That's what the Nazis did with captured Soviet women. European women and Soviet soldiers

“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. Low bow to you, women, for everything you endured and, alas, never appreciated by the state, people, researchers. About this it was difficult to write. It is even more difficult to talk with former prisoners. A deep bow to you - the Heroines."

"And there were no such beautiful women on the whole earth..." Job (42:15)

"My tears were my bread day and night... ...my enemies scold 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 volunteered to join the army and divisions of the people's militia. Based on the decrees of the State Defense Committee of March 25, April 13 and 23, 1942, mass mobilization of women began. Only at the call of the Komsomol, 550 thousand Soviet women became soldiers. 300,000 were drafted into the Air Defense Forces. Hundreds of thousands - to the military medical and sanitary service, signal troops, road and other units. In May 1942, another GKO decree was adopted - on the mobilization of 25,000 women in the Navy.

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

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

Ryazan Infantry School. Voroshilov trained women commanders of rifle units. In 1943 alone, 1388 people graduated from it.

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

However, female medical instructors and nurses in the active army accounted for only 40%, which violates the prevailing notion of a girl under fire rescuing the wounded. In his interview, A. Volkov, who went through the entire war as a medical instructor, refutes the myth that only girls were medical instructors. According to him, the girls were nurses and orderlies in the 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 to medical instructor courses. Only hefty ones! The work of a medical instructor is harder than that of a sapper. A medical instructor must crawl at least four times during the night to find the wounded. , so big, almost a kilometer on you! 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? A medical instructor must prevent a large loss of blood and apply a bandage. to drag him to the rear, for this, everything is subordinate to the medical instructor. There is always someone to take out of the battlefield. The medical instructor, after all, is subordinate to no one. Only the head of the medical battalion."

Not everything can be agreed with A. Volkov. The female medical instructors saved the wounded, 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 the stereotypical screen images and the truth of the war.

For example, a former medical instructor Sofya Dubnyakova says: “I watch films about the war: a nurse is on the front line, she is neat, clean, not in wadded trousers, but in a skirt, she has a pilot on a tuft .... Well, not true! ... Is it we could pull out the wounded like this? .. You don’t really crawl in a skirt when there are only men around. But to tell the truth, skirts were only given to us at the end of the war. At the same time, we also received knitted underwear instead of men's underwear. "

In addition to medical instructors, among whom were women, there were porters in the sanrots - they were only men. They also helped 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 submitting military orderlies and porters to the government award 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, each orderly and porter should be presented with a government award with a medal "For Military Merit" or "For Courage." For the removal from the battlefield of 25 wounded 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 2nd and 3rd degree. Four became full cavaliers of the Order of Glory of three degrees. 86 women were awarded the title of Hero Soviet Union.

At all times, the service of women in the army was considered immoral. There are many insulting lies about them, it is enough to recall PZh - a field wife.

Oddly enough, such an attitude towards women was engendered by front-line men. War veteran N.S. Posylayev recalls: “As a rule, women who got to the front soon became mistresses of officers. How else: if a woman is on her own, there will be no end to harassment.

To be continued...

A. Volkov said that when a group of girls arrived in the army, “merchants” immediately followed them: “First, the army headquarters took the youngest and most beautiful, then the headquarters of a lower rank.”

In the autumn of 1943, a medical orderly girl arrived in his company at night. And only one medical instructor is assigned to the company. It turns out that the girl “was molested everywhere, and since she did not yield to anyone, she was sent down below. From the headquarters of the army to the headquarters of the division, then to the headquarters of the regiment, then to the company, and the company commander sent the touchy into the trenches.

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

“It was winter, the platoon lodged in a rural house, where I had a nook. In the evening I was summoned by the commander of the regiment. Sometimes he himself set the task of sending behind enemy lines. This time he was drunk, the table with the leftover 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 me to be held. They both tore my clothes off. The landlady, who was quartered, flew into my cries, and only this saved me. I ran through the village, half-dressed, crazy. For some reason, I thought that I would find protection from the commander of the corps, General Sharaburko, he fatherly called me daughter. The adjutant did not let me in, but I rushed to the general, beaten, disheveled. She told incoherently how Colonel M. had 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. That's what war is, it's not just bombs, tanks, exhausting marches..."

