Russian Seven — selected articles

• How German Women’s Attitudes Toward Red Army Soldiers and Allied Soldiers Differed — 29/11/18
• Where Were the Worst Conditions of Captivity for Female Service Members in the Second World War? — 06/02/19
• Female Service Members in the Second World War: What Awaited Them in Captivity — 26/04/19
• “What Will You Do When the Russians Come?”: What Women of the Third Reich Were Preparing For — 14/05/19
• “No Mercy”: How Female Service Members Were Held in Captivity During the Second World War — 01/07/19
• “Women in Captivity”: How They Were Held During the Second World War — 09/09/19
• What Red Army Soldiers Did with Captured Women Who Had Fought for Hitler — 07/11/19
• Red Army Soldiers and Allied Soldiers: How German Women Treated Them — 30/11/20
• How Red Army Soldiers Treated Captured German Women — 10/01/21
• How German Women’s Attitude Toward Red Army Soldiers Changed in 1945 — 27/06/21
• Which Penal Soldiers in the Red Army Were Called “SS Men” — 13/11/21
• Reprisal Against the Executioners in Odesa: How Red Army Soldiers Took Revenge on Policemen After the City Was Liberated — 04/09/22

How German Women’s Attitudes Toward Red Army Soldiers and Allied Soldiers Differed

29/11/2018

At the beginning of 1945, the Red Army and the Allied forces crossed the German border from opposite directions in order finally to liberate Europe from Nazism. Yet the local population reacted differently to the victors.

Unlike the Allied armies, the Red Army entered a Germany that had already been prepared by Goebbels’s propaganda. German media circulated stories about savage hordes from the East supposedly capable only of rape, robbery, and murder. Soviet troops had barely crossed the borders of East Prussia when Goebbels announced numerous cases in towns and villages of German women and girls between the ages of ten and seventy being raped.

It is therefore unsurprising that, on the eve of the Soviet troops’ arrival, a considerable part of Germany’s population was gripped by panic. This sometimes led to suicide. According to the statistical collection Berlin in Figures, about 7,000 people took their own lives in the German capital in the spring of 1945, most of them women.

Goebbels’s propaganda naturally hurried to place all responsibility for the wave of suicides on the Red Army. Postwar research into the subject, however, showed that in the overwhelming majority of cases the immediate cause was not violence by Soviet soldiers but rumors of atrocities that they were allegedly committing. German historians, moreover, cite many cases in which Red Army soldiers helped local residents and even prevented suicide attempts, pulling mothers and their children out of rivers when they tried to drown themselves. Werner Naumann, an aide to Goebbels, later confirmed that German propaganda itself had driven German women toward suicide.

According to eyewitness recollections, many German women expected violence from Red Army soldiers and saw themselves as booty left to the mercy of the victors. SS veteran Manfred Diener, for example, recalled a conversation with a woman in Vienna. “What will you do when the Russians come?” he asked. “Well, we’ll spread our legs,” she replied.

As British historian Antony Beevor observed, the image of the Soviet soldier was frightening and repellent to many German women:

“The long columns of Soviet troops entering East Prussia in January 1945 represented an unusual mixture of modernity and the Middle Ages: tank crews in black leather helmets, Cossacks on shaggy horses, followed by a second echelon made up of carts.”

Soviet commanders did not deny that sexual violence against German women occurred, but they maintained that such incidents were investigated and the perpetrators punished severely. One story tells of a rifle-battalion commander who personally shot a lieutenant who had allegedly taken part in a gang rape together with his subordinates.

According to Soviet veterans, violence was often unnecessary because there were enough German women offering sexual services. The frontline poet David Samoilov described one such case. In Arendsfeld a group of women came under his unit’s control and, while waiting to be registered, were temporarily placed in a cellar. The eldest of them, Frau Friedrich, suddenly approached Samoilov and said:

“Herr Commissar, we understand that soldiers have small needs. They are prepared to provide several younger women for them...”

Samoilov says he did not continue the conversation.

German women understood that, given the atrocities committed by their compatriots in the occupied territories of the USSR, they could hardly expect indulgence from Soviet soldiers. Elisabeth Schmeer, a Berlin woman whose son served in the SS, knew that the Russians had reasons for revenge. If the Red Army came, she said, they would not “sprinkle us with rose oil.” Yet her actual encounter with Soviet soldiers changed her opinion:

“It turned out completely differently. The victors give us more food than the previous government did. It is difficult for us to understand. Apparently only Russians are capable of such humanity.”

