by Douglas Boyd
It was his sympathy that broke the dam of her self-control. Tears streaming down her face, Marie-Rose was driven away with the other shorn women and again locked up in the collège. A guard she knew told them their ordeal was over and they would soon be released. Neither of her parents came to visit Marie-Rose, but her brother brought food several times during the next four days’ confinement. At 6 a.m. one morning, the women were released, the time being chosen because few people would be in the streets. Setting out to walk the few miles back to her parents’ home, Marie-Rose was given a lift by a Spanish refugee who had lived in Moissac since the civil war. On the way, he tried to comfort her with the reflection that most people soon forget everything, both the good and the bad.
For a week she dared not set foot outside, but then courageously decided that the first step in restarting her life was to make herself a wig and get back to work. As she says, ‘I was lucky. At least I knew how to do that for myself.’ Reopening the salon, she found that far from losing customers, all the regulars came back as though nothing had happened and a whole crop of new customers booked appointments as a tacit gesture of sympathy from the women of the town.5
Other women’s lives were irrevocably shattered in a few minutes by the scissors or clippers wielded by their tormentors. The Liberation lasted eleven months, from 6 June 1944 to the signature of the unconditional surrender by General Alfred Jodl on 7 May 1945 in Rheims, when the last pockets of resistance in France gave in. Throughout this time, 20,000-plus women were humiliated as Marie-Rose had been, reaching a peak in August and September 1944.6 If the majority were aged between 17 and 34, cases were recorded as young as 15 and as old as 68.7
Mademoiselle Z was also sentenced by a purge court to ten years of ‘national indignity’ for ‘passing intelligence to the enemy’. Today, her daughter Line speaks out at the monstrosity of the sentence:
She was seventeen years old! What political motive could she have had? She was condemned for bearing a German’s child. After five years in Troyes prison and at the camp of Jargeau where they put all the undeclared prostitutes, when she came out, she was completely unstable. Her life was ruined.8
As another of the ‘children of national shame’ said:
If it had been a one-night stand, there was always the traditional way out of the problem: single mothers left the baby on the doorstep of an orphanage, a convent or the local presbytery. But our mothers chose to keep us, so there must have been love.9
Certainly Anne S showed devotion for Günther, her German MP lover. Throughout the four years of their relationship, as a daughter of a railway worker, she repeatedly travelled free by train to wherever he was posted. During the Liberation he was taken prisoner and imprisoned near Lyon. To help the father of her child, she persuaded her brother-in-law, who had made false ID papers for résistants, to make a set for Günther, but he broke a leg while escaping and was recaptured, which led to Anne being sentenced to six months in prison, during which time her only joy was to see through the bars of her cell her small son being carried in his grandmother’s arms along the street outside the prison once a week. Anne’s mother paid the owner of the local paper not to report the affair and shame the family, but he printed it all the same.
Anita A brought up her German lover’s child in an abusive household. Married to an alcoholic ex-résistant who exploited her shame by repeated beatings and other humiliations, she accepted the abuse as atonement and spent hours alone in her room praying for forgiveness. Only after the husband committed suicide in 1999 did her daughter find, on going through family papers, that her birth certificate bore the stigmatic ‘father unknown’. Among her mother’s papers were dozens of exercise books filled with the repeated phrase ‘I must atone, I must atone …’10
The humiliation of women continued throughout the Liberation, which did not end until the last pockets of resistance on the Atlantic coast capitulated in May 1945. Even later, some women who had been requises working in Germany had their heads shorn on return to their hometowns.
After the capitulation of the La Rochelle pocket, on 7 May 1945 the little seaside resort of Fouras on the Atlantic coast saw thirty or so local women dragged by neighbours to the picturesque nineteenth-century bandstand where concerts had been given for summer visitors before the war. Renée X was cleaning the tables in her aunt’s neighbourhood restaurant, which had been requisitioned by the Germans as a mess, when four male neighbours ordered her to come with them. Forced up the steps to the bandstand, she and the other women were kept standing there, in her words ‘like sows in a market pen’, except that sows do not get spat on or have fists shaken in their faces.
With clippers and scissors, the self-appointed justiciars started cutting hair – blonde hair, dark hair, red hair, she remembers – until the women were standing on a carpet of their own hair, symbolising the femininity they were accused of soiling. Afterwards, as she recalled much later, ‘I walked back to the hotel. 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 wonders whether ‘people will ever understand 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.’11
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 for relationships with French soldiers. Head shaving also occurred during the Spanish and Greek civil wars.12 The victims were being humiliated for having enjoyed preferential treatment in terms of food, clothes and makeup, 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 many thousands of French girls flirted with, or had affairs with, German soldiers while most boys of their own age were away in POW camps, with the Maquis or in Germany with the STO, was that treason? Estimates are that between 49 and 57 per cent of the women punished were accused of no other crime13 – so what exactly were they being punished for?
