Women in war: Why was captivity more terrible for Soviet female military personnel than hostilities?

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

Many Soviet women who served in the Red Army were ready to commit suicide in order not to be captured. Violence, bullying, painful executions - such a fate awaited most of the captured nurses, signalmen, scouts. Only a few ended up in prisoner of war camps, but even there their situation was often even worse than that of the men of the Red Army.

During the Great Patriotic War, more than 800 thousand women fought in the ranks of the Red Army. The Germans equated Soviet nurses, scouts, snipers with partisans and did not consider them military personnel. Therefore, the German command did not apply to them even those few international rules for the treatment of prisoners of war that were in effect in relation to Soviet male soldiers.

The materials of the Nuremberg trials preserved the order that was in effect throughout the war: to shoot all "commissars, who can be recognized by the Soviet star on the sleeve and Russian women in uniform."

The execution most often ended a series of bullying: women were beaten, brutally raped, curses were carved on their bodies. The bodies were often stripped and thrown, without even thinking about burial. Aron Schneier's book contains the testimony of the German soldier Hans Rudhoff, who saw dead Soviet nurses in 1942: “They were shot and thrown into the road. They lay naked."

Svetlana Aleksievich, in her book "The War Does Not Have a Woman's Face", quotes the memoirs of one of the female soldiers. According to her, they always kept two cartridges for themselves in order to shoot themselves, and not be captured. The second cartridge is in case of a misfire. The same participant in the war recalled what happened to the captive nineteen-year-old nurse. When they found her, her chest was cut off and her eyes were gouged out: "They put her on a stake … Frost, and she is white and white, and her hair is all gray." The deceased girl had letters from home and a children's toy in her backpack.

Friedrich Eckeln, an SS Obergruppenfuehrer known for his brutality, equated women with commissars and Jews. All of them, according to his order, were supposed to be interrogated with partiality and then shot.

Female soldiers in the camps

Those women who managed to avoid being shot were sent to the camps. There they faced almost constant violence. Particularly cruel were the policemen and those male prisoners of war who agreed to work for the Nazis and went over to the camp guards. Women were often given “as a reward” for their service.

In the camps, there were often no basic living conditions. The inmates of the Ravensbrück concentration camp tried to make their existence as easy as possible: they washed their heads with the ersatz coffee given out for breakfast, and secretly sharpened their combs themselves.

According to international law, prisoners of war could not be involved in work at military factories. But this was not applied to women. In 1943, captured Elizaveta Klemm, on behalf of a group of prisoners, tried to protest the decision of the Germans to send Soviet women to the factory. In response, the authorities first beat everyone up, and then drove them into a cramped room where it was impossible even to move.

In Ravensbrück, female prisoners of war sewed uniforms for the German troops, worked in the infirmary. In April 1943, the famous "protest march" also took place there: the camp authorities wanted to punish the recalcitrant who referred to the Geneva Convention and demanded that they be treated as captured soldiers. The women were supposed to march through the camp grounds. And they marched. But not doomed, but chasing a step, as in a parade, in a slender column, with the song "Sacred War". The effect of the punishment turned out to be the opposite: they wanted to humiliate the women, but instead received evidence of intransigence and fortitude.

In 1942, a nurse, Elena Zaitseva, was captured near Kharkov. She was pregnant, but hid it from the Germans. She was selected to work at a military plant in the city of Neusen. The working day lasted 12 hours, we spent the night in the workshop on wooden planks. The prisoners were fed with swede and potatoes. Zaitseva worked before giving birth, nuns from a nearby monastery helped to take them. The newborn was given to the nuns, and the mother returned to work. After the end of the war, mother and daughter managed to reunite. But there are few such stories with a happy ending.

Only in 1944 was a special circular issued by the chief of the security police and SD on the treatment of women prisoners of war. They, like other Soviet prisoners, had to be subjected to a police check. If it turned out that a woman was “politically unreliable,” then the prisoner of war status was removed from her and she was handed over to the security police. All the rest were sent to concentration camps. In fact, this was the first document in which women serving in the Soviet army were equated with male prisoners of war.

After interrogation, the "unreliable" were sent to execution. In 1944, a female major was taken to the Stutthof concentration camp. Even in the crematorium, they continued to mock her until she spat in the face of the German. After that, she was pushed alive into the furnace.

There have been cases when women were released from the camp and transferred to the status of civilian workers. But it is difficult to say what the percentage of those actually released was. Aron Schneer notes that in the cards of many Jewish prisoners of war, the entry "released and sent to the labor exchange" actually meant something completely different. They were formally released, but in fact they were transferred from Stalag to concentration camps, where they were executed.

After captivity

Some women managed to escape from captivity and even return to the unit. But being in captivity changed them irreversibly. Valentina Kostromitina, who served as a medical instructor, recalled her friend Musa, who was in captivity. She "was terribly afraid to go to the landing, because she was in captivity." She never managed to "cross the bridge on the pier and get on the boat." Her friend's stories made such an impression that Kostromitina feared captivity even more than bombing.

A considerable number of Soviet women prisoners of war after the camps could not have children. Often, they were experimented with, subjected to forced sterilization.

Those who survived to the end of the war were under pressure from their own people: women were often reproached for having survived in captivity. They were expected to commit suicide but not surrender. At the same time, it was not even taken into account that many at the time of captivity did not have any weapons with them.

During the Great Patriotic War, such a phenomenon as collaboration was also widespread. The question is who and why went over to the side of the fascist army, and today is a subject of study for historians.