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

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

Rashel Berezina, in the army since 1942 - interpreter-intelligence of military intelligence, ended the war in Vienna as a senior interpreter of 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, in the intelligence department in her presence they even stopped using foul language.

Maria Fridman, a scout of the 1st NKVD division, who fought in the Nevsky Dubrovka area near Leningrad, recalls that scouts protected her, 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 boyfriends:“ If no one, then no one.

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

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

“The lice have eaten the soldiers. They pull off shirts, pants, but what about a girl? I had to look for an abandoned dugout and there, stripping naked, I tried to get rid of lice. Sometimes they helped me, someone would stand at the door and say: “Don’t poke your head, Maruska crushes lice there!”

A bath day! And go as needed! I somehow retired, climbed under a bush, above the parapet of the trench, the Germans either did not immediately notice, or they let me sit quietly, but when I began to pull on my pants, it whistled from left and right. I fell into the trench, panties at the heels. Oh, they were guffawing in the trenches about how Maruskin blinded the Germans ...

At first, I must admit, this soldier's cackle irritated me, until I realized that they were not laughing at me, but at their own soldier's fate, in blood and lice, 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. Fridman fought at the front and behind enemy lines, was wounded three times, was awarded the medal "For Courage", the Order of the Red Star ...

To be continued...

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

The Germans, in whose army women carried 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 have 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 individual cases, such as the notorious "shock girls" 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 thought of the mass involvement of women in the army as fighters, on the front line with weapons in their hands, except for the Bolsheviks.

Every nation seeks to protect its women from danger, to save a woman, because a woman is a mother, 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 threatening the continued existence of the nation, would try to withdraw its country from the war, because every national government cherishes its people.” (Highlighted by the Germans. Here is the main idea: we must end the war, and we need a national government. - Aron Schneer).

« The Bolsheviks think otherwise. Georgian Stalin and various Kaganoviches, Berias, Mikoyans and the entire Jewish kahal (well, how to do without anti-Semitism in propaganda! - Aron Schneer), sitting on the people's neck, do not give a damn about the Russian people and all other peoples of Russia and Russia itself. They have one goal - to maintain their power and their skins. Therefore, they need a war, a war at all costs, a war by any means, at the cost of any victims, a 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 “know how” to die at the front, drag her there into the meat grinder of war, there’s nothing to be gentle with her. Stalin does not feel sorry for the Russian woman ... "

The Germans, of course, miscalculated, did not take into account the sincere patriotic impulse of thousands of Soviet women, volunteer girls. Of course, there were mobilizations, extraordinary measures in conditions of extreme danger, the tragic situation that had developed on the fronts, but it would be wrong not to take into account the sincere patriotic impulse of the youth, 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 volunteered for the front:

"I left my childhood To a dirty car, To an infantry train, To a medical platoon. ... I came from school To damp dugouts. From beautiful lady- In “mother” and “rewind”. Because the name is 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, they are fanatical, dangerous. In 1941, the sanitary battalions defended the last frontiers before Leningrad with grenades and rifles in their hands."

The liaison officer Prince Albert of Hohenzollern, who took part in the storming of Sevastopol in July 1942, "admired the Russians and especially women, who, according to him, show 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 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 else. They only asked to be allowed to pre-bath and wash their dirty linen in order to die in a clean state, as it should be according to old Russian customs. The Germans granted their request. And here they are, having washed and put on clean shirts, went to be shot ... "

The fact that the story of the Italian about the participation of the 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 it was never told about the participation in battles of individual female infantry units, I had to turn to the material published in the Vlasov newspaper Zarya .

To be continued...

The article "Valya Nesterenko - assistant commander of the intelligence platoon" tells about the fate of a Soviet girl taken prisoner. 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 did they go! They gathered young people, a representative from the district military registration and enlistment office comes to the meeting and asks: “How, girls, do you love Soviet power?” They answer - "We love" - "So we must protect!" They write applications. And then try, refuse! And since 1942, mobilizations have begun at all. Everyone receives a summons, appears in the military registration and enlistment office. Goes to the commission. The commission gives a conclusion: they are fit for military service. They are sent to the unit. Those who are older or have children, - those who are mobilized for work. And those who are younger and without children, they go to the army. There were 200 people in my graduation. Some did not want to study, but then they were sent to dig trenches.

