In Post-World War II Western Europe, and especially France, this happened countless times. Of all the acts of reprisals against collaborators, the abuse of women is the most public and widespread.
In the past, everyone agreed that the French were too cowardly to deal with the Germans on the battlefield, and after lying down to win, they jumped out to bully their own women, and they deserved to be breastfed! Some people also feel that the male legal adulterers have been shot, these women are also legal adulterers, shaving their heads and roaming the streets is a cheaper for them!
But in fact, what both sides say is not comprehensive, and we can't simply look at historical issues from the perspective of gender narratives. Women on such a large scale were insulted not only because they slept with the Germans, but there were deep reasons behind this, both class struggle and suppression of the guerrillas, and of course, the "rejuvenation" of the Gallic rooster, which ultimately profoundly affected the political landscape of post-war Western Europe.
But what is certain is that France has not done a good job here, and he is completely in trouble. Also after the victory, the Soviets tortured German men, women and children to death, and the Americans tortured German prisoners of war into dogs that wagged their tails and begged for mercy. So why did France, or Western Europe, represented by France, strike hard at its own women and children? Today, we will analyze the "mental journey" of France in these 20 minutes.
Tips: The following is the "Concentrated Milk Method" time. But up will never play rotten terriers, and the milk method must also be justified.
The so-called revenge must meet the following conditions: 1, the role of the perpetrator and the victim is completely reversed; 2. The misfortunes previously endured must be translated into each other. Only in this way can true revenge be achieved.
At the height of Nazi Germany, he controlled more than 12 countries in Europe, directly or indirectly. But apart from the Soviet Union, no country could take the most direct revenge on the Germans and the Germans, and they relied entirely on the Soviet Union and the United States for the liberation of their own country.
So how will these countries feel? One word: nest!
So naturally, the anger turned to all kinds of "traitor" collaborators in the country, and everyone should pay attention to all the collaborators, not just the women who were in league with the German army. If you think about it, it was impossible for the Nazis to control France without collaborators. For example, officials and civil servants at all levels of the puppet government, as well as pseudo-military and pseudo-police pseudo-gendarmes, cooperated with the German army to suppress resistance organizations, took the initiative to send Jews to german concentration camps, and had a blood debt; there were also "volunteers" who joined the SS to kill people on the Eastern Front, and here is a cold message: in the Battle of Berlin, the last unit to desperately guard Hitler's bunker was the French volunteer "Charlemagne Infantry Battalion", not the German army; and the capitalists who contracted Nazi projects and made a windfall for the German army to produce war materials as well as journalists, announcers, producers, and so on who promoted the Nazis.
So, have these real traitors been punished as they deserve?
The answer is: No!
We have the impression that France is fierce and fierce against french traitors, but in reality, France or the whole of Europe, the reckoning of traitors and far-right can be described as thunderous and rainy, high and gently lowered. In fact, with the exception of a few areas after the liberation of the guerrillas, france basically maintained the original power structure. Before and after liberation, it was the same people who ruled society.
The French version of "Wang Jingwei" Pétain
So why not liquidate?
France faces a very real problem: the whole country is cooperating with Germany, the whole state apparatus is fighting for the Germans. Every civil servant, policeman, soldier, had more or less ties to Germany or the Nazis. After liberation, is it necessary to sweep away these people? Isn't this making room for 900,000 French Communists? Of course not.
But the cries for revenge cannot be completely ignored. So France began a pretentious "great purge", but the French version of cleaning is as gentle and comfortable as a hot spring bath.
After the war, a total of 311,000 individuals were investigated in France, of which only about 95,000 were convicted, accounting for only 30% of the total number of cases filed. And of all those convicted, only 45,000, less than half, were sentenced to imprisonment or heavier. The other 50,000 or so were deprived of citizenship, that is, you were not allowed to vote or be allowed to hold public office. However, the vast majority of punishments were lifted in the 1947 amnesty, and most of the prisoners in prison were released. After another amnesty in 1951, only 1,500 most heinous war criminals remained in prison, with the rest released. A total of 11,000 civil servants were dismissed in 1945, with the vast majority reinstating them within six years.
