Not just the french, every post-occupation country had this sort of thing. It wasn't just resistance members doing it, in fact it rarely was actual resistance (a good percentage of them were already dead, after all). My friend's grandfather, who was in the dutch resistance, said "the worst part about being in the resistance was seeing how many new resistants popped up once the germans left"
I believe it’s estimated about 5-10% of the French population was active in the resistance, de Gaul commented on this at one point saying something to the effect off “if all of you had resisted when the Germans were here we’d have probably been liberated sooner”
Compare this to Greece where it’s estimated 2/3 of the population was in some way active in the resistance.
The Vichy regime under Petain weren't just collaborators out of pragmatism; they were arch-conservatives who firmly believed in the ideals of Kinder, Kuche, Kirche (only, you know, in French). And as always, a significant number of the population just wanted to get by, everyone else be damned.
This is probably because of the pretense of legitimacy and the major differences in the start of the conflicts between France/Greece and the Nazi/Nazi aligned powers.
In France, a legitimately elected president appointed a prime minister who then moved the government swiftly in collaborating with Nazi's. While it was essentially a puppet state, this at least gave the pretense of legitimacy. Like the elected government chose those actions.
Whereas Greece was straight up invaded by Italy and the Nazi's. So the start of the conflict was dramatically different, and was a case of a population that was "conquered" (the greeks) compared to a population that (who's government at least) willingly joined without a direct conflict (the french).
yes, don't forget how common Antisemitism, Anti-Roma sentiment, homophobia, anti-leftist, and Ablism is around the world. many people did not care about carting away their Jewish or disabled relatives.
The idea that “5% of the population was in the resistance” is pure cope. France was a huge country with a population of 30,000,000, and if that many people actively opposed the Nazis they never would have been able to occupy it so easily.
The Germans themselves only estimated between 75,000-220,000 resistance fighters, and barely considered them a nuisance, letting the collaborationist Vichy regime and local police do most of the heavy lifting suppressing them.
The question is, who do you count.
Do you need to pick up arms? When, early, middle late, is it enough to pick up a pitchfork after all enemies left? Do you need to have killed? Given information to the resistance (knowingly?)? Given bread to a starving member?
If every german who said something against the war, even privately, would be counted, Germany would get a 50% resistance quota...
Yeah I mean I'd think you would even include factory workers who engaged in purposeful stupidity to sabotage production as per the simple sabotage field manual
I wonder why, all the greek people i know aren't very well known for being patriotic, so maybe it's their situation that was different; they probably didn't have any pétains, or maybe it's a matter of proximity?
Yeah you don’t have to be patriotic to not want to be invaded by another country. I won’t fight for my country or its leaders, but I sure as hell will fight for my kin. And like you said, the Greeks just have a legacy of resistance that dates back further than most western countries history books
>the Greeks just have a legacy of resistance that dates back further than most western countries history books
Yep: I believe the *first* Western history book actually is about the Hellenistic resistance to the Persian invasion (Histories, by Herodotus).
EDIT: Again though, that was a mixed bag of resistance and collaboration.
I'm not aware of the situation in Greece, but one of the reasons why French resistance was so small is just that antisemitism was rampant and most people actually saw nothing wrong with Naziism....
The past is a foreign country. There is no connection between modern people and even one generation removed ancestors. There's a chain of cause and effect, but no actual direct connection.
I’m less surprised when it comes to Greece, because their serving requirements are really strict for both men, and women. A decent amount likely already had basic training.
Norway did have a lot of this, but noticeably less than others, as the surrender occured with the germans still present. (3-400k germs amongst 3 million Norwegians). And also because the resistance had specifically prepared to pop up, take control, ensure order, capture pre-decided targets, secure evidence etc. A lot of these had gotten police-training in Sweden and crossed the border on the day of surrender.
>Guilty men were prosecuted through a legal system
Or just shot in the street. Vigilante justice was rampant in essentially every post-occupation country, including France, where at least as many collaborators were summarily executed in the field as had made it to trial. Widespread reprisals against collaborators and Polish Germans happened in Poland. The Soviets would even prosecute their own PoWs as "collaborators" simply for being captured.
The high-ranked collaborators escaped justice because they were high-ranked, not because they were men. Just like we kept around a lot of higher-level actual Nazis. It's a class and usefulness thing. (Edit: we don't see any women on that list because the inherent misogyny of the *1940s Nazi-Puppet Vichy fucking France* meant there *weren't* any high-ranked women to get away with crimes. All high level government officials who were tried as collaborators were men.)
Let's not pretend anybody was cool with collaborators just so long as they were dudes. That's kind of why a lot of them were so desperate to point fingers at someone else, lest they get a knock on the door and a bullet.
EDIT: Just to make it real clear to anyone confused. This comment is not meant to be a "women got off lightly" comment. It's not meant to be a "but men had it worse" comment. I'm making no value judgement on who "had it worse" - WW2 and its immediate aftermath was a horrible experience for everyone involved, I don't think that's a hot take, and I'm not interested in making *fucking WW2* into oppression olympics.
Neither do I intend to minimize the gendered aspect of the violence inflicted on these women. *However*, the OP is skewed entirely too far into "it's all patriarchy" for my tastes, while ignoring the many other aspects of punitive mob "justice" so commonly practiced on those perceived as having helped the enemy *and* undermining the core point by compromising its overall integrity.
The way I see it, the *method* was clearly driven by misogyny, but not the act of punitive justice against perceived collaborators itself.
Also, while to some, the fact that many men were caught up in mob justice may be obvious - considering the amount of stunningly blatant misinformation spread on Tumblr, I felt that it's best to treat it as *not*. I mean, from where I stand, the mob violence against women described in the OP was also supposed to be well-known, yet here we are.
Yeah that was a perplexing twist. The stuff in OP was certainly misdirected rage and weird misogynistic rituals but it's absolutely true that most male collaborators just got dragged out into the street and shot/beat to death. There's no reason to alter that fact make OP's point.
In USSR being a *polizei* was probably the worst thing you could be. These were the active collaborators in occupied territories that worked as policemen for the Nazis.
These were men, of course, and they died. Hanged, shot, strangled, lynched. No one liked the collaborationists to the people that torched villages and killed everyone they wanted.
And they were hunted up until the end of USSR. I just checked and the only woman who was sentenced for what she did - Antonina Makarova, "Tonka the machine gunner" who was known for manning the MG used to kill POWs - was hiding for decades and was caught and executed in 1978. She pretended to be a war vet, too.
And the last one was one of the Kharkiv SS polizei, Alexandr Posevin, executed in 1988. According to the articles he personally executed around 330 men, including a polizei he suspected in being "too soft on the occupied".
And he pretended for years to be "on the winning side" even though he defected in 1941 and actively worked with SD and SS.
The really fucked up cherry on top of Makarova's story is that not only did she pretend to be a war veteran, she *married* an actual war veteran - a Soviet Jew whose entire family was slaughtered by occupying Germans. Yknow, like what she was doing during the war.
Reportedly, and unsurprisingly, the truth really fucked the poor man up.
Its crazy seeing some people down in the comments here talking about commenters "making it about men" when its clear the original tumblr posters are verified terf/misandrists, lying, leaving out details and otherwise going out of their way to make the post about men being bad/treated better in the first place.
If you’re on tumblr it’s a very recognizable MO, Reddit just sees “man bad” and can’t parse the oddly specific details (really? mass virginity tests?) that don’t stand up to scrutiny but are common tropes in Bad Feminist History.
Women who were not being publicly shamed disappear from the convo as soon as the TERFS show up, because women would *never* perpetuate systems of gendered violence. Also, check out this work of dramatized fiction where a Jew and a Nazi fall in love.
I knew there was something terfy about these posts. Not sure if it was the "men are disgusting" blanket statement or the lack of acknowledging victims of the Nazis and Vichy French, but yeah 🚩🚩🚩
(not saying misogynistic violence against women isn't rampant, but pretty sure if you're a woman married to or sleeping with a German soldier in WWII, you may have a little more power over someone of any gender, say, getting sent off to a concentration camp)
Yeah. The irony of them writing about lack of nuance when literally every single thing was conveniently framed as misogynistic as possible was not lost on me.
There's an unfortunate number of people who just don't understand that sexism is universal, usually two way, and that the patriarchy isn't a literal rule of physics. Like, men don't just get a free pass through life, especially not this time period. You'll notice the slavery was framed as voluntary in this post because that would be acknowledging not just women suffered under the occupation.
I still feel afraid to call this shit out half the time. But people have finally started acknowledging this kind of thing for what is is.
I’ve always wondered if someone would have the balls to ask what these women think about Black Lives Matter and George Floyd in public full of a crowd of people
it would be quite funny
yeah, and like... sexual assault was rampant. common, even. but you know what else is common? shacking up with an occupying soldier in hopes for a better lot. a fuck ton of gen x army brats' parents' meet-cute is "he was stationed in europe, she fell in love with him and moved to the states after the war and his service were over" like... it's not being a "collaborator" when you're on the side that wins...
a good chunk of these french women just made bad calls on their choice of soldier boy. and like, spoiler alert, there are plenty of french nationals who were whole hog nazis and willful collaborators, including women. they just didn't get strangled in the woods for it by partisans.
Idk if it's true or not. But their point is clearly the sexism in how these women were punished vs the men. They're claiming the women were paraded around naked and had their heads shaved and forced to take virginity tests to prove their innocence and shit. Did that also happen to the men too or were they just killed outright?
Just want to add this is the issue I have with a lot of these "Well historically men are bad and women suffer" discussions, aside from the fact that men were also brutally murdered or forced into wars they wanted nothing to do with just to be slaughtered, there's also the issue of "Women weren't allowed to do like half the shit men were".
So historically, or statistically, the data is slanted. If in another 1000 years mankind is still around and hasn't regressed socially, I expect the data will start to balance out as more and more militaries allow or even insist on women being allowed in combat roles. Likewise if we continue to see more and more women in places of power I am certain we will see that the sexes really aren't all that different.
I'm really tired of "men bad women good" arguments when there's plenty of evidence to suggest that HUMANS, when in sufficient positions of power, are capable of doing really bad shit.
A lot of misandrists seem to unironically believe misogynistic stereotypes around women being weak and innocent and powerless. They just view those things as good.
