We can all agree that the Nazis did terrible things during World War II. The Holocaust was perhaps their most famous crime. But in concentration camps there were terrible and inhuman things that most people did not know about. The camp inmates were used as test subjects in many experiments that were very painful and usually resulted in death.
blood clotting experiments
Dr. Sigmund Rascher performed blood clotting experiments on prisoners in the Dachau concentration camp. He created a drug, Polygal, which included beets and apple pectin. He believed that these pills could help stop bleeding from battle wounds or during surgical operations.
Each subject was given a tablet of the drug and shot in the neck or chest to test its effectiveness. The limbs were then amputated without anesthesia. Dr. Rascher created a company to produce these pills, which also employed prisoners.
Experiments with sulfa drugs 
In the Ravensbrück concentration camp, the effectiveness of sulfonamides (or sulfanilamide preparations) was tested on prisoners. Subjects were given incisions on the outside of their calves. The doctors then rubbed the mixture of bacteria into the open wounds and stitched them up. To simulate combat situations, glass fragments were also brought into the wounds.
However, this method turned out to be too mild compared to the conditions at the fronts. To simulate gunshot wounds, blood vessels were tied off on both sides to cut off blood circulation. Then the prisoners were given sulfa drugs. Despite the advances made in the scientific and pharmaceutical fields through these experiments, the prisoners experienced terrible pain that led to severe injury or even death.
Freezing and Hypothermia Experiments 
The German armies were ill-prepared for the cold they faced on Eastern Front and from which thousands of soldiers died. As a result, Dr. Sigmund Rascher conducted experiments in Birkenau, Auschwitz and Dachau to find out two things: the time required for the body temperature to drop and death, and methods for reviving frozen people.
Naked prisoners were either placed in a barrel of ice water, or driven out into the street in sub-zero temperatures. Most of the victims died. Those who only fainted were subjected to painful resuscitation procedures. To revive the subjects, they were placed under lamps of sunlight that burned their skin, forced to copulate with women, injected with boiling water or placed in baths of warm water (which turned out to be the most effective method).
Experiments with firebombs 
For three months in 1943 and 1944, Buchenwald prisoners were tested for the effectiveness of pharmaceutical preparations against phosphorus burns caused by incendiary bombs. The test subjects were specially burned with a phosphorus composition from these bombs, which was a very painful procedure. Prisoners were seriously injured during these experiments.
sea water experiments 
Experiments were conducted on Dachau prisoners to find ways to turn sea water into drinking water. The test subjects were divided into four groups, whose members did without water, drank sea water, drank Burke-treated seawater, and drank seawater without salt.
Subjects were given food and drink assigned to their group. Prisoners who received some form of seawater eventually suffered from severe diarrhea, convulsions, hallucinations, went insane, and eventually died.
In addition, the subjects were subjected to needle biopsy of the liver or lumbar punctures to collect data. These procedures were painful and in most cases ended in death.
Experiments with poisons 
In Buchenwald, experiments were carried out on the effects of poisons on people. In 1943, poisons were secretly administered to prisoners.
Some died themselves from poisoned food. Others were killed for the sake of an autopsy. A year later, poisoned bullets were fired at the prisoners to speed up data collection. These test subjects experienced terrible torment.
Experiments with sterilization 
As part of the extermination of all non-Aryans, Nazi doctors conducted mass sterilization experiments on prisoners from various concentration camps in search of the least laborious and cheapest method of sterilization.
In one series of experiments, a chemical irritant was injected into the reproductive organs of women to block the fallopian tubes. Some women have died after this procedure. Other women were killed for autopsies.
In a number of other experiments, prisoners were subjected to intense X-ray radiation, which led to severe burns on the abdomen, groin and buttocks. They were also left with incurable ulcers. Some test subjects died.
Bone, muscle and nerve regeneration and bone grafting experiments 
For about a year, experiments were carried out on the prisoners of Ravensbrück to regenerate bones, muscles and nerves. Nerve surgeries included the removal of segments of nerves from the lower limbs.
Bone experiments included breaking and repositioning bones in several places on the lower extremities. Fractures were not allowed to heal properly as doctors needed to study the healing process and also test different healing methods.
Doctors also removed numerous fragments of the tibia from the test subjects to study bone regeneration. Bone grafts included transplanting fragments of the left tibia to the right and vice versa. These experiments caused unbearable pain and severe injuries to the prisoners.
Experiments with typhus 
From the end of 1941 to the beginning of 1945, doctors conducted experiments on the prisoners of Buchenwald and Natzweiler in the interests of the German armed forces. They were testing vaccines for typhus and other diseases.
Approximately 75% of test subjects were injected with trial typhoid or other vaccines. chemical substances. They were injected with a virus. As a result, more than 90% of them died.
The remaining 25% of the test subjects were injected with the virus without any prior protection. Most of them did not survive. Physicians also conducted experiments related to yellow fever, smallpox, typhoid, and other diseases. Hundreds of prisoners died, and more prisoners suffered unbearable pain as a result.
Twin experiments and genetic experiments 
The purpose of the Holocaust was the elimination of all people of non-Aryan origin. Jews, blacks, Hispanics, homosexuals and other people who did not meet certain requirements were to be exterminated so that only the "superior" Aryan race remained. Genetic experiments were carried out to provide the Nazi Party scientific evidence the superiority of the Aryans.
Dr. Josef Mengele (also known as the "Angel of Death") had a strong interest in the twins. He separated them from the rest of the prisoners when they entered Auschwitz. The twins had to donate blood every day. The real purpose of this procedure is unknown.
The experiments with twins were extensive. They were to be carefully examined and every centimeter of their body measured. After that, comparisons were made to determine hereditary traits. Sometimes doctors performed mass blood transfusions from one twin to the other.
Since people of Aryan origin mostly had blue eyes, experiments were carried out to create them with chemical drops or injections into the iris of the eye. These procedures were very painful and led to infections and even blindness.
Injections and lumbar punctures were done without anesthesia. One twin deliberately contracted the disease, and the other did not. If one twin died, the other twin was killed and studied for comparison.
Amputations and removals of organs were also performed without anesthesia. Most of the twins who ended up in the concentration camp died in one way or another, and their autopsies were the last experiments.
Experiments with high altitudes 
From March to August 1942, the prisoners of the Dachau concentration camp were used as test subjects in experiments to test human endurance at high altitudes. The results of these experiments were supposed to help the German air force.
The test subjects were placed in a low pressure chamber, which created atmospheric conditions at altitudes up to 21,000 meters. Most of the test subjects died, and the survivors suffered from various injuries from being at high altitudes.
Experiments with malaria 
Over the course of more than three years, more than 1,000 Dachau prisoners were used in a series of experiments related to the search for a cure for malaria. Healthy prisoners were infected by mosquitoes or extracts from these mosquitoes.
Prisoners who contracted malaria were then treated with various drugs to test their effectiveness. Many prisoners died. The surviving prisoners suffered greatly and were mostly disabled for the rest of their lives.
"Skrekkens hus" - "House of Horror" - that's what they called it in the city. Since January 1942, the Gestapo headquarters in southern Norway have been located in the city archive building. Arrested people were brought here, torture chambers were equipped here, from here people were sent to concentration camps and to be shot.
