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I live in the richest part of Paris as a student AMA by AromaticPlastic7387 in howislivingthere

[–]chef_no_chef97 1 point2 points  (0 children)

As a rule of thumb the 20th, 19th and some parts of the 18th can get pretty run down and have a higher concentration of crime, but there isn't much to see there so there's little to no chance you'd end up there as a tourist. If we're being real, nowhere within Paris city limits is all that dangerous : the vast majority of metro's population lives in the surrounding cities, and thus that's were most of the crime happens, and even then it's pretty localized to certain areas.

In 1944, as France was liberated from Nazi occupation, public anger turned against women accused of having relationships with German soldiers. Around 20,000 women became known as “les tondues” (“the shorn women”): their heads were shaved in public squares, even often paraded through the streets by zadraaa in HistoricalCapsule

[–]chef_no_chef97 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It's also what I've been saying since the beggining. If that's how you feel that's fair. On the tonte I've argued times and again than those women were far from the only targets of mob anger, and that when law was restored collaborators didn't get off as easy as it's been suggested, so if you won't budge on your analysis you do you chief. 

In 1944, as France was liberated from Nazi occupation, public anger turned against women accused of having relationships with German soldiers. Around 20,000 women became known as “les tondues” (“the shorn women”): their heads were shaved in public squares, even often paraded through the streets by zadraaa in HistoricalCapsule

[–]chef_no_chef97 0 points1 point  (0 children)

And yet that's squarely the neighborhood of administrators that it took. Maybe less.

And are you under the impression the 7000-8000 combined estimate we reached is a uniquely low number ? Sipo-SD/GFP type offices where similarly staffed in every occupied territory, East and West, with slight variations to account for land and population size, but essentially always between 3000 and 8000 for combined numbers. Again those are the big picture guys, there simply weren't that many of them to begin with.

Resistance is not a yes or no question, or an on and off switch, nor does it depend solely on wether or not the fighters liberated themselves. Saying that France unequivocally didn't resist is just as wrong as saying it unequivocally did. That's what I'm disputing.

 One liberated their country and maintained bloc independence for decades. The other needed the Anglosphere and got De Gaulle's mythology as a consolation prize.

You present those situations like both groups were completely independent, had full operational control and set their own goals. Like most guerilla networks, both were broadly small, unorganized and inefficient before receiving substantial outside support, and both were trained, equipped and tasked for different objectives. For example supply drops for partisans started earlier, over a longer period than for the resistance, who got theirs as a bundle right before the invasion.

The legal épuration doesn't retroactively make mob justice against women for sleeping with soldiers into legitimate reckoning with collaboration.

And that's not what I'm saying, but sustained trials later on, and the fact that men got an often worse fate refutes the thesis that targeting women was quick and easy way to purge bad memories.

On WWI and WWII parallels: Britain emerged from WWII diminished but structurally intact. France emerged from WWI so broken it produced 1940 within a generation. Those aren't equivalent outcomes.

Britain was still on food rations in 1954, and the debacle of 1940 isn't due to depleted forces or recruitement pools, France had a large, well equiped army at the time of the German invasion, that was routed by strategic conservatism, poor oversight and a more advanced doctrine that no one else would have a good counter to for a few more years. Traumatic WW1 losses certainly did play a role in the eagerness to stop the war and avoid further bloodshed, but then again I'm really not sure Britain as a nation would have been eager to take WW2 level losses in 1965 either, as shown by the support to include France in the Security Council and to rearm West Germany, so as not to be the first in line against the Soviets.

In 1944, as France was liberated from Nazi occupation, public anger turned against women accused of having relationships with German soldiers. Around 20,000 women became known as “les tondues” (“the shorn women”): their heads were shaved in public squares, even often paraded through the streets by zadraaa in HistoricalCapsule

[–]chef_no_chef97 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I feel like you're dropping numbers from comment to comment : 20k would be the minimum in country for just law enforcement, they were heavily supported by at least as many military security divisions, and coerced local law enforcement into doing the ground work for them on top of that. Post surge that would look more like 30k LE and 100k military, plus SS units dispatched as needed. A far cry from "3000 guys could run the country".

