Brutal torture of women by the Nazis. Women captured by the Germans

Women medical workers of the Red Army, taken prisoner near Kiev, were collected for transfer to a prisoner of war camp, August 1941:

The dress code of many girls is semi-military and semi-civilian, which is typical for the initial stage of the war, when the Red Army had difficulties in providing women's uniform sets and uniform shoes in small sizes. On the left is a sad captured artillery lieutenant, who could be the “stage commander”.

How many female soldiers of the Red Army ended up in German captivity is unknown. However, the Germans did not recognize women as military personnel and regarded them as partisans. Therefore, according to the German private Bruno Schneider, before sending his company to Russia, their commander, Oberleutnant Prince, familiarized the soldiers with the order: “Shoot all women who serve in units of the Red Army.” Numerous facts indicate that this order was applied throughout the war.
In August 1941, on the orders of Emil Knol, commander of the field gendarmerie of the 44th Infantry Division, a prisoner of war, a military doctor, was shot.
In the city of Mglinsk, Bryansk region, in 1941, the Germans captured two girls from a medical unit and shot them.
After the defeat of the Red Army in Crimea in May 1942, in the fishing village “Mayak” not far from Kerch, an unknown girl in military uniform was hiding in the house of a resident of Buryachenko. On May 28, 1942, the Germans discovered her during a search. The girl resisted the Nazis, shouting: “Shoot, you bastards! I am dying for the Soviet people, for Stalin, and you, monsters, will die like a dog!” The girl was shot in the yard.
At the end of August 1942, in the village of Krymskaya, Krasnodar Territory, a group of sailors was shot, among them were several girls in military uniform.
In the village of Starotitarovskaya, Krasnodar Territory, among the executed prisoners of war, the corpse of a girl in a Red Army uniform was discovered. She had a passport with her in the name of Tatyana Alexandrovna Mikhailova, 1923. She was born in the village of Novo-Romanovka.
In the village of Vorontsovo-Dashkovskoye, Krasnodar Territory, in September 1942, captured military paramedics Glubokov and Yachmenev were brutally tortured.
On January 5, 1943, not far from the Severny farm, 8 Red Army soldiers were captured. Among them is a nurse named Lyuba. After prolonged torture and abuse, all those captured were shot.

Two rather grinning Nazis - a non-commissioned officer and a fanen-junker (officer candidate, right) - are escorting a captured Soviet girl soldier - into captivity... or to death?

It seems that the “Hans” do not look evil... Although - who knows? In war, completely ordinary people often do such outrageous abominations that they would never do in “another life”...
The girl is dressed in a full set of field uniforms of the Red Army model 1935 - men's, and in good "command" boots that fit.

A similar photo, probably from the summer or early autumn of 1941. Convoy - a German non-commissioned officer, a female prisoner of war in a commander's cap, but without insignia:

Divisional intelligence translator P. Rafes recalls that in the village of Smagleevka, liberated in 1943, 10 km from Kantemirovka, residents told how in 1941 “a wounded female lieutenant was dragged naked onto the road, her face and hands were cut, her breasts were cut off... »
Knowing what awaited them if captured, female soldiers, as a rule, fought to the last.
Captured women were often subjected to violence before their death. A soldier from the 11th Panzer Division, Hans Rudhof, testifies that in the winter of 1942 “... Russian nurses were lying on the roads. They were shot and thrown onto the road. They lay naked... On these dead bodies... obscene inscriptions were written."
In Rostov in July 1942, German motorcyclists burst into the yard in which nurses from the hospital were located. They were going to change into civilian clothes, but did not have time. So, in military uniform, they were dragged into a barn and raped. However, they did not kill him.
Women prisoners of war who ended up in the camps were also subjected to violence and abuse. Former prisoner of war K.A. Shenipov said that in the camp in Drohobych there was a beautiful captive girl named Luda. “Captain Stroyer, the camp commandant, tried to rape her, but she resisted, after which the German soldiers, called by the captain, tied Luda to a bed, and in this position Stroyer raped her and then shot her.”
In Stalag 346 in Kremenchug at the beginning of 1942, the German camp doctor Orland gathered 50 female doctors, paramedics, and nurses, stripped them and “ordered our doctors to examine them from the genitals to see if they were suffering from venereal diseases. He conducted the external inspection himself. He chose 3 young girls from them and took them to “serve” him. German soldiers and officers came for the women examined by doctors. Few of these women managed to avoid rape.

Women soldiers of the Red Army who were captured while trying to escape the encirclement near Nevel, summer 1941.

Judging by their haggard faces, they had to endure a lot even before being captured.

Here the “Hans” are clearly mocking and posing - so that they themselves can quickly experience all the “joys” of captivity!! And the unfortunate girl, who, it seems, has already had her fill of hardships at the front, has no illusions about her prospects in captivity...

In the left photo (September 1941, again near Kiev -?), on the contrary, the girls (one of whom even managed to keep a watch on her wrist in captivity; an unprecedented thing, watches are the optimal camp currency!) do not look desperate or exhausted. The captured Red Army soldiers are smiling... A staged photo, or did you really get a relatively humane camp commandant who ensured a tolerable existence?

Camp guards from among former prisoners of war and camp police were especially cynical about women prisoners of war. They raped their captives or forced them to cohabit with them under threat of death. In Stalag No. 337, not far from Baranovichi, about 400 women prisoners of war were kept in a specially fenced area with barbed wire. In December 1967, at a meeting of the military tribunal of the Belarusian Military District, the former chief of camp security, A.M. Yarosh, admitted that his subordinates raped prisoners in the women’s block.
Women prisoners were also kept in the Millerovo prisoner of war camp. The commandant of the women's barracks was a German woman from the Volga region. The fate of the girls languishing in this barracks was terrible:
“The police often looked into this barracks. Every day, for half a liter, the commandant gave any girl her choice for two hours. The policeman could have taken her to his barracks. They lived two to a room. These two hours he could use her as a thing, abuse her, mock her, do whatever he wanted.
Once, during the evening roll call, the police chief himself came, they gave him a girl for the whole night, the German woman complained to him that these “bastards” are reluctant to go to your policemen. He advised with a grin: “And for those who don’t want to go, arrange a “red fireman.” The girl was stripped naked, crucified, tied with ropes on the floor. Then they took a large red hot pepper, turned it inside out and inserted it into the girl’s vagina. They left it in this position for up to half an hour. Screaming was forbidden. Many girls had their lips bitten - they were holding back a scream, and after such punishment they could not move for a long time.
The commandant, who was called a cannibal behind her back, enjoyed unlimited rights over captured girls and came up with other sophisticated bullying. For example, “self-punishment”. There is a special stake, which is made crosswise with a height of 60 centimeters. The girl must undress naked, insert a stake into the anus, hold on to the crosspiece with her hands, and place her feet on a stool and hold on like this for three minutes. Those who could not stand it had to repeat it all over again.
We learned about what was going on in the women's camp from the girls themselves, who came out of the barracks to sit on a bench for ten minutes. Also, the policemen boastfully talked about their exploits and the resourceful German woman.”

Women doctors of the Red Army who were captured worked in camp hospitals in many prisoner of war camps (mainly in transit and transit camps).

There may also be a German field hospital in the front line - in the background you can see part of the body of a car equipped for transporting the wounded, and one of the German soldiers in the photo has a bandaged hand.

Infirmary barracks of the prisoner of war camp in Krasnoarmeysk (probably October 1941):

In the foreground is a non-commissioned officer of the German field gendarmerie with a characteristic badge on his chest.

