Correspondent: Camp bed. The Nazis forced female prisoners into prostitution - Archive

When it comes to talking about wars and the horrific conditions in which captives had to live, it is often exclusively men that are meant. Meanwhile, around the world, women often found themselves in the camps of warring parties. Many of them went crazy out of despair and were ready to commit suicide, since their situation was sometimes even worse than that of the male captives.

Women soldiers of the Red Army in German captivity

The women who miraculously survived were subjected to abuse, brutal torture and violence. They were beaten to death, raped repeatedly, had obscene inscriptions carved into their bodies and faces, or had parts of their bodies cut off and left to bleed to death.

There were women prisoners of war in every German concentration camp. Over time, confinement in separate barracks and a ban on communication with men became mandatory. Throughout the imprisonment, minimum sanitary conditions were lacking. We couldn’t even dream of clean water and fresh linen. Food was provided once a day, and sometimes with long intervals.

How do they survive captivity of the Islamic State?

On the contrary, when building a fair society of “true Islam,” jihadists pay increased attention to the issue of interaction with women. According to Sharia law, they are obliged to devote all their time to their family: raising children, taking care of the household, and carrying out their husband’s orders. Accordingly, if women think differently, Islamists do not hesitate to impose their rules by force.

Anyone who professed another religion before the arrival of IS is automatically recognized as traitors. And they treat them accordingly: they are taken into slavery, bought and sold, forced to do hard and dirty work. Rape and mutilation of enslaved women has long been recognized by Islamic State theologians as part of Sharia law.

The lives of the unfortunate captives have no value. They are used as human shields, forced to dig trenches and shelters under crossfire, and sent into crowded areas as suicide bombers.

Germans in Eisenhower's death camps

Women who never participated in combat were kept in equal conditions with men. These were one of the largest prisoner of war camps: tens of thousands of people were herded into groups and held for months right in the open air, fencing the area with barbed wire.

The prisoners had no shelters. They were not given warm clothing or basic hygiene products. In order to somehow protect themselves from heavy rains and frosts, many dug holes and tried to build improvised huts from tree branches. However, this was not what was truly terrible. Both women and men in Eisenhower's camps were essentially starved to death. The American general personally signed an order stating that this category of prisoners does not fall under the Geneva Convention.

The American army reserves had a huge supply of food, but this did not stop the prevailing enemy from cutting the prisoners' rations in half, and after a while - reducing the portions by another third. People were so hungry that they ate grass and drank their own urine. The mortality rate in Eisenhower's death camps was more than 30%, and the bulk of them were women, pregnant girls and children.

Captured by Somali terrorists

Girls are taken captive for ransom or used as “bait” in ambushes. The attitude towards captives is appropriate: they live in cramped rooms or pits, more like coffins, are forced to endure endless beatings and exist in a half-starved state. It often happens that women are gang raped. The only chance to free yourself is to wait for help from the authorities. Even if the terrorists agree to the exchange, there is a real risk of ending up in prison for transferring funds.

Many captives see renunciation of their own religion and adoption of Islam as a way to save their lives. This, in particular, happens because the kidnappers often talk about the commandments of the Koran, which prohibit one Muslim from killing or raping another. However, in reality, even after accepting Islam, the hostages are not treated better. But to all the already standard bullying is added the requirement to pray five times a day.

Many years after the war it became known.

What did the Nazis do with the captured women? Truth and myths regarding the atrocities that German soldiers committed against Red Army soldiers, partisans, snipers and other females. During the Second World War, many volunteer girls were sent to the front; almost a million especially female ones were sent to the front, and almost all signed up as volunteers. It was already much more difficult for women at the front than for men, but when they fell into the clutches of the Germans, all hell broke loose.

Women who remained under occupation in Belarus or Ukraine also suffered a lot. Sometimes they managed to survive the German regime relatively safely (memoirs, books by Bykov, Nilin), but this was not without humiliation. Even more often, a concentration camp, rape, and torture awaited them.

Execution by shooting or hanging

The treatment of captured women who fought in positions in the Soviet army was quite simple - they were shot. But scouts or partisans, most often, faced hanging. Usually after much bullying.

Most of all, the Germans loved to undress captured Red Army women, keep them in the cold or drive them along the street. This comes from the Jewish pogroms. In those days, girlish shame was a very strong psychological tool; the Germans were surprised at how many virgins there were among the captives, so they actively used such a measure to completely crush, break, and humiliate.

Public flogging, beatings, carousel interrogations are also some of the favorite methods of the fascists.

Rape by the entire platoon was often practiced. However, this mainly happened in small units. The officers did not welcome this, they were forbidden to do this, so more often guards and assault groups did this during arrests or during closed interrogations.

Traces of torture and abuse were found on the bodies of killed partisans (for example, the famous Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya). Their breasts were cut off, stars were cut out, and so on.

Did the Germans impale you?

Today, when some idiots are trying to justify the crimes of the fascists, others are trying to instill more fear. For example, they write that the Germans impaled captured women on stakes. There is no documentary or photographic evidence of this, and it’s simply unlikely that the Nazis wanted to waste time on this. They considered themselves “cultured,” so acts of intimidation were carried out mainly through mass executions, hangings, or general burning in huts.

Of the exotic types of executions, only the gas van can be mentioned. This is a special van where people were killed using exhaust gases. Naturally, they were also used to eliminate women. True, such machines did not serve Nazi Germany for long, since the Nazis had to wash them for a long time after the execution.

Death camps

Soviet women prisoners of war were sent to concentration camps on an equal basis with men, but, of course, the number of prisoners who reached such a prison was much less than the initial number. Partisans and intelligence officers were usually hanged immediately, but nurses, doctors, and representatives of the civilian population who were Jewish or related to party work could be driven away.

