How Russian Soldiers Abused German Women: Who Raped German Women and How They Lived in Occupied Germany

The Second World War rolled over humanity like a steamroller. Millions were killed, and still more lives and destinies were destroyed. All the opposing sides committed truly monstrous acts and justified them by war.

The Nazis were especially notorious in this respect, even without taking the Holocaust into account. There are many stories of the brutality of German soldiers, some documented and others openly fabricated.

One high-ranking German officer recalled the instructions he had received. Notably, where women in Red Army uniform were concerned, the order was simple: “Shoot them.”

Most did exactly that. Yet among the dead, the bodies of women—soldiers, nurses, or medical orderlies—were often found bearing clear signs of brutal torture.

Residents of the village of Smaglevka, for example, remembered how the Nazis found a badly wounded girl. Despite her condition, they dragged her onto the road, stripped her, and shot her.

Before killing her, however, they tortured her for a long time simply for their own pleasure. Her whole body was turned into a bloody mass. The Nazis treated female partisans in much the same way: before execution they could be stripped and left standing in the cold for hours.

Female prisoners were regularly subjected to sexual violence. Although intimate relations with prisoners were formally prohibited for senior Wehrmacht officers, ordinary soldiers were not constrained in the same way. If a girl survived abuse by an entire company, she might simply be shot afterward.

Conditions in concentration camps were even more terrible. If a girl was not “lucky” enough to be taken into the service of some superior, her fate differed little from that of the other prisoners. Even those assigned as “servants” were not protected from abuse.

Camp No. 337 was regarded as one of the most brutal places. Prisoners were kept naked in the frost for hours and driven into barracks a hundred at a time. Those who could not keep up with the work were killed on the spot. According to testimony, as many as 700 prisoners of war died every day in this Stalag.

Women were tortured just as men were, and at times even more cruelly. Judging by eyewitness testimony, the Spanish Inquisition might have envied Nazi methods. Girls were sometimes tormented even by other women—the wives of camp commandants—for amusement. The prisoners nicknamed the commandant of Stalag No. 337 “the cannibal.”

O. Kazarinov, Unknown Faces of War. Chapter 5. Violence Breeds Violence (continued)

Forensic psychologists have long established that rape generally arises not from a desire for sexual satisfaction but from a desire for power: to humiliate, demonstrate superiority, and take revenge.

And what, if not war, gives the basest instincts such freedom to run wild?

On September 7, 1941, at a rally in Moscow, an appeal by Soviet women was read aloud: “Words cannot convey what the fascist monsters are doing to women in the temporarily occupied territories of the Soviet country. Their sadism knows no bounds. These vile cowards drive women, children, and old people ahead of them so that they can hide behind them from Red Army fire. Their rape victims have their bellies cut open, their breasts cut off, are crushed by vehicles, and torn apart by tanks...”

What is the state of a woman who has been violated, left defenseless, and psychologically broken by the awareness of her humiliation and shame?

The crimes taking place around her produce mental paralysis. Thought stops. Shock. A foreign uniform, foreign speech, a foreign smell. The attackers are not even perceived simply as male aggressors. They seem like dreadful beings from another world.

And they ruthlessly destroy every idea of chastity, decency, and modesty that had been instilled for years. They invade what had always been hidden from strangers’ eyes, what had been considered indecent to show, what people whispered about in doorways and entrusted only to those closest to them—loved ones and doctors.

Despair, humiliation, shame, fear, disgust, and pain all twist together into one knot that tears a person apart from within and destroys human dignity. It breaks the will, burns out the soul, kills the personality. It drains life away. Clothes are torn off. Resistance is impossible. IT will happen anyway.

I think thousands upon thousands of women, at such moments, cursed the mere fact that they had been born women.

Let us turn to documents, which speak more vividly than any literary description. All of the following refer only to 1941.

“...It happened in the apartment of a young teacher, Elena K. At noon a group of drunken German officers burst in. At the time, the teacher was giving lessons to three girls who were her pupils. The intruders locked the door and ordered Elena K. to undress. The young woman firmly refused to comply with this shameful demand. The Nazis then tore off her clothes and raped her in front of the children. When the girls tried to defend their teacher, the criminals brutally abused them. The teacher’s five-year-old son remained in the room. The boy, too terrified even to scream, stared at what was happening. A Nazi officer approached him and cut him in two with a sword.”

Testimony of Lidia N. from Rostov

“Yesterday I heard a loud pounding at the door. When someone went to the door, they struck him with a rifle butt and tried to break it down. Five German soldiers burst into the apartment. My father, mother, and younger brother were taken away. Later I found my brother’s body on the stair landing. According to witnesses, a German soldier threw him from the third floor of our house. His head was smashed. My mother and father were shot at the entrance to our building. I myself was gang-raped. I lost consciousness. When I came to, I heard the hysterical screams of women in neighboring apartments. That evening the Germans violated every apartment in our building. All the women were raped.”

A horrifying document. This woman’s terror inevitably appears only in a few sparse lines. A pounding at the door. Five monsters. Fear for herself and for relatives taken to an unknown fate: Why? Where are they being taken? Arrested? Killed? Then vile torture and loss of consciousness. And afterward the nightmare of “the hysterical screams of women in neighboring apartments,” as if the entire building were groaning. Unreal.

Maria Tarantseva, a resident of the village of Novo-Ivanovka, testified: “Four German soldiers burst into my house and brutally raped my daughters Vera and Pelageya.”

On the very first night in Luga, the Nazis seized and raped eight girls in the street.

“In the town of Tikhvin in the Leningrad Region, fifteen-year-old M. Kolodetskaya was wounded by shrapnel and taken to a hospital, formerly a monastery, where wounded German soldiers were being treated. Despite her wounds, Kolodetskaya was gang-raped by German soldiers and died.”

Each time you think about what lies behind the dry language of a document, you shudder. A girl is bleeding and suffering. Why did this war begin? At last she reaches a hospital: the smell of iodine, a bandage. People are treated in hospitals—even if they are not Russian, they will surely help her. And suddenly, instead, there is new pain, a scream, animal anguish sliding toward madness... and consciousness slowly fades away. Forever.

