GERMAN SOLDIERS’ STORIES ABOUT THE WAR WITH THE RUSSIANS. GERMAN OPINIONS OF RUSSIAN SOLDIERS DURING THE SECOND WORLD WAR

12 August 2021

I was called up for military service.

In the fighting near Reval on 20 August, Ferdi Walbreker fell for his fatherland. Hans and I spent the last Sunday in September in Aachen. It was very pleasant to see Germans: German men, women, and German girls. Earlier, when we had only just arrived in Belgium, the difference had not struck me… To truly love one’s homeland, one must first spend some time away from it.

1941. October. 10 October 1941.

I am on guard duty. Today men were transferred to the active army. In the morning the list was read out. Almost exclusively men from construction battalions. From the July recruits only a few mortar men. What can be done? I can only wait. But next time, probably, it will affect me too. Why should I volunteer? I know it will be harder there to do my duty, much harder, but still…

14 October 1941.

Tuesday. On Sunday machine gunners were selected from 1st platoon. I was among them. We had to swallow twenty quinine pills; they were testing our fitness for service in tropical conditions. On Monday I received the answer: fit. But I heard that the departure had been cancelled. Why?

Today we had an inspection. It was conducted by our company commander. The whole thing was only a theatrical performance. As could have been foreseen, everything went well. Leave in Liège for 18–19 October has been arranged.

22 October 1941.

The leave is already over. It was good. We still managed to catch the military chaplain. I assisted him during the service. After lunch he showed us Liège. It was a pleasant day. I felt among people again.

Hans, Günter, and Klaus have left. Who knows whether we shall see one another again.

At home there has been no news from my brother for many weeks (seven to nine). Since receiving news of Ferdi Walbreker’s death, I have had the feeling that my brother too will be killed. May the Lord God protect us from that, for my parents’ sake, especially my mother’s.

Werner Kunze and Kosmann have been killed. Nothing more is heard about Africa.

I wrote to Frieda Grieslam (attitude toward the government and the people; the soldier and the woman at the present time).

1941. November.

20 November 1941.

Five days in Elsenborn have passed. Service there was very easy. Apart from platoon firing, we practically did nothing. But we were in Germany, and that was pleasant. In Elsenborn I visited the priest.

One can understand the way the Germans conduct themselves in the former Eupen-Malmedy; we expected a different Germany. Not one so anti-Christian. Yet there are Walloon villages there too, and quite a few. During firing someone lit a bonfire. When you stand there and look at the flames, old memories rise up. How it used to be. Nothing could be better for me now than to set off on the road with a few fellows, but…

P… also wrote about wasting time, now when we are in the prime of our strength and want to use it. What work might we undertake?

What tasks await us! They say two march battalions are being formed again. News from home: Willi Walbreker has also been killed. We too have made our sacrifice. Willi is the fourth. I ask: who is next?

26 November 1941.

Willi Schäfter is in hospital. He was a real comrade. More and more often the thought occurs to me that I am wasting my time here to no purpose. I hesitate about what I want to be: Africa; a technical profession; or a priest devoted only to God.

There is no comradeship to be found in our room. I would rather get to the front soon. That will be good for me.

25 November 1941.

Yesterday morning, unexpectedly for everyone, the order to depart arrived. Now no one wanted to believe it when we were assembled. But it is so. The day was spent being kitted out. At last what I had expected has come, and I firmly believe that more will come. A harder but better (if that is the right word) time begins. Now it must be shown whether you are a man or a coward. I hope this experience will be a gain for me for my whole life; I shall become more mature.

I do not want to write about the general enthusiasm expressed in drinking; it will not last long.

1941. December. 8 December 1941.

This week I wrote various things, and much more could still be written. About the general enthusiasm, about duty at the present moment, and so on. Düsseldorf! This is not good for you. No!

On Wednesday Magdalena was here too (last Sunday my parents were here). The Gestapo searched the place and took my letters and other things. No comment is necessary. On Sunday I shall get leave and learn more about it. From me they went to Dieler and took many things there. Do they have the right, after all we live in Germany? Dieler was taken to …, and from there sent to Dortmund, where he is in pre-trial detention. Until Sunday they were still being held. Johann is there too. I reckon some sixty to a hundred people are being held there.

12 December 1941. Friday.

We have been on the road since Wednesday. They say we shall be in Insterburg on 13 December and across the border on 15 December.

America too has entered the war.

It is cramped here in the railway carriage. Whether we shall reach the Southern Front now is perhaps doubtful. Regarding the Gestapo, I went to our captain; he promised me full support. I drafted a letter, though there are still some details; we shall see. Somewhere we shall be at Christmas.

13 December 1941. Saturday.

I wrote the letter to the Gestapo. The captain will probably sign the petition. What more can one ask? I set everything out matter-of-factly. Success is doubtful. We are in Insterburg.

Almost all of East Prussia is behind us. I have not shaved since Monday. “Unshaven and far from home.” I still have not encountered comradeship. I hope it is better in this respect at the front; otherwise it would be a great disappointment for me.

16 December 1941. Tuesday.

Lithuania and Latvia are behind us. We are in Estonia. We had a long stop in … I went into town. Nothing interesting. Riga was better. Unfortunately, we could not get into the city.

The mood in our carriage is terrible! Yesterday two men fought; today two more. Comradeship here is an illusion, a utopia.

Lithuania is a flat country, stretching wide before our eyes. It is a poor country. Everywhere there are wooden huts (they cannot be called houses), thatched roofs. Inside they are small and cramped.

Latvia is not so flat. One part is hilly and covered with forest. Houses even in the villages are better here, and look more comfortable. Estonia too has many forests and hills.

The population here is very likable. The language is completely incomprehensible. There is little of everything here too. No vodka. Food ration cards.

In Riga, they say, 10,000 Jews were shot (German Jews). No comment is necessary. Three men were shot for looting; I support that, however harsh it may be. To prevent it from spreading, decisive intervention is necessary. This is a mistake: on Tuesday we were not yet in Estonia (18 December).

18 December 1941.

In Russia. We passed through Estonia very quickly. Russia is a flat, endless country. Tundra. We received ammunition.

We traveled by the following route: Riga—Valka (Estonia)—Russia; to Pskov. Pskov, they say, is the third most beautiful city in Russia.

I am reading Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice and Hamlet. We are ten kilometers from Pskov and will probably remain here a long time. I like Shakespeare.

19 December 1941.

We are still outside Pskov. The fact is that the Russians have badly damaged the railway system and there are few locomotives here.

I gave several Russians bread. How grateful these poor people were. They are treated worse than cattle. Of 5,000 Russians only about 1,000 remain. It is a disgrace. What would Dwinghof and Ettighoffer say if they learned of this?

Then I “visited” a peasant. When I gave him a cigarette he was happy. I looked at the kitchen. Poverty! They treated me to cucumbers and bread. I left them a packet of cigarettes. Not a word of the language can be understood except “Stalin,” “Communist,” “Bolshevik.”

The ring around Petersburg was broken by the Russians several days ago. The Russians broke through forty kilometers. Against the tanks … nothing could be done. The Russians are extremely strong here. Whether the ring is closed on the lake side is doubtful. We have too few troops there. When will Leningrad fall? War! When will it end?

21 December 1941.

Today is Sunday. There is nothing to show it. The journey is over. At Gatchina (Baltic railway) we were unloaded. The population besieged our carriages, asking for bread and so on. It is good when you can bring joy to a child, a woman, or a man. But there are too many of them.