The fascists did not really favor women, since they worked worse than men. It is known that the Nazis carried out medical experiments on people; women's ovaries were cut out. The famous Nazi sadistic doctor Joseph Mengele sterilized women with X-rays and tested them on the human body’s ability to withstand high voltage.

Famous women's concentration camps are Ravensbrück, Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Mauthausen, Salaspils. In total, the Nazis opened more than 40 thousand camps and ghettos, and executions were carried out. The worst situation was for women with children, whose blood was taken. Stories about how a mother begged a nurse to inject her child with poison so that he would not be tortured by experiments are still horrifying. But for the Nazis, dissecting a living baby and introducing bacteria and chemicals into the child was in the order of things.

Verdict

About 5 million Soviet citizens died in captivity and concentration camps. More than half of them were women, however, there would hardly have been even more than 100 thousand prisoners of war. Basically, representatives of the fair sex in greatcoats were dealt with on the spot.

Of course, the Nazis responded for their crimes, both with their complete defeat and with executions during the Nuremberg trials. But the worst thing was that many, after the Nazi concentration camps, were heading to Stalin’s camps. This, for example, was often done with residents of occupied regions, intelligence workers, signalmen, etc.

“I didn’t immediately decide to publish this chapter from the book “Captive” on the website. This is one of the most terrible and heroic stories. My deepest bow to you, women, for everything you suffered and, alas, was never appreciated by the state, people, and researchers. About this It was difficult to write. It was even more difficult to talk to former prisoners. Low bow to you, Heroine."

“And there were no such beautiful women in all the earth...” Job (42:15)

"My tears were bread for me day and night... ...my enemies mock 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 voluntarily joined the army and militia divisions. Based on the resolutions 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 warriors. 300 thousand were drafted into the air defense forces. Hundreds of thousands go to the military medical and sanitary services, signal troops, road and other units. In May 1942, another GKO resolution was adopted - on the mobilization of 25 thousand women in the Navy.

Three air regiments were formed from women: two bomber and one fighter, 1st separate women's volunteer rifle brigade, 1st separate women's reserve rifle regiment.

Created in 1942, the Central Women's Sniper School trained 1,300 female snipers.

Ryazan Infantry School named after. Voroshilov trained female commanders of rifle units. In 1943 alone, 1,388 people graduated from it.

During the war, women served in all branches of the military and represented all military specialties. Women made up 41% of all doctors, 43% of paramedics, and 100% of nurses. In total, 800 thousand women served in the Red Army.

However, female medical instructors and nurses in the active army made up only 40%, which violates the prevailing ideas about a girl under fire saving the wounded. In his interview, A. Volkov, who served as a medical instructor throughout the war, refutes the myth that only girls were medical instructors. According to him, the girls were nurses and orderlies in medical battalions, and mostly men served as medical instructors and orderlies on the front line in the trenches.

“They didn’t even take frail men for the medical instructor courses. Only the big ones! The work of a medical instructor is harder than that of a sapper. A medical instructor must crawl his trenches at least four times a night to find the wounded. It’s written in movies and books: she’s so weak, she was dragging a wounded man , so big, almost a kilometer long! 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? drag him to the rear, for this the medical instructor is subordinate to everyone. There is always someone to take him out of the battlefield. The medical instructor is subordinate to no one. Only the chief of the medical battalion.”

You can’t agree with A. Volkov on everything. Female medical instructors saved the wounded by 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 stereotypical screen images and the truth of the war.

For example, former medical instructor Sofya Dubnyakova says: “I watch films about the war: a nurse on the front line, she walks neatly, cleanly, not in padded trousers, but in a skirt, she has a cap on her crest... Well, that’s not true!... Isn’t it true? We could pull out a wounded man like this?.. It’s not like you’re crawling around in a skirt when there are only men around. But to tell the truth, they only gave us skirts at the end of the war. It was then that we received underwear instead of men’s underwear.”

In addition to the medical instructors, among whom there were women, there were porter nurses in the medical units - these were only men. They also provided assistance to 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 presenting military orderlies and porters for government awards for good combat work.” The work of orderlies and porters was equated to a military feat. The said order stated: “For the removal from the battlefield of 15 wounded with their rifles or light machine guns, present each orderly and porter for a government award with a medal “For Military Merit” or “For Courage.” For the removal of 25 wounded from the battlefield 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 of the 2nd and 3rd degrees. Four became full holders of the Order of Glory of three degrees. 86 women were awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union.

At all times, women's service in the army was considered immoral. There are many offensive lies about them; just remember PPZh - field wife.

Oddly enough, men at the front gave rise to such an attitude towards women. War veteran N.S. Posylaev recalls: “As a rule, women who went to the front soon became the mistresses of officers. How could it be otherwise: if a woman is on her own, there will be no end to the harassment. It’s a different matter with someone else...”

To be continued...

A. Volkov said that when a group of girls arrived in the army, “merchants” immediately came for them: “First, the youngest and most beautiful were taken by the army headquarters, then by lower-ranking headquarters.”

In the fall of 1943, a girl medical instructor arrived in his company at night. And there is only one medical instructor per company. It turns out that the girl “was pestered everywhere, and since she did not yield to anyone, everyone sent her lower. From army headquarters to division headquarters, then to regimental headquarters, then to the company, and the company commander sent the untouchable to the trenches.”