So, how many traitors have been killed in France as a whole?
About 1500-1600 people, some of them were SS French volunteers, some were military police who had suppressed resistance groups, and some were hardcore Nazis. And most of them were caught by the guerrillas before the authorities, without trial, and shot directly.
After the Arrival of the Allies, most of the civil servants who collaborated with the enemy managed to retain their positions, and their experience helped to control the situation. Similarly, many police and gendarmes were retained to prevent military and police power from falling into the hands of communist guerrillas.
The French government's explanation was that the civil servants were not traitors, they were simply following the instructions of the so-called legitimate government of the time.
At the Battle of Berlin, the French shed their last drop of blood for Germany
Another one who has been gently left behind is the capitalist. The capitalists claimed that if their factories did not cooperate with the Germans, people would starve and workers would be recruited and brought to Germany as forced laborers. So they are with the Germans, they are curvy patriotic! A few procurators with conscience insisted on accusing the capitalists, but the capitalists had the money and the ability to hire good lawyers, who vigorously delayed the trial until the parties were acquitted. The French authorities also lacked the political drive to try the capitalists: the situation in post-war Europe was quite bad, and the authorities needed to continue to operate the enterprises that had collaborated with the enemy to prevent the workers from losing their jobs and the economy from collapsing; and the managers who collaborated with the enemy were allowed to remain in office because they had valuable "experience".
Ordinary people are not fools, of course they have to vent their disappointment and frustration. The authorities don't kill traitors? It didn't matter, we rushed into jail to execute ourselves.
This kind of "self-enforcement" is taboo for the authorities, especially in cases where the French communist guerrillas are involved, and the police or allies will quickly intervene to restore "order". There is only one exception. I believe that the clever little friend has guessed, that is, the collective humiliation of women, the humiliation of women who have "fornicated" with the Germans, known in French folklore as "lying in the enemy's collaborator".
From a legal point of view, the French women who slept with the German army did not commit any crimes against the law, nor did they cause any substantial harm to France, so they could not be judged by law. But the French authorities are well aware that civil servants and capitalists are the "pillars" of the country and cannot be moved, and the people need a pressure relief valve to vent their anger, what better is more suitable than a woman who has no backstage, no power, no money, no voice? Of course, this refers specifically to the lower classes, as for the women of high society, such as Madame Chanel, nothing happens, it does not matter how many Germans sleep!
In fact, the French government has been allowing and even encouraging the people to insult the women, and the occasional police or Allied soldiers who are present always stand by and let the people do whatever they want, which eventually develops into a series of atrocities.
At first it was just shaving the woman's hair. France's unending enemy, Britain, has left us with a lot of written and pictorial evidence. A British artillery officer recalled that a so-called bad woman, pinned to a chair, a shaver shaved her half-bald head, and the whole town came out to watch, including several guerrillas and a free French officer. The woman's mother was also present, watching as the shaver shaved her daughter's hair, and the mother pounded her chest and shouted at the onlookers.
Shaving ceremony
A sapper officer, Lieutenant Holboro, had seen a similar scene: everyone celebrated liberation from morning to night, and the vast majority of the people were drunk. Then about 18 women and girls were escorted to a makeshift stage and sat in front of a local shaver: the shaver took a shaving knife from his pocket, opened the blade, grabbed a woman's hair, skillfully stroked it a few times, and threw the shaved hair into the crowd. When the shaver shaved the woman thoroughly, she began to scream, and then she was lifted up and publicly displayed to the crowd who shouted and laughed.
A few days later, when Lieutenant Holboro's troops left the town, he was blocked on the main road by another group of loud-talking men. It turned out that they were gleefully watching a group of shaved women, all with notice boards hanging from their necks, forced to pick up horse dung from the road with their bare hands. Whenever the bucket was filled, someone kicked the bucket over and the whole process had to start all over again.
