Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II (31 page)

While we might understand the widespread collaboration with despotic regimes during the war, this does not mean we should condone it. When the conduct of those collaborators crossed a moral line, this cannot be excused just because the broad political outlook of those collaborators might chime with our own. Likewise, we should not condone the brutal vengeance committed by partisans in the aftermath of the war. But neither can we judge their actions by modern-day standards. Injustices
did
occur. Innocent people
were
killed. But for the European people, brutalized by years of repression and atrocity, to be capable of avoiding such excesses would surely have been asking too much.

14

Revenge on Women and Children

In most of western Europe, vengeance on collaborators tended to be a small-scale affair. It was usually committed by individuals or by small groups of partisans with particular grudges to settle. Mass vengeance – that is, vengeance committed by whole towns or villages
communally
- was actually fairly rare, and generally confined to those areas where the process of liberation had been particularly violent. On the whole, as I have shown, the communities of western Europe were more or less content to turn their collaborators over to the proper authorities. In those areas where they did not trust the authorities, and tried to take the law into their own hands, the police or the Allied armies stepped in fairly quickly to restore order.

The only major exception, which occurred throughout western Europe, was the way in which women who had slept with German soldiers were treated. Such women were universally regarded as traitors - ‘horizontal collaborators’, to use the French term – but they had not necessarily committed any crime that could be legally prosecuted. When their communities turned on them after the war, very few people were willing to come to their defence. Policemen or Allied soldiers who were present almost always stood aside and allowed the mob to have their way: indeed, in some towns the authorities
encouraged
the abuse of these women because they regarded it as a useful pressure valve for popular anger.
¹

Of all the revenge that was carried out upon collaborators in western Europe, this was by far the most public and the most universal. There are many reasons why women were singled out in this way, not all of which relate to the actual betrayal they were supposed to have committed. Their punishment, and the subsequent treatment of their children, is worth looking at because it says a great deal about the way that European society had come to view itself after the war.

The Shearing of Women

In the autumn of 1944 a young girl from Saint-Clément in the Yonne
département
of France was arrested for having ‘intimate relations’ with a German officer. When questioned by the police she openly admitted to her affair. ‘I became his mistress,’ she said. ‘He sometimes came to the house to help my father when he was ill. When he left, he left me his
Feldpost
number. I wrote to him and had my letters taken to him by other Germans because I could not use the postal services in France. I wrote to him for two or three months but I do not have his address anymore.’
²

Many women across Europe embarked on such relationships with Germans during the war. They justified their actions by saying that ‘relationships based on love’ were ‘not a crime’, that ‘matters of the heart have nothing to do with politics’, or that ‘love is blind’.
³
But in the eyes of their communities, this was no excuse. Sex, if it was with a German,
was
political. It came to represent the subjugation of the continent as a whole: a female France, Denmark or Holland being ravished by a male Germany. Just as importantly, as I have already mentioned in Chapter 4, it also came to represent the emasculation of European men. These men, who had already shown themselves impotent against the military might of Germany, now found themselves communally cuckolded by their own womenfolk.

The number of sexual relationships that took place between European women and Germans during the war is quite staggering. In Norway as many as 10 per cent of women aged between fifteen and thirty had German boyfriends during the war.
⁴
If the statistics on the number of children born to German soldiers are anything to go by, this was by no means unusual: the numbers of women who slept with German men across western Europe can easily be numbered in the hundreds of thousands .
⁵

Resistance movements in occupied countries came up with all kinds of excuses for the behaviour of their women and girls. They characterized women who slept with Germans as ignorant, poor, even mentally defective. They claimed that women were raped, or that they only slept with Germans out of economic necessity. While this was undoubtedly the case for some, recent surveys show that women who slept with German soldiers came from all classes and all walks of life. On the whole European women slept with Germans not because they were forced to, or because their own men were absent, or because they needed money or food – but simply because they found the strong, ‘knightly’ image of the German soldiers intensely attractive, especially compared to the weakened impression they had of their own menfolk. In Denmark, for example, wartime pollsters were shocked to discover that 51 per cent of Danish women openly admitted to finding German men more attractive than their own compatriots.
⁶

Vichy leader François Darlan throws the key to ‘her’ room to a German

Nowhere was this need more keenly felt than in France. In a nation where the huge, almost entirely male German presence was matched by a corresponding absence of French men – 2 million of whom were prisoners or workers in Germany – it is unsurprising that the occupation itself was often seen in sexual terms. France had become a ‘slut’, giving herself up to Germany with the Vichy government acting as her pimp.
⁷
As Jean-Paul Sartre noted after the war, even the collaborationist press tended to represent the relationship between France and Germany as a union ‘in which France was always playing the part of the woman’.
⁸

Even those who still felt patriotic in the face of this were obliged to register a sense of sexual humiliation. Writing in 1942, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry suggested that all Frenchmen were tainted by an unavoidable feeling of being cuckolded by the war, but that they should not allow this shame to destroy their innate sense of patriotism:

Does a husband go from house to house crying out to his neighbours that his wife is a strumpet? Is it thus that he can preserve his honour? No, for his wife is one with his home. No, for he cannot establish his dignity against her. Let him go home to her, and there unburden himself of his anger. Thus, I shall not divorce myself from a defeat which surely will often humiliate me. I am part of France, and France is part of me.
⁹

Such emotions were experienced not only by Frenchmen, but also by men in all the occupied nations. As an airman fighting on behalf of the Free French, Saint-Exupéry was at least doing something to help liberate his country. For those who were stuck at home without any realistic means of fighting back, the frustration was more difficult to bear.