Germany’s female population discovered that the Russians were not only capable of fighting but could also be generous. Writer Vladimir Gelfand, describing his courtship of a German girl, noted that her mother was pleased with him as a suitor:

“And why wouldn’t she be? On the altar of trust and goodwill from the family I laid sweets and butter, sausage, expensive German cigarettes.”

Gelfand observed that food was worth far more to Germans at that moment than life itself, “even the life of such a young and sweet sensual creature as the delicate beauty Margot.”

Some Soviet soldiers became so attached to their German lovers that they had no intention of going home. The command had considerable difficulty returning some deserters to the USSR. Apparently, the German women were not particularly eager to part with their gallant Russian admirers either.

At first German women viewed Allied soldiers—Americans, British, and French—differently from Red Army men, because the Allies represented the “civilized West” rather than the “barbaric East.” Fräuleins and Fraus spoke highly of liberators who treated them to chewing gum and gave them nylon stockings. For a long time there was a widespread belief that German women were very willing to jump into bed with an American serviceman.

The charm wore off as German women encountered acts of violence by Allied servicemen—not violence invented by Goebbels’s propaganda but real violence. Lutheran pastor Sylvester Michelfelder described in his memoirs how large groups of American and British soldiers raped women and girls in full view of others and forced them to walk naked in public.

German history professor Miriam Gebhardt estimates that about 190,000 German women were raped by Americans and roughly 45,000 each by British and French soldiers. She does not provide a figure for violence by Soviet soldiers, but regards the figure of two million widely circulated in Western historiography as greatly exaggerated.

In the Allied armies rape did not carry a punishment as severe as the Soviet penalty of execution, though aggravated sexual violence could result in life imprisonment. Senior officers, however, often tried to smooth over such incidents. Why discredit themselves in the eyes of world public opinion?

The American command even seems to have encouraged sexual contacts between its servicemen and German women. According to Time magazine of September 17, 1945, as many as 50 million condoms a month were being shipped from across the Atlantic to Germany.

As with Soviet servicemen, German women often entered into sexual relationships with Allied soldiers in order to obtain food for themselves and their relatives. The London publication Weekly Review wrote on October 25, 1945:

“Homeless young girls openly offer themselves for food or a night’s lodging... It is all very simple: they have only one thing left to sell, and they sell it.”

Taras Repin

Where Were the Worst Conditions of Captivity for Female Service Members in the Second World War?

06/02/2019

Women serving in the armed forces who were captured during the Great Patriotic War were often subjected to far greater abuse and torment than men, sometimes immediately before inevitable death. Yet more than seventy years after the end of the Second World War, historians have still not established even the approximate scale of these atrocities. Documentary evidence concerning the conditions in which female military prisoners were held either did not survive or remains classified.

How Red Army soldiers treated captured “military Fraus”

There is in fact not much reliable information about what happened to women who served on the side of the Wehrmacht, the SS, and other formations of Hitler’s armed forces. This is especially so because women in Hitler’s forces officially received full military status only at the end of August 1944; until then, in all branches they were formally regarded merely as “civilian employees attached to the army.”

It must also be taken into account that after the war thousands of German women—as well as women of other nationalities living in countries that had actively assisted Hitler and were subsequently liberated by the Red Army—were interned in the USSR. They worked in Gulag camps alongside Soviet prisoners. Some percentage of them may have been former service members, but the subject has still not been sufficiently studied.

The diary of Soviet combat officer Vladimir Gelfand, a participant in the storming of Berlin who died in Dnipropetrovsk in the early 1980s, has long been published. As a twenty-two-year-old lieutenant and direct participant in the fighting, Gelfand described an incident that occurred on the Oder front in the early spring of 1945. Soviet troops completely defeated a women’s battalion that had attacked them—women who called themselves “avengers for husbands killed at the front.” Ordinary Red Army soldiers wanted to kill the captured German women in a “perverted manner,” but in the end the captured submachine-gunners were sorted into three categories. The first consisted of... Russians; the second of officers’ wives and other female relatives of Hitler’s servicemen who proudly declared those relationships; the third of young unmarried women. Those in the third group were taken by individual soldiers “to their beds” (their later fate is not reported), while the others—the Russians first of all—were shot, without torture or abuse.

...and how Hitler’s forces treated Soviet women in uniform

The conditions in which female Red Army prisoners of war were held are now much better documented. Numerous memoirs describe atrocities committed by Nazis and their collaborators both against prisoners who had not yet reached concentration camps—for example in the recollections of divisional interpreter Pavel Rafes and in the archives of Yad Vashem—and against women held in concentration camps in Germany and in countries allied with the Nazis.

