The greatest danger in Paris is the widespread and uncontrolled presence of whores. – Heinrich Himmler
At 11 AM on November 11th, 1918 Germany signed the armistice which ended the First World War. In observance of the event November 11th was named Armistice Day in many countries, and later it was rededicated in the Commonwealth as Remembrance Day (to commemorate all war dead) and in the United States as Veterans Day (to honor all veterans). One year ago today I presented the story of Mata Hari, the most famous courtesan of World War I, and today I’d like to tell you a little about the French prostitutes of World War II and the shameful way they were treated after the liberation.
When the Nazi war machine occupied France in May of 1940, any business which wanted to remain in operation had to deal with the Germans. Shops, cafes, tradesmen and filles de joie had to accept German soldiers as customers or literally starve; the Germans seized 20% of all produce, 50% of the meat and 80% of the champagne, and what was not seized outright was purchased at the confiscatory rate of one reichsmark per twenty francs. In Paris, the luxurious brothels of the Pigalle district (which was also home to the Moulin Rouge and Grand Guignol) were placed under direct military control and were only allowed to serve German officers. And though independent whores were under no such restriction, they had little choice but to accept German troops into their beds if they wanted the only currency which could actually buy anything anymore. Nor were the professionals alone; many single French women, or married ones whose husbands had been killed, wounded or captured, were forced to prostitute themselves to the enemy in order to provide for themselves and their children. Even those with an income might find themselves hard-pressed; the ration allowance provided by the Vichy government was a scant 1300 calories a day (roughly two-thirds what an active adult woman needs and one-third the intake of a healthy teenage boy), and the only way to get extra coupons, goods or hard currency (to buy things on the black market) was to become what Frenchmen angrily called “a mattress for the Boche”. Nor were all of these liaisons voluntary; landladies were often forced to billet troops (who then took what they pleased, as ever happens in such situations), and French streetwalkers were no more able to refuse the trade of unprincipled German soldiers than American streetwalkers can refuse the trade of the police; as in the latter case, they were lucky if they got paid.
Of course, this sort of behavior took its toll; condoms were as much in short supply as anything else, and as regular readers know men in positions of armed authority over women often refuse to use them even when they’re available. The result? An epidemic of syphilis (blamed, of course, on the whores rather than amateurs or the soldiers’ own stupid behavior) among the occupying troops which was so serious that Heinrich Himmler persuaded the Führer to order the manufacture of blow-up sex dolls which could be issued to the troops so they wouldn’t have to rely on French hookers. This plan, dubbed the Borghild Project, was dropped two years later when it was found that soldiers wouldn’t carry the dolls for fear of ridicule if they were captured.
The officers, who were employing the high-class doxies of the brothels, had no such problems, nor did most of them abuse their companions; in fact, some of them later reported that the Germans were better, cleaner and more generous clients than the Frenchmen they were used to. Because of this, many of them did quite well for themselves during the occupation, a fact which was to return to haunt them later; they, and the other women who managed to feed themselves and their own by supplying sex to those in control, were subjected to horrible treatment after the liberation.
French men who felt emasculated by the humiliatingly-rapid conquest but had lacked the balls to join the resistance and fight back, women who had been unwilling or unable to use their sexuality to provide for their children, and petty collaborators eager to turn attention away from their own actions, all conspired to revenge themselves on the whores (both professional and amateur). Many of them were simply envious of those who had survived the occupation without severe privation, but while they couldn’t openly attack the merchants, restauranteurs and other businesses who had survived in the same way, the harlot is always a popular scapegoat. Women who had prostituted themselves to the enemy were accused of collaboration horizontale (horizontal collaboration), a particularly nasty permutation of the Myth of the Wanton in which their actions were portrayed as the result of lust rather than business or survival. Typically, such women were captured by mobs of vigilantes called tondeurs (shearers), who shaved their heads and sometimes paraded them through the streets naked, but this mostly happened in cities; in rural areas which suffered less the women were generally simply ostracized, but in other areas where the resistance was strong they were sometimes killed.
Luckily, this didn’t go on for long; as order was re-established the French authorities took a dim view of such lynchings. Besides, the prostitutes were needed to control another invading army: that of the Americans. Instead of sex dolls, the American authorities distributed condoms, and soon Pigalle (or as the GIs called it, “Pig Alley”) was overrun to the tune of roughly 10,000 soldiers a day; as in Japan, the prostitutes were necessary to protect the virtue of unwilling French amateurs. But once the war was over and the Yanks had gone home, French politicians with the same thirst for vengeance as the tondeurs unveiled their own plan to take their frustrations out on defenseless women: they started a crusade to close the brothels, which had been tolerated since just after the French Revolution, and selected one Marthe Richard to front it. Richard claimed to have been an aviatrix, a spy in World War I and a resistance leader, and her popularity made it difficult for politicians to resist her campaign; in 1946, they succumbed to pressure and roughly 1400 maisons closes across France were shut down, with many of their estimated 20,000 workers ending up on the streets.
