Brave boys, proud warriors
Came here from afar
They brought us freedom
So they should have some fun
But many a “Dutch girl”
Soon threw away her honor
For a packet of cigarettes
And chocolate bar . . .
Many who hailed with the Huns
Have already paid the price
Girl, you betrayed the honor of your country
Just as much . . .
No Dutch boy will look at you again
Since you left him in the cold . . .
It is all there: national honor, loose morals, material greed, the local boys spurned. Most revealing is the direct comparison of girls who had relations with the German occupiers and the liberators from Britain or North America. The implication is clear. What mattered was female immorality. That is why some Dutch girls who fraternized with Canadians had their hair cut off by angry mobs, just like the “Jerry whores” (Moffenhoeren).
Several things made the moral panic unleashed by foreign occupation, in liberated countries as much as among the defeated, more acute. Misguided occupation policies did little to soften the resentment of local men. Allied troops requisitioned cinemas, cafés, dance halls, and swimming pools for themselves. These were off-limits to the native population, but not to local girls who managed to pick up an Allied soldier. Naturally, this was resented. In the city of Utrecht, a group of young Dutchmen grabbed some girls who had been seen with Canadian soldiers and tried to shave their heads. The Canadians felt protective. Knives were pulled, stones were thrown, guns went off. Nobody got killed in this instance, although several people were wounded.
The ban on organized prostitution by the Allied authorities also contributed to the high rate of venereal diseases. A popular expression among the Americans in Germany, just after the war was finally declared over, was “VD follows V-E.” In the American occupation zone in Germany, VD rates are said to have gone up 235 percent between V-E Day and the end of 1945, that is, from 75 per 1,000 soldiers per year to 250 per year.61 This despite distribution among GIs, at railway stations and Red Cross Clubs, of “V-packets,” containing condoms and potassium permanganate pills. In Holland, VD rates had already gone up considerably during the German occupation, and rose further immediately after the war. The press published scare stories about more than 10,000 women who were supposedly infected with diseases without even realizing it. There were similar scares in France.
In southern Italy, the moral panic, equating the danger of VD with national humiliation, found a typically histrionic expression in a famous book by Curzio Malaparte titled The Skin. Malaparte was a fabulist, something he never denied, and was more than a little bit sympathetic to the fascists, but he had a gift for expressing a popular mood, even if details were made up for effect. The Allied invasion is compared in his book to a plague, in which “the limbs remained seemingly intact,” but “the soul festered and rotted.” During the German occupation, Malaparte explains, “only prostitutes” had relations with the occupiers. But now, under the Americans and British, “as a result of this loathsome plague, which first corrupted the feminine sense of honor and dignity,” shame has infected every Italian home. Why? Because such was “the baneful power of the contagion that self-prostitution had become a praiseworthy act, almost a proof of patriotism, and all, men and women, far from blushing at the thought of it, seemed to glory in their own and the universal degradation.”62
This was probably an exaggeration. But many people, apart from the author, may have felt it that way. Sleeping with the foreign soldier was the same as prostitution. If it was voluntary, so much the worse.
GIs in France were shown a documentary film titled Good Girls Have VD Too. One of the humiliations suffered by women in occupied cities, in Amsterdam no less than in Tokyo, was to be regularly rounded up at random for VD checks. No doubt the scarcity of medical facilities in the postwar chaos, the bad hygienic conditions, and the relative inexperience of many young men and women, often raised in socially conservative or puritanical societies, compounded the medical problems. But Malaparte, in his overwrought manner, put his finger on the sorest spot: women, for a variety of reasons, were doing as they liked.
Not everyone disapproved. Some progressively minded people, such as the Dutch gynecologist and sexual reformer Wim Storm, saw merit in fraternization: a breakthrough for female emancipation and a welcome end to such outdated notions as male privilege and wives’ submission to their husbands. Women seeking happiness in the “khaki arms” of Canadians, “getting to know a new language, the jitterbug, and love,” well, “all these women know exactly what they want.” To claim that they are prostituting themselves for a bar of chocolate or a few cigarettes “is a terrible insult.”63 The best solution to the VD problem was to hand out more condoms to women and promote sex education among the young.
But the likes of Storm were a minority, and they would lose the argument, at least for the time being. The voices for moral regeneration, for rebuilding society on a traditional moral basis, were stronger in an atmosphere of moral panic. This was true in the Netherlands, where even a liberal newspaper such as Het Parool, founded by the anti-Nazi resistance, fired an editor for printing an article in favor of handing out contraceptives to women: “We see it as our duty to educate our nation’s people towards higher moral norms . . . and resist all forms of dissipation.”64 It was true also in France, where the provisional government under General de Gaulle was deeply worried that wartime occupation and liberation had undermined public morals, posing a fatal threat to “the French race.”65 Laws against abortion and adultery in liberated France were as strict as they had been under the Vichy regime, in some cases even stricter.
The puritanical reaction to what was regarded as moral dissolution was by no means confined to religious conservatives or the political right. In France, a large number of men and women in the resistance had joined the Communist Party for romantic or idealistic reasons. Wartime conditions had loosened the rules of conventional morality. But the postwar French communists, under the leadership of Maurice Thorez, put a swift end to this. Dedication to the Party, and a stable family life, were promoted with zeal. “Debauchery” resulting from war and fraternizing with foreign troops was denounced. In Germany, too, where communists tightened their control of the Eastern zones under their Soviet patrons, political repression came with a new moral order. Erich Honecker, leader of the Communist Youth Federation, tried his very best to wean young women from such frivolities as swing music and sex, hoping to gain their support for the communist cause. But he felt frustrated in his efforts. The problem, he said, was clear: “We have to overcome their drive to take pleasure in life [Drang nach Lebensfreude].”
Erich “Honni” Honecker—no stranger to life’s pleasures himself, having had several affairs with much younger women—needn’t have worried unduly. A state of exultation cannot last. The rush of liberation had already begun to fade by the end of 1945. Foreign troops were going home in ever greater numbers, even though large military bases would remain in Germany and Japan, and to a lesser extent in Britain and Italy as well. Moral panic laid the ground for a conservative reaction. Fear of female sexual license, as well as a common desire for bourgeois stability, after years of danger, chaos, and deprivation, would soon restore a more traditional order to life in the liberated as well as the defeated nations. In the 1950s the summer of ’45 would already seem like a distant memory. Sexual liberation had to wait for another twenty years, when the birth control pill arrived along with the second wave of Anglo-Saxon hedonism, when the Beatles and the Rolling Stones unleashed something Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman could only have dreamed of.
Even so, the postwar disorder, however temporary, was not without some positive consequence. Beno?te Groult’s wish to remake her own freedom did not rest on a complete illusion. Women in France were given the right to vote in March 1944 by the provisional government even before France was liberated—a right born from the dearth of men; the assumption was that wives would represent the views of their absent husbands. The same right came to Italian women in 1945, to Japanese a year later, to women in Romania and Yugoslavia in 1946, and to Belgian women in 1948. No matter how much some people might have wished, the world could never quite go back to the way things had been before.