Zina Serdyukova, a former sergeant major of the reconnaissance company of the 6th Guards Cavalry Corps, knew how to behave strictly with soldiers and commanders, but one day the following happened:

“It was winter, the platoon was quartered in a rural house, and I had a nook there. In the evening the regiment commander called me. Sometimes he himself set the task of sending them behind enemy lines. This time he was drunk, the table with the remains of 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 him to hold me. The two of them tore my clothes off. In response to my screams, the landlady where I was staying flew in, and that was the only thing that saved me. I ran through the village, half-naked, crazy. For some reason, I believed that I would find protection from the corps commander, General Sharaburko, he called me his daughter like a father. The adjutant did not let me in, but I burst into the general’s room, beaten and disheveled. She told me incoherently how Colonel M. 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. This is what war is, it’s not just bombs, tanks, grueling marches...”

Everything in life was at the front, where “there are four steps to death.” However, most veterans remember the girls who fought at the front with sincere respect. Those who were slandered most often were those who sat in the rear, behind the backs of the women who went to the front as volunteers.

Former front-line soldiers, despite the difficulties they had to face in the men's team, remember their combat friends with warmth and gratitude.

Rachelle Berezina, in the army since 1942 - a translator-intelligence officer for military intelligence, ended the war in Vienna as a senior translator in 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; the intelligence department even stopped swearing in her presence.

Maria Fridman, an intelligence officer of the 1st NKVD division, who fought in the Nevskaya Dubrovka area near Leningrad, recalls that the intelligence officers protected her and 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 suitors: “If it’s no one, then no one.”

When volunteer girls from Leningrad appeared in the regiment, every month we were dragged to the “brood,” as we called it. In the medical battalion they checked to see if anyone was pregnant... After one such “brood,” the regiment commander asked me in surprise: “Maruska, who are you taking care of for? They will kill us anyway...” The people were rude, but kind. And fair. I have never seen such militant justice as in the trenches.”

The everyday difficulties that Maria Friedman had to face at the front are now remembered with irony.

“The lice infested the soldiers. They take off their shirts and pants, but what does it feel like for the girl? I had to look for an abandoned dugout and there, stripping naked, I tried to cleanse myself of lice. Sometimes they helped me, someone would stand at the door and say: “Don’t poke your nose in, Maruska is squashing lice there!”

And bath day! And go when needed! Somehow I found myself alone, climbed under a bush, above the parapet of the trench. The Germans either didn’t notice right away or let me sit quietly, but when I started pulling on my panties, there was a whistling sound from left and right. I fell into the trench, my pants at my heels. Oh, they were laughing in the trenches about how Maruska’s ass blinded the Germans...

At first, I must admit, this soldier’s cackling irritated me, until I realized that they were not laughing at me, but at their fate as a soldier, covered in blood and lice, they were 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. Friedman fought at the front and behind enemy lines, was wounded three times, 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 basis with men, not inferior to them either in courage or military skill.

The Germans, in whose army women carried out 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 the inhumanity of the Soviet system, which 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 has been wounded...”

The Bolsheviks 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 isolated cases, like the notorious “shock women” 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 yet thought of the massive involvement of women in the army as fighters, on the front line with weapons in hand, except the Bolsheviks.

Every nation strives to protect its women from danger, to preserve women, for a woman is a mother, and 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 that threaten the continued existence of the nation, would try to take its country out of the war, because every national government cherishes its people.” (Emphasis by the Germans. This turns out to be the main idea: we need to end the war, and we need a national government. - Aron Schneer).

« The Bolsheviks think differently. The Georgian Stalin and the various Kaganovichs, Berias, Mikoyans and the entire Jewish kagal (how can you do without anti-Semitism in propaganda! - Aron Schneer), sitting on the people’s neck, don’t give a damn about the Russian people and all the other peoples of Russia and Russia itself. They have one goal - to preserve their power and their skins. Therefore, they need war, war at all costs, war by any means, at the cost of any sacrifice, 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 also “manage” to die at the front, drag her too into the meat grinder of war, there is no need to be gentle with her. Stalin does not feel sorry for the Russian woman..."

The Germans, of course, miscalculated and did not take into account the sincere patriotic impulse of thousands of Soviet women and girl volunteers. Of course, there were mobilizations, emergency measures in conditions of extreme danger, the tragic situation that developed at the fronts, but it would be wrong not to take into account the sincere patriotic impulse of young people 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 voluntarily went to the front:

“I left my childhood Into a dirty heated vehicle, Into an infantry echelon, Into a medical platoon. ... I came from school Into damp dugouts. From a Beautiful Lady - Into “mother” and “rewind”. Because the name is Closer than “Russia”, I 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, are fanatical, dangerous. In 1941, the sanitary battalions defended the last lines before Leningrad with grenades and rifles in their hands.”

Liaison officer Prince Albert of Hohenzollern, who took part in the assault on Sevastopol in July 1942, “admired the Russians and especially the women, who, he said, showed 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 those 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 first wash themselves in the bathhouse and wash their dirty linen in order to die in a clean state, as it should be according to old Russian customs. The Germans granted their request. And here they are, having washed and Putting on clean shirts, we went to be shot..."

The fact that the Italian’s story about the participation of a female infantry unit in the battles is not fiction is confirmed by another story. Since both in Soviet scientific and fiction literature there were numerous references only to the exploits of individual women - representatives of all military specialties and never talked about the participation in 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 - deputy platoon commander of reconnaissance” tells about the fate of a captured Soviet girl. 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 they went! They gathered young people, a representative from the district military registration and enlistment office comes to the meeting and asks: “How do you girls love Soviet power?” They answer - “We love you.” - “That’s how we need to protect!” They write applications. And then try, refuse! And in 1942, mobilization began. - those are mobilized for work. And those who are younger and without children - there were 200 people in my graduating class. Some did not want to study, but they were then sent to dig trenches.

