Only recently, researchers have established that in a dozen European concentration camps, the Nazis forced female prisoners to engage in prostitution in special brothels, writes Vladimir Ginda in the section Archive in issue 31 of the magazine Correspondent dated August 9, 2013.
Torment and death or prostitution - the Nazis faced this choice with European and Slavic women who found themselves in concentration camps. Of those several hundred girls who chose the second option, the administration staffed brothels in ten camps - not only those where prisoners were used as labor, but also others aimed at mass extermination.
In Soviet and modern European historiography, this topic did not actually exist; only a couple of American scientists - Wendy Gertjensen and Jessica Hughes - raised some aspects of the problem in their scientific works.
At the beginning of the 21st century, German cultural scientist Robert Sommer began to scrupulously restore information about sexual conveyors
At the beginning of the 21st century, German cultural scientist Robert Sommer began to scrupulously restore information about sexual conveyors operating in the horrific conditions of German concentration camps and death factories.
The result of nine years of research was a book published by Sommer in 2009 Brothel in a concentration camp, which shocked European readers. Based on this work, the exhibition Sex Work in Concentration Camps was organized in Berlin.
Bed motivation
“Legalized sex” appeared in Nazi concentration camps in 1942. The SS men organized houses of tolerance in ten institutions, among which were mainly so-called labor camps - in the Austrian Mauthausen and its branch Gusen, the German Flossenburg, Buchenwald, Neuengamme, Sachsenhausen and Dora-Mittelbau. In addition, the institution of forced prostitutes was also introduced in three death camps intended for the destruction of prisoners: in the Polish Auschwitz-Auschwitz and its “companion” Monowitz, as well as in the German Dachau.
The idea of creating camp brothels belonged to Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler. The researchers' findings suggest that he was impressed by the system of incentives used in Soviet forced labor camps to increase prisoners' productivity.
Imperial War Museum
One of his barracks in Ravensbrück, the largest women's concentration camp in Nazi Germany
Himmler decided to adopt experience, simultaneously adding to the list of “incentives” something that was not in the Soviet system - “incentive” prostitution. The SS chief was confident that the right to visit a brothel, along with receiving other bonuses - cigarettes, cash or camp vouchers, an improved diet - could force prisoners to work harder and better.
In fact, the right to visit such institutions was predominantly held by camp guards from among the prisoners. And there is a logical explanation for this: most of the male prisoners were exhausted, so they did not even think about any sexual attraction.
Hughes points out that the proportion of male prisoners who used the services of brothels was extremely small. In Buchenwald, according to her data, where about 12.5 thousand people were kept in September 1943, 0.77% of prisoners visited the public barracks in three months. A similar situation was in Dachau, where as of September 1944, 0.75% of the 22 thousand prisoners who were there used the services of prostitutes.
Heavy share
Up to two hundred sex slaves worked in brothels at the same time. The largest number of women, two dozen, were kept in a brothel in Auschwitz.
Only female prisoners, usually attractive, aged 17 to 35, became brothel workers. About 60-70% of them were of German origin, from among those whom the Reich authorities called “anti-social elements.” Some were engaged in prostitution before entering the concentration camps, so they agreed to similar work, but behind barbed wire, without problems, and even passed on their skills to inexperienced colleagues.
The SS recruited approximately a third of the sex slaves from prisoners of other nationalities - Polish, Ukrainian or Belarusian. Jewish women were not allowed to do such work, and Jewish prisoners were not allowed to visit brothels.
These workers wore special insignia - black triangles sewn onto the sleeves of their robes.
The SS recruited approximately a third of the sex slaves from prisoners of other nationalities - Poles, Ukrainians or Belarusians
Some of the girls voluntarily agreed to “work.” Thus, one former employee of the medical unit of Ravensbrück - the largest women's concentration camp of the Third Reich, where up to 130 thousand people were kept - recalled: some women voluntarily went to a brothel because they were promised release after six months of work.
Spaniard Lola Casadel, a member of the Resistance movement who ended up in the same camp in 1944, told how the head of their barracks announced: “Whoever wants to work in a brothel, come to me. And keep in mind: if there are no volunteers, we will have to resort to force.”
The threat was not empty: as Sheina Epstein, a Jew from the Kaunas ghetto, recalled, in the camp the inhabitants of the women’s barracks lived in constant fear of the guards, who regularly raped the prisoners. The raids were carried out at night: drunken men walked along the bunks with flashlights, choosing the most beautiful victim.
“Their joy knew no bounds when they discovered that the girl was a virgin. Then they laughed loudly and called their colleagues,” Epstein said.
Having lost honor, and even the will to fight, some girls went to brothels, realizing that this was their last hope for survival.
“The most important thing is that we managed to escape from [the camps] Bergen-Belsen and Ravensbrück,” said Liselotte B., a former prisoner of the Dora-Mittelbau camp, about her “bed career.” “The main thing was to somehow survive.”