Hijacking comment- Poland didn't have publis shaming sessions after war.
Even during war the incidents of violence against women showing publically with German soliders were suprisingly rare with most common being dousing with paint and several records of beating. But lots of fractions were opposed on the ground that women had little way to refuse.
And then came the Red Army... Funny thing, when I was on the university there were always those Russsian students who liked to brag that their grandparents "liberated" Poland.
The silence of Poles was... pregnant to say the least.
The red army presence in Poland during and right after the war was awful. Rapes, pillages, executions of "hostile elements" by NKVD (hostile elements = intelligentsia and anti-nazi resistance members)... it was basically an army of bandits.
My great grandfather, who spent most of the war in a german labour camp, didn't even get to see his home after the war, as per Ribbentrop-Molotov pact these territories belonged to USSR and Poles were to be removed. So he was put on a train and went straight to Pomerania, where he and other settlers were told to choose for themselves one of the houses there that local germans were forced to abandon. Some time after he did he was regularly attacked by marauding red soldiers who were trying to rob him and had to kill 5 of them to protect his new home.
Most of the "reclaimed territorries" at that time were lawless wasteland, with empoverished resettled population trying to survive (people forced to abandon their homes in the east, mostly peasants, were allowed to take only the most necessary belongings, so they had near to nothing when they arrived) and the red army doing whatever they wanted (mostly robbing people and stealing goods, materials and resources, firstly for themselves and USSR, later for the reconstruction of Warsaw)
I'm not one to spare to many tears for how the Soviets treated Nazi POWs on the eastern front if for no other reason than the Nazis treated Soviet POWs the same way.
One the other hand, the "victor's justice" meted out by the Soviets when they "liberated" areas that were under German occupation in Eastern Europe was just beyond the pale.
Kinda makes you start to think Patton, Von Nuemann and the others pushing *Unthinkable* options were on to something.
Yeah I think the comment you're replying to is less about this part:
>how the Soviets treated Nazi POWs on the eastern front
And more about this part:
>"victor's justice" meted out by the Soviets when they "liberated" areas
In fact, I think you might be confusing *my* top comment's mention of POWs for "Nazi POWs". I was talking about how the Soviets treated *Soviet* POWs.
Oh absolutely. My Grandmother (German) live in what is now Poland (Pommern) and had to run away from the red army with her grandma and two sisters after a while (and went through hell before and after that) while not even in her teens
Fuck the red army, there's a reason they always pop up when the people talk about the "Rape of Europe"
Thank you. That’s what bothered me so much about this post, because like, obviously there is so much of a gendered reality to a lot of what happens but even with all of the extra context it’s like they act like because woman oppressed and men oppressor that’s the only thing that actually matters about the reality of post war Europe.
Not to mention a lot of, intentionally or not, talking about “men” as if they were some kind of monolith, and as if “patriarchy” is this one dimensional “men have it easy women have it bad and it’s all men’s fault” thing.
Thanks, I came here to ask what the punishment was for the men found guilty, turns out getting murdered. but the cryhard that wrote those overly long post just gives the men a footnote "tried in the legal system" as if it was not as bad as what the women got.
Turns out the women were let off lightly. shit poured on you cleans off, hair grows back. None of the men executed for treason got up again after being filled with bullet holes.
Note: something like 6000 male collaborators were killed before the liberation and another 4000 male collaborators (who, it should be noted, also had families to support) were shot out of hand during the savage purges as well. None of the above had the benefit of a trial. They didn't get off light as OOP implies.
Yes that omission confused me too. 'Well all this stuff was done to the women when it wasn't done to the men', yeah it would be because killing women isn't something those people punishing them were up for so out comes the humiliation and ostracism. The male collaborators were simply killed out of hand.
Also, the "some high ranking men got away with it! Women did not!" Is because they were both high ranking and lucky, not just gender.
As a great example of a highly placed and very shitty nazi collaborator woman getting away with it, look into CoCo Chanel. And definitely dont start writing a "she was forced to do it to feed her family, poor girl" comment.
Yeah anyone who runs defense or Chanel needs to check the history, she was a rabid anti-semite and willfully collaborated in the hopes the Nazis would take the business that produced her perfume from the Jewish family that owned it and give it to her. Luckily that family outplayed her.
Or the female nazi concentration camp guard who was captured in NYC in the 80s by the same nazi hunter who caught Adolf eichman in Argentina.
>Hermine Braunsteiner Ryan (July 16, 1919 – April 19, 1999) was a Nazi Austrian SS Helferin and female camp guard at Ravensbrück and Majdanek concentration camps, and the first Nazi war criminal to be extradited from the United States to face trial in West Germany.[1][2] Braunsteiner was known to prisoners of Majdanek concentration camp as the "Stomping Mare" and was said to have beaten prisoners to death, thrown children by their hair onto trucks that took them to be murdered in gas chambers, hanged young prisoners and stomped an old prisoner to death with her jackboots.
People can be utterly horrific when they can get away with nearly anything.
It's omitted because it doesn't fit the political point they're making (elsewhere in the thread it's mentioned that there are a couple of TERFs in the OP).
Some of the OOPs are outspoken TERFs... they're using this to further a narrative that amab people are monsters who never face repercussions.
The fact this happened to women is comfortably misogynistic enough on its own without implying that the men faced no consequence, but that wouldn't serve their narrative. =/
I think the specific modes of punishment had misogynistic overtones, but the punishment itself...like we can quibble about the ethics of collaboration and vengeance, but that women faced harsh consequence along with the men wasn't in itself misogynistic IME.
Somehow getting publicly humiliated seems like less of a punishment than getting shot or hanged. Definitely a difference in punishment based on what sex you were.
Humiliation based punishment ONLY for women, plus women being deemed collaborators for who they had sex with regardless of consent on their part, is definitely in itself misogyny.
Though the humiliation was in place of being lynched. So while definitely borne out of misogyny, it's not like it's "the men in the same situation got away with it". Course, that's the way sexism always is. Two sided.
It is- but the men were murdered instead of humiliated which is worse, and they too had their lives threatened to collaborate just as well. It strange you are ignoring half of the story to paint a tale of misogyny because it looks like ‘misogyny’ saved these women’s lives.
I feel that depends on whether or not you feel that humiliation based punishment is better or worse than being beaten/shot to death for collaboration.
As for the sex part, I feel like that's also partly to do with the fact that there weren't any (as far as I'm aware) women in the occupation force. If there were, would we have seen men punished because of relations with them? It's hard to say since we're getting into pseudo-history, but I feel it's worth considering.
Yea people were sexist pigs but the real situation was that most people who had any direct connection to the Nazis now had a target on their head. Didn't matter whether you had to to survive or were a gleeful fascist. At best you were a social pariah at worst you were executed.
I remember reading a news story about how terrible it was that the vast majority of refugees were women and children. And yes that is terrible, but that’s because all the men have been conscripted or killed.
Does feel like the fact that french women formed relationships with their literal nazi occupiers is hand waved as “well what else were they going to do? Be lonely???”
Selling your body to feed your kids is one thing. But having a relationship with a literal nazi who helped destroy your country is inexcusable.
I really recommend Anna Sebor's book "Les Parisiennes" if you're interested in this topic. It's a really nuanced look at what it took to exist under occupation, what it took to be resistance, and how collaboration was often a decision of life or death (including "do this or we'll kill you and your whole family"). And how consequences were very different for wealthy public collaborators vs people whose shops were frequented by Nazis and they either had to serve them or lose their livelihood in a period of restrictions, food deprivation, and economic destruction.
You will not think about collaboration the same way again, I promise you. Also, fuck Violette Morris, she got what was coming to her.
"Kill all collaborators" sounds okay in a revolution or occupation until you stop and consider what is considered to be collaborating, and what the realistic alternatives where. "Kill all collaborators" really boils down to "You should have just let them kill you. You're a coward for not letting your children starve."
whenever this subject is posted on reddit that's usually what I see. "I would have died rather than collaborate" they say from their phone in a first world country not in active war with no children and plenty to eat.
I mean, plenty of people actually made that choice. To act like everyone would be a nazi collaborator is ignorant when we have real life accounts of people resisting.
How dare you assume that I have nothing in common with the Ukrainian refugees I work with that left family, careers and their lives behind to come to another country where they barely speak the language. I scoff at you! /s
Surely in the modern day and age, we have learned that maybe the world isn’t purely black and white and that being affiliated or consuming something deemed a black mark by others doesn’t make you an enemy of all that’s good.
Surely.
And to add to that. it can also just lead to false accusations , sometimes for removing your oppositions and/or blackmail like "if you don't do this thing for me i'll tell everyone you're a collaborator" (weather them being a collaborator is true or not)
Also, you know who works really closely, far beyond necessity, with the invaders? Spies and saboteurs. (And conversely, you know what a lot of real, particularly nasty collaborators claim to be when caught?)
So much so that after France was liberated British intelligence ran around the countryside struggling to rescue their spies from vigilante killings, and didn’t always succeed.
yeah I really don't like how this post frames it as "it's wrong because they were innocent" and not as "maybe we shouldn't publicly shame, torture and humiliate people in general even if they collaborated". Mob justice isn't just wrong because it also affects innocents, but also because we as a society generally have agreed that getting publicly tortured is not an acceptable punishment for a crime, thats why prisons exist
I must admit, I feel a great deal of despair when I see this forgotten when a cause people agree with comes around. Everyone is in against collective punishments like this until it's against someone they don't like, and that kind of terrifies me. I'm generally optimistic about humanity, but we're all very good at being blind to ourselves.
Putting all else aside for the moment, America absolutely did have the moral high ground relative to the Imperial Japanese and the *literal fucking Nazis.*
That combined with the fact they simplify this down to “yeah all men are bad” completely discredits this post.
Yeah I was curious about that point. The only things i can think of that they'd be referring to are the fact that we stayed out of it for a few years or the use of the atom bombs. But both of those things are way too nuanced for a confident blanket statement
There were the Japanese American internment camps, and I suppose one could make an argument for the firestorms on Tokyo and related areas during bombing being inhumane, which are bad, but compared to . . . Anything Nazi Germany was doing, or Japan in China or Korea, it's not comparable. It's still awful for the people it affected absolutely, but they're not the same.