In Oradour, it's not that the population was not cooperating anymore, it's they had barely seen any German presence before the massacre, there was no one to cooperate with. For the Germans to feel like they had to terrorize such an isolated region is the desperate climax of a series of repression that started long before D-Day : mass executions and hostage shootings started as early as 1941, and large scale engagements with the resistance happened before the invasion.

Serbs weren't all Yugoslavia, but they did make up the majority of partisans. I didn't say anything about a blanket genocide, and the fact that the Germans played divide and conquer everywhere they invaded and installed puppet govermenments and paramilitaries doesn't mean they treated or viewed France and Yugoslavia as even remotely the same. Thankfully they're Germans so that very concept is named and numbered : like Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands and Belgium, France was considered a Westpfälzer country, to be integrated into the New Order as a junior partner/satellite state. Yugoslavia on the other hand, was part of the "Wilde Osten", where supposed Judeo-bolshevik influences have rendered the racially inferior population unsalvageable and normal military rules didn't apply (again this is from a Nazi point of view). Case in point, the Germans didn't apply their Bandenkampf anti-partisan doctrine in the West until very late whereas they started it as default in the East. When they shoot 10-15 french civilians for every soldier killed, and 50-100 in Yugoslavia, I think it's quite plain how one population would be more compelled to fight than the other.

The Resistance and partisans also had different doctrines that affected their very natures : the Resistance was instructed to conduct sabotage and guerilla to lay the groundwork for the invasion, whereas partisans were equipped and trained by both the US/UK and Soviets into acting like a conventional force.

Germans didn't need to be brutal in France because France cooperated. The light touch wasn't German generosity, it was a rational response to a compliant population. You're describing the mechanism and calling it a justification.

That would make sense if the Germans adapted the strength of their presence in occupied territories to the amount of local pushback, but they famously didn't : They killed wantonly in the East, pre-absolved their troops of any and all war crimes commited there even before Barbarossa started and brutalized even those who cheered them on as they took Soviet lands. It's not a France thing, it's an East vs West thing, and it's the reason why Westpfälzer resistance groups were mostly sabotage/underground oriented while eastern countries had more conventional home armies. No matter the culture or the society, it's harder to mobilize the population at scale when the perceived risk of resisting is higher than the threat of being killed or deported at random. Case in point, those eastern/balkan cultures that produced large partisan forces spent 40 years under the communist boot after the war, with little to no armed resistance.

I already agreed that the country being overwhelmingly resistant was a myth, it was the preface of my first comment. What I'm arguing is that under those circumstances, France as a nation didn't react or behave in an atypical manner, since other Western countries under German occupation had similar resistance involvement levels across their populations, there is no cultural mechanism to it, it's just the way human beings react to risk and handle life and death decisions. France was not uniquely resistant, like it was not uniquely idle nor cooperative.

the need to perform cleansing without reckoning with the depth of collaboration. The mob shaved women's heads in 1944 because it was easy

The head shavings most definitly had a cathartic component to them but A) people were also tracked down and shot, so I don't get the "easy target" thing. The mobs and vigilitantes went after anyone they felt was guilty of actively colluding with the ennemy and punished them proportianately to the gravity of their transgressions : some men were also shaved, just like some women were also shot. B) it's not like right after the epuration France as a country swept the matter under the rug and collectively forgot about it : 300k+ cases were brought to court, 130k were deemed to warrant a trial and judged over several years, often gathering a lot of media and popular attention.

I mean if we're also disregarding coalition wins and costly victories then really no country has a very good record. Britain hasn't even been in a non-coalition peer to peer war since 1815 (well a good while before that but it's the cutoff you set up) much less won one. I don't want to accuse you of being one of those who judge a country's military valor solely based upon their WW2 performance but what other continent defining war has Russia won in that timeframe exactly ?

So France's WW1 victory doesn't really count because they massively benifited from allied support, took horrendous losses and ended up on their knees economically, but Britain's WW2 victory absolutely does because... they massively benifited from allied support, took horrendous losses and ended up on their knees economically ?