In our regiment of three battalions, there were two male and one female. The female was the first battalion - submachine gunners. In the beginning, there were girls from orphanages in it. They were desperate. With this battalion, we occupied up to ten settlements, and then most of them were out of order. 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. There were older women and girls in the new battalion. All were mobilized. We studied for three months as submachine gunners. At first, while there were no big fights, they were brave.

Our regiment was advancing on the villages of Zhilino, Savkino, Surovezhki. The women's battalion acted in the middle, and the men's - from the left and right flanks. The women's battalion was to cross the Helm and advance to the edge of the forest. As soon as they climbed the hillock, the artillery began to beat. Girls and women started screaming and crying. They huddled together, so the German artillery put them all in a heap. There were at least 400 people in the battalion, and three girls survived from the entire battalion. What happened - and it's scary to look at ... mountains of female corpses. Is this a woman's business, war?"

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 Ober-Lieutenant Prince acquainted the soldiers with the order: "Shoot all women who serve in the Red Army." Numerous facts testify 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 the medical unit and shot them.

After the defeat of the Red Army in the Crimea in May 1942, in the Mayak fishing village near Kerch, an unknown girl was hiding in the house of a resident of military uniform. On May 28, 1942, the Germans discovered her during a search. The girl resisted the Nazis, shouting: "Shoot, you bastards! I'm 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 there 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 found. She had a passport in the name of Mikhailova Tatyana Alexandrovna, 1923. She was born in the village of Novo-Romanovka.

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

On January 5, 1943, 8 Red Army soldiers were captured near the Severny farm. Among them is a nurse named Lyuba. After prolonged torture and abuse, all those captured were shot.

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 lieutenant girl was dragged naked onto the road, her face, hands were cut, her breasts were cut off ..."

Knowing what awaits them in the event of captivity, female soldiers, as a rule, fought to the last.

Often captured women were raped before they died. Hans Rudhoff, a soldier from the 11th Panzer Division, testifies that in the winter of 1942 "... Russian nurses lay on the roads. They were shot and thrown onto the road. They lay naked... These dead bodies... obscene inscriptions were written ".

In Rostov in July 1942, German motorcyclists broke into the yard, where there were nurses from the hospital. They were going to change into civilian clothes, but did not have time. So, in military uniform, they dragged them into a barn and raped them. However, they were not killed.

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

In Stalag 346 in Kremenchug at the beginning of 1942, the German camp doctor Orlyand gathered 50 women doctors, paramedics, nurses, undressed them and "ordered our doctors to examine them from the genitals - if they were sick with venereal diseases. He carried out an external examination himself. Chose 3 of them were young girls, took them to him to "serve". German soldiers and officers came for women examined by doctors. Few of these women managed to avoid rape.

The camp guards from among the former prisoners of war and camp policemen were especially cynical about women prisoners of war. They raped captives or, under threat of death, forced them to cohabit with them. In Stalag No. 337, not far from Baranovichi, about 400 female 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 former boss guards of the camp A.M. Yarosh admitted that his subordinates raped the prisoners of the women's block.

The Millerovo POW camp also contained female prisoners. The commandant of the women's barracks was a German from the Volga region. The fate of the girls languishing in this barrack was terrible:

"The policemen often looked into this barracks. Every day, for half a liter, the commandant gave any girl to choose from for two hours. The policeman could take her to his barracks. They lived two in a room. These two hours he could use her as a thing, outrage, mock, do whatever he pleases. Once, during the evening verification, the chief of police himself came, they gave him a girl for the whole night, a German woman complained to him that these “bastards” were reluctant to go to your policemen. He advised with a grin: “A for those who do not 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, twisted it and inserted it into the girl's vagina. They left it in this position for up to half an hour. It was forbidden to scream Many girls' lips were bitten - they held back a cry, and after such a punishment they for a long time couldn't move. The commandant, behind her back they called her a cannibal, enjoyed unlimited rights over the captive girls and came up with other sophisticated mockeries. For example, "self-punishment". There is a special stake, which is made crosswise with a height of 60 centimeters. The girl should strip naked, insert a stake into the anus, hold on to the cross with her hands, and put her legs on a stool and hold on for three minutes. Who could not stand it, had to repeat from the beginning. We learned about what was happening in the women's camp from the girls themselves, who came out of the barracks to sit for about ten minutes on a bench. Also, the policemen boastfully talked about their exploits and the resourceful German woman.

