Women captured by the Germans. How the Nazis mocked captured Soviet women
The Second World War went like a skating rink through humanity. Millions of dead and many more crippled lives and destinies. All the belligerents did truly monstrous things, justifying everything with war.
Carefully! The material presented in the collection may seem unpleasant or intimidating.
Of course, the Nazis were especially distinguished in this regard, and this is not even taking into account the Holocaust. There are many both documented and frankly fictional stories about what the German soldiers did.
One of the high-ranking German officers recalled the briefings they went through. Interestingly, there was only one order regarding female soldiers: “Shoot.”
Most did so, but among the dead, the bodies of women in the form of the Red Army are often found - soldiers, nurses or nurses, on whose bodies there were traces of cruel torture.
Residents of the village of Smagleevka, for example, say that when they had Nazis, they found a seriously wounded girl. And in spite of everything they dragged her onto the road, stripped her and shot her.
We recommend reading 
But before her death, she was tortured for a long time for pleasure. Her entire body was turned into a continuous bloody mess. The Nazis did the same with female partisans. Before being executed, they could be stripped naked and kept in the cold for a long time.
Women soldiers of the Red Army in captivity and the Germans 1 part
Of course, the captives were constantly raped.
Women soldiers of the Red Army captured by the Finns and Germans part 2. Jews
And if the highest German ranks were forbidden to have an intimate relationship with the captives, then ordinary privates had more freedom in this matter.
And if the girl did not die after a whole company used her, then she was simply shot.
The situation in the concentration camps was even worse. Unless the girl was lucky and one of the higher ranks of the camp took her to him as a servant. Although it did not save much from rape.
In this regard, camp No. 337 was the most cruel place. There, the prisoners were kept naked for hours in the cold, hundreds of people were settled in the barracks at once, and anyone who could not do the work was immediately killed. About 700 prisoners of war were destroyed daily in the Stalag.
Women were subjected to the same torture as men, and even much worse. In terms of torture, the Nazis could be envied by the Spanish Inquisition.
Soviet soldiers knew exactly what was happening in the concentration camps and what the threat of captivity was. Therefore, no one wanted to give up and was not going to. They fought to the end, until death, she was the only winner in those terrible years.
Blessed memory of all those who died in the war ...
This text is based on the diary entries of Vladimir Ivanovich Trunin, about whom we have already told our readers more than once. This information is unique in that it is transmitted first-hand, from a tanker who spent the entire war on a tank.
Before the Great Patriotic War, women did not serve in the Red Army. But often they "served" at the border posts along with their husbands, border guards.
The fate of these women with the advent of the war was tragic: most of them died, only a few managed to survive those terrible days. But I'll talk about that later...
By August 1941, it became obvious that women were indispensable.
The first to serve in the Red Army were female medical workers: medical battalions (medical sanitary battalions), PPG (field mobile hospitals), EG (evacuation hospitals) and sanitary echelons were deployed, in which young nurses, doctors and nurses served. Then the military commissars began to call signalmen, telephone operators, and radio operators to the Red Army. It got to the point that almost all anti-aircraft units were staffed by girls and young unmarried women aged 18 to 25 years. Women's aviation regiments began to form. By 1943, from 2 to 2.5 million girls and women served in the Red Army at different times.
The military commissars drafted the healthiest, most educated, most beautiful girls and young women into the army. All of them showed themselves very well: they were brave, very persistent, hardy, reliable fighters and commanders, they were awarded military orders and medals for bravery and courage shown in battle.
For example, Colonel Valentina Stepanovna Grizodubova, Hero of the Soviet Union, commanded a long-range aviation bomber division (ADD). It was her 250 IL4 bombers that forced her to surrender in July-August 1944 Finland.
About anti-aircraft girls
Under any bombing, under any shelling, they remained at their guns. When the troops of the Don, Stalingrad and Southwestern fronts closed the encirclement around the enemy groups in Stalingrad, the Germans tried to organize an air bridge from the territory of Ukraine they occupied to Stalingrad. For this, the entire military transport air fleet of Germany was transferred to Stalingrad. Our Russian anti-aircraft gunners organized an anti-aircraft screen. They shot down 500 three-engine German Junkers 52 aircraft in two months.