Women were raped and tortured before being killed simply because they wore military uniforms. In camps they also suffered no less than men for basic physiological reasons: there were no elementary conditions for hygiene and no possibility of changing underwear. Jewish women and partisans were shot immediately. In camps holding female POWs, atrocities were committed not only by Nazis but also by auxiliary policemen and by volunteer female helpers recruited from among the prisoners themselves.

In Japanese camps

Japan has still not fully declassified the archives relating to the dozens of concentration camps that operated on its territory during the Second World War. The facility best known for its atrocities, thanks to the so-called Khabarovsk Trial of 1949, was Unit 731. During the war it caused the deaths of about 3,000 people, though this is only an estimate and no exact figure exists. Russian women were among the victims of monstrous experiments involving biological weapons, methods of killing comparable to—and in cruelty exceeding—the experiments of Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, and other atrocities. Elena Masyuk’s documentary Death Conveyor (Unit 731) names one such woman, tortured to death together with her four-year-old daughter.

How many Soviet female service members were among the experimental “logs,” as Unit 731’s executioners called their prisoners, is unknown. The total number of Russian prisoners is also unknown; historians estimate that they may have made up about one third of all inmates.

...and in American captivity

A soldier in Eisenhower’s army, Martin Brash, described one example of the conditions in which German women in military service were held after being captured by Americans in 1945. Like the other prisoners, the women were kept in the Andernach camp in the open air, though in an enclosure separated from the men. They were poorly fed, as were the other prisoners; inmates ate grass, contracted dysentery, and died in large numbers.

Brash explained his command’s treatment of the prisoners by saying that by then the Americans had already seen the horrors of Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and other Nazi camps, which newspapers were reporting every day. The Americans had food in abundance; it was simply deliberately withheld from the prisoners because the Americans had come to hate Germans as a nation.

Female Service Members in the Second World War: What Awaited Them in Captivity

26/04/2019

Women serving in the armed forces who were captured during the Great Patriotic War were often subjected to far greater abuse and torment than men, sometimes immediately before inevitable death. Yet more than seventy years after the end of the Second World War, historians have still not established even the approximate scale of these atrocities. Documentary evidence concerning the conditions in which female military prisoners were held either did not survive or remains classified.

There is in fact not much reliable information about what happened to women who served on the side of the Wehrmacht, the SS, and other formations of Hitler’s armed forces, especially because women in Hitler’s forces officially received full military status only at the end of August 1944. Until then, in all branches they were formally considered merely “civilian employees attached to the army.”

It must also be taken into account that after the war thousands of German women, as well as women of other nationalities living in states that had actively assisted Hitler and were subsequently liberated by the Red Army, were interned in the USSR. They worked in Gulag camps alongside Soviet prisoners. Some percentage may have been former service members, but this issue has still not been sufficiently studied.

The published diary of Soviet combat officer Vladimir Gelfand, a participant in the storming of Berlin who died in Dnipropetrovsk in the early 1980s, contains an episode from the Oder front in early spring 1945. The twenty-two-year-old lieutenant wrote that Soviet troops completely defeated a women’s battalion that attacked them—women who called themselves “avengers for husbands killed at the front.” Ordinary Red Army soldiers wanted to kill the captured German women in a “perverted manner,” but the captured submachine-gunners were eventually sorted into three categories: first, Russians; second, officers’ wives and other female relatives of Hitler’s servicemen who proudly announced those ties; third, young unmarried women. The young women were released, while the others—the Russians first of all—were shot, without torture or abuse.

The conditions in which female Red Army prisoners of war were held are relatively well documented today. Numerous memoirs describe atrocities committed by Nazis and their collaborators both against prisoners who never reached concentration camps and against those held in camps in Germany and in countries allied with the Nazis. Sources include the recollections of divisional interpreter Pavel Rafes and the archives of Yad Vashem.

Women were raped and tortured before being killed simply because they wore military uniforms. In camps they also suffered no less than men for basic physiological reasons: there were no elementary facilities for hygiene and no opportunity to change underwear. Jewish women and partisans were shot immediately. In fascist camps holding female prisoners of war, atrocities were committed not only by Nazis but also by auxiliary policemen and by volunteer female helpers recruited from the prisoners themselves.

Japan has still not fully declassified the archives relating to the dozens of concentration camps that operated on its territory during the Second World War. The facility best known for its atrocities, thanks to the so-called Khabarovsk Trial of 1949, was Unit 731. It caused the deaths of about 3,000 people during the war, though that is only an estimate. Russian women were among the victims of monstrous experiments with biological weapons, killing methods comparable to—and even more brutal than—the experiments of Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, and other atrocities. Elena Masyuk’s documentary Death Conveyor (Unit 731) names one such woman, tortured to death together with her four-year-old daughter.