Women prisoners of war were held in many camps. According to eyewitnesses, they made an extremely pathetic impression. It was especially difficult for them in the conditions of camp life: they, like no one else, suffered from the lack of basic sanitary conditions.
K. Kromiadi, a member of the labor distribution commission, visited the Sedlice camp in the fall of 1941 and talked with the women prisoners. One of them, a female military doctor, admitted: “... everything is bearable, except for the lack of linen and water, which does not allow us to change clothes or wash ourselves.”
A group of female medical workers captured in the Kiev pocket in September 1941 was held in Vladimir-Volynsk - Oflag camp No. 365 "Nord".
Nurses Olga Lenkovskaya and Taisiya Shubina were captured in October 1941 in the Vyazemsky encirclement. First, the women were kept in a camp in Gzhatsk, then in Vyazma. In March, as the Red Army approached, the Germans transferred captured women to Smolensk to Dulag No. 126. There were few captives in the camp. They were kept in a separate barracks, communication with men was prohibited. From April to July 1942, the Germans released all women with “the condition of free settlement in Smolensk.”

Crimea, summer 1942. Very young Red Army soldiers, just captured by the Wehrmacht, and among them is the same young girl soldier:

Most likely, she is not a doctor: her hands are clean, she did not bandage the wounded in a recent battle.

After the fall of Sevastopol in July 1942, about 300 female medical workers were captured: doctors, nurses, and orderlies. First, they were sent to Slavuta, and in February 1943, having gathered about 600 women prisoners of war in the camp, they were loaded into wagons and taken to the West. In Rivne, everyone was lined up, and another search for Jews began. One of the prisoners, Kazachenko, walked around and showed: “this is a Jew, this is a commissar, this is a partisan.” Those who were separated from the general group were shot. Those who remained were loaded back into the wagons, men and women together. The prisoners themselves divided the carriage into two parts: in one - women, in the other - men. We recovered through a hole in the floor.
Along the way, the captured men were dropped off at different stations, and the women were brought to the city of Zoes on February 23, 1943. They lined them up and announced that they would work in military factories. Evgenia Lazarevna Klemm was also in the group of prisoners. Jewish. A history teacher at the Odessa Pedagogical Institute who pretended to be a Serbian. She enjoyed special authority among women prisoners of war. E.L. Klemm, on behalf of everyone, stated in German: “We are prisoners of war and will not work in military factories.” In response, they began to beat everyone, and then drove them into a small hall, in which it was impossible to sit down or move due to the cramped conditions. They stood like that for almost a day. And then the recalcitrants were sent to Ravensbrück. This women's camp was created in 1939. The first prisoners of Ravensbrück were prisoners from Germany, and then from European countries occupied by the Germans. All the prisoners had their heads shaved and dressed in striped (blue and gray striped) dresses and unlined jackets. Underwear - shirt and panties. There were no bras or belts. In October, they were given a pair of old stockings for six months, but not everyone was able to wear them until spring. Shoes, as in most concentration camps, are wooden lasts.
The barracks were divided into two parts, connected by a corridor: a day room, in which there were tables, stools and small wall cabinets, and a sleeping room - three-tier bunks with a narrow passage between them. One cotton blanket was given to two prisoners. In a separate room lived the blockhouse - the head of the barracks. In the corridor there was a washroom and toilet.

A convoy of Soviet women prisoners of war arrived at Stalag 370, Simferopol (summer or early autumn 1942):

The prisoners carry all their meager belongings; under the hot Crimean sun, many of them tied their heads with scarves “like women” and took off their heavy boots.

Ibid., Stalag 370, Simferopol:

The prisoners worked mainly in the camp's sewing factories. Ravensbrück produced 80% of all uniforms for the SS troops, as well as camp clothing for both men and women.
The first Soviet women prisoners of war - 536 people - arrived at the camp on February 28, 1943. First, everyone was sent to the bathhouse, and then they were given camp striped clothes with a red triangle with the inscription: “SU” - Sowjet Union.
Even before the arrival of the Soviet women, the SS men spread a rumor throughout the camp that a gang of female killers would be brought from Russia. Therefore, they were placed in a special block, fenced with barbed wire.
Every day the prisoners got up at 4 am for verification, which sometimes lasted several hours. Then they worked for 12-13 hours in sewing workshops or in the camp infirmary.
Breakfast consisted of ersatz coffee, which women used mainly for washing their hair, since there was no warm water. For this purpose, coffee was collected and washed in turns.
Women whose hair had survived began to use combs that they made themselves. Frenchwoman Micheline Morel recalls that “Russian girls, using factory machines, cut wooden planks or metal plates and polished them so that they became quite acceptable combs. For a wooden comb they gave half a portion of bread, for a metal one - a whole portion.”
For lunch, the prisoners received half a liter of gruel and 2-3 boiled potatoes. In the evening, for five people they received a small loaf of bread mixed with sawdust and again half a liter of gruel.

One of the prisoners, S. Müller, testifies in her memoirs about the impression Soviet women made on the prisoners of Ravensbrück:
“...one Sunday in April we learned that Soviet prisoners refused to carry out some order, citing the fact that, according to the Geneva Convention of the Red Cross, they should be treated as prisoners of war. For the camp authorities this was unheard of insolence. For the entire first half of the day they were forced to march along Lagerstraße (the main “street” of the camp - A. Sh.) and were deprived of lunch.
But the women from the Red Army bloc (that’s what we called the barracks where they lived) decided to turn this punishment into a demonstration of their strength. I remember someone shouted in our block: “Look, the Red Army is marching!” We ran out of the barracks and rushed to Lagerstraße. And what did we see?
It was unforgettable! Five hundred Soviet women, ten in a row, kept in alignment, walked as if in a parade, taking their steps. Their steps, like the beat of a drum, beat rhythmically along Lagerstraße. The entire column moved as one. Suddenly a woman on the right flank of the first row gave the command to start singing. She counted down: “One, two, three!” And they sang:

Get up, huge country,
Get up for mortal combat...

I had heard them sing this song in a low voice in their barracks before. But here it sounded like a call to fight, like faith in an early victory.
Then they started singing about Moscow.
The Nazis were puzzled: the punishment of humiliated prisoners of war by marching turned into a demonstration of their strength and inflexibility...
The SS failed to leave Soviet women without lunch. The political prisoners took care of food for them in advance.”

Soviet women prisoners of war more than once amazed their enemies and fellow prisoners with their unity and spirit of resistance. One day, 12 Soviet girls were included in the list of prisoners intended to be sent to Majdanek, to the gas chambers. When the SS men came to the barracks to pick up the women, their comrades refused to hand them over. The SS managed to find them. “The remaining 500 people lined up in groups of five and went to the commandant. The translator was E.L. Klemm. The commandant drove those who came into the block, threatening them with execution, and they began a hunger strike.”
In February 1944, about 60 women prisoners of war from Ravensbrück were transferred to the concentration camp in Barth to the Heinkel aircraft plant. The girls refused to work there either. Then they were lined up in two rows and ordered to strip down to their shirts and remove their wooden stocks. They stood in the cold for many hours, every hour the matron came and offered coffee and a bed to anyone who agreed to go to work. Then the three girls were thrown into a punishment cell. Two of them died from pneumonia.
Constant bullying, hard labor, and hunger led to suicide. In February 1945, the defender of Sevastopol, military doctor Zinaida Aridova, threw herself at the wire.
And yet the prisoners believed in liberation, and this faith sounded in a song composed by an unknown author:

Heads up, Russian girls!
Over your head, be brave!
We don't have long to endure
The nightingale will fly in the spring...
And it will open the doors to freedom for us,
Takes a striped dress off your shoulders
And heal deep wounds,
He will wipe the tears from his swollen eyes.
Heads up, Russian girls!
Be Russian everywhere, everywhere!
It won't be long to wait, it won't be long -
And we will be on Russian soil.

Former prisoner Germaine Tillon, in her memoirs, gave a unique description of the Russian women prisoners of war who ended up in Ravensbrück: “...their cohesion was explained by the fact that they went through army school even before captivity. They were young, strong, neat, honest, and also rather rude and uneducated. There were also intellectuals (doctors, teachers) among them - friendly and attentive. In addition, we liked their rebellion, their unwillingness to obey the Germans."