Now, in the basement of the building where the punishment cells were located and where the prisoners were tortured, there is a museum that tells about what happened during the war years in the building of the state archive.
The layout of the basement corridors has been left unchanged. There were only new lights and doors. The main exposition with archival materials, photographs, posters is arranged in the main corridor.
So the suspended arrested person was beaten with a chain.
So tortured with electric stoves. With the special zeal of the executioners, the hair on the head could catch fire in a person.
I have written about water torture before. It was also used in the Archives.
In this device, fingers were clamped, nails were pulled out. The machine is authentic - after the liberation of the city from the Germans, all the equipment of the torture chambers remained in its place and was saved.
Nearby - other devices for conducting interrogation with "addiction".
Reconstructions were arranged in several basements - as it looked then, in this very place. This is a cell where especially dangerous arrested persons were kept - members of the Norwegian Resistance who fell into the clutches of the Gestapo.
The torture chamber was located in the next room. Here, a real scene of the torture of a married couple of underground workers taken by the Gestapo in 1943 during a communication session with an intelligence center in London is reproduced. Two Gestapo men torture a wife in front of her husband, who is chained to the wall. In the corner, on an iron beam, another member of the failed underground group is suspended. They say that before interrogations, the Gestapo were pumped up with alcohol and drugs.
Everything was left in the cell, as it was then, in 1943. If you turn over that pink stool at the woman's feet, you can see the mark of Kristiansand's Gestapo.
This is a reconstruction of the interrogation - the Gestapo provocateur (on the left) shows the arrested radio operator of the underground group (he is sitting on the right, in handcuffs) his radio station in a suitcase. In the center sits the chief of the Kristiansand Gestapo, SS-Hauptsturmführer Rudolf Kerner - I will talk about him later.
In this showcase are things and documents of those Norwegian patriots who were sent to the Grini concentration camp near Oslo, the main transit point in Norway, from where prisoners were sent to other concentration camps in Europe.
The system for designating different groups of prisoners in the Auschwitz concentration camp (Auschwitz-Birkenau). Jewish, political, gypsy, Spanish republican, dangerous criminal, felon, war criminal, Jehovah's Witness, homosexual. The letter N was written on the badge of a Norwegian political prisoner.
School tours are given to the museum. I stumbled across one of these - several local teenagers were walking down the corridors with Ture Robstad, a local war survivor volunteer. It is said that about 10,000 schoolchildren visit the museum in the Archive every year.
Toure tells the children about Auschwitz. Two boys from the group were there recently on an excursion.
Soviet prisoner of war in a concentration camp. In his hand is a homemade wooden bird.
In a separate display case, things made by Russian prisoners of war in Norwegian concentration camps. These handicrafts were exchanged by Russians for food from local residents. Our neighbor in Kristiansand had a whole collection of such wooden birds - on the way to school she often met groups of our prisoners going to work under escort, and gave them her breakfast in exchange for these carved wooden toys.
Reconstruction of a partisan radio station. Partisans in southern Norway transmitted to London information about the movements of German troops, deployment military equipment and ships. In the north, the Norwegians supplied intelligence to the Soviet Northern Fleet.
"Germany is a nation of creators."
Norwegian patriots had to work under the strongest pressure on the local population of Goebbels propaganda. The Germans set themselves the task of the speedy nazification of the country. Quisling's government made efforts for this in the field of education, culture, and sports. Quisling's (Nasjonal Samling) Nazi Party, even before the start of the war, inspired the Norwegians that the main threat to their security was military power. Soviet Union. It should be noted that the Finnish campaign of 1940 contributed to the intimidation of the Norwegians about Soviet aggression in the North. With the coming to power, Quisling only stepped up his propaganda with the help of the Goebbels department. The Nazis in Norway convinced the population that only a strong Germany could protect the Norwegians from the Bolsheviks.
Several posters distributed by the Nazis in Norway. "Norges nye nabo" - "The New Norwegian Neighbor", 1940. Pay attention to the now fashionable technique of "reversing" Latin letters to imitate the Cyrillic alphabet.
"Do you want it to be like this?"
The propaganda of the "new Norway" in every way emphasized the kinship of the "Nordic" peoples, their unity in the struggle against British imperialism and the "wild Bolshevik hordes". Norwegian patriots responded by using the symbol of King Haakon and his image in their struggle. The king's motto "Alt for Norge" was ridiculed in every possible way by the Nazis, who inspired the Norwegians that military difficulties were temporary and that Vidkun Quisling was the new leader of the nation.
Two walls in the gloomy corridors of the museum are given over to the materials of the criminal case, according to which the seven main Gestapo men were tried in Kristiansand. In Norwegian judicial practice there have never been such cases - the Norwegians tried the Germans, citizens of another state, accused of crimes in Norway. Three hundred witnesses, about a dozen lawyers, the Norwegian and foreign press took part in the process. The Gestapo were tried for torture and humiliation of those arrested, there was a separate episode about the summary execution of 30 Russian and 1 Polish prisoners of war. On June 16, 1947, all were sentenced to death, which for the first time and temporarily was included in the Criminal Code of Norway immediately after the end of the war.
Rudolf Kerner is the chief of the Kristiansand Gestapo. Former shoemaker. A notorious sadist, in Germany he had a criminal past. He sent several hundred members of the Norwegian Resistance to concentration camps, is guilty of the death of an organization of Soviet prisoners of war uncovered by the Gestapo in one of the concentration camps in southern Norway. He was, like the rest of his accomplices, sentenced to death, which was later commuted to life imprisonment. He was released in 1953 under an amnesty declared by the Norwegian government. He went to Germany, where his traces were lost.
Near the building of the Archive there is a modest monument to the Norwegian patriots who died at the hands of the Gestapo. In the local cemetery, not far from this place, the ashes of Soviet prisoners of war and English pilots, shot down by the Germans in the sky over Kristiansand, rest. Every year on May 8, flagpoles next to the graves raise the flags of the USSR, Great Britain and Norway.
In 1997, the building of the Archive, from which state archive moved to another location, it was decided to sell in private hands. local veterans, public organizations strongly opposed, organized into a special committee and ensured that in 1998 the owner of the building, the state concern Statsbygg, transferred the historic building to the veterans' committee. Now here, along with the museum that I told you about, there are offices of Norwegian and international humanitarian organizations - the Red Cross, Amnesty International, the UN.
We can all agree that the Nazis did terrible things during World War II. The Holocaust was perhaps their most famous crime. But in the concentration camps, terrible and inhuman things happened that most people did not know about. The camp inmates were used as test subjects in many experiments that were very painful and usually resulted in death.blood clotting experiments
Dr. Sigmund Rascher performed blood clotting experiments on prisoners in the Dachau concentration camp. He created a drug, Polygal, which included beets and apple pectin. He believed that these pills could help stop bleeding from battle wounds or during surgical operations.
Each subject was given a tablet of the drug and shot in the neck or chest to test its effectiveness. The limbs were then amputated without anesthesia. Dr. Rascher created a company to produce these pills, which also employed prisoners.
Experiments with sulfa drugs
In the Ravensbrück concentration camp, the effectiveness of sulfonamides (or sulfanilamide preparations) was tested on prisoners. Subjects were given incisions on the outside of their calves. The doctors then rubbed the mixture of bacteria into the open wounds and stitched them up. To simulate combat situations, glass fragments were also brought into the wounds.