To be continued...

Women prisoners of war were held in many camps. According to eyewitnesses, they made an extremely miserable impression. In the conditions of camp life, it was especially difficult for them: they, like no one else, suffered from the lack of basic sanitary conditions.

In the fall of 1941, K. Kromiadi, a member of the commission for the distribution of labor, who visited the Sedlice camp, talked with the captured women. 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."

A group of female medical workers taken prisoner in the Kiev pocket in September 1941 was kept in Vladimir-Volynsk - camp Oflag No. 365 "Nord".

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

After the fall of Sevastopol in July 1942, about 300 female health workers were captured: doctors, nurses, nurses. At first they were sent to Slavuta, and in February 1943, having gathered about 600 female prisoners of war in the camp, they were loaded into wagons and taken to the West. Everyone was lined up in Rovno, 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. The rest were again loaded into wagons, men and women together. The prisoners themselves divided the car into two parts: in one - women, in the other - men. Recovered in a hole in the floor.

On the way, the captured men were dropped off at different stations, and on February 23, 1943, the women were brought to the city of Zoes. Lined up and announced that they would work in military factories. Evgenia Lazarevna Klemm was also in the group of prisoners. Jewish. History teacher at the Odessa Pedagogical Institute, posing as a Serb. She enjoyed special prestige among women prisoners of war. E.L. Klemm on behalf of all German said: "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, because of the crowding, it was impossible to sit down or move. It stayed that way for almost a day. And then the rebellious were sent to Ravensbrück.

This women's camp was established in 1939. The first prisoners of Ravensbrück were prisoners from Germany, and then from European countries occupied by the Germans. All the prisoners were shaved bald, dressed in striped (blue and gray striped) dresses and unlined jackets. Underwear - shirt and shorts. There were no bras or belts. In October, a pair of old stockings was given out for half a year, but not everyone managed to walk in them until spring. Shoes, as in most concentration camps, are wooden blocks.

The barrack was 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-tiered plank beds with a narrow passage between them. For two prisoners, one cotton blanket was issued. V private room vein block - senior hut. There was a washroom in the hallway.

Prisoners worked mainly in the camp's sewing factories. In Ravensbrück, 80% of all uniforms for the SS troops were made, 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. At first, everyone was sent to a bathhouse, and then they were given striped camp clothes with a red triangle with the inscription: "SU" - Sowjet Union.

Even before the arrival of the Soviet women, the SS spread a rumor around the camp that a gang of female murderers 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 in the morning for verification, sometimes lasting 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, as warm water did not have. For this purpose, coffee was collected and washed in turn.

Women whose hair survived began to use combs, which they themselves made. 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 they received a small loaf of bread for five people with an admixture of sawdust and again half a liter of gruel.

The impression that Soviet women made on the prisoners of Ravensbrück is testified in her memoirs by one of the prisoners, Sh. Müller: 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 impudence. All the first half of the day they were forced to march along Lagerstrasse (the main "street" of the camp - the author's note) and deprived of lunch.

But the women from the Red Army bloc (as 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, keeping alignment, walked, as if in a parade, minting a step. Their steps, like a drum roll, beat rhythmically along the Lagerstrasse. The whole column moved as a single unit. Suddenly, a woman on the right flank of the first row gave the command to sing. She counted out: “One, two, three!” And they sang:

Get up, huge country, Get up for a mortal battle...

Then they sang about Moscow.

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

It was not possible for the SS to leave Soviet women without lunch. Political prisoners took care of food for them in advance."

To be continued...

Soviet women prisoners of war more than once struck their enemies and fellow campers with their unity and spirit of resistance. Once 12 Soviet girls were included in the list of prisoners destined to be sent to Majdanek, to the gas chambers. When the SS men came to the barracks to take the women away, the comrades refused to hand them over. The SS managed to find them. "The remaining 500 people lined up five people at a time and went to the commandant. E.L. Klemm was the translator. The commandant drove the newcomers 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 a concentration camp in the city of Barth at the Heinkel aircraft factory. The girls refused to work there. Then they were lined up in two rows and ordered to strip down to their shirts and remove the wooden blocks. For many hours they stood in the cold, every hour the matron came and offered coffee and a bed to anyone who would agree to go to work. Then the three girls were thrown into a punishment cell. Two of them died of pneumonia.