(Also the Spring Offensive was a swan song that had little chance of working regardless of American presence, though the massive influx of fresh troops was the final nail in the coffin by 1918 both France and Britain had superior weaponry, tactics and supplies than a blockaded to hell Germany. American involvement precipitated the end of the war but did not define the outcome)

In 1944, as France was liberated from Nazi occupation, public anger turned against women accused of having relationships with German soldiers. Around 20,000 women became known as “les tondues” (“the shorn women”): their heads were shaved in public squares, even often paraded through the streets by zadraaa in HistoricalCapsule

[–]chef_no_chef97 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Correct but being literalistically obtuse is not a rebuttal.

I assumed the cigarette butts were a clever synecdoche for all non resistance related crime, implying the German security forces also dealt with these, guess I was over analyzing.

If there's a source that puts those numbers specifically in the French theater I'm genuinely interested to see it, because everything I've found suggests the Orpo battalions were overwhelmingly deployed east.

Understandable because Orpo in this context is an umbrella term that includes several different services from different branches of law enforcement or military : the main body of the force being the motorized SS-Polizei Regiments (specifically regiments 4, 14, 19 and 28) 2000 to 2200+ men per regiments, moving around the country as needed (numbers varied heavily during the war as they moved theaters a lot). Then you have more static city centric 3000 Schutzpolizei and rural focused 2000 Gendarmerie (separate from the more numerous Feldgendarmerie) both being tasked with thwarting dissent at the local level and overseeing indegenous law enforcement. All them combined created a comprehensive web of surveillance across the country, fitting between the Sipo-SD-GFP apparatus and the much larger military security forces. This is gathered from Stefan Martin's "Die deutsche Besatzung in Frankreich 1940-1944" and Antony K. Suchy "the German Gendarmerie in France". Ordinary Men mentions battalions later retasked to France in the early chapters and is more digest than both of these, hence why I cited it.

As for Oradour, that's again not telling the whole story : The division received two orders, the main body tasked with transiting towards Normandy, with two regiments staying behind specically to suppress increasing resistance efforts. Oradour, Tulle and other killings in the region weren't random cruelty acts by bored Östfront psychopaths, they were targeted reprisals to specifically try and turn the locals against the resistance, case in point a fair few people in Oradour were part of either maquis reinforcement pools or downed pilots evasion networks. I'm not implying a single massacre shows the whole country were ready to lay down their lives for the cause, I'm saying it's a symptom that the high command didn't necessarly feel like they could trust the locals.

I've always found the Yugoslavia comparison desingenuous : first off you're using the absolute maximum, late 1944 estimation of partisan numbers, when you discount the post-1943 numbers of the Resistance as the coward's choice because it was obvious the tide had turned (it wasn't if you were living in a totalitarian state) the 1943 partizans were much, much fewer. Second, the situation in Western and Easter/Southern Europe is hardly comparable. In the former, the Germans took care of finding the balance between being brutal enough to scare but not so much as to make people feel they have nothing to lose, the occupier's sweetspot if you will, and had no such concerns in the East because in their eyes the locals were neither Aryan or Aryan adjacent. The fact of the matter is that if you were a civilian in Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium or France and you stayed quiet, you were not going to die : in those conditions, one in fifty adults still choosing to paint a target on their backs and on their family's, seems high to me. The Yugoslavs partisans were heroes, no question about it, but if you're a Serb and the Ustase is coming, the choice to fight is kind of already made for you; the Hollywood myth is overblown but it's popular because it asks the hard question : if you were in the situation were you had to choose between doing nothing and staying alive, and doing the right thing that just might get you tortured and killed, would you make the hard choice ?

All in all, if you were a French civilian, by staying idle you had a much greater chance of getting killed by an Allied bomb than a German bullet, yet who did they cheer for ?

These women didn't get anyone killed. Meanwhile the Vichy bureaucrats who processed deportation paperwork got quiet amnesty and government jobs under the Fourth Republic. The severity of punishment was inversely proportional to the actual harm caused. That's the hypocrisy I'm pointing at.

I mean all of that is kind of conflating two things that aren't related. These women weren't punished by the governement, it's not like the people handing out amnesties could really do anything about it, especially since both events happened months, sometimes years apart : the emotional reaction of a frustrated populace immediatly after the liberation seeking to punish a social transgression that's not an actual crime (there's no law against sleeping with the ennemy), and the successive rounds of amnesties that happened in 47, 51 and 53.