However, this method turned out to be too mild compared to the conditions at the fronts. To simulate gunshot wounds, blood vessels were tied off on both sides to cut off blood circulation. Then the prisoners were given sulfa drugs. Despite the advances made in the scientific and pharmaceutical fields through these experiments, the prisoners experienced terrible pain that led to severe injury or even death.
Freezing and Hypothermia Experiments
The German armies were ill-prepared for the cold that they faced on the Eastern Front and from which thousands of soldiers died. As a result, Dr. Sigmund Rascher conducted experiments in Birkenau, Auschwitz and Dachau to find out two things: the time required for the body temperature to drop and death, and methods for reviving frozen people.
Naked prisoners were either placed in a barrel of ice water, or driven out into the street in sub-zero temperatures. Most of the victims died. Those who only fainted were subjected to painful resuscitation procedures. To revive the subjects, they were placed under lamps of sunlight, which burned their skin, forced to copulate with women, injected with boiling water or placed in baths of warm water (which turned out to be the most effective method).
Experiments with firebombs
For three months in 1943 and 1944, Buchenwald prisoners were tested for the effectiveness of pharmaceutical preparations against phosphorus burns caused by incendiary bombs. The test subjects were specially burned with a phosphorus composition from these bombs, which was a very painful procedure. Prisoners were seriously injured during these experiments.
sea water experiments
Experiments were conducted on Dachau prisoners to find ways to turn sea water into drinking water. The subjects were divided into four groups, whose members went without water, drank sea water, drank sea water treated according to the Burke method, and drank sea water without salt.
Subjects were given food and drink assigned to their group. Prisoners who received some form of seawater eventually suffered from severe diarrhea, convulsions, hallucinations, went insane, and eventually died.
In addition, the subjects were subjected to needle biopsy of the liver or lumbar punctures to collect data. These procedures were painful and in most cases ended in death.
Experiments with poisons
In Buchenwald, experiments were carried out on the effects of poisons on people. In 1943, poisons were secretly administered to prisoners.
Some died themselves from poisoned food. Others were killed for the sake of an autopsy. A year later, poisoned bullets were fired at the prisoners to speed up data collection. These test subjects experienced terrible torment.
Experiments with sterilization
As part of the extermination of all non-Aryans, Nazi doctors conducted mass sterilization experiments on prisoners from various concentration camps in search of the least laborious and cheapest method of sterilization.
In one series of experiments, a chemical irritant was injected into the reproductive organs of women to block the fallopian tubes. Some women have died after this procedure. Other women were killed for autopsies.
In a number of other experiments, prisoners were subjected to intense X-ray radiation, which led to severe burns on the abdomen, groin and buttocks. They were also left with incurable ulcers. Some test subjects died.
Bone, muscle and nerve regeneration and bone grafting experiments
For about a year, experiments were carried out on the prisoners of Ravensbrück to regenerate bones, muscles and nerves. Nerve surgeries included the removal of segments of nerves from the lower limbs.
Bone experiments included breaking and repositioning bones in several places on the lower extremities. Fractures were not allowed to heal properly as doctors needed to study the healing process and also test different healing methods.
Doctors also removed numerous fragments of the tibia from the test subjects to study bone regeneration. Bone grafts included transplanting fragments of the left tibia to the right and vice versa. These experiments caused unbearable pain and severe injuries to the prisoners.
Experiments with typhus
From the end of 1941 until the beginning of 1945, doctors conducted experiments on the prisoners of Buchenwald and Natzweiler in the interests of the German armed forces. They were testing vaccines for typhus and other diseases.
Approximately 75% of test subjects were injected with trial typhoid vaccines or other chemicals. They were injected with a virus. As a result, more than 90% of them died.
The remaining 25% of the test subjects were injected with the virus without any prior protection. Most of them did not survive. Physicians also conducted experiments related to yellow fever, smallpox, typhoid, and other diseases. Hundreds of prisoners died, and more prisoners suffered unbearable pain as a result.
Twin experiments and genetic experiments
The purpose of the Holocaust was the elimination of all people of non-Aryan origin. Jews, blacks, Hispanics, homosexuals and other people who did not meet certain requirements were to be exterminated so that only the "superior" Aryan race remained. Genetic experiments were carried out to provide the Nazi Party with scientific proof of the superiority of the Aryans.
Dr. Josef Mengele (also known as the "Angel of Death") had a strong interest in the twins. He separated them from the rest of the prisoners when they entered Auschwitz. The twins had to donate blood every day. The real purpose of this procedure is unknown.
The experiments with twins were extensive. They were to be carefully examined and every centimeter of their body measured. After that, comparisons were made to determine hereditary traits. Sometimes doctors performed mass blood transfusions from one twin to the other.
Since people of Aryan origin mostly had blue eyes, experiments were carried out to create them with chemical drops or injections into the iris of the eye. These procedures were very painful and led to infections and even blindness.
Injections and lumbar punctures were done without anesthesia. One twin deliberately contracted the disease, and the other did not. If one twin died, the other twin was killed and studied for comparison.
Amputations and removals of organs were also performed without anesthesia. Most of the twins who ended up in the concentration camp died in one way or another, and their autopsies were the last experiments.
Experiments with high altitudes
From March to August 1942, the prisoners of the Dachau concentration camp were used as test subjects in experiments to test human endurance at high altitudes. The results of these experiments were to help the German air force.
The test subjects were placed in a low pressure chamber, which created atmospheric conditions at altitudes up to 21,000 meters. Most of the test subjects died, and the survivors suffered from various injuries from being at high altitudes.
Experiments with malaria
Over the course of more than three years, more than 1,000 Dachau prisoners were used in a series of experiments related to the search for a cure for malaria. Healthy prisoners were infected by mosquitoes or extracts from these mosquitoes.
Prisoners who contracted malaria were then treated with various drugs to test their effectiveness. Many prisoners died. The surviving prisoners suffered greatly and were mostly disabled for the rest of their lives.
Especially for readers of my blog site - according to an article from listverse.com- translated by Sergey Maltsev
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Are you looking for this? Perhaps this is what you could not find for so long?
“I did not immediately decide to publish this chapter from the book “Captivity” on the site. This is one of the most terrible and heroic stories. Low bow to you, women, for everything you endured and, alas, never appreciated by the state, people, researchers. About this it was difficult to write. It is even more difficult to talk with former prisoners. A deep bow to you - the Heroines."
"And there were no such beautiful women on the whole earth..." Job (42:15)
"My tears were my bread day and night... ...my enemies scold me..." Psalter. (41:4:11)
From the first days of the war, tens of thousands of female medical workers were mobilized into the Red Army. Thousands of women volunteered to join the army and divisions of the people's militia. Based on the decrees of the State Defense Committee of March 25, April 13 and 23, 1942, mass mobilization of women began. Only at the call of the Komsomol, 550 thousand Soviet women became soldiers. 300,000 were drafted into the Air Defense Forces. Hundreds of thousands - to the military medical and sanitary service, signal troops, road and other units. In May 1942, another GKO decree was adopted - on the mobilization of 25,000 women in the Navy.