With Aryan meticulousness
After the initial selection, the workers were brought to special barracks in the concentration camps where they were planned to be used. To bring the emaciated prisoners into a more or less decent appearance, they were placed in the infirmary. There, medical workers in SS uniforms gave them calcium injections, they took disinfectant baths, ate and even sunbathed under quartz lamps.
There was no sympathy in all this, only calculation: the bodies were being prepared for hard work. As soon as the rehabilitation cycle ended, the girls became part of the sex conveyor belt. Work was daily, rest was only if there was no light or water, if an air raid warning was announced or during the broadcast of speeches by German leader Adolf Hitler on the radio.
The conveyor worked like clockwork and strictly according to schedule. For example, in Buchenwald, prostitutes got up at 7:00 and took care of themselves until 19:00: they had breakfast, did exercises, underwent daily medical examinations, washed and cleaned, and had lunch. By camp standards, there was so much food that prostitutes even exchanged food for clothes and other things. Everything ended with dinner, and at seven in the evening the two-hour work began. The camp prostitutes could not go out to see her only if they had “these days” or fell ill.
AP
Women and children in one of the barracks of the Bergen-Belsen camp, liberated by the British
The procedure for providing intimate services, starting from the selection of men, was as detailed as possible. The only people who could get a woman were the so-called camp functionaries - internees, those involved in internal security, and prison guards.
Moreover, at first the doors of the brothels were opened exclusively to the Germans or representatives of the peoples living on the territory of the Reich, as well as to the Spaniards and Czechs. Later, the circle of visitors was expanded - only Jews, Soviet prisoners of war and ordinary internees were excluded. For example, logs of visits to a brothel in Mauthausen, which were meticulously kept by representatives of the administration, show that 60% of the clients were criminals.
Men who wanted to indulge in carnal pleasures first had to get permission from the camp leadership. Afterwards, they bought an entrance ticket for two Reichsmarks - this is slightly less than the cost of 20 cigarettes sold in the canteen. Of this amount, a quarter went to the woman herself, and only if she was German.
In the camp brothel, clients first of all found themselves in a waiting room, where their data was verified. They then underwent a medical examination and received prophylactic injections. Next, the visitor was given the number of the room where he should go. There the intercourse took place. Only the “missionary position” was allowed. Conversations were not encouraged.
This is how Magdalena Walter, one of the “concubines” kept there, describes the work of the brothel in Buchenwald: “We had one bathroom with a toilet, where the women went to wash themselves before the next visitor arrived. Immediately after washing, the client appeared. Everything worked like a conveyor belt; men were not allowed to stay in the room for more than 15 minutes.”
During the evening, the prostitute, according to surviving documents, received 6-15 people.
Body to work
Legalized prostitution was beneficial to the authorities. So, in Buchenwald alone, in the first six months of operation, the brothel earned 14-19 thousand Reichsmarks. The money went to the account of the German Economic Policy Directorate.
The Germans used women not only as objects of sexual pleasure, but also as scientific material. The inhabitants of the brothels carefully monitored their hygiene, because any venereal disease could cost them their lives: infected prostitutes in the camps were not treated, but experiments were performed on them.
Imperial War Museum
Liberated prisoners of the Bergen-Belsen camp
Reich scientists did this, fulfilling the will of Hitler: even before the war, he called syphilis one of the most dangerous diseases in Europe, capable of leading to disaster. The Fuhrer believed that only those nations would be saved who would find a way to quickly cure the disease. In order to obtain a miracle cure, the SS turned infected women into living laboratories. However, they did not remain alive for long - intensive experiments quickly led the prisoners to a painful death.
Researchers have found a number of cases where even healthy prostitutes were given over to sadistic doctors.
Pregnant women were not spared in the camps. In some places they were immediately killed, in some places they were artificially aborted, and after five weeks they were sent back into service. Moreover, abortions were performed at different times and in different ways - and this also became part of the research. Some prisoners were allowed to give birth, but only then to experimentally determine how long a baby could live without nutrition.
Despicable prisoners
According to former Buchenwald prisoner Dutchman Albert van Dyck, camp prostitutes were despised by other prisoners, not paying attention to the fact that they were forced to go “on panel” by cruel conditions of detention and an attempt to save their lives. And the work of the brothel dwellers itself was akin to repeated daily rape.
Some of the women, even finding themselves in a brothel, tried to defend their honor. For example, Walter came to Buchenwald as a virgin and, finding herself in the role of a prostitute, tried to defend herself from her first client with scissors. The attempt failed, and according to accounting records, the former virgin satisfied six men that same day. Walter endured this because she knew that otherwise she would face a gas chamber, a crematorium, or a barracks for cruel experiments.
Not everyone had the strength to survive the violence. Some of the inhabitants of the camp brothels, according to researchers, committed suicide, and some lost their minds. Some survived, but remained captive to psychological problems for the rest of their lives. Physical liberation did not relieve them of the burden of the past, and after the war, camp prostitutes were forced to hide their history. Therefore, scientists have collected little documented evidence of life in these brothels.