Women prisoners of war were also sent to other concentration camps. Auschwitz prisoner A. Lebedev recalls that paratroopers Ira Ivannikova, Zhenya Saricheva, Victorina Nikitina, doctor Nina Kharlamova and nurse Klavdiya Sokolova were kept in the women's camp.
In January 1944, for refusing to sign an agreement to work in Germany and transfer to the category of civilian workers, more than 50 female prisoners of war from the camp in Chelm were sent to Majdanek. Among them were doctor Anna Nikiforova, military paramedics Efrosinya Tsepennikova and Tonya Leontyeva, infantry lieutenant Vera Matyutskaya.
The navigator of the air regiment, Anna Egorova, whose plane was shot down over Poland, shell-shocked, with a burnt face, was captured and kept in the Kyustrin camp.
Despite the death that reigned in captivity, despite the fact that any relationship between male and female prisoners of war was prohibited, where they worked together, most often in camp infirmaries, love sometimes arose, giving new life. As a rule, in such rare cases, the German hospital management did not interfere with childbirth. After the birth of the child, the mother-prisoner of war was either transferred to the status of a civilian, released from the camp and released to the place of residence of her relatives in the occupied territory, or returned with the child to the camp.
Thus, from the documents of the Stalag camp infirmary No. 352 in Minsk, it is known that “nurse Sindeva Alexandra, who arrived at the First City Hospital for childbirth on 23.2.42, left with the child for the Rollbahn prisoner of war camp.”

Probably one of the last photographs of Soviet women soldiers captured by the Germans, 1943 or 1944:

Both were awarded medals, the girl on the left - “For Courage” (dark edging on the block), the second one may also have “BZ”. There is an opinion that these are pilots, but - IMHO - it is unlikely: both have “clean” shoulder straps of privates.

In 1944, attitudes towards women prisoners of war became harsher. They are subjected to new tests. In accordance with the general provisions on the testing and selection of Soviet prisoners of war, on March 6, 1944, the OKW issued a special order “On the treatment of Russian women prisoners of war.” This document stated that Soviet women held in prisoner-of-war camps should be subject to inspection by the local Gestapo office in the same way as all newly arriving Soviet prisoners of war. If, as a result of a police check, the political unreliability of female prisoners of war is revealed, they should be released from captivity and handed over to the police.
Based on this order, the head of the Security Service and SD on April 11, 1944 issued an order to send unreliable female prisoners of war to the nearest concentration camp. After being delivered to the concentration camp, such women were subjected to so-called “special treatment” - liquidation. This is how Vera Panchenko-Pisanetskaya, the eldest of a group of seven hundred girl prisoners of war who worked at a military plant in the city of Gentin, died. The plant produced a lot of defective products, and during the investigation it turned out that Vera was in charge of the sabotage. In August 1944 she was sent to Ravensbrück and hanged there in the autumn of 1944.
In the Stutthof concentration camp in 1944, 5 Russian senior officers were killed, including a female major. They were taken to the crematorium - the place of execution. First they brought the men and shot them one by one. Then - a woman. According to a Pole who worked in the crematorium and understood Russian, the SS man, who spoke Russian, mocked the woman, forcing her to follow his commands: “right, left, around...” After that, the SS man asked her: “Why did you do that? ” I never found out what she did. She replied that she did it for the Motherland. After that, the SS man slapped him in the face and said: “This is for your homeland.” The Russian woman spat in his eyes and replied: “And this is for your homeland.” There was confusion. Two SS men ran up to the woman and began to push her alive into the furnace for burning the corpses. She resisted. Several more SS men ran up. The officer shouted: “Fuck her!” The oven door was open and the heat caused the woman's hair to catch fire. Despite the fact that the woman resisted vigorously, she was placed on a cart for burning corpses and pushed into the oven. All the prisoners working in the crematorium saw this.” Unfortunately, the name of this heroine remains unknown.
________________________________________ ____________________

Yad Vashem Archive. M-33/1190, l. 110.

Right there. M-37/178, l. 17.

Right there. M-33/482, l. 16.

Right there. M-33/60, l. 38.

Right there. M-33/ 303, l 115.

Right there. M-33/ 309, l. 51.

Right there. M-33/295, l. 5.

Right there. M-33/ 302, l. 32.

P. Rafes. They had not yet repented then. From the Notes of a Divisional Intelligence Translator. "Spark." Special issue. M., 2000, No. 70.

Yad Vashem Archive. M-33/1182, l. 94-95.

Vladislav Smirnov. Rostov nightmare. - “Spark.” M., 1998. No. 6.

Yad Vashem Archive. M-33/1182, l. eleven.

Yad Vashem Archive. M-33/230, l. 38.53.94; M-37/1191, l. 26

B. P. Sherman. ...And the earth was horrified. (About the atrocities of the German fascists on the territory of the city of Baranovichi and its surroundings on June 27, 1941 - July 8, 1944). Facts, documents, evidence. Baranovichi. 1990, p. 8-9.

S. M. Fischer. Memories. Manuscript. Author's archive.

K. Kromiadi. Soviet prisoners of war in Germany... p. 197.

T. S. Pershina. Fascist genocide in Ukraine 1941-1944... p. 143.

Yad Vashem Archive. M-33/626, l. 50-52. M-33/627, l. 62-63.

N. Lemeshchuk. Without bowing your head. (On the activities of the anti-fascist underground in Hitler’s camps) Kyiv, 1978, p. 32-33.

Right there. E. L. Klemm, shortly after returning from the camp, after endless calls to the state security authorities, where they sought her confession of treason, committed suicide

G. S. Zabrodskaya. The will to win. On Sat. "Witnesses for the prosecution." L. 1990, p. 158; S. Muller. Ravensbrück locksmith team. Memoirs of prisoner No. 10787. M., 1985, p. 7.

Women of Ravensbrück. M., 1960, p. 43, 50.

G. S. Zabrodskaya. The will to win... p. 160.

S. Muller. Ravensbrück locksmith team... p. 51-52.

Women of Ravensbrück... p.127.

G. Vaneev. Heroines of the Sevastopol Fortress. Simferopol.1965, p. 82-83.

G. S. Zabrodskaya. The will to win... p. 187.

N. Tsvetkova. 900 days in fascist dungeons. In the collection: In the Fascist dungeons. Notes. Minsk.1958, p. 84.

A. Lebedev. Soldiers of a small war... p. 62.

A. Nikiforova. This must not happen again. M., 1958, p. 6-11.

N. Lemeshchuk. Without bowing your head... p. 27. In 1965, A. Egorova was awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union.

Yad Vashem Archive. M-33/438 part II, l. 127.

A. Streim. Die Behandlung sowjetischer Kriegsgefangener… S. 153.

A. Nikiforova. This must not happen again... p. 106.

A. Streim. Die Behandlung sowjetischer Kriegsgefangener…. S. 153-154.

From the author:

“I did not immediately decide to publish this chapter from the book “Captivity” on the site. This is one of the most terrible and heroic stories. A low bow to you, women, for everything you have suffered and, alas, never appreciated by the state, people, and researchers. This was difficult to write about. It is even more difficult to talk to former prisoners. Low bow to you - Heroine."

“And there were not such beautiful women in all the earth...”
Job (42:15)

“My tears were bread for me day and night...
...my enemies curse at me..."
Psalter. (41:4:11)

From the first days of the war, tens of thousands of female medical workers were mobilized into the Red Army. Thousands of women voluntarily joined the army and militia divisions. Based on the resolutions of the State Defense Committee of March 25, April 13 and 23, 1942, the mass mobilization of women began. Only at the call of the Komsomol, 550 thousand Soviet women became warriors. 300 thousand were drafted into the air defense forces. Hundreds of thousands go to the military medical and sanitary services, signal troops, road and other units. In May 1942, another GKO resolution was adopted - on the mobilization of 25 thousand women in the Navy.

Three air regiments were formed from women: two bomber and one fighter, 1st separate women's volunteer rifle brigade, 1st separate women's reserve rifle regiment.

Created in 1942, the Central Women's Sniper School trained 1,300 female snipers.

Ryazan Infantry School named after. Voroshilov trained female commanders of rifle units. In 1943 alone, 1,388 people graduated from it.

During the war, women served in all branches of the military and represented all military specialties. Women made up 41% of all doctors, 43% of paramedics, and 100% of nurses. In total, 800 thousand women served in the Red Army.