“In the Belarusian town of Shatsk, the Nazis rounded up and raped all the young girls, then kicked them while they were naked and forced them to dance. Those who protested were shot on the spot by the fascist monsters. Such violence and abuse by the occupiers became widespread.”

“On the first day in the village of Basmanovo in the Smolensk Region, fascist wolves seized more than two hundred schoolboys and schoolgirls who had come to the village for the harvest, surrounded them, and shot them. They took the schoolgirls ‘for officers.’”

It is difficult even to imagine those girls arriving in the village with noisy classmates, teenage loves and experiences, with the carefree liveliness natural to that age. They suddenly saw the bloodied bodies of their boys, had no time to understand what had happened, could not believe it, and fell into a hell created by adults.

“On the first day after the Germans entered Krasnaya Polyana, two fascists appeared at the home of Alexandra Yakovlevna Demyanova. Demyanova’s daughter, fourteen-year-old Nyura, was in the room, a frail and sickly girl. A German officer seized the teenager and raped her in front of her mother. On December 10 a doctor at the local gynecological hospital examined the girl and stated that the Hitlerite bandit had infected her with syphilis. Another fourteen-year-old girl, Tonya I., was raped by a Nazi brute in a neighboring apartment.”

On December 9, 1941, the body of a Finnish officer was found at Krasnaya Polyana. In his pocket was a collection of thirty-seven women’s buttons—a tally of rapes. At Krasnaya Polyana he had raped Margarita K. and torn a button from her blouse.

Dead soldiers were often found carrying such “trophies”: buttons, stockings, locks of women’s hair. Photographs of scenes of violence, letters, and diaries were also found.

“In their letters the Hitlerites recount their adventures with a mixture of shamelessness and pride. Corporal Felix Kapdels wrote to a friend: ‘After getting our fill and having a good dinner, we started having fun. The girl got angry, but we dealt with her too. It did not matter that the whole section...’”

Corporal Georg Pfaler, without hesitation, wrote to his mother in Sappenfeld: “We stayed in a small town for three days... You can imagine how much we ate in three days. How many chests and cupboards were ransacked, how many young women were ruined... Life is happy for us now, not like in the trenches...”

A dead general’s diary contained the following entry: “October 12. Today I took part in clearing the camp of suspects. Eighty-two were disposed of. Among them was a beautiful woman. Karl and I took her to the operating room, where she bit me. Forty minutes later she was shot. A memory: a few minutes of pleasure.”

Conversations with prisoners who had failed to get rid of such compromising material were brief: they were taken aside and shot in the back of the head.

A woman in military uniform aroused a special hatred in the enemy. She was not only a woman but also a combatant fighting them. If captured male soldiers were broken psychologically and physically by brutal torture, female soldiers were also subjected to rape. Similar abuse occurred during interrogation. The Germans raped girls from the Young Guard and, in one case described here, threw one of them naked into a preheated oven.

Medical personnel who fell into their hands were, according to these accounts, raped without exception.

“Two kilometers south of the village of Akimovka in the Melitopol area, the Germans attacked a vehicle carrying two wounded Red Army soldiers and a female medical orderly accompanying them. They dragged the woman into a sunflower field, raped her, and then shot her. These beasts bent the arms of the wounded Red Army men and shot them...”

“In the Ukrainian village of Voronki, the Germans placed forty wounded Red Army soldiers, prisoners of war, and nurses in a hospital. The nurses were raped and shot, while guards were posted over the wounded...”

“At Krasnaya Polyana the wounded soldiers and a wounded nurse were given no water for four days and no food for seven days, after which they were given salt water. The nurse began to suffer terribly. The dying girl was raped by Hitler’s men in front of the wounded Red Army soldiers.”

The perverse logic of war demands that the aggressor demonstrate absolute power. Humiliating the victim is not enough. The victim is then degraded beyond endurance, and finally life itself is taken as the ultimate demonstration of power. Otherwise, the aggressor may imagine that the victim could see weakness in him because he failed to control his sexual desire. Hence the sadism and murder.

“In one village, Hitlerite bandits seized and brutally raped a fifteen-year-old girl. Sixteen beasts tortured her. She resisted, called for her mother, screamed. Her eyes were gouged out, her body cut to pieces and scattered in the street... This happened in the Belarusian town of Chernovtsy.”

“In Lviv, thirty-two women workers from the Lviv garment factory were raped and then murdered by German storm troopers. Drunken German soldiers dragged girls and young women from Lviv into Kościuszko Park and brutally raped them. An elderly priest, V. L., who tried to stop the violence against the girls while holding a cross, was beaten by the fascists; his cassock was torn off, his beard burned, and he was stabbed with a bayonet.”

“The streets of the village of K., which the Germans had occupied for some time, were filled with the bodies of women, old people, and children. Survivors told Red Army soldiers that the Nazis had driven all the girls into a hospital and raped them. Then they closed the doors and set the building on fire.”

“In the Begoml district, the wife of a Soviet worker was raped and then bayoneted.”

“In Dnipropetrovsk, on Bolshaya Bazarnaya Street, drunken soldiers detained three women. The Germans tied them to posts, savagely abused them, and then killed them.”

“In the village of Milyutino, the Germans arrested twenty-four collective farmers and took them to a neighboring village. Among those arrested was thirteen-year-old Anastasia Davydova. After throwing the villagers into a dark barn, the Nazis began to torture them, demanding information about the partisans. Everyone remained silent. The Germans then took the girl out and asked where the collective-farm cattle had been driven. The young patriot refused to answer. The fascist criminals raped her and then shot her.”

“‘The Germans are coming!’ Their collaborators dragged a sixteen-year-old daughter to the cemetery and raped her. Then the soldiers were ordered to hang the victims from trees. The soldiers obeyed and hung them upside down. There the soldiers also raped a nine-year-old girl.” The testimony is attributed to Petrova of the Shumchu collective farm.

