After the end of the Nazi occupation in France, thousands of women were victims of public abuse as a result of relationships established with German soldiers during World War II. These events, which took place between 1943 and 1946, became known as Épuration légale, legal purges, or even, through the name of the victims, les femmes tondues, the shorn women, because the main punishment given to women was the shaving of their heads.
The crime that these women allegedly committed was having sexual relations with German soldiers during the period of Nazi occupation in France. They were accused of “horizontal collaboration” with a war enemy, which led to them being targets of public moral lynchings.
The practice of legal purging carried out against women consisted of shaving their hair, one of the symbols of female seduction, and public parading through the streets of cities, towns or even small villages in rural areas after the expulsion of Nazi troops from these places. Many of the women were also stripped naked and marked with the Nazi swastika using dye or even a hot iron. In addition to all the humiliation, they were sentenced to sentences of six months to one year in prison as a result of their alleged collaboration with the enemy.
Possibly as many as 20,000 women were targeted in France’s legal purges. The accusations were generally made by neighbors or even real collaborators of the Germans who intended to divert attention from their actions in support of the war enemy. Many of the victims were prostitutes, who did not distinguish their nationality when selling their bodies, having both French and German clients.
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Other victims were young mothers whose husbands were prisoners of war in German camps and who, during the war, had no means of obtaining material support for their survival. One of the ways to obtain food for themselves and their children was through sexual relations with German soldiers.
In Norway, around five thousand women who had children with German parents were sentenced to a year and a half of forced labor. The children were sent to sanatoriums, and were also used as guinea pigs in drug tests.
According to the French historian Fabrice Virgili, the legal purges against women were patriotic and virile violence, the affirmation of a masculine, strongly sexual punishment. But this practice did not only occur at the end of World War II. The fascist supporters of Franco in Spain had a similar device against republican women. Such practices demonstrate that the horrors of wars and human actions are not limited to deaths on the battlefields.
* Image Credit: German Federal Archives
By Tales Pinto
Master in History