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

Nevertheless, the prisoners believed in liberation, and this belief sounded in a song composed by an unknown author:

Keep your head up, Russian girls! Above your head, be bold! We don't have long to endure, A nightingale will fly in in the spring... And open the doors for us to freedom, Remove a striped dress from our shoulders And heal deep wounds, Wipe tears from swollen eyes. Keep your head up, Russian girls! Be Russian everywhere, everywhere! Not long to wait, not long - And we will be on Russian soil.

Former prisoner Germain Tillon, in her memoirs, gave a peculiar description of Russian women prisoners of war who ended up in Ravensbrück: "... their solidarity was due to the fact that they had gone through an army school even before their capture. They were young, strong, neat, honest, and also quite "rude and uneducated. There were also intellectuals (doctors, teachers) among them - friendly and attentive. In addition, we liked their disobedience, unwillingness to obey the Germans."

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

In January 1944, for refusing to sign an agreement to work in Germany and move into 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 Leontieva, infantry lieutenant Vera Matyutskaya.

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

Despite the death reigning in captivity, despite the fact that any connection between prisoners of war men and women was forbidden, where they worked together, most often in camp infirmaries, love was sometimes born, bestowing new life. As a rule, in such rare cases the German leadership of the infirmary 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 at the place of residence of her relatives in the occupied territory, or returned with the child to the camp.

So, from the documents of the Stalag camp infirmary No. 352 in Minsk, it is known that "who arrived at the 1st City Hospital for childbirth on February 23, 1942, the nurse Sindeva Alexandra left with her child for the Rollbahn prisoner of war camp."

In 1944, the attitude towards women prisoners of war hardened. They are subjected to new tests. In accordance with 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 prisoners of war held in camps should be subjected to checks by the local Gestapo branch 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.

On the basis of this order, on April 11, 1944, the head of the Security Service and the SD issued an order to send unreliable female prisoners of war to the nearest concentration camp. After being delivered to a concentration camp, such women were subjected to the so-called " special treatment"- liquidation. So Vera Panchenko-Pisanetskaya died - senior group seven hundred female prisoners of war who worked at a military factory in the city of Genthin. A lot of marriage was produced at the plant, and during the investigation it turned out that Vera led 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, the men were brought in and shot one after the other. 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 this? ” What she did, I never found out. 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 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 corpses. She resisted. Several more SS men ran up. The officer shouted: “Into her furnace!” The oven door was open and the heat set the woman's hair on fire. Despite the fact that the woman vigorously resisted, she was placed on a cart for burning corpses and pushed into the furnace. This was seen by all the prisoners who worked in the crematorium. "Unfortunately, the name of this heroine remained unknown.

To be continued...

Women who escaped from captivity continued to fight against the enemy. In the 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 had previously served in the Red Army and was taken prisoner After escaping from the POW camp, she took refuge in orphanage in Uman under a false name and was engaged in medical practice. I used this opportunity to gain access to the POW camp for espionage purposes." Probably, the unknown heroine assisted the POWs.

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 autumn of 1942, in the Georgievsk camp, along with other prisoners, there were several hundred female prisoners of war. Once the Germans took the identified Jews to be shot. Among the doomed was Tsilya Gedaleva. V last minute the German officer in charge of the massacre suddenly said: "Medchen raus! - The girl - get out!" And Tsilya returned to the women's barracks. Girlfriends gave Tsilya a new name - Fatima, and in the future, according to all documents, she passed as a Tatar.

Military doctor III rank Emma Lvovna Khotina from September 9 to 20 was surrounded in the Bryansk forests. Was taken prisoner. During the next stage, she fled from the village of Kokarevka to the city of Trubchevsk. Hiding under a false 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 on February 2, 1942, the partisans attacked Trubchevsk, 17 doctors, paramedics and nurses left with them. E. L. Khotina became the head of the sanitary service of the partisan association of the Zhytomyr region.

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

S. Zemelman was sent to the medical battalion of the 3rd Pomor 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 Patriotic War 1st degree, 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, who had gone through the hell of the German camps.