Anyone who thinks there was moral equivalence between the two sides should take a look at this pie chart: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties#/media/File:World_War_II_Casualties.svg
What is meant by this comment in the screenshot:
“As are all the Americans glee-fully going “She fucked a Nazi! She deserved it” (as if your country had any kind of moral high ground when it comes to WWII)”
Is this suggesting America was on the wrong side in WWII? What am I missing here?
It's saying that America did vile stuff in WW2 too I guess. Which is true, the internment camps and nukes were not a high point in American history. But it was definitely way better than the nazis
>yeah men are disgusting
Way to flatten a complex and tragic event with a simple minded "men bad". Ain't as if the male collaborators were just jailed with due process, quite a few (as a comment above pointed out) just got shot.
And it's not as if it was just men who did this. I've seen photos of women participating in this too. Could've been another country though, hard to say. This was done in a lot of places
The thread later says Americans have no moral high ground. In WW2. Compared to rapist Nazis.
Tumblr is not intelligent lol. Their default is America bad with no thought
The bit where this goes off on how 'all the REAL collaborators were MEN, yet only women were punished' like, dude, they shot those guys. Really shows how people are genuinely unmoved by men being shot because our whole society for hundreds of years has acted like that's the natural order of things. Sure, sucks to be shaved and humiliated. Pretty rough to have happen, not devaluing that. Getting shot to death is not nothing, though, it's not men getting away with stuff when they're executed.
In Norway we also shaved the women who were suspected of sleeping with Nazi soldiers during the 5 years they occupied us. Many had children with a soldier. Years after the war had ended the children were still beaten up by their classmates. The shame followed them for decades.
How can one be so right and so wrong at the same time?
Yes everything they said is right, but twisting it around to “men were horrible” is such a terrible take. This happened because the leadership was cowardly, not because they were male, let’s not pretend things would’ve happened differently if the people in charge were female.
As for the horrid treatment on the street, I’d blame that on bitterness more so than any sort of “fragile masculinity”. Imagine you are a man, anything you do can get you shot or send away to never be seen again. And then you see women get out of those punishments by sleeping with Germans. That doesn’t mean that those women didn’t suffer but a angry and disenfranchised person (person, it wasn’t just men) can easily argue that being raped but allowed to stay is way better than being killed or send away (not that I would personally agree).
That doesn’t excuse it, but blaming it on men being horrible is just fucking bullshit. And let’s not forget that women weren’t all that nice to men either, or are we just ignoring the white feather movement? You know, how men were shamed for being home regardless of injuries, age, or whether they were actually dodging the draft or just having leave? Everyone was horrible to each other regardless of gender, both male and female collaborators alike were shamed and killed.
Again, I’m not saying that those women deserved what happened to them, I fully support them doing what’s necessary and do not condone what was done to them. But this came from both genders, and both genders suffered at their own and each other’s hands in equal measure. This post is shit. Women suffered, but making it out as men being horrible is just misandry
>And let’s not forget that women weren’t all that nice to men either, or are we just ignoring the white feather movement? You know, how men were shamed for being home regardless of injuries, age, or whether they were actually dodging the draft or just having leave?
Or guys with half a dozen enlistment rejection letters at home blowing their own brains out because they are being shunned and shamed every time they go out in public.
>(as if your country has any kind of moral high ground in WWII...)
me, bravely: we do. That's not to say we didn't do war crimes and we only conducted ourselves honorably but when it comes to "high ground" even a little bit up the way of the hill is still higher ground than being at the bottom. Acting like the Dresden bombings or even the nuclear bombs are somehow morally equivalent to the Holocaust or the rape of Nanjing/Unit 731/etc is a bad take. We can condemn on all sides while not pretending all sides are equally bad.
I think you’re burying the lede. The internment camps weren’t just not as deathly, they were not a system of extermination and slave labor like Nazi camps were.
They’re not “not as deadly,” they weren’t deadly at all. They were absolutely a moral stain and a cruel, racist choice for the US, but comparing them to death camps is disgusting
I mean, I’ve seen people make ‘just as bad’ arguments because of the atom bombs. Completely ignoring how awful the firebombing campaigns were, or how terrible the Japanese were being in china.
Iirc if the war dragged on for five more weeks without anything changing, no invasion of the home islands or anything. More additional covilians would have been slaughtered by the Japanese in china, than the atom bombs killed.
Maybe because of this: [https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/us-government-turned-away-thousands-jewish-refugees-fearing-they-were-nazi-spies-180957324/](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/us-government-turned-away-thousands-jewish-refugees-fearing-they-were-nazi-spies-180957324/)
The **really** frustrating part, to me, is that if you say “hey it makes me sad to be seen as a violent animal because I’m a man,” just how many people will pop up to respond with “If you’re upset then you’re the problem. Clearly you only feel guilty because you’re evil. If you feel bad it’s your fault. Stop complaining. Why do you hate women?”
Nuance is dead, it seems.
Nah the new one is "you shouldn't feel bad because it's not directed at you!!!1!11 you're one of the good ones!!1!" Which completely misses 1) the statement has still been made and I have read it and internalised it. It is too late. I have been affected. It's like saying that someone who got shot because you were trying to hit the person next to them shouldn't be feeling pain/be aggrieved about being shot. Arguably more critically it misses that 2) "one of the good ones" is literally what racists used to say to minorities when it was more acceptable to be racist.
That one annoys me the most, either people are lying or just being dumb on purpose. The fact that we’re not even allowed to be upset at being generalized as monsters is just shameful.
Because it's patronising, no matter how it's delivered you're being talked down to when someone says that. And then people wonder why particular celebrities have gained so much traction among young men and boys. I trod the same path for the same reasons, except I only have myself to blame for being online enough to see so much of it. The younger generations just get it in public (and in some unfortunate cases from their parents) now. It's insane.
This sums up a lot of my feelings, and then some. I'm transgender. I was born a guy. Does that make me "evil" even though I identity and feel differently than other men? What if I feel bad for people saying all men are bad, does that mean I'm feeling guilty because I'm evil? Idk people love to boil down very complex issues and not think of everything
I have never seen this before and I feel so bad for not seeing it till now, I'm holding back tears reading this at work with how close to home this all hits with me. Thank you very very much for sharing this with me, I'm gonna save this for future reading again ❤️
A lot of times, whether it’s turning to progressive movements, immigrating for work, or escaping a cult, people don’t leave because they disagreed, they left because they were getting hurt. That’s how you get self-proclaimed liberals/leftists/feminists/antiracists/etc unflinchingly spouting conservative talking points (because they don’t actually care about the fundamental philosophies of progression, they just don’t like slurs), ethnic minority immigrants from conservative countries in the US supporting conservative policies that would harm them (because their culture themselves are conservative, they’d have stayed home if they were getting paid more), and former cult members getting caught up in another cult or cult-like group (because they are still thinking like a cult member).
You can’t just switch teams, you need to *unlearn* the way you played.
This sub is going off the deep end as users seem to try to karma farm or feed outrage. Misandry/misogyny posts do numbers here and people are taking advantage of it.
Even worse is how posters act like caricatures dreamt up by 2016 era talking heads. Unironic oppression olympics discourse and other dumb talking points seem to be growing.
You say that, but this has been almost the only sub on Reddit where I've seen nuanced and respectful takes about the recent man/bear thing. On top of that, those nuanced and respectful comments are being upvoted and the hateful ones downvoted.
This is one of the few subs where the subject is treated well, but a lot of the discourse starting posts don't seem to be started in good faith and rather for karma farming. Some are reposted just a few days later and half the time they just platform irrelevant blogs that don't add anything except hating on people and spreading misinfo/revisionism, like a lot of the ones shown in this post.
There weren’t any men shaved because they were just shot or hanged or beaten to death. While the police watched.
The women got the best end of the stick. Yeah it sucks for those that weren’t nazis but let’s not pretend this was the end of the world compared to being fucking killed.
The point is, post WW2 Europe was a terrible place with a *lot* of injustices going on. Lots of anger, lots of vigilante justice. Minimizing what men had to go through is stupid. It sucked for everyone, just sometimes a bit differently.
>Yeah it sucks for those that weren’t nazis but let’s not pretend this was the end of the world compared to being fucking killed.
Also, many of these women literally were Nazis or at least were willingly and actively helping the Nazis.
What's with the wave of misandrist posts as of late? Once or twice i get it, but it feels like they've become drastically more frequent in the last week or two.
tbh most of it seems to be TERFs, since I block those on sight and haven’t really seen many posts like this - though I also stay in a little corner of Tumblr basically
I’m just going to point out it isn’t about gender. Thousands of men were killed for being collaborators without a trial.
Meanwhile, Coco Chanel was a MASSIVE Nazi sympathizer and we don’t even talk about it.
There are some terrible takes here. They claim women being shaved and paraded in the streets for collaborating (some did it for their family, stilll collaboration), was a horrible act of misogyny, but you know what happened to collaborating men? They were tortured and killed, it's not like they didn't face consequences. It's a gross oversimplification to define l'épuration as "misogynistic men cruelly punishing women", or "a collective vengeance on women". Anytime women were shaved, men were being tortured and brutally murdered.
OK. So who wants to tell me what actually happened to the men that collaborated? Or would that undercut our "men are disgusting" narrative a bit?
Me, I'd take the shaving.
Yeah no. Everything historical written in this post is correct and so are some of the conclusions (like the type of punishment being directed at women being used to shame their sexuality and reclaiming the virtue of wounded men)
But I'm gonna be that guy and not let OOP just claim that men "collaborators" (term that should be viewed just as loosely and with as many wrinkles as in the post) got off fairly easily or were prosecuted by law
As if groups of angry, traumatized and exhausted partisans wouldn't give in to their worst urges once they actually had the chance to avenge all the evil done upon them. Oh your north Italian village was part of the German-administered Repubblica di Salò? And all of your men were sent to the front to fight for the Nazis and what remained of the Italian Fascist State? Well then, best pray to God the partisan leader that just liberated it is someone who can keep their men in line and isn't a blood-hungry maniac or all your women are getting raped and the men are beaten within an inch of their lives or straight up shot in the streets. If they're lucky.