“It’s one thing to say ‘I worked as a carpenter’ or ‘I built roads’ and quite another to say ‘I was forced to work as a prostitute,’” says Insa Eschebach, director of the Ravensbrück former camp memorial.
This material was published in No. 31 of the Korrespondent magazine dated August 9, 2013. Reproduction of Korrespondent magazine publications in full is prohibited. The rules for using materials from the Korrespondent magazine published on the Korrespondent.net website can be found .
During all armed conflicts in the world, the weaker sex was the most unprotected and subject to bullying and murder. Remaining in territories occupied by enemy forces, young women became targets of sexual harassment and... Since statistics on atrocities against women have only been conducted recently, it is not difficult to assume that throughout the history of mankind the number of people subjected to inhuman abuse will be many times greater.
The greatest surge in bullying of the weaker sex was observed during the Great Patriotic War, armed conflicts in Chechnya, and anti-terrorist campaigns in the Middle East.
Displays all atrocities against women, statistics, photos and video materials, as well as stories of eyewitnesses and victims of violence, which can be found in.
Statistics of atrocities against women during the Second World War
The most inhumane atrocities in modern history were the atrocities committed against women during the war. The most perverted and terrible were the Nazi atrocities against women. Statistics count about 5 million victims.
In the territories captured by the troops of the Third Reich, the population, until its complete liberation, was subjected to cruel and sometimes inhumane treatment by the occupiers. Of those who found themselves under the power of the enemy, there were 73 million people. About 30–35% of them are female of different ages.
The Germans' atrocities against women were extremely cruel - under the age of 30-35 they were "used" by German soldiers to satisfy sexual needs, and some, under threat of death, worked in brothels organized by the occupation authorities.
Statistics on atrocities against women show that older women were most often taken by the Nazis for forced labor in Germany or sent to concentration camps.
Many of the women suspected by the Nazis of having connections with the partisan underground were tortured and subsequently shot. According to rough estimates, every second woman on the territory of the former USSR, during the occupation of part of its territory by the Nazis, experienced abuse from the invaders, many of them were shot or killed.
The atrocities of Soviet soldiers against women were also monstrous. Statistics gradually increased as the Red Army advanced through the countries of Western Europe previously captured by the Germans towards Berlin. Embittered and having seen enough of all the horrors created by Hitler’s troops on Russian soil, the Soviet soldiers were spurred on by a thirst for revenge and some orders from the highest military leadership.
According to eyewitnesses, the victorious march of the Soviet Army was accompanied by pogroms, robberies and often gang rape of women and girls.
Chechen atrocities against women: statistics, photos
Throughout all armed conflicts on the territory of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria (Chechnya), Chechen atrocities against women were particularly brutal. In three Chechen territories occupied by militants, genocide was carried out against the Russian population - women and young girls were raped, tortured and killed.
Some were taken away during the retreat and then, under threat of death, demanded a ransom from their relatives. For the Chechens, they represented nothing more than a commodity that could be profitably sold or exchanged. Women rescued or ransomed from captivity spoke about the terrible treatment they received from the militants - they were poorly fed, often beaten and raped.
For attempting to escape they threatened with immediate death. In total, during the entire period of confrontation between federal troops and Chechen militants, more than 5 thousand women were injured, brutally tortured and killed.
War in Yugoslavia - atrocities against women
The war on the Balkan Peninsula, which subsequently led to a split in the state, became another armed conflict in which the female population was subjected to terrible abuse, torture, etc. The reason for the cruel treatment was the different religions of the warring parties and ethnic strife.
As a result of the Yugoslav wars between Serbs, Croats, Bosnians, and Albanians that lasted from 1991 to 2001, Wikipedia estimates the death toll at 127,084 people. Of these, about 10–15% are civilian women shot, tortured, or killed as a result of airstrikes and artillery shelling.
ISIS atrocities against women: statistics, photos
In the modern world, the most terrible in their inhumanity and cruelty are the atrocities of ISIS against women who find themselves in territories controlled by terrorists. Representatives of the fairer sex who do not belong to the Islamic faith are subjected to particular cruelty.
Women and minor girls are kidnapped, after which many are resold many times on the black market as slaves. Many of them are forced into sexual relations with militants - sex jihad. Those who refuse intimacy are publicly executed.
Women who fall into sexual slavery by jihadists are taken away from them, from whom they are trained as future militants, forced to do all the hard work around the house, and to have intimate relationships with both the owner and his friends. Those who try to escape and are caught are brutally beaten, after which many are publicly executed.
Today, ISIS militants have kidnapped more than 4,000 women of various ages and nationalities. The fate of many of them is unknown. The approximate number of women victims, including those killed during the largest wars of the twentieth century, is presented in the table:
| Name of the war, its duration | Approximate number of women victims of the conflict |
| Great Patriotic War 1941–1945 | 5 000 000 |
| Yugoslav Wars 1991–2001 | 15 000 |
| Chechen military companies | 5 000 |
| Anti-terrorism campaigns against ISIS in the Middle East 2014 - to date | 4 000 |
| Total | 5 024 000 |
Conclusion
Military conflicts arising on earth lead to the fact that the statistics of atrocities against women, without the intervention of international organizations and the manifestation of humanity of the warring parties towards women, will steadily increase in the future.