The only theory that makes any sense of the shearing of women’s hair in liberated Denmark, Belgium, Holland, the Channel islands, Italy, France and elsewhere is that the child-bearing potential of women’s bodies was regarded as common property, so that the woman who used 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 wishing to ‘marry out’. Perhaps also, the collective need to punish anybody vulnerable seized upon the women during the Liberation as victims because the act of shearing is a physical and psychological violence with a strong element of fetishistic pleasure that can easily be sanctioned 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 women shorn seems to indicate that all of these explanations are partially true.
Since the act of punishment was always sanctioned 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 guilty women, as though subjugating the vulnerable ‘guilty females’ of the herd demonstrates that the males are no longer themselves subjugated to a more potent enemy.14 That the act of shearing was inflicted for many other offences on women,15 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 at the Liberation was singer Vera Valmont, whose only known ‘crime’ was to have accepted engagements on Radio Paris.16
Illic
it affairs with German personnel during the occupation resulted in 30,000 declared births. To this figure must be added all the children who, on paper, were ‘fathered’ by an unwitting or consenting French partner of the mother. Conservative estimates put the total above 70,000, which compares with 5,500 known births to German fathers in Denmark, whose population is one tenth the size of France’s,17 but it may well be higher: the Propaganda Abteilung reported to Oberg on 14 September 1942 that some 3,000 children had already been fathered by German personnel in Normandy alone.18 Whichever figure one takes, if pregnancy resulted in only 5 per cent of cases, there must have been several hundred thousand emotional liaisons with ‘the occupier’. Viewed by the French as the ultimate national shame, this is only now being discussed and written about openly – more than two generations later.
What strikes one on looking at photographs of the shorn women, whether clothed or naked, swastika-branded or with a ‘confession’ pinned to their blouses, is the range of faces. 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, like Marie-Rose, have eyes downcast as if praying for the nightmare to end, not conscious 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 on public sale.19
NOTES
1. Thornton, The Liberation of Paris, p. 207.
2. Amouroux, La Vie, Vol. 1, pp. 362–7.
3. Cahen-D’Anvers, Baboushka Remembers, pp. 243–4.
4. Marie-Rose’s story as told to the author.
5. Ibid.
6. F. Virgili, La France Virile (Paris: Payot, 2000), p. 88.
7. Ibid., p. 226.
8. J.-P. Guilloteau, in L’Express, 31 May 2004.
9. Ibid.
10. The cases of Renée X, Anne S and Anita A are condensed from Guilloteau’s article in L’Express of 31 May 2005.
11. D. Saubaber, Pour l’amour d’un boche, quoted by J.-P. Guilloteau in L’Express, 31 May 2004.
12. Virgili, La France Virile, p. 276.
13. Ibid., pp. 23, 29.
14. See, at length, in Virgili, La France Virile.
15. Black market, 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.
16. Morris, Collaboration and Resistance Reviewed, pp. 85–6.
17. Burrin, Living with Defeat, p. 207.
18. The figure seems questionable and no information is available as to how it was calculated. See Burrin, Living with Defeat, p. 207.
19. See several articles in Arkheia, No. 17–18, 2006.
25
DEATH OF A TOWN
The liberation of the Atlantic coast pockets had scant priority with an Allied command intent on driving into the heartland of the Reich as rapidly as possible with a minimum of casualties. This implied bypassing strongly held areas to avoid impeding the advance and the pockets of resistance around ports of lesser importance in the race to Berlin. Thus, the main thrust evolved by the beginning of September 1944 into the shape of a fist with the accusing index finger pointing at the vital industrial complex of the Ruhr Valley.
Leclerc’s Free French forces being under Allied command, the liberation of the rest of France was not a tidal wave of freedom washing rapidly across the map, for there was no way that the unassisted FFI could tackle the heavily fortified pockets of resistance around the Atlantic ports. Therefore, when French troops entered Strasbourg on 23 November – the German border had been briefly crossed by US forces early in September – there were many hundreds of thousands of French civilians still living under German occupation in conditions worse than ever, for rations were reduced. German paranoia understandably rose and RAF and US air forces diverted resources to ‘keeping the enemy’s heads down’ and reducing morale to the point where surrender became acceptable to the pocket commanders ordered by Hitler to hold out to the last man and bullet.
Le Havre was not liberated until 12 September, Boulogne on 22 September and Calais on the last day of that month, their civilian populations suffering great privation during this time. At Le Havre, where Allied bombing continued until the day of liberation, each evening after a day’s work in appalling conditions even those few civilians whose homes were still habitable took a bus or train to spend the night in nearby villages less likely to be bombed. Each night 2,000 people carried their remaining belongings or wheeled them on barrows into a partly constructed road tunnel, where they cooked supper over hollowed-out swedes filled with sump oil by the light of carbide lamps and slept on mattresses laid on the damp floor.