In addition, they shot down another 500 aircraft of other types. The German invaders have never known such a rout anywhere in Europe.
Night Witches
The women's regiment of night bombers of Guards Lieutenant Colonel Yevdokia Bershanskaya, flying on U-2 single-engine aircraft, bombed German troops on the Kerch Peninsula in 1943 and 1944. And later in 1944-45. fought on the first Belorussian front, supporting the troops of Marshal Zhukov and the troops of the 1st Army of the Polish Army.
Aircraft U-2 (since 1944 - Po-2, in honor of the designer N. Polikarpov) flew at night. They were based 8-10 km from the front line. They needed a small runway, only 200 meters. During the night in the battles for the Kerch Peninsula, they made 10-12 sorties. Carried U2 up to 200 kg of bombs at a distance of up to 100 km to the German rear. . During the night, they dropped up to 2 tons of bombs and incendiary ampoules on German positions and fortifications. They approached the target with the engine turned off, silently: the aircraft had good aerodynamic properties: the U-2 could glide from a height of 1 kilometer to a distance of 10 to 20 kilometers. It was difficult for the Germans to shoot them down. I myself have seen many times how German anti-aircraft gunners drove heavy machine guns across the sky, trying to find a silent U2.
Now the pan-Poles do not remember how Russian beautiful pilots in the winter of 1944 dropped weapons, ammunition, food, medicines to Polish citizens who rebelled in Warsaw against the German fascists ....
On the Southern Front near Melitopol and in the male fighter regiment, a Russian pilot girl, whose name was White Lily, fought. It was impossible to shoot her down in aerial combat. On board her fighter was painted a flower - a white lily.
Once the regiment was returning from a combat mission, the White Lily flew in the rear - only the most experienced pilots receive such an honor.
The German fighter Me-109 guarded her, hiding in a cloud. He fired a burst at the White Lily and disappeared into the cloud again. Wounded, she turned the plane around and rushed after the German. She never returned back ... Already after the war, her remains were accidentally discovered by local boys when they were catching snakes in a mass grave in the village of Dmitrievka, Shakhtersky district of Donetsk region.
Miss Pavlichenko
In the Primorsky Army, one among the men - sailors, a girl - a sniper, fought. Ludmila Pavlichenko. By July 1942, Lyudmila already had 309 destroyed German soldiers and officers (including 36 enemy snipers) on her account.
In the same 1942, she was sent with a delegation to Canada and the United States. 
States. During the trip, she was at the reception of the President of the United States, Franklin Roosevelt. Later, Eleanor Roosevelt invited Lyudmila Pavlichenko on a trip around the country. American country singer Woody Guthrie wrote the song "Miss Pavlichenko" about her.
In 1943, Pavlichenko was awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union.
"For Zina Tusnolobova!"
Regiment medical instructor (nurse) Zina Tusnolobova fought in a rifle regiment on the Kalinin Front near Velikiye Luki.
She walked in the first chain along with the fighters, bandaging the wounded. In February 1943, in the battle for the Gorshechnoye station in the Kursk region, while trying to help the wounded platoon commander, she herself was seriously wounded: her legs were broken. At this time, the Germans launched a counterattack. Tusnolobova tried to pretend to be dead, but one of the Germans noticed her, and with the blows of his boots and butt he tried to finish off the nurse.
At night, a nurse showing signs of life was discovered by a reconnaissance group, transferred to the location of the Soviet troops and on the third day taken to a field hospital. Her hands and lower legs were frostbitten and had to be amputated. She left the hospital on prostheses and with prosthetic hands. But she didn't lose heart.
Got better. Got married. She gave birth to three children and raised them. True, her mother helped her raise children. She died in 1980 at the age of 59.
Zinaida's letter was read to the soldiers in units before the assault on Polotsk:
Revenge me! Revenge for my Native Polotsk!
May this letter reach the heart of each of you. This is written by a man whom the Nazis deprived of everything - happiness, health, youth. I am 23 years old. For 15 months now I have been lying, chained to a hospital bed. I have no arms or legs now. The Nazis did it.