We are six kilometers from the station. In one room with four broad beds there are sixteen of us; three men to each bed, and the other four..?

I do not want to write anything about the last days in the carriage. Not a trace of soldiers’ friendship. In one prisoner camp, they say, more than a hundred prisoners died in a single night.

22 December 1941.

Our quarters are good. The landlady (a Finn) is very kind, but poor. We give her quite a lot. It is better to give than to take.

24 December 1941.

Today is Christmas Eve… In Gatchina most of the churches were destroyed by German airmen, not by the Reds. A cross still stands on the palace even now.

(Bra)uchitsch has resigned, or was dismissed. What does this mean?

27 December 1941.

Christmas is over.

In fact they were very, very sad days; there could be no real Christmas mood.

They say the 1st Division, because it took part in very hard fighting, will be sent to southern France. We shall therefore probably end up in the 12th Division. I hope so. Others would also like to go to southern France.

Today we saw seven railway carriages of soldiers who had arrived from the ring around Leningrad. These soldiers looked terrible. You do not see such pictures in newsreels.

It is gradually getting colder here. Twenty degrees below zero.

I wrote a little about soldiers’ life. I think a great deal about Dieler, Johann, and the things connected with them.

30 December 1941.

Today or tomorrow we are being sent off, and to the 1st Division at that… What will happen there with Dieler, Johann, and the others…

1942. January. 3 January 1942.

The New Year has arrived. Will the war end in 1942? On 31 December 1941 we set out from Gatchina. After we had marched fifteen or twenty kilometers, two buses and one truck drove up and immediately took sixty men to the 1st Division. Wunten, Zuytsinga, and I were among those sixty. In the division we were immediately distributed among the regiments; the three of us ended up in the 1st Regiment. That same evening we were sent to the 3rd Battalion, where we spent the night in a dugout as cold as ice. That was our New Year’s present. Then we were assigned to companies. Wunten and I went to the 10th Company. We handed our food in to the kitchen and “tramped” off to the company, which had been resting for five days and on the evening of 1 January 1942 was just returning to the front line.

And now we are in a dugout. We stand sentry six or seven hours a day. The rest of the time we lie down or eat. A life unworthy of a human being.

We are here between Leningrad and Shlisselburg, by the Neva where it makes a sharp bend. The crossing is still in Russian hands. We are to the left of it. The dugout is tolerable (compared with others). It is quiet here. Mortars fire occasionally. Yesterday evening one man was killed. Today one man in the 2nd Platoon was killed.

Our lives are in God’s hands. We are to remain on the front line for ten days and then have five days’ rest.

The company has forty to fifty men. Of the division (15,000 men), only 3,000 remain alive. The ring around Leningrad is not closed (propaganda). The food is very good.

4 January 1942.

You look like a pig. That is not an exaggeration. There is no possibility of washing. And then you have to eat in that state. I write this not to complain. It simply has to be recorded.

Yesterday we carried in a dead man—“We do not carry treasure, we carry a corpse.” The others pay no attention. That is because one sees too many dead people.

Friendship! Will it ever come? I do not know. Or have I simply not yet adapted to the new surroundings?

Johann and Dieler—what can this be? One often flies into a rage when thinking of such baseness. If one then remembers that one is here at the front, questions arise to which one would like answers. But there is a difference between the government and the people. That is the only solution.

7 January 1942.

Yesterday more replacements arrived from the 4th March Company. There is talk that we shall be relieved in the next few days!?!

The “comrades” often sing a fine song:

“Heil Hitler, Heil Hitler, All day long—Heil Hitler, And on Sundays Heil Hitler, Heil Hitler, Heil Hitler.”

They sing it to the melody of “Aunt Hedwig, Aunt Hedwig, the machine won’t sew”… No comment is necessary.

There is one soldier in our squad. He is Catholic. He is thirty-five years old. A farmer (six cows, one horse). He is from Altenburg, two and a half hours on foot from Burscheid. Perhaps somehow he could be useful for the group, or..?

(?). January 1942.

Yesterday there was talk that we were leaving here. Supposedly the transport column has already been loaded. Everyone believes it. I too think it is true. I call it a great swindle. The “comrades” are glad. I understand those who have been here from the beginning. But we, who have only just arrived and are already going back—it is a downright scandal. Yet there is nothing we can change. Where we are being sent, nobody knows. Königsberg? Finland, to go skiing?

13 January 1942.

We are resting. If this can be called rest. In any case it is better than the front line. As for relief: beyond Mga, where the transport column is, a new position is being built.

18 January 1942.

We are again on the front line for ten days. This time at the right-hand (southern) position. We have to put out rather more sentries. The dugout is small and cold. The talk really was empty. It will probably last a long time. But we suppose that when the offensive begins in spring we shall not be here, because then we are finished, everyone says.

Comradeship is turning out oddly. Sometimes you are satisfied, and at other times there is again the most uncomradely and selfish act imaginable. Soon I shall start collecting cigarettes again, because the comrades really do not deserve always to be given cigarettes as gifts.

30 January 1942.

Only today have I found time to continue writing. Instead of ten days it became thirteen, but the dugout was quite good… During that time I shaved once and “washed” in a lid containing water (a quarter of a liter). Von Leeb too has gone, or been removed. Reichenau has died. It is not clear how this is to be understood. I would not object to getting back to Germany either.

1942. February.

2 February 1942.

Two days of rest ended very quickly. As early as Sunday, 31 January, the order came. At 18:00 we went out and back again. We were supposed to be here only the next morning at six. During the night we changed our underwear and “washed.” We are farther east than the old position. Again by the Neva. The sector is quieter and better. All the dugouts are fairly comfortable. The company held 1,800 meters (probably the length of the defensive sector—editor’s note). There are four men in our squad. At night we put out one man. That would be all right if during the day we were not kept too busy with other work (carrying ammunition).

They say we shall remain here until the offensive? We are not receiving trench rations. That is wrong.

15 February 1942.

I am in another squad again. Tomorrow we move to another place. Erwin Schulz was wounded by a mortar fragment on 7 February. Because of that, the three of us have to stand sentry duty. That is quite a lot, but all the other squads do the same. So one must be satisfied. Everything is still quiet here. I rejoice at every letter from home. About Johann and Dieler I finally know now… I shall stop. Prayer must not be forgotten. I shall be glad when I am free of military service and can live as I want—not as everyone else does.

Long live Moscow! Rot Front!

22 February 1942.

We are still in the same position. It has become colder again. I am satisfied with the mail. The Gestapo was at our home. They wanted to learn the address. I hope I shall hear something about it soon.

27 February 1942.

Today I turn nineteen. Lance Corporal Schiller arrived from Mga. The wound was not serious; it was caused not by the Russians but by Domerak.

Already now I look forward to the day when I can begin working, free from military service.

NCO Riedel seems to be a real swine. Still nothing has been heard from the Gestapo. If only somehow one could hear nothing at all for a few days about all the things that are so repulsive.

1942. March. 9 March 1942.

Several days have passed again. It would be good to sleep properly for several nights. I do not have enough food—too little bread. Wild rumors circulate about Vienna, Koblenz, and elsewhere.

12 March 1942.

From 9:30 to 10:00 approximately 100–200 rounds per rifle and 600–1,000 rounds per machine gun were fired; in addition, a great number of flares were launched. After 10:00—silence. During the day we were not supposed to show ourselves. This was done on the sector from the crossing to Shlisselburg (15 km). The command wanted in this way to attract deserters or provoke the dispatch of a reconnaissance party, because prisoners were needed in order to obtain information.