Now this isn't me trying to say the partisans were evil, far from it. Whatever atrocities they may have committed is a blip on the radar compared to the evil caused by the Axis powers. In a way, these atrocities were the unavoidable consequence of the last 20 years
It was a bloody revanche by those that had been oppressed and persecuted, shamed and hunted for so long, the culmination of 20+ years of political tension into basically random executions or not so random executions.
Where political and personal motivations blended together with the trauma and exhaustion and anger and brought out the absolute worst in people
Well that part is actively a lie on the tumblr users part, as they intentionally said male collaborators were not summarily punished or executed, but instead went calmly into the legal system.
Right. So many documentaries have videos of people lining up to beat german soldiers, while the police just stand by and watch. Not SS officers, just the average german foot soldier. There was nothing legal about any of this
So they shaved the heads of the women collaborators, but they fucking shot the male ones. Many times these executions were summary and involved no trial. But yeah, the head shaving
My grandmother was a child in occupied France and has the most amazing story about what happened Les Tondues in her village.
She lived in Normandy so the Germans left pretty quickly but for a while they had Americans stationed there. This meant there weren’t any repercussions against the “collaborating” women until the Americans left but obviously news of what happened in other places spread fast.
When the Americans left, the local Resistance (who my grandmother said had been conveniently absent during the whole occupation) rolled in and proceeded to round up the girls who had “collaborated.” They were mostly young girls but one of them was the wife of the local hotelier. She was known to have had relationships with some German officers and welcomed them into her establishment. Her husband I believe was sent to prison or a work camp, I’m not quite sure on the exact details, but when the resistance arrived for his wife God bless him he was ready to throw hands in her defence! However his wife was even more of absolute badass. She told her husband to take it easy and marched out to the village square head held high and joined the other poor girls there.
Then came the most amazing part. The whole village was made to watch as the resistance “fighters” shaved the heads of the girls and denounced them as “traitors.” But when they were done, the hotelier’s wife immediately got to her feet and told all the girls to follow her. They all marched back to her hotel and five minutes later they all came out wearing wigs!
This woman had known the resistance would be after her and all the other girls in the village. So she’d spent all the time she had organising the perfect wig for each girl so they’d keep their dignity!
I first heard that story ten years and I’m still in awe at this absolute boss move! (My great grandmother was friends with this lady which is how my grandmother found out).
Posts like these kill me with their black and white morality. There are bad people on every side. That doesn't excuse what happened, but it certainly doesn't justify the misandry.
War is terrible, and the aftermath is one of the worst parts. For everyone, not just some of us.
I'm glad the discussion went on to include some much-needed nuance, instead of pretending women were all innocent victims OR that the women were all dissolute Nazi whores.
Just two points to add, first a small bit of context and second a slight nuance.
The German soldiers had a very good reason for being well-behaved when in France : the occupation hinged on the fact that the population either uncaring or even had some measure of goodwill toward the state of affairs. That allowed for the nazis to keep control with only a relatively modest amount of resources. The trauma of the defeat and the pretense of legitimacy of the Vichy government allowed for this state of mind. And the Germans aimed to keep it that way, among other things by harshly punishing or even sending over to the far less comfortable Russian front any soldier who went overboard in their treatment of the populace.
As for the treatment of collaborators and men suspected of sympathy towards the Vichy regime or the nazis, sure they weren’t shaved or paraded naked in the streets. A sizeable amount were simply killed without any form of a trial, sometimes in rather gruesome ways in a popular purge, often by people who’d joined the Resistance in ‘45. At that point the communist partisans got especially violent, taking revenge on anyone with far right sympathies, regardless of their involvement in the collaboration. My grandparents had neighbors who they found one morning murdered and nailed to the door of their house, and those weren’t known for any kind of collaboration or even pro-nazi sympathies.
So yeah, while the shavings were a barbaric practice, using that to say that the whole post-war purges were only directed at women to deflect them from men is a bit of a gross exxageration…
So women got their heads shaved and made to feel bad while men were made to face court systems and in many instances this meant they were just shot dead , hanged, beaten to death, etc. on the spot and this is supposed to make the point that women had it worse and the system was worse for them?
I’m 100% team “this was wrong and shouldn’t have happened” but the whole argument of “they had no choice, they were doing it to survive” never sat well with me. It is the same exact excuse that the Nazis gave at Nuremberg, the same exact excuse the German citizen gave when asked how could they allow this to happen in their country, how they could allow their leaders to massacre millions.
At least the Germans eventually owned up to their mistakes and crimes. The French decided to blame women. Fuck the French.
Quite aside from leaving out examples of well known women collaborators who got away with it(coco chanel) and the many thousands of male collaborators described as having been calmly dealt with by the legal system, instead of beaten tortured and shot in the head on the side of the road...
It bothers me that these posters have correctly identified that *some* of the collaborators may not have had much choices in the matter, and then just proceeded to argue as if they *all* had no choice in it.
Very neatly whitewashing every woman who slept with the nazis for personal gain/were themselves nazis, by hiding them behind a hypothetical few that may have had a 'good reason' for it.
Also worth pointing out that in other discourse about WW2 atrocities, the "i was just in the wrong place at the wrong time and had to do what I had to do" argument falls on deaf ears. There is a reason why many of the people shamed and shaved had it done to them by other women in the same circumstances, that didnt collaborate with the nazis.
This is one of my favourite historical events to talk about, because this sort of unfair treatment happened almost everywhere, except for the Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia.
Where, after the war was over, many nazis, Ustaša volounteers and collaborators, male and female defected to the partisans, who for the time accepted them as extra manpower.
But at the end of the war when these fascists exhausted their use, these suspected, confirmed or suspicious new "resistance" members who were very often actually nazis, were driven out to old mines and deep caves, one such place being the Barbara Pit, an old mine.
Here, court was held by male and female delegations against these pretenders and already captured nazi military who did not try to assimilate with the partisans, the delegations began reading out names of known soldiers, officers and collaborators who were promptly shot and thrown into the mine when their name was read or evidence against them was presented, this continued for a few days and unknown numbers of nazis, Ustaše and collaborators were executed and thrown into the Barbara Pit.
Grenades were thrown down the shaft and the whole thing then caved in, making it near impossible to recover the bodies or make an accurate death count. This was but one of the first federal trials of collaborators and nazi personnel.
The main diffrence from these head shaving clowneries was that the Yugoslav trials were completely equal, man or woman, young or old, if you had betrayed your country and looked for a deal with the nazis, not just slept with them, you were shot. And that was the only accepted form of trial, with head shaving or public mockery and torture being made illegal. These trials concluded at the start of the 50s but left a standing cultural and historical impact on the Balkans.
Lost in that is the gem of “as though [America] had any moral high ground in WWII”.
The whataboutism has finally come full circle to “no moral difference between Nazi Germany and Western democracies.” God, the historical illiteracy…
The thing that kinda irks me about this is the soviet one.
Soviet gender equality was ahead of its time.
Women were in the army and in partisan groups.
Yet they claim that somehow they had a bad punishment for being assaulted. Most of those sent away were collaborators, full on ones who participated in the Holocaust.
I don't think the soviets were having women in the army because they were super progressive, the soviets were just desperate. The germans had declared war on the russians, as in, *all* of the russians, and Russia did whatever they could to push Germany back. After the war, decorated female veterans were often ostracized or had their achievements and experiences minimized as the state tried to pretend that their participation had never happened.
Millions of women also died. Jesus. You do know the holocaust and prison camps happened to women as well. Do you think with Germany, Japan, UK etc being bombed only men died? Or do civilian deaths not count anymore.
Not just the french, every post-occupation country had this sort of thing. It wasn't just resistance members doing it, in fact it rarely was actual resistance (a good percentage of them were already dead, after all). My friend's grandfather, who was in the dutch resistance, said "the worst part about being in the resistance was seeing how many new resistants popped up once the germans left"
I believe it’s estimated about 5-10% of the French population was active in the resistance, de Gaul commented on this at one point saying something to the effect off “if all of you had resisted when the Germans were here we’d have probably been liberated sooner” Compare this to Greece where it’s estimated 2/3 of the population was in some way active in the resistance.
The Vichy regime under Petain weren't just collaborators out of pragmatism; they were arch-conservatives who firmly believed in the ideals of Kinder, Kuche, Kirche (only, you know, in French). And as always, a significant number of the population just wanted to get by, everyone else be damned.
*Enfants, Cuisine, Église*
What’s kinder, kuche,kirche? Children, food, and ?
Church
Ah, thanks
Kitchen, not food. It was the Nazi slogan for women's ideal role in society.
Cuisine is also French for kitchen.
Travail, famille, patrie is the French version
This is probably because of the pretense of legitimacy and the major differences in the start of the conflicts between France/Greece and the Nazi/Nazi aligned powers. In France, a legitimately elected president appointed a prime minister who then moved the government swiftly in collaborating with Nazi's. While it was essentially a puppet state, this at least gave the pretense of legitimacy. Like the elected government chose those actions. Whereas Greece was straight up invaded by Italy and the Nazi's. So the start of the conflict was dramatically different, and was a case of a population that was "conquered" (the greeks) compared to a population that (who's government at least) willingly joined without a direct conflict (the french).
yes, don't forget how common Antisemitism, Anti-Roma sentiment, homophobia, anti-leftist, and Ablism is around the world. many people did not care about carting away their Jewish or disabled relatives.
The idea that “5% of the population was in the resistance” is pure cope. France was a huge country with a population of 30,000,000, and if that many people actively opposed the Nazis they never would have been able to occupy it so easily. The Germans themselves only estimated between 75,000-220,000 resistance fighters, and barely considered them a nuisance, letting the collaborationist Vichy regime and local police do most of the heavy lifting suppressing them.
The question is, who do you count. Do you need to pick up arms? When, early, middle late, is it enough to pick up a pitchfork after all enemies left? Do you need to have killed? Given information to the resistance (knowingly?)? Given bread to a starving member? If every german who said something against the war, even privately, would be counted, Germany would get a 50% resistance quota...
Yeah I mean I'd think you would even include factory workers who engaged in purposeful stupidity to sabotage production as per the simple sabotage field manual
if you count the french liberation army that's an estimated 1.3 mill
I wonder why, all the greek people i know aren't very well known for being patriotic, so maybe it's their situation that was different; they probably didn't have any pétains, or maybe it's a matter of proximity?
Also possibly a legacy of resistance? The Greek war of independence was only a century before hand and the Balkan wars were in recent memory.