On 5 September 1944 the tonnage of high explosive and incendiaries dropped on the town was such that a fire-storm engulfed half the built-up area, melting and igniting road surfaces to produce a column of superheated gases that blew human remains and other large and small debris as far as 30km away. Even those taking refuge in the deep tunnel were not safe, an uncounted number being engulfed by a subterranean river of mud liquefied by the explosions. Survivors were trapped for forty-eight hours without food or water. In the Atlantic port of Brest the entire Sadi-Carnot shelter literally blew up on 9 September, when an unidentified projectile hit a German arms dump in one section of the shelter, killing 350 French civilians in less than a second.
Keenly aware that more of France had been liberated by men in US, Canadian and British uniforms than by General Leclerc, de Gaulle wanted to see the strategically unimportant south-west of France liberated by men in French uniform. The three pockets around La Rochelle, Royan and Pointe de Grave totalled 710 concrete blockhouses surrounded by extensive minefields and barbed-wire entanglements, defended by 30,000 men in German uniform, including anglophobe Sikhs who had changed sides after being captured in North Africa. On 18 September 1944 at Saintes, de Gaulle congratulated Colonel Adeline, provisional commander of FFI forces in the south-west, on the way his men had been containing the Germans in the pockets. ‘However,’ he continued, ‘I want no local armistice of any kind. The German pockets must, and will, be reduced by force of arms.’ The armistices referred to were exchanges of wounded on the front line under flags of truce, for the skirmishes along the coast produced casualties in this forgotten war – forgotten outside France even while it was being fought, the world’s media being focused on the Allied drive into Germany.
Promising that a French armoured division would be sent, de Gaulle could not say when because it required Eisenhower’s consent.1 After notifying Supreme Allied HQ on 21 September of his intention to liberate the two pockets blocking the port of Bordeaux, de Gaulle ordered General de Lattre de Tassigny on 7 October to relinquish two divisions for this campaign, but Eisenhower made clear who was in charge by not agreeing until the end of November to let them go, effective 25 December – perhaps as an ironic Christmas present.
By then de Gaulle had given General Edgard de Larminat command of the Forces Françaises de l’Ouest (FFO), as of 14 October 19442 tasked with the liquidation of the pockets as a matter of national honour. Significantly, de Gaulle baptised the operation ‘Independance’. There was more to this than personal arrogance: once the US military presence was installed in France, it would take him twenty-two years to eject his transatlantic allies.
Not until 23 October 1944 did the White House and Downing Street recognise de Gaulle’s government ‘subject to the military requirements of the Supreme Commander’.3 Three days later he decreed that all FFI units not incorporated into the uniformed services or under military command must hand in their weapons or face the consequences – an order that was directly aimed at the communist factions. Since, as head of the provisional government, he had already announced on 15 September that ‘Vichy war criminals’ would be placed on trial, all that remained was to define who was a criminal.
On 7 November de Gaulle used his newly confirmed auth
ority to demand a million German POWs to repair war damage in France and French zones of occupation in Germany and Austria after the end of hostilities. Since Stalin refused to give up any of ‘his’ territory, this meant the UK and US allowing France to occupy some of their territory in occupied Germany. In return for his sometimes wavering support, on 12 November Winston Churchill was given the freedom of the city of Paris.
To invest the landward sides of the three pockets in the southwest, de Larminat had 10,700 men containing the 16,000-man garrison at La Rochelle. Another 5,000 were on the Médoc Peninsula containing the Pointe de Grave pocket. The major pocket of Royan, with its 5,000-plus defenders, was contained by 10,040 FFO men. Their few artillery pieces were captured German or Italian cannon, with limited ammunition supplies. The only advantage they enjoyed was freedom of the air in the form of occasional support from Allied aircraft and the promise of aerial bombardment to ‘soften up’ the pockets before an eventual all-out attack.
The German pockets of resistance after June 1944.
It was to plan this that de Larminat conferred at Cognac with US General Ralph Royce commanding 1st Tactical Air Force on 10 December. He claimed afterwards they discussed intensive bombing of the allegedly exclusively military zones of the Royan and Pointe de Grave pockets after the expected reinforcements arrived. Yet, the bombing mission was misleadingly described on the teletype as ‘to destroy town strongly defended by enemy and occupied by German troops only’.4
The first of the promised armoured troops arrived on 12 December, but Hitler’s Ardennes offensive, opening four days later, and only two days after Montgomery had assured the world that Hitler had no reserves with which to undertake another major initiative, caused Eisenhower to cancel Operation Independance and recall the troops already in the south-west. If he had also cancelled the planned air support for Independance, that would have saved many civilian lives but, in the confusion caused by the unexpected German offensive, Air Chief Marshal ‘Bomber’ Harris received no order to cancel the planned raid.