How many Soviet female service members were among the experimental “logs,” as Unit 731’s executioners called the prisoners, is unknown, as is the total number of Russian prisoners. Historians estimate that Russians may have made up roughly one third of the inmates.

A soldier in Eisenhower’s army, Martin Brash, described one example of the conditions in which German women in military service were held after being captured by Americans in 1945. Like other prisoners, the women were kept at the Andernach camp in the open air, though in a separate enclosure from the men. They were poorly fed, prisoners ate grass, contracted dysentery, and died in large numbers.

Brash explained his command’s treatment of the prisoners by saying that by then the Americans had already seen the horrors of Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and other Nazi camps, which newspapers reported every day. The Americans had food in abundance; they simply deliberately refused to give it to the prisoners because they had come to hate Germans as a nation.

“What Will You Do When the Russians Come?”: What Women of the Third Reich Were Preparing For

14/05/2019

At the beginning of 1945, the Red Army and Allied forces crossed the German border from opposite directions in order finally to liberate Europe from Nazism. Yet the local population reacted differently to the victors.

Unlike the Allied armies, the Red Army entered a Germany that had already been prepared by Goebbels’s propaganda. German media spread stories about savage hordes from the East supposedly capable only of rape, robbery, and murder. Soviet troops had barely crossed the borders of East Prussia when Goebbels announced numerous cases of German women and girls between the ages of ten and seventy being raped in towns and villages.

It is therefore unsurprising that much of the German population was seized by panic before the Soviet troops arrived. This sometimes led to suicide. According to Berlin in Figures, about 7,000 people took their own lives in the German capital in the spring of 1945, most of them women.

Goebbels’s propaganda naturally blamed the Red Army for the mass suicides, but postwar studies concluded that in the overwhelming majority of cases the immediate cause was not violence by Soviet soldiers but rumors of atrocities they were allegedly committing. German historians also cite many examples of Red Army soldiers helping local residents and even preventing suicides, pulling mothers and their children out of rivers after they tried to drown themselves. After the war, Goebbels aide Werner Naumann confirmed that German propaganda itself had driven German women toward suicide.

According to eyewitness recollections, many German women expected violence from Red Army soldiers and perceived themselves as booty left to the victors. SS veteran Manfred Diener recalled asking a Viennese woman, “What will you do when the Russians come?” She answered, “Well, we’ll spread our legs.”

British historian Antony Beevor observed that the image of the Soviet soldier was frightening and repellent to many German women:

“The long columns of Soviet troops entering East Prussia in January 1945 represented an unusual mixture of modernity and the Middle Ages: tank crews in black leather helmets, Cossacks on shaggy horses, followed by a second echelon made up of carts.”

Soviet commanders did not deny that sexual violence against German women occurred, but maintained that such incidents were investigated and the perpetrators severely punished. One story tells of a rifle-battalion commander who personally shot a lieutenant who allegedly participated in a gang rape with his subordinates.

According to Soviet veterans, violence was often unnecessary because there were enough German women offering sexual services. The frontline poet David Samoilov described one such incident. In Arendsfeld a group of women came under his unit’s control and, while awaiting registration, were temporarily placed in a cellar. The eldest, Frau Friedrich, approached Samoilov and said:

“Herr Commissar, we understand that soldiers have small needs. They are prepared to provide several younger women for them...”

Samoilov says he ended the conversation there.

Germany’s female population discovered that the Russians were not only capable of fighting but could also be generous. Vladimir Gelfand, describing his courtship of a German girl, wrote that her mother was pleased with him as a suitor:

“And why wouldn’t she be? On the altar of trust and goodwill from the family I laid sweets and butter, sausage, expensive German cigarettes.”

Gelfand noted that food was worth far more to Germans at that moment than life itself, “even the life of such a young and sweet sensual creature as the delicate beauty Margot.”

Some Soviet soldiers became so close to their German lovers that they did not intend to return home. The command had considerable difficulty returning some deserters to the USSR. Apparently, the German women did not especially want to part from their gallant Russian admirers either.

At first German women viewed Allied soldiers—Americans, British, and French—differently from Red Army men, because they represented the “civilized West” rather than the “barbaric East.” Fräuleins and Fraus spoke highly of liberators who gave them chewing gum and nylon stockings. For a long time there was a widespread belief that German women willingly jumped into bed with American servicemen.