Three air regiments were formed from women: two bombers and one fighter, the 1st separate women's volunteer rifle brigade, and the 1st separate women's reserve rifle regiment.
Established in 1942, the Central Women's Sniper School trained 1,300 female snipers.
Ryazan Infantry School. Voroshilov trained women commanders of rifle units. In 1943 alone, 1388 people graduated from it.
During the war years, women served in all branches of the military and represented all military specialties. Women made up 41% of all doctors, 43% of paramedics, 100% of nurses. In total, 800 thousand women served in the Red Army.
However, women health instructors and nurses in active army accounted for only 40%, which violates the prevailing ideas about the girl under fire, rescuing the wounded. In his interview, A. Volkov, who went through the entire war as a medical instructor, refutes the myth that only girls were medical instructors. According to him, the girls were nurses and orderlies in the medical battalions, and mostly men served as medical instructors and orderlies on the front line in the trenches.
“Even frail men were not taken to medical instructor courses. Only hefty ones! The work of a medical instructor is harder than that of a sapper. A medical instructor must crawl at least four times during the night to find the wounded. , so big, almost a kilometer on you! Yes, this is nonsense. We were especially warned: if you drag a wounded man to the rear, you will be shot on the spot for desertion. After all, what is a medical instructor for? A medical instructor must prevent a large loss of blood and apply a bandage. to drag him to the rear, for this, everything is subordinate to the medical instructor. There is always someone to take out of the battlefield. The medical instructor, after all, is subordinate to no one. Only the head of the medical battalion."
Not everything can be agreed with A. Volkov. The female medical instructors saved the wounded, pulling them out on themselves, dragging them behind them, there are many examples of this. Another thing is interesting. The women front-line soldiers themselves note the discrepancy between stereotyped screen images with the truth of war.
For example, a former medical instructor Sofya Dubnyakova says: “I watch films about the war: a nurse is on the front line, she is neat, clean, not in wadded trousers, but in a skirt, she has a pilot on a tuft .... Well, not true! ... Is it we could pull out the wounded like this? .. You don’t really crawl in a skirt when there are only men around. But to tell the truth, skirts were only given to us at the end of the war. At the same time, we also received knitted underwear instead of men's underwear. "
In addition to medical instructors, among whom were women, there were porters in the sanrots - they were only men. They also helped the wounded. However, their main task is to carry the already bandaged wounded from the battlefield.
On August 3, 1941, the People's Commissar of Defense issued Order No. 281 "On the procedure for submitting to government award military orderlies and porters for good combat work. "The work of orderlies and porters was equated to a military feat. The specified order said:" For the removal from the battlefield of 15 wounded with their rifles or light machine guns, submit to the government award the medal “For Military Merit” or “ For the courage of "every orderly and porter". For the removal from the battlefield of 25 wounded with their weapons, submit to the Order of the Red Star, for the removal of 40 wounded - to the Order of the Red Banner, for the removal of 80 wounded - to the Order of Lenin.
150 thousand Soviet women were awarded military orders and medals. 200 - Orders of Glory 2nd and 3rd degree. four steel full cavaliers Order of Glory of three degrees. 86 women were awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union.
At all times, the service of women in the army was considered immoral. There are many insulting lies about them, it is enough to recall PZh - a field wife.
Oddly enough, such an attitude towards women was engendered by front-line men. War veteran N.S. Posylayev recalls: “As a rule, women who got to the front soon became mistresses of officers. How else: if a woman is on her own, there will be no end to harassment.
To be continued...
A. Volkov said that when a group of girls arrived in the army, “merchants” immediately followed them: “First, the army headquarters took the youngest and most beautiful, then the headquarters of a lower rank.”
In the autumn of 1943, a medical orderly girl arrived at his company at night. And only one medical instructor is assigned to the company. It turns out that the girl “was molested everywhere, and since she did not yield to anyone, she was sent down below. From the headquarters of the army to the headquarters of the division, then to the headquarters of the regiment, then to the company, and the company commander sent the touchy into the trenches.
Zina Serdyukova, a former foreman of the reconnaissance company of the 6th Guards Cavalry Corps, knew how to deal strictly with soldiers and commanders, but one day the following happened:
“It was winter, the platoon lodged in a rural house, where I had a nook. In the evening I was summoned by the commander of the regiment. Sometimes he himself set the task of sending behind enemy lines. This time he was drunk, the table with the leftover food was not cleared. Without saying anything, he rushed towards me, trying to undress me. I knew how to fight, I'm a scout after all. And then he called the orderly, ordering me to be held. They both tore my clothes off. The landlady, who was quartered, flew into my cries, and only this saved me. I ran through the village, half-dressed, crazy. For some reason, I thought that I would find protection from the commander of the corps, General Sharaburko, he fatherly called me daughter. The adjutant did not let me in, but I rushed to the general, beaten, disheveled. She told incoherently how Colonel M. had tried to rape me. The general reassured me, saying that I would not see Colonel M. again. A month later, my company commander reported that the colonel had died in battle, he was part of a penal battalion. That's what war is, it's not just bombs, tanks, exhausting marches..."
Everything was in life at the front, where "there are four steps to death." However, most veterans with sincere respect remember the girls who fought at the front. Most often, those who sat in the rear, behind the backs of women who had gone to the front as volunteers, were most often slandered.
Former front-line soldiers, despite the difficulties they had to face in the men's team, remember their combat friends with warmth and gratitude.
Rashel Berezina, in the army since 1942 - interpreter-intelligence of military intelligence, ended the war in Vienna as a senior interpreter of the intelligence department of the First Guards Mechanized Corps under the command of Lieutenant General I.N. Russiyanov. She says that they treated her very respectfully, in the intelligence department in her presence they even stopped using foul language.
Maria Fridman, a scout of the 1st NKVD division, who fought in the Nevsky Dubrovka area near Leningrad, recalls that scouts protected her, filled her with sugar and chocolate, which they found in German dugouts. True, sometimes I had to defend myself with a "fist in the teeth."
“If you don’t hit me in the teeth, you’ll be lost! .. In the end, the scouts began to protect me from other people’s boyfriends:“ If no one, then no one.
When volunteer girls from Leningrad appeared in the regiment, we were dragged every month to the “brood”, as we called it. In the medical battalion they checked if anyone got pregnant ... After one such “brood”, the regiment commander asked me in surprise: “Maruska, for whom are you protecting yourself? They will kill us anyway...” The people were rude, but kind. And fair. I never saw such militant justice as in the trenches.”
The everyday difficulties that Maria Fridman had to face at the front are now remembered with irony.
“The lice have eaten the soldiers. They pull off shirts, pants, but what about a girl? I had to look for an abandoned dugout and there, stripping naked, I tried to get rid of lice. Sometimes they helped me, someone would stand at the door and say: “Don’t poke your head, Maruska crushes lice there!”
A bath day! And go as needed! I somehow retired, climbed under a bush, above the parapet of the trench, the Germans either did not immediately notice, or they let me sit quietly, but when I began to pull on my pants, it whistled from left and right. I fell into the trench, panties at the heels. Oh, they were guffawing in the trenches about how Maruskin blinded the Germans ...
At first, I must admit, this soldier's cackle irritated me, until I realized that they were not laughing at me, but at their own soldier's fate, in blood and lice, laughing in order to survive, not to go crazy. And it was enough for me that after a bloody skirmish someone asked in alarm: “Manka, are you alive?”