In our regiment of three battalions there were two men's and one women's. The first battalion was female - machine gunners. In the beginning, there were girls from orphanages. They were desperate. With this battalion we occupied up to ten settlements, and then most of them fell out of action. 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. The new battalion included older women and girls. Everyone got involved in mobilization. We trained for three months to become machine gunners. At first, while there were no big battles, they were brave.

Our regiment advanced on the villages of Zhilino, Savkino, and Surovezhki. The women's battalion operated in the middle, and the men's on the left and right flanks. The women's battalion had to cross Chelm and advance to the edge of the forest. As soon as we climbed the hill, the artillery began to fire. The girls and women started screaming and crying. They huddled together, and the German artillery put them all in a heap. There were at least 400 people in the battalion, and only three girls remained alive from the entire battalion. What happened was scary to watch... mountains of female corpses. Is war a woman’s business?”

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, Oberleutnant Prince, familiarized the soldiers with the order: “Shoot all women who serve in units of the Red Army.” Numerous facts indicate 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 a medical unit and shot them.

After the defeat of the Red Army in Crimea in May 1942, in the fishing village "Mayak" not far from Kerch, an unknown girl in military uniform was hiding in the house of a resident of Buryachenko. On May 28, 1942, the Germans discovered her during a search. The girl resisted the Nazis, shouting: “Shoot, you bastards! I am 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, in the village of Krymskaya, Krasnodar Territory, a group of sailors was shot, among them 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 discovered. She had a passport with her in the name of Tatyana Alexandrovna Mikhailova, born in 1923 in the village of Novo-Romanovka.

In the village of Vorontsovo-Dashkovskoye, Krasnodar Territory, in September 1942, captured military paramedics Glubokov and Yachmenev were brutally tortured.

On January 5, 1943, not far from the Severny farm, 8 Red Army soldiers were captured. 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 female lieutenant was dragged naked onto the road, her face and hands were cut, her breasts were cut off...”

Knowing what awaited them if captured, female soldiers, as a rule, fought to the last.

Captured women were often subjected to violence before their death. A soldier from the 11th Panzer Division, Hans Rudhof, testifies that in the winter of 1942, “... Russian nurses were lying on the roads. They were shot and thrown onto the road. They were lying naked... On these dead bodies... obscene inscriptions were written ".

In Rostov in July 1942, German motorcyclists burst into the yard in which nurses from the hospital were located. They were going to change into civilian clothes, but did not have time. So, in military uniform, they were dragged into a barn and raped. However, they did not kill him.

Women prisoners of war who ended up in the camps were also subjected to violence and abuse. Former prisoner of war K.A. Shenipov said that in the camp in Drohobych there was a beautiful captive girl named Luda. “Captain Stroyer, the camp commandant, tried to rape her, but she resisted, after which the German soldiers, called by the captain, tied Luda to a bed, and in this position Stroyer raped her and then shot her.”

In Stalag 346 in Kremenchug at the beginning of 1942, the German camp doctor Orland gathered 50 female doctors, paramedics, and nurses, stripped them and “ordered our doctors to examine them from the genitals to see if they were suffering from venereal diseases. He carried out the external examination himself. He chose of which 3 were young girls, he took them to “serve.” German soldiers and officers came to look after the women examined by doctors. Few of these women managed to avoid rape.

Camp guards from among former prisoners of war and camp police were especially cynical about women prisoners of war. They raped their captives or forced them to cohabit with them under threat of death. In Stalag No. 337, not far from Baranovichi, about 400 women 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 chief of camp security, A.M. Yarosh, admitted that his subordinates raped prisoners in the women’s block.

Women prisoners were also kept in the Millerovo prisoner of war camp. The commandant of the women's barracks was a German woman from the Volga region. The fate of the girls languishing in this barracks 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 to a room. For these two hours, he could use her as a thing, abuse, mock, do whatever he wants. One day, during an evening check, the police chief himself came, they gave him a girl for the whole night, the German woman complained to him that these “bastards” are reluctant to go to your policemen. He advised with a grin: “A. For those who don’t want to go, arrange a “red fireman.” The girl was stripped naked, tied with ropes on the floor. Then they took a large red hot pepper, turned it inside out and inserted it into the girl’s vagina. They left her in this position for up to half an hour. Many girls had their lips bitten - they held back their screams, and after such punishment they could not move for a long time. The commandant, behind her back, was called a cannibal, enjoyed unlimited rights over the captive girls and came up with other sophisticated abuses. For example, “self-punishment”. There is a special stake, which is made crosswise with a height of 60 centimeters. The girl must undress naked, insert a stake into the anus, hold on to the crosspiece with her hands, and place her feet on a stool and hold on like this for three minutes. Those who could not stand it had to repeat it all over again. We learned about what was going on in the women's camp from the girls themselves, who came out of the barracks to sit on a bench for ten minutes. 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 pathetic impression. It was especially difficult for them in the conditions of camp life: they, like no one else, suffered from the lack of basic sanitary conditions.

K. Kromiadi, a member of the labor distribution commission, visited the Sedlice camp in the fall of 1941 and talked with the women prisoners. 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 captured in the Kiev pocket in September 1941 was kept in Vladimir-Volynsk - Oflag camp No. 365 "Nord".

Nurses Olga Lenkovskaya and Taisiya Shubina were captured in October 1941 in the Vyazemsky encirclement. First, the women were kept in a camp in Gzhatsk, then in Vyazma. In March, as the Red Army approached, the Germans transferred captured women to Smolensk to Dulag No. 126. There were few captives in the camp. They were kept in a separate barracks, communication with men was prohibited. From April to July 1942, the Germans released all women with “the condition of free settlement in Smolensk.”