I was a laboratory chemist. When the war broke out, together with other Komsomol members, she voluntarily went to the front. Here I participated in the battles, endured the wounded. For the removal of 40 soldiers along with their weapons, the government awarded me the Order of the Red Star. In total, I carried 123 wounded soldiers and commanders from the battlefield.
In the last battle, when I rushed to the aid of the wounded platoon commander, I was also wounded, both legs were broken. The Nazis went on a counterattack. There was no one to pick me up. I pretended to be dead. A fascist approached me. He kicked me in the stomach, then began to beat me with a butt on the head, in the face ...
And now I'm disabled. I recently learned to write. I am writing this letter with the stump of my right arm, which is cut off above the elbow. I got dentures, and maybe I'll learn to walk. If only I could pick up a machine gun at least once more to get even with the Nazis for blood. For torment, for my warped life!
Russian people! Soldiers! I was your comrade, walked with you in the same row. Now I can't fight anymore. And I beg you: take revenge! Remember and do not spare the damned fascists. Destroy them like mad dogs. Take revenge on them for me, for hundreds of thousands of Russian slaves driven into German slavery. And let each maiden's burning tear, like a drop of molten lead, incinerate another German.
My friends! When I was in a hospital in Sverdlovsk, the Komsomol members of a Ural plant, who took patronage over me, built five tanks at an inopportune time and named them after me. The realization that these tanks are now beating the Nazis gives great relief to my torment...
It's very hard for me. At twenty-three years of age, to be in the position I was in ... Eh! Not even a tenth of what I dreamed about, what I aspired to ... But I do not lose heart. I believe in myself, I believe in my strength, I believe in you, my dear! I believe that the Motherland will not leave me. I live in the hope that my grief will not remain unavenged, that the Germans will pay dearly for my torment, for the suffering of my loved ones.
And I ask you, relatives: when you go to the assault, remember me!
Remember - and let each of you kill at least one fascist!
Zina Tusnolobova, guard foreman of the medical service.
Moscow, 71, 2nd Donskoy proezd, 4-a, Institute of Prosthetics, room 52.
Newspaper "Forward to the enemy", May 13, 1944.
tank girls
The tanker has a very hard job: loading shells, collecting and repairing broken tracks, working with a shovel, crowbar, sledgehammer, and carrying logs. And most often under enemy fire.
In the 220th tank brigade, the T-34 was with us on the Leningrad Front as a driver, technician-lieutenant Valya Krikaleva. In battle, a German anti-tank gun smashed the caterpillar of her tank. Valya jumped out of the tank and began to repair the caterpillar. A German machine gunner scribbled it across her chest. Comrades did not have time to cover it. So the wonderful girl tanker went into eternity. We, tankers from the Leningrad Front, still remember her.
On the Western Front in 1941, the company commander, tanker Captain Oktyabrsky, fought on the T-34. He died a heroic death in August 1941. The young wife Maria Oktyabrskaya, who remained in the rear, decided to take revenge on the Germans for the death of her husband.
She sold her house, all her property and sent a letter to the Supreme Commander-in-Chief Stalin Joseph Vissarionovich with a request to allow her to buy a T-34 tank with the proceeds and take revenge on the Germans for their tanker husband killed by them:
Moscow, Kremlin To the Chairman of the State Defense Committee. Supreme Commander.
Dear Joseph Vissarionovich!
In the battles for the Motherland, my husband, regimental commissar Ilya Fedotovich Oktyabrsky, died. For his death, for the death of all Soviet people tortured by fascist barbarians, I want to take revenge on the fascist dogs, for which I contributed all my personal savings - 50,000 rubles - to the state bank to build a tank. I ask you to name the tank "Fighting Girlfriend" and send me to the front as the driver of this tank. I have the specialty of a driver, I have an excellent command of a machine gun, I am a Voroshilov shooter.
I send you warm greetings and wish you health for many, many years to the fear of enemies and to the glory of our Motherland.
OCTOBER Maria Vasilievna.