M. Fridman fought at the front and behind enemy lines, was wounded three times, was awarded the medal "For Courage", the Order of the Red Star ...
To be continued...
Front-line girls bore all the hardships of front-line life on an equal footing with men, not inferior to them either in courage or in military skill.
The Germans, in whose army women carried only auxiliary service, were extremely surprised by such an active participation of Soviet women in hostilities.
They even tried to play the "women's card" in their propaganda, talking about inhumanity Soviet system that throws women into the fire of war. An example of this propaganda is a German leaflet that appeared at the front in October 1943: "If a friend was wounded ..."
The Bolsheviks have always surprised the whole world. And in this war, they gave something completely new:
« Woman at the front! Since ancient times, people have been fighting and everyone has always believed that war is a man's business, men should fight, and it never occurred to anyone to involve women in war. True, there were individual cases, such as the notorious "shock girls" at the end of the last war - but these were exceptions and they went down in history as a curiosity or an anecdote.
But no one has thought of the mass involvement of women in the army as fighters, on the front line with weapons in their hands, except for the Bolsheviks.
Every nation seeks to protect its women from danger, to save a woman, because a woman is a mother, the preservation of the nation depends on her. Most of the men may perish, but the women must survive, otherwise the whole nation may perish."
Are the Germans suddenly thinking about the fate of the Russian people, they are concerned about the issue of its preservation. Of course not! It turns out that all this is just a preamble to the most important German thought:
“Therefore, the government of any other country, in the event of excessive losses threatening the continued existence of the nation, would try to withdraw its country from the war, because every national government cherishes its people.” (Highlighted by the Germans. Here is the main idea: we must end the war, and we need a national government. - Aron Schneer).
« The Bolsheviks think otherwise. Georgian Stalin and various Kaganoviches, Berias, Mikoyans and the entire Jewish kahal (well, how to do without anti-Semitism in propaganda! - Aron Schneer), sitting on the people's neck, do not give a damn about the Russian people and all other peoples of Russia and Russia itself. They have one goal - to maintain their power and their skins. Therefore, they need a war, a war at all costs, a war by any means, at the cost of any victims, a war to the last man, to the last man and woman. “If a friend was wounded” - for example, both legs or arms were torn off, it doesn’t matter, to hell with him, the “girlfriend” will “know how” to die at the front, drag her there into the meat grinder of war, there’s nothing to be gentle with her. Stalin does not feel sorry for the Russian woman ... "
The Germans, of course, miscalculated, did not take into account the sincere patriotic impulse of thousands of Soviet women, volunteer girls. Of course, there were mobilizations, extraordinary measures in the face of extreme danger, the tragic situation that had developed on the fronts, but it would be wrong not to take into account the sincere patriotic impulse of the youth, born after the revolution and ideologically prepared in the pre-war years for struggle and self-sacrifice.
One of these girls was Yulia Drunina, a 17-year-old schoolgirl who went to the front. A poem she wrote after the war explains why she and thousands of other girls volunteered for the front:
"I left my childhood To a dirty car, To an infantry train, To a sanitary platoon. ... I came from school To damp dugouts. From the Beautiful Lady - To "mother" and "rewind". Because the name is Closer than "Russia", Couldn't find it."
Women fought at the front, thereby asserting their right, equal with men, to defend the Fatherland. The enemy repeatedly praised the participation of Soviet women in battles:
"Russian women ... communists hate any enemy, they are fanatical, dangerous. In 1941, the sanitary battalions defended the last frontiers before Leningrad with grenades and rifles in their hands."
The liaison officer Prince Albert of Hohenzollern, who took part in the storming of Sevastopol in July 1942, "admired the Russians and especially women, who, according to him, show amazing courage, dignity and fortitude."
According to the Italian soldier, he and his comrades had to fight near Kharkov against the "Russian women's regiment". Several women were captured by the Italians. However, in accordance with the agreement between the Wehrmacht and the Italian army, all captured by the Italians were handed over to the Germans. The latter decided to shoot all the women. According to the Italian, "the women did not expect anything else. They only asked to be allowed to wash themselves in the bathhouse and wash their dirty linen in order to die in a clean state, as it should be according to the old Russian customs. The Germans granted their request. And here they are, having washed and putting on clean shirts, they went to be shot ... "
The fact that the story of the Italian about the participation of the female infantry unit in the battles is not fiction is confirmed by another story. Since both in Soviet scientific and in fiction, there were numerous references only to the exploits of individual women - representatives of all military specialties and never talked about the participation in the battles of individual female infantry units, I had to turn to the material published in the Vlasov newspaper Zarya.
To be continued...
The article "Valya Nesterenko - assistant commander of the intelligence platoon" tells about the fate of a Soviet girl taken prisoner. Valya graduated from the Ryazan Infantry School. According to her, about 400 women and girls studied with her:
“Why were they all volunteers? They were considered volunteers. But how did they go! They gathered young people, a representative from the district military registration and enlistment office comes to the meeting and asks: “How, girls, do you love Soviet power?” They answer - "We love" - "So we must protect!" They write statements. And then try, refuse! And since 1942, mobilizations have begun at all. Everyone receives a summons, goes to the military registration and enlistment office. Goes to the commission. The commission gives a conclusion: they are fit for military service. They are sent to the unit. Those who are older or have children, - those who are mobilized for work. And whoever is younger and without children, they go to the army. There were 200 people in my graduation. Some did not want to study, but then they were sent to dig trenches.
In our regiment of three battalions, there were two male and one female. The female was the first battalion - submachine gunners. In the beginning, there were girls from orphanages in it. They were desperate. We occupied with this battalion up to ten settlements, and then most of them were out of order. Requested a refill. Then the remnants of the battalion were withdrawn from the front and a new women's battalion was sent from Serpukhov. A women's division was specially formed there. There were older women and girls in the new battalion. All were mobilized. We studied for three months as submachine gunners. At first, while there were no big fights, they were brave.
Our regiment was advancing on the villages of Zhilino, Savkino, Surovezhki. The women's battalion acted in the middle, and the men's - from the left and right flanks. The women's battalion was to cross the Helm and advance to the edge of the forest. As soon as they climbed the hillock, the artillery began to beat. Girls and women started screaming and crying. They huddled together, so the German artillery put them all in a heap. There were at least 400 people in the battalion, and three girls survived from the entire battalion. What happened - and it's scary to look at ... mountains of female corpses. Is this a woman's business, war?"
How many female soldiers of the Red Army ended up in German captivity is unknown. However, the Germans did not recognize women as military personnel and regarded them as partisans. Therefore, according to the German private Bruno Schneider, before sending his company to Russia, their commander Ober-Lieutenant Prince acquainted the soldiers with the order: "Shoot all women who serve in the Red Army." Numerous facts testify that this order was applied throughout the war.
In August 1941, on the orders of Emil Knol, commander of the field gendarmerie of the 44th Infantry Division, a prisoner of war, a military doctor, was shot.
In the city of Mglinsk, Bryansk region, in 1941, the Germans captured two girls from the medical unit and shot them.