However, female medical instructors and nurses in the active army made up only 40%, which violates the prevailing ideas about a girl under fire saving the wounded. In his interview, A. Volkov, who served as a medical instructor throughout the war, refutes the myth that only girls were medical instructors. According to him, the girls were nurses and orderlies in medical battalions, and mostly men served as medical instructors and orderlies on the front line in the trenches.

“They didn’t even take frail men for the medical instructor courses. Only the big ones! The work of a medical instructor is harder than that of a sapper. The medical instructor must crawl his trenches at least four times during the night to find the wounded. It’s in the movies and books: she’s so weak, she dragged a wounded man, so big, on her for almost a kilometer! Yes, this is nonsense. We were especially warned: if you drag a wounded man to the rear, you will be shot on the spot for desertion. After all, what is a medical instructor for? The medical instructor must prevent large blood loss and apply a bandage. And in order to drag him to the rear, for this purpose the medical instructor has everything under his control. There is always someone to carry you out of the battlefield. The medical instructor does not report to anyone. Only to the head of the medical battalion."

You can’t agree with A. Volkov on everything. Female medical instructors saved the wounded by pulling them out on themselves, dragging them behind them; there are many examples of this. Another thing is interesting. The women front-line soldiers themselves note the discrepancy between stereotypical screen images and the truth of the war.

For example, former medical instructor Sofya Dubnyakova says: “I watch films about the war: a nurse on the front line, she walks neatly, cleanly, not in padded trousers, but in a skirt, she has a cap on her crest…. Well, that’s not true!... Could we have pulled out a wounded man like that?.. You’re not very good at crawling around in a skirt when there are only men around. But to tell the truth, we were only given skirts at the end of the war. At the same time, we also received underwear instead of men’s underwear.”

In addition to the medical instructors, among whom there were women, there were porter nurses in the medical units - these were only men. They also provided assistance to the wounded. However, their main task is to carry the already bandaged wounded from the battlefield.

On August 3, 1941, the People's Commissar of Defense issued order No. 281 “On the procedure for presenting military orderlies and porters for government awards for good combat work.” The work of orderlies and porters was equated to a military feat. The said order stated: “For the removal from the battlefield of 15 wounded with their rifles or light machine guns, present each orderly and porter for a government award with a medal “For Military Merit” or “For Courage.” For the removal of 25 wounded from the battlefield with their weapons, submit to the Order of the Red Star, for the removal of 40 wounded - to the Order of the Red Banner, for the removal of 80 wounded - to the Order of Lenin.

150 thousand Soviet women were awarded military orders and medals. 200 - Orders of Glory of the 2nd and 3rd degrees. Four became full holders of the Order of Glory of three degrees. 86 women were awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union.

At all times, women's service in the army was considered immoral. There are many offensive lies about them; just remember PPZh - field wife.

Oddly enough, men at the front gave rise to such an attitude towards women. War veteran N.S. Posylaev recalls: “As a rule, women who went to the front soon became the mistresses of officers. How could it be otherwise: if a woman is on her own, there will be no end to harassment. It's a different matter with someone..."

A. Volkov said that when a group of girls arrived in the army, “merchants” immediately came for them: “First, the youngest and most beautiful were taken by the army headquarters, then by lower-ranking headquarters.”

In the fall of 1943, a girl medical instructor arrived in his company at night. And there is only one medical instructor per company. It turns out that the girl “was pestered everywhere, and since she did not yield to anyone, everyone sent her lower. From army headquarters to division headquarters, then to regimental headquarters, then to the company, and the company commander sent the untouchable to the trenches.”

Zina Serdyukova, a former sergeant major of the reconnaissance company of the 6th Guards Cavalry Corps, knew how to behave strictly with soldiers and commanders, but one day the following happened:

“It was winter, the platoon was quartered in a rural house, and I had a nook there. In the evening the regiment commander called me. Sometimes he himself set the task of sending them behind enemy lines. This time he was drunk, the table with the remains of food was not cleared. Without saying anything, he rushed towards me, trying to undress me. I knew how to fight, I’m a scout after all. And then he called the orderly, ordering him to hold me. The two of them tore my clothes off. In response to my screams, the landlady where I was staying flew in, and that was the only thing that saved me. I ran through the village, half-naked, crazy. For some reason, I believed that I would find protection from the corps commander, General Sharaburko, he called me his daughter like a father. The adjutant did not let me in, but I burst into the general’s room, beaten and disheveled. She told me incoherently how Colonel M. tried to rape me. The general reassured me, saying that I would not see Colonel M. again. A month later, my company commander reported that the colonel had died in battle; he was part of a penal battalion. This is what war is, it’s not just bombs, tanks, grueling marches...”

Everything in life was at the front, where “there are four steps to death.” However, most veterans remember the girls who fought at the front with sincere respect. Those who were slandered most often were those who sat in the rear, behind the backs of the women who went to the front as volunteers.

Former front-line soldiers, despite the difficulties they had to face in the men's team, remember their combat friends with warmth and gratitude.

Rachelle Berezina, in the army since 1942 - a translator-intelligence officer for military intelligence, ended the war in Vienna as a senior translator in the intelligence department of the First Guards Mechanized Corps under the command of Lieutenant General I.N. Russiyanov. She says that they treated her very respectfully; the intelligence department even stopped swearing in her presence.

Maria Fridman, an intelligence officer of the 1st NKVD division, who fought in the Nevskaya Dubrovka area near Leningrad, recalls that the intelligence officers protected her and filled her with sugar and chocolate, which they found in German dugouts. True, sometimes I had to defend myself with a “fist in the teeth.”

“If you don’t hit me in the teeth, you’ll be lost!.. In the end, the scouts began to protect me from other people’s suitors: “If it’s no one, then no one.”

When volunteer girls from Leningrad appeared in the regiment, every month we were dragged to the “brood,” as we called it. In the medical battalion they checked to see if anyone was pregnant... After one such “brood,” the regiment commander asked me in surprise: “Maruska, who are you taking care of for? They will kill us anyway...” The people were rude, but kind. And fair. I have never seen such militant justice as in the trenches.”

The everyday difficulties that Maria Friedman had to face at the front are now remembered with irony.

“The lice infested the soldiers. They take off their shirts and pants, but what does it feel like for the girl? I had to look for an abandoned dugout and there, stripping naked, I tried to cleanse myself of lice. Sometimes they helped me, someone would stand at the door and say: “Don’t poke your nose in, Maruska is squashing lice there!”

And bath day! And go when needed! Somehow I found myself alone, climbed under a bush, above the parapet of the trench. The Germans either didn’t notice right away or let me sit quietly, but when I started pulling on my panties, there was a whistling sound from left and right. I fell into the trench, my pants at my heels. Oh, they were laughing in the trenches about how Maruska’s ass blinded the Germans...

At first, I must admit, this soldier’s cackling irritated me, until I realized that they were not laughing at me, but at their fate as a soldier, covered in blood and lice, they were laughing in order to survive, not to go crazy. And it was enough for me that after a bloody skirmish someone asked in alarm: “Manka, are you alive?”

M. Friedman fought at the front and behind enemy lines, was wounded three times, awarded the medal “For Courage”, the Order of the Red Star...

Front-line girls bore all the hardships of front-line life on an equal basis with men, not inferior to them either in courage or military skill.

The Germans, in whose army women carried out only auxiliary service, were extremely surprised by such an active participation of Soviet women in hostilities.

They even tried to play the "women's card" in their propaganda, talking about the inhumanity of the Soviet system, which throws women into the fire of war. An example of this propaganda is a German leaflet that appeared at the front in October 1943:
“If a friend was wounded...”

The Bolsheviks always surprised the whole world. And in this war they gave something completely new:

« Woman at the front!
Since ancient times, people have been fighting and everyone has always believed that war is a man’s business, men should fight, and it never occurred to anyone to involve women in war. True, there were isolated cases, like the notorious “shock women” at the end of the last war - but these were exceptions and they went down in history as a curiosity or an anecdote.