The ability to forgive is characteristic of Russians. But still, how amazing this property of the soul is - especially when you hear about it from the lips of yesterday’s enemy...
Letters from former German prisoners of war.
I belong to the generation that experienced the Second World War. In July 1943, I became a Wehrmacht soldier, but due to long training, I got to the German-Soviet front only in January 1945, which by that time passed through the territory of East Prussia. Then the German troops no longer had any chance in confronting the Soviet army. On March 26, 1945, I was captured by the Soviets. I was in camps in Kohla-Jarve in Estonia, in Vinogradovo near Moscow, and worked in a coal mine in Stalinogorsk (today Novomoskovsk).
We were always treated like people. We had the opportunity to spend free time and were provided with medical care. On November 2, 1949, after 4.5 years of captivity, I was released and was released as a physically and spiritually healthy person. I know that, in contrast to my experience in Soviet captivity, Soviet prisoners of war in Germany lived completely differently. Hitler treated most Soviet prisoners of war extremely cruelly. For a cultured nation, as the Germans are always represented, with so many famous poets, composers and scientists, such treatment was a disgrace and an inhumane act. After returning home, many former Soviet prisoners of war waited for compensation from Germany, but it never came. This is especially outrageous! I hope that with my modest donation I will make a small contribution to mitigating this moral injury.
Hans Moeser
Fifty years ago, on April 21, 1945, during the fierce battles for Berlin, I was captured by the Soviets. This date and the accompanying circumstances were of great importance for my subsequent life. Today, after half a century, I look back, now as a historian: the subject of this look into the past is myself.
On the day of my capture, I had just celebrated my seventeenth birthday. Through the Labor Front we were drafted into the Wehrmacht and assigned to the 12th Army, the so-called “Ghost Army”. After the Soviet Army launched “Operation Berlin” on April 16, 1945, we were literally thrown to the front.
Captivity came as a great shock to me and my young comrades, because we were completely unprepared for such a situation. And we knew nothing at all about Russia and Russians. This shock was also so severe because only when we found ourselves behind the Soviet front line did we realize the severity of the losses that our group had suffered. Of the hundred people who entered the battle in the morning, more than half died before noon. These experiences are among the most difficult memories of my life.
This was followed by the formation of trains with prisoners of war, which took us - with numerous intermediate stations - deep into the Soviet Union, to the Volga. The country needed German prisoners of war as a labor force, because factories that were inactive during the war needed to be restarted. In Saratov, a beautiful city on the high bank of the Volga, the sawmill began operating again, and I spent more than a year in the “cement city” of Volsk, also located on the high bank of the river.
Our labor camp belonged to the Bolshevik cement factory. Work at the factory was unusually difficult for me, an untrained eighteen-year-old high school student. The German “kameradas” did not always help in this case. People just needed to survive, to survive until they were sent home. In this pursuit, German prisoners developed their own, often cruel, laws in the camp.
In February 1947 I had an accident in a quarry, after which I could no longer work. Six months later I returned home as an invalid to Germany.
This is only the external side of the matter. During my stay in Saratov and then in Volsk, conditions were very difficult. These conditions are quite often described in publications about German prisoners of war in the Soviet Union: hunger and work. For me, the climate factor also played a big role. In the summer, which is unusually hot on the Volga, I had to shovel hot slag from under the furnaces at a cement plant; in winter, when it is extremely cold there, I worked in a quarry on the night shift.
Before summing up my stay in the Soviet camp, I would like to describe here some more of what I experienced in captivity. And there were a lot of impressions. I will give just a few of them.
The first is nature, the majestic Volga, along which we marched every day from the camp to the plant. The impressions from this huge river, the mother of Russian rivers, are difficult to describe. One summer, when after the spring flood the river was rolling wide, our Russian guards allowed us to jump into the river to wash off the cement dust. Of course, the “supervisors” acted against the rules; but they were also humane, we exchanged cigarettes, and they were not much older than me.
In October, winter storms began, and by the middle of the month the river was covered with an ice blanket. Roads were laid along the frozen river; even trucks could move from one bank to the other. And then, in mid-April, after six months of captivity in the ice, the Volga flowed freely again: with a terrible roar, the ice broke, and the river returned to its old channel. Our Russian guards were overjoyed: “The river is flowing again!” A new time of the year has begun.
The second part of the memories is relationships with Soviet people. I have already described how humane our guards were. I can give other examples of compassion: for example, one nurse who stood at the camp gate every morning in the bitter cold. Those who did not have enough clothing were allowed by the guards to stay in the camp in winter, despite the protests of the camp authorities. Or a Jewish doctor in a hospital who saved the lives of more than one German, although they came as enemies. And finally, an elderly woman who, during the lunch break, at the train station in Volsk, shyly served us pickles from her bucket. It was a real feast for us. Later, before leaving, she came and crossed herself in front of each of us. Mother Rus', which I met in the era of late Stalinism, in 1946, on the Volga.