After the defeat of the Red Army in the Crimea in May 1942, in the Mayak fishing village near Kerch, an unknown girl was hiding in the house of a resident of military uniform. On May 28, 1942, the Germans discovered her during a search. The girl resisted the Nazis, shouting: "Shoot, you bastards! I'm dying for the Soviet people, for Stalin, and you, monsters, will die like a dog!" The girl was shot in the yard.
At the end of August 1942, a group of sailors was shot in the village of Krymskaya in the Krasnodar Territory, among them there were several girls in military uniform.
In the village of Starotitarovskaya, Krasnodar Territory, among the executed prisoners of war, the corpse of a girl in a Red Army uniform was found. She had a passport in the name of Mikhailova Tatyana Alexandrovna, 1923. She was born in the village of Novo-Romanovka.
In the village of Vorontsovo-Dashkovskoye, Krasnodar Territory, in September 1942, captured military assistants Glubokov and Yachmenev were brutally tortured.
On January 5, 1943, 8 Red Army soldiers were captured near the Severny farm. Among them is a nurse named Lyuba. After prolonged torture and abuse, all those captured were shot.
Divisional intelligence translator P. Rafes recalls that in the village of Smagleevka, liberated in 1943, 10 km from Kantemirovka, residents told how in 1941 "a wounded lieutenant girl was dragged naked onto the road, her face, hands were cut, her breasts were cut off ..."
Knowing what awaits them in the event of captivity, female soldiers, as a rule, fought to the last.
Often captured women were raped before they died. Soldier from the 11th tank division Hans Rudhoff testifies that in the winter of 1942, "... Russian nurses were lying on the roads. They were shot and thrown onto the road. They lay naked ... These dead bodies ... obscene inscriptions were written."
In Rostov in July 1942, German motorcyclists broke into the yard, where there were nurses from the hospital. They were going to change into civilian clothes, but did not have time. So, in military uniform, they dragged them into a barn and raped them. However, they were not killed.
Women prisoners of war who ended up in camps were also subjected to violence and abuse. Former prisoner of war K.A. Shenipov said that in the camp in Drogobych there was a beautiful captive girl named Lyuda. "Captain Stroher, the commandant of the camp, tried to rape her, but she resisted, after which the German soldiers, called by the captain, tied Luda to a bunk, and in this position Stroher raped her and then shot her."
In Stalag 346 in Kremenchug at the beginning of 1942, the German camp doctor Orlyand gathered 50 women doctors, paramedics, nurses, undressed them and "ordered our doctors to examine them from the genitals - if they were sick with venereal diseases. He carried out an external examination himself. Chose 3 of them were young girls, took them to him to "serve". German soldiers and officers came for women examined by doctors. Few of these women managed to avoid rape.
The camp guards from among the former prisoners of war and camp policemen were especially cynical about women prisoners of war. They raped captives or, under threat of death, forced them to cohabit with them. In Stalag No. 337, not far from Baranovichi, about 400 female prisoners of war were kept in a specially fenced area with barbed wire. In December 1967, at a meeting of the military tribunal of the Belarusian military district, the former head of the camp guard A.M. Yarosh admitted that his subordinates raped the prisoners of the women's bloc.
The Millerovo POW camp also contained female prisoners. The commandant of the women's barracks was a German from the Volga region. The fate of the girls languishing in this barrack was terrible:
"The policemen often looked into this barracks. Every day, for half a liter, the commandant gave any girl to choose from for two hours. The policeman could take her to his barracks. They lived two in a room. These two hours he could use her as a thing, outrage, mock, do whatever he pleases. Once, during the evening verification, the chief of police himself came, they gave him a girl for the whole night, a German woman complained to him that these “bastards” were reluctant to go to your policemen. He advised with a grin: “A for those who do not want to go, arrange a “red firefighter". The girl was stripped naked, crucified, tied with ropes on the floor. Then they took a large red hot pepper, twisted it and inserted it into the girl's vagina. They left it in this position for up to half an hour. It was forbidden to scream Many girls' lips were bitten - they held back the cry, and after such a punishment they could not move for a long time.The commandant, behind her eyes they called her a cannibal, enjoyed unlimited rights over the captive girls and came up with other sophisticated mockeries. For example, "self-punishment". There is a special stake, which is made crosswise with a height of 60 centimeters. The girl should strip naked, insert a stake into the anus, hold on to the cross with her hands, and put her legs on a stool and hold on for three minutes. Who could not stand it, had to repeat from the beginning. We learned about what was happening in the women's camp from the girls themselves, who came out of the barracks to sit for about ten minutes on a bench. Also, the policemen boastfully talked about their exploits and the resourceful German woman.
To be continued...
Women prisoners of war were held in many camps. According to eyewitnesses, they made an extremely miserable impression. In the conditions of camp life, it was especially difficult for them: they, like no one else, suffered from the lack of basic sanitary conditions.
In the fall of 1941, K. Kromiadi, a member of the commission for the distribution of labor, who visited the Sedlice camp, talked with the captured women. One of them, a female military doctor, admitted: "...everything is bearable, except for the lack of linen and water, which does not allow us to change clothes or wash ourselves."
A group of female medical workers taken prisoner in the Kiev cauldron in September 1941 was kept in Vladimir-Volynsk - Camp Oflag No. 365 "Nord".
Nurses Olga Lenkovskaya and Taisiya Shubina were captured in October 1941 in the Vyazemsky encirclement. At first, women were kept in a camp in Gzhatsk, then in Vyazma. In March, when the Red Army approached, the Germans transferred the captured women to Smolensk in Dulag No. 126. There were few prisoners in the camp. They were kept in a separate barracks, communication with men was forbidden. From April to July 1942, the Germans released all the women with "the condition of a free settlement in Smolensk."
After the fall of Sevastopol in July 1942, about 300 female health workers were captured: doctors, nurses, nurses. At first they were sent to Slavuta, and in February 1943, having gathered about 600 female prisoners of war in the camp, they were loaded into wagons and taken to the West. Everyone was lined up in Rovno, and another search for Jews began. One of the prisoners, Kazachenko, walked around and showed: "this is a Jew, this is a commissar, this is a partisan." Those who were separated from the general group were shot. The rest were again loaded into wagons, men and women together. The prisoners themselves divided the car into two parts: in one - women, in the other - men. Recovered in a hole in the floor.
On the way, the captured men were dropped off at different stations, and on February 23, 1943, the women were brought to the city of Zoes. Lined up and announced that they would work in military factories. Evgenia Lazarevna Klemm was also in the group of prisoners. Jewish. History teacher at the Odessa Pedagogical Institute, posing as a Serb. She enjoyed special prestige among women prisoners of war. E.L. Klemm on behalf of all German said: "We are prisoners of war and will not work in military factories." In response, they began to beat everyone, and then drove them into a small hall, in which, because of the crowding, it was impossible to sit down or move. It stayed that way for almost a day. And then the rebellious were sent to Ravensbrück.
This women's camp was established in 1939. The first prisoners of Ravensbrück were prisoners from Germany, and then from European countries occupied by the Germans. All the prisoners were shaved bald, dressed in striped (blue and gray striped) dresses and unlined jackets. Underwear - shirt and shorts. There were no bras or belts. In October, a pair of old stockings was given out for half a year, but not everyone managed to walk in them until spring. Shoes, as in most concentration camps, are wooden blocks.