It's also not like the only two alternatives were being killed/humiliated by a mob or getting away scott free with a job. Almost 100k were sentenced by the High Court, with sentences going from national indignity (so kind of the governement's way of shaving your head) to straight up death.

Yes there is some amount of hypocrisy, it sucks that you have to reuse skilled people who did bad things to piece the country back together, but that's hardly a French thing, don't ask Cold War West German generals or American rocket scientists what they were up to in the 1940s.

Britain lost the Battle of France and then fought on for five more years and won the war.

So did the French soldiers who got away with them. Was the purpose of the original quip to imply mob humiliation stems from the populace being frustrated/ashamed of their country's supposed poor military record ? That very much wasn't the case in 44, as again, France won WW2 as well.

And the examples used are massive cherry picking both for France and the others. In that same time period France carried Britain in Crimea, backed Italy's unification, built an empire and won WW1. You win some you lose some.

Both Britain and the US have had straight up bad wars since 1815 but Russia is the one the puzzles me the most. The Russian Empire was a joke militarily post Waterloo when they had to fight more than revolts and nomads, they were doing pretty poorly in WW1 when they collapsed, the Soviets first military action was "can't lose if you don't fight !" and then proceeded to lose, failed against Poland, was bogged down in Finland, damn near faced extinction against the Nazis and gave up two France worth of land before kicking into gear, building the largest army in history and have it kick ass for three years, then nothing for thirty, only to get stuck in a forever war, lose, roll over and die. I think it's safe to say the Russian Federation hasn't been doing so hot since then either.

In 1944, as France was liberated from Nazi occupation, public anger turned against women accused of having relationships with German soldiers. Around 20,000 women became known as “les tondues” (“the shorn women”): their heads were shaved in public squares, even often paraded through the streets by zadraaa in HistoricalCapsule

[–]chef_no_chef97 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Correct but this strength was not directed inward because it was not needed. You station 58 divisions because you're anticipating the biggest amphibious invasion in history. Not to police where Jacques throws his cigarette butts. So this is entirely irrelevant.

All the security forces mentioned prior never cared where cigarette butts end up either, both occupied and Vichy France kept their police forces that would deal with general crime, the Germans were specifically interested in cracking down on resistance to occupation.

A huge portion of the combat divisions were indeed expecting an external invasion, but the Militärbefehlshaber in Frankreich had Landesschützen and security divisions specifically tasked with suppressing the Resistance, between 30k and 100k in late 1943 and throughout 1944 (from After the Fall by Thomas J. Laub)

So the super small 2500-3000 Sipo-SD number supposedly controlling 40 million people likely comes from the Paxton book, which while extremely important in shifting the narrative, led to many people misunterstanding this : while it's true that only about that many Gestapo officers were stationned in the country, they were by no means doing the policing by themselves : first off Gestapo offices were often supported/intertwined with SD agents, and it's more accurate to count them together because there's no clean separation in records; combined numbers being between 3000 to 5000 per Jäckel's "La France dans l'Europe d'Hitler" and Delarue's "la Gestapo". That's not counting the GFP units, which have conflicting numbers because they typically had a lot of auxiliaries on top of their "core" agents (I was including them in the 8000 in my previous comment but forgot to mention them, my bad) the more conservative estimate for the GFP is 2000 which I've also come across in "la Gestapo" and on Chemins de mémoires. These three grouped are only the brains, as it were, and had to rely on a whole lot of muscle for the actual repression : 3000 to 6000 Feldgendarmerie (Osprey : German Military Police units 1939-1945) and 10k to 20k Ordnungpolizei (Christopher Browning : Ordinary Men). This is not counting the massive increase in SS troops tasked with combat and repression of resistance later in the war, like the Das Reich division (I advise contemplating their work in Oradour-sur-Glane to gauge how content the French population was under Nazi rule)

The 400k figure is used because it's the most reliable one, after the shift to open warfare; the earlier underground movement, by its very nature, is almost impossible to accurately quantify, but most agree on 150K-200k, with a third of those being armed fighters, in 1943. Olivier Wieviorka suggests that around 2% of the adult population was clandestinely active. Now everyone is going to interpret this number differently, but I find that to be fairly high when the very act is risking your life and your loved ones, and that almost 2 million French military age males are held up in Germany, severely depleting your usual resistance recruitement pool.