“We stopped in the village of Bolshoye Pankratovo. On Monday the 21st, at four in the morning, a fascist officer went through the village, entered every house, took money and belongings from the inhabitants, and threatened to shoot everyone. Then he came to the hospital. There were a doctor and a girl there. He told the girl, ‘Follow me to headquarters; I must check your documents.’ I saw him hide her passport inside his tunic. She was taken to the kindergarten next to the hospital and raped there. Then the girl ran into the field screaming, and it became clear that she had lost her mind. He caught her and shortly afterward showed me her passport, covered in blood...”

“The fascists burst into the People’s Commissariat of Health sanatorium at Avgustovo. (...) The German Nazis raped all the women in the sanatorium. The wounded and beaten victims were then shot.”

Historical literature has repeatedly stated that investigations of war crimes uncovered many documents and testimonies describing the rape of young pregnant women, after which their throats were cut and their breasts pierced with bayonets. The source from which this passage is taken adds the polemical claim that hatred of women’s breasts was somehow “in the Germans’ blood.”

Here are several such documents and testimonies.

“In the village of Semyonovskoye in the Kaliningrad Region, the Germans raped twenty-five-year-old Olga Tikhonova, the wife of a Red Army soldier, the mother of three children, who was in the final stage of pregnancy, and tied her hands with rope. After the rape the Germans cut her throat, pierced both breasts, and kicked her sadistically.”

“In Belarus, seventy-five women and girls who fled toward the town of Borisov as German troops approached were captured by the Nazis. The Germans raped and then brutally murdered thirty-six women and girls. Sixteen-year-old L. I. Melchukova, on the orders of a German officer named Hammer, was taken into the forest by soldiers and raped. A little later, other women led into the forest saw the dying Melchukova by the trees; her breasts had been cut off. Other women, including V. I. Alperenko and V. M. Bereznikova, were subjected to similar mutilation...”

Even with all the powers of imagination, it is difficult to picture the inhuman screams that must have accompanied the suffering of those women in that Belarusian forest. This was a crime against human beings.

“In the village of G., beside the road, we saw the mutilated, stripped body of the elderly Timofei Vasilyevich Globa. Nearby, in a garden, lay the naked body of a girl. Her eyes had been cut out, her right breast cut off, and her left breast pierced with a bayonet. She was old Globa’s daughter, Galya.”

When the Nazis entered the village, the girl hid in the garden and remained there for three days. On the morning of the fourth day Galya decided to go to the hut in the hope of finding something to eat. A German officer seized her there. Hearing his daughter’s screams, the wounded Globa ran up and struck the attacker with a crutch. Two more officers rushed from the hut, called soldiers, and seized Galya and her father. The daughter was stripped naked, raped, and brutally tortured while her father was held so that he would be forced to watch. Her eyes were cut out, her right breast cut off, and a bayonet driven into the left. Timofei Globa was then stripped and placed on his daughter’s body, where he was beaten with sticks. When he tried to escape with his remaining strength, he was caught on the road, shot, and bayoneted.

Raping and torturing women in front of those closest to them—husbands, parents, and children—was treated as a special display of “courage.” Perhaps the intention was to demonstrate strength before an audience and emphasize the victim’s humiliating powerlessness.

“Everywhere brutal German bandits break into homes, rape women and girls before their relatives and children, mock the raped women, and abuse their victims on the spot.”

“Collective farmer Ivan Gavrilovich Teryokhin and his wife Polina Borisovna were passing through the village of Puchki. Several German soldiers seized Polina, dragged her aside, threw her down, and began raping her one after another in front of her husband. The woman screamed and resisted with all her strength.”

One of the Nazi attackers then shot her. Polina Teryokhina lay dying in agony. Her husband broke away from the attackers and ran to his dying wife, but the Germans seized him and fired six bullets into his back.

“On the Apnas farmstead, drunken German soldiers raped a sixteen-year-old girl and threw her into a well. Her mother, who tried to stop the attackers, was thrown into the same well.”

Vasily Vishnichenko from the village of Generalnoye stated: “German soldiers seized me and took me to headquarters. At that moment one of the Nazis dragged my wife into the cellar. When I returned, I found her lying in the cellar with her clothes torn. She was dead. She had been raped and shot in the head and heart.”

To develop the subject further and supplement the preceding article, the publication offers readers another article by Elena Senyavskaya, published on the site on May 10, 2012.

The Red Army and European Women at the End of the War

At the final stage of the Great Patriotic War, the Red Army crossed the state frontier of the USSR while pursuing the retreating enemy and liberating Soviet territories occupied by Germany and its satellites. From that point began its victorious advance through European countries—both those that had suffered under Nazi occupation for six years and those that had been allies of the Third Reich, including Hitler’s Germany itself. As Soviet servicemen moved west and inevitably came into contact with local populations, many of them, who had never previously been outside their own country, acquired numerous new and often contradictory impressions of other peoples and cultures. These impressions later formed durable stereotypes about Europeans. One of the central figures in this perception was the European woman. In soldiers’ letters, diaries, and later memoirs, lyrical tones sometimes give way to embittered judgments, and even naturalistic descriptions occur.

In August 1944, Romania became the first European country entered by the Red Army. In the wartime notes of front-line soldier Boris Slutsky, one finds harsh lines: “This almost coincides with the average dream of happiness and of the postwar world. Restaurants. Bathrooms. Beds with clean linen. Groveling shopkeepers. And—women, clever city women—the girls of Europe—the first tribute we receive from the defeated...” He then describes his first impressions of “abroad”: dirt, then washed faces; featherbeds instead of blankets; and immediate generalizations prompted by disgust with everyday life. In Constanța they encountered brothels for the first time. “Our first enthusiasm about the existence of free love quickly passes. It is not only fear of infection and the high price, but contempt for the very possibility of buying a human being...” He recalled a case in which a Romanian complained to the commandant’s office that a Soviet officer had not paid his wife, although she had agreed to a price of fifteen hundred lei. The shared reaction was: “This would be impossible among us...” Slutsky concluded that Soviet soldiers would remember Romania as a country of syphilitics and that it was in Romania, in his view, that “our soldier felt his elevation above Europe.”

Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Fyodor Smolnikov recorded his impressions of Bucharest on September 17, 1944: “Hotel Ambassador, restaurant, ground floor. I watch the idle public passing by; they have nothing to do, they wait. They look at me like a curiosity. ‘A Russian officer!!!’ I am dressed very modestly, more than modestly. So be it. We will be in Budapest anyway. That is as certain as the fact that I am in Bucharest. A first-class restaurant. The public is dressed up; the most beautiful Romanian women demonstratively cast glances... We spend the night in a first-class hotel. The capital’s street is seething. There is no music; the public is waiting. A capital, damn it! I will not be taken in by the advertising...”

In Hungary, the Red Army encountered not only armed resistance but also hostility from parts of the local population. “Drunks and stragglers were killed in farmyards,” some were “drowned in bunkers.” Yet the women, Slutsky wrote, “not so depraved as the Romanians, yielded with shameful ease... A little love, a little generosity, and above all, of course, fear.” A Hungarian lawyer is quoted as saying: “It is very good that the Russians love children so much. It is very bad that they love women so much.” Boris Slutsky adds: “The tenderness of the girls and the desperate tenderness of soldiers who had given their husbands to the killers...”

Grigory Chukhray described an episode in Hungary in his memoirs. During a meal, the owners of the house in which Soviet soldiers were billeted “relaxed under the influence of Russian vodka and admitted that they were hiding their daughter in the attic.” The Soviet officers were offended: “Who do you take us for? We are not fascists!” The hosts became embarrassed, and soon brought a thin girl named Mariyka to the table. She ate greedily, then relaxed, flirted, and asked questions. By the end of the supper everyone was in a good mood and drank a toast to friendship. Mariyka understood the gesture rather literally. When everyone had gone to bed, she came into Chukhray’s room wearing only an undershirt. “As a Soviet officer, I immediately understood that a provocation was being prepared. They were counting on my weakness. But I will not give in to the provocation.” The girl made no impression on him, and he escorted her to the door.

The next morning the hostess banged the dishes loudly while serving food. “She is nervous. The provocation failed!” Chukhray thought. He shared the idea with the Hungarian interpreter, who laughed: “It was not a provocation! They treated you in a friendly way, and you ignored it. Now you are no longer a man in this house. You will have to move.”

Why had they hidden their daughter in the attic?

They were afraid of violence. In their country, the memoir explains, it was considered normal for a girl to have sexual relations with several men before marriage, with her parents’ consent. As Hungarians themselves supposedly said, “You do not buy a cat in a sack...”

Young, physically healthy men naturally felt attracted to women. Yet the relative freedom of European sexual customs corrupted some Soviet soldiers while, on the contrary, strengthening others in the belief that relations between a man and a woman should not be reduced to simple physiology. Sergeant Alexander Rodin recorded his impressions after visiting a Budapest brothel “out of pure curiosity,” one that continued operating for a while after the war ended: “...After leaving, there arose a disgusting, shameful sense of falseness, of obvious, open pretense. The woman cannot endure it... It is interesting that this unpleasant aftertaste remained not only with me, a young man raised on the principle ‘without love, not even a kiss,’ but with most of the soldiers with whom I later happened to speak...”

During those same days Rodin struck up a conversation with an attractive Hungarian woman who knew Russian. When she asked whether he liked Budapest, he said yes but added that the brothels bothered him. “Why?” she asked. “Because it is unnatural, savage,” I explained. “A woman takes money and then immediately starts ‘loving’!” The girl thought for a moment, nodded in agreement, and said: “You are right. It is ugly to take the money in advance...”

Poland left a very different impression. According to the poet David Samoylov, “...in Poland we were kept under strict control. It was difficult to go off on your own. And misbehavior was punished severely.” His impressions of the country were mixed. He considered the beauty of Polish women the one unequivocally positive feature: “I cannot say that we liked Poland very much,” he wrote. “I found nothing noble or chivalrous in it. On the contrary, everything was bourgeois and peasant-like, both in ideas and in interests. Even in eastern Poland they looked at us warily and with half-concealed hostility, trying to get everything possible out of the ‘liberators.’ Yet the women were consolingly beautiful and coquettish; they captivated us by their gentle manners and cooing speech, in which everything suddenly became understandable. Sometimes they themselves yielded to crude male force or to the soldier’s uniform. And their pale, exhausted former admirers, grinding their teeth, withdrew into the shadows for a time...”

Not all memories of Polish women were so romantic. On October 22, 1944, Junior Lieutenant Vladimir Gelfand wrote in his diary: “...Beautiful Polish women, proud to the point of disgust... I was told that they lure our soldiers and officers in and, in bed, cut off their genitals with a razor, strangle them with their hands, scratch out their eyes. Mad, savage, ugly females! One must be careful with them and not surrender to their beauty. And Polish women can be both beautiful and ugly.” Yet his diary also records very different moods. On October 24 he wrote about meeting Polish girls: “Today, in one village, my companions were beautiful Polish girls. They complained that there were no young men in Poland. They called me ‘pan’ but kept their distance. I gently patted one on the shoulder and consoled her with the thought that the road to Russia was open to her—there are many men there. She quickly moved away and replied that there would be men here too. She simply said goodbye with a handshake. So it was not we who set the boundaries, but these sweet girls, even if they were Polish.”

On November 22 he described the first large Polish settlement he encountered, Mińsk Mazowiecki. He was struck by the architecture and by the number of bicycles used by every category of the population, but especially by the appearance of the women: “Crowds of idle people. The women look as though selected to match, in peculiar white hats worn against the wind, which make them look ten years older and surprise by their novelty. The men wear triangular caps and neat hats—solid, well cared for, aloof. Painted lips, carefully shaped brows, pomposity, excessive politeness... It does not look like natural life at all. It seems that they live and move only in order to be seen, and will vanish as soon as the last spectator leaves the town.”

