The mass rapes horrified the world, and Emperor Hirohito was concerned with its impact on Japan’s image. Along the way, Japanese troops raped between 20,000 and 80,000 Chinese women. On December 13, 1937, Japanese troops began a six-week-long massacre that essentially destroyed the Chinese city of Nanking. Though military brothels existed in the Japanese military since 1932, they expanded widely after one of the most infamous incidents in imperial Japan’s attempt to take over the Republic of China and a broad swath of Asia: the Rape of Nanking. Records of the women’s subjugation is scant there are very few survivors and an estimated 90 percent of “comfort women” did not survive the war. It’s been nearly a century since the first women were forced into sexual slavery for Imperial Japan, but the details of their servitude remain painful and politically divisive in Japan and the countries it once occupied. p. 253.Lee Ok-seon, then 80, in a shelter for former sex slaves near Seoul, South Korea, holding an old photo of herself on April 15, 2007. Ann Arbor, MI: National Archives and Records Service, General Services Administration.
After Hall fled France, Guérin continued helping resistance fighters, providing them food and shelter. Prior to her recruitment into Hall's spy network, however, she was already part of the French resistance movement and she was known for harboring Jews forced into hiding. Guérin was 37 years old when she became Virginia Hall's agent. With the help of Rousset, a gynecologist, she was able to manipulate this identification document so that infected girls were presented as disease-free. She used forged white cards that authorities used in their drive to prevent the spread of sexually transmitted diseases.
Guérin also helped undermine the Nazis by spreading sexually transmitted diseases among her German patrons. Her brothel was popular among German soldiers, placing her in a strategic position to extract information through the prostitutes she employed. Guérin was on the list and the two women first met at the former's salon in the winter of 1942. When Virginia Hall was assigned in France to establish resistance networks, she was given a list of names she can contact by the Allied pilot, Flight Lieutenant Simpson. She lived in an apartment above her business, which was located in a backstreet of the city, an area now occupied by the offices of the National Treasury of France. She was described as a brunette who wrapped herself in jewels, silks, and furs. Little is known about Guérin's life and background except for accounts chronicling her life as a "madam", an owner of a popular brothel in Lyons. Along with the gynecologist Jean Rousset, she helped Hall save Jews, Allied pilots, spies, radio operators, and refugees during the Second World War. She was part of Virginia Hall's spy network that operated in Lyons, France.
Germaine Guérin was a brothel owner and a French resistance sympathizer during the Vichy regime.
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