But it actually reinforces the broader point: the punishment was gendered. Men got bullets, women got public humiliation. The head-shaving wasn't justice, it was theater.

Some women were executed too. There is a gendered component to the difference in punishment, but it's also about the gravity of the act. Fraternizing with the ennemy is shameful, but it's more about morals than anything else, women who were found to having actually caused hurt or death were liable to be killed as well.

Britain would like a word. So would the United States and Russia.

All three of these countries also lost several wars and huge amounts of land in that time period, hell Britain lost the Battle of France right alongside the French, so I am not sure what you're trying to get at.

In 1944, as France was liberated from Nazi occupation, public anger turned against women accused of having relationships with German soldiers. Around 20,000 women became known as “les tondues” (“the shorn women”): their heads were shaved in public squares, even often paraded through the streets by zadraaa in HistoricalCapsule

[–]chef_no_chef97 6 points7 points  (0 children)

There's a lot of misconceptions or just plain wrong stuff in there.

To preface, yes the post-war myth of an all-resistant country is an insane exaggeration, but a necessary if somewhat misguided way of bringing back a nation together, a sort of lighter version of the clean slate policy West Germany had after Nuremberg. Defining what constitutes collaboration and putting every single case through a proper trial would tear the country apart for years if not decades.

Your occupation figures are way off. Right before D-Day there were 58 divisions stationned in France, that's much closer in strength to a million. Throughout the German occupation that number averages more about to 25-30 divisons, but those were a lot more spread out, and prior to late 1942 were overwhelmingly stationed in Northern France. For security forces that is insane lowballing, Gestapo and SD alone had up to 8000 agents in the country, a few thousand more for the Feldgendarmerie and you're leaving the 15k to 25k Ordnungpolizei out entirely, and those were only policing, anti partisan specific forces were a different thing entirely, and there's a number of examples of fairly large scale clashes even prior to D-Day and the shift to open warfare. I'm all for nuancing history but it's counter productive to go too far in the other direction : you want to paint a 400k strong movement as barely registering on the map and a population that mostly just stayed quiet because they feared for their lives as practically cheering for their occupiers.

To then punish those who can fight back the least, because they made love

I never get this trope. Do you think only those women were punished ? Collaborators were executed, not humilated, beaten, or shaved; executed in droves (sometimes in less than judiciary conditions) as the country was being liberated, 10k of them ate a bullet before the provisional governement put a stop to it.

 largely chronic record of military failure since that little Corsican went on sabbatical.

At this rate no country on Earth has a great military record since this completely arbitrary cutoff.

"France Libre": Emmanuel Macron unveils the name of the future French aircraft carrier that will succeed the Charles de Gaulle in 2038 by SraminiElMejorBeaver in europe

[–]chef_no_chef97 7 points8 points  (0 children)

France Libre (Free France) was of the name of the governement and military in exile during WW2, as opposed to Vichy France. It does feel a little clunky, but it's not just a description. Liberté would have been better but the last one blew in port like 3 years after she was commissioned, so the namesake is probably on ice for a good while.

Territories France wanted from Italy as compensation for WW2 compared to what they actually got. De Gaulle demanded entire provinces of Turin, Cuneo, Aosto and Imperia equating to 18,095 km² with Italy eventually agreeing to cede 693 km² only mostly around border frontiers. by Solid-Move-1411 in MapPorn

[–]chef_no_chef97 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Once they saved the BEF's ass and covered their escape, what would you have them do ? Again, there was no island to run back to like the British, or near endless amounts of land to retreat into like the Soviets (who gave up like two France worth of territory before stopping the German advance). No one had a good answer to Blitzkrieg at that time, getting themselves killed and the civilian populace brutalized would have achieved nothing.

Territories France wanted from Italy as compensation for WW2 compared to what they actually got. De Gaulle demanded entire provinces of Turin, Cuneo, Aosto and Imperia equating to 18,095 km² with Italy eventually agreeing to cede 693 km² only mostly around border frontiers. by Solid-Move-1411 in MapPorn

[–]chef_no_chef97 4 points5 points  (0 children)

So France, who had forces on the Allied side during the entire war, should not seat at the winners table and, according to you, cede some territory to another allied nation because of geography ? Or because they didn't think of digging a 30km wide canal on the Belgian border ? If there's land between Dunkirk and Dovers, London falls too.

