The American photographer stepped into the path of the procession and raised his camera. Before him came eleven women, one after another, their heads freshly shaved, marched home through the streets of Chartres with a crowd following behind. One of them carried a baby, less than three months old. The mother was in her early twenties.

Her name was Simone Tuso. Less than three weeks later, Life magazine printed the picture for millions of Americans. The caption read: “Woman collaborationist carrying baby is followed by jeering procession after her head has been clipped. ”

She was one of about 20,000 women in France who had their heads shaved in public between 1943 and 1946.

And in at least 15 French towns, the United States Army was there with a movie camera. Ask about these women today and you will hear two stories. One says they were traitors who slept with the enemy and got what they deserved. The other says they were scapegoats, punished by a country that wanted to forget its own four years of surrender.

The record itself does not settle the argument. It shows the army’s own film, the newspapers the soldiers read, the court files, and the people who were there. The question is left open. To understand the summer of 1944, you have to start in the summer of 1940.

France fell in six weeks. Around 1. 8 million French soldiers were taken prisoner, about one in every ten grown men in the country. More than 1.

6 million of them were sent to camps in Germany. Many would not come home until 1945. So for four years, millions of French women ran farms, shops, and families alone in a country occupied by a foreign army. The Germans needed workers, cooks, cleaners, translators, and typists.

In a country short of everything, those jobs paid. From 1942, hundreds of thousands of French men were sent to work in German factories—somewhere between 600,000 and 650,000. The Vichy government watched the wives left behind. A law of December 1942 made it a crime to live with the wife of a prisoner of war.

The German army had its own rules. It set up its own brothels and tried to keep soldiers away from local women. By the end of 1941, it counted 143 army brothels in one military district alone. Its reasons were written down: stop venereal disease, enforce the Nazi racial rules on who a German soldier could sleep with, and limit contact with the local population.

The rules did not hold. Hundreds of thousands of young German soldiers lived in French towns for four years. Relationships happened. How many children were born from them is still argued.

The historian Fabrice Virgili estimates around 100,000. Two journalists who studied those children put it at 200,000. Some of those relationships were love. Some were survival.

Some were business. And some of the women who worked for the Germans did far more than type letters. Their neighbors were watching all of it, and they were keeping count. In a small town, people notice everything: who talks to the soldiers, who works at the Kommandantur, who seems to have enough to eat, and who gets arrested the week after.

For four years, most of it was only remembered. The first shavings came before D-Day. In 1943 and the spring of 1944, they were done in secret, at night, inside the homes of women accused of working with the Germans. Historians have found them in Loire-Atlantique in March 1944, in Ille-et-Vilaine in May, and in Isère in June.

Shaving a woman’s head was not a new idea. A decree of Charlemagne’s court in the year 805 already used it as a punishment for women. In the Middle Ages, it was done to adulteresses. In the Spanish Civil War, only a few years before, Franco’s side shaved Republican women.

After the First World War, French soldiers occupying the German Rhineland had seen German women shaved by their own neighbors for keeping company with the French. Even Nazi Germany did it. German women accused of relations with foreign workers or prisoners had their heads shaved. In October 1941, Martin Bormann ordered that it stop being done in public.

In 1945, the American Army magazine Yank reported that in Nuremberg, Julius Streicher had German women who had been with Jewish men shaved and put on show. The Nazi state punished women for the wrong kind of love in exactly the same way. Only the enemy had changed. By the summer of 1944, the scissors were ready.

All that was missing was the day the Germans left. That day came town by town, from June to the end of the year. On the 14th of July 1944, Bastille Day, Cherbourg had been free for more than three weeks. An Army Signal Corps photographer was in the street that day.

The Army caption on the picture says: “Housemaids and servants of the Germans were gathered together, shorn of all their hair, and paraded through the streets. ”

Early in August, a Reuters correspondent named Charles Lynch drove into Brittany behind the American tanks. In the village of Dol, he saw what he had only heard about. His account ran in the Stars and Stripes, the Army’s own newspaper.