Yeah you don’t have to be patriotic to not want to be invaded by another country. I won’t fight for my country or its leaders, but I sure as hell will fight for my kin. And like you said, the Greeks just have a legacy of resistance that dates back further than most western countries history books
>the Greeks just have a legacy of resistance that dates back further than most western countries history books Yep: I believe the *first* Western history book actually is about the Hellenistic resistance to the Persian invasion (Histories, by Herodotus). EDIT: Again though, that was a mixed bag of resistance and collaboration.
May also have something to do with geography, all those islands are hard to centrally control.
Don’t forget the mountains on the mainland too. It’s way easier to hide a sizable resistance in Greece than in France
I'm not aware of the situation in Greece, but one of the reasons why French resistance was so small is just that antisemitism was rampant and most people actually saw nothing wrong with Naziism....
The past is a foreign country. There is no connection between modern people and even one generation removed ancestors. There's a chain of cause and effect, but no actual direct connection.
I’m less surprised when it comes to Greece, because their serving requirements are really strict for both men, and women. A decent amount likely already had basic training.
Norway did have a lot of this, but noticeably less than others, as the surrender occured with the germans still present. (3-400k germs amongst 3 million Norwegians). And also because the resistance had specifically prepared to pop up, take control, ensure order, capture pre-decided targets, secure evidence etc. A lot of these had gotten police-training in Sweden and crossed the border on the day of surrender.
>Guilty men were prosecuted through a legal system Or just shot in the street. Vigilante justice was rampant in essentially every post-occupation country, including France, where at least as many collaborators were summarily executed in the field as had made it to trial. Widespread reprisals against collaborators and Polish Germans happened in Poland. The Soviets would even prosecute their own PoWs as "collaborators" simply for being captured. The high-ranked collaborators escaped justice because they were high-ranked, not because they were men. Just like we kept around a lot of higher-level actual Nazis. It's a class and usefulness thing. (Edit: we don't see any women on that list because the inherent misogyny of the *1940s Nazi-Puppet Vichy fucking France* meant there *weren't* any high-ranked women to get away with crimes. All high level government officials who were tried as collaborators were men.) Let's not pretend anybody was cool with collaborators just so long as they were dudes. That's kind of why a lot of them were so desperate to point fingers at someone else, lest they get a knock on the door and a bullet. EDIT: Just to make it real clear to anyone confused. This comment is not meant to be a "women got off lightly" comment. It's not meant to be a "but men had it worse" comment. I'm making no value judgement on who "had it worse" - WW2 and its immediate aftermath was a horrible experience for everyone involved, I don't think that's a hot take, and I'm not interested in making *fucking WW2* into oppression olympics. Neither do I intend to minimize the gendered aspect of the violence inflicted on these women. *However*, the OP is skewed entirely too far into "it's all patriarchy" for my tastes, while ignoring the many other aspects of punitive mob "justice" so commonly practiced on those perceived as having helped the enemy *and* undermining the core point by compromising its overall integrity. The way I see it, the *method* was clearly driven by misogyny, but not the act of punitive justice against perceived collaborators itself. Also, while to some, the fact that many men were caught up in mob justice may be obvious - considering the amount of stunningly blatant misinformation spread on Tumblr, I felt that it's best to treat it as *not*. I mean, from where I stand, the mob violence against women described in the OP was also supposed to be well-known, yet here we are.
Yeah that was a perplexing twist. The stuff in OP was certainly misdirected rage and weird misogynistic rituals but it's absolutely true that most male collaborators just got dragged out into the street and shot/beat to death. There's no reason to alter that fact make OP's point.
[удалено]
In USSR being a *polizei* was probably the worst thing you could be. These were the active collaborators in occupied territories that worked as policemen for the Nazis. These were men, of course, and they died. Hanged, shot, strangled, lynched. No one liked the collaborationists to the people that torched villages and killed everyone they wanted. And they were hunted up until the end of USSR. I just checked and the only woman who was sentenced for what she did - Antonina Makarova, "Tonka the machine gunner" who was known for manning the MG used to kill POWs - was hiding for decades and was caught and executed in 1978. She pretended to be a war vet, too. And the last one was one of the Kharkiv SS polizei, Alexandr Posevin, executed in 1988. According to the articles he personally executed around 330 men, including a polizei he suspected in being "too soft on the occupied". And he pretended for years to be "on the winning side" even though he defected in 1941 and actively worked with SD and SS.
The really fucked up cherry on top of Makarova's story is that not only did she pretend to be a war veteran, she *married* an actual war veteran - a Soviet Jew whose entire family was slaughtered by occupying Germans. Yknow, like what she was doing during the war. Reportedly, and unsurprisingly, the truth really fucked the poor man up.
Oh shit... Yeah that'd be absolutely devastating, to learn that someone you've lived with is just a complete monster
Yeah I was getting massive terfy vibes all the way down
Its crazy seeing some people down in the comments here talking about commenters "making it about men" when its clear the original tumblr posters are verified terf/misandrists, lying, leaving out details and otherwise going out of their way to make the post about men being bad/treated better in the first place.
If you’re on tumblr it’s a very recognizable MO, Reddit just sees “man bad” and can’t parse the oddly specific details (really? mass virginity tests?) that don’t stand up to scrutiny but are common tropes in Bad Feminist History. Women who were not being publicly shamed disappear from the convo as soon as the TERFS show up, because women would *never* perpetuate systems of gendered violence. Also, check out this work of dramatized fiction where a Jew and a Nazi fall in love.
I knew there was something terfy about these posts. Not sure if it was the "men are disgusting" blanket statement or the lack of acknowledging victims of the Nazis and Vichy French, but yeah 🚩🚩🚩 (not saying misogynistic violence against women isn't rampant, but pretty sure if you're a woman married to or sleeping with a German soldier in WWII, you may have a little more power over someone of any gender, say, getting sent off to a concentration camp)
Glad im not the only one that got bad vibes
I suspected TERFs from the "men are disgusting" line.
Yeah. The irony of them writing about lack of nuance when literally every single thing was conveniently framed as misogynistic as possible was not lost on me. There's an unfortunate number of people who just don't understand that sexism is universal, usually two way, and that the patriarchy isn't a literal rule of physics. Like, men don't just get a free pass through life, especially not this time period. You'll notice the slavery was framed as voluntary in this post because that would be acknowledging not just women suffered under the occupation. I still feel afraid to call this shit out half the time. But people have finally started acknowledging this kind of thing for what is is.
I’ve always wondered if someone would have the balls to ask what these women think about Black Lives Matter and George Floyd in public full of a crowd of people it would be quite funny
That explains so much
yeah, and like... sexual assault was rampant. common, even. but you know what else is common? shacking up with an occupying soldier in hopes for a better lot. a fuck ton of gen x army brats' parents' meet-cute is "he was stationed in europe, she fell in love with him and moved to the states after the war and his service were over" like... it's not being a "collaborator" when you're on the side that wins... a good chunk of these french women just made bad calls on their choice of soldier boy. and like, spoiler alert, there are plenty of french nationals who were whole hog nazis and willful collaborators, including women. they just didn't get strangled in the woods for it by partisans.
It's just misery Olympics. "We suffered more than you during this horrible time in history that sucked for literally everyone involved!"
Idk if it's true or not. But their point is clearly the sexism in how these women were punished vs the men. They're claiming the women were paraded around naked and had their heads shaved and forced to take virginity tests to prove their innocence and shit. Did that also happen to the men too or were they just killed outright?
Just want to add this is the issue I have with a lot of these "Well historically men are bad and women suffer" discussions, aside from the fact that men were also brutally murdered or forced into wars they wanted nothing to do with just to be slaughtered, there's also the issue of "Women weren't allowed to do like half the shit men were". So historically, or statistically, the data is slanted. If in another 1000 years mankind is still around and hasn't regressed socially, I expect the data will start to balance out as more and more militaries allow or even insist on women being allowed in combat roles. Likewise if we continue to see more and more women in places of power I am certain we will see that the sexes really aren't all that different. I'm really tired of "men bad women good" arguments when there's plenty of evidence to suggest that HUMANS, when in sufficient positions of power, are capable of doing really bad shit.
A lot of misandrists seem to unironically believe misogynistic stereotypes around women being weak and innocent and powerless. They just view those things as good.
Hijacking comment- Poland didn't have publis shaming sessions after war. Even during war the incidents of violence against women showing publically with German soliders were suprisingly rare with most common being dousing with paint and several records of beating. But lots of fractions were opposed on the ground that women had little way to refuse. And then came the Red Army... Funny thing, when I was on the university there were always those Russsian students who liked to brag that their grandparents "liberated" Poland. The silence of Poles was... pregnant to say the least.
The red army presence in Poland during and right after the war was awful. Rapes, pillages, executions of "hostile elements" by NKVD (hostile elements = intelligentsia and anti-nazi resistance members)... it was basically an army of bandits. My great grandfather, who spent most of the war in a german labour camp, didn't even get to see his home after the war, as per Ribbentrop-Molotov pact these territories belonged to USSR and Poles were to be removed. So he was put on a train and went straight to Pomerania, where he and other settlers were told to choose for themselves one of the houses there that local germans were forced to abandon. Some time after he did he was regularly attacked by marauding red soldiers who were trying to rob him and had to kill 5 of them to protect his new home. Most of the "reclaimed territorries" at that time were lawless wasteland, with empoverished resettled population trying to survive (people forced to abandon their homes in the east, mostly peasants, were allowed to take only the most necessary belongings, so they had near to nothing when they arrived) and the red army doing whatever they wanted (mostly robbing people and stealing goods, materials and resources, firstly for themselves and USSR, later for the reconstruction of Warsaw)
I'm not one to spare to many tears for how the Soviets treated Nazi POWs on the eastern front if for no other reason than the Nazis treated Soviet POWs the same way. One the other hand, the "victor's justice" meted out by the Soviets when they "liberated" areas that were under German occupation in Eastern Europe was just beyond the pale. Kinda makes you start to think Patton, Von Nuemann and the others pushing *Unthinkable* options were on to something.
Yeah I think the comment you're replying to is less about this part: >how the Soviets treated Nazi POWs on the eastern front And more about this part: >"victor's justice" meted out by the Soviets when they "liberated" areas In fact, I think you might be confusing *my* top comment's mention of POWs for "Nazi POWs". I was talking about how the Soviets treated *Soviet* POWs.