The charm wore off when German women encountered actual sexual violence by Allied soldiers rather than violence invented by Goebbels’s propaganda. Lutheran pastor Sylvester Michelfelder described in his memoirs how large groups of American and British servicemen raped women and girls in full view of others and forced them to walk naked in public.

German history professor Miriam Gebhardt estimates that about 190,000 German women were raped by Americans and around 45,000 each by British and French soldiers. She does not provide a figure for Soviet soldiers, but regards the figure of two million widely circulated in Western historiography as greatly exaggerated.

In the Allied armies rape did not carry a punishment as severe as the Soviet penalty of execution, although aggravated rape could result in life imprisonment. Senior officers, however, often tried to smooth over such incidents. Why discredit themselves in the eyes of world public opinion?

The American command even appears to have encouraged sexual contacts between its servicemen and German women. According to Time magazine of September 17, 1945, as many as 50 million condoms a month were shipped from overseas to Germany.

As with Soviet servicemen, German women often entered into sexual relationships with Allied soldiers to obtain food for themselves and their families. The London publication Weekly Review wrote on October 25, 1945:

“Homeless young girls openly offer themselves for food or a night’s lodging... It is all very simple: they have only one thing left to sell, and they sell it.”

Taras Repin

“No Mercy”: How Female Service Members Were Held in Captivity During the Second World War

01/07/2019

Women serving in the armed forces who were captured during the Great Patriotic War were often subjected to far greater abuse and torment than men, sometimes immediately before inevitable death. Yet more than seventy years after the end of the Second World War, historians have still not established even the approximate scale of these atrocities. Documentary evidence concerning the conditions in which female military prisoners were held either did not survive or remains classified.

How Red Army soldiers treated captured “military Fraus”

There is not much reliable information about what happened to women who served on the side of the Wehrmacht, the SS, and other formations of Hitler’s armed forces. This is especially so because women in Hitler’s forces officially received full military status only at the end of August 1944; until then they were formally considered merely “civilian employees attached to the army.”

It must also be borne in mind that after the war thousands of German women, as well as women of other nationalities living in states that had actively assisted Hitler and were then liberated by the Red Army, were interned in the USSR. They worked in Gulag camps alongside Soviet prisoners. Some may have been former service members, but this question has still not been sufficiently studied.

The published diary of Vladimir Gelfand, a Soviet combat officer who took part in the storming of Berlin and died in Dnipropetrovsk in the early 1980s, contains an episode from the Oder front in early spring 1945. The twenty-two-year-old lieutenant wrote that Soviet troops completely defeated a women’s battalion that attacked them, calling themselves “avengers for husbands killed at the front.” Ordinary Red Army soldiers wanted to kill the captured German women in a “perverted manner,” but the captured submachine-gunners were eventually sorted into three categories: first, Russians; second, officers’ wives and other female relatives of Hitler’s servicemen, who proudly announced those ties; third, young unmarried women. Those in the third group were taken by individual soldiers “to their beds” (their later fate is not reported), while the others, especially the Russians, were shot without torture or abuse.

...and how Hitler’s forces treated Soviet women in uniform

The conditions of female Red Army prisoners of war have been relatively well documented. Numerous memoirs describe atrocities committed by Nazis and their collaborators both against prisoners who did not reach concentration camps and against those held in camps in Germany and in countries allied with the Nazis. Sources include the memoirs of divisional interpreter Pavel Rafes and the archives of Yad Vashem.

Women in the camps suffered no less than men for basic physiological reasons: there were no elementary hygienic facilities and no opportunity to change underwear. Jewish women and partisans were shot immediately. In fascist camps holding female POWs, atrocities were committed not only by Nazis but also by auxiliary policemen and volunteer female helpers recruited from among the prisoners themselves.

In American captivity

A soldier in Eisenhower’s army, Martin Brash, described one example of the conditions in which German female service members were held after being captured by Americans in 1945. Like the other prisoners, the women were kept at the Andernach camp in the open air, though in a separate enclosure from the men. They were poorly fed, prisoners ate grass, contracted dysentery, and died in large numbers.

Brash explained his command’s treatment of the prisoners by saying that by then Americans had already seen the horrors of Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and other Nazi camps, reported in newspapers every day. The Americans had food in abundance; it was simply deliberately withheld from the prisoners because Americans had come to hate Germans as a nation.

