With support from the University of Richmond

History News Network puts current events into historical perspective. Subscribe to our newsletter for new perspectives on the ways history continues to resonate in the present. Explore our archive of thousands of original op-eds and curated stories from around the web. Join us to learn more about the past, now.

New book lays bare French collaboration with the Nazis

AN unusual history of the Nazis in France has trampled on one of the country’s most painful taboos by focusing on women who slept with the enemy during the occupation.

Flouting a long-running convention of silence on what he calls “horizontal collaboration”, Patrick Buisson, the author, describes the Nazi occupation as the “golden age” of the French brothel, chronicling a dramatic growth in prostitution to satisfy German demand.

The book, 1940-1945, Erotic Years, is the second hefty volume in a wide-ranging sexual history of the occupation that one critic last week described as a “magisterial provocation” because of its assault on the myth that life under the Nazi boot was all resistance, hardship and suffering.

Read entire article at Times (UK)