Grunya Grigoryeva recalls that the Red Army soldiers who liberated Ravensbrück on April 30, 1945, looked at the girls-prisoners of war “... looked at as traitors. This shocked us. We did not expect such a meeting. Ours preferred French women more, Poles - foreigners.

After the end of the war, women prisoners of war went through all the torment and humiliation during SMERSH checks in filtration camps. Alexandra Ivanovna Max, one of 15 Soviet women liberated in the Neuhammer camp, tells how a Soviet officer in a repatriation camp chastised them: “Shame on you, you surrendered, you ...” And I argue with him: “Ah what were we supposed to do?" And he says: "You should have shot yourself, but not surrendered!" And I say: "Where did we have pistols?" - "Well, you could, you should have hanged yourself, killed yourself. But don't surrender."

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

And already a few years after the war, a female doctor, a former prisoner, writes in a private letter: "... sometimes I am very sorry that I survived, because I always wear this dark spot 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 burden of captivity there and remained honest citizens of the Soviet state.

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

Some, transferred from POW camps to concentration camps, were subjected to sterilization. “I didn’t have children after being sterilized in the camp. And so I remained, as it were, a cripple ... Many of our girls did not have children. So some husbands left because they wanted to have children. And my husband did not leave me as I am, he says, we will live like that. And we still live with him. "

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Women captured by the Germans. How the Nazis mocked captured Soviet women

Second World War rolled over 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, in this regard, the Nazis were especially distinguished, 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.

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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 join intimate relationship with captives, then ordinary privates in this matter had more freedom.

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 ...

The Red Army soldiers, for the most part poorly educated, were characterized by complete ignorance in matters of sex and a rude attitude towards women.

"Red Army soldiers don't believe in 'individual connections' with German women," the playwright Zakhar Agranenko wrote in his diary, which he kept during the war in East Prussia. "Nine, ten, twelve at once - they rape them collectively."

The long columns of Soviet troops that entered East Prussia in January 1945 were an unusual mixture of modernity and the Middle Ages: tankers in black leather helmets, Cossacks on shaggy horses with loot tied to their saddles, dodges and Studebakers received under Lend-Lease, followed by a second echelon of carts. The variety of weapons was fully consistent with the variety of characters of the soldiers themselves, among whom were both outright bandits, drunkards and rapists, as well as idealist communists and intellectuals who were shocked by the behavior of their comrades.

In Moscow, Beria and Stalin were well aware of what was happening from detailed reports, one of which stated: "many Germans believe that all German women who remained in East Prussia were raped by soldiers of the Red Army." Numerous examples of gang rape "both minors and old women" were cited.

Marshall Rokossovsky issued Order #006 in order to direct "the feeling of hatred towards the enemy on the battlefield". It didn't lead to anything. There were several arbitrary attempts to restore order. The commander of one of the rifle regiments allegedly "personally shot a lieutenant who lined up his soldiers in front of a German woman who had been knocked to the ground." But in most cases, either the officers themselves participated in the atrocities, or the lack of discipline among drunken soldiers armed with machine guns made it impossible to restore order.

Calls to avenge the Fatherland, which was attacked by the Wehrmacht, were understood as permission to show cruelty. Even young women, soldiers and paramedics, did not oppose. A 21-year-old girl from the reconnaissance detachment Agranenko said: "Our soldiers behave with the Germans, especially with German women, absolutely correctly." Some people found it interesting. So, some Germans remember that Soviet women watched how they were raped and laughed. But some were deeply shocked by what they saw in Germany. Natalia Hesse, a close friend of the scientist Andrei Sakharov, was a war correspondent. She later recalled: "Russian soldiers raped all German women between the ages of 8 and 80. It was an army of rapists."

Drinking, including dangerous chemicals stolen from laboratories, played a significant role in this violence. It seems that the Soviet soldiers could only attack the woman after getting drunk for courage. But at the same time, they too often got drunk to such a state that they could not complete sexual intercourse and used bottles - some of the victims were disfigured in this way.

The topic of the mass atrocities of the Red Army in Germany has been banned in Russia for so long that even now veterans deny that they took place. Only a few spoke about it openly, but without any regrets. The commander of a tank unit recalled: "They all lifted their skirts and lay down on the bed." He even boasted that "two million of our children were born in Germany."

