Humiliated: Her head shaved by angry neighbors, a tearful Corsican woman is stripped na**ked and taunted for consorting with German soldiers during their occupation.

Everybody had come out of the war with somebody to hate, we should hate ourselves as humans who claim to such superiority in who we are but are barbaric and animalistic to the core.

Humiliated: Her head shaved by angry neighbors, a tearful Corsican woman is stripped naked and taunted for consorting with German soldiers during their occupation.

The truth is that World War II, which we remember as a great moral campaign, had wreaked incalculable damage on Europe’s ethical sensibilities. And in the desperate struggle for survival, many people would do whatever it took to get food and shelter.

In Allied-occupied Naples, the writer Norman Lewis watched as local women, their faces identifying them as ‘ordinary well-washed respectable shopping and gossiping housewives’, lined up to sell themselves to young American GIs for a few tins of food.

Another observer, the war correspondent Alan Moorehead, wrote that he had seen ‘the moral collapse’ of the Italian people, who had lost all pride in their ‘animal struggle for existence’.

Amid the trauma of war and occupation, the bounds of sexual decency had simply collapsed. In Holland one American soldier was propositioned by a 12-year-old girl. In Hungary scores of 13-year-old girls were admitted to hospital with venereal disease; in Greece, doctors treated VD-infected girls as young as ten.

What was more, even in those countries liberated by the British and Americans, a deep tide of hatred swept through national life.

In northern Italy, some 20,000 people were summarily murdered by their own countrymen in the last weeks of the war.

 And in French town squares, women accused of sleeping with German soldiers were stripped and shaved, their breasts marked with swastikas while mobs of men stood and laughed. Yet even today, many Frenchmen pretend these appalling scenes never happened.