About 200 people gathered in the village square. A woman was placed on a chair in the middle of the crowd. Three men wearing armbands of the French forces went to work on her at the same time with clippers. Within minutes, her head was shaved clean.

The men lifted her onto their shoulders, and the crowd roared. She asked to say something, and she shouted, “I never liked Germans. ” Then she pushed her way through the crowd and walked up the main street with the crowd following her. Nobody in that report says what she was accused of.

Nobody asked. The scene repeated itself across France. In Beauvais, the local paper counted 80 women shaved on the day of liberation. In Lyon and in Lille, witnesses described whole trucks and carts full of shorn women driven through the streets.

Some of it happened in the open square. Some of it happened inside prefectures, town halls, police stations, and prisons, run almost like official business. At Romans-sur-Isère, in the Drôme, ten women already in custody had their hair cut on the 6th of September. In Toul, a special court sentenced one young woman to three months in prison with her head shaved.

The prosecutor had asked for twenty years of hard labor. For many women, the shaving was only the beginning. Many were also locked up, tried in court, or stripped of their civic rights. Some were shaved, released, and arrested again.

Look closely at the film and you start to see a pattern. From Brittany to the Alps, the shavings looked alike. Virgili found the same steps again and again. A table set up as a shaving office, in a cafe, on a station platform, or on a stage in the square.

The town barber was called in with his own clippers and razor. In a Grenoble prison, one report said, “The prison barber ran his clippers according to the fashion of the day for these ladies. ”

Then came the walk. Past the town hall, through the market square, around the fountain.

The places where for four years German posters and German flags had hung. In Moulins, one woman was shaved on her own balcony, so the whole street could see. It took place in the same days as the Allied parades, the ceremonies at the war memorials, and the first dances in four years. To the crowds, it was part of the same celebration.

In Toul, a local writer described one shorn woman’s walk under the headline “A picturesque parade. ” He compared it to the carnival processions of his childhood. Allied soldiers saw it from the road. A British artillery officer passing through the Norman village of Saint-André, where people showered the passing soldiers with flowers, wrote down what was happening in the marketplace.

A woman, said to be a bad woman, was seated in a chair while a barber shaved her head to the crown, and she attracted a crowd of onlookers. Some towns came late. Tournon, in the Drôme, had been free for almost a month when four or five women were shaved there at the end of September. The local resistance paper explained why.

“It is never too late to do the right thing,” it wrote. “The town of Tournon had to have its shorn women, too. ”

No American order to start the shavings has ever been found. No order to stop them has been found either.

Mostly, the Americans watched, and the army filmed them. Signal Corps cameramen recorded shavings and parades of shorn women in Rennes, Aix-en-Provence, Étampes, Paris, Nemours, Châlons-en-Champagne, Reims, Montélimar, Lyon, Besançon, and more. At its film center in New York, the army cataloged the rolls on typed index cards describing what was on them shot by shot. For one roll filmed at Montélimar on the 29th of August, the army’s card gives the story a title in quotation marks: “Nazi lovers get shaved.

” The same day at Châlons-en-Champagne, a sergeant named Mozel filmed a seated woman while an armed Frenchman cut her hair. At Besançon, the card for the 8th of September reads: “Some women collaborators jeer at cameraman while others cry. ” Another card for a roll that came in without captions says simply: “A woman smiles as her head is shaven. ” Another weeps hysterically.

That film is still in the archives, and it can be watched frame by frame. At Aix-en-Provence on the 15th of August, a woman is questioned at a table in front of a crowd. In Rennes on the 4th of August, a woman in a torn blouse is led through a packed street. In Lyon on the 3rd of September, a young woman with a shaved head stands among a group of grinning men.

The men are making the V-for-victory sign at the camera. Nobody in that frame is hiding from the American camera. The soldiers’ own newspaper treated it as local color. At Sainte-Maxime on the Riviera, the Stars and Stripes called it a traditional form of reprisal against collaborationists.

From Nice, an army reporter wrote that several girls who had been too friendly with the Germans were driven down the main drag with their hair shaven off. From Grenoble, another wrote that the women had betrayed husbands or brothers or consorted with the Germans and been responsible for the deaths of fellow Frenchmen. Read those three reports together and you see the problem. To the Americans passing through, every shorn woman looked the same.