After the fall of Sevastopol in July 1942, about 300 female medical workers were captured: doctors, nurses, and orderlies. First, they were sent to Slavuta, and in February 1943, having gathered about 600 women prisoners of war in the camp, they were loaded into wagons and taken to the West. In Rivne, everyone was lined up, 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. Those who remained were loaded back into the wagons, men and women together. The prisoners themselves divided the carriage into two parts: in one - women, in the other - men. We recovered through a hole in the floor.

Along the way, the captured men were dropped off at different stations, and the women were brought to the city of Zoes on February 23, 1943. They lined them up and announced that they would work in military factories. Evgenia Lazarevna Klemm was also in the group of prisoners. Jewish. A history teacher at the Odessa Pedagogical Institute who pretended to be a Serbian. She enjoyed special authority among women prisoners of war. E.L. Klemm, on behalf of everyone, stated in German: “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 it was impossible to sit down or move due to the cramped conditions. They stood like that for almost a day. And then the disobedient ones were sent to Ravensbrück.

This women's camp was created in 1939. The first prisoners of Ravensbrück were prisoners from Germany, and then from European countries occupied by the Germans. All the prisoners had their heads shaved and dressed in striped (blue and gray striped) dresses and unlined jackets. Underwear - shirt and panties. There were no bras or belts. In October, they were given a pair of old stockings for six months, but not everyone was able to wear them until spring. Shoes, as in most concentration camps, are wooden lasts.

The barracks were 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-tier bunks with a narrow passage between them. One cotton blanket was given to two prisoners. In a separate room lived the blockhouse - the head of the barracks. In the corridor there was a washroom and toilet.

The prisoners worked mainly in the camp's sewing factories. Ravensbrück produced 80% of all uniforms for the SS troops, 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. First, everyone was sent to the bathhouse, and then they were given camp striped clothes with a red triangle with the inscription: "SU" - Sowjet Union.

Even before the arrival of the Soviet women, the SS men spread a rumor throughout the camp that a gang of female killers 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 am for verification, which sometimes lasted several hours. Then they worked for 12-13 hours in sewing workshops or in the camp infirmary.

Breakfast consisted of ersatz coffee, which women used mainly for washing their hair, since there was no warm water. For this purpose, coffee was collected and washed in turns.

Women whose hair had survived began to use combs that they made themselves. The 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, for five people they received a small loaf of bread mixed with sawdust and again half a liter of gruel.

One of the prisoners, S. Müller, testifies in her memoirs about the impression that Soviet women made on the prisoners of Ravensbrück: “...on one Sunday in April we learned that Soviet prisoners refused to carry out some order, citing the fact that 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 insolence. For the entire first half of the day, they were forced to march along Lagerstraße (the main “street” of the camp - author’s note) and were deprived of lunch.

But the women from the Red Army bloc (that’s what 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, kept in alignment, walked as if in a parade, taking a measured step. Their steps, like the beat of a drum, beat rhythmically along Lagerstraße. The entire column moved as one. Suddenly a woman on the right flank of the first row gave the command to start singing. She counted down: “One, two, three!” And they sang:

Get up, huge country, get up for mortal combat...

Then they started singing about Moscow.

The Nazis were puzzled: the punishment of humiliated prisoners of war by marching turned into a demonstration of their strength and inflexibility...

The SS failed to leave Soviet women without lunch. The political prisoners took care of food for them in advance."

To be continued...

Soviet women prisoners of war more than once amazed their enemies and fellow prisoners with their unity and spirit of resistance. One day, 12 Soviet girls were included in the list of prisoners intended to be sent to Majdanek, to the gas chambers. When the SS men came to the barracks to pick up the women, their comrades refused to hand them over. The SS managed to find them. “The remaining 500 people lined up in groups of five and went to the commandant. The translator was E.L. Klemm. The commandant drove those who came into the block, threatening to shoot them, and they began a hunger strike.”

In February 1944, about 60 women prisoners of war from Ravensbrück were transferred to the concentration camp in Barth to the Heinkel aircraft factory. The girls refused to work there too. Then they were lined up in two rows and ordered to strip down to their shirts and remove the wooden stocks. They stood in the cold for many hours, every hour the matron came and offered coffee and a bed to anyone who agreed to go to work. Then the three girls were thrown into a punishment cell. Two of them died from pneumonia.

Constant bullying, hard labor, and hunger led to suicide. In February 1945, the defender of Sevastopol, military doctor Zinaida Aridova, threw herself onto the wire.

And yet the prisoners believed in liberation, and this faith sounded in a song composed by an unknown author:

Heads up, Russian girls! Over your head, be brave! We don't have long to endure, A nightingale will fly in in the spring... And open the doors to freedom, Take off the striped dress from the shoulders And heal deep wounds, Wip away the tears from swollen eyes. Heads up, Russian girls! Be Russian everywhere, everywhere! It won't be long to wait, not long - And we will be on Russian soil.

Former prisoner Germaine Tillon, in her memoirs, gave a unique description of the Russian women prisoners of war who ended up in Ravensbrück: “... their cohesion was explained by the fact that they went through army school even before captivity. They were young, strong, neat, honest, and also quite They were rude and uneducated. There were also intellectuals (doctors, teachers) among them who were friendly and attentive. In addition, we liked their rebellion and unwillingness to obey the Germans.”

Women prisoners of war were also sent to other concentration camps. Auschwitz prisoner A. Lebedev recalls that paratroopers Ira Ivannikova, Zhenya Saricheva, Victorina Nikitina, doctor Nina Kharlamova and nurse Klavdiya Sokolova were kept in the women's camp.

In January 1944, for refusing to sign an agreement to work in Germany and transfer to 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 Leontyeva, and infantry lieutenant Vera Matyutskaya.

The navigator of the air regiment, Anna Egorova, whose plane was shot down over Poland, shell-shocked, with a burnt face, was captured and kept in the Kyustrinsky camp.

