Crimes of Fashion in WWII
You know the perfume. You don’t know the woman. By the end of our most recent episode you’re going to be furious that the only thing most people associate with her name is a bottle on a department store counter.
We don’t usually think about fashion and war crimes at the same time. Today’s episode forces us to. This story is about 2 MAJOR fashion houses and the very different roles they played in Nazi occupation in Europe.
Listen to the latest episode here: Bitchstory
Most of what you’ve been taught about World War II is a story about men.
Men with maps. Men in war rooms. Men storming beaches. The women in those stories — when they exist at all — are nurses, sweethearts, mothers waiting at home. Maybe a brave farm girl hiding a downed pilot in her barn for thirty seconds of B-roll.
The reality is so much messier, and darker, and more interesting than that. This week’s episode is about one woman in particular. To understand her, you have to understand the world she walked into.
Occupied France was not what the movies told you
By the summer of 1940, France had fallen to Germany in six weeks. The country was carved in two: the north under German military occupation, the south governed by a French puppet regime under Marshal Philippe Pétain, headquartered in the spa town of Vichy.
Vichy France wasn’t a Nazi occupation in the technical sense. It was worse. It was Frenchmen, voluntarily, enforcing Nazi policy on other Frenchmen. Vichy passed its own antisemitic laws. Vichy deported its own Jewish citizens. Vichy police rounded up Jewish children for the camps without being asked by anyone in Berlin.
And inside this collaborationist France, a shadow infrastructure of resistance had to invent itself, from scratch, with no playbook.
What the Resistance actually was
When Americans hear “French Resistance,” they picture a man in a beret blowing up a train. That happened. It wasn’t the main thing.
The main thing was information. Resistance networks got intelligence on German troop movements, factory output, supply lines — and got that information out of France to Allied intelligence in London. The actual war-changing work was done by typists and couriers and people who walked memorized secrets across town.
And the people most useful to these networks — who could move freely through occupied territory, attend social events without arousing suspicion, carry packages no one would stop to search — were women.
And if they got caught, they didn’t get a prisoner-of-war camp. They got the Gestapo.
When Frenchmen tortured Frenchwomen
There’s a story Americans rarely hear about the occupation, and it’s the story of the French people who chose to work for the Nazis. The street-level enforcers. The ones with the rubber hoses.
The most notorious unit was known as the Rue de la Pompe Gestapo, named for its headquarters in an elegant building in the 16th arrondissement of Paris. The unit had a German leader, but it was staffed by French collaborators. French citizens who volunteered to interrogate, torture, and break other French citizens. Historians who’ve studied these units agree on something disturbing: the French collaborators were often more vicious than the Germans. They had something to prove.
Their preferred technique was what they called “the bath.” A prisoner stripped, bound, plunged headfirst into ice water for forty-five minutes at a time. Pulled out and beaten across the neck with rubber hoses until they confessed. They tortured Resistance fighters to death. The survivors got sent east.
The camp built only for women
Most people, when they think of the Nazi camp system, think of Auschwitz. They picture men in striped uniforms.
There was another camp, ninety kilometers north of Berlin, built specifically and exclusively for women. Its name was Ravensbrück. About 130,000 women passed through during the six years it operated. Estimates of the dead range from thirty thousand to ninety thousand. The uncertainty itself is a kind of damnation — we don’t even know how many they killed.
There is a memorial at Ravensbrück now. It is small. It is quiet. Auschwitz gets tourist buses; Ravensbrück gets a few visitors a week. Most of the world has decided it doesn’t need to remember the camp where they kept the women.
So who is “she”?
You’ll find out on this week’s episode of bitchstory.
We’ll tell you who she was — not just as a Resistance fighter, not just as a survivor of Ravensbrück, but as a sister, a lover, a daughter, a woman who grew flowers for a living and never wanted to be famous. We’ll tell you about the perfume in your bathroom that bears her name, though you’ve never heard hers.
We’ll tell you about another famous Frenchwoman who spent those same years a few miles away, in a very different hotel, sleeping with a very different kind of man — and what happened to her after the war.
The collaborator almost got a state funeral.
The Resistance fighter died in obscurity.
We’ll tell you about another famous Frenchwoman who spent those same years a few miles away, in a very different hotel, sleeping with a very different kind of man — and what happened to her after the war.
The collaborator almost got a state funeral.
The Resistance fighter died in obscurity.