On the night of 9–10 March, on the left wing of our company, one man came over—whether he was a deserter or not, eyewitnesses disagree. He told a great deal: the positions were poorly defended, there was nothing to eat, the company commander was supposedly a Jew, and so on. Whether it is true is doubtful. How many Russians fell into our hands on the sector mentioned, I do not know.

It was also said that if we do not obtain prisoners, a reconnaissance detachment will have to be sent across the Neva, which can be called a death squad. Volunteers, forward! Prisoners must be brought back!

Still nothing has been heard from the Gestapo.

20 March 1942.

At 20:30 we were loaded up and taken by truck to Shapki (a little farther away).

21 March 1942.

Reconnaissance detachment in the forest.

24 March 1942.

Around three o’clock. Order: get ready. We are now sitting as battalion reserve in dugouts in which “the sun shines.” The worst thing is the artillery fire.

10th Company—losses: 9 men.

10th, 11th, 12th Companies—losses: 60 men.

9th Company—losses: 40 percent.

Our position—Omega (possibly Mga—compiler’s note). Food is better. Easter. What will happen at Easter?

Translated by: technical quartermaster 1st rank Zinder.

Women of Liberated Europe Through the Eyes of Soviet Soldiers and Officers (1944–1945)

As a continuation of the subject and a supplement to Elena Senyavskaya’s article posted on the site on 10 May 2012, we offer readers another article by the same author, published in a journal.

At the final stage of the Great Patriotic War, after liberating Soviet territory occupied by Germany and its satellites and pursuing the retreating enemy, the Red Army crossed the state border of the USSR. From that moment its victorious advance began through the countries of Europe—those that had languished under fascist occupation for six years, those that had fought in the war as allies of the Third Reich, and the territory of Hitler’s Germany itself. During this movement westward and the inevitable, varied contacts with the local population, Soviet servicemen, many of whom had never previously been outside their own country, acquired numerous new and highly contradictory impressions of representatives of other peoples and cultures. These impressions later contributed to ethnopsychological stereotypes through which Europeans were perceived. The image of European women occupied a particularly important place among them. References to them, and sometimes detailed stories, appear in letters and diaries and on the pages of many war memoirs, where lyrical and cynical judgments and tones often alternate.

Residents of Bucharest welcome Soviet soldiers. The inscription on the large banner reads “TRĂIASCĂ MARELE STALIN — GENIAL COMANDANT AL ARMATEI ROŞII,” which may be translated as “Long live the great Stalin—the brilliant commander of the Red Army.”

The first European country entered by the Red Army, in August 1944, was Romania. In the Notes on the War by frontline poet Boris Slutsky we find very candid lines:

“Suddenly Constanța opens before us, almost colliding with the sea. It almost coincides with the average dream of happiness and of ‘after the war.’ Restaurants. Bathtubs. Beds with clean linen. Shops with servile salesmen. And—women, smartly dressed urban women—the girls of Europe—the first tribute taken by us from the defeated…”¹

He then describes his first impressions of “abroad”: “European barbershops, where they wash with their fingers and do not use brushes; the absence of bathhouses; washing from basins—‘where first the dirt from the hands remains, and then one washes one’s face’; feather beds instead of blankets—disgust with everyday life immediately produced generalizations… In Constanța we encountered brothels for the first time… The initial delight at the existence of free love quickly passed. Not only fear of infection and expense made themselves felt, but also contempt for the very possibility of buying a person… Many took pride in cases when, for example, a Romanian husband complained to the commandant’s office that one of our officers had not paid his wife the agreed fifteen hundred lei. Everyone had a clear conviction: ‘With us this is impossible’… Our soldiers will probably remember Romania as a country of syphilitics…”²

In conclusion he says that it was precisely in Romania, this European backwater, that “our soldier most strongly felt his superiority over Europe.”³

A column of Soviet troops on a street in central Bucharest.

Another Soviet officer, Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Fyodor Smolnikov, recorded his impressions of Bucharest in his diary on 17 September 1944:

“Hotel Ambasador, restaurant, lower floor. I see how the idle public spends its time—it has nothing to do; it waits. They look at me as though I were a curiosity: ‘A Russian officer!!!’ I am dressed very modestly—even too modestly. So be it. We shall be in Budapest anyway; that is as certain as the fact that I am in Bucharest now. A first-class restaurant. The public has dressed itself up; the most beautiful Romanian women literally bore into me with their eyes.⁴ We spend the night in a first-class hotel. Outside is the bustle of a capital. There is no music; the public is waiting. Damn it, a real capital! But I shall not be taken in by the advertising…”⁴

A Romanian peasant woman offers milk to a Soviet soldier.

In Hungary the Soviet army encountered not only organized armed resistance but also treacherous attacks by civilians: “drunken and straggling solitary soldiers were killed on farmsteads,” “they were drowned in silage pits.” Women, however, according to eyewitnesses, “were not as depraved as Romanian women, yet yielded with shameful ease… A little love, a little licentiousness, but above all, of course, fear helped.”⁵ Quoting one Hungarian lawyer—“It is very good that the Russians love children so much. It is very bad that they love women so much”—Boris Slutsky remarks: “He did not take into account that Hungarian women also loved Russians; that alongside the dark fear which parted the knees of matrons and mothers of families there existed the tenderness of girls and the desperate affection of soldiers’ wives who gave themselves to the killers of their husbands.”⁶

A Jewish family liberated from the Budapest ghetto. Photo: Yevgeny Khaldei © Information Telegraph Agency of Russia (ITAR-TASS).

Grigory Chukhray describes in his memoirs a characteristic episode that occurred in Hungary. His unit was quartered in a small town. During a meal, the owners of the house where he and his men were staying, “relaxed under the influence of Russian vodka,” admitted that they were hiding their daughter in the attic. The Soviet officers reacted indignantly: “Who do you take us for? We are not fascists!” The hosts became embarrassed, and soon a thin girl named Marika appeared at the table and hungrily began to eat. Gradually becoming at ease, she started flirting and joining the conversation. By the end of dinner the atmosphere had become friendly, and those present drank to “barátság” (friendship). Marika, however, took the gesture too literally. When everyone had gone to their rooms, she appeared before Chukhray wearing only a slip.

“As a Soviet officer I immediately understood that a provocation was being prepared. They expect me to succumb to Marika’s charms and then they will raise a scandal. But I shall not allow myself to be drawn in,” he recalled. In addition, he did not find the girl attractive. He pointed her to the door.

The next morning the hostess, while laying the table, noisily banged the dishes. “She is nervous. The provocation failed,” he thought, and shared the idea with the Hungarian interpreter. The interpreter laughed:

“‘It was no provocation at all. They showed you friendly goodwill and you rejected it. Now they do not regard you as a man in this house. You will have to move to another apartment.’

“‘But why, then, did they hide their daughter in the attic?’

“‘They were afraid of violence. With us it is customary that, with her parents’ consent, a girl may become intimate with several men before marriage. We have a saying: “you do not buy a cat in a tied sack.”’”⁷

A column of Soviet soldiers in the streets of Budapest.