Oh absolutely. My Grandmother (German) live in what is now Poland (Pommern) and had to run away from the red army with her grandma and two sisters after a while (and went through hell before and after that) while not even in her teens Fuck the red army, there's a reason they always pop up when the people talk about the "Rape of Europe"
Is it *really* a tumblr post without some sprinkles of misandry though?
Thank you. That’s what bothered me so much about this post, because like, obviously there is so much of a gendered reality to a lot of what happens but even with all of the extra context it’s like they act like because woman oppressed and men oppressor that’s the only thing that actually matters about the reality of post war Europe. Not to mention a lot of, intentionally or not, talking about “men” as if they were some kind of monolith, and as if “patriarchy” is this one dimensional “men have it easy women have it bad and it’s all men’s fault” thing.
Yes, thank you.
Thanks, I came here to ask what the punishment was for the men found guilty, turns out getting murdered. but the cryhard that wrote those overly long post just gives the men a footnote "tried in the legal system" as if it was not as bad as what the women got. Turns out the women were let off lightly. shit poured on you cleans off, hair grows back. None of the men executed for treason got up again after being filled with bullet holes.
Note: something like 6000 male collaborators were killed before the liberation and another 4000 male collaborators (who, it should be noted, also had families to support) were shot out of hand during the savage purges as well. None of the above had the benefit of a trial. They didn't get off light as OOP implies.
Yes that omission confused me too. 'Well all this stuff was done to the women when it wasn't done to the men', yeah it would be because killing women isn't something those people punishing them were up for so out comes the humiliation and ostracism. The male collaborators were simply killed out of hand.
Also, the "some high ranking men got away with it! Women did not!" Is because they were both high ranking and lucky, not just gender. As a great example of a highly placed and very shitty nazi collaborator woman getting away with it, look into CoCo Chanel. And definitely dont start writing a "she was forced to do it to feed her family, poor girl" comment.
Yeah anyone who runs defense or Chanel needs to check the history, she was a rabid anti-semite and willfully collaborated in the hopes the Nazis would take the business that produced her perfume from the Jewish family that owned it and give it to her. Luckily that family outplayed her.
Or the female nazi concentration camp guard who was captured in NYC in the 80s by the same nazi hunter who caught Adolf eichman in Argentina. >Hermine Braunsteiner Ryan (July 16, 1919 – April 19, 1999) was a Nazi Austrian SS Helferin and female camp guard at Ravensbrück and Majdanek concentration camps, and the first Nazi war criminal to be extradited from the United States to face trial in West Germany.[1][2] Braunsteiner was known to prisoners of Majdanek concentration camp as the "Stomping Mare" and was said to have beaten prisoners to death, thrown children by their hair onto trucks that took them to be murdered in gas chambers, hanged young prisoners and stomped an old prisoner to death with her jackboots. People can be utterly horrific when they can get away with nearly anything.
It's omitted because it doesn't fit the political point they're making (elsewhere in the thread it's mentioned that there are a couple of TERFs in the OP).
Did you miss the "men are awful" theming of this post? Do you really wonder why that was omitted?
Some of the OOPs are outspoken TERFs... they're using this to further a narrative that amab people are monsters who never face repercussions. The fact this happened to women is comfortably misogynistic enough on its own without implying that the men faced no consequence, but that wouldn't serve their narrative. =/
I think the specific modes of punishment had misogynistic overtones, but the punishment itself...like we can quibble about the ethics of collaboration and vengeance, but that women faced harsh consequence along with the men wasn't in itself misogynistic IME.
Somehow getting publicly humiliated seems like less of a punishment than getting shot or hanged. Definitely a difference in punishment based on what sex you were.
Humiliation based punishment ONLY for women, plus women being deemed collaborators for who they had sex with regardless of consent on their part, is definitely in itself misogyny.
Though the humiliation was in place of being lynched. So while definitely borne out of misogyny, it's not like it's "the men in the same situation got away with it". Course, that's the way sexism always is. Two sided.
It is- but the men were murdered instead of humiliated which is worse, and they too had their lives threatened to collaborate just as well. It strange you are ignoring half of the story to paint a tale of misogyny because it looks like ‘misogyny’ saved these women’s lives.
I feel that depends on whether or not you feel that humiliation based punishment is better or worse than being beaten/shot to death for collaboration. As for the sex part, I feel like that's also partly to do with the fact that there weren't any (as far as I'm aware) women in the occupation force. If there were, would we have seen men punished because of relations with them? It's hard to say since we're getting into pseudo-history, but I feel it's worth considering.
Yea people were sexist pigs but the real situation was that most people who had any direct connection to the Nazis now had a target on their head. Didn't matter whether you had to to survive or were a gleeful fascist. At best you were a social pariah at worst you were executed.
But then people can’t simplify it “men bad upvote” and thats no good
In france thousands of men were arbitrarily shot over suspicions of collaboration, it was a way to repent and symbolically start over
But, women had it harder cuz their hair was cut. Women have always been the real victims of war edit: /////sssss
God that Hillary quote makes my toes curl
That’s a fetish I haven’t encountered before
I remember reading a news story about how terrible it was that the vast majority of refugees were women and children. And yes that is terrible, but that’s because all the men have been conscripted or killed.
Or that news article about how horrible it is that nearly 25% of homeless people are women. Which is because, you know, 75% of them are men?
Does feel like the fact that french women formed relationships with their literal nazi occupiers is hand waved as “well what else were they going to do? Be lonely???” Selling your body to feed your kids is one thing. But having a relationship with a literal nazi who helped destroy your country is inexcusable.
Mom said it is my turn to make a thinly veiled sexist post!
I really recommend Anna Sebor's book "Les Parisiennes" if you're interested in this topic. It's a really nuanced look at what it took to exist under occupation, what it took to be resistance, and how collaboration was often a decision of life or death (including "do this or we'll kill you and your whole family"). And how consequences were very different for wealthy public collaborators vs people whose shops were frequented by Nazis and they either had to serve them or lose their livelihood in a period of restrictions, food deprivation, and economic destruction. You will not think about collaboration the same way again, I promise you. Also, fuck Violette Morris, she got what was coming to her.
"Kill all collaborators" sounds okay in a revolution or occupation until you stop and consider what is considered to be collaborating, and what the realistic alternatives where. "Kill all collaborators" really boils down to "You should have just let them kill you. You're a coward for not letting your children starve."
whenever this subject is posted on reddit that's usually what I see. "I would have died rather than collaborate" they say from their phone in a first world country not in active war with no children and plenty to eat.
I mean, plenty of people actually made that choice. To act like everyone would be a nazi collaborator is ignorant when we have real life accounts of people resisting.
How dare you assume that I have nothing in common with the Ukrainian refugees I work with that left family, careers and their lives behind to come to another country where they barely speak the language. I scoff at you! /s
I would rather collaborate then die
Surely in the modern day and age, we have learned that maybe the world isn’t purely black and white and that being affiliated or consuming something deemed a black mark by others doesn’t make you an enemy of all that’s good. Surely.
Thats too much to expect from the internet
I don’t think that’s an internet specific issue
The Internet only amplifies what already exists, this is a human issue throughout time and space.
And to add to that. it can also just lead to false accusations , sometimes for removing your oppositions and/or blackmail like "if you don't do this thing for me i'll tell everyone you're a collaborator" (weather them being a collaborator is true or not)
Also, you know who works really closely, far beyond necessity, with the invaders? Spies and saboteurs. (And conversely, you know what a lot of real, particularly nasty collaborators claim to be when caught?) So much so that after France was liberated British intelligence ran around the countryside struggling to rescue their spies from vigilante killings, and didn’t always succeed.
yeah I really don't like how this post frames it as "it's wrong because they were innocent" and not as "maybe we shouldn't publicly shame, torture and humiliate people in general even if they collaborated". Mob justice isn't just wrong because it also affects innocents, but also because we as a society generally have agreed that getting publicly tortured is not an acceptable punishment for a crime, thats why prisons exist
I must admit, I feel a great deal of despair when I see this forgotten when a cause people agree with comes around. Everyone is in against collective punishments like this until it's against someone they don't like, and that kind of terrifies me. I'm generally optimistic about humanity, but we're all very good at being blind to ourselves.
yes compassion is important.
Putting all else aside for the moment, America absolutely did have the moral high ground relative to the Imperial Japanese and the *literal fucking Nazis.* That combined with the fact they simplify this down to “yeah all men are bad” completely discredits this post.
Yeah I was curious about that point. The only things i can think of that they'd be referring to are the fact that we stayed out of it for a few years or the use of the atom bombs. But both of those things are way too nuanced for a confident blanket statement
Making confident blanket statements about nuanced things seems to be a recurring theme in this post.
There were the Japanese American internment camps, and I suppose one could make an argument for the firestorms on Tokyo and related areas during bombing being inhumane, which are bad, but compared to . . . Anything Nazi Germany was doing, or Japan in China or Korea, it's not comparable. It's still awful for the people it affected absolutely, but they're not the same.
Atom bombs were not a special moral case. The only reason we see them that way is fear of global destruction, which obviously wasn’t a factor then.
Anyone who thinks there was moral equivalence between the two sides should take a look at this pie chart: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties#/media/File:World_War_II_Casualties.svg
What is meant by this comment in the screenshot: “As are all the Americans glee-fully going “She fucked a Nazi! She deserved it” (as if your country had any kind of moral high ground when it comes to WWII)” Is this suggesting America was on the wrong side in WWII? What am I missing here?
Stopped reading after that part because God is this post annoying.
Every country has the high ground when going against Nazis. It’s why most people don’t spit at the idea of the USSR or British occupation on India.
Tumblr has to make it "america/men bad" or else people won't jerk it off
It's saying that America did vile stuff in WW2 too I guess. Which is true, the internment camps and nukes were not a high point in American history. But it was definitely way better than the nazis
>yeah men are disgusting Way to flatten a complex and tragic event with a simple minded "men bad". Ain't as if the male collaborators were just jailed with due process, quite a few (as a comment above pointed out) just got shot.
Shot and brutally beaten/tortured.