The reasons were very different. So who were they? The man who spent years answering that question is the French historian Fabrice Virgili. He went through police files, court records, and local newspapers département by département.

He found shavings in at least 77 of France’s 90 départements, about 20,000 women. He is the first to say the exact number can never be known. That is roughly one French woman in every 800 over the age of 15. In his count, a little over half of them—57 percent—were accused of an intimate relationship with a German.

A lover, a boyfriend, a man in the house. The rest were accused of the same things men were accused of: denouncing neighbors to the Germans, joining collaborationist parties, working for the occupier. A man accused of those things might be jailed, tried, or shot. A woman accused of them was shaved and often jailed and tried as well.

Men were shaved, too, but rarely. Virgili confirmed it in at least seven départements. Never once was the reason sexual. Men were shaved for looting, for going to work in Germany, or for joining the Milice or a fascist party.

In the Tarn-et-Garonne, men who refused to go and fight at the front were shaved by their own comrades and walked through the streets. Once a woman was shaved, the shaving itself could become the evidence. In one court file, a witness against a woman wrote that the resistance had cut her hair. “Proof,” the witness wrote, “without any doubt of her good conduct.

” The words were meant as sarcasm. The state’s own lawyers saw something deeper than politics. In February 1945, the chief prosecutor of Besançon wrote about the possibility of a real mixing of French blood with the German race and called it an attack on the unity of the French nation. Nazi Germany had used the same language of blood about its own women.

Virgili put it in one line. The shaving was not the punishment for sleeping with the enemy. It was the punishment for collaboration given to women. Men paid, too, and many paid more.

In the months of the liberation, around 9,000 people were killed without trial across France, the great majority of them men. After that came the courts. Over 311,000 cases were opened. Around 1,500 people were executed after trial.

Women were in the dock as well. In 1944 alone, 651 women were sentenced to death, and 46 of them were shot. And for the women, there was something no court ever ordered. No law in France required a woman’s head to be shaved.

No order came from de Gaulle, from the government, or from the leaders of the resistance. The scissors came from the town itself. Which brings us back to Chartres and to the woman with the baby. Simone Tuso was born in Chartres in 1921.

She was a bright student. Her family ran a shop that failed, and her parents drifted to the far right. When the Germans came, she worked for them as a secretary and translator at the Kommandantur, the German headquarters in the town. There, she met a German soldier named Erich Götz.

He was a librarian from a small town in southern Germany, and he ran the army bookshop in Chartres. By the time that survived, he kept his distance from the Nazi party. He wanted to marry her. The German authorities said no.

In the spring of 1943, Simone joined Jacques Doriot’s party, the PPF, one of the most openly pro-Nazi movements in France. She followed Erich to Germany, to Munich, where she worked at the BMW plant to be near him. On the 23rd of May 1944, their daughter was born. Erich never saw her grow up.

He was sent back to the Eastern Front and killed near Minsk on the 8th of July. Five weeks later, his daughter was in Robert Capa’s photograph. There is another part of the record. In February 1943, five of Simone’s neighbors on the Rue de Beauvais were arrested by the German security police in the night and deported to Mauthausen.

Two of them died there. After the liberation, Simone and her mother were charged with denouncing them. Her mother was shaved with her that day. In Capa’s picture, her father walks ahead of them in a beret carrying a bundle.

The father was left free. One account calls him a good man who could not keep the women of his house in line. Simone spent more than two years in prisons in Chartres, Pithiviers, and Paris. In November 1946, a court dismissed the denunciation charges for lack of evidence.

Four months later, a different court found her guilty of national indignity for working for the Germans and took away her civic rights for ten years. So was Simone Tuso a girl in love or a collaborator who helped send her neighbors to a camp? The record says she was in love. It also says she was a collaborator.

The courts never proved the rest. Simone always said someone else had done it. She named her former friend, a Swiss-born woman named Ella Ammersin-Mayer, who worked as an interpreter for the German security police in Chartres. Ella left with the Germans on the 15th of August 1944, the day before Simone was shaved.