Later, shaving the head was no longer enough, and it was necessary to add pickpocketing clothes; later, the fruit body parade was not enough fun, and the tricks were more and more played. The following is recorded in the official documents of the Liberation Committee of a French province:
They were almost naked, wearing Nazi insignia, covered in sticky asphalt, their hair was cut in a mess, and finally shaved in a special way, looking like strange prisoners. Beginning the night before, this brutal hunt continued throughout the day the next, and many locals gleefully gathered around the streets to watch the women in Wehrmacht hats parade through the streets. People began to sing patriotic songs spontaneously, and everyone sang and danced as if they were holding a celebration.
According to statistics, about 20,000 French women are pulled out of the streets because of acts of collaboration with the enemy. Of course, similar incidents have occurred all over Europe, but not as much as in France.
Historian Peter Norwick, a leading figure in the study of French history in this period, made the point that the women were actually "scapegoats" pushed by the French government, shaving their hair and stripping their clothes to parade the streets, a relatively simple and safe revenge in which everyone could participate, and gave the local community an emotional catharsis, thus avoiding the reckoning of those who were really and more guilty of the enemy.
French journalist Robert Blasiac also said that shaving women's hair symbolizes not only shaving off their sins, but also symbolizing shaving off the sins of the whole of France.
What is the crime of France? During World War II, he said, the whole of France "slept with Germany," and that France itself gave up its weapons, cooperated with all German actions, and did countless things to keep the German war machine running; but only women who slept with Germans were punished.
We can conclude that this movement was in fact a guiding measure taken by the French authorities to avoid a large-scale class struggle, drawing the attention of the people to a more "pleasing" form.
So everyone thinks, do these women deserve sympathy? Or is it deserved? Do a small survey, compassionate buckle 1, deserved buckle 2.
Today, it is difficult for you to imagine how many such women there are in Western Europe. There are no official statistics on this, but there is a set of data to snoop on.
In Denmark, there are 5,579 children whose legal fathers are German, in the Netherlands there are about 50,000 mixed Germans, and in France, the figure may be as large as 200,000. In wartime Norway, 10% of women aged 15 to 30 had German boyfriends. To estimate this way, there may be as many as a million women sharing beds with the Germans throughout Western Europe.
After the war, the countries of Western Europe tried to explain this phenomenon for various reasons, with the right liking to punch, saying that women were born with low minds and brains living in the vagina; the reasons put forward by the left were accepted by the majority, that is, these women were forced to sleep with the Germans for subsistence, to bring bread back to their homes, or to get protection from the Germans.
But both the left and the right deliberately ignore one of the most important reasons, and that is love. The countries of Western Europe, represented by France, did not dare to admit that their women slept with the Germans, not because they were forced by others or because they were in urgent need of subsistence, but simply because they were fascinated by german soldiers. These women will say "it's because of love" when defending themselves, "true love is not guilty", "true love has nothing to do with politics", "love is blind".
This is difficult for Chinese to understand. Fall in love with the enemy? In love with the invaders? Brain Watts?
In fact, the situation is different. On the battlefields of China and the Eastern Front, we and the Soviets were desperately trying to avoid "national annihilation and extinction", but the Countries of Western Europe did not have a sense of urgency for survival, they were originally the same species as Germany, and after a few days of fighting, they surrendered the whole country and could still survive lying under Germany. The whole country was working closely with the Germans, men could join the SS to shed the last drop of blood for Germany, and women went to bed!
In the end, it was too fast to kneel. Denmark once had a shocking poll: 51 percent of Danish women openly admitted that German soldiers were more attractive, charismatic, stronger, and more like a samurai than their fellow citizens. In contrast, domestic men are too weak. Given that Denmark surrendered in four hours, we can fully understand the Danish lady's feelings.
German soldiers exchange clothes with their French girlfriends
However, other small countries in Western Europe may find four hours of surrender understandable, even "honorable." But France, the "Gallic rooster", once the European hegemon who hung Germany, has now become one of Germany's harems, and the psychological gap is too big. The Vichy French pseudo-government said that France and Germany cooperated like a husband and wife married, although "France assumed the role of a woman". Vichy's metaphor is actually a tribute to herself, she is not a German wife at all, but a German "prostitute", and the Vichy government is the pimp of this prostitute.