But no one has yet thought of the massive involvement of women in the army as fighters, on the front line with weapons in hand, except the Bolsheviks.

Every nation strives to protect its women from danger, to preserve women, for a woman is a mother, and the preservation of the nation depends on her. Most of the men may perish, but the women must survive, otherwise the whole nation may perish.”

Are the Germans suddenly thinking about the fate of the Russian people? They are concerned about the issue of its preservation. Of course not! It turns out that all this is just a preamble to the most important German thought:

“Therefore, the government of any other country, in the event of excessive losses that threaten the continued existence of the nation, would try to take its country out of the war, because every national government cherishes its people.”
(Emphasis by the Germans. This turns out to be the main idea: we need to end the war, and we need a national government. - Aron Schneer).

« The Bolsheviks think differently. The Georgian Stalin and the various Kaganovichs, Berias, Mikoyans and the entire Jewish kagal (how can you do without anti-Semitism in propaganda! - Aron Schneer), sitting on the people’s neck, don’t give a damn about the Russian people and all the other peoples of Russia and Russia itself.
They have one goal - to preserve their power and their skins.
Therefore, they need war, war at all costs, war by any means, at the cost of any sacrifice, war to the last man, to the last man and woman.
“If a friend was wounded” - for example, both legs or arms were torn off, it doesn’t matter, to hell with him, “the girlfriend” will also “manage” to die at the front, drag her too into the meat grinder of war, there is no need to be gentle with her. Stalin does not feel sorry for the Russian woman..."

The Germans, of course, miscalculated and did not take into account the sincere patriotic impulse of thousands of Soviet women and girl volunteers. Of course, there were mobilizations, emergency measures in conditions of extreme danger, the tragic situation that developed at the fronts, but it would be wrong not to take into account the sincere patriotic impulse of young people born after the revolution and ideologically prepared in the pre-war years for struggle and self-sacrifice.

One of these girls was Yulia Drunina, a 17-year-old schoolgirl who went to the front. A poem she wrote after the war explains why she and thousands of other girls voluntarily went to the front:

"I left my childhood
In a dirty car,
To the infantry echelon,
To the medical platoon.
... I came from school
The dugouts are damp.
From a Beautiful Lady -
In “mother” and “rewind”.
Because the name
Closer than “Russia”,
I couldn’t find it.”

Women fought at the front, thereby asserting their right, equal with men, to defend the Fatherland.
The enemy repeatedly praised the participation of Soviet women in battles:

“Russian women... communists hate any enemy, are fanatical, dangerous. In 1941, medical battalions defended the last lines before Leningrad with grenades and rifles in their hands.”

Liaison officer Prince Albert of Hohenzollern, who took part in the assault on Sevastopol in July 1942, “admired the Russians and especially the women, who, he said, showed amazing courage, dignity and fortitude.”

According to the Italian soldier, he and his comrades had to fight near Kharkov against the “Russian women’s regiment.” Several women were captured by the Italians. However, in accordance with the agreement between the Wehrmacht and the Italian army, all those captured by the Italians were handed over to the Germans. The latter decided to shoot all the women. According to the Italian, “the women did not expect anything different. They only asked to be allowed to first take a bath in the bathhouse and wash their dirty linen in order to die in a clean state, as required by old Russian customs. The Germans granted their request. And so they, having washed themselves and put on clean shirts, went to be shot..."

The fact that the Italian’s story about the participation of a female infantry unit in the battles is not fiction is confirmed by another story. Since both in Soviet scientific and fiction literature there were numerous references only to the exploits of individual women - representatives of all military specialties and never talked about the participation in battles of individual female infantry units, I had to turn to the material published in the Vlasov newspaper "Zarya" .

The article “Valya Nesterenko - deputy platoon commander of reconnaissance” tells about the fate of a captured Soviet girl. Valya graduated from the Ryazan Infantry School. According to her, about 400 women and girls studied with her:

“Why were they all volunteers? They were considered volunteers. But how they went! We were gathering young people, a representative from the district military registration and enlistment office comes to the meeting and asks: “How do you girls love Soviet power?” They answer: “We love you.” - “This is how we need to protect!” They write statements. And then try it, refuse! And from 1942 mobilizations began. Each receives a summons and appears at the military registration and enlistment office. Goes to the commission. The commission gives a conclusion: fit for combat service. They are sent to the unit. Those who are older or have children are mobilized for work. And those who are younger and without children join the army. There were 200 people in my graduation. Some did not want to study, but they were then sent to dig trenches.

...In our regiment of three battalions there were two men's and one women's. The first battalion was female - machine gunners. In the beginning, there were girls from orphanages. They were desperate. With this battalion we occupied up to ten settlements, and then most of them fell out of action. Requested a refill. Then the remnants of the battalion were withdrawn from the front and a new women's battalion was sent from Serpukhov. A women's division was specially formed there. The new battalion included older women and girls. Everyone got involved in mobilization. We trained for three months to become machine gunners. At first, while there were no big battles, they were brave.

... Our regiment was advancing on the villages of Zhilino, Savkino, Surovezhki. The women's battalion operated in the middle, and the men's on the left and right flanks. The women's battalion had to cross Chelm and advance to the edge of the forest. As soon as we climbed the hill, the artillery began to fire. The girls and women started screaming and crying. They huddled together, and the German artillery put them all in a heap. There were at least 400 people in the battalion, and only three girls remained alive from the entire battalion. What happened - and it’s scary to watch... mountains of female corpses. Is war a woman’s business?”

In August 1941, on the orders of Emil Knol, commander of the field gendarmerie of the 44th Infantry Division, a prisoner of war, a military doctor, was shot.

In the city of Mglinsk, Bryansk region, in 1941, the Germans captured two girls from a medical unit and shot them.

After the defeat of the Red Army in Crimea in May 1942, in the fishing village “Mayak” not far from Kerch, an unknown girl in military uniform was hiding in the house of a resident of Buryachenko. On May 28, 1942, the Germans discovered her during a search. The girl resisted the Nazis, shouting: “Shoot, you bastards! I am dying for the Soviet people, for Stalin, and you, monsters, will die like a dog!” The girl was shot in the yard.

At the end of August 1942, in the village of Krymskaya, Krasnodar Territory, a group of sailors was shot, among them were several girls in military uniform.

In the village of Starotitarovskaya, Krasnodar Territory, among the executed prisoners of war, the corpse of a girl in a Red Army uniform was discovered. She had a passport with her in the name of Tatyana Alexandrovna Mikhailova, born in 1923 in the village of Novo-Romanovka.

In the village of Vorontsovo-Dashkovskoye, Krasnodar Territory, in September 1942, captured military paramedics Glubokov and Yachmenev were brutally tortured.

On January 5, 1943, not far from the Severny farm, 8 Red Army soldiers were captured. Among them is a nurse named Lyuba. After prolonged torture and abuse, all those captured were shot.

Knowing what awaited them if captured, female soldiers, as a rule, fought to the last.

Captured women were often subjected to violence before their death. A soldier from the 11th Panzer Division, Hans Rudhof, testifies that in the winter of 1942 “...Russian nurses were lying on the roads. They were shot and thrown onto the road. They lay naked... On these dead bodies... obscene inscriptions were written.”

In Rostov in July 1942, German motorcyclists burst into the yard in which nurses from the hospital were located. They were going to change into civilian clothes, but did not have time. So, in military uniform, they were dragged into a barn and raped. However, they did not kill him.

Women prisoners of war who ended up in the camps were also subjected to violence and abuse. Former prisoner of war K.A. Shenipov said that in the camp in Drohobych there was a beautiful captive girl named Luda. “Captain Stroyer, the camp commandant, tried to rape her, but she resisted, after which the German soldiers, called by the captain, tied Luda to a bed, and in this position Stroyer raped her and then shot her.”