Ability Soviet officers to convince oneself that most of the victims were either pleased or agree that this was a fair retribution for the actions of the Germans in Russia is amazing. A Soviet major told an English journalist at the time: "Our comrades were so hungry for female affection that they often raped sixty, seventy, and even eighty-year-olds to their frank surprise, if not pleasure."

One can only outline the psychological contradictions. When the raped women of Koenigsberg begged their tormentors to kill them, the Red Army men considered themselves offended. They answered: "Russian soldiers don't shoot women. Only the Germans do that." The Red Army convinced itself that, since it had assumed the role of liberating Europe from fascism, its soldiers had every right to behave as they pleased.

A sense of superiority and humiliation characterized the behavior of most of the soldiers towards the women of East Prussia. The victims not only paid for the crimes of the Wehrmacht, but also symbolized an atavistic object of aggression - as old as the war itself. As historian and feminist Susan Brownmiller has observed, rape, as a conqueror's right, is directed "against the women of the enemy" to emphasize victory. True, after the initial frenzy of January 1945, sadism manifested itself less and less. When the Red Army reached Berlin 3 months later, the soldiers were already viewing the German women through the prism of the usual "right of winners." The feeling of superiority certainly remained, but it was perhaps an indirect consequence of the humiliation that the soldiers themselves suffered from their commanders and the Soviet leadership as a whole.

Several other factors also played a role. Sexual freedom was widely discussed in the 1920s within the Communist Party, but in the next decade, Stalin did everything to make Soviet society virtually asexual. This had nothing to do with the puritanical views of the Soviet people - the fact is that love and sex did not fit into the concept of "deindividualization" of the individual. Natural desires had to be suppressed. Freud was banned, divorce and adultery not approved by the Communist Party. Homosexuality became a criminal offence. The new doctrine completely forbade sex education. In art, the image of a female breast, even covered with clothes, was considered the height of eroticism: it had to be covered by work overalls. The regime demanded that any expression of passion be sublimated into love for the party and for Comrade Stalin personally.

The Red Army soldiers, for the most part poorly educated, were characterized by complete ignorance in matters of sex and a rude attitude towards women. Thus, the Soviet state's attempts to suppress the libido of its citizens led to what one Russian writer called "barrack erotica" that was far more primitive and brutal than any of the hardest pornography. All this was mixed with the influence of modern propaganda, which deprives a person of his essence, and atavistic primitive impulses, marked by fear and suffering.

The writer Vasily Grossman, a war correspondent for the advancing Red Army, soon discovered that Germans were not the only victims of rape. Among them were Poles, as well as young Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians who ended up in Germany as a displaced labor force. He noted: "The liberated Soviet women often complain that our soldiers rape them. One girl told me in tears: "He was an old man, older than my father."

The rapes of Soviet women nullify attempts to explain the behavior of the Red Army as revenge for German atrocities on the territory of the Soviet Union. On March 29, 1945, the Komsomol Central Committee notified Malenkov about the report from the 1st Ukrainian Front. General Tsygankov reported: "On the night of February 24, a group of 35 soldiers and their battalion commander entered the women's hostel in the village of Grutenberg and raped everyone."

In Berlin, despite Goebbels' propaganda, many women were simply not prepared for the horrors of Russian revenge. Many have tried to convince themselves that while the danger must be great in the countryside, mass rape cannot take place in the city in front of everyone.

In Dahlem, Soviet officers visited Sister Kunigunda, the abbess convent, which housed an orphanage and a maternity hospital. The officers and soldiers behaved impeccably. They even warned that reinforcements were following them. Their prediction came true: nuns, girls, old women, pregnant women and those who had just given birth were all raped without mercy.

Within a few days, the custom arose among the soldiers to choose their victims by shining torches in their faces. The very process of choice, instead of violence indiscriminately, indicates a certain change. By this time, Soviet soldiers began to view German women not as responsible for the crimes of the Wehrmacht, but as spoils of war.

Rape is often defined as violence that has little to do with actual sexual attraction. But this definition is from the point of view of the victims. To understand the crime, you need to see it from the point of view of the aggressor, especially in the later stages, when "mere" rape has replaced the rampage of January and February.