Tomsk, Belinsky, 31
Stalin ordered to take Maria Oktyabrskaya to the Ulyanovsk Tank School, to train her, to give her a T-34 tank. After graduating from college, Maria was awarded the military rank of technician-lieutenant driver.
She was sent to that section of the Kalinin Front where her husband fought.
On January 17, 1944, in the vicinity of the Krynki station in the Vitebsk region, a left sloth was smashed by a shell near the tank "Fighting Girlfriend". The mechanic Oktyabrskaya tried to repair the damage under enemy fire, but a fragment of a mine that exploded nearby seriously wounded her in the eye.
She underwent surgery in a field hospital, and then was taken by plane to a front-line hospital, but the wound turned out to be too severe, and she died in March 1944.
Katya Petlyuk is one of the nineteen women whose gentle hands drove tanks towards the enemy. Katya was the commander of the T-60 light tank on the Southwestern Front west of Stalingrad.
Katya Petlyuk got the T-60 light tank. For convenience in battle, each machine had its own name. The names of the tanks were all impressive: “Eagle”, “Falcon”, “Terrible”, “Glory”, and on the turret of the tank that Katya Petlyuk received, an unusual one was displayed - “Baby”.
The tankers chuckled: “We have already hit the mark - a baby in the “Baby”.
Her tank was connected. She walked behind the T-34, and if one of them was hit, then she approached the wrecked tank on her T-60 and helped the tankers, delivered spare parts, and was a liaison officer. The fact is that not all T-34s had radio stations.
Only many years after the war, senior sergeant from the 56th tank brigade Katya Petlyuk learned the story of the birth of her tank: it turns out that it was built with the money of Omsk preschool children, who, wanting to help the Red Army, gave their accumulated toys for the construction of a combat vehicle and dolls. In a letter to the Supreme Commander-in-Chief, they asked to name the tank "Baby". Omsk preschoolers collected 160,886 rubles…
A couple of years later, Katya was already leading the T-70 tank into battle (they still had to part with the Malyutka). Participated in the battle for Stalingrad, and then as part of the Don Front in the encirclement and defeat of the Nazi troops. Participated in the battle on the Kursk Bulge, liberated the left-bank Ukraine. She was seriously wounded - at the age of 25 she became an invalid of the 2nd group.
After the war - lived in Odessa. Having taken off her officer's epaulettes, she trained as a lawyer and worked as the head of the registry office.
She was awarded the Order of the Red Star, the Order of the Patriotic War II degree, medals.
Many years later, Marshal of the Soviet Union I. I. Yakubovsky, the former commander of the 91st separate tank brigade, wrote in the book “Earth on Fire”: “... but in general it is difficult to measure how many times the heroism of a person exalts. They say about him that this is courage of a special order. They, of course, were possessed by a participant in the Battle of Stalingrad, Ekaterina Petlyuk.
Based on the diary entries of Vladimir Ivanovich Trunin and the Internet.
Many Soviet women who served in the Red Army were ready to commit suicide so as not to be captured. Violence, bullying, painful executions - such a fate awaited most of the captured nurses, signalmen, intelligence officers. Only a few ended up in prisoner-of-war camps, but even there their situation was often even worse than that of Red Army men.
During the Great Patriotic War, more than 800 thousand women fought in the ranks of the Red Army. The Germans equated Soviet nurses, intelligence officers, snipers with partisans and did not consider them military personnel. Therefore, the German command did not extend to them even those few international rules for the treatment of prisoners of war that applied to Soviet male soldiers.
In the materials of the Nuremberg trials, an order was preserved that was in force throughout the war: to shoot all "commissars who can be recognized by the Soviet star on their sleeves and Russian women in uniform."
The execution most often completed a series of bullying: women were beaten, brutally raped, and curses were carved on their bodies. The bodies were often stripped and thrown away without even thinking about burial. The book of Aron Schneer cites the testimony of a German soldier Hans Rudhoff, who in 1942 saw dead Soviet nurses: “They were shot and thrown onto the road. They lay naked."
Svetlana Aleksievich in the book "War has no 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 captured 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-white, and her hair is all gray.” In the backpack, the deceased girl had letters from home and a children's toy.