When today, fifty years after my captivity, I try to take stock, I discover that my time in captivity turned my whole life in a completely different direction and determined my professional path.
What I experienced in my youth in Russia did not let me go even after returning to Germany. I had a choice - to push my stolen youth out of my memory and never think about the Soviet Union again, or to analyze everything I had experienced and thus bring some kind of biographical balance. I chose the second, immeasurably more difficult path, not least under the influence of my doctoral supervisor, Paul Johansen.
As stated at the beginning, it is to this difficult path that I look back today. I reflect on what I have achieved and note the following: for decades in my lectures I have tried to convey to students my critically rethought experience, while receiving the liveliest response. I could help my closest students more competently in their doctoral work and exams. And finally, I established long-term contacts with Russian colleagues, primarily in St. Petersburg, which over time developed into lasting friendships.
Klaus Meyer
On May 8, 1945, the remnants of the German 18th Army capitulated in the Courland Pocket in Latvia. It was a long-awaited day. Our small 100-watt transmitter was designed to negotiate terms of surrender with the Red Army. All weapons, equipment, vehicles, radio cars and the joy stations themselves were, according to Prussian neatness, collected in one place, on an area surrounded by pine trees. Nothing happened for two days. Then Soviet officers appeared and took us into two-story buildings. We spent the night cramped on straw mattresses. Early in the morning of May 11, we were lined up in hundreds, like the old distribution of companies. The foot march into captivity began.
One Red Army soldier in front, one behind. So we walked in the direction of Riga to a huge assembly camp prepared by the Red Army. Here the officers were separated from ordinary soldiers. The guards searched the things they took with them. We were allowed to leave some underwear, socks, a blanket, dishes and folding cutlery. Nothing else.
From Riga we marched in endless daytime marches to the east, to the former Soviet-Latvian border in the direction of Dünaburg. After each march we arrived at the next camp. The ritual was repeated: a search of all personal belongings, distribution of food and night sleep. Upon arrival in Dunaburg we were loaded into freight cars. The food was good: bread and American canned meat "Corned Beef". We went southeast. Those who thought that we were heading home were very surprised. After many days we arrived at the Baltic Station in Moscow. Standing on the trucks, we drove through the city. It's already dark. Was any of us able to make any notes?
At a distance from the city, next to a village of three-story wooden houses, there was a large prefabricated camp, so large that its outskirts were lost beyond the horizon. Tents and prisoners... The week passed with good summer weather, Russian bread and American canned food. After one morning roll call, 150 to 200 prisoners were separated from the rest. We got on the trucks. None of us knew where we were going. The path lay to the northwest. We drove the last kilometers through a birch forest along a dam. After about a two-hour drive (or longer?) we were at our destination.
The forest camp consisted of three or four wooden barracks located partially at ground level. The door was located low, at the level of several steps down. Behind the last barracks, in which the German camp commandant from East Prussia lived, there were quarters for tailors and shoemakers, a doctor’s office and a separate barracks for the sick. The entire area, barely larger than a football field, was surrounded by barbed wire. A somewhat more comfortable wooden barrack was intended for security. There was also a sentry booth and a small kitchen on the premises. This place was to become our new home for the next months, maybe even years. It didn't feel like a quick return home.
In the barracks along the central passage there were two rows of wooden two-story bunks. At the end of the complex registration procedure (we did not have our soldier's books with us), we placed straw-filled mattresses on the bunks. Those located on the upper tier could be lucky. He had the opportunity to look out through a glass window measuring about 25 x 25 centimeters.
Exactly at 6 o'clock we got up. After that, everyone ran to the washbasins. At a height of approximately 1.70 meters, a tin drain began, mounted on a wooden support. The water went down to about the level of the stomach. In those months when there was no frost, the upper reservoir was filled with water. To wash, a simple valve had to be turned, after which water flowed or dripped onto the head and upper body. After this procedure, roll call on the parade ground was repeated every day. Exactly at 7 o'clock we went to the logging site in the endless birch forests surrounding the camp. I can't remember ever having to fell a tree other than birch.
Our “bosses,” civilian civilian overseers, were waiting for us on the spot. They distributed tools: saws and axes. Groups of three were created: two prisoners felled a tree, and the third collected leaves and unnecessary branches into one pile and then burned them. Especially in wet weather, this was an art. Of course, every prisoner of war had a lighter. Along with the spoon, this is probably the most important item in captivity. But with the help of such a simple object, consisting of a flint, a wick and a piece of iron, it was possible to set fire to rain-soaked wood, often only after many hours of effort. Burning wood waste was a daily norm. The norm itself consisted of two meters of felled wood, stacked. Each wooden stump had to be two meters long and at least 10 centimeters in diameter. With such primitive tools as blunt saws and axes, which often consisted of only a few ordinary pieces of iron welded together, it was hardly possible to fulfill such a norm.