Despite the death that reigned in captivity, despite the fact that any relationship between male and female prisoners of war was prohibited, where they worked together, most often in camp infirmaries, love sometimes arose, giving new life. As a rule, in such rare cases, the German hospital management 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 to the place of residence of her relatives in the occupied territory, or returned with the child to the camp.

Thus, from the documents of the Stalag camp infirmary No. 352 in Minsk, it is known that “nurse Sindeva Alexandra, who arrived at the First City Hospital for childbirth on 23.2.42, left with the child for the Rollbahn prisoner of war camp.”

In 1944, attitudes towards women prisoners of war became harsher. They are subjected to new tests. In accordance with the 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 held in prisoner-of-war camps should be subject to inspection by the local Gestapo office in the same way as all newly arriving Soviet prisoners of war. If a police investigation reveals that women prisoners of war are politically unreliable, they should be released from captivity and handed over to the police.

Based on this order, the head of the Security Service and SD on April 11, 1944 issued an order to send unreliable female prisoners of war to the nearest concentration camp. After being delivered to the concentration camp, such women were subjected to so-called “special treatment” - liquidation. This is how Vera Panchenko-Pisanetskaya, the eldest of a group of seven hundred girl prisoners of war who worked at a military plant in the city of Gentin, died. The plant produced a lot of defective products, and during the investigation it turned out that Vera was in charge of 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 they brought the men and shot them one by one. 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 that? ” I never found out what she did. She replied that she did it for her homeland. After that, the SS man slapped him in the face and said: “This is for your homeland.” The Russian woman 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 the corpses. She resisted. Several more SS men ran up. The officer shouted: “Fuck her!” The oven door was open and the heat caused the woman's hair to catch fire. Despite the fact that the woman resisted vigorously, she was placed on a cart for burning corpses and pushed into the oven. All the prisoners working in the crematorium saw this." Unfortunately, the name of this heroine remains unknown.

To be continued...

The women who escaped from captivity continued to fight against the enemy. In secret message No. 12 dated July 17, 1942, the chief of the security police of the occupied eastern regions to the imperial minister of security of the XVII Military District, in the section “Jews,” it is reported that in Uman “a Jewish doctor was arrested, who previously served in the Red Army and was taken prisoner After escaping from the prisoner of war camp, she took refuge in an orphanage in Uman under a false name and practiced medicine. She used this opportunity to gain access to the prisoner of war camp for espionage purposes.” Probably, the unknown heroine provided assistance to prisoners of war.

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 fall of 1942, in the Georgievsk camp, along with other prisoners, there were several hundred girls prisoners of war. One day, the Germans led identified Jews to execution. Among the doomed was Tsilya Gedaleva. At the last minute, the German officer in charge of the reprisal suddenly said: “Mädchen raus! - The girl is out!” And Tsilya returned to the women’s barracks. Tsila's friends gave her a new name - Fatima, and in the future, according to all documents, she passed as a Tatar.

Military doctor of the 3rd rank Emma Lvovna Khotina was surrounded in the Bryansk forests from September 9 to 20. She was captured. During the next stage, she fled from the village of Kokarevka to the city of Trubchevsk. She hid under someone else's 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 the partisans attacked Trubchevsk on February 2, 1942, 17 doctors, paramedics and nurses left with them. E. L. Khotina became the head of the sanitary service of the partisan association of the Zhitomir region.

Sarah Zemelman - military paramedic, medical service lieutenant, worked in mobile field hospital No. 75 of the Southwestern Front. On September 21, 1941, near Poltava, wounded in the leg, she was captured along with the hospital. The head of the hospital, Vasilenko, handed Sarah documents addressed to Alexandra Mikhailovskaya, the murdered paramedic. There were no traitors among the hospital employees who were captured. Three months later, Sarah managed to escape from the camp. She wandered through forests and villages for a month until, not far from Krivoy Rog, in the village of Vesyye Terny, she was sheltered by the family of veterinarian Ivan Lebedchenko. For more than a year, Sarah lived in the basement of the house. On January 13, 1943, Vesely Terny was liberated by the Red Army. Sarah went to the military registration and enlistment office and asked to go to the front, but she was placed in filtration camp No. 258. They called in for interrogations only at night. Investigators asked how she, a Jew, survived fascist captivity? And only a meeting in the same camp with her hospital colleagues - a radiologist and the chief surgeon - helped her.

S. Zemelman was sent to the medical battalion of the 3rd Pomeranian 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 of the Patriotic War, 1st degree, and was 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, having gone through the hell of the German camps.

Grunya Grigorieva 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 gave more preference to French women, Polish women - to foreign women.”

After the end of the war, female prisoners of war went through all the torment and humiliation during SMERSH inspections in filtration camps. Alexandra Ivanovna Max, one of the 15 Soviet women liberated in the Neuhammer camp, tells how a Soviet officer in the repatriation camp scolded them: “Shame on you, you surrendered into captivity, you...” And I argued with him: “Oh what were we supposed to do?" And he says: “You should have shot yourself and not surrendered!” And I say: “Where were our pistols?” - “Well, you could, should have hanged yourself, killed yourself. But do not surrender.”

Many front-line soldiers knew what awaited the former prisoners at home. One of the liberated women, N.A. Kurlyak, recalls: “We, 5 girls, were left to work in a Soviet military unit. We kept asking: “Send us home.” We were dissuaded, begged: “Stay a little longer, they will look at you with contempt.” “But we didn’t believe.”

And a few years after the war, a female doctor, a former prisoner, writes in a private letter: “... sometimes I am very sorry that I remained alive, because I always carry this dark stain of captivity. Still, many people don’t know “What kind of “life” was it, if you can call it life. Many do not believe that we honestly endured the hardships of captivity and remained honest citizens of the Soviet state.”