The police continued to keep prostitute registries until 1960, when they were finally destroyed; in the process of doing so the truth about the abolitionist champion Marthe Richard was discovered. It turned out that not only were her heroic exploits a total fabrication, but that she had been a prostitute herself. The woman who had been represented as a patriotic crusader against Nazi-loving whores had actually spent the first few years of the occupation in Vichy as a madam catering exclusively to German officers. By the time Richard’s hypocrisy was revealed many French citizens had recognized the stupidity of the brothel ban, but it was too late; France was now officially abolitionist, having passed laws against “living on the avails”, “procuring” and “soliciting” in addition to banning brothels. Moralists, control freaks and (in later times) neofeminists have prevented any discussion of repealing these oppressive laws (despite the fact that prostitution itself is still legal) and now there is talk of imposing the repulsive Swedish Model on the country. In a sense, this is just a continuation of the outrages perpetrated by the tondeurs; like their actions, the Swedish Model is nothing but misogyny, envy and vengeance dressed up in righteous indignation drag.
The blow up dolls is one of the funniest things I’ve heard about WW11.
Did you know that the first two target groups arrested and sent to Dachau were alcoholics and prostitutes? Here the SS worked under the belief that the bad behavior of these people could be beaten out of them, which they tried hard to do everyday for several months or years at a time.
I was surprised to hear that some of the French professionals said that the German officers treated them with respect. The official Nazi line was that whores were a danger to the racial purity of the German state.
Yes, the post war treatment of the collaborators was disgraceful. The French were furious about having been occupied and they badly needed scapegoats.
This is a good illustration of French vengefulness.
The one good thing I will say about Nazi Germany’s military, and there aren’t many good things to say about them including what you illustrated is that genuine rape was punishable by death and the German attitude was we pay each of you military men enough to pay for whores which we also let you have access for your sexual needs or desires. Life was unpleasant for the conquered to be sure. However our ally at the time, the USSR, was much worse. They would allow or even encourage their soldiers to rape “liberated” or conquered populations. To be fair Nazi Germany’s ally, Japan, was the same in allowing or encouraging their soldiers to rape. Many of today’s neofeminists and antiprostitution people like to point to the “Comfort Women” of East Asia especially of Korea to service Japanese soldiers as whores for their lurid stories about how virtually no women would ever truly volunteer to be a prostitute. Although some women have been forced to be prostitutes, most have not in all of human history unlike the neofeminists and anti-prostitution people would like you to believe.The USSR and Japan were the worst major players in the Second World War on how they treated their conquered and liberated populations, and even though Nazi Germany was bad, all you ever hear in the USA is how bad the Nazi Germans were and not enough about how bad the USSR and Japan was in my humble opinion.The USA and Britain as major players although could be unpleasant at times were reasonably good during the Second World War as major players in the war. Even U.S. Lieutenant General Patton and British Prime Minister Churchill wondered if we didn’t kill the wrong pig first by destroying Nazi Germany instead of the USSR at the end of the war. South Korea never became as anti-prostitution as France did, and Korea was conquered by Japan in 1895 in the Sino-Japanese War and lost even their semi-sovereignty in 1910. They weren’t liberated until the end of the Second World War in 1945. Of course most Koreans thought of or treated Korean women including prostitutes who were believed to have sex with foreigners as human garbage for centuries, and sadly a large enough minority at the very least still do. Koreans when I was there didn’t think of prostitutes as good for marriage either even though prostitution was much more rampant than the USA. Still, although South Koreans aren’t as pleasant about prostitution as many here would like, they are much better than the French. Also remember that Korea suffered for much longer and more severely under Japan than France did under Germany and this is especially true for the Korean prostitutes in comparison to the French prostitutes. Much the same could be said of all East Asia in comparison to Europe when we speak of Japan and Germany.
It just goes to show what cowards and senseless idiots most people are especially in regards to prostitution or resisting the enemy. However these same cowards are often bullies when they are winning. Neofeminists and anti-prostitution people are senseless idiotic cowardly bullies in my opinion. Marthe Richard, even as a whore or madam or a neofeminist anti-prostitution woman is a fine example of this as were her minions who were or were not prostitutes or their customers.
I forgot to add that Taiwan which is 98% Chinese suffered a similar fate as Korea in the aftermath of the Sino-Japanese War in 1895. Taiwanese seem to be moving in a more tolerable direction for prostitution while the Koreans move in a less tolerable direction largely but not mostly due to American influence. I’ve never been to Taiwan though, but I’ve heard prostitution is more prevalant than the USA and most of the Western World which seems to include France. I’ve made a comment in your last article that I truly believe a higher percentage of women are against prostitutes than men because they hate the competition more than anything else they claim on average. They are jealous of the prostitutes because as Maggie McNeill often says, prostitutes are among the most free women in society, and they hate how prostitutes free men by offering to sell their bodies for a time slot. Female prostitute freedom and male accessability to prostitutes which also frees men whether or not such men will ever be customers is permanantly linked and can not be seperated.