“Women in Captivity”: How They Were Held During the Second World War

09/09/2019

Women serving in the armed forces who were captured during the Great Patriotic War were often subjected to far greater abuse and torment than men, sometimes immediately before inevitable death. Yet more than seventy years after the end of the Second World War, historians have still not established even the approximate scale of these atrocities. Documentary evidence concerning the conditions in which female military prisoners were held either did not survive or remains classified.

There is not much reliable information about what happened to women who served on the side of the Wehrmacht, the SS, and other formations of Hitler’s armed forces, particularly because women in Hitler’s forces officially received full military status only at the end of August 1944. Until then, in all branches they were formally considered merely “civilian employees attached to the army.”

It must also be taken into account that after the war thousands of German women, as well as women of other nationalities living in states that had actively assisted Hitler and were liberated by the Red Army, were interned in the USSR. They worked in Gulag camps alongside Soviet prisoners. Some may have been former service members, but the subject has still not been sufficiently studied.

The published diary of Soviet combat officer Vladimir Gelfand, who took part in the storming of Berlin and died in Dnipropetrovsk in the early 1980s, contains an episode from the Oder front in early spring 1945. The twenty-two-year-old lieutenant wrote that Soviet troops completely defeated a women’s battalion that attacked them, whose members called themselves “avengers for husbands killed at the front.” Ordinary Red Army soldiers wanted to kill the captured German women in a “perverted manner,” but the captured submachine-gunners were eventually sorted into three categories: Russians; officers’ wives and other female relatives of Hitler’s soldiers who proudly declared those ties; and young unmarried women. The young women were taken by individual soldiers “to their beds” (their later fate is not reported), while the others—especially the Russians—were shot without torture or abuse.

The conditions in which female Red Army prisoners of war were held are relatively well documented. Numerous memoirs describe atrocities committed by Nazis and their collaborators against prisoners who did not reach concentration camps and against those held in concentration camps in Germany and countries allied with the Nazis. Sources include the recollections of divisional interpreter Pavel Rafes and the archives of Yad Vashem.

Women in camps suffered no less than men for basic physiological reasons: there were no elementary conditions for hygiene and no possibility of changing underwear. Jewish women and partisans were shot immediately. In fascist camps holding female prisoners of war, atrocities were committed not only by Nazis but also by auxiliary policemen and volunteer female helpers recruited from the prisoners themselves.

A soldier in Eisenhower’s army, Martin Brash, described one example of the conditions in which German female service members were held after being captured by Americans in 1945. Like the other prisoners, the women were kept at the Andernach camp in the open air, though in an enclosure separate from the men. They were poorly fed, prisoners ate grass, contracted dysentery, and died in large numbers.

Brash explained his command’s treatment of the prisoners by saying that by then Americans had already seen the horrors of Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and other Nazi camps, which newspapers reported every day. The Americans had food in abundance; they simply deliberately withheld it from the prisoners because Americans had come to hate Germans as a nation.

Which Penal Soldiers in the Red Army Were Called “SS Men”

07/11/2019

During the Great Patriotic War, some soldiers in Red Army penal units were called “SS men.” This had nothing to do with ferocity or cruelty, as one might suppose. On the contrary, these penal soldiers were regarded as the least reliable. The abbreviation “SS” appearing in their documents was interpreted in an extremely unflattering way: samostrel—a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

“Left-handers” and other self-mutilators

The practice of shooting oneself to escape service had spread in the Red Army as early as the 1930s. Despite Soviet propaganda, not every conscript was prepared to defend the “world’s first socialist state.” During the fighting at Khalkhin Gol in the autumn of 1939, 122 cases of self-mutilation and self-inflicted gunshot wounds were recorded.

Because of the catastrophic beginning of the Great Patriotic War, many Red Army soldiers shot themselves in order to wait out the German offensive in a hospital. From June 22 to October 10, 1941 alone, according to a memorandum by State Security Commissar Solomon Milshtein, NKVD personnel identified 1,671 soldiers who had shot themselves.

The problem only worsened. Chief Military Prosecutor Vladimir Nosov reported to Stalin a “large increase” in the number of convictions for self-mutilation in December 1941. In the prosecutor’s view, this was a consequence of measures taken against desertion: soldiers who had given up direct flight from their units found another way to leave the battlefield.

“Unstable elements try to evade participation in combat under the guise of wounds received in battle. Self-mutilators resort mainly to self-inflicted gunshots,” Nosov noted.

Especially many cases were recorded immediately before battles. During the Demyansk offensive operations on the Northwestern Front in May 1942, for example, nine times as many cases of self-mutilation were detected as in January of the same year. On the Southern Front, self-shooters became particularly active during the retreat in the summer of 1942.