In Stalag 346 in Kremenchug at the beginning of 1942, the German camp doctor Orland gathered 50 female doctors, paramedics, and nurses, stripped them and “ordered our doctors to examine them from the genitals to see if they were suffering from venereal diseases. He conducted the external inspection himself. He chose 3 young girls from them and took them to “serve” him. German soldiers and officers came for the women examined by doctors. Few of these women managed to escape rape.

Women prisoners were also kept in the Millerovo prisoner of war camp. The commandant of the women's barracks was a German woman from the Volga region. The fate of the girls languishing in this barracks was terrible:

“The police often looked into this barracks. Every day, for half a liter, the commandant gave any girl her choice for two hours. The policeman could have taken her to his barracks. They lived two to a room. These two hours he could use her as a thing, abuse her, mock her, do whatever he wanted.
Once, during the evening roll call, the police chief himself came, they gave him a girl for the whole night, the German woman complained to him that these “bastards” are reluctant to go to your policemen. He advised with a grin: “And for those who don’t want to go, arrange a “red fireman.” The girl was stripped naked, crucified, tied with ropes on the floor. Then they took a large red hot pepper, turned it inside out and inserted it into the girl’s vagina. They left it in this position for up to half an hour. Screaming was forbidden. Many girls had their lips bitten - they were holding back a scream, and after such punishment they could not move for a long time.
The commandant, who was called a cannibal behind her back, enjoyed unlimited rights over captured girls and came up with other sophisticated bullying. For example, “self-punishment”. There is a special stake, which is made crosswise with a height of 60 centimeters. The girl must undress naked, insert a stake into the anus, hold on to the crosspiece with her hands, and place her feet on a stool and hold on like this for three minutes. Those who could not stand it had to repeat it all over again.
We learned about what was going on in the women's camp from the girls themselves, who came out of the barracks to sit on a bench for ten minutes. Also, the policemen boastfully talked about their exploits and the resourceful German woman.”

K. Kromiadi, a member of the labor distribution commission, visited the Sedlice camp in the fall of 1941 and talked with the women prisoners. One of them, a female military doctor, admitted: “... everything is bearable, except for the lack of linen and water, which does not allow us to change clothes or wash ourselves.”

A group of female medical workers captured in the Kiev pocket in September 1941 was kept in Vladimir-Volynsk - Oflag camp No. 365 “Nord”.

Nurses Olga Lenkovskaya and Taisiya Shubina were captured in October 1941 in the Vyazemsky encirclement. First, the women were kept in a camp in Gzhatsk, then in Vyazma. In March, as the Red Army approached, the Germans transferred captured women to Smolensk to Dulag No. 126. There were few captives in the camp. They were kept in a separate barracks, communication with men was prohibited. From April to July 1942, the Germans released all women with “the condition of free settlement in Smolensk.”

Along the way, the captured men were dropped off at different stations, and the women were brought to the city of Zoes on February 23, 1943. They lined them up and announced that they would work in military factories. Evgenia Lazarevna Klemm was also in the group of prisoners. Jewish. A history teacher at the Odessa Pedagogical Institute who pretended to be a Serbian. She enjoyed special authority among women prisoners of war. E.L. Klemm, on behalf of everyone, stated in German: “We are prisoners of war and will not work in military factories.” In response, they began to beat everyone, and then drove them into a small hall, in which it was impossible to sit down or move due to the cramped conditions. They stood like that for almost a day. And then the disobedient ones were sent to Ravensbrück.

This women's camp was created in 1939. The first prisoners of Ravensbrück were prisoners from Germany, and then from European countries occupied by the Germans. All the prisoners had their heads shaved and dressed in striped (blue and gray striped) dresses and unlined jackets. Underwear - shirt and panties. There were no bras or belts. In October, they were given a pair of old stockings for six months, but not everyone was able to wear them until spring. Shoes, as in most concentration camps, are wooden lasts.

The barracks were divided into two parts, connected by a corridor: a day room, in which there were tables, stools and small wall cabinets, and a sleeping room - three-tier bunks with a narrow passage between them. One cotton blanket was given to two prisoners. In a separate room lived the blockhouse - the head of the barracks. In the corridor there was a washroom and toilet.

The prisoners worked mainly in the camp's sewing factories. Ravensbrück produced 80% of all uniforms for the SS troops, as well as camp clothing for both men and women.

The first Soviet women prisoners of war - 536 people - arrived at the camp on February 28, 1943. First, everyone was sent to the bathhouse, and then they were given camp striped clothes with a red triangle with the inscription: “SU” - Sowjet Union.

Even before the arrival of the Soviet women, the SS men spread a rumor throughout the camp that a gang of female killers would be brought from Russia. Therefore, they were placed in a special block, fenced with barbed wire.

Every day the prisoners got up at 4 am for verification, which sometimes lasted several hours. Then they worked for 12-13 hours in sewing workshops or in the camp infirmary.

Breakfast consisted of ersatz coffee, which women used mainly for washing their hair, since there was no warm water. For this purpose, coffee was collected and washed in turns.

Women whose hair had survived began to use combs that they made themselves. Frenchwoman Micheline Morel recalls that “Russian girls, using factory machines, cut wooden planks or metal plates and polished them so that they became quite acceptable combs. For a wooden comb they gave half a portion of bread, for a metal one - a whole portion.”

For lunch, the prisoners received half a liter of gruel and 2-3 boiled potatoes. In the evening, for five people they received a small loaf of bread mixed with sawdust and again half a liter of gruel.

But the women from the Red Army bloc (that’s what we called the barracks where they lived) decided to turn this punishment into a demonstration of their strength. I remember someone shouted in our block: “Look, the Red Army is marching!” We ran out of the barracks and rushed to Lagerstraße. And what did we see?

It was unforgettable! Five hundred Soviet women, ten in a row, kept in alignment, walked as if in a parade, taking their steps. Their steps, like the beat of a drum, beat rhythmically along Lagerstraße. The entire column moved as one. Suddenly a woman on the right flank of the first row gave the command to start singing. She counted down: “One, two, three!” And they sang:

Get up, huge country,
Get up for mortal combat...

Then they started singing about Moscow.

The Nazis were puzzled: the punishment of humiliated prisoners of war by marching turned into a demonstration of their strength and inflexibility...

The SS failed to leave Soviet women without lunch. The political prisoners took care of food for them in advance.”

In February 1944, about 60 women prisoners of war from Ravensbrück were transferred to the concentration camp in Barth to the Heinkel aircraft plant. The girls refused to work there either. Then they were lined up in two rows and ordered to strip down to their shirts and remove their wooden stocks. They stood in the cold for many hours, every hour the matron came and offered coffee and a bed to anyone who agreed to go to work. Then the three girls were thrown into a punishment cell. Two of them died from pneumonia.

Constant bullying, hard labor, and hunger led to suicide. In February 1945, the defender of Sevastopol, military doctor Zinaida Aridova, threw herself onto the wire.

And yet the prisoners believed in liberation, and this faith sounded in a song composed by an unknown author:

Over your head, be brave!
We don't have long to endure
The nightingale will fly in the spring...
And it will open the doors to freedom for us,
Takes a striped dress off your shoulders
And heal deep wounds,
He will wipe the tears from his swollen eyes.
Heads up, Russian girls!
Be Russian everywhere, everywhere!
It won't be long to wait, it won't be long -
And we will be on Russian soil.

Women prisoners of war were also sent to other concentration camps. Auschwitz prisoner A. Lebedev recalls that paratroopers Ira Ivannikova, Zhenya Saricheva, Victorina Nikitina, doctor Nina Kharlamova and nurse Klavdiya Sokolova were kept in the women's camp.

In January 1944, for refusing to sign an agreement to work in Germany and transfer to the category of civilian workers, more than 50 female prisoners of war from the camp in Chelm were sent to Majdanek. Among them were doctor Anna Nikiforova, military paramedics Efrosinya Tsepennikova and Tonya Leontyeva, and infantry lieutenant Vera Matyutskaya.

The navigator of the air regiment, Anna Egorova, whose plane was shot down over Poland, shell-shocked, with a burnt face, was captured and kept in the Kyustrin camp.