Many women were forced to "surrender" to one soldier in the hope that he would protect them from others. Magda Wieland, a 24-year-old actress, tried to hide in a closet, but was pulled out by a young soldier from Central Asia. He was so turned on by the opportunity to make love to a beautiful young blonde that he came prematurely. Magda tried to explain to him that she agreed to become his girlfriend if he would protect her from other Russian soldiers, but he told his comrades about her, and one soldier raped her. Ellen Goetz, Magda's Jewish friend, was also raped. When the Germans tried to explain to the Russians that she was Jewish and that she was being persecuted, they received in response: "Frau ist Frau" (A woman is a woman - approx. per.).

Soon the women learned to hide during the evening "hunting hours". Young daughters were hidden in attics for several days. Mothers went out for water only in the early morning, so as not to fall under the arm of Soviet soldiers sleeping off after drinking. Sometimes the greatest danger came from neighbors who gave away the places where the girls were hiding in an attempt to save their own daughters. Old Berliners still remember the screams at night. It was impossible not to hear them, as all the windows were broken.

According to two city hospitals, 95,000-130,000 women were victims of rape. One doctor estimated that out of 100,000 raped, about 10,000 later died, mostly by suicide. Mortality among the 1.4 million raped in East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia was even higher. Although at least 2 million German women were raped, a significant proportion, if not the majority, were victims of gang rape.

If someone tried to protect a woman from a Soviet rapist, it was either a father trying to protect his daughter, or a son trying to protect his mother. “13-year-old Dieter Sahl,” wrote neighbors in a letter shortly after the event, “rushed with his fists at a Russian who raped his mother right in front of him. He only achieved that he was shot.”

After the second stage, when women offered themselves to one soldier to protect themselves from the rest, the next stage came - the post-war famine - as Susan Brownmiller noted, "the thin line separating military rape from military prostitution." Ursula von Kardorf notes that shortly after the surrender of Berlin, the city was filled with women trading themselves for food or an alternative currency - cigarettes. Helke Sander, a German filmmaker who has studied this issue thoroughly, writes of "a mixture of direct violence, blackmail, calculation and real affection."

The fourth stage was a strange form of cohabitation of Red Army officers with German "occupation wives". Soviet officials went berserk when several Soviet officers deserted from the army when it was time to return home to stay with their German mistresses.

Even if the feminist definition of rape as purely an act of violence seems simplistic, there is no justification for male complacency. The events of 1945 clearly show us how subtle a veneer of civility can be if there is no fear of retaliation. They also remind us that male sexuality has a dark side, the existence of which we prefer not to remember.

("The Daily Telegraph", UK)

The materials of InoSMI contain only assessments of foreign media and do not reflect the position of the editors of InoSMI.

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.

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.

Of course, the captives were constantly raped. 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.

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. Very often, girls were bullied by other women, such as the wives of commandants, just for fun. The nickname of the commandant of Stalag No. 337 was "cannibal".

It's just a nightmare! The content of Soviet prisoners of war by the Nazis was extremely terrible. But it became even worse when a female soldier of the Red Army was captured.

Order of the fascist command

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

This was done in many German units. Among those who died in battles and encirclement, a huge number of bodies of women in Red Army uniforms were found. Among them are many nurses and women paramedics. Traces on their bodies testified that many were brutally tortured and then shot.

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

Terrifying marks of torture remained on the body of the unfortunate woman. Before her death, her breasts were cut off, her entire face and hands were completely cut to pieces. The woman's body was a continuous 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

The Soviet soldiers who were in captivity - and women too - were supposed to be "sorted". The weakest, the wounded and exhausted were to be destroyed. The rest were used for the hardest work in concentration camps.

In addition to these atrocities, Red Army women were constantly subjected to rape. The highest military ranks of the Wehrmacht were forbidden to have intimate relations with the Slavs, so they did it secretly. The rank and file had a certain freedom here. Finding one Red Army woman or a 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 chose the most attractive girls from among the prisoners and took them to their place to “serve”. So did the camp doctor Orlyand in Shpalaga (prisoner of war camp) No. 346 near the city of Kremenchug. The guards themselves regularly raped the prisoners of the women's block of the concentration camp.

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

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

Torture was used for women prisoners of war, the cruelty of which medieval inquisitors could only envy: they were put on a stake, stuffed insides with hot red pepper, etc. Often they were 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 eloquently spoke of her temper.