After the decisive Soviet victories of 1943, the number of self-inflicted wounds declined but did not disappear. Fear of death affected even hardened soldiers. In February 1945, Vladimir Gelfand wrote in his diary about a lieutenant who, out of cowardice, shot himself through the hand. According to Gelfand, the man’s Order of the Red Banner and Medal for the Defense of Stalingrad were taken away, his property was confiscated, and he was “shot like a dog.”

Veterans recalled that conscripts from the national republics of the Caucasus and Central Asia were especially often accused of such acts. For many of them, what was happening at the front seemed like “someone else’s war.” After the liberation of Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia in 1944, reinforcements from those territories also sometimes tried to reach a hospital rather than the front line.

According to military feldsher Rakhmiel Sitnitsky, some ethnic-minority soldiers “voted in the elections to the Supreme Soviet”: they stuck a hand out of a trench and waited for a German to shoot it. Some arranged with comrades to fire at them.

Because a self-inflicted shot was usually fired from close range, burns and traces of powder gases remained on the skin. The wounded man’s explanations often sounded unconvincing.

“We looked carefully—the skin around the wound was burned. We told him so,” war veteran Elena Karpova recalled of one case. “He began shouting that we did not know what hand-to-hand combat was like, that the German had fired point-blank. But we had to turn him over to the prosecutor. It really was a self-inflicted wound.”

To disguise the injury, soldiers began firing through a board, cloth, a canteen, a mess tin filled with snow, or simply a piece of bread. Frontline veteran Nikolai Nikulin even mentioned cases in which men shot themselves through the bodies of the dead.

Even so, a suspicious wound immediately attracted attention. If the bullet struck the palm or the fleshy part of the left hand and passed through, that was almost certain evidence of a self-inflicted injury. Such wounded men were called “left-handers.” Sometimes military doctors kept such cases secret, but more often they handed the patients over to special-department officers.

“Doctors determine self-inflicted gunshot wounds with complete accuracy, even if someone fires through bread, a wet towel, or something else (here too the war introduced new methods and techniques into life),” wrote frontline veteran Nikolai Inozemtsev.

Cartridge cases and bullets were examined by forensic methods and the trajectory of the shot was calculated. Investigators used microscopes for expert examination. Over time, soldiers trying to fake wounds began shooting one another from greater distances, although this significantly increased the risk of serious injury.

Penal battalions for self-shooters

At the beginning of the war, every detected self-inflicted gunshot wound inevitably resulted in the culprit’s execution. Executions were carried out demonstratively in front of formations in order to intimidate other soldiers. From 1943, however, a divisional tribunal could replace the death sentence with service in a penal unit. The grounds on which sentences were mitigated are not entirely clear. The offender’s emotional state may sometimes have been taken into account. Some soldiers, for example, justified their act by saying they wanted to be able to care for parents who had remained in the rear.

“In the eyes of these men I read repentance and a desire to regain their honor and dignity after having once lost courage,” penal-battalion commander Vasily Kopylov said of men who had shot themselves.

Entire penal companies were sometimes formed from such personnel. According to the memoirs of Senior Lieutenant Aleksandr Lebedintsev of the 38th Rifle Division, self-shooters were treated with contempt. Their punishment was viewed almost as a deferred death sentence.

“The company commander said outright that tomorrow half of them would be shot in battle: either for refusing to rise for an attack or, if they withdrew without orders, for running away,” Lebedintsev recalled.

The nickname “SS men” was given to penal soldiers with self-inflicted wounds by army special-department officers and military lawyers. It reflected the extreme dislike Red Army soldiers felt toward comrades who had displayed what they regarded as shameful cowardice. Those who boasted before battle and then faked a wound were despised particularly strongly. Yet, like other penal soldiers, self-shooters could “redeem” their offense by distinguishing themselves at the front.

Timur Sagdiev

Reprisal Against the Executioners in Odesa: How Red Army Soldiers Took Revenge on Policemen After the City Was Liberated

04/09/2022

During the final stages of the Great Patriotic War, and after it ended, Germans and auxiliary policemen were tried in the formerly occupied territories. War criminals were brought to justice in Ukraine as well. Trials and public executions of occupiers and collaborators took place in Kharkiv, Mykolaiv, Kyiv, Poltava, and Donetsk, then called Stalino.

Odesa was an exception. In the “Pearl of the Black Sea,” the issue of the occupiers had already been “settled” in the spring of 1944, when units of General Malinovsky’s forces liberated the city.