Polish peasants, not only city dwellers, made mixed impressions. “The vitality of the Poles, who had survived the horrors of war and occupation, was astonishing,” Alexander Rodin recalled. “Sunday. In a Polish village everyone is dressed up—in silk dresses, stockings, polka dots. The same women who on weekdays kneaded manure barefoot look like noble ladies. Even elderly women seem fresh. Only the circles around their eyes are dark...” He quoted a diary entry from November 5, 1944: “Everyone is dressed up. Men in felt hats and ties. Women in silk, in bright stockings that have not yet been worn. Young women with rosy cheeks and curled fair hair... There is excitement in the corner of the cottage—our soldiers. But any sensitive person will understand that this is a painful awakening. Loud laughter to conceal envy: ‘Are we worse than they are? What happiness—a peaceful life! I have never seen one at all!’”

Sergeant Nikolai Nesterov wrote on the same day: “Today is a day off. The Poles are nicely dressed and gather in pairs in one cottage. It is somehow unsettling. Will I ever again be able simply to sit down like this and remain sitting?”

Servicewoman Galina Yartseva was merciless toward what she called “European morality,” comparing it to “a feast during the plague.” On February 24, 1945, she wrote to a friend from the front: “...If I could, I would send magnificent parcels of their captured things. There is plenty to take here. We would strip them bare. What cities I have seen, what men and women. Looking at them, you choke on rage and hatred. They live, love, laugh, while you go to liberate them. They laugh at Russians—‘Schwein!’ Yes, yes! Bastards... I love no one but the USSR, except those peoples who are with us. I believe in no friendship—not with Poles, not with Lithuanians...”

In the spring of 1945 Soviet troops entered Austria and encountered “universal surrender.” “Whole villages were covered in white flags. Elderly women raised their hands when meeting a Red Army soldier.” According to Boris Slutsky, it was in Austria that “our soldiers caught blonde women,” while the Austrians themselves “showed no excessive obstinacy.” Most peasant girls willingly associated with the “pampered” victors. The victors felt perfectly secure and comfortable. In Vienna a bank employee serving as a guide was astonished by the persistence and impatience of Soviet soldiers; he believed that gallantry alone was enough to obtain anything from an Austrian woman. This was attributed not only to fear but also to mentality and traditional patterns of behavior.

And finally, Germany. The enemy’s women were the mothers, wives, daughters, and sisters of those who had brutalized civilians in the occupied territories of the USSR in 1941–1944. How did Soviet servicemen see them? Vladimir Bogomolov’s diary describes the appearance of German women in a crowd of refugees: “...in torn clothes of an incomprehensible cut... Many women wear dark glasses so as not to squint in the bright May sun and thus protect their faces from wrinkles...”

Lev Kopelev remembered meeting evacuated Berlin women in Allenstein: “Two women on the pavement. Elaborate hats, one even with a veil. Solid coats, and they themselves are smooth, well cared for.” He also quoted comments from Soviet soldiers: “Hens,” “turkeys,” and “if only one could get hold of someone so smooth...”

How did Germans behave when they encountered Red Army units? A report by G. F. Shikin, deputy head of the Red Army’s Main Political Directorate, to the Central Committee of the Communist Party stated: “Women gradually begin to come out into the streets; almost all wear white armbands. When they meet our soldiers, many women raise their hands, cry with fear, and tremble. But as soon as they become convinced that Soviet servicemen are nothing like the picture painted by fascist propaganda, fear quickly passes. More and more people come out into the streets, offer their services, and try to demonstrate loyalty to the Red Army.”

The modesty and prudence of German women made a particularly strong impression on Soviet soldiers. In this context the recollection of mortar man N. A. Orlov is revealing. He was struck by the behavior of German women in the spring of 1945: “In our mortar battalion no one killed civilian Germans. Our special-section officer was a Germanophile. If a killing had occurred, command would have reacted quickly. As for violence against German women, I think some people exaggerate it. I remember another case. In one German town we were quartered in houses. A Frau of about forty-five appeared and asked, ‘Where is the commandant?’ She was taken to Marchenko. She claimed to be responsible for the district and had gathered twenty German women for the sexual (!) servicing of Russian soldiers. Marchenko understood German, and I translated what she said for political officer Dolgoborodov. The reaction was angry and humiliating. The German woman was taken away together with her ‘detachment,’ ready for service. In general, German obedience amazed us. We had expected partisan warfare and sabotage. But for Germans, order—Ordnung—is above everything. If you are the victor, they stand on their hind legs before you, consciously, not under coercion. That is their psychology...”

David Samoylov described a similar case in his wartime notes: “At Arendsfeld, where we had just settled, a group of women with children appeared. They were led by a German woman of about fifty, Frau Friedrich. She said that she represented the civilian population and asked us to register the remaining residents. We replied that this could be done after the commandant’s office arrived.

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

“The civilians supported her words with shouts and tears. Not knowing what to do, I suggested that they settle in the basement of the house where we were staying. They calmed down, went downstairs, and waited there for the authorities.

“‘Herr Commissar,’ Frau Friedrich said to me—I was wearing a leather jacket—‘we understand that the soldiers have needs. They are prepared,’ she continued, ‘to provide several young women...’

“I did not continue the conversation with her.”

On May 2, 1945, Vladimir Bogomolov wrote in his diary: “We enter one of the surviving houses. Silence like a grave. We knock and ask them to open. In the corridor there is whispering and muffled, agitated talk. At last the door opens. Several women are huddled together, bowing low; their faces show fear, humiliation, submission. German women are afraid of us. They had been told that Soviet soldiers, especially Asians, would rape and kill them. There is fear and hatred on their faces. Yet sometimes it seems that they even like being defeated—their behavior is obliging, their smiles sweet, their words affectionate. They said that one soldier entered a German apartment, asked for a drink, and the German woman lay down on the sofa and took off her stockings.”