The barrack was divided into two parts, connected by a corridor: a day room, in which there were tables, stools and small wall cabinets, and a sleeping room - three-tiered plank beds with a narrow passage between them. For two prisoners, one cotton blanket was issued. In a separate room lived block - senior barracks. There was a washroom in the hallway.
Prisoners worked mainly in the camp's sewing factories. In Ravensbrück, 80% of all uniforms for the SS troops were made, as well as camp clothing for both men and women.
The first Soviet women prisoners of war - 536 people - arrived at the camp on February 28, 1943. At first, everyone was sent to a bathhouse, and then they were given striped camp clothes with a red triangle with the inscription: "SU" - Sowjet Union.
Even before the arrival of the Soviet women, the SS spread a rumor around the camp that a gang of female murderers would be brought from Russia. Therefore, they were placed in a special block, fenced with barbed wire.
Every day, the prisoners got up at 4 in the morning for verification, sometimes lasting several hours. Then they worked for 12-13 hours in sewing workshops or in the camp infirmary.
Breakfast consisted of ersatz coffee, which the women used mainly to wash their hair, as there was no warm water. For this purpose, coffee was collected and washed in turn.
Women whose hair survived began to use combs, which they themselves made. Frenchwoman Micheline Morel recalls that "Russian girls, using factory machines, cut wooden planks or metal plates and polished them so that they became quite acceptable combs. For a wooden comb they gave half a portion of bread, for a metal one - a whole portion."
For lunch, the prisoners received half a liter of gruel and 2-3 boiled potatoes. In the evening we received for five people a small loaf of bread with an admixture of sawdust and again half a liter of gruel.
The impression that Soviet women made on the prisoners of Ravensbrück is testified in her memoirs by one of the prisoners, S. Müller: that, according to the Geneva Convention of the Red Cross, they should be treated as prisoners of war. For the camp authorities, this was unheard of impudence. All the first half of the day they were forced to march along Lagerstrasse (the main "street" of the camp - the author's note) and deprived of lunch.
But the women from the Red Army bloc (as we called the barracks where they lived) decided to turn this punishment into a demonstration of their strength. I remember someone shouted in our block: “Look, the Red Army is marching!” We ran out of the barracks and rushed to Lagerstrasse. And what did we see?
It was unforgettable! Five hundred Soviet women, ten in a row, keeping alignment, walked, as if in a parade, minting a step. Their steps, like a drum roll, beat rhythmically along the Lagerstrasse. The whole column moved as a single unit. Suddenly, a woman on the right flank of the first row gave the command to sing. She counted out: “One, two, three!” And they sang:
Get up, huge country, Get up for a mortal battle...
Then they sang about Moscow.
The Nazis were puzzled: the punishment by marching the humiliated prisoners of war turned into a demonstration of their strength and inflexibility ...
It was not possible for the SS to leave Soviet women without lunch. Political prisoners took care of food for them in advance."
To be continued...
Soviet women prisoners of war more than once struck their enemies and fellow campers with their unity and spirit of resistance. Once 12 Soviet girls were included in the list of prisoners destined to be sent to Majdanek, to the gas chambers. When the SS men came to the barracks to take the women away, the comrades refused to hand them over. The SS managed to find them. "The remaining 500 people lined up five people at a time and went to the commandant. E.L. Klemm was the translator. The commandant drove the newcomers into the block, threatening them with execution, and they began a hunger strike."
In February 1944, about 60 women prisoners of war from Ravensbrück were transferred to a concentration camp in the city of Barth at the Heinkel aircraft factory. The girls refused to work there. Then they were lined up in two rows and ordered to strip down to their shirts and remove the wooden blocks. For many hours they stood in the cold, every hour the matron came and offered coffee and a bed to anyone who would agree to go to work. Then the three girls were thrown into a punishment cell. Two of them died of pneumonia.
Constant bullying, hard labor, hunger led to suicide. In February 1945, the defender of Sevastopol, military doctor Zinaida Aridova, threw herself on the wire.
Nevertheless, the prisoners believed in liberation, and this belief sounded in a song composed by an unknown author:
Keep your head up, Russian girls! Above your head, be bold! We don't have long to endure, A nightingale will fly in in the spring... And open the doors for us to freedom, Remove a striped dress from our shoulders And heal deep wounds, Wipe tears from swollen eyes. Keep your head up, Russian girls! Be Russian everywhere, everywhere! Not long to wait, not long - And we will be on Russian soil.
Former prisoner Germain Tillon, in her memoirs, gave a peculiar description of Russian women prisoners of war who ended up in Ravensbrück: "... their solidarity was explained by the fact that they had gone through an army school even before their capture. They were young, strong, neat, honest, and also quite rude and uneducated. There were also intellectuals (doctors, teachers) among them - benevolent and attentive. In addition, we liked their disobedience, unwillingness to obey the Germans. "
Women prisoners of war were also sent to other concentration camps. Prisoner of Auschwitz A. Lebedev recalls that paratroopers Ira Ivannikova, Zhenya Saricheva, Viktorina Nikitina, doctor Nina Kharlamova and nurse Claudia Sokolova were kept in the women's camp.
In January 1944, for refusing to sign an agreement to work in Germany and move into the category of civilian workers, more than 50 female prisoners of war from the camp in Chelm were sent to Majdanek. Among them were doctor Anna Nikiforova, military paramedics Efrosinya Tsepennikova and Tonya Leontieva, infantry lieutenant Vera Matyutskaya.
Air regiment navigator Anna Egorova, whose plane was shot down over Poland, shell-shocked, with a burnt face, was taken prisoner and kept in the Kyustrinsky camp.
Despite the death reigning in captivity, despite the fact that any connection between prisoners of war men and women was forbidden, where they worked together, most often in camp infirmaries, sometimes love was born, bestowing new life. As a rule, in such rare cases, the German leadership of the infirmary did not interfere with childbirth. After the birth of the child, the mother-prisoner of war was either transferred to the status of a civilian, released from the camp and released at the place of residence of her relatives in the occupied territory, or returned with the child to the camp.
So, from the documents of the camp infirmary Stalag No. 352 in Minsk, it is known that "who arrived at the 1st City Hospital for childbirth on February 23, 1942, the nurse Sindeva Alexandra left with her child for the Rollbahn prisoner of war camp."
In 1944, the attitude towards women prisoners of war hardened. They are subjected to new tests. In accordance with general provisions on the testing and selection of Soviet prisoners of war, on March 6, 1944, the OKW issued a special order "On the treatment of Russian women prisoners of war." This document stated that Soviet women prisoners of war held in camps should be subjected to checks by the local Gestapo branch in the same way as all newly arriving Soviet prisoners of war. If, as a result of a police check, the political unreliability of female prisoners of war is revealed, they should be released from captivity and handed over to the police.
On the basis of this order, on April 11, 1944, the head of the Security Service and the SD issued an order to send unreliable female prisoners of war to the nearest concentration camp. After being delivered to a concentration camp, such women were subjected to the so-called "special treatment" - liquidation. So Vera Panchenko-Pisanetskaya died - senior group seven hundred female prisoners of war who worked at a military factory in the city of Genthin. A lot of marriage was produced at the plant, and during the investigation it turned out that Vera led the sabotage. In August 1944 she was sent to Ravensbrück and hanged there in the autumn of 1944.