The return of Odesa

Odesa spent almost three years under fascist Romanian rule. At the beginning of 1944, as the front approached the city, the Germans took complete control of Odesa. On April 9, 1944, troops of the 3rd Ukrainian Front began the assault on the “Southern Palmyra,” and the Wehrmacht’s 304th Infantry Division eventually chose to retreat beyond the Dniester.

On the night of April 10, the occupiers hurriedly abandoned Odesa. Many collaborators evacuated together with the Germans and Romanians, though naturally not all managed to escape. When the Red Army entered Odesa, the city was sealed off for an entire day so that no one could leave. Before NKVD units arrived, Odesa residents themselves administered justice to occupiers and traitors. A common version of these events appears in writer Gennady Veretelnikov’s book The Swans Are Flying:

“It turned out that during the period when access to Odesa was blocked, the townspeople themselves caught all the traitors to the motherland and carried out vigilante justice.”

There were many motives for revenge. Odesa had suffered terrible material losses: while retreating, the Germans and Romanians plundered the Archaeological Museum, destroyed industrial enterprises, removed libraries and the equipment of hospitals and clinics. Port buildings were blown up, and the occupiers clogged Odesa Bay with sunken ships. But the principal cause of vigilante revenge was different.

Although occupation in Odesa was supposedly more “liberal” than in territories occupied directly by Germany, terror was rampant. The Jewish population that had failed to evacuate in 1941 suffered especially badly. One of the most terrible events of the Holocaust occurred at the camp on the Bogdanovka state farm, where 54,000 people were shot. The Siguranța, the “Romanian Gestapo,” was also active. During the occupation it killed 10,000 people suspected of links to partisans and communists.

According to Marshal Rodion Malinovsky’s recollections, only one day before they fled, on April 9, the Germans carried out a mass execution of Odesa residents in a clay quarry. Elderly people, women, and children fell under enemy bullets. Four hundred people were killed, including thirty children.

Gallows for the occupiers

Little is known about exactly how reprisals against occupiers and collaborators were carried out. This is understandable: from a legal point of view, vigilante punishment in liberated territories lay in a “gray zone.” It is possible that Soviet law-enforcement bodies deliberately allowed a short period of such action in order to make their own work easier.

According to a widespread story, hundreds of gallows were erected on Odesa’s main square. Enemy collaborators were supposedly hanged in haste, after which the instruments of execution were removed. There is, however, no documentary confirmation of this account.

Soviet Lieutenant Vladimir Gelfand left an interesting eyewitness account of justice in Odesa. His diary entry for April 12, 1944 says nothing about events on the main square. But Gelfand did see with his own eyes a truck used as a gallows on Tiraspolskaya Street. Odesa residents gathered around it to watch the execution of “three scoundrels”—two Romanians and one Russian—who had committed abuses in the village of Anatolyevka near Odesa. Formally, a “trial” had nevertheless been held.

“One of the Romanians was terribly distressed and could barely stand because of the foreknowledge of death,” Gelfand wrote. “The other two bastards revealed nothing of their feelings, and their eyes looked indifferently into the crowd. No fear, no anger, no rage, no pleading—nothing could be read in those dreadful robber’s and traitor’s eyes. I came closer and listened to the sentence. Then the truck pulled away, they slipped off the side and hung in the air. The middle one, the indifferent Romanian, convulsed briefly, and it was all over. The other two did not even move—in their agony they were weaker than the man in the middle.”

A little later, placards stating the crimes of the executed men were placed on the cooling corpses.

Gelfand saw another hanged Romanian near Odesa’s burned-out railway station. A notice stated that the occupier had been punished “for sexual violence and the shooting of peaceful citizens.”

Subsequent trials

Despite the story of a mass execution of collaborators, the noose did not catch anything like all of the guilty at the time. In liberated Odesa there remained plenty of work for SMERSH officers as well, according to Major General Leonid Ivanov, a veteran of military counterintelligence.

The Chișinău trial of December 6–13, 1947 is well known. The defendants—three Germans and seven Romanians—had committed atrocities in Transnistria during the war and were implicated in the killing of Odesa’s Jews. Because the death penalty did not exist in the USSR at that particular time, the perpetrators received prison terms.

Some people who had operated in Odesa were also punished in socialist Romania. In May 1945, for example, Constantin Trestioreanu, commander of the artillery of Odesa’s 2nd Army Corps, was convicted for crimes against Odesa Jews. He remained behind bars until 1956.

The activities of the “self-defense” formations of ethnic German colonists from settlements near Odesa were investigated separately. Most members had left for Germany. Some were convicted for their crimes in the 1950s and 1960s.

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