“All German women are depraved. They have nothing against sleeping with us”—this opinion became widespread in the Red Army. It was reinforced by numerous examples and, as military doctors soon discovered, had dangerous consequences.

An order of the Military Council of the 1st Belorussian Front, No. 00343/Sh of April 15, 1945, stated: “During the troops’ stay on enemy territory, the number of venereal diseases increased sharply. Investigation showed that syphilis and gonorrhea were widespread among the Germans. Before retreating, and also in territory occupied by us, the German side resorted to deliberately infecting women in order to create centers for spreading disease among Red Army soldiers.”

On April 26, 1945, the Military Council of the 47th Army reported: “...In March, the number of venereal diseases among servicemen increased fourfold compared with February. In the districts examined, 8–15 percent of the female population is infected. Cases are known in which German women with venereal diseases were deliberately left behind in order to infect our soldiers.”

In implementation of the Military Council of the 1st Belorussian Front’s Resolution No. 056 of April 18, 1945, on the prevention of venereal disease in the troops, the 33rd Army issued the following notice:

“Comrade servicemen!

“You are being deceived by German women whose husbands wandered through all the brothels of Europe, became infected, and infected German women.

“Before you are German women whom the enemy has deliberately left behind to spread venereal diseases and thereby harm Red Army soldiers.

“We must understand that victory over the enemy is near and that you will soon return to your families.

“How will a man who has become a carrier of an infectious disease feel when returning to his loved ones?

“Can we, warriors of the heroic Red Army, become a source of infection for our country? No! The moral image of a Red Army soldier must be as pure as the image of his Motherland and his family!”

Even the memoirs of Lev Kopelev, who angrily described violence and looting by Soviet troops in East Prussia, contain lines reflecting another side of relations with the local population: wives and daughters in exchange for a loaf of bread. His words are corroborated by numerous sources.

Vladimir Gelfand described in his diary an encounter with a German girl. The entry, dated October 26, 1945, was written after the war but is highly revealing: “I wanted to enjoy the caresses of pretty Margo. I expected more but did not dare to demand or insist. The girl’s mother was pleased with me. Of course she was! I had brought sweets, butter, sausage, expensive German cigarettes—enough to give me, in her eyes, the complete right to do whatever I wanted with her daughter, and the mother would not say a word against it. Food is more precious than life now, especially the life of a young and sensual woman like sweet Margo.”

Interesting diary notes were left by Australian war correspondent Osmar White, who served in Europe in 1944–1945 alongside George Patton’s U.S. Third Army. In May 1945, only a few days after the fighting ended, he wrote from Berlin: “I made a tour of the night cabarets, beginning with the Femina near Potsdamer Platz. The evening was warm and damp. The air was saturated with the smell of sewage and decaying bodies. The façade of the Femina was decorated with futuristic pictures of naked women and advertisements in four languages. The ballroom and restaurant were full of Russian, British, and American officers escorting or hunting women. A bottle of wine cost twenty-five dollars, a horse-meat hamburger with potatoes ten dollars, a packet of American cigarettes twenty dollars. The cheeks of Berlin women were rouged and their lips painted as if Hitler had won the war. Many wore silk stockings. The hostess opened the evening by speaking in German, Russian, English, and French. This provoked a smirk from a Russian artillery captain sitting nearby. He leaned over and said to me in decent English, ‘Such a rapid transition from national to international! RAF bombs are the best teachers, aren’t they?’”

The general image of European women that formed among Red Army soldiers was of women who were elegant and well groomed, especially in contrast with Soviet women exhausted by the war, but also accessible, selfish, sexually loose, or cowardly submissive. Yugoslav and Bulgarian women were regarded as exceptions. Strict and ascetic Yugoslav female partisans were seen as comrades in arms and considered untouchable. Given the discipline and harsh morals of the Yugoslav army, Soviet soldiers believed that female partisans themselves despised women who voluntarily became intimate with servicemen. Boris Slutsky recalled Bulgarian women: “...After the self-satisfaction of Ukrainian women and Romanian looseness, the severe inaccessibility of Bulgarian women shocked our men. No one boasted of ‘victories.’ It was the only country where officers taking walks were accompanied by men rather than women. Later Bulgarians proudly said, ‘The Russians will return to Bulgaria for brides—the only women in the world who have remained pure and untouched.’”

Czech women also made a pleasant impression, sincerely welcoming their Soviet liberators. Embarrassed tank crews climbing out of dirty vehicles decorated with flowers said among themselves: “That is some bride for cleaning a tank. And look how the girls have dressed up. Good people. We have not met such sincere people for a long time...” Czech hospitality and friendliness were genuine. Boris Polevoy wrote on May 11, 1945, that a Prague tram driver said to the approving laughter of townspeople: “If it were possible, I would kiss every soldier and officer of the Red Army for the liberation of Prague.”

In other countries entered by the victorious army, however, women were often treated without respect. “In Europe, the women surrendered first,” Slutsky wrote. “I was always struck, embarrassed, and bewildered by the shameful ease with which relationships began. Respectable women, even those who wanted nothing in return, seemed like prostitutes: the haste, the lack of interest in the motives driving a man toward intimacy. Like people who know only three obscene words from the entire vocabulary of love poetry, they reduced everything to a few mechanical movements, provoking disgust even among our most cynical officers...” What restrained men from such relations was often not so much ethics as fear of infection, public disgrace, or pregnancy. Under occupation, “general corruption concealed and made invisible individual female promiscuity, turning it into something shameful.”

Yet despite prohibitions and harsh orders from Soviet command, other factors also encouraged the spread of “international love”: women’s curiosity about “exotic” lovers and the unprecedented generosity of Russians. Sympathy, generosity, and attention, it was said, distinguished them favorably from restrained and thrifty European men.