The liberation was an opportunity to put some of this right. By taking up arms once more, and participating in the invasion of their own country, French men had a chance to redeem themselves both in the eyes of their womenfolk and in the eyes of the world. This is perhaps one reason why Charles de Gaulle became such an important symbol for the French during the war. In contrast to the effeminate supplication of Vichy, de Gaulle had never surrendered his martial spirit, and stubbornly refused to bend to anyone else’s will, including that of his allies. The speeches he broadcast on the BBC were littered with masculine references to ‘Fighting France’, the ‘proud, brave and great French people’, the ‘military strength of France’ and the ‘aptitude for warfare of our race’.
¹⁰
In a speech to the Consultative Assembly in Algiers in the run-up to the D-Day landings, de Gaulle praised

The work of our magnificent troops … the ardour of our units as they prepare for the great battle; the spirit of our ships’ companies; the prowess of our gallant air squadrons; the heroic boys who fight in the Maquis without uniforms, and nearly without arms, but animated by the purest military flame …
¹¹

Such words are often used by generals who wish to appeal to the martial spirit of their troops. But they are significant here because they contrast so strongly with the defeatist, ‘effeminate’ way that Vichy portrayed French military hopes.

The rehabilitation of French masculinity began in earnest after the D-Day landings in June 1944, when de Gaulle and his ‘Free French’ troops finally returned to France. In the following months, they won a series of military scoops. The first was the liberation of Paris, which was conducted exclusively by French troops under General Philippe Leclerc (despite American attempts to hold Leclerc in check while they organized a more coordinated assault with US divisions). The second was the arrival in Provence on 15 August of French troops, who fought all the way through to Alsace and eventually crossed into Germany to capture Stuttgart. On the way, they liberated Lyon, France’s second city – again, without American help. Slowly but surely they were beginning to redeem themselves for the military embarrassment of 1940.

However, perhaps the greatest boost to French pride was the formation of something that the British and Americans did not have – a separate army within France itself, which rose up and fought the Germans from the inside. The Forces Françaises de l’ntérieur (FFI) – or
les fifis
as they were affectionately and disparagingly known – were an amalgamation of all the most important French Resistance groups under the nominal leadership of General Pierre Koenig. During the summer of 1944 they took control of town after town, often fighting alongside regular British and American forces. They liberated almost all of south-west France without any outside help, and likewise cleared the region east of Lyon for Allied troops driving north from Marseilles (see Map 8, p.282).

The exploits of the FFI gave a huge psychological boost to French morale, and particularly to the morale of young French men, who flocked to join up in great numbers: between June and October 1944, the ranks of the FFI swelled from 100,000 to 400,000.
¹²
While seasoned
résistants
tended from habit to keep a fairly low profile, these new recruits were enormously keen to flaunt their new-found virility. Allied soldiers often reported seeing them appear with ‘bandoleers of ammunition strung all about them’ or with ‘grenades hanging from shoulder and belt’, as they kept ‘letting off round after round into the air’.
¹³
According to Julius Neave, who served as a major in the British Royal Armoured Corps, they were perhaps more of a nuisance than they were worth: ‘They roar round in civilian cars knocking each other down and fighting pitched battles with everyone, including themselves, ourselves and the Boche.’
¹⁴
Even some of the French villagers characterized them as ‘young men … parading with FFI amulets and posing as heroes’.
¹⁵
But if they appeared a little too keen to prove themselves, this was only because, unlike British and American men, they had for years been unable to take up arms against Germany. Now, for the first time, they were presented with a chance to fight properly, openly — like
men.

Unfortunately, this new-found display of virility also had its darker side. The sudden influx of young men into the ranks of the Resistance pushed out many much more experienced female
résistantes.
Jeanne Bohec, for example, who was a well-respected female explosives expert in Saint-Marcel, suddenly found herself sidelined. ‘I was told politely to forget about it. A woman isn’t supposed to fight when so many men are available. Yet I surely knew how to use a submachine gun better than lots of the FFI volunteers who had just got hold of these arms.’
¹⁶
During the last winter of the occupation women were phased out of active participation in the Resistance, and the Communist Francs-Tireurs et Partisans (FTP) issued orders to phase out women altogether. This is in direct contrast to countries like Italy and Greece, where significant numbers of women continued to fight for the partisans on the front line right to the end of the war.
¹⁷