In the show Band of Brothers we are shown numerous woman who had slept with German soldiers while their heads are being shaved after a Dutch town is liberated by American Soldiers. Similarly, we are shown women whose head was shaved with a baby. What happened to these women and their children?

by circa285

How were the women who chose to sleep with German Soldiers and their children treated during and after the war? Did they remain pariahs? Were they able to reintegrate into society as a whole?

Goiyon

Normally this would be out of my area of expertise. There is nothing in this that ties itself to the inquiries about the Middle Ages that I normally answer, but in this particular case I have had the privilege of doing some local research through the Amsterdam City Archives, as well as access to some of the sources on the matter.

Of the 130.000 - 150.000 women that maintained a relationship with a German soldier in some form or another, roughly one-third came from a household with a NSB (Nationaal-Socialistische Beweging, National-Socialist Movement, the Dutch ideological brother of the German NSDAP) background. For these women with a known NSB background, the quality of life in the sense of social interaction is likely to have actually seen improvement during the war; they already had been largely ostracized by the Dutch populace due to their political inclination, and contact and intimacy with a German soldier would have provided them with better financial means as well as some comfort. If they were with child (about 10% of these women became pregnant), they had access to special maternity care, to prevent them from the potential ridicule in a hospital with Dutch staff. However, there are some examples of attempts of persecution of these women, at least indirectly, by resistance groups already during the course of the war, such as the placement of signs that warned them of hooking up with a German soldier rather than a 'proper' Dutch man, and that they were better off desisting their behavior or 'face the consequences'. These forms of persecution intensified after 1943, when the military situation that Germany found itself in worsened, leading to more desperate measures in occupied countries and an increase in the intensity of active military resistance and in turn the German reprisals.

After the war, the persecution of these women logically snowballed. However, the shavings themselves were far from spontaneous events. It has been proven that almost all of these shavings have been organised by the BS (Binnenlandse Strijdkrachten, Interior Armed Forces, a collective of the foremost resistance groups founded in 1944) in order to provide the populace a means to vent their lingering resentment and frustration, and it has even been argued that doing so has prevented worse uncoordinated vigilante justice from taking place.

Concerning the reintegration into society, it differs wildly from the location in the Netherlands as well as the familial situation. The women (and their children) had a more difficult time in the rural communities prevalent in provinces such as Groningen and Drenthe, as the small population numbers meant that the local social network was far more intimate: there was no hiding in the anonymity of the masses, which facilitated them moving to a different town or city or sometimes even to another country. For the same reasons it was easier for them to reintegrate in areas with heightened urban development with a larger population. Unlike what used to be assumed, there was no large scale deportation of these women to post-war internment camps. Some did end up interned, but on grounds of their actions in service for German institutions or the NSB (which had to be more substantial than going to bed with the enemy). The degree to which the people in the post-war internment camps were guilty or innocent is a whole other can of worms.

On an ending note, research into the matter is notoriously difficult in terms of getting reliable data. Virtually the only numbers we have are from the figures gathered by resistance groups (they collected the women's names and addresses in order to make sure they did not avoid persecution later), the BS, and from the special maternity wards. In comparison to the ostracizing by the larger society, the resentment towards these relationships from within the family was often far more intense, at least where it concerns the two-thirds of the women without NSB background. This ensures that even today the women who were shaved then are still not eager to speak about these things, and we always have to consider that when they do there is the risk of a misrepresentation of events. One example is that nearly all these women claim that they were naive in the sense they did not know anything bad would come from it, which, in the case of the women with a NSB background, contrasts their experiences with earlier ostracizing on political grounds.

Lastly, similar events have taken place elsewhere in Europe. Perhaps someone else is able to fill you in on that in case you are curious.

Sources:

Hopman (2016)

Diederichs (2015)

King_of_Men

A followup question: OP asks about Holland, but the practice of shaving the hair of women accused of sleeping with German soldiers seems to have been widespread. Why did this particular form of punishment become so popular?