Junior Lieutenant Daniil Zlatkin, who found himself on the Danish island of Bornholm at the end of the war, later spoke in an interview about the mutual curiosity of Russian men and European women: “We had not seen women, and we needed to... And when we arrived in Denmark... everything was free, please. They wanted to test, experience, try a Russian man—what is he like, what is he really like? And apparently it turned out better than with the Danes. Why? We were unselfish and kind... I gave away half a table of boxes of chocolates; I gave a woman I did not know one hundred roses... for her birthday...”

Nevertheless, because of the rigid position of the Soviet leadership, serious relationships or marriage with foreign women remained almost impossible. A resolution of the Military Council of the 4th Ukrainian Front dated April 12, 1945, stated: “1. Explain to all officers and personnel of the front that marriage to foreign women is illegal and strictly prohibited. 2. Immediately report to command all cases in which servicemen marry foreign women, as well as relations with hostile elements of foreign states, so that those responsible may be held accountable for loss of vigilance and violation of Soviet law.”

A similar directive from the Political Directorate of the 1st Belorussian Front dated April 14, 1945, emphasized: “According to information from the Main Personnel Directorate, the Center continues to receive applications from officers of the active army asking permission to marry women who are citizens of foreign states—Polish, Bulgarian, Czech women, and others. Such cases must be viewed as a blunting of political vigilance and a weakening of patriotic feeling. Political and educational work must explain especially clearly that such actions by officers of the Red Army are inadmissible. Officers who do not understand the hopelessness of such marriages must have their inadvisability explained to them, up to and including a direct prohibition. Not a single case must be permitted.”

European women themselves had no illusions about the intentions of their admirers. Boris Slutsky wrote: “At the beginning of 1945 even the most naive Hungarian peasant women no longer believed our promises. European women already knew that we were forbidden to marry foreigners and suspected that there was a similar rule against appearing together in restaurants, cinemas, and the like. This did not prevent them from loving our Don Juans, but it gave these relationships a purely bodily, ‘fleshly’ character.”

Overall, it must be acknowledged that the image of European women formed in the minds of Red Army soldiers in 1944–1945 was, with rare exceptions, very far from the suffering, shackled woman on the poster “Europe Will Be Free!” Instead, soldiers’ stories, letters, and diaries were dominated by themes of seduction, physical intimacy, and contrast with Soviet women, who were exhausted by war and hardened by life in the rear or at the front. The image of the European woman became many-sided: romanticized Czech beauties, Bulgarian women, and Yugoslav female partisans at one extreme; at the other, sharply negative images of “loose” French women, “cynical” German women, “cowardly” Hungarian women, or “cunning” Polish women.

The article’s final observation stresses that soldiers’ perceptions of European women were shaped less by conscious analysis than by experiences of contrast: between war and peace, between female vulnerability and sexual availability, and between cultural expectation and personal experience.

Notes and sources

Boris Slutsky, Wartime Notes: Poems and Ballads, St. Petersburg, 2000, p. 174; ibid., pp. 46–48; Fyodor M. Smolnikov, We Are at War! A Front-Line Soldier’s Diary. Letters from the Front, Moscow, 2000, pp. 228–229; Slutsky, cited work, pp. 110, 107, 177; Grigory Chukhray, My War, Moscow: Algorithm, 2001, pp. 258–259; Alexander Rodin, “Three Thousand Kilometers in the Saddle,” in Diaries, Moscow, 2000, p. 127; David Samoylov, “People of One Variant. From the War Archives,” Aurora, 1990, no. 2, pp. 67, 70–71; Vladimir N. Gelfand, Diaries 1941–1946; Rodin, cited work, pp. 110, 122–123; Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, Fond 372, inventory 6570, file 76, leaf 86; Slutsky, cited work, pp. 125, 127–128; Vladimir O. Bogomolov, Germany, Berlin. A Work of 1945, in My Life, or Did I Dream of You?, Our Contemporary, nos. 10–12, 2005 and no. 1, 2006; Lev Kopelev, To Be Preserved Forever, book 1, parts 1–4, Moscow: Terra, 2004, chapter 11; Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History, Fond 17, inventory 125, file 321, leaves 10–12; interview with N. A. Orlov on the I Remember project; Samoylov, cited work, p. 88; Bogomolov, cited work; political report on instructions delivered to personnel of the 185th Rifle Division, April 20, 1945, no. 11072; State Archive of the Russian Federation, Fond R-9401, inventory 2, file 96, leaf 203; Kopelev, cited work, chapter 12; Gelfand, cited work; Osmar White, The Road to Victory: Eyewitness Accounts of Germany 1945, Cambridge University Press, 2003; Slutsky, cited work, pp. 99 and 71; Boris Polevoy, “The Liberation of Prague,” in From the Soviet Information Bureau: Journalism and Wartime Essays, 1941–1945, vol. 2, 1943–1945, Moscow: APN, 1982, p. 439 and pp. 177–180; interview with D. F. Zlatkin, June 16, 1997, personal archive; Bogomolov, cited work; Slutsky, cited work, pp. 180–181.

The article was prepared under project No. 11-01-00363a with financial support from the Russian Humanitarian Science Foundation. Its design used the 1944 Soviet poster “Europe Will Be Free!” by artist V. Koretsky.

Women Captured by the Germans: How the Nazis Abused Soviet Female Prisoners

The Second World War swept over humanity like a steamroller. Millions were killed, and still more lives and destinies were maimed. Every opposing side committed truly monstrous acts and justified them by the conditions of war.

Warning: the material in this selection may be disturbing or shocking.

The Nazis were especially notorious in this respect, even without taking the Holocaust into account. There are many accounts of the actions of German soldiers—some supported by documentary evidence and others openly falsified.

One high-ranking German officer recalled the instructions he had received. Significantly, as far as female Red Army personnel were concerned, there was only one order: “Shoot them.”

Although most were indeed shot, among the dead one often found women in Red Army uniform—soldiers, nurses, or orderlies—whose bodies bore clear signs of brutal torture.

Residents of the village of Smaglevka, for example, say that the Hitlerites found a girl who was badly wounded. Despite her condition, they took her away, stripped her, and shot her.