Young, physically healthy men naturally felt a pull toward women. Yet the ease of European morals corrupted some Soviet soldiers, while convincing others, on the contrary, that relations should not be reduced to simple physiology. Sergeant Alexander Rodin recorded his impressions of visiting—out of curiosity!—a brothel in Budapest, where his unit was stationed for some time after the war ended: “…After leaving I felt a disgusting, shameful sense of lies and falseness; I could not get out of my head the picture of the woman’s obvious, frank pretense… Interestingly, such an unpleasant aftertaste from visiting a brothel remained not only with me, a youngster raised, moreover, on principles such as ‘do not give a kiss without love,’ but also with most of our soldiers with whom I happened to speak… Around those same days I had a conversation with a pretty Magyar girl (somehow she knew Russian). When she asked whether I liked Budapest, I answered that I did, except that the brothels bothered me. ‘But why?’ the girl asked. Because it is unnatural, savage, I explained: a woman takes money and immediately after that begins to ‘love!’ The girl thought for a while, then nodded in agreement and said: ‘You are right: it is not nice to take the money in advance’…”⁸

Poland left different impressions. According to the poet David Samoilov, “…in Poland we were kept under strict discipline. It was difficult to slip away from one’s unit. And mischief was punished severely.”⁹

He describes a country in which the beauty of Polish women was almost the only positive feature: “I cannot say that we liked Poland very much,” he wrote. “At that time I encountered nothing noble or chivalrous in it. On the contrary, everything was petty-bourgeois, provincial—both ideas and interests. And in eastern Poland they looked at us warily and half-hostilely, trying to fleece the liberators for everything they could. Still, the women were consolingly beautiful and coquettish; they captivated us by their manners and their cooing speech, in which everything suddenly became understandable, and they in turn were sometimes captivated by rough masculine strength or a soldier’s uniform. And their pale, emaciated former admirers, gnashing their teeth, withdrew into the shadows for the time being…”¹⁰

Troops of the 10th Tank Corps of the 5th Guards Tank Army of the 2nd Belorussian Front occupy the town of Mühlhausen (now the Polish town of Młynary) during the Mława–Elbing operation. Mühlhausen was liberated from Hitler’s troops on 24 January 1945.

Not all assessments of Polish women were so romantic. On 22 October 1944 Junior Lieutenant Vladimir Gelfand wrote in his diary: “In the distance loomed the town I had left behind, with its Polish name [Władów], and beautiful Polish women, proud to the point of disgust. …I was told about Polish women: they lured our soldiers and officers into their embraces and, when it came to bed, cut off their genitals with a razor, strangled them with their hands around the throat, scratched out their eyes. Mad, savage, ugly females! One must be careful with them and not become carried away by their beauty. And the Polish women are beautiful, the wretches.”¹¹ Yet other moods also appear in his notes. On 24 October he records the following encounter: “Today my companions on the road to one of the villages were beautiful Polish girls. They complained about the absence of young men in Poland. They too called me ‘pan,’ but they remained untouchable. I gently patted one of them on the shoulder in response to her remark about men and comforted her with the thought that the road to Russia was open to her—there were plenty of men there. She hurried to step aside and answered that men could be found for her here as well. We said goodbye with a handshake. So we never reached agreement, but they were fine girls, though Polish.”¹²

A month later, on 22 November, he recorded his impressions of the first large Polish town he had encountered, Mińsk Mazowiecki. Amid his descriptions of its architectural beauty and the astonishing number of bicycles used by all categories of inhabitants, he gives special attention to the townswomen: “A noisy idle crowd; the women, almost every one of them, in special white hats, apparently worn against the wind, which make them look like magpies and surprise by their novelty. The men in triangular caps, in hats—fat, neat, empty. How many of them! …Painted lips, penciled eyebrows, affectation, excessive delicacy. How unlike natural human life all this is. It seems that the people themselves live and move only so that others may look at them, and that all will disappear when the last spectator leaves the town…”¹³

A Soviet poster on the border between Poland and Germany.

Not only Polish townswomen but also peasant women made a strong, though contradictory, impression. “The love of life of the Poles, who had endured the horrors of war and German occupation, was striking,” Alexander Rodin recalled. “Sunday in a Polish village. Beautiful, elegant Polish women in silk dresses and stockings, who on weekdays are ordinary peasant women, barefoot, raking manure and tirelessly doing housework. Older women also look fresh and young. Though some have black circles around their eyes…”¹⁴ He then quotes his diary entry of 5 November 1944: “Sunday; all the inhabitants are dressed up. They gather to visit one another. Men in felt hats, ties, sweaters. Women in silk dresses, bright, unworn stockings. Rosy-cheeked girls—the ‘panienki.’ Beautifully curled blond hairstyles… The soldiers in the corner of the cottage are lively too. But anyone sensitive will notice that it is a painful liveliness. Everyone laughs excessively loudly to show that it means nothing to them, does not touch them at all, that they are not envious. Are we any worse than they? The devil knows what happiness peaceful life is! I had practically never seen it in civilian life!”¹⁵ His fellow soldier Sergeant Nikolai Nesterov wrote in his diary that same day: “Today is a day off; the Poles, beautifully dressed, gather in one cottage and sit in couples. It even makes one feel uncomfortable. Could I not sit like that too?..”¹⁶

Serviceman Galina Yartseva was far more merciless in her assessment of “European morals,” which reminded her of “a feast in time of plague.” On 24 February 1945 she wrote to a friend from the front: “…If there were an opportunity, one could send wonderful parcels of trophy things. There is quite a bit. If only it were for our barefoot and poorly clothed people. What cities I have seen, what men and women. And looking at them, such anger, such hatred takes possession of you! They walk about, love, live, while you go and liberate them. And they laugh at the Russians—‘Schwein!’ Yes, yes! Scoundrels… I love no one except the USSR, except the peoples who live with us. I believe in no friendship with Poles and other Lithuanians…”¹⁷

Soviet soldiers in the streets of Vienna.

In Austria, which Soviet troops entered in the spring of 1945, they encountered “wholesale capitulation”: “Entire villages were headed by white rags. Elderly women raised their hands when meeting a man in a Red Army uniform.”¹⁸ It was here, according to B. Slutsky, that the soldiers “finally got at the fair-haired women.” At the same time, “Austrian women did not prove excessively unyielding. The overwhelming majority of peasant girls married ‘spoiled.’ Soldiers on leave felt completely at ease. In Vienna our guide, a bank clerk, was surprised at the Russians’ insistence and impatience. He believed that gallantry was enough to obtain from a Viennese woman everything one wanted.”¹⁹ Thus the matter was not only fear, but also certain features of national mentality and traditional behavior.

A Nazi, before the arrival of Soviet troops, shot his family and killed himself in a Vienna street.

And then, finally, Germany. And the women of the enemy—the mothers, wives, daughters and sisters of those who from 1941 to 1944 had abused civilians in the occupied territory of the USSR. What did Soviet servicemen see when they met them? Vladimir Bogomolov described the appearance of German women moving in a crowd of refugees in his diary: “The women—old and young—wear hats, scarves wound like turbans or simply draped like our peasant women’s, smart coats with fur collars, and worn clothing of an incomprehensible cut. Many women wear dark glasses so as not to squint in the bright May sun and thereby protect their faces from wrinkles…”²⁰

Lev Kopelev recalled meeting evacuated Berlin women in Allenstein: “Two women on the sidewalk. Elaborate hats, one even with a veil. Good-quality coats, and they themselves smooth and well-groomed.”²¹ He also quoted soldiers’ comments about them: “hens,” “turkeys,” “wouldn’t mind one that smooth…”

How did German women behave when meeting Soviet troops? A report by Shikin, deputy head of the Main Political Directorate of the Red Army, to G. F. Alexandrov of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), dated 30 April 1945, on the attitude of Berlin’s civilian population toward Red Army personnel stated: “As soon as our units occupy one district of the city or another, residents gradually begin to come out into the streets; almost all of them have white armbands. When they meet our servicemen many women raise their hands, cry and shake with fear, but as soon as they become convinced that Red Army soldiers and officers are not at all what fascist propaganda portrayed them to be, this fear quickly passes; more and more of the population comes out into the streets and offers its services, trying in every way to emphasize its loyal attitude toward the Red Army.”²²

The victors were most impressed by the submissiveness and calculation of German women. In this connection it is worth citing the account of mortar man N. A. Orlov, who was shocked by the behavior of German women in 1945: “No one in the mortar battalion killed German civilians. Our special-department officer was a ‘Germanophile.’ Had anything like that happened, the punitive authorities’ reaction to such an excess would have been swift. As for violence against German women, it seems to me that some people, when speaking of such a phenomenon, somewhat ‘lay it on thick.’ I remember an example of another kind.