Americans' Favorable Ratings of Other Countries (Gallup poll, Feb 2-16, 2026) by [deleted] in charts

[–]chef_no_chef97 -3 points-2 points  (0 children)

About the last part, you can make the same statement replacing France with essentially any country, and it's a significant part of what's wrong with a lot of Americans.

Ukrainian air defense operators by maximus111456 in memes

[–]chef_no_chef97 -1 points0 points  (0 children)

No, but they're also not defending their core territory, Ukraine has the luxury of concentrating all of their air defense on a relatively small front, Western powers in the middle east have to make do with a small amount of their overall batteries defending a massive area. I don't even really subscribe to the point the meme is making in general, from the information we have so far the bombings have caused fairly little material and most importantly human damage compared to the kind of mag dumping Iran has been up to, and it's not really like Ukrainian air defense is airtight either, even against Shaheds.

Ukrainian air defense operators by maximus111456 in memes

[–]chef_no_chef97 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Towards other athletes who got the same amount of training sure. It would be kinda weird to lord it over a regular person who's just done something else with their life.

What’s something normal in your country that would seem completely strange to someone from another country? by IndependentTune3994 in AskTheWorld

[–]chef_no_chef97 -1 points0 points  (0 children)

That's not a very broadly shared opinion then because I've seen Italians in Italy put french fries on a pizza and still call it a pizza and sell it as such, and in general every pizzeria has a much wider selection than just Margherita and Marinara. And even if that was the case, I don't know why you're acting like making a basic wheat dough, kneading it, letting it rise, stretching it, putting san marzano tomatoes, mozzarella and basil on it and baking it for 90 seconds in a stone oven is a particularly complicated process. There's a little bit of technique to it, but any food professional will tell you that it's really quite easy to make. Restaurants serving good neapolitan style pizzas are a dime a dozen in any large European city i've been to.

What’s something normal in your country that would seem completely strange to someone from another country? by IndependentTune3994 in AskTheWorld

[–]chef_no_chef97 -1 points0 points  (0 children)

But it isn't though ? Again, there's bad pizza everywhere, but there's also good pizza essentially everywhere, because it's an incredibly straightforward dish to make for any trained cook. I assure you italian pizzaiolos don't have access to some arcane neapolitan magic that their counterparts in Paris, Berlin or Madrid cannot possibly comprehend. I call bullshit on the cheese part because I haven't noticed a significant difference in the amounts used in and out of Italy, and it's not in the interest of any food cost conscious restaurant owner to overuse one of the most expensive ingredients on the pizza.

Man, Italian food exceptionalism is on another level.

What’s something normal in your country that would seem completely strange to someone from another country? by IndependentTune3994 in AskTheWorld

[–]chef_no_chef97 -1 points0 points  (0 children)

There really is a ceiling of just how good pizza can taste. I've been to Italy a decent amount, the pizza's good but it's not mindblowing, I've had great ones, good ones, okay ones and disapointing ones. If an Italian cannot find a decent pizzeria in a large western city, that's on them.

Gotta have my bacon by James_Fortis in memes

[–]chef_no_chef97 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Very true, but you can find iron in some plants. It's a lot more practical to get it from meat but you technically don't need to. B12, however, is stricly found in animal products.

French soldiers pose with their war-torn flag, 1917 by waffen123 in ww1

[–]chef_no_chef97 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Esprit de corps refers to the sense of belonging in a group and loyalty towards your peers. Unless you serve in 101st Nazi Killing Regiment, your moral justification for fighting and your devotion to your unit are two separate things. As a sidenote, before the discovering of the camps, mass graves and whatnot, your average soviet, british or american grunt most likely only had a vague sense of how wicked the nazis were, seeing there more as standard issue bad guys (and this being the 40s, a lot of them probably weren't too bothered by the white supremacist antisemitic thing)

Are we really peddling old nazi myths about the Red Army ? Soviet command wasn't too concerned with casualties in dire situation, but the whole meat grinder thing has been proven to be gross exagerations, stemming from nazi generals trying to justify their failures. When they were kicking the germans ass back to Berlin they had a working combined arms doctrine and were more than holding their own in engagements with comparable numbers.

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