In the Stutthof concentration camp in 1944, 5 Russian senior officers were killed, including a female major. They were taken to the crematorium - the place of execution. First, the men were brought in and shot one after the other. Then a woman. According to a Pole who worked in the crematorium and understood Russian, the SS man, who spoke Russian, mocked the woman, forcing her to follow his commands: “right, left, around ...” After that, the SS man asked her: “Why did you do this? ” What she did, I never found out. She replied that she did it for the motherland. After that, the SS man slapped him in the face and said: "This is for your homeland." The Russian spat in his eyes and replied: “And this is for your homeland.” There was confusion. Two SS men ran up to the woman and began to push her alive into the furnace for burning corpses. She resisted. Several more SS men ran up. The officer shouted: “Into her furnace!” The oven door was open and the heat set the woman's hair on fire. Despite the fact that the woman vigorously resisted, she was placed on a cart for burning corpses and pushed into the furnace. This was seen by all the prisoners who worked in the crematorium. "Unfortunately, the name of this heroine remained unknown.
To be continued...
Women who escaped from captivity continued to fight against the enemy. In secret message No. 12 dated July 17, 1942, the head of the security police of the occupied eastern regions The Imperial Minister of Security of the 17th Military District is informed in the "Jews" section that in Uman "a Jewish doctor who had previously served in the Red Army and was taken prisoner was arrested. After escaping from a prisoner of war camp, she took refuge in orphanage in Uman under a false name and was engaged in medical practice. She used this opportunity to gain access to the POW camp for espionage purposes." Probably, the unknown heroine assisted the POWs.
Women prisoners of war, risking their lives, repeatedly saved their Jewish friends. In Dulag No. 160, Khorol, about 60 thousand prisoners were kept in a quarry on the territory of a brick factory. There was also a group of girls-prisoners of war. Of these, seven or eight remained alive by the spring of 1942. In the summer of 1942 they were all shot for harboring a Jewish woman.
In the autumn of 1942, in the Georgievsk camp, along with other prisoners, there were several hundred female prisoners of war. Once the Germans took the identified Jews to be shot. Among the doomed was Tsilya Gedaleva. At the last minute, the German officer in charge of the massacre suddenly said: "Medchen raus! - The girl - get out!" And Tsilya returned to the women's barracks. Girlfriends gave Tsilya a new name - Fatima, and in the future, according to all documents, she passed as a Tatar.
Military doctor III rank Emma Lvovna Khotina from September 9 to 20 was surrounded in the Bryansk forests. Was taken prisoner. During the next stage, she fled from the village of Kokarevka to the city of Trubchevsk. Hiding under a false name, often changing apartments. She was helped by her comrades - Russian doctors who worked in the camp infirmary in Trubchevsk. They established contact with the partisans. And when on February 2, 1942, the partisans attacked Trubchevsk, 17 doctors, paramedics and nurses left with them. E. L. Khotina became the head of the sanitary service of the partisan association of the Zhytomyr region.
Sarah Zemelman - military paramedic, lieutenant of the medical service, worked in the mobile field hospital No. 75 of the South-Western Front. September 21, 1941 near Poltava, wounded in the leg, was taken prisoner along with the hospital. The head of the hospital, Vasilenko, handed Sarah documents in the name of Alexandra Mikhailovskaya, the murdered paramedic. There were no traitors among the hospital staff who were captured. Three months later, Sarah managed to escape from the camp. For a month she wandered through the forests and villages, until not far from Krivoy Rog, in the village of Veseli Terny, she was sheltered by the family of the paramedic-veterinarian Ivan Lebedchenko. For over a year, Sarah lived in the basement of the house. January 13, 1943 Merry Terny were liberated by the Red Army. Sarah went to the draft board and asked to go to the front, but she was placed in the filtration camp No. 258. They were called in for interrogations only at night. The investigators asked how she, a Jewess, survived in Nazi captivity? And only a meeting in the same camp with colleagues in the hospital - a radiologist and a chief surgeon - helped her.
S. Zemelman was sent to the medical battalion of the 3rd Pomor Division of the 1st Polish Army. She ended the war on the outskirts of Berlin on May 2, 1945. She was awarded three Orders of the Red Star, the Order Patriotic War 1st degree, awarded the Polish Order of the Silver Cross of Merit.
Unfortunately, after being released from the camps, the prisoners faced injustice, suspicion and contempt for them, who had gone through the hell of the German camps.
Grunya Grigoryeva recalls that the Red Army soldiers who liberated Ravensbrück on April 30, 1945, “... looked at the girls-prisoners of war as traitors. This shocked us. We did not expect such a meeting. Ours preferred French women more, Poles - foreigners.
After the end of the war, women prisoners of war went through all the torment and humiliation during SMERSH checks in filtration camps. Alexandra Ivanovna Max, one of 15 Soviet women liberated in the Neuhammer camp, tells how Soviet officer in the camp for repatriates, he scolded them: "Shame on you, you surrendered to captivity, you ..." And I argue with him: "What were we supposed to do?" And he says: "You should have shot yourself, but not surrendered!" And I say: "Where did we have pistols?" - "Well, you could, you should have hanged yourself, killed yourself. But don't surrender."
Many front-line soldiers knew what awaited the former prisoners at home. One of the released women, N.A. Kurlyak, recalls: “We, 5 girls, were left to work in a Soviet military unit. We kept asking: “Send me home.” We were dissuaded, begged: “Stay a little longer, they will look at you with contempt "But we didn't believe."
And already a few years after the war, a female doctor, a former prisoner, writes in a private letter: "... sometimes I am very sorry that I survived, because I always carry this dark spot of captivity. Still, many do not know what kind of "life" it was, if you can call it life. Many do not believe that we honestly endured the burdens of captivity there and remained honest citizens of the Soviet state. "
Staying in fascist captivity irreparably affected the health of many women. For most of them, while still in the camp, natural female processes stopped and many never recovered.
Some, transferred from POW camps to concentration camps, were subjected to sterilization. “I didn’t have children after being sterilized in the camp. And so I remained like a cripple ... Many of our girls did not have children. So some husbands left because they wanted to have children. And my husband didn’t leave me as I am, he says, we will live like that. And we still live with him. "
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08.10.42: In one village, liberated from the Germans, there were monuments of a civilization that was mysterious to us. Around the hut where the officers lived, birch trees were planted, and among the trees there was a toy gallows: on it the Fritz, having fun, hung cats - there were no people, people. ("Red Star", USSR)15.09.42: Dark animal malice lives in the Germans. “Lieutenant Kleist came up, looked at the wounded Russians and said: “These pigs must be shot right away.” “The woman was crying that all her beets were taken away from her, but Hitzder beat her.” “Yesterday we hanged two scoundrels, and somehow it became easier on the soul.” "I would not leave Russian children either - they will grow up and become partisans, they all need to be hanged." "If you leave at least one family, they will divorce and take revenge on us."
In impotent rage, the Fritz dream of gases. Feldwebel Schledeter writes to his wife: "If it were in my power, I would poison them with gases." Mother writes to non-commissioned officer Dobler: “We are told that the Russians need to be suffocated with gases, because there are too many of them, and too much.” ("Red Star", USSR)
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