The German army had a continuous sitting order, and for every German who died on French soil, 50 to 300 Ordinary French people had to pay for their lives, forcing the French Communist Partisans to dare not fire on the Germans, and the Vichy government did not even dare to put one. France has proved its weakness in the struggle against german military power, and men have lost completely. And the French woman falls in love with the German soldiers, which is called worse, symbolizing the complete conquest of France by Germany: symbolizing the castration of the male in the French spirit. "Rooster rooster", in the final analysis, is a rooster, not a hen, and the chicken will not lay eggs no matter how weak the chicken is, right?
This may explain why Charles de Gaulle had such a lofty status in the minds of the French people. In contrast to the wagging tail of the Vichy regime, de Gaulle never gave up the struggle, and he was probably the most man-like French man.
It wasn't until the Allies came that the French finally had the courage to shoot at the Germans and have a chance to regain their dignity in front of the world. In June 1944, the representative of the French Resistance, the French Interior Army, exploded. The French Interior Army was a hybrid force that included free French led by de Gaulle, resistance groups in the Vichy French army, and the partisan "free shooters" led by the French Communist Party, bringing together all the most important French resistance forces.
In the summer of 1944, the Inland Army fought alongside British and American forces and recaptured many towns, the most remarkable of which was that they liberated all of southwestern France without external assistance and cleared the area east of Lyon for the Allied forces moving north from Marseille.
In the months that followed, the Inland Army won a series of military victories. The first was the liberation of Paris, which was also a task accomplished by the French forces alone. To interject here, the Allied commander Eisenhower tried to stop the French army, and he thought that the elimination of the German forces was more strategic than the attack on Paris. In order to end the war as soon as possible, Eisenhower had planned to bypass Paris and advance directly into Germany. However, he could not persuade de Gaulle and had to let the French army move freely.
After that, French troops arrived in Provence and liberated Lyon. They advanced all the way into Alsace and eventually into Germany and occupied Stuttgart. This series of victories, slowly but firmly restoring the lost dignity of the French, provided the French, especially the young French boys, with a great sense of moral and psychological superiority. From June to October 1944, the number of the French Army surged from 100,000 to 400,000. Yes, before the Normandy landings, there were only 100,000 French guerrillas, and most of the French people honestly squatted at home as good citizens.
However, these recruits seem to be too eager to prove themselves, guerrilla veterans out of habit to keep a low profile, recruits can't wait to show off their manhood. The British had always looked down on the French, and British soldiers often reported seeing them "strapped with bullet belts" or "full of grenades" and "flaunting around the streets", like little roosters patrolling the territory. Major General Julius Neve of the Royal Panzer Corps felt that the gang had not done enough and had more than enough to lose: "They drove civilian cars, shouting and colliding with each other, and they started a fight and shot indiscriminately, hit their own people, hit us, and hit the Germans." "Well, these Brits are too harsh to be intimate at all, and for years the French have been afraid to take up arms against Germany. Now for the first time, I have the opportunity to fight like a man, and I will inevitably be too excited, and I will understand and understand more!
However, this renewed masculinity also has a dark side. The sudden influx of young men into the Resistance has marginalized many of the more experienced female fighters who have held out for four years. Jeanne Boe, once a widely respected female demolition expert, now finds herself an outsider. She said, "I was politely told, please don't mind. With so many men joining the organization, women don't have to fight. But I'm still convinced that I'm better at using submachine guns than many recruits, who are just getting started. By the winter of 1944, women were gradually withdrawing from the stage of the Resistance, and even the Communist guerrillas, without exception, issued an order: to remove all female fighters. It seems that the French Communist Party was first French and then the Communist Party. This is in stark contrast to the Italian and KKE, whose female partisans fought on the front until the final victory.