“We entered some German town and quartered ourselves in houses. A ‘Frau’ of about forty-five appeared and asked for the ‘Herr Kommandant.’ They brought her to Marchenko. She said that she was responsible for the neighborhood and had gathered twenty German women for the sexual (!!!) servicing of Russian soldiers. Marchenko understood German, and I translated what the woman had said for Deputy Political Commander Dolgoborodov, who was standing next to me. The reaction of our officers was angry and profane. The German woman was driven away together with her ‘detachment,’ ready to provide its services. In general, German submissiveness stunned us. We had expected partisan warfare and sabotage from the Germans. But for this nation order—‘Ordnung’—is above all. If you are the victor, they are ‘on their hind legs’ before you, consciously and without coercion. Such is the psychology…”²³

David Samoilov gives a similar episode in his wartime notes: “At Arendsfelde, where we had just settled in, a small crowd of women with children appeared. They were led by an enormous mustachioed German woman of about fifty—Frau Friedrich. She declared that she was a representative of the civilian population and asked us to register the remaining residents. We replied that this could be done as soon as the commandant’s office appeared.

“‘That is impossible,’ said Frau Friedrich. ‘There are women and children here. They must be registered.’

“The civilian population confirmed her words with cries and tears.

“Not knowing what to do, I suggested that they occupy the basement of the house in which we were quartered. Reassured, they went down into the basement and began settling there while waiting for the authorities.

“‘Herr Kommissar,’ Frau Friedrich said to me good-naturedly (I wore a leather jacket), ‘we understand that soldiers have little needs. They are prepared,’ Frau Friedrich continued, ‘to set aside several younger women for them, for…’

“I did not continue the conversation with Frau Friedrich.”²⁴

Residents of the city queue for water during the Second World War. Photo: Yevgeny Khaldei © Information Telegraph Agency of Russia (ITAR-TASS).

After speaking with women in Berlin on 2 May 1945, Vladimir Bogomolov wrote in his diary: “We enter one of the surviving houses. Everything is quiet, dead. We knock and ask them to open. We can hear whispering in the corridor, muffled, agitated voices. At last the door opens. Women of indeterminate age, huddled in a tight group, bow fearfully, low and obsequiously. German women are afraid of us; they had been told that Soviet soldiers, especially Asians, would rape and kill them… Fear and hatred are on their faces. But sometimes it seems that they like being defeated—their behavior is so attentive, their smiles so ingratiating, their words so sweet. These days a story is making the rounds about one of our soldiers entering a German apartment and asking for a drink, and the German woman, the moment she saw him, lying down on the sofa and taking off her panties.”²⁵

“All German women are depraved. They have nothing against sleeping with them.”²⁶ Such an opinion circulated among Soviet troops and was reinforced not only by many visible examples but also by their unpleasant consequences, which military doctors soon discovered.

Directive No. 00343/Sh of the Military Council of the 1st Belorussian Front, dated 15 April 1945, stated: “During the troops’ stay on enemy territory, cases of venereal disease among servicemen have risen sharply. Study of the reasons for this situation shows that venereal diseases are widespread among the Germans. Before retreating, and also now in the territory occupied by us, the Germans have taken the path of artificially infecting German women with syphilis and gonorrhea in order to create major centers for the spread of venereal disease among Red Army servicemen.”²⁷

On 26 April 1945 the Military Council of the 47th Army reported that “…in March the number of venereal diseases among servicemen increased fourfold compared with February of this year. …The female population of Germany in the districts examined is infected at a rate of 8–15%. There are cases in which the enemy deliberately leaves German women suffering from venereal diseases in order to infect servicemen.”²⁸

To implement Resolution No. 056 of the Military Council of the 1st Belorussian Front of 18 April 1945 on the prevention of venereal disease, the troops of the 33rd Army issued a leaflet reading as follows:

“Comrade servicemen!

“German women are tempting you—women whose husbands visited all the brothels of Europe, became infected themselves, and infected their German women.

“Before you are also those German women whom the enemy has deliberately left behind to spread venereal disease and thereby put Red Army soldiers out of action.

“You must understand that our victory over the enemy is near and that soon you will have the opportunity to return to your families.

“With what eyes will a man look his loved ones in the eye if he brings home an infectious disease?

“Can we, soldiers of the heroic Red Army, be a source of infectious diseases in our country? NO! For the moral character of a Red Army soldier must be as pure as the image of his Motherland and family!”²⁹

Practical Germans were most concerned about food supplies, and for them they were allegedly prepared to do literally anything. Thus a certain physician, Dr. Kalisturkh, discussing the Red Army’s attitude toward the German population with colleagues, stated: “It cannot be concealed that I personally saw bad treatment of our women by individual Russian soldiers, but I said that the war was to blame for this, and, most importantly, that our soldiers and especially the SS men had behaved much worse toward Russian women.” And then, without transition, he added: “I was very worried about the food question…”³⁰

Even in the memoirs of Lev Kopelev, who angrily describes violence and looting by Soviet servicemen in East Prussia, one finds lines reflecting another side of “relations” with the local population: “They told stories about the submissiveness, servility and ingratiation of the Germans: there, they said, that is what they are like—they sell their wives and daughters for a loaf of bread.”³¹ The disgusted tone in which Kopelev relays these “stories” implies that he considered them unreliable. Yet they are corroborated by many sources.

Berlin, summer 1945.

Vladimir Gelfand described in his diary his courtship of a German girl (the entry was made six months after the end of the war, on 26 October 1945, but is nevertheless highly characteristic): “I wanted to enjoy to the full the caresses of pretty Margot—kisses and embraces alone were not enough. I expected more but did not dare demand or insist. The girl’s mother was pleased with me. Of course! On the altar of her relatives’ trust and goodwill I had offered sweets and butter, sausage, and expensive German cigarettes. Even half of these products is enough today to give one the fullest grounds and right to do whatever one wishes with the daughter before her mother’s eyes, and the mother will say nothing against it. For foodstuffs today are dearer even than life—even the life of such a young and sweet sensual creature as the gentle beauty Margot.”³²

Australian war correspondent Osmar White, who in 1944–1945 was in Europe with the U.S. Third Army under George Patton, left interesting diary entries. This is what he recorded in Berlin in May 1945, literally only a few days after the end of the assault: “I made a tour of the night cabarets, starting with the ‘Femina’ near Potsdamer Platz. It was a warm, humid evening. The air smelled of sewage and rotting corpses. The façade of the ‘Femina’ was covered with futuristic pictures of nudes and notices in four languages. The dance hall and restaurant were filled with Russian, British, and American officers accompanied by women (or hunting for them). A bottle of wine cost 25 dollars, a horsemeat-and-potato hamburger 10 dollars, and a packet of American cigarettes an astonishing 20 dollars. The cheeks of Berlin women were rouged and their lips painted as though Hitler had won the war. Many women wore silk stockings. The mistress of ceremonies opened the concert in German, Russian, English, and French. This provoked a jibe from a Russian artillery captain sitting beside me. He leaned toward me and said in decent English: ‘Such a rapid transition from the national to the international! RAF bombs are excellent professors, are they not?’”³³

Women partisans of the 1st Proletarian Brigade of the National Liberation Army of Yugoslavia. The village of Žarkovo near Belgrade on the eve of the fighting for the city.