Being in fascist captivity irreparably affected the health of many women. For most of them, the natural female processes stopped while still in the camp, and for many they never recovered.

Some, transferred from prisoner of war camps to concentration camps, were sterilized. “I did not have children after sterilization in the camp. And so I remained, as it were, crippled... Many of our girls did not have children. So some were abandoned by their husbands because they wanted to have children. But my husband did not abandon me, as is, He says that’s how we’ll live. And we still live with him.”

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Only recently, researchers have established that in a dozen European concentration camps, the Nazis forced female prisoners to engage in prostitution in special brothels, writes Vladimir Ginda in the section Archive in issue 31 of the magazine Correspondent dated August 9, 2013.

Torment and death or prostitution - the Nazis faced this choice with European and Slavic women who found themselves in concentration camps. Of those several hundred girls who chose the second option, the administration staffed brothels in ten camps - not only those where prisoners were used as labor, but also others aimed at mass extermination.

In Soviet and modern European historiography, this topic did not actually exist; only a couple of American scientists - Wendy Gertjensen and Jessica Hughes - raised some aspects of the problem in their scientific works.

At the beginning of the 21st century, German cultural scientist Robert Sommer began to scrupulously restore information about sexual conveyors

At the beginning of the 21st century, German cultural scientist Robert Sommer began to scrupulously restore information about sexual conveyors operating in the horrific conditions of German concentration camps and death factories.

The result of nine years of research was a book published by Sommer in 2009 Brothel in a concentration camp, which shocked European readers. Based on this work, the exhibition Sex Work in Concentration Camps was organized in Berlin.

Bed motivation

“Legalized sex” appeared in Nazi concentration camps in 1942. The SS men organized houses of tolerance in ten institutions, among which were mainly so-called labor camps - in the Austrian Mauthausen and its branch Gusen, the German Flossenburg, Buchenwald, Neuengamme, Sachsenhausen and Dora-Mittelbau. In addition, the institution of forced prostitutes was also introduced in three death camps intended for the extermination of prisoners: in the Polish Auschwitz-Auschwitz and its “companion” Monowitz, as well as in the German Dachau.

The idea of ​​creating camp brothels belonged to Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler. The researchers' findings suggest that he was impressed by the system of incentives used in Soviet forced labor camps to increase prisoners' productivity.

Imperial War Museum
One of his barracks in Ravensbrück, the largest women's concentration camp in Nazi Germany

Himmler decided to adopt experience, simultaneously adding to the list of “incentives” something that was not in the Soviet system - “incentive” prostitution. The SS chief was confident that the right to visit a brothel, along with receiving other bonuses - cigarettes, cash or camp vouchers, an improved diet - could force prisoners to work harder and better.

In fact, the right to visit such institutions was predominantly held by camp guards from among the prisoners. And there is a logical explanation for this: most of the male prisoners were exhausted, so they did not even think about any sexual attraction.

Hughes points out that the proportion of male prisoners who used the services of brothels was extremely small. In Buchenwald, according to her data, where about 12.5 thousand people were kept in September 1943, 0.77% of prisoners visited the public barracks in three months. A similar situation was in Dachau, where as of September 1944, 0.75% of the 22 thousand prisoners who were there used the services of prostitutes.

Heavy share

Up to two hundred sex slaves worked in brothels at the same time. The largest number of women, two dozen, were kept in a brothel in Auschwitz.

Only female prisoners, usually attractive, aged 17 to 35, became brothel workers. About 60-70% of them were of German origin, from among those whom the Reich authorities called “anti-social elements.” Some were engaged in prostitution before entering the concentration camps, so they agreed to similar work, but behind barbed wire, without problems, and even passed on their skills to inexperienced colleagues.

The SS recruited approximately a third of the sex slaves from prisoners of other nationalities - Polish, Ukrainian or Belarusian. Jewish women were not allowed to do such work, and Jewish prisoners were not allowed to visit brothels.

These workers wore special insignia - black triangles sewn onto the sleeves of their robes.

The SS recruited approximately a third of the sex slaves from prisoners of other nationalities - Poles, Ukrainians or Belarusians

Some of the girls voluntarily agreed to “work.” Thus, one former employee of the medical unit of Ravensbrück - the largest women's concentration camp of the Third Reich, where up to 130 thousand people were kept - recalled: some women voluntarily went to a brothel because they were promised release after six months of work.

Spaniard Lola Casadel, a member of the Resistance movement who ended up in the same camp in 1944, told how the head of their barracks announced: “Whoever wants to work in a brothel, come to me. And keep in mind: if there are no volunteers, we will have to resort to force.”

The threat was not empty: as Sheina Epstein, a Jew from the Kaunas ghetto, recalled, in the camp the inhabitants of the women’s barracks lived in constant fear of the guards, who regularly raped the prisoners. The raids were carried out at night: drunken men walked along the bunks with flashlights, choosing the most beautiful victim.

“Their joy knew no bounds when they discovered that the girl was a virgin. Then they laughed loudly and called their colleagues,” Epstein said.

Having lost honor, and even the will to fight, some girls went to brothels, realizing that this was their last hope for survival.

“The most important thing is that we managed to escape from [the camps] Bergen-Belsen and Ravensbrück,” said Liselotte B., a former prisoner of the Dora-Mittelbau camp, about her “bed career.” “The main thing was to somehow survive.”

With Aryan meticulousness

After the initial selection, the female workers were brought to special barracks in the concentration camps where they were planned to be used. To bring the emaciated prisoners into a more or less decent appearance, they were placed in the infirmary. There, medical workers in SS uniforms gave them calcium injections, they took disinfectant baths, ate and even sunbathed under quartz lamps.