Despite the death that reigned in captivity, despite the fact that any relationship between male and female prisoners of war was prohibited, where they worked together, most often in camp infirmaries, love sometimes arose, giving new life. As a rule, in such rare cases, the German hospital management did not interfere with childbirth. After the birth of the child, the mother-prisoner of war was either transferred to the status of a civilian, released from the camp and released to the place of residence of her relatives in the occupied territory, or returned with the child to the camp.

Thus, from the documents of the Stalag camp infirmary No. 352 in Minsk, it is known that “nurse Sindeva Alexandra, who arrived at the First City Hospital for childbirth on 23.2.42, left with the child for the Rollbahn prisoner of war camp.”

Based on this order, the head of the Security Service and SD on April 11, 1944 issued an order to send unreliable female prisoners of war to the nearest concentration camp. After being delivered to the concentration camp, such women were subjected to so-called “special treatment” - liquidation. This is how Vera Panchenko-Pisanetskaya, the eldest of a group of seven hundred girl prisoners of war who worked at a military plant in the city of Gentin, died. The plant produced a lot of defective products, and during the investigation it turned out that Vera was in charge of the sabotage. In August 1944 she was sent to Ravensbrück and hanged there in the autumn of 1944.

In the Stutthof concentration camp in 1944, 5 Russian senior officers were killed, including a female major. They were taken to the crematorium - the place of execution. First they brought the men and shot them one by one. Then - a woman. According to a Pole who worked in the crematorium and understood Russian, the SS man, who spoke Russian, mocked the woman, forcing her to follow his commands: “right, left, around...” After that, the SS man asked her: “Why did you do that?” I never found out what she did. She replied that she did it for her homeland. After that, the SS man slapped him in the face and said: “This is for your homeland.” The Russian woman spat in his eyes and replied: “And this is for your homeland.” There was confusion. Two SS men ran up to the woman and began to push her alive into the furnace for burning the corpses. She resisted. Several more SS men ran up. The officer shouted: “Fuck her!” The oven door was open and the heat caused the woman's hair to catch fire. Despite the fact that the woman resisted vigorously, she was placed on a cart for burning corpses and pushed into the oven. All the prisoners working in the crematorium saw this.” Unfortunately, the name of this heroine remains unknown.

The women who escaped from captivity continued to fight against the enemy. In secret message No. 12 dated July 17, 1942, the chief of the security police of the occupied eastern regions to the imperial minister of security of the XVII Military District in the section “Jews” it is reported that in Uman “a Jewish doctor was arrested, who previously served in the Red Army and was taken prisoner . After escaping from a prisoner of war camp, she took refuge in an orphanage in Uman under a false name and practiced medicine. Used this opportunity to gain access to the prisoner of war camp for espionage purposes.” Probably, the unknown heroine provided assistance to prisoners of war.

Women prisoners of war, risking their lives, repeatedly saved their Jewish friends. In Dulag No. 160, Khorol, about 60 thousand prisoners were kept in a quarry on the territory of a brick factory. There was also a group of girls prisoners of war. Of these, seven or eight remained alive by the spring of 1942. In the summer of 1942, they were all shot for harboring a Jewish woman.

In the fall of 1942, in the Georgievsk camp, along with other prisoners, there were several hundred girls prisoners of war. One day, the Germans led identified Jews to execution. Among the doomed was Tsilya Gedaleva. At the last minute, the German officer in charge of the massacre suddenly said: “Mädchen raus! “Girl, get out!” And Tsilya returned to the women’s barracks. Tsila's friends gave her a new name - Fatima, and in the future, according to all documents, she passed as a Tatar.

Military doctor of the 3rd rank Emma Lvovna Khotina was surrounded in the Bryansk forests from September 9 to 20. She was captured. During the next stage, she fled from the village of Kokarevka to the city of Trubchevsk. She hid under someone else's name, often changing apartments. She was helped by her comrades - Russian doctors who worked in the camp infirmary in Trubchevsk. They established contact with the partisans. And when the partisans attacked Trubchevsk on February 2, 1942, 17 doctors, paramedics and nurses left with them. E. L. Khotina became the head of the sanitary service of the partisan association of the Zhitomir region.

Sarah Zemelman - military paramedic, medical service lieutenant, worked in mobile field hospital No. 75 of the Southwestern Front. On September 21, 1941, near Poltava, wounded in the leg, she was captured along with the hospital. The head of the hospital, Vasilenko, handed Sarah documents addressed to Alexandra Mikhailovskaya, the murdered paramedic. There were no traitors among the hospital employees who were captured. Three months later, Sarah managed to escape from the camp. She wandered through forests and villages for a month until, not far from Krivoy Rog, in the village of Vesyye Terny, she was sheltered by the family of veterinarian Ivan Lebedchenko. For more than a year, Sarah lived in the basement of the house. On January 13, 1943, Vesely Terny was liberated by the Red Army. Sarah went to the military registration and enlistment office and asked to go to the front, but she was placed in filtration camp No. 258. They called in for interrogations only at night. Investigators asked how she, a Jew, survived fascist captivity? And only a meeting in the same camp with her hospital colleagues - a radiologist and the chief surgeon - helped her.

S. Zemelman was sent to the medical battalion of the 3rd Pomeranian Division of the 1st Polish Army. She ended the war on the outskirts of Berlin on May 2, 1945. She was awarded three Orders of the Red Star, the Order of the Patriotic War, 1st degree, and was awarded the Polish Order of the Silver Cross of Merit.

Unfortunately, after being released from the camps, the prisoners faced injustice, suspicion and contempt for them, having gone through the hell of the German camps.

Grunya Grigorieva recalls that the Red Army soldiers who liberated Ravensbrück on April 30, 1945, looked at the girls prisoners of war “... as traitors. This shocked us. We did not expect such a meeting. Ours gave more preference to French women, Polish women - to foreign women.”

After the end of the war, female prisoners of war went through all the torment and humiliation during SMERSH inspections in filtration camps. Alexandra Ivanovna Max, one of the 15 Soviet women liberated in the Neuhammer camp, tells how a Soviet officer in the repatriation camp scolded them: “Shame on you, you surrendered into captivity, you...” And I argued with him: “But what should we have done? And he says: “You should have shot yourself and not surrendered!” And I say: “Where were our pistols?” - “Well, you could, should have hanged yourself, killed yourself. But don’t give in.”

Many front-line soldiers knew what awaited the former prisoners at home. One of the liberated women, N.A. Kurlyak, recalls: “We, 5 girls, were left to work in a Soviet military unit. We kept asking: “Send us home.” They dissuaded us, begged us: “Stay a little longer, they will look at you with contempt.” But we didn’t believe.”

And a few years after the war, a female doctor, a former prisoner, writes in a private letter: “... sometimes I am very sorry that I remained alive, because I always carry this dark stain of captivity. Still, many do not know what kind of “life” it was, if you can call it life. Many do not believe that we honestly endured the hardships of captivity there and remained honest citizens of the Soviet state.”

Being in fascist captivity irreparably affected the health of many women. For most of them, the natural female processes stopped while still in the camp, and for many they never recovered.

Some, transferred from prisoner of war camps to concentration camps, were sterilized. “I didn’t have children after sterilization in the camp. And so I remained, as it were, crippled... Many of our girls did not have children. So some husbands left them because they wanted to have children. But my husband didn’t leave me, he says we will live as we are. And we still live with him.”

Messages merged April 2, 2017, time of first edit April 2, 2017

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In his memoirs, officer Bruno Schneider told what kind of instruction German soldiers received before being sent to the Russian front. Regarding the female Red Army soldiers, the order said one thing: “Shoot!”

This is what many German units did. Among those killed in battle and encirclement, a huge number of bodies of women in Red Army uniform were found. Among them are many nurses and female paramedics. Traces on their bodies indicated that many were brutally tortured and then shot.

Residents of Smagleevka (Voronezh region) said after their liberation in 1943 that at the beginning of the war, a young Red Army girl died a terrible death in their village. She was seriously injured. Despite this, the Nazis stripped her naked, dragged her onto the road and shot her.