The overall impression of European women formed among Soviet servicemen was of women who were well-groomed and smartly dressed (compared with their compatriots exhausted by the war in the half-starved rear, on territories liberated from occupation, and even with their frontline female comrades dressed in washed-out tunics), readily available, self-interested, promiscuous, or timidly submissive. Yugoslav and Bulgarian women were exceptions. The stern and ascetic Yugoslav women partisans were regarded as comrades-in-arms and considered untouchable. Given the strict morals of the Yugoslav army, “the partisan girls probably looked upon the PPZh [‘field wives’] as creatures of a special, nasty kind.”³⁴ Boris Slutsky recalled Bulgarian women this way: “…After Ukrainian good nature, after Romanian debauchery, the stern inaccessibility of Bulgarian women astonished our men. Almost no one boasted of conquests. It was the only country where officers out for a stroll were very often accompanied by men and almost never by women. Later the Bulgarians were proud when told that Russians intended to return to Bulgaria for brides—the only ones in the world who had remained pure and untouched.”³⁵

Residents of a Bulgarian town celebrate liberation. Photo: Yevgeny Khaldei © Information Telegraph Agency of Russia (ITAR-TASS).

The beautiful Czech women who joyfully welcomed Soviet liberating soldiers left a pleasant impression. Embarrassed tank men on combat vehicles coated in oil and dust and decorated with wreaths and flowers said among themselves: “…As if a tank were a bride, to be decorated. But their girls keep hanging things on it. Good people. Haven’t seen such warmhearted people for a long time…” The friendliness and hospitality of the Czechs was sincere. “…‘If it were possible, I would kiss every soldier and officer of the Red Army for liberating my Prague,’ …a Prague tram worker said to general, friendly, approving laughter.”³⁶ Boris Polevoy thus described the atmosphere in the liberated Czech capital and the mood of local residents on 11 May 1945.

But in the other countries through which the victorious army passed, the female part of the population did not inspire respect. “In Europe the women surrendered, defected before everyone else…” B. Slutsky wrote. “I was always astonished, thrown off balance, disoriented by the ease, the shameful ease, of amorous relations. Respectable women, unquestionably disinterested, resembled prostitutes in their hasty availability, their wish to bypass the intermediate stages, their lack of interest in the motives that pushed a man toward intimacy with them. Like people who had learned three obscene words from the entire vocabulary of love poetry, they reduced the whole affair to a few bodily movements, provoking hurt and contempt even among the greenest of our officers… The restraining motives were not ethics at all, but fear of infection, fear of publicity, fear of pregnancy.”³⁷ He added that under conditions of conquest “universal corruption covered over and concealed specifically female corruption, made it invisible and unashamed.”³⁸

Among the motives that contributed to the spread of “international love,” despite all the bans and severe orders of the Soviet command, there were several others: women’s curiosity about “exotic” lovers and the Russians’ unprecedented generosity toward the objects of their affection, which distinguished them favorably from parsimonious European men.

Northern Fleet divers with Norwegian children, 1944.

Junior Lieutenant Daniil Zlatkin found himself in Denmark, on the island of Bornholm, at the very end of the war. In an interview he said that the interest of Russian men and European women in one another was mutual: “We had not seen women, and we needed to… And when we arrived in Denmark… it was free, please. They wanted to check, test, try a Russian man—what is he, what is it like—and it seemed to work out better than with the Danes. Why? We were selfless and kind… I would give a box of chocolates half the size of a table; I gave one hundred roses to a woman I did not know … for her birthday…”³⁹

At the same time few contemplated serious relationships or marriage, because the Soviet leadership had clearly stated its position on the matter. A Resolution of the Military Council of the 4th Ukrainian Front dated 12 April 1945 read: “1. Explain to all officers and all personnel of the Front that marriage to foreign women is illegal and categorically prohibited. 2. All cases of servicemen entering into marriage with foreign women, as well as connections between our people and hostile elements of foreign states, are to be reported immediately through the chain of command so that the guilty parties may be held accountable for loss of vigilance and violation of Soviet laws.”⁴⁰ A directive of the head of the Political Directorate of the 1st Belorussian Front dated 14 April 1945 stated: “According to the head of the Main Personnel Directorate of the People’s Commissariat of Defense, the Center continues to receive applications from officers of the active army requesting authorization for marriages with women of foreign states (Polish, Bulgarian, Czech women, etc.). Such facts should be regarded as a dulling of vigilance and patriotic feeling. Therefore political-educational work must pay attention to a thorough explanation of the inadmissibility of such acts on the part of Red Army officers. Explain to all officers who do not understand the lack of prospects for such marriages the inadvisability of marrying foreign women, up to and including direct prohibition, and permit not a single case.”⁴¹

Nor did the women harbor illusions about the intentions of their suitors. “At the beginning of 1945 even the stupidest Hungarian peasant girls no longer believed our promises. European women already knew that we were forbidden to marry foreigners and suspected that there was a similar order against appearing together in restaurants, cinemas, and the like. This did not prevent them from loving our womanizers, but it gave that love a strictly ‘ouaidum’ [carnal] character,”⁴² B. Slutsky wrote.

Overall, it must be acknowledged that the image of European women formed among Red Army soldiers in 1944–1945, with rare exceptions, proved very far removed from the suffering figure with shackled hands who gazed hopefully from the Soviet poster “Europe Will Be Free!”