SS-Obergruppenführer Friedrich Jeckeln, known for his cruelty, equated women with commissars and Jews. All of them, according to his order, were supposed to be interrogated with passion and then shot.
Women soldiers in the camps
Those women who managed to escape execution were sent to camps. Almost constant violence awaited them there. Especially cruel were the policemen and those male prisoners of war who agreed to work for the Nazis and joined the camp guards. Women were often given to them "as a reward" for their service.
In the camps, there were often no elementary living conditions. The prisoners of the Ravensbrück concentration camp tried to make their existence as easy as possible: they washed their hair with ersatz coffee that was given out for breakfast, they secretly made their own combs.
According to the norms of international law, prisoners of war could not be involved in work in military factories. But this was not applied to women. In 1943, the captured Elizaveta Klemm tried on behalf of a group of prisoners to protest the decision of the Germans to send Soviet women to the factory. In response to this, the authorities first beat everyone, and then herded them into a cramped room where it was impossible even to move.
In Ravensbrück, female prisoners of war sewed uniforms for the German troops and worked in the infirmary. In April 1943, the famous “protest march” took place there: the camp authorities wanted to punish the recalcitrants who invoked the Geneva Convention and demanded that they be treated as prisoners of war. The women were to march through the camp. And they marched. But not doomed, but chasing a step, as in a parade, in a slender column, with the song "Holy War". The effect of punishment turned out to be the opposite: they wanted to humiliate women, but instead they received evidence of intransigence and fortitude.
In 1942, Elena Zaitseva, a nurse, was taken prisoner near Kharkov. She was pregnant, but hid it from the Germans. She was selected to work at a military factory in Neusen. The working day lasted 12 hours, they spent the night in the workshop on wooden plank beds. The prisoners were fed turnips and potatoes. Zaitseva worked until childbirth, 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 happy endings.
Only in 1944 was a special circular issued by the Chief of the Security Police and the SD on the treatment of female prisoners of war. They, like other Soviet prisoners, were to be subjected to a police check. If it turned out that a woman was “politically unreliable”, then the status of a prisoner of war was removed from her and she was handed over to the security police. The rest were sent to concentration camps. In fact, this was the first document in which women who served in the Soviet army were equated with male prisoners of war.
"Unreliable" after interrogations were sent to execution. In 1944, a female major was brought to the Stutthof concentration camp. Even in the crematorium, they continued to mock her until she spat in the German's face. After that, she was pushed alive into the furnace.
There were cases when women were released from the camp and transferred to the status of civilian workers. But it is difficult to say what was the percentage of those actually released. 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 the Stalags 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 had been in captivity. She was "terribly afraid to go into the landing, because she was in captivity." She never managed to "cross the bridge on the pier and board the boat." The stories of a friend made such an impression that Kostromitina was afraid of 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 on, subjected to forced sterilization.
Those who survived to the end of the war were under pressure from their own: often women were reproached for surviving captivity. They were expected to commit suicide but not surrender. At the same time, even the fact that many did not have any weapons with them at the time of captivity was not taken into account.
During the Great Patriotic War, such a phenomenon as collaborationism was also widespread.
The question of whether and today is the subject of study for historians.
Military history knows many cases of cruelty, deceit and betrayal.
Some cases are striking in their scale, others in their belief in absolute impunity, one thing is clear: for some reason, some people who find themselves in harsh military conditions for some reason decide that the law is not written for them, and they have the right to control other people's destinies, forcing people to suffer .
Below are some of the most eerie realities that took place during wartime.
1. Nazi baby factories
The photo below shows the rite of baptism of a small child who was "bred out" by Aryan selection.
During the ceremony, one of the SS men holds a dagger over the baby, and the newly-made mother gives the Nazis an oath of allegiance.
It is important to note that this baby was one of tens of thousands of babies who participated in the project. Lebensborn. However, not all children received life in this children's factory, some were kidnapped, and they were only raised there.
