French woman accused of sleeping with Germans during the occupation has her head shaved by vindictive neighbors in village near Marseilles.

 


French woman accused of sleeping with Germans during the occupation has her head shaved by vindictive neighbors in village near Marseilles. 

Antony Beevor wrote: "... In Paris, there were cases of prostitutes kicked to death for having accepted German soldiers as clients. 

A large number of the victims were prostitutes who had simply plied their trade with Germans as well as Frenchmen, although in some areas it was accepted that their conduct was professional rather than political, others were silly teenagers who had associated with German soldiers out of bravado or boredom. 

In a number of cases, female schoolteachers who, living alone, had German soldiers billeted on them, were falsely denounced for having been a "mattress for the boches. 

 Women accused of having had an abortion were also assumed to have consorted with Germans. Many victims were young mothers, whose husbands were in German prisoner-of-war camps.

 During the war, they often had no means of support and their only hope of obtaining food for themselves and their children was to accept a liaison with a German soldier.

After the humiliation of a public head-shaving, the tondues - the shorn women - were often paraded through the streets on the back of a lorry, occasionally to the sound of a drum as if it were a tumbril and France was reliving the revolution of 1789.”

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