Captured Soviet Female Soldiers - How Did the Germans Treat Them?

[Music] this episode is brought to you by curiosity stream a subscription streaming service that offers thousands of documentaries and non-fiction titles from some of the world's best filmmakers including exclusive originals like berlin 1945 time travel in cinematic style into the city's most fateful year through the eyes of those who experienced it and apocalypse stalin the rise of stalin from bank robber to cold-blooded leader of the soviet union go to curiositystream.com forward slash mark feltham for unlimited access to the world's top documentaries and non-fiction series and for our fans use the promo code mark felton and you will save 25 off which comes to only 14.99 a year that's just one dollar 25 cents per month for the very best in history programming choose curiosity stream the german army launched operation barbarossa on the 22nd of june 1941 the invasion of the soviet union it faced one interesting situation that it had not previously encountered in poland france or the low countries female enemy combatants the war on the eastern front was a conflict of ideologies on the one hand german national socialism and on the other soviet communism both sides loathed each other in a far more visceral way than the fighting between the germans and british and french troops in the west the soviet population had been actively denigrated as slavic sub-humans by nazi propaganda leading to great cruelty and suffering as the germans advanced eastwards what really disgusted the germans aside from the obvious racial and political hatreds was the fact that the red army used women in combat utterly at odds with the nazi party's views concerning the acceptable roles and places of women in society the germans would be forced to recruit hundreds of thousands of women during the war to release more men to fighting units but with a few notable exceptions service women acted as nurses clerks drivers searchlight operators and other non-front-line posts the germans did not consider the front line a suitable place for a woman the soviet union on the other hand viewed men and women as essentially equal certainly equal enough for women to bear arms and fight alongside men in the defence of the motherland as well as serving in the kinds of female military positions seen in the german british and american armed services soviet female soldiers also manned anti-aircraft batteries see my video about the female anti-aircraft battery that was the first red army unit to engage german panzers as they approached stalingrad in 1942 some women were fighter and bomber pilots there was even a bomber squadron that the germans derisively named the night witches and famously there were of course women snipers many of whom earning terrifying reputations and high kill tallies in total around a million soviet women served during world war ii and almost 200 000 were decorated with 89 receiving the soviet union's highest award for gallantry and meritorious service hero of the soviet union allowing women to take up arms was complete anathema to the traditional german mindset and led to a very unpleasant reaction when female soviet soldiers fell into german hands as they did in fairly large numbers in the first months of the campaign in russia the germans had a derogatory name for female red army soldiers they called them flint viber which loosely translates as rifle broad instead of being viewed as women in uniform in the german military mind they were indicative of the degeneration of communism and they were the face of evil many hundreds of thousands of red army troops predominantly male but with some female troops as well carried on fighting behind german lines due to the rapidly moving and fluid state of the battlefield in 1941-42 the germans had strong views over what they termed partisans they were ruthlessly hunted down and killed soviet female soldiers were also targeted for death the germans portraying them as degenerates ready to inflict unspeakable cruelties upon male german soldiers this was not the nazis speaking but the regular german army offended that women had entered the male military arena the only group of soviet women actually left alone by the germans largely were soviet army nurses who were usually spared due to their non-combatant status on the 29th of june 1941 only seven days into the german invasion field marshal gunter von kluger commanding the fourth army ordered quote women in uniform are to be shot unquote this was a stark order that was later rescinded but individual german commanders continued to issue such illegal orders for dealing with soviet female troops in october 1941 field marshal fautavan reichenau commanding the german sixth army issued specific instructions for the treatment of captured partisans women soldiers and soviet military commissars who were political officers they were all to be shot female soldiers were to be executed immediately following capture further down the chain of command general ernst hammer commander of the 75th infantry division promulgated a similar illegal order that read quote women folk and russian uniforms are to be shot immediately on principle unquote also in october 1941 the commander of the fourth panzer division wrote quote insidious and cruel partisans as well as degenerate flint and viber don't belong in a prisoner of war camp but hung from the nearest tree unquote german units followed superior orders and killed soviet female troops on site from the beginning of the invasion and following fancluger's illegal order the 27th of june the following month the 122nd infantry division filed a report as an example that they had shot 30 female soviet soldiers that one of its units had captured remember these german units were taking prisoner male soviet soldiers with the exceptions of partisans and political commissars though the pows were being horrifically maltreated in largely open-air pow camps systematically starved and abused as we see here german soldiers throwing scraps of food to starving soviet prisoners for fun all of this was done by the regular german army the figures are stuck six million soviets became prisoners of the germans during the war and three million of them died in captivity not all female soviet soldiers were shot out of hand many were horrifically sexually assaulted before being killed others were taken prisoner and instead handed over to the ss as the army had no prisoner-of-war facilities for women these unfortunate women largely ended up in ravensbruck germany's biggest concentration camp for women or auschwitz-birkenau women's camp about 18 000 soviet female pows were held at ravensbrook at one time or another large numbers of soviet women soldiers committed suicide if faced with imminent capture while the germans shot thousands thanks for watching please subscribe and share and also visit my audiobook channel war stories with mark felton you can also help to support both of my channels at paypal and patreon details in the description box below [Music]

Channel: Mark Felton Productions

Views: 3,135,427

Rating: 4.8594174 out of 5

Keywords: Eastern Front, Red Army, Soviet Union, Mark Felton

Id: BsjJ5AAKGP0

Length: 8min 34sec (514 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 21 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/xfjqvyks]

Well, I don’t think I’ve ever been so depressed so quickly.

[u/W3remaid]

Wow I had no idea there were so many women in the Soviet army— but that was difficult to watch

[u/SgtGinja]

Unfortunately this barely scratches the surface of the Soviet Woman’s experience of World War II. If you would like to know more I highly recommend The Unwomanly Face of War by Svetlana Alexievich which won a Nobel Prize in Literature. Note it is one of the most difficult books I have ever read and I have been studying war for some time now.

[u/Willywonkahc]

The Russians were no better. I personally like the transition from Russian women getting killed, to urging the viewers to subscribe :D

[u/48756e746572]

I honestly don't even want to watch this video. Given the Nazi's mass rape that they did and the fact that approximately 50% of all soviet PoWs in German hands died I can only conclude, poorly.

[u/J_A_Brone]

See also; the rape of Berlin