Before her death, however, she was tortured for a long time for their amusement. Her entire body was turned into a bloody mass. The Nazis did the same to female partisans. They could be stripped and kept in the cold for a long time before execution.

Female prisoners were, of course, repeatedly subjected to sexual violence.

While senior German officers were forbidden intimate relations with prisoners, ordinary soldiers had considerably more freedom in this respect.

If a girl did not die after being abused by an entire company, she might simply be shot.

Conditions in concentration camps were even more horrifying. If a girl was unlucky and no high-ranking camp official took her into his service, there was practically nothing to protect her from violence.

From this standpoint, Camp No. 337 was considered one of the most brutal places. Prisoners were kept naked in the frost for hours, a hundred at a time were driven into barracks, and those unable to work were killed immediately. Around seven hundred prisoners of war were said to die each day in the Stalag.

Women were tortured in the same way as men and sometimes even more cruelly. In their brutality, Nazi methods of torture could have made medieval inquisitors envious.

Soviet soldiers understood very well what happened in concentration camps and how dangerous it was to be captured. That was why so few wanted to surrender. They fought to the end—to death itself, which in those terrible years so often proved the only victor.

May all those who died in the war be remembered with honor.

The image of the Soviet woman in the minds of the German occupiers had been formed under the influence of Nazi propaganda. It taught that the immense eastern territories were populated by immoral, half-savage women without intelligence and without any understanding of human virtues.

After crossing the border of the Soviet Union, however, German servicemen were forced to acknowledge that the Party’s stereotypes did not correspond to reality.

Among the qualities of Soviet women that surprised Germans most were compassion and an absence of hatred toward enemy soldiers.

Major Kühner’s front-line notes contain episodes about peasant women who, despite difficult lives and general grief, did not become embittered and shared their last food with German soldiers in need. He wrote: “When we become thirsty during marches, we go into their huts and they give us milk.” Such episodes, he said, placed the occupiers in an ethically bewildering position.

Chaplain Kieler, who served with a medical unit, once found himself in the home of a seventy-seven-year-old grandmother named Alexandra. Her sincere care moved him deeply and provoked almost metaphysical reflection: “She knows that we are her enemies, yet she knits socks for me... It seems that hostility is foreign to her. These poor people share their last things with us. Do they do it from fear, from an innate capacity for self-sacrifice, or simply from kindness?”

Kühner wrote in amazement about the maternal instinct of Russian women: “How often I saw Russian peasant women mourning wounded German soldiers as if they were sons they themselves had borne.”

The high moral standards of Soviet women came as a genuine shock to German soldiers. The fascist propaganda image of a sexually loose eastern woman proved false and without foundation.

A Wehrmacht soldier named Michels observed: “What were we told about Russian women? And what did we actually see? I think there can hardly be a German soldier who has been to Russia and did not learn to respect and value the Russian woman.”

Women deported from occupied Soviet territories for forced labor in Germany were immediately sent for medical examinations, which produced unexpected results.

A medical orderly named Eirich recorded a military doctor’s words in his notebook: “He was astonished: 99 percent of Russian girls between eighteen and thirty-five were virgins. He even said that in Orel it would have been impossible to find girls for a brothel.”

Similar information came from the management of enterprises where Russian girls worked. At a factory in Wolfen, for example, the observation was made: “It appears that Russian men give women proper consideration—this clearly affects the moral level of society.”

The writer Ernst Jünger, who served in the German army, confirmed the truth of these observations. After hearing staff doctor von Grevenitz admit that the myth of the “sexual looseness of eastern women” was completely untenable, Jünger acknowledged that his own impressions had been correct. He wrote of a “radiance of purity surrounding the faces of Russian girls.” That light, he said, was not an active display of virtue but resembled reflected moonlight—soft, yet powerful in its effect.

German Panzer General Leo Geyr von Schweppenburg stressed in his memoirs the physical endurance and strength of Russian women. These qualities did not go unnoticed by the German leadership, which decided to use women deported from occupied Soviet territories as domestic servants in the homes of Nazi Party members.

The text itself then contains the line: “If you want a continuation, I am ready to process all the remaining text according to the same principle.”

A housemaid’s duties included thorough cleaning of the apartment, which irritated the spoiled German Frau and, the author mockingly adds, had a harmful effect on her precious health.

Cleanliness

One reason Soviet women were readily employed as domestic workers was their remarkable neatness. Germans entering the rather modest homes of Soviet civilians were astonished by their cleanliness, orderliness, and decoration shaped by folk taste.

Fascist soldiers who expected to encounter barbarians were startled by the appearance and hygiene habits of Soviet women. One official from the Dortmund health department remarked: “I was struck by the good appearance of the women from the East. What surprised me most were their teeth—I did not meet a single Russian woman with bad teeth. Unlike us Germans, they apparently pay serious attention to this.”

A priest named Franz, who by virtue of his calling was not supposed to look at women through a man’s eyes, observed more cautiously: “As far as Russian women are concerned, if one may put it that way, I had the impression that through their special inner strength they keep even those Russians who might be regarded as barbarians under moral control.”

Family Bonds

The false picture created by fascist propaganda of the supposed destruction of the family as an institution in the Soviet Union did not survive contact with reality.

From letters written by German soldiers at the front, their relatives learned that Soviet women were not the soulless creatures depicted by propagandists but affectionate and caring daughters, mothers, wives, and grandmothers. Moreover, the warmth and solidarity of family relationships in the USSR aroused envy in many observers. Whenever possible, relatives tried to maintain contact and help one another.

Piety

Despite the state’s official anti-religious policy, the Nazis were deeply surprised by the religious faith of Soviet women who had managed to preserve an inner bond with God. Moving from village to village, German soldiers often found functioning churches and monasteries where services continued.

In his memoirs Major Kühner describes two peasant women whom he found praying fervently among the ruins of a church burned by the Germans.

The occupiers were especially astonished by Soviet female prisoners of war who refused to work on church holidays. In some camps the guards showed understanding toward their religious feelings, but there were also cases in which such “disobedience” brought a death sentence.