I’ve been to Taiwan; I’ve lived in China and I’m currently in Korea (on and off).
Prostitution has always been seen as a “profession” of the lucky who can do it: not respectable, but not exactly forbidden or socially wrong. It was a limnal area.
Expensive, high-class escorts and second wives or “kept women” are standard in China, always have been: the Communists stressed “morality” and female liberation and prostitution was savaged, with the cultural revolution seeing millions tortured or “re-educated”. But in fact it continued all along. In the more traditional Taiwan and HK, prostitution continued in every possible form, including the rank materialism inherent in marriage, which increasingly looks like prostitution in all but name.
Japan was the same. Prostitution was never demonized effectively there, and the Americans had actually less influence on actual social mores than they did on the country’s constitution.
In Korea, where sexuality is savagely regulated, it’s dirt easy for foreign men to get laid without paying for it: women are repressed and there are few socially sanctioned sexual outlets for either men or women. Without the dizzying multiplicity of levels in the sex industry, Korean men might boil away in sexual repression.
Famously, if you’re not ugly, it’s relatively easy for a Western guy to make out like a fox in Korea, largely because once you’re outside the social order, you represent a severe breath of freedom for Korean women.
So moral repression in an Asian context does what you would expect it to do: generate lots of semi-sanctioned fringe-prostitution and hard-core prostitution, and a large number of sexually frustrated men and women.
I have little experience of prostitution (actually, none), but what I hear, but I dated a woman who worked as a high-class call girl for a time; and I found myself the fox in the proverbial henhouse for a number of years, so I know how the social order operates towards women in a very, very direct fashion. I also suspect a number of women I knew have at one time or another sold their favors for a nice hotel or a meal or a hot night out; they were, at best, cheap whores (amateurs). Taking presents for “boyfriending” men is pretty standard. As a foreigner you escape these rules, but I’ve actually watched Chinese and Korean women tell me how they’d never sleep with the boyfriends they were supposedly dating until a sufficient amount had been “invested” in them – though they would say this while in bed with me. And married women were little better, in many cases – fidelity being, well, “notional” rather than actual in many cases.
So women were often treated like whores even if they weren’t.
But on the German front –
The germans were reasonably good in France ; certainly better than most. But in Eastern Europe, they were savage monsters who had a plan to literally exterminate Eastern Europeans. The Russians were mild by comparison when they reinvaded their own country and th ecountries under German occupation.
German behavior in France can’t b compared to their behavior anywhere else.
It can be compared to their conquest of the nordic countrys.
All this was simply a result of their racial ideology – the pigs in the east had to be exterminated to create living space.
Rather stupid, however, every nation has dirt on its heels – the german dirt (our dirt) is just bigger.
Also, as we know, the winner takes it all. He also writes history
French men who felt emasculated by the humiliatingly-rapid conquest but had lacked the balls to join the resistance and fight back
While the French are one of the most cowardly nations in Europe, there was an important political factor in their quick surrender and weak resistance:
The French right was terrified of the communists, and saw Hitler as the lesser evil; while the French communists were instructed by the Soviet Union to not resist the Germans, and they even gave the Nazis the names and addresses of French Trotskyites. This only changed when Germany attacked the USSR.
A national myth of widespread resistance was to be constructed, and these poor French women were the innocent sacrifices thereto.
The French surrendered a mostly intact army to the Germans in WWII. It’s not like the Germans had to bleed much to take France. If the FRENCH MEN had a problem with the German’s “sipping their wine” … they maybe they should have put up a better fight in the first place.
One of my favorite quotes from Chesty Puller …
“Our Country won’t go on forever, if we stay soft as we are now. There won’t
be any AMERICA because some foreign soldiery will invade us and take our
women and breed a hardier race!”
And one more thing … I never hated the German people or even the German Army. Hitler and his Nazi SS … I have no love for – but certain parts of the German military I actually admire.
As a Submariner – I learned the history of the German WWII UBoats. Absolutely amazing. People don’t realize this – but the German submarine program was so advanced, it catapulted the US Submarine Service ahead by leaps and bounds once we captured their technology.
The “Great Underwater Propulsion Power Program” was based on reverse engineering some captured experimental German U-Boats. The “GUPPY” program served as the foundation for submarine development after WWII and paved the way to the nuclear era. Because of this – the US Submarine Service became – and, for the moment still is, the greatest submarine program on earth.
