JAN JANDOUREK
LANDMARKS
5 June 2021

Being taken prisoner is always unpleasant for a soldier. Under some circumstances it can become a catastrophe, especially when two sides fighting with extreme ferocity do not even care about their own soldiers. That was also the case in the battles between the Red Army and the Wehrmacht.
Not only men but women fought as well, and they too found themselves in captivity. There is little reliable information about what happened to women who fought on the side of the Wehrmacht, the SS, and other units of Hitler’s army and were then captured by the Red Army. What is known does not sound very good.
Women in the Wehrmacht did not receive full military status until the end of August 1944; before then they were merely “civilian employees” in all divisions.
The Russian website Russia7.ru recalls the diary entries of Vladimir Gelfand. He was a Soviet officer who took part in the advance on Berlin and died as a war veteran in Dnipropetrovsk in the early 1980s. His diaries were published some time ago. “Twenty-two-year-old Lieutenant Gelfand was a direct participant in the fighting and described an incident that occurred on the Oder front in early spring 1945. Soviet troops smashed head-on a women’s battalion that was attacking them. These were the so-called ‘avengers for husbands killed at the front.’”
Red Army soldiers wanted to stab the captured German women “in a perverted way,” but in the end the “sorted” girls were divided into three categories. The first were… Russians (!), the second were officers’ wives and relatives of Hitler’s soldiers who proudly called themselves such, and the third group were virgins. The soldiers divided them into so-called “groups.” Their further fate is not reported. The others (mostly Russian women) were shot, without torture or mockery.
Naturally, this account has to be supplemented by the other side: how captured Red Army women lived in German hands. Their fates are described on the website Unrecht-erinnern.info.
“Female Red Army soldiers who became German prisoners of war were usually separated from the men immediately. At the beginning of the war they were even shot. The basis for this was an order by Field Marshal Walter von Reichenau of June 29, 1941, although it was rescinded on July 3. Nevertheless, killings recurred later. German soldiers did not have to fear any consequences for their actions.
Until 1943, captured women were taken to Germany only if the Wehrmacht could use them in military hospitals in Stalags. Otherwise they remained in camps in specially designated areas. There they were fed just as poorly as their male comrades. From 1943, because of the labor shortage in the German Reich, women were officially released from prisoner-of-war status and required to perform forced labor as civilian ‘Eastern workers’ or as concentration-camp prisoners.
In postwar Soviet society former female prisoners of war were looked down upon, just like men. If their fate was discussed at all, they had to belong to a resistance group or have a heroic story, like the women from Ravensbrück concentration camp. Historian Ramona Saavedra Santis, who has studied women from this camp in particular, describes how women returning from captivity were often subjected to sexual violence during the ‘filtration’ process. They were accused of having already ‘sacrificed themselves’ to the Germans or of having been ‘raped’ by the enemy and were therefore regarded as morally inferior.
But when we return to Germany, even there there is often no clear awareness of how deeply women were involved in the war directly in the ranks of the military. This is discussed in an article by the German publication Zeit.de.
“German women played a far more active role in supporting the Second World War than the public long believed. As recent research shows, they were used not only as industrial and agricultural workers replacing the rapidly growing number of conscripts, and as nurses — about 400,000 of whom served in the German Red Cross — but also as Wehrmacht auxiliaries.
Altogether around 500,000, predominantly young and unmarried women, served in the Wehrmacht. They were deployed in all combat zones in the army, air force, and navy in order to free soldiers for front-line service. Of these, 160,000 took a direct part in combat as anti-aircraft artillery auxiliaries. By the end of the Second World War there was at least one woman for every twenty Wehrmacht soldiers.
At that time there were also 500,000 Reich air-raid-control personnel in the rear. In her book Hitler’s Furies, historian Wendy Lower has again shown that women participated in Nazi genocides far more often than was long assumed; 10,000 women belonged to the SS alone.
The scale of women’s support during the Second World War exceeded not only their participation during the First World War but also that of the American and British opponents. Both countries likewise needed women as armed-forces auxiliaries for the war. Only in the Soviet Union were larger numbers of women mobilized to fight. There they also officially served as soldiers — about 520,000. Another 300,000 were employed in air defense, around 500,000 in aviation-related wartime work, 300,000 as nurses, and 500,000 as medical orderlies.”
War has never been purely a “men’s affair,” and in our own time this is even more true. It also includes countless sad or at least dramatic stories of women who normally would never have wanted to serve in uniform.