Factory of true Aryans
The Nazis believed that there were few Aryans with blond hair and blue eyes in the world, which is why it was decided, by the way, by the same people who were responsible for the Holocaust, to launch the Lebensborn project, which dealt with breeding purebred Aryans, which in the future were to join the Nazi ranks.
It was planned to settle the children in beautiful houses, which were appropriated after the mass extermination of Jews.
And it all started with the fact that after the occupation of Europe, mixing with the indigenous people was actively encouraged among the SS. The main thing that the number of the Nordic race grew.
Pregnant unmarried girls, within the framework of the "Lebensborn" program, were placed in houses with all amenities, where they gave birth and raised their children. Thanks to such care during the war years, it was possible to grow from 16,000 to 20,000 Nazis.
But, as it turned out later, this amount was not enough, so other measures were taken. The Nazis began to forcibly take away from their mothers children who had the desired color of hair and eyes.
It is worth adding that many of the assigned children were orphans. Of course, light skin color and the absence of parents is not an excuse for the activities of the Nazis, but, nevertheless, at that difficult time, the children had something to eat and a roof over their heads.
Some parents gave up their children to avoid ending up in a gas chamber. Those who most suited the given parameters were selected literally immediately, without further persuasion.
At the same time, no genetic examinations were carried out, children were selected based only on visual information. Those selected were included in the program, or they were sent to some German family. Those who did not fit ended their lives in concentration camps.
The Poles say that because of this program, the country has lost about 200,000 children. But it is unlikely that you will ever be able to find out the exact figure, because many children have successfully settled down in German families.
Brutality during the war
2. Hungarian angels of death
Do not think that only the Nazis committed atrocities during the war. The pedestal of perverted war nightmares was shared with them by ordinary Hungarian women.
It turns out that to commit crimes it is not at all necessary to serve in the army. These dear guardians of the home front, having combined their efforts, sent almost three hundred people to the next world.
It all started during the First World War. It was then that many women living in the village of Nagiryov, whose husbands had gone to the front, began to take an interest in the prisoners of war of the Allied armies who were located nearby.
Women liked this kind of affair, and prisoners of war, apparently, too. But when their husbands began to return from the war, something abnormal began to happen. One by one the soldiers died. Because of this, the village got the name "murder area".
The killings began in 1911, when a midwife named Fuzekas appeared in the village. She taught women who were temporarily left without husbands, get rid of the consequences of contact with lovers.
After the soldiers began to return from the war, the midwife suggested that the wives boil sticky paper designed to kill flies to get arsenic, and then add it to food.
Arsenic
Thus, they were able to commit a huge number of murders, and women remained unpunished due to the fact that the village official was the brother of the midwife, and in all the death certificates of the victims he wrote "not killed."
The method gained such strong popularity that almost any, even the most insignificant problem, began to be solved with the help of soup with arsenic. When the neighboring settlements finally realized what was happening, fifty criminals managed to kill three hundred people, including objectionable husbands, lovers, parents, children, relatives and neighbors.
Human hunting
3. Parts of the human body as a trophy
It is important to say that during the war, many countries conducted propaganda among their soldiers, in which they were implanted in the brain that the enemy is not a person.
Distinguished in this respect and the American soldiers, whose psyche was influenced very actively. Among them were the so-called "hunting licenses.
One of them went like this: Japanese hunting season is open! There are no restrictions! Hunters get rewarded! Free ammo and equipment! Join the US Marine Corps!
Therefore, there is nothing surprising in the fact that American soldiers during the battle of Guadalcanal (Guadalcanal), killing the Japanese, cut off their ears and kept them as souvenirs.
Moreover, necklaces were made from the teeth of the slain, their skulls were sent home as souvenirs, and their ears were often worn around the neck or on a belt.
11:20 , 14.07.2017
Rape during armed conflicts has always had a military-psychological significance as a means of intimidating and demoralizing the enemy.
At the same time, violence against women acted as a manifestation of sexist (that is, purely masculine) and racist syndromes, which gain particular strength in large-scale stressful situations.