After the work was completed, the stacks of wood were picked up by the “bosses” and loaded onto open trucks. At lunchtime, work was interrupted for half an hour. We were given watery cabbage soup. Those who managed to fulfill the norm (due to hard work and insufficient nutrition, only a few succeeded) received in the evening in addition to the usual diet, which consisted of 200 grams of wet bread, which however tasted good, a tablespoon of sugar and a pinch of tobacco, and straight porridge on the lid of the pan. One thing “reassured”: the food of our guards was little better.
Winter 1945/46 was very difficult. We stuck balls of cotton wool into our clothes and boots. We felled trees and stacked them until the temperature dropped below 20 degrees Celsius. If it got colder, all the prisoners remained in the camp.
Once or twice a month we were woken up at night. We got up from our straw mattresses and rode in a truck to the station, which was about 10 kilometers away. We saw huge mountains of forest. These were the trees we felled. The wood was to be loaded into closed freight cars and sent to Tushino, near Moscow. The forest mountains instilled in us a state of depression and horror. We had to set these mountains in motion. This was our job. How much longer can we hold out? How long will this last? These night hours seemed endless to us. When daylight arrived, the carriages were fully loaded. The work was tiring. Two people carried a two-meter tree trunk on their shoulders to the carriage, and then simply pushed it without a lift into the open doors of the carriage. Two particularly strong prisoners of war were stacking wood inside the carriage into staples. The carriage was filling up. It was the turn of the next carriage. We were illuminated by a spotlight on a high pole. It was some kind of surreal picture: shadows from tree trunks and swarming prisoners of war, like some kind of fantastic wingless creatures. When the first rays of the sun fell on the ground, we walked back to the camp. This whole day was already a day off for us.
One January night in 1946 is particularly etched in my memory. The frost was so severe that after work the truck engines would not start. We had to walk on ice for 10 or 12 kilometers to the camp. The full moon illuminated us. A group of 50-60 prisoners trudged along, stumbling. People were moving further and further away from each other. I could no longer distinguish the person walking in front. I thought this was the end. To this day I don’t know how I managed to get to the camp.
Logging. Day after day. Endless winter. More and more prisoners felt morally depressed. The salvation was to sign up for a “business trip”. That’s what we called work on nearby collective and state farms. We used a hoe and a shovel to dig out potatoes or beets from the frozen ground. It was not possible to collect much. But anyway, what was collected was put into a pan and heated. Melted snow was used instead of water. Our guard ate what was cooked with us. Nothing was thrown away. The clearings were collected, secretly from the controllers at the entrance to the camp, they entered the territory and, after receiving evening bread and sugar, were fried in the barracks on two red-hot iron stoves. It was a kind of “carnival” food in the dark. Most of the prisoners were already asleep by that time. And we sat, absorbing the warmth with our exhausted bodies like sweet syrup.
When I look at the past time from the height of the years I have lived, I can say that I have never, anywhere, in any place in the USSR noticed such a phenomenon as hatred of the Germans. It is amazing. After all, we were German prisoners, representatives of a people who, over the course of a century, twice plunged Russia into war. The Second War was unparalleled in its level of cruelty, horror and crime. If there were signs of any accusations, they were never “collective”, addressed to the entire German people.
At the beginning of May 1946, I worked as part of a group of 30 prisoners of war from our camp on one of the collective farms. Long, strong, newly grown tree trunks intended for building houses had to be loaded onto prepared trucks. And then it happened. The tree trunk was carried on the shoulders. I was on the “wrong” side. While loading the barrel into the back of the truck, my head was caught between two barrels. I was lying unconscious in the back of the car. Blood was flowing from the ears, mouth and nose. The truck took me back to camp. At this point my memory failed. I didn’t remember anything further.
The camp doctor, an Austrian, was a Nazi. Everyone knew about this. He did not have the necessary medicines and dressings. His only tool was nail scissors. The doctor said immediately: “Fracture of the base of the skull. There is nothing I can do here...”
For weeks and months I lay in the camp infirmary. It was a room with 6-8 two-story bunks. Mattresses stuffed with straw lay on top. When the weather was good, flowers and vegetables grew near the barracks. In the first weeks the pain was unbearable. I didn't know how to lie down more comfortably. I could barely hear. The speech resembled incoherent muttering. Vision has noticeably deteriorated. It seemed to me that an object located in my field of vision on the right was on the left and vice versa.
Some time before my accident, a military doctor arrived at the camp. As he himself said, he came from Siberia. The doctor introduced many new rules. A sauna was built near the camp gate. Every weekend prisoners washed and steamed in it. The food has also improved. The doctor visited the infirmary regularly. One day he explained to me that I would be in the camp until such time as I could not be transported.