Horrifying traces of torture remained on the unfortunate woman's body. Before her death, her breasts were cut off and her entire face and arms were completely mangled. The woman's body was a complete bloody mess. They did the same with Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya. Before the demonstration execution, the Nazis kept her half naked in the cold for hours.

Women in captivity

Captured Soviet soldiers—and women too—were supposed to be “sorted.” The weakest, wounded and exhausted were subject to destruction. The rest were used for the most difficult jobs in concentration camps.

In addition to these atrocities, female Red Army soldiers were constantly subjected to rape. The highest military ranks of the Wehrmacht were forbidden to enter into intimate relationships with Slavic women, so they did it in secret. The rank and file had a certain freedom here. Having found one female Red Army soldier or nurse, she could be raped by a whole company of soldiers. If the girl did not die after that, she was shot.

In concentration camps, the leadership often selected the most attractive girls from among the prisoners and took them to “serve.” This is what the camp doctor Orlyand did in Shpalaga (prisoner of war camp) No. 346 near the city of Kremenchug. The guards themselves regularly raped prisoners in the women's block of the concentration camp.

This was the case in Shpalaga No. 337 (Baranovichi), about which the head of this camp, Yarosh, testified during a tribunal meeting in 1967.

Shpalag No. 337 was distinguished by particularly cruel, inhumane conditions of detention. Both women and men Red Army soldiers were kept half naked in the cold for hours. Hundreds of them were stuffed into lice-infested barracks. Anyone who could not stand it and fell was immediately shot by the guards. Every day, more than 700 captured military personnel were destroyed in Shpalaga No. 337.

Women prisoners of war were subjected to torture, the cruelty of which medieval inquisitors could only envy: they were impaled, their insides were stuffed with hot red pepper, etc.

They were often mocked by German commandants, many of whom had obvious sadistic inclinations. Commandant Shpalag No. 337 was called a “cannibal” behind her back, which spoke eloquently about her character.

Not only the torture undermined the morale and last strength of the exhausted women, but also the lack of basic hygiene. There was no talk of any washing for the prisoners. Insect bites and purulent infections were added to the wounds. Women soldiers knew how the Nazis treated them, and therefore they fought to the last.

Horrifying traces of torture remained on the unfortunate woman's body. Before her death, her breasts were cut off and her entire face and arms were completely mangled. The woman's body was a complete bloody mess. They did the same with Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya. Before the show execution, the Nazis kept her half naked in the cold for hours.

Women in captivity

This was the case in Shpalaga No. 337 (Baranovichi), about which the head of this camp, Yarosh, testified during a tribunal meeting in 1967.

Women prisoners of war were subjected to torture, the cruelty of which medieval inquisitors could only envy: they were impaled, their insides were stuffed with hot red pepper, etc. They were often mocked by German commandants, many of whom were distinguished by obvious sadistic inclinations. Commandant Shpalag No. 337 was called a “cannibal” behind her back, which spoke eloquently about her character.

We all remember what horrors Hitler and the entire Third Reich committed, but few take into account that the German fascists had sworn allies, the Japanese. And believe me, their executions, torments and tortures were no less humane than the German ones. They mocked people not even for any gain or benefit, but simply for fun...

Cannibalism

This terrible fact is very difficult to believe, but there is a lot of written evidence and evidence about its existence. It turns out that the soldiers who guarded the prisoners often went hungry, there was not enough food for everyone and they were forced to eat the corpses of prisoners. But there are also facts that the military cut off body parts for food not only from the dead, but also from the living.

Experiments on pregnant women

“Unit 731” is especially famous for its terrible abuse. The military was specifically allowed to rape captive women so that they could become pregnant, and then carried out various frauds on them. They were specially infected with sexually transmitted, infectious and other diseases in order to analyze how the female body and the fetus would behave. Sometimes in the early stages, women were “cut open” on the operating table without any anesthesia and the premature baby was removed to see how it copes with infections. Naturally, both women and children died...

Brutal torture

There are many known cases where the Japanese tortured prisoners not for the sake of obtaining information, but for the sake of cruel entertainment. In one case, a captured wounded Marine had his genitals cut off and stuffed into the soldier's mouth before he was released. This senseless cruelty of the Japanese shocked their opponents more than once.

Sadistic curiosity

During the war, Japanese military doctors not only carried out sadistic experiments on prisoners, but often did this without any, even pseudoscientific, purpose, but out of pure curiosity. This is exactly what the centrifuge experiments were like. The Japanese were interested in what would happen to the human body if it was rotated for hours in a centrifuge at high speed. Tens and hundreds of prisoners became victims of these experiments: people died from bleeding, and sometimes their bodies were simply torn apart.

Amputations

The Japanese abused not only prisoners of war, but also civilians and even their own citizens suspected of spying. A popular punishment for spying was cutting off some part of the body - most often a leg, fingers or ears. The amputation was carried out without anesthesia, but at the same time they carefully ensured that the punished survived - and suffered for the rest of his days.

Drowning

Immersing an interrogated person in water until he begins to choke is a well-known torture. But the Japanese moved on. They simply poured streams of water into the prisoner's mouth and nostrils, which went straight into his lungs. If the prisoner resisted for a long time, he simply choked - with this method of torture, literally minutes counted.

Fire and Ice

Experiments on freezing people were widely practiced in the Japanese army. The limbs of prisoners were frozen until they were solid, and then skin and muscle were cut from living people without anesthesia to study the effects of cold on tissue. The effects of burns were studied in the same way: people were burned alive with burning torches, skin and muscles on their arms and legs, carefully observing tissue changes.

Radiation

All in the same notorious unit 731, Chinese prisoners were driven into special cells and subjected to powerful X-rays, observing what changes subsequently occurred in their bodies. Such procedures were repeated several times until the person died.

Buried alive

One of the most brutal punishments for American prisoners of war for mutiny and disobedience was burial alive. The person was placed upright in a hole and covered with a pile of earth or stones, leaving him to suffocate. The corpses of those punished in such a cruel way were discovered more than once by Allied troops.

Decapitation

Beheading an enemy was a common execution in the Middle Ages. But in Japan this custom survived until the twentieth century and was applied to prisoners during the Second World War. But the most terrible thing was that not all executioners were skilled in their craft. Often the soldier did not complete the blow with his sword, or even hit the executed man on the shoulder with his sword. This only prolonged the torment of the victim, whom the executioner stabbed with a sword until he achieved his goal.

Death in the waves

This type of execution, quite typical for ancient Japan, was also used during World War II. The executed person was tied to a pole dug in the high tide zone. The waves slowly rose until the person began to choke, and finally, after much suffering, drowned completely.

The most painful execution

Bamboo is the fastest growing plant in the world; it can grow 10-15 centimeters per day. The Japanese have long used this property for ancient and terrible executions. The man was chained with his back to the ground, from which fresh bamboo shoots sprouted. For several days, the plants tore apart the sufferer’s body, dooming him to terrible torment. It would seem that this horror should have remained in history, but no: it is known for certain that the Japanese used this execution for prisoners during the Second World War.

Welded from the inside

Another section of experiments carried out in part 731 was experiments with electricity. Japanese doctors shocked prisoners by attaching electrodes to the head or torso, immediately giving a large voltage or exposing the unfortunate people to a lower voltage for a long time... They say that with such exposure a person had the feeling that he was being fried alive, and this was not far from the truth: some The victims' organs were literally boiled.

Forced labor and death marches

The Japanese prisoner of war camps were no better than Hitler's death camps. Thousands of prisoners who found themselves in Japanese camps worked from dawn to dusk, while, according to stories, they were provided with very little food, sometimes without food for several days. And if slave labor was needed in another part of the country, hungry, exhausted prisoners were driven, sometimes a couple of thousand kilometers, on foot under the scorching sun. Few prisoners managed to survive the Japanese camps.

Prisoners were forced to kill their friends

The Japanese were masters of psychological torture. They often forced prisoners, under threat of death, to beat and even kill their comrades, compatriots, even friends. Regardless of how this psychological torture ended, the will and soul of a person were forever broken.