband, who had been deported to Germany, Madeleine took the scissors from her and continued hacking off her victim’s hair until she was completely bald.

Now she says, ‘It was such a terrible thing to do, but at the time, I just wanted to hurt someone to make up for those awful four years of fear and unhappiness.’
¹⁹

Notes

1
Vergili, F.,
La France Virile
, Paris, Payot, 2000.

2
Ibid., p. 88.

3
All the women’s names have been changed at their request.

4
J.-P. Guilloteau article in
L’Express
, 31 May 2004.

5
Ibid.

6
Ibid.

7
The cases of Mlle Z, Anne S. and Anita A. are condensed from Guilloteau’s article.

8
Saubaber, D.
Pour l’amour d’un Boche
, quoted by Guilloteau in
L’Express
, 31 May 2004.

9
Vergili, p. 276.

10
Ibid., pp. 23, 29.

11
Argument expounded in Vergili,
La France Virile
.

12
For black marketeering, 14.6 per cent; denunciation, 6.5 per cent; political/military, 8 per cent; foreign nationality, 2.1 per cent; unknown, 26.7 per cent.

13
Morris, A.,
Collaboration and Resistance Reviewed
, New York/Oxford, Berg, 1992, pp. 85–6.

14
Vergili, p. 226.

15
Burrin, P.,
Living with Defeat
, London, Arnold/Hodder, 1996, p. 207.

16
See ibid., p. 207, although no information is available as to how this figure was computed.

17
Article by J. Tronel in
Arkheia
magazine, Nos 17–8, pp. 26–45.

18
Name changed at her request.

19
Personal communication with the author.

PAYING THE PRICE OF LOVE

Statistics, and even the photographs taken over half a century ago, convey nothing of what the experience was like for the ‘guilty women’. Perhaps their feelings were as different as their facial expressions. To research even just one personal story was not easy, for even those who had survived their humiliation without trauma were not prepared to talk about it so long after the event. Who can blame them? Through a trusted mutual female friend, the author was able to interview one of what the French call
les tondues –
the women with shaven heads.