War rapes are different from rapes committed in peacetime. Sexual violence in times of war or armed conflict can have a double meaning if carried out on a large scale. It serves not only to humiliate the individual who experiences it, but also to demonstrate to the people of the enemy state that its political leaders and army are not capable of protecting it. Therefore, such acts of violence, unlike those carried out in everyday life, do not take place secretly, but publicly, often even with the forced presence of other people.
In general, there are three features that distinguish military sexual violence from peacetime rape. The first is a public act. The enemy needs to see what is happening to his "property", which is why rapists often rape women in front of their own home. This is an act against the husband (symbolically the father of the nation or the leader of the enemy), not an act against the woman. The second is gang rape. Fighting comrades make it in one team: everyone should be like the others. This reflects the ongoing group need to strengthen and reproduce solidarity. In other words, drink together, walk together, rape together. The third is the murder of a woman after sexual assault.
Documents available to researchers testify to the mass rape of women by Wehrmacht soldiers in the occupied territories. However, it is difficult to determine the real scale of sexual crime during the war caused by the invaders on the territory of the USSR: primarily due to the lack of generalizing sources. In addition, in Soviet times, this problem was not focused on and no records of such victims were kept. Certain statistical data could give women's appeals to doctors, but they did not turn to doctors for help, fearing the condemnation of society.
Back in January 1942, People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs of the USSR V. Molotov noted: “There are no boundaries to the people's anger and indignation, which cause countless facts of vile violence, vile mockery of women's honor and massacres of Soviet citizens and women in the entire Soviet population and in the Red Army, which are committed by fascist German officers and soldiers ... Everywhere brutalized German bandits break into houses, rape women, girls in front of their relatives and their children, mock the raped ... ".
On the Eastern Front, group sexual violence against women was quite common among Wehrmacht soldiers. But not only German soldiers did this during the years of occupation, their allies did not disdain such behavior. Especially in this, according to the witnesses of the occupation, the Hungarian military “distinguished themselves”. The Soviet partisans did not remain aloof from such crimes.
In Lvov in 1941, 32 garment factory workers were raped and then killed by German stormtroopers. Drunken soldiers dragged Lviv girls and young women into the park. Kosciuszko was raped. Jewish women had to endure terrible scenes of sexual humiliation during the pogrom on July 1, 1941 in Lvov.
The angry crowd did not stop at nothing, women and girls were undressed, driven in their underwear through the streets of the city, which, of course, humiliated their dignity and caused, in addition to physical, also psychological trauma. For example, eyewitnesses told the following story: participants in the pogroms stripped a twenty-year-old Jewish girl, stuck a baton in her vagina and forced her to march past the post office to the prison on Lontskoy, where “prison work” was being carried out at that time.
The mass rape of women and girls in the villages of Galicia is mentioned in the report of the Ukrainian rebels in October 1943:
“July 21, 1943. began in the Valley of the Pacific. The pacification should be translated by Zondereinsatz SD in the strength of 100 people, insults including from the Uzbeks themselves under the wire of the practitioner of the Security Police in the Valley of the Pole Yarosh. The Uzbeks arrived at the age of 16. In the evening, before the village of Pohorilets, she made a terrible shooter and wanted to catch people. People started ticking wherever I can. All the men flowed into the forest. The Uzbeks rushed through the states and began to shoot and catch chicken and geese, and in the huts they ran for butter, syrup, eggs, meat, and in the middle of the black for moonshine, so by force they stirred up the women to cook and attach zhu їm. Having eaten well and sprinkled with hot moonshine, they climbed over the girls and young people. They raped de ill there. There were a dozen of experiences in the presence of relatives, who sterilized them in kutkas, and on the daughters of the most refined ones, their animal instincts were calmed down. About the number of vipadkіv znasiluvannya years to be reluctant to confess. Similar to the pacification was translated until now near the villages: Ilemnya, Grabiv and Lopyanka.
The rebels cited the small number of people who wanted to go to Germany from these villages and the actions of partisans in the region as the reason for such actions.
No less scenes of sexual violence were committed in Western Ukraine by Soviet partisans. This is evidenced by many reports of UPA detachments, however, to illustrate the rape of women by red partisans, it is still worth citing Soviet sources - they are more reliable and, most importantly, objective, because the reports of the UPA and the memories of witnesses to a certain extent could "go too far" in this aspect. The documents of the "Ukrainian headquarters of the partisan movement" testify to the sexual violence against the civilian population by the "people's avengers".