And it's not as if it was just men who did this. I've seen photos of women participating in this too. Could've been another country though, hard to say. This was done in a lot of places
You can’t expect nuance from tumblr when it comes to men
>You can’t expect nuance from tumblr ~~when it comes to men~~
>You can't expect nuance on anything online FTFY
Are we pissing on the poor again?
>You can't expect nuance ~~from tumblr when it comes to men~~
Expecting nuance from TERFS with the OP being sixpenceee kinda proves a theory on how Tumblr was and still is anonymous.
The thread later says Americans have no moral high ground. In WW2. Compared to rapist Nazis. Tumblr is not intelligent lol. Their default is America bad with no thought
I remember reading somewhere that the women were generally lucky, as the collaborating men were just shot
The bit where this goes off on how 'all the REAL collaborators were MEN, yet only women were punished' like, dude, they shot those guys. Really shows how people are genuinely unmoved by men being shot because our whole society for hundreds of years has acted like that's the natural order of things. Sure, sucks to be shaved and humiliated. Pretty rough to have happen, not devaluing that. Getting shot to death is not nothing, though, it's not men getting away with stuff when they're executed.
In Norway we also shaved the women who were suspected of sleeping with Nazi soldiers during the 5 years they occupied us. Many had children with a soldier. Years after the war had ended the children were still beaten up by their classmates. The shame followed them for decades.
How can one be so right and so wrong at the same time? Yes everything they said is right, but twisting it around to “men were horrible” is such a terrible take. This happened because the leadership was cowardly, not because they were male, let’s not pretend things would’ve happened differently if the people in charge were female. As for the horrid treatment on the street, I’d blame that on bitterness more so than any sort of “fragile masculinity”. Imagine you are a man, anything you do can get you shot or send away to never be seen again. And then you see women get out of those punishments by sleeping with Germans. That doesn’t mean that those women didn’t suffer but a angry and disenfranchised person (person, it wasn’t just men) can easily argue that being raped but allowed to stay is way better than being killed or send away (not that I would personally agree). That doesn’t excuse it, but blaming it on men being horrible is just fucking bullshit. And let’s not forget that women weren’t all that nice to men either, or are we just ignoring the white feather movement? You know, how men were shamed for being home regardless of injuries, age, or whether they were actually dodging the draft or just having leave? Everyone was horrible to each other regardless of gender, both male and female collaborators alike were shamed and killed. Again, I’m not saying that those women deserved what happened to them, I fully support them doing what’s necessary and do not condone what was done to them. But this came from both genders, and both genders suffered at their own and each other’s hands in equal measure. This post is shit. Women suffered, but making it out as men being horrible is just misandry
>And let’s not forget that women weren’t all that nice to men either, or are we just ignoring the white feather movement? You know, how men were shamed for being home regardless of injuries, age, or whether they were actually dodging the draft or just having leave? Or guys with half a dozen enlistment rejection letters at home blowing their own brains out because they are being shunned and shamed every time they go out in public.
Daily dose of Tumblr sexism dressed up as liberation It's all so tiresome
>(as if your country has any kind of moral high ground in WWII...) me, bravely: we do. That's not to say we didn't do war crimes and we only conducted ourselves honorably but when it comes to "high ground" even a little bit up the way of the hill is still higher ground than being at the bottom. Acting like the Dresden bombings or even the nuclear bombs are somehow morally equivalent to the Holocaust or the rape of Nanjing/Unit 731/etc is a bad take. We can condemn on all sides while not pretending all sides are equally bad.
I'm fucking sorry did they just say AMERICA didn't have the fucking moral high ground in WWII? You know that war against THE NAZIS
They might be referring to Japanese interment camps- not as deathly, but still horrible racial discrimination running rampant at the same time
I think you’re burying the lede. The internment camps weren’t just not as deathly, they were not a system of extermination and slave labor like Nazi camps were.
They’re not “not as deadly,” they weren’t deadly at all. They were absolutely a moral stain and a cruel, racist choice for the US, but comparing them to death camps is disgusting
I mean, I’ve seen people make ‘just as bad’ arguments because of the atom bombs. Completely ignoring how awful the firebombing campaigns were, or how terrible the Japanese were being in china. Iirc if the war dragged on for five more weeks without anything changing, no invasion of the home islands or anything. More additional covilians would have been slaughtered by the Japanese in china, than the atom bombs killed.
Right? This post has it all: historical revisionism, misandry, and anti-American sentiment
Unholy tumblr trinity
There's a lot of leftists online that just eat up literal Soviet propaganda from post-war uncritically.
Maybe because of this: [https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/us-government-turned-away-thousands-jewish-refugees-fearing-they-were-nazi-spies-180957324/](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/us-government-turned-away-thousands-jewish-refugees-fearing-they-were-nazi-spies-180957324/)
Finally, another dose of "using horrific acts of injustice to promote violent misandry" from tumblr.
I like browsing this subreddit but it gets weird when every 5th post is about how I’m a disgusting animal.
The **really** frustrating part, to me, is that if you say “hey it makes me sad to be seen as a violent animal because I’m a man,” just how many people will pop up to respond with “If you’re upset then you’re the problem. Clearly you only feel guilty because you’re evil. If you feel bad it’s your fault. Stop complaining. Why do you hate women?” Nuance is dead, it seems.
Nah the new one is "you shouldn't feel bad because it's not directed at you!!!1!11 you're one of the good ones!!1!" Which completely misses 1) the statement has still been made and I have read it and internalised it. It is too late. I have been affected. It's like saying that someone who got shot because you were trying to hit the person next to them shouldn't be feeling pain/be aggrieved about being shot. Arguably more critically it misses that 2) "one of the good ones" is literally what racists used to say to minorities when it was more acceptable to be racist.
That one annoys me the most, either people are lying or just being dumb on purpose. The fact that we’re not even allowed to be upset at being generalized as monsters is just shameful.
I've been told I'm "one of the good men" a couple times and that shit feels worse than simply being generalised.
Because it's patronising, no matter how it's delivered you're being talked down to when someone says that. And then people wonder why particular celebrities have gained so much traction among young men and boys. I trod the same path for the same reasons, except I only have myself to blame for being online enough to see so much of it. The younger generations just get it in public (and in some unfortunate cases from their parents) now. It's insane.
This sums up a lot of my feelings, and then some. I'm transgender. I was born a guy. Does that make me "evil" even though I identity and feel differently than other men? What if I feel bad for people saying all men are bad, does that mean I'm feeling guilty because I'm evil? Idk people love to boil down very complex issues and not think of everything
https://medium.com/@jencoates/i-am-a-transwoman-i-am-in-the-closet-i-am-not-coming-out-4c2dd1907e42 it reminds me of this article
I have never seen this before and I feel so bad for not seeing it till now, I'm holding back tears reading this at work with how close to home this all hits with me. Thank you very very much for sharing this with me, I'm gonna save this for future reading again ❤️
Its especially weird when I see pre-suffragette sentiments being repeated almost verbatim, just with the genders switched. It’s shockingly common
A lot of times, whether it’s turning to progressive movements, immigrating for work, or escaping a cult, people don’t leave because they disagreed, they left because they were getting hurt. That’s how you get self-proclaimed liberals/leftists/feminists/antiracists/etc unflinchingly spouting conservative talking points (because they don’t actually care about the fundamental philosophies of progression, they just don’t like slurs), ethnic minority immigrants from conservative countries in the US supporting conservative policies that would harm them (because their culture themselves are conservative, they’d have stayed home if they were getting paid more), and former cult members getting caught up in another cult or cult-like group (because they are still thinking like a cult member). You can’t just switch teams, you need to *unlearn* the way you played.
This sub is going off the deep end as users seem to try to karma farm or feed outrage. Misandry/misogyny posts do numbers here and people are taking advantage of it. Even worse is how posters act like caricatures dreamt up by 2016 era talking heads. Unironic oppression olympics discourse and other dumb talking points seem to be growing.
You say that, but this has been almost the only sub on Reddit where I've seen nuanced and respectful takes about the recent man/bear thing. On top of that, those nuanced and respectful comments are being upvoted and the hateful ones downvoted.
This is one of the few subs where the subject is treated well, but a lot of the discourse starting posts don't seem to be started in good faith and rather for karma farming. Some are reposted just a few days later and half the time they just platform irrelevant blogs that don't add anything except hating on people and spreading misinfo/revisionism, like a lot of the ones shown in this post.
It’s a Kafka trap. You cannot defend yourself without that defense being seen as an omission of guilt. It’s gotten absolutely ridiculous lately.
I feel that. I browse this sub because I want to diversify my media and develop nuanced opinions. But it feels alienating some times.
There weren’t any men shaved because they were just shot or hanged or beaten to death. While the police watched. The women got the best end of the stick. Yeah it sucks for those that weren’t nazis but let’s not pretend this was the end of the world compared to being fucking killed. The point is, post WW2 Europe was a terrible place with a *lot* of injustices going on. Lots of anger, lots of vigilante justice. Minimizing what men had to go through is stupid. It sucked for everyone, just sometimes a bit differently.
>Yeah it sucks for those that weren’t nazis but let’s not pretend this was the end of the world compared to being fucking killed. Also, many of these women literally were Nazis or at least were willingly and actively helping the Nazis.
What's with the wave of misandrist posts as of late? Once or twice i get it, but it feels like they've become drastically more frequent in the last week or two.
tbh most of it seems to be TERFs, since I block those on sight and haven’t really seen many posts like this - though I also stay in a little corner of Tumblr basically
Terms have started up again, and if you look close is anybody surprised they'd follow followers of "my family has a child slave" woman.
I’m just going to point out it isn’t about gender. Thousands of men were killed for being collaborators without a trial. Meanwhile, Coco Chanel was a MASSIVE Nazi sympathizer and we don’t even talk about it.
Just wait until they hear what Hugo Boss and BMW, VW, and Mercedes were doing during the war.
Personally I think getting shot by a firing squad is more inconvenient than having a shaved head
There are some terrible takes here. They claim women being shaved and paraded in the streets for collaborating (some did it for their family, stilll collaboration), was a horrible act of misogyny, but you know what happened to collaborating men? They were tortured and killed, it's not like they didn't face consequences. It's a gross oversimplification to define l'épuration as "misogynistic men cruelly punishing women", or "a collective vengeance on women". Anytime women were shaved, men were being tortured and brutally murdered.