Not a lot of people know this. They know about the rocket technology we got from the Germans. They know about the Aviation Technology we got from them – but few know this about Submarines.
They weren’t the “master race” – but they were pretty damned smart and ingenious.
And THEY got eugenics from US and the British.
And eugenics came out of the social purity movements of the 19th century. Wow! Talk about coming full circle!
Krulac,
There is a joke about French Military Surplus. The rifles are promoted by the tagline: Never fired. Only dropped once.
I have to be careful what I type because any time French participation in WWII comes up, I tend to lose it. My father was a WWII vet who served in the 1st Infantry Division, literally joining up right after Pearl Harbor. Dad had three amphibious invasions under his belt, Oran, Sicily and Normandy (Omaha), with the first people to fire on him being the French in North Africa. Everyone outside of the small number who really participated in the resistance were collaborators, but the French have never truly come to terms with the moral cowardice they showed in the war and I always thought it ridiculous that we treated them as equal allies in matters such as temporary government, zone of control after the war and a permanent seat on the Security Council. Naturally such debased degenerates would focus their anger on those unable to defend themselves. Any farmer who sold food to the German army was more of a collaborator than a prostitute; after all she took money for a service that provided no material benefit to the war effort, while the farmer provided one of the most important supplies a military can use.
One reason that the Allies were so slow to fully believe the stories about the awful thing the Nazis were doing the east was that their behavior in the western countries they had occupied was generally decent by relevant historical standards.
By all accounts, prostitution was extremely common in occupied western Germany in the years immediately following the war. It does not seem to have been a traumatic experience.
Another reason is because there were a lot of phoney atrocity stories about Germany during the First World War. So when atrocity stories about the Germans began to circulate during the Second World War, a lot of Americans (not unreasonably) thought, “Yeah, right. Heard that sort of thing before.”
This time, it turned out to be true. Any nation can promote evil deeds, especially if the populous is whipped up into hatred, or as Voltaire put it, “Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”
The wonderful “victory girls” deserve a mention:
http://forum.theblackdahliainhollywood.com/archive/index.php/thread-1023.html
I didn’t find a lot of information on them from my Internet search. But, at least there’s some articles! THANK YOU to Sailor Barsoom for telling me about them 1st. These were the women who had sex with the soldiers for no charge as a tribute to them. I LOVE THIS! They also gave emotional support, encouragement, etc., to the soldiers (at no charge also). YES! These women are on my “personal heroes” list.
I do sort of wish that the twelve year old victory girls had waited for Korea.
This is a wonderful bit of American History. It corroborates my speculation that when traumatized Greek men returned from a war the Sacred Harlots of Aphrodite healed them partly with sex but also with TLC. I don”t know how they could have been aware of it at the time, but the Sacred Harlots were turning them from military men into civilians again.
There’s a lot of talk these days about veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, and about the need for them to “transition” to civilian life.
Wives, girlfriends, wild women, hookers, victory girls, they can all help.
Dear Sailor B, THANK YOU! I’m sick and tired of when not ALL the groups that help get credit. Yes, all kinds of women have helped the soliders (and still do).
It IS a wonderful bit is history, isn’t it? I was very excited when Sailor B 1st told me about the victory girls. It’s wonderful when ALL women who help out men sexually and in non-sexual ways get credit. ALL deserve credit.
Dear Laura,
I’m with you 100%.
Indeed, they do deserve credit.
Laura, when you say “help out men… in non-sexual ways”, are you primarily talking about emotional support, or more practical assistance like doing the shopping for men with mobility problems?
I’m talking about both of those things plus whatever else will help.
Laura is my role model.
If I’m your role model, I’m literally scared for you…;-)…thanks, my friend, for your kind words.
;-)…hope THIS winking head works!
It worked.
There’s a nice, but alas probably apocryphal story about the UK, Russia and condoms in WWII. The UK sent a large supply of condoms to Russia. On the direct orders of Mr Churchill, the Prime Minister, they were marked “extra small”.
I remember my husband (A retired Master Sargent), as he was told
this story, about our Russian allies (or at least they were on our side then.) Because of being below freezing weather and the fact that *everyone*
on the battlelines had to keep their rifles and/or pistols
Problem with this was the men would, whenever possible, make what
amounted to a small garbage can fire for them to huddle around to stay warm.
So, this constant exposure to changing temperatures, the gun and rifle barrels would freeze, then later on get warmed up around these small, but carefully hidden fires, Then condensation and moisture would damage the weapon, likely causing rust. It was then the call for help to the USofA to ask for condoms to keep their weapons free of rust & damage. Yes, the containers that held the condoms were marked “Small”.
I wonder if there is any reason to believe that “horizontal collaboration” may have been one of the reasons why France was spared much of the excesses visited upon other occupied territories? After all, history has it’s share of (though rarely publicized) examples of the conquered using their charms to negate the power of the conquerors.