Notes

1. Slutsky, B. Notes on the War. Poems and Ballads. St. Petersburg, 2000, p. 174.
2. Ibid., pp. 46–48.
3. Ibid., pp. 46–48.
4. Smolnikov, F. M. We Are Fighting! A Frontline Soldier’s Diary. Letters from the Front. Moscow, 2000, pp. 228–229.
5. Slutsky, B., op. cit., pp. 110, 107.
6. Ibid., p. 177.
7. Chukhray, G. My War. Moscow: Algoritm, 2001, pp. 258–259.
8. Rodin, A. Three Thousand Kilometers in the Saddle. Diaries. Moscow, 2000, p. 127.
9. Samoilov, D. “People of One Variant. From Wartime Notes,” Avrora, 1990, no. 2, p. 67.
10. Ibid., pp. 70–71.
11. Gelfand, V. N. Diaries 1941–1946. http://militera.lib.ru/db/gelfand_vn/05.html
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid.
14. Rodin, A. Three Thousand Kilometers in the Saddle. Diaries. Moscow, 2000, p. 110.
15. Ibid., pp. 122–123.
16. Ibid., p. 123.
17. Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, fond 372, opis 6570, file 76, fol. 86.
18. Slutsky, B., op. cit., p. 125.
19. Ibid., pp. 127–128.
20. Bogomolov, V. O. “Germany, Berlin. Spring 1945,” in My Life, or Did I Dream You?.. Moscow: Nash Sovremennik, nos. 10–12, 2005; no. 1, 2006. http://militera.lib.ru/prose/russian/bogomolov_vo/03.html
21. Kopelev, L. To Be Preserved Forever, 2 vols., vol. 1, parts 1–4. Moscow: Terra, 2004, ch. 11. http://lib.rus.ec/b/137774/read#t15
22. Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History (RGASPI), fond 17, opis 125, file 321, fols. 10–12.
23. From an interview with N. A. Orlov on the “I Remember” website. http://www.iremember.ru/minometchiki/orlov-naum-aronovich/stranitsa-6.html
24. Samoilov, D., op. cit., p. 88.
25. Bogomolov, V. O. My Life, or Did I Dream You?.., Nash Sovremennik, 2005, nos. 10–12; 2006, no. 1. http://militera.lib.ru/prose/russian/bogomolov_vo/03.html
26. From a political report on communicating Comrade Stalin’s Directive No. 11072 of 20 April 1945 to personnel of the 185th Rifle Division, 26 April 1945. Cited in Bogomolov, V. O., op. cit. http://militera.lib.ru/prose/russian/bogomolov_vo/02.html
27. Cited in Bogomolov, V. O., op. cit. http://militera.lib.ru/prose/russian/bogomolov_vo/02.html
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid.
30. State Archive of the Russian Federation, fond r-9401, opis 2, file 96, fol. 203.
31. Kopelev, L., op. cit., ch. 12. http://lib.rus.ec/b/137774/read#t15
32. Gelfand, V. N., op. cit.
33. White, Osmar. Conquerors’ Road: An Eyewitness Account of Germany 1945. Cambridge University Press, 2003 [1996], XVII, 221 pp. http://www.argo.net.au/andre/osmarwhite.html
34. Slutsky, B., op. cit., p. 99.
35. Ibid., p. 71.
36. Polevoy, B. “The Liberation of Prague,” in From the Soviet Information Bureau… Journalism and Essays of the War Years, 1941–1945, vol. 2, 1943–1945. Moscow: APN Publishing House, 1982, p. 439.
37. Ibid., pp. 177–178.
38. Ibid., p. 180.
39. From an interview with D. F. Zlatkin, 16 June 1997, private archive.
40. Cited in Bogomolov, V. O., op. cit. http://militera.lib.ru/prose/russian/bogomolov_vo/04.html
41. Ibid.
42. Slutsky, B., op. cit., pp. 180–181.

The article was prepared with financial support from the Russian Foundation for the Humanities, project No. 11-01-00363a. The layout used the 1944 Soviet poster “Europe Will Be Free!” by artist V. Koretsky.

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20 July 1941. “…one can see local residents lining up at our bakery for bread under the supervision of a smiling soldier…

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“I was standing alone in a house, lit a match, and bedbugs began falling from the ceiling. Around the hearth it was completely black with them: a terrifying living carpet…”

2 November 1941. “…we do not receive new army boots or shirts when the old ones wear out: we wear Russian trousers and Russian shirts, and when our footwear becomes unusable we wear Russian shoes and footwraps, or even make ear protectors against the frost from those footwraps…

“The offensive on the main axis toward Moscow has been stopped, ‘bogged down’ in the mud and forests about one hundred kilometers from the capital…”

1 January 1942. “…in this house we were offered potatoes, tea, and a loaf of bread kneaded from rye and barley flour with onions added. There were probably several brown cockroaches in it; at least I cut one out…

“Franz has finally been awarded the Iron Cross. His service record says: ‘For pursuing an enemy tank from point C to the neighboring village and attempting to knock it out with an antitank rifle’…”

10 March 1942. “…for the last several days we have been collecting Russian corpses… This was done not out of piety but for hygiene… mutilated bodies are thrown into piles, frozen stiff in the most impossible positions. The end. For them everything is over; they will be burned. But first their own people, the Russians—old men and children—will strip off their clothes. It is terrible. Watching the process reveals an aspect of the Russian mentality that is simply beyond understanding. They smoke and joke; they smile. It is hard to believe that any Europeans can be so insensitive…”

The page comments: of course, how could Europeans understand what trousers and greatcoats represented in value to villagers, even if full of holes…

“Some bodies have no heads; others have been chopped up by fragments… only now do you gradually begin to realize what these people had to endure and what they were capable of…

“Field post gave me pleasure with letters and parcels containing cigarettes, biscuits, sweets, nuts, and a pair of hand muffs for warmth. I was so touched… let us remember this moment!

“Our Russian, Vasil, gets along well with the battery… We picked him up together with thirteen of his comrades in Kalinin. They stayed in the prisoner-of-war camp, not wanting to remain in the Red Army any longer… Vasil says that in fact he does not want to go to Germany but wants to stay with the battery…

“Yesterday we could already hear them [the Russians] singing in their dugouts in P. A gramophone howled; the wind carried fragments of propaganda speeches. Comrade Stalin handed out vodka; long live Comrade Stalin!…

“Order is maintained in the dugout by general goodwill, friendly tolerance, and inexhaustible good humor, and all of this brings a glimmer of cheerfulness into the most unpleasant situation… let us remember that too for later comparison…

“It seems that the Russians cannot, and we do not want to…

“How tired I am of these dirty roads! It is already unbearable to see them any longer—rain, ankle-deep mud, villages resembling one another…

“A country of extremes. Nothing shows moderation. Heat and cold, dust and mud. Everything is furious and unrestrained. Should one not expect the people here to be the same?…

“There were many destroyed buildings in the town. The Bolsheviks burned all the houses. Some were destroyed by bombing, but in many cases these were acts of arson…”

24 August 1942. “…they have been attacking here since the beginning of July. It is unbelievable. They must have terrible losses… they rarely manage to deploy their infantry even within range of our machine guns… but then they appear again, moving in the open, and rush into the forests, where they come under flat-trajectory fire from our artillery and dive bombers. Of course we also have losses, but they are incomparable with the enemy’s…

“Their mother washed the dugout today. She began doing the dirty work of her own accord, believe it or not…

“At the door I saw two women, each carrying a pair of buckets on a wooden shoulder yoke. They asked in a friendly way: ‘Comrade, wash?’ They were simply going to follow me…

“And still they hold on, the old people, women, and children. They are strong. Timid, exhausted, good-natured, shameless—as circumstances require… there is a boy who buried his mother in the garden behind the house, the way animals are buried. He tamped down the earth without saying a word: without tears, without putting up a cross or a stone… there is a priest’s wife, nearly blinded by tears. Her husband was deported to Kazakhstan. She has three sons whose whereabouts are now unknown… the world collapsed and the natural order of things was disturbed long ago…

“All around us villages blazed in a broad ring—a terrible and beautiful sight, breathtaking in its magnificence and at the same time a nightmare. With my own hands I threw burning logs into barns and granaries beyond the road…

“The thermometer fell to forty-five degrees below zero… we created an island of peace in the midst of war, where comradeship arises easily and someone’s laughter can always be heard…”

25 January 1943. “…between our own trench and the enemy’s barbed wire we were able to count five hundred and fifty dead bodies. The captured weapons consisted of eight heavy and light machine guns, thirty submachine guns, five flamethrowers, four antitank rifles, and eighty-five rifles. It was a Russian penal battalion of one thousand four hundred men…”

The page comments that this seems to confirm the theory of “one rifle for five men,” with the qualification that the battalion was a penal one: they were “redeeming themselves,” that is, with blood.

