Colorized by me for The World Aflame: French woman accused of sleeping with Germans during the occupation has her head shaved by vindictive neighbors in village near Marseilles.
".. there were cases of prostitutes kicked to death for having accepted German soldiers as clients."
Original by Carl Mydans.
"A large number of the victims were prostitutes who had simply plied their trade with Germans as well as Frenchmen, although in some areas it was accepted that their conduct was professional rather than political...
... others were silly teenagers who had associated with German soldiers out of bravado or boredom. In a number of cases, female schoolteachers who, living alone, had German soldiers billeted on them, were falsely denounced for having been a "mattress for the boches.
(...) Women accused of having had an abortion were also assumed to have consorted with Germans. Many victims were young mothers, whose husbands were in German prisoner-of-war camps.
During the war, they often had no means of support...
... and their only hope of obtaining food for themselves and their children was to accept a liaison with a German soldier.
(...) After the humiliation of a public head-shaving, the tondues - the shorn women - were often paraded through the streets on the back of a lorry, occasionally to the sound of a drum as if it were a tumbril and France was reliving the revolution of 1789.
Some were daubed with tar, some stripped half naked, some marked with swastikas in paint or lipstick."
"... resistance leaders in Paris made a determined effort to stop all head-shaving. Colonel Henri Rol-Tanguy had posters run off warning of reprisals against would-be tondeurs, and René Porte knocked together the heads of a group of youths tormenting a young woman."
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Colorized by me: 🇨🇦 “Wait for Me, Daddy” - taken by Claude P. Dettloff on October 1, 1940, of The British Columbia Regiment (Duke of Connaught's Own Rifles). While Dettloff was taking the photo, Warren "Whitey" Bernard ran away from his mother to his father, Private Jack Bernard.
The picture received extensive exposure and was used in war-bond drives. When Jack Bernard returned home Dettloff was on hand to photograph the family's reunion. Jack and Bernice Bernard eventually divorced.
🇲🇽 Frida used to accompany her father, Guillermo Kahlo —a well-known photographer of German origins and Hungarian heritage— to his studio, where she helped him in the darkroom, retouching photographic plates.
(Museo Frida Kahlo)
This is an invitation to a Roman birthday party sent around 100 AD to a Sulpicia Lepidina:
"On 11 September, sister, for the day of the celebration of my birthday, I give you a warm invitation to make sure that you come to us, to make the day more enjoyable for me...
... by your arrival, if you are present. Give my greetings to your Cerialis. My Aelius and my little son send him their greetings."
(2nd hand): "I shall expect you, sister. Farewell, sister, my dearest soul, as I hope to prosper, and hail."
(On the back, 1st hand): "To Sulpicia Lepidina, wife of Cerialis, from Severa."