If the "good" women are forced to stand aside by the gushing "roosters", then the "bad" women have humiliated the nation and can only wait for more harsh treatment. And the "German babies" born to bad women are even more a symbol of national shame, and they wish they had not existed. Many babies are labeled "mentally handicapped" and thrown directly into orphanages for special education, and those who are lucky enough to stay with their mothers are also threatened, ridiculed, and snubbed for life.
Speaking of which, the French government is really quite a chicken thief, he has penetrated the psychology of the public, and in this subtle way, France has changed from a feminine and obedient little hen back to a masculine, aggressive "Gallic rooster".
However, when this picture spread all over the world, no reader would feel that the French had become masculine.
A French woman with a bloodied face was choked by a "heroic" French man
In this way, the countries of Western Europe, at the expense of bullying women and children, preserved their own "political elites" and capitalists, or rather, the right-wing forces. Is it obvious that those who are willing to cooperate with the Nazis will still be left-wing? Thus avoiding a communist movement. After the end of World War II, the countries of Western Europe smoothly passed through the capitalist countries, and everyone continued to be a "prostitute" in peace, but the sweet father was no longer Germany, but the United States.
The French, of course, knew how humiliated they were at the international level for bullying women and children, so they began to make up history and throw the pot to the guerrillas. In the end, it is the left wing that carries the pot. Who let them have no capital and no voice. Beginning in the 1950s, hundreds of horrific stories began to appear in the mass media about how guerrillas tortured and mistreated civilians. Many of the stories feature what happened to women, who were stripped naked, shaved off their hair, humiliated, beaten with iron rods, and raped and raped. This did happen after the war, except that the abusers were everyone in the town, not the guerrillas.
Along with these stories, there are fabricated data. Beginning in the 1950s, many authors claim that within a few months of liberation, about 105,000 collaborators were executed by the French Resistance. This figure comes from the nonsense of Dixière, then minister of the interior in November 1944, and the real number may be only one percent. But who cares about the truth?
Similarly, in Italy, the fascist right, which continues to be in power, cannot wait to whitewash itself as a victim. Since the 1950s, they have portrayed the early postwar period as a bloody era, falsely claiming that as many as 300,000 people were murdered. Correspondingly, the number of partisan victims killed by the fascists during the war was greatly reduced to 45,000, creating the illusion that the anti-fascist guerrillas were the more vicious villains. This utter absurdity, repeated a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand times, becomes true.
The myth of the innocence of the right has become more popular in recent decades. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the tide of European communism receded, and the right-wing parties rose with it, and similar situations occurred in all European countries. These rumor-mongering figures have been turned over and artistically reprocessed. Because more exaggerated numbers can put the left, communism and the Soviet Union as "more evil". At the beginning of the 21st century, the Italian writer Giampa Pianza wrote a book, "The King Is Defeated", which attacked the heroism of the Italian resistance by detailing the scenes of guerrilla killings before and after liberation. Pansa took great pains to fabricate how innocent the slain were, thus demonstrating the evil of the Communist guerrillas. Outrageously, the book sold 350,000 copies in its first year of publication, which is enough to testify how powerful the Italian New Right is. And the New Right is happy to use the controversies he provokes, coupled with the work of other ambiguous historians, to falsify history.
Gradually, Mussolini, Antonescu, and even Hitler began to be whitewashed one by one. They were fabricated of all virtues, all kinds of achievements, and the crimes they committed were justified, even ignored. Fascists in Hungary, Croatia, Ukraine, and the Baltic states, although they had collaborated with the Nazis in killing Jews and Communists at will during the war, are now also regarded as national heroes. Instead, the Liberator Soviet Army was made to shout and beat everyone.
It seems that after decades of distorted history, the truth is almost completely drowned out. This can't help but make us wonder, after the victory of World War II, who is the enemy? In the next episode, then, we'll talk about how France, Italy, and Greece, after completing their so-called "revenge," cut the communist party, the heroes of the former state. Don't forget a key drop, we will not see each other in the next period.
bibliography:
Peter Novick, The Holocaust and Collective Memory
Keith Lowe, Savage Land
Georges Dolby, A History of French Civilization
Roberts, The Price of Freedom