A French court sentenced her to death in her absence. She was found and sent back to France in 1947. In 1950, she was sentenced to life at hard labor. A month later, the verdict was thrown out because she had taken German citizenship in May 1944.

Ella Ammersin-Mayer went back to Germany. She lived to be about a hundred near Hanover. Now here is the strangest part. In the same days, in the same prefecture courtyard where the shaving was going on, there was another young woman named Simone.

Simone Segouin was a farm girl from Thivars, just outside Chartres. She had joined the resistance, and she was 17. Life’s correspondent Jack Belden found her in the courtyard eating two large chunks of bread with jam. A small revolver was stuck in the waistband of her skirt.

“She neither cheered the hair shearing,” he wrote, “nor flirted with the swarms of American correspondents. ” The next morning, he saw her walk a column of 25 German prisoners past the cathedral. Belden looked at the women of Chartres that week and wrote that they were of three kinds. First, those dragged in by the crowd to have their heads shorn because they had consorted with the Germans.

Next, the respectable women who applauded the hair shearing with just the right measure of gaiety and satisfied indignation. And third, the large group who smiled at the American soldiers and flirted with them, as he put it, patriotically. Life ran both Simones in the same issue. One with a gun, one with a baby.

Simone Segouin lived to be 97. Simone Tuso married in 1954, had two more children, and lost her job when people found out who she was. She died in 1966 in her mid-forties. Inside France, people argued about the shavings while they were still happening.

The arguments did not split neatly between resistance and collaborators. Some cheered. In Châteauroux, a women’s organization wrote in a liberation newspaper that this was a day when women got their revenge. “Each one’s turn to tremble,” they wrote.

In Chablis, local fighters recorded with pride how eight young women who had shown open sympathy for the Germans were sheared on the steps of the town hall in front of a joyful crowd. A Corrèze newspaper admitted that once its civilized conscience would have revolted against this kind of punishment. “Four years of occupation,” it wrote, “had made the anger explode. ”

Others were disgusted.

Jean-Paul Sartre, writing about the liberation of Paris, called it medieval sadism. In Marseille, a communist newspaper said the shavings recalled the worst habits of the SS. One week earlier, the same paper had praised the valiant FFI fighters who arrested women seen with Germans and shaved their heads. In Virgili’s reading of the press, the articles in favor of the shavings slightly outnumbered the articles against.

None of them had called for the shavings before they began. Some defended it as a joke. In October 1944, a French paper wrote that it considered the shaving of a few women a very frivolous distraction and added a line about women who, under any occupation, only ask to be occupied. And something else had changed that year.

In April 1944, the Free French government had given French women the right to vote. They would cast their first ballots in 1945. Virgili’s own reading is that defeat in 1940 had humiliated French men and that the liberation was also a way for them to take that power back. Through the shavings, he says, men reasserted their power over women.

Others read it first as the anger of four years of fear, hunger, and denunciation, as the Corrèze paper did. The record supports parts of both. One article from that summer put it in four words: France would be virile or dead. And a woman reporter in the Corrèze asked one plain question in print: Is there a French law that sentences people to be shaved, and only women?

Many resistance units and liberation committees called for it to stop. In Bourg-en-Bresse, a resistance officer reported fighters who had shaved women and paraded them without orders. Some of the men who stopped it were not French at all. In Paris, Spanish Republican soldiers of Leclerc’s armored division broke up shavings or cut them short.

Charles de Gaulle’s line was that justice belonged to the state and only to the state. And the French filmmakers who shot the liberation of Paris filmed the shavings, too. Then they agreed to leave them out of the official film, so the liberation would look radiant and heroic. Even the most famous woman accused of sleeping with a German was never shaved.

The film star Arletty had an open affair with a Luftwaffe officer. She was arrested in October 1944, held at Drancy and Fresnes, kept under watch for 18 months, and banned from working for three years. The famous line she is supposed to have said in court—that her heart was French but the rest of her was international—was probably written by a screenwriter friend. There is no reliable record that she ever said it.