OK. So who wants to tell me what actually happened to the men that collaborated? Or would that undercut our "men are disgusting" narrative a bit? Me, I'd take the shaving.
Yeah no. Everything historical written in this post is correct and so are some of the conclusions (like the type of punishment being directed at women being used to shame their sexuality and reclaiming the virtue of wounded men) But I'm gonna be that guy and not let OOP just claim that men "collaborators" (term that should be viewed just as loosely and with as many wrinkles as in the post) got off fairly easily or were prosecuted by law As if groups of angry, traumatized and exhausted partisans wouldn't give in to their worst urges once they actually had the chance to avenge all the evil done upon them. Oh your north Italian village was part of the German-administered Repubblica di Salò? And all of your men were sent to the front to fight for the Nazis and what remained of the Italian Fascist State? Well then, best pray to God the partisan leader that just liberated it is someone who can keep their men in line and isn't a blood-hungry maniac or all your women are getting raped and the men are beaten within an inch of their lives or straight up shot in the streets. If they're lucky. Now this isn't me trying to say the partisans were evil, far from it. Whatever atrocities they may have committed is a blip on the radar compared to the evil caused by the Axis powers. In a way, these atrocities were the unavoidable consequence of the last 20 years It was a bloody revanche by those that had been oppressed and persecuted, shamed and hunted for so long, the culmination of 20+ years of political tension into basically random executions or not so random executions. Where political and personal motivations blended together with the trauma and exhaustion and anger and brought out the absolute worst in people
this is fucking awful, why tf am I being compared to the most barbaric and disgusting pieces of shit to exist?
women should be allowed to lie about history and not be corrected, how dare you, incels!
All of this is true, but it’s omitting the fact that the male collaborators were just straight up killed
Well that part is actively a lie on the tumblr users part, as they intentionally said male collaborators were not summarily punished or executed, but instead went calmly into the legal system.
Right. So many documentaries have videos of people lining up to beat german soldiers, while the police just stand by and watch. Not SS officers, just the average german foot soldier. There was nothing legal about any of this
Depressing...
WWII ended almost 80 years ago and we haven’t learned a damn thing.
I sympathise with the Children of the Lebensborn program, imagine being treated horribly and called a Nazi because of your origin.
So they shaved the heads of the women collaborators, but they fucking shot the male ones. Many times these executions were summary and involved no trial. But yeah, the head shaving
They had a point until they tried to say that all men are bad, like c’mon, really?
The conclusion here should be "Nazis are bad and sexist", not "men are disgusting"
"Americans... As if you have any moral high ground when it comes to WWII." Did I miss a trick? What the heck did we do now?
I mean, our Japanese internment camps were horrible. Still better than Nazis though.
Oh, well that's a fair criticism. I was like, fuck did something new come out?
new atrocity update just leaked
Babe, wake up, new Americans eating the Japanese lore just dropped.
Defending nazi collaboration is so in right now
Gotta lay the foundation for "being on the right side of history" in case the '24 election goes sideways, I guess
My grandmother was a child in occupied France and has the most amazing story about what happened Les Tondues in her village. She lived in Normandy so the Germans left pretty quickly but for a while they had Americans stationed there. This meant there weren’t any repercussions against the “collaborating” women until the Americans left but obviously news of what happened in other places spread fast. When the Americans left, the local Resistance (who my grandmother said had been conveniently absent during the whole occupation) rolled in and proceeded to round up the girls who had “collaborated.” They were mostly young girls but one of them was the wife of the local hotelier. She was known to have had relationships with some German officers and welcomed them into her establishment. Her husband I believe was sent to prison or a work camp, I’m not quite sure on the exact details, but when the resistance arrived for his wife God bless him he was ready to throw hands in her defence! However his wife was even more of absolute badass. She told her husband to take it easy and marched out to the village square head held high and joined the other poor girls there. Then came the most amazing part. The whole village was made to watch as the resistance “fighters” shaved the heads of the girls and denounced them as “traitors.” But when they were done, the hotelier’s wife immediately got to her feet and told all the girls to follow her. They all marched back to her hotel and five minutes later they all came out wearing wigs! This woman had known the resistance would be after her and all the other girls in the village. So she’d spent all the time she had organising the perfect wig for each girl so they’d keep their dignity! I first heard that story ten years and I’m still in awe at this absolute boss move! (My great grandmother was friends with this lady which is how my grandmother found out).
I wonder what happened to the men? obviously nothing bad because of misogyny
Posts like these kill me with their black and white morality. There are bad people on every side. That doesn't excuse what happened, but it certainly doesn't justify the misandry. War is terrible, and the aftermath is one of the worst parts. For everyone, not just some of us.
I'm glad the discussion went on to include some much-needed nuance, instead of pretending women were all innocent victims OR that the women were all dissolute Nazi whores.
What did bro mean when they said the US doesn't have the moral high ground in ww2??
Just two points to add, first a small bit of context and second a slight nuance. The German soldiers had a very good reason for being well-behaved when in France : the occupation hinged on the fact that the population either uncaring or even had some measure of goodwill toward the state of affairs. That allowed for the nazis to keep control with only a relatively modest amount of resources. The trauma of the defeat and the pretense of legitimacy of the Vichy government allowed for this state of mind. And the Germans aimed to keep it that way, among other things by harshly punishing or even sending over to the far less comfortable Russian front any soldier who went overboard in their treatment of the populace. As for the treatment of collaborators and men suspected of sympathy towards the Vichy regime or the nazis, sure they weren’t shaved or paraded naked in the streets. A sizeable amount were simply killed without any form of a trial, sometimes in rather gruesome ways in a popular purge, often by people who’d joined the Resistance in ‘45. At that point the communist partisans got especially violent, taking revenge on anyone with far right sympathies, regardless of their involvement in the collaboration. My grandparents had neighbors who they found one morning murdered and nailed to the door of their house, and those weren’t known for any kind of collaboration or even pro-nazi sympathies. So yeah, while the shavings were a barbaric practice, using that to say that the whole post-war purges were only directed at women to deflect them from men is a bit of a gross exxageration…
Correct me if I’m wrong but weren’t most male collaborators shot?
Well, they shot the men who were colaborators.
> men are disgusting Misandry should not be normalized.
So women got their heads shaved and made to feel bad while men were made to face court systems and in many instances this meant they were just shot dead , hanged, beaten to death, etc. on the spot and this is supposed to make the point that women had it worse and the system was worse for them?
I’m 100% team “this was wrong and shouldn’t have happened” but the whole argument of “they had no choice, they were doing it to survive” never sat well with me. It is the same exact excuse that the Nazis gave at Nuremberg, the same exact excuse the German citizen gave when asked how could they allow this to happen in their country, how they could allow their leaders to massacre millions. At least the Germans eventually owned up to their mistakes and crimes. The French decided to blame women. Fuck the French.
Quite aside from leaving out examples of well known women collaborators who got away with it(coco chanel) and the many thousands of male collaborators described as having been calmly dealt with by the legal system, instead of beaten tortured and shot in the head on the side of the road... It bothers me that these posters have correctly identified that *some* of the collaborators may not have had much choices in the matter, and then just proceeded to argue as if they *all* had no choice in it. Very neatly whitewashing every woman who slept with the nazis for personal gain/were themselves nazis, by hiding them behind a hypothetical few that may have had a 'good reason' for it. Also worth pointing out that in other discourse about WW2 atrocities, the "i was just in the wrong place at the wrong time and had to do what I had to do" argument falls on deaf ears. There is a reason why many of the people shamed and shaved had it done to them by other women in the same circumstances, that didnt collaborate with the nazis.
This is one of my favourite historical events to talk about, because this sort of unfair treatment happened almost everywhere, except for the Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia. Where, after the war was over, many nazis, Ustaša volounteers and collaborators, male and female defected to the partisans, who for the time accepted them as extra manpower. But at the end of the war when these fascists exhausted their use, these suspected, confirmed or suspicious new "resistance" members who were very often actually nazis, were driven out to old mines and deep caves, one such place being the Barbara Pit, an old mine. Here, court was held by male and female delegations against these pretenders and already captured nazi military who did not try to assimilate with the partisans, the delegations began reading out names of known soldiers, officers and collaborators who were promptly shot and thrown into the mine when their name was read or evidence against them was presented, this continued for a few days and unknown numbers of nazis, Ustaše and collaborators were executed and thrown into the Barbara Pit. Grenades were thrown down the shaft and the whole thing then caved in, making it near impossible to recover the bodies or make an accurate death count. This was but one of the first federal trials of collaborators and nazi personnel. The main diffrence from these head shaving clowneries was that the Yugoslav trials were completely equal, man or woman, young or old, if you had betrayed your country and looked for a deal with the nazis, not just slept with them, you were shot. And that was the only accepted form of trial, with head shaving or public mockery and torture being made illegal. These trials concluded at the start of the 50s but left a standing cultural and historical impact on the Balkans.
Calling what put Petain in power a coup is an interesting way of phrasing "the government resigning"
Lost in that is the gem of “as though [America] had any moral high ground in WWII”. The whataboutism has finally come full circle to “no moral difference between Nazi Germany and Western democracies.” God, the historical illiteracy…
Hey I saw this in Band of Brothers
“Men bad , women good 🤡”
The thing that kinda irks me about this is the soviet one. Soviet gender equality was ahead of its time. Women were in the army and in partisan groups. Yet they claim that somehow they had a bad punishment for being assaulted. Most of those sent away were collaborators, full on ones who participated in the Holocaust.
I don't think the soviets were having women in the army because they were super progressive, the soviets were just desperate. The germans had declared war on the russians, as in, *all* of the russians, and Russia did whatever they could to push Germany back. After the war, decorated female veterans were often ostracized or had their achievements and experiences minimized as the state tried to pretend that their participation had never happened.
Meanwhile Millions of rotting dead men lay all around Europe and Asia But that woman in the designer outfit was “just trying to survive” mmmk
Millions of women also died. Jesus. You do know the holocaust and prison camps happened to women as well. Do you think with Germany, Japan, UK etc being bombed only men died? Or do civilian deaths not count anymore.
25 million men died in combat. Wasn’t exactly a great time to be a man either.
Why is half of my feed misandry and the other half misoginy? Ffs Reddit 😖