During the warm summer months my health improved noticeably. I could get up and made two discoveries. First of all, I realized that I was alive. Secondly, I found a small camp library. On rough wooden shelves one could find everything that the Russians valued in German literature: Heine and Lessing, Berne and Schiller, Kleist and Jean Paul. As a person who had already given up on himself, but who managed to survive, I attacked the books. I read Heine first, and then Jean Paul, about whom I had never heard anything at school. Although I still felt pain when turning the pages, over time I forgot everything that was happening around me. Books enveloped me like a coat, protecting me from the outside world. As I read, I felt an increase in strength, new strength that drove away the effects of my trauma. Even after darkness fell, I could not take my eyes off the book. After Jean Paul, I began reading a German philosopher named Karl Marx. "18. Brumer Louis Bonaparte" immersed me in the atmosphere of Paris in the mid-19th century, and "The French Civil War" plunged me into the thick of the battles of Parisian workers and the Commune of 1870-71. My head felt like it had been wounded again. I realized that behind this radical criticism lay a philosophy of protest, expressed in an unshakable belief in man's individuality, in his ability to achieve self-liberation and, as Erich Fromm said, “in his ability to express inner qualities.” It was as if someone had lifted the veil of lack of clarity, and the driving forces of social conflicts acquired a coherent understanding.
I don't want to gloss over the fact that reading wasn't easy for me. Everything I had ever believed in was destroyed. I began to understand that with this new perception came a new hope, not limited to just the dream of returning home. It was the hope for a new life in which there would be a place for self-awareness and respect for man.
While reading one of the books (I think it was “Economic and Philosophical Notes” or maybe “German Ideology”), I appeared before a commission from Moscow. Its task was to select sick prisoners for further transportation to Moscow for treatment. "Will you go home!" - a doctor from Siberia told me.
A few days later, at the end of July 1946, I was driving in an open truck with several, standing as always and huddled closely together, across a familiar dam in the direction of Moscow, which was 50 or 100 km away. I spent several days in a kind of central hospital for prisoners of war under the supervision of German doctors. The next day I boarded a freight car lined with straw on the inside. This long train was supposed to take me to Germany.
During a stop in an open field, one train overtook us on neighboring rails. I recognized the two-meter trunks of birch trees, the same trunks that we felled en masse in captivity. The trunks were intended for locomotive fires. That's what they were used for. I could hardly think of a more pleasant farewell.
On August 8, the train arrived at the Gronenfelde assembly point near Frankfurt an der Oder. I received my release papers. On the 11th of that month, I, 89 pounds lighter but a new free man, walked into my parents' house.
About 12% of the population of the occupied territories collaborated to one degree or another with the Nazi invaders.
Pedantic Germans found work for everyone. Men could serve in police detachments, and women worked as dishwashers and cleaners in soldiers' and officers' canteens. However, not everyone earned an honest living.
Horizontal betrayal
The Germans approached the “sexual” issue in the occupied territories with their characteristic punctuality and calculation. Brothels were created in large cities; the Nazis themselves called them “brothel houses.” From 20 to 30 women worked in such establishments, and rear service soldiers and military police kept order. The employees of the brothel houses did not pay any taxes or taxes to the German “supervisors”; the girls took everything they earned home.
In cities and villages, meeting rooms were organized at soldiers’ canteens, in which, as a rule, women “worked”, working as dishwashers and cleaners.
But, according to the observations of the Wehrmacht rear services, the established brothels and visiting rooms could not cope with the volume of work. Tension among the soldiers grew, quarrels broke out, which ended in the death or injury of one soldier and disbat for another. The problem was solved by the revival of free prostitution in the occupied territories.
To become a priestess of love, a woman had to register with the commandant’s office, undergo a medical examination and provide the address of the apartment where she would receive German soldiers. Medical examinations were regular, and infection of occupiers with venereal disease was punishable by death. In turn, German soldiers had a clear instruction: it was mandatory to use condoms during sexual contacts. Infection with a venous disease was a very serious crime, for which a soldier or officer was demoted and sent to disbat, which was almost equivalent to a death sentence.
Slavic women in the occupied territories did not take money for intimate services, preferring payment in kind - canned food, a loaf of bread or chocolate. The point was not the moral aspect and the complete lack of commercialism among the employees of brothel houses, but the fact that money during the war was not of particular value and a bar of soap had much greater purchasing power than the Soviet ruble or occupation Reichsmarks.
Punished with contempt
Women who worked in German brothels or cohabited with German soldiers and officers were openly condemned by their compatriots. After the liberation of the territories, employees of military brothels were often beaten, had their heads shaved, and were showered with contempt at every opportunity.
By the way, local residents of the liberated territories very often wrote denunciations against such women. But the position of the authorities turned out to be different; not a single case was opened for cohabitation with the enemy in the USSR.
In the Soviet Union, “Germans” were the name given to children that women gave birth to from the German invaders. Very often, babies were born as a result of sexual violence, so their fate was unenviable. And the point is not at all in the severity of Soviet laws, but in the reluctance of women to raise the children of enemies and rapists. But someone put up with the situation and left the children of the occupiers alive. Even now, in the territories captured by the Germans during World War II, you can meet elderly people with typically German features who were born during the war in remote villages of the Soviet Union.