24 April 1943. “…I cannot help remembering how often in the first summer of the war we encountered sincere hospitality among Russian peasants, how even without being asked they set their modest refreshments before us…

“I again saw on a woman’s emaciated face tears expressing the full weight of her suffering when I gave her child a sweet. I felt an old grandmother’s hand on my hair when she received me, the first terrible soldier, with many bows and an old-fashioned kissing of the hand…

“I stood in the middle of the village giving sweets to children. I was about to give one boy another, but he refused, saying he already had one, and stepped back smiling. Two sweets—just think—that was too much…

“We burn their homes, take their last cow from the barn and the last potatoes from their cellars. We take their felt boots from them; they are often shouted at and treated roughly. Yet they always gather up their bundles and go with us, from Kalinin and all the villages along the road. We assign a special detachment to take them to the rear. Anything rather than be on the other side! What a schism, what a contrast! What must these people have lived through! What a mission it must be to restore order and peace to them and provide them with work and bread!…”

Comment on Pabst’s memoirs

What can be said of these memoirs as a whole? It is as though they were written not by a Hitlerite occupier but almost by a liberating soldier. Perhaps he sometimes passed off what he wished to see as reality. He certainly omitted some things. Perhaps in his notes G. Pabst soothed his conscience. It is also clear that, alongside educated men such as he, the German army had plenty of cruel and immoral people. But it is equally clear, the page argues, that by no means every man serving Hitler was a fascist; perhaps such men were even a minority. Only Soviet propaganda, it says, could without hesitation list all Germans mobilized by Hitler as destroyers and tormentors, because its task was to increase hatred of the enemy. Pabst, however, does not conceal that the Wehrmacht brought destruction to conquered villages and cities. It is also important that the author had no time to adjust his notes to any ideology: he was killed in 1943 and before that was not a military correspondent subject to censorship.

It should also be noted that for this German all people were “Russians,” “Ivans,” although on his way he also met Ukrainians and Belarusians. Their attitude toward the Germans, and the Germans’ attitude toward them, was somewhat different.

The page concludes that the next post will examine excerpts from a Russian soldier’s diary and compare several important points, asserting that the diaries were not specially selected but chosen by random sampling.

What German occupiers wrote about Soviet women

German occupiers’ ideas about Soviet women had been formed by Nazi propaganda, which claimed that the vast eastern territory was inhabited by unintelligent, half-savage and promiscuous women who had lost any conception of human virtues.

After crossing the border of the USSR, Nazi servicemen were forced to acknowledge that the stereotypes imposed on them by the party did not correspond to reality at all.

Mercy

Among the qualities of Soviet women that surprised German soldiers, they especially noted compassion and an absence of hatred toward enemy soldiers.

Major Kuehner’s frontline notes contain passages about peasant women who, despite deprivation and universal grief, did not become embittered and shared their last meager food supplies with needy German soldiers. The notes also record that “when we [Germans] become thirsty during marches, we go into their cottages and they give us milk,” thereby putting the invaders in an ethical dilemma.

Chaplain Kieler, who served with a medical unit, happened by fate to be quartered in the home of seventy-seven-year-old Grandmother Alexandra. Her heartfelt care for him made him ponder metaphysical questions: “She knows that we are fighting against them, and yet she knits socks for me. The feeling of enmity is probably unknown to her. Poor people share their last possessions with us. Do they do this out of fear, or is there really an inborn sense of self-sacrifice in this people? Or do they do it out of good nature, or even out of love?”

Kuehner was genuinely perplexed by the strong maternal instinct of Soviet women, about which he wrote: “How often I saw Russian peasant women wailing over wounded German soldiers as though they were their own sons.”

Morality

The high moral standards of Soviet women came as a real shock to the German occupiers. The thesis propagated by Nazi propaganda that eastern women were promiscuous proved, according to the page, to be nothing more than an unfounded myth.

Wehrmacht soldier Michels wrote while reflecting on the subject: “What were we told about the Russian woman? And how did we find her? I think there is hardly a German soldier who has been in Russia who did not learn to value and respect the Russian woman.”

All women brought to Germany from occupied Soviet territories for forced labor were immediately sent for medical examinations, which revealed details the German observers regarded as highly unexpected.

Medical orderly Hamm, assistant to Dr. Eirich, left the following curious note in his notebook: “The doctor examining Russian girls… was deeply impressed by the results of the examination: 99% of girls aged eighteen to thirty-five proved to be chaste,” followed by the addition: “he thinks it would be impossible to find girls for a brothel in Oryol…”

Similar reports came from various enterprises to which Soviet girls were sent, including the Wolfen factory, whose representatives noted: “One gets the impression that the Russian man pays due attention to the Russian woman, which ultimately finds expression in the moral aspects of life as well.”

The writer Ernst Jünger, who served with German forces, heard from staff doctor von Grevenitz that reports of eastern women’s sexual promiscuity were a complete deception and realized that his own impressions had not misled him. Gifted at looking into human souls, the writer observed in Russian young women “the radiance of purity surrounding their faces. Its light does not contain the shimmer of active virtue, but rather resembles reflected moonlight. Yet for that very reason one feels the great strength of this light…”

Capacity for work

German tank general Leo Geyr von Schweppenburg noted in his recollections of Russian women their “purely physical capacity for work, standing beyond any doubt.” German leaders also noticed this trait and decided to use women deported from the occupied eastern territories as domestic servants in the homes of loyal members of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party.

A maid’s duties included thorough cleaning of apartments—work that burdened pampered German Frau and, the text says, had a bad effect on their precious health.

Cleanliness

One reason Soviet women were recruited for domestic work was their striking cleanliness. Germans entering the relatively modest-looking homes of civilians were surprised by interiors decorated with folk motifs and by their tidiness.

Nazi servicemen expecting to meet “barbarians” were taken aback by the appearance and personal hygiene of Soviet women. One official of the Dortmund health department reported: “I was in fact astonished by the good appearance of the workers from the East. The greatest surprise was caused by the workers’ teeth, because up to now I have not yet discovered a single case of a Russian woman having bad teeth. Unlike us Germans, they must devote a great deal of attention to keeping their teeth in order.”

Chaplain Franz, who by his vocation had no right to look at a woman through a man’s eyes, stated with restraint: “Of the feminine Russian women (if I may put it that way), I formed the impression that through their special inner strength they keep under moral control those Russians who might be regarded as barbarians.”

Family ties

The claims of Nazi agitators that the totalitarian authorities of the Soviet Union had completely destroyed the institution of the family—an institution the Nazis praised—did not survive contact with reality.

From letters sent from the front, relatives of German soldiers learned that women from the USSR were not unfeeling robots but tender and caring daughters, mothers, wives, and grandmothers. Moreover, the warmth and closeness of their family ties could only be envied. At every opportunity, numerous relatives communicated and helped one another.

Religious devotion

German soldiers were strongly impressed by the deep religious devotion of Soviet women, who, despite official persecution of religion in the country, had managed to preserve a close connection with God in their souls. Moving from one settlement to another, Hitler’s soldiers found many churches and monasteries in which services were being held.

Major K. Kuehner recalled in his memoirs seeing two peasant women who prayed fervently while standing among the ruins of a church burned by the Germans.

The Nazis were also surprised by women prisoners of war who refused to work on church feast days. In some places guards accommodated the prisoners’ religious feelings; in others disobedience could bring a death sentence.

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