An interesting point: in the reports of partisan formations stationed in the Sumy, Chernihiv, and Kiev regions, there are few references to the rape of women; they begin to appear with rare frequency during raids in Western Ukraine. This is explained by the attitude of the Soviet partisans towards this politically "unreliable" region and the unfriendly perception of the councils by the local population.
The vast majority of Galicians considered them enemies and supported the Ukrainian rebels. It should not be discarded that the partisans during the raid were not too worried about their reputation, they understood that, apparently, they would not soon return to the places of their crimes. Being in the same territory, it is worth thinking about establishing normal relations with the population in order to be able to receive food or clothing from it. During the raid, it was possible to take all this by force.
The sexual violence is described quite thoroughly in the memorandum of the former partisans of the formation named after him. Budyonny V. Buslaev and N. Sidorenko in the name of the head of the NKVD of the Ukrainian SSR S. Savchenko.
The document says, in part:
“In the village of Dubovka, near Tarnopol, a woman aged 40-45 was raped by partisans Gardonovim, Panasyuk, Mezentsev, the detachment commander Bubnov and others. The name of the victim is unknown. In the village of Verkhobuzh, near Brody, foreman Mezentsev tried to rape a girl and her mother of 65 years old, took her out into the street at night and, under pain of a weapon, demanded consent. He put it against the wall and fired from a machine gun over their heads, after which he raped ...
In one village, I don’t remember the name, near Snyatyn, foreman Mezentsev, getting drunk, took out a gun and tried to rape a girl who ran away, then he raped her grandmother, who was 60-65 years old ... The platoon commander Bublik Pavel personally and on this incited the fighters, was engaged in the sale of vodka horses, which he took back before leaving ...
He systematically drank, made illegal searches on his own and demanded vodka from the population. He always did it with weapons in his hands, shot at apartments, intimidated the population. In the village of Biskov (in the Carpathian Mountains) in the apartment of the headquarters of the formation, the cook of the headquarters fired at the windows, kitchen utensils and the ceiling because he wanted to rape the mistress, but she ran away. After which he relieved his need on the table...
Robberies were usually carried out during searches under the pretext of whether there were “spies” or “Bandera” members, and, as a rule, places where there could be watches and other valuable things were searched. Things like watches, razors, rings, expensive suits were simply taken without appeal. The population usually knew about the approach of the Soviet partisan unit 30-40 km away. And in recent days it was possible to meet villages left with only grandfathers, or even empty houses.
Of course, the leadership of the NKVD demanded an explanation from the command of the Budyonnovsky formation. In the report, the commander of the “For Kyiv” detachment, Captain Makarov, explained everything simply. He denied all the facts, and accused the partisans who wrote the note of treason (the complainants left the detachment and went to the rear of the Red Army) and ties with Bandera. By the way, this is a fairly common type of replies from the commanders of partisan detachments in case they are accused of looting, drunkenness or sexual violence. (It turned out to be a paradox - it turned out that Makarov did not suspect that there were two Banderaites in his detachment, but he "saw the light" only when they wrote a memorandum about violations in the unit). The case was probably hushed up. At least it was not possible to trace its further course due to the lack of documents indicating the punishments imposed on the defendants.
As you can see, during the war years, women often became victims of rape by soldiers of the warring parties. In the post-war period, it was very difficult for them to return to a full life. Indeed, in the USSR they did not receive proper medical care, in cases of pregnancy they could not get rid of the fetus - in the Soviet Union, abortions were prohibited by law. Many, unable to bear this, laid hands on themselves, someone moved to another place of residence, thus trying to protect themselves from gossip or sympathy of people and try to forget what they experienced.
NOTES
Kjopp G. Why was I born a girl?: sexual "exploits" of the Soviet liberators. - M. 2011. - p.138-139.
Meshcherkina E. Mass rape as part of the military ethos // Gender studies of the military ethos. - 2001. - No. 6. - With. 258.