There were no repressions against the “Germans” or their mothers, which is an exception. For example, in Norway, women caught cohabiting with fascists were punished and prosecuted. But it was the French who distinguished themselves the most. After the fall of the fascist empire, about 20 thousand French women were repressed for cohabitation with German soldiers and officers.
Fee of 30 pieces of silver
From the first day of the occupation, the Germans carried out active propaganda, sought out people who were dissatisfied with the Soviet regime, and persuaded them to cooperate. Even their own newspapers were published in the occupied Soviet territories. Naturally, Soviet citizens worked as journalists in such publications and began to voluntarily work for the Germans.
Vera Pirozhkova And Polyakov Olympics (Lidiya Osipova) began to cooperate with the Germans almost from the first day of the occupation. They were employees of the pro-fascist newspaper “For the Motherland”. Both were dissatisfied with the Soviet regime, and their families suffered to one degree or another during the mass repressions.
The newspaper “For the Motherland” is an occupation German two-color newspaper published from the autumn of 1942 to the summer of 1944. Source: ru.wikipedia.org
The journalists worked for their enemies voluntarily and fully justified any actions of their masters. They even called the bombs that the Nazis dropped on Soviet cities “liberation bombs.”
Both employees emigrated to Germany when the Red Army approached. There was no persecution by military or law enforcement agencies. Moreover, Vera Pirozhkova returned to Russia in the 90s.
Tonka the machine gunner
Antonina Makarova is the most famous female traitor of World War II. At the age of 19, Komsomol member Makarova ended up in the Vyazemsky Cauldron. A soldier emerged from the encirclement with a young nurse Nikolay Fedchuk. But the joint wandering of the nurse and the fighter turned out to be short-lived; Fedchuk abandoned the girl when they reached his home village, where he had a family.
Then Antonina had to move alone. The Komsomol member’s campaign ended in the Bryansk region, where she was detained by a police patrol of the notorious “Lokot Republic” (a territorial formation of Russian collaborators). The police took a liking to the captive, and they took her into their squad, where the girl actually performed the duties of a prostitute.
It's just a nightmare! The maintenance of Soviet prisoners of war by the Nazis was extremely terrible. But it became even worse when a female Red Army soldier was captured.
Order of the fascist command
In his memoirs, officer Bruno Schneider told what kind of instruction German soldiers received before being sent to the Russian front. Regarding the female Red Army soldiers, the order said one thing: “Shoot!”
This is what many German units did. Among those killed in battle and encirclement, a huge number of bodies of women in Red Army uniform were found. Among them are many nurses and female paramedics. Traces on their bodies indicated that many were brutally tortured and then shot.
Residents of Smagleevka (Voronezh region) said after their liberation in 1943 that at the beginning of the war, a young Red Army girl died a terrible death in their village. She was seriously injured. Despite this, the Nazis stripped her naked, dragged her onto the road and shot her.
Horrifying traces of torture remained on the unfortunate woman's body. Before her death, her breasts were cut off and her entire face and arms were completely mangled. The woman's body was a complete bloody mess. They did the same with Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya. Before the show execution, the Nazis kept her half naked in the cold for hours.
Women in captivity
Captured Soviet soldiers—and women too—were supposed to be “sorted.” The weakest, wounded and exhausted were subject to destruction. The rest were used for the most difficult jobs in concentration camps.
In addition to these atrocities, female Red Army soldiers were constantly subjected to rape. The highest military ranks of the Wehrmacht were forbidden to enter into intimate relationships with Slavic women, so they did it in secret. The rank and file had a certain freedom here. Having found one female Red Army soldier or nurse, she could be raped by a whole company of soldiers. If the girl did not die after that, she was shot.
In concentration camps, the leadership often selected the most attractive girls from among the prisoners and took them to “serve.” This is what the camp doctor Orlyand did in Shpalaga (prisoner of war camp) No. 346 near the city of Kremenchug. The guards themselves regularly raped prisoners in the women's block of the concentration camp.
This was the case in Shpalaga No. 337 (Baranovichi), about which the head of this camp, Yarosh, testified during a tribunal meeting in 1967.
Shpalag No. 337 was distinguished by particularly cruel, inhumane conditions of detention. Both women and men Red Army soldiers were kept half naked in the cold for hours. Hundreds of them were stuffed into lice-infested barracks. Anyone who could not stand it and fell was immediately shot by the guards. Every day, more than 700 captured military personnel were destroyed in Shpalaga No. 337.
Women prisoners of war were subjected to torture, the cruelty of which medieval inquisitors could only envy: they were impaled, their insides were stuffed with hot red pepper, etc. They were often mocked by German commandants, many of whom were distinguished by obvious sadistic inclinations. Commandant Shpalag No. 337 was called a “cannibal” behind her back, which spoke eloquently about her character.
Not only the torture undermined the morale and last strength of the exhausted women, but also the lack of basic hygiene. There was no talk of any washing for the prisoners. Insect bites and purulent infections were added to the wounds. Women soldiers knew how the Nazis treated them, and therefore tried not to be captured. They fought to the last.
