This week's 65th anniversary of the D-day landings is an opportunity to review happy memories of the 1944 liberation of France. Among the inspirational pictures, though, there are also startling ones. These depict the fate of ladies accused of "collaboration horizontale". Robert Capa's fallen-Madonna picture of a shaven-headed young woman cradling her baby suggests subtly the outcome of a relationship with a German soldier.
Shaving a woman's head carried biblical roots as punishment. In Europe, the habit originated among the Visigoths in the dark ages. During the middle ages, adultery was often punished with this mark of shame that denigrated a woman of what was supposed to be her most seductive trait. In the 20th century, shaving women's heads once more was used as a mark of punishment and humiliation. German women who had relationships with French soldiers later suffered the same fate once they occupied the Rhineland in 1923. And during the Second World War, the Nazi government issued directives stating German women accused of sleeping with non-Aryan or foreign prisoners working on farms should also be publicly punished in this manner.