The women who were shaved were mostly not famous. In Cherbourg, the army caption called them housemaids and servants of the Germans. Most of their names are in local police files and almost nowhere else. The American cameramen’s film was not cut.

It went into the United States National Archives, where it remains. Most people think it ended with the summer of 1944. It did not. In May and June 1945, the war in Europe ended and the trains started coming home from Germany.

On them were French prisoners of war, forced laborers, and the survivors of the concentration camps. On the same trains were the French who had gone to Germany by choice: volunteer workers and women who had followed German men. Station platforms became places of shaving and sometimes of lynching. Virgili found this second wave in at least 16 départements.

On the platforms, families waited for sons and husbands they had not seen in five years. Some never stepped off the train. Some stepped off as skeletons from the camps. And some men stepped off and learned what their wives had done while they were gone.

In the Jura, the prefect reported in 1945 that for the first time in many months in several towns, people had seized certain women to cut their hair. After that wave, the shavings faded. What replaced them was quieter: shots fired into houses at night, explosives left at a door, and the prisons slowly emptying. Forty thousand people were held for collaboration in early 1945.

By 1950, 6,000. By 1954, fewer than 1,000. The last shavings Virgili found date from early 1946, nearly three years after the first. And not every story ended with a haircut.

At Monterfil in Brittany in August 1944, women were shaved and then put to death. In 2020, the French government named that village in an official answer to parliament. Some of the shorn women went to the courts themselves and filed complaints against the men who had cut their hair. In June 1945, a court in Saint-Dié ruled on one of them.

Its judgment said it was understandable that French people of high patriotic feeling had been outraged by these women. Then it said it could not be denied that cutting the woman’s hair had been an act of violence. Both sentences are in the same judgment from the same court, written less than a year after the liberation. Then there were the children.

Daniel Roussel was born in Brittany in 1943. His father was a German lieutenant. His mother worked in the canteen of a German air base, and she left after the war to escape the shavings. He was raised by his grandmother in a village that turned against him.

He has said he was made to sleep in a hen house. “I cried a lot,” he said. “I was only 6 years old, and already I wanted to kill myself. ”

He remembered the joke people told about children like him.

“A swallow takes its babies with it when it leaves France. The Bosch leaves them behind. ”

Another son, Gérard Perreau, said his mother had loved someone considered the enemy. “After the war, that was seen as a sin,” he said, “and she passed the shame onto him.

”

In 2009, Germany agreed to grant citizenship to the French children of Wehrmacht soldiers. Daniel Roussel was the first to receive it. On the day he got his papers, he said: “I’m German. I’m not a bastard anymore.

I’m a child like all the others. ”

Another of those children, Michel Panier, wrote to the German Embassy: “I was a child of shame. In the end, however, I am a child of love. ”

Simone Tuso’s daughter is still alive.

She has never spoken in public, and she has kept her name private. Other countries have looked back at the same history. In 2018, the Prime Minister of Norway formally apologized to the Norwegian women who had been punished for relationships with German soldiers. In 2020, a French member of Parliament asked whether France would do the same.

The government said there had been no concerted national plan behind the shavings. It recognized the suffering of the women and their families. And it said it does not intend to make an official apology. For years, France mostly remembered the shorn women through art.

In 1944, the poet Paul Éluard published a poem about a shorn girl called “Comprendre qui voudra”—let those understand who will. In 1959, Marguerite Duras wrote Hiroshima mon amour. Its heroine is a young woman from Nevers whose German lover is killed at the liberation. She is shaved and shut away in a cellar.

In 1964, the singer Georges Brassens recorded a song called “La Tondue”—the shorn woman. So here is the record with nothing taken out. About 20,000 women. A little over half accused of sleeping with Germans.

The rest accused of the same collaboration men were tried and shot for. Among them, women who loved German soldiers, women who worked for the occupier, and women whose neighbors never came back from the camps. A summer of liberation after four years of occupation. Mostly with no law, no order, and no trial.

And an American army that filmed it, wrote a caption, and drove on. Justice, revenge, or something in between. The people of 1944 could not agree on it. The courts could not agree on it.

Eighty years later, France still has not settled it.