There was no sympathy in all this, only calculation: the bodies were prepared for hard work. As soon as the rehabilitation cycle ended, the girls became part of the sex conveyor belt. Work was daily, rest was only if there was no light or water, if an air raid warning was announced or during the broadcast of speeches by German leader Adolf Hitler on the radio.

The conveyor worked like clockwork and strictly according to schedule. For example, in Buchenwald, prostitutes got up at 7:00 and took care of themselves until 19:00: they had breakfast, did exercises, underwent daily medical examinations, washed and cleaned, and had lunch. By camp standards, there was so much food that prostitutes even exchanged food for clothes and other things. Everything ended with dinner, and at seven in the evening the two-hour work began. The camp prostitutes could not go out to see her only if they had “these days” or were sick.

AP
Women and children in one of the barracks of the Bergen-Belsen camp, liberated by the British

The procedure for providing intimate services, starting from the selection of men, was as detailed as possible. The only people who could get a woman were the so-called camp functionaries - internees, those involved in internal security, and prison guards.

Moreover, at first the doors of the brothels were opened exclusively to the Germans or representatives of the peoples living on the territory of the Reich, as well as to the Spaniards and Czechs. Later, the circle of visitors was expanded - only Jews, Soviet prisoners of war and ordinary internees were excluded. For example, logs of visits to a brothel in Mauthausen, which were meticulously kept by representatives of the administration, show that 60% of the clients were criminals.

Men who wanted to indulge in carnal pleasures first had to get permission from the camp leadership. Afterwards, they bought an entrance ticket for two Reichsmarks - this is slightly less than the cost of 20 cigarettes sold in the canteen. Of this amount, a quarter went to the woman herself, and only if she was German.

In the camp brothel, clients first of all found themselves in a waiting room, where their data was verified. They then underwent a medical examination and received prophylactic injections. Next, the visitor was given the number of the room where he should go. There the intercourse took place. Only the “missionary position” was allowed. Conversations were not encouraged.

This is how Magdalena Walter, one of the “concubines” kept there, describes the work of the brothel in Buchenwald: “We had one bathroom with a toilet, where the women went to wash themselves before the next visitor arrived. Immediately after washing, the client appeared. Everything worked like a conveyor belt; men were not allowed to stay in the room for more than 15 minutes.”

During the evening, the prostitute, according to surviving documents, received 6-15 people.

Body to work

Legalized prostitution was beneficial to the authorities. So, in Buchenwald alone, in the first six months of operation, the brothel earned 14-19 thousand Reichsmarks. The money went to the account of the German Economic Policy Directorate.

The Germans used women not only as objects of sexual pleasure, but also as scientific material. The inhabitants of the brothels carefully monitored their hygiene, because any venereal disease could cost them their lives: infected prostitutes in the camps were not treated, but experiments were performed on them.

Imperial War Museum
Liberated prisoners of the Bergen-Belsen camp

Reich scientists did this, fulfilling the will of Hitler: even before the war, he called syphilis one of the most dangerous diseases in Europe, capable of leading to disaster. The Fuhrer believed that only those nations would be saved who would find a way to quickly cure the disease. In order to obtain a miracle cure, the SS turned infected women into living laboratories. However, they did not remain alive for long - intensive experiments quickly led the prisoners to a painful death.

Researchers have found a number of cases where even healthy prostitutes were given over to sadistic doctors.

Pregnant women were not spared in the camps. In some places they were immediately killed, in some places they were artificially aborted, and after five weeks they were sent back into service. Moreover, abortions were performed at different times and in different ways - and this also became part of the research. Some prisoners were allowed to give birth, but only then to experimentally determine how long a baby could live without nutrition.

Despicable prisoners

According to former Buchenwald prisoner Dutchman Albert van Dyck, camp prostitutes were despised by other prisoners, not paying attention to the fact that they were forced to go “on panel” by cruel conditions of detention and an attempt to save their lives. And the very work of the brothel dwellers was akin to repeated daily rape.

Some of the women, even finding themselves in a brothel, tried to defend their honor. For example, Walter came to Buchenwald as a virgin and, finding herself in the role of a prostitute, tried to defend herself from her first client with scissors. The attempt failed, and according to accounting records, the former virgin satisfied six men that same day. Walter endured this because she knew that otherwise she would face a gas chamber, a crematorium, or a barracks for cruel experiments.

Not everyone had the strength to survive the violence. Some of the inhabitants of the camp brothels, according to researchers, took their own lives, and some lost their minds. Some survived, but remained captive to psychological problems for the rest of their lives. Physical liberation did not relieve them of the burden of the past, and after the war, camp prostitutes were forced to hide their history. Therefore, scientists have collected little documented evidence of life in these brothels.

“It’s one thing to say ‘I worked as a carpenter’ or ‘I built roads’, but quite another to say ‘I was forced to work as a prostitute,’” says Insa Eschebach, director of the Ravensbrück former camp memorial.

This material was published in No. 31 of the Korrespondent magazine dated August 9, 2013. Reproduction of Korrespondent magazine publications in full is prohibited. The rules for using materials from the Korrespondent magazine published on the Korrespondent.net website can be found .

This small, clean house in Kristiansad next to the road to Stavanger and the port during the war was the most terrible place in the entire south of Norway. “Skrekkens hus” - “House of Horror” - that’s what they called it in the city. Since January 1942, the city archive building has been the headquarters of the Gestapo in southern Norway. Those arrested were brought here, torture chambers were equipped here, and from here people were sent to concentration camps and executions. Now in the basement of the building where the punishment cells were located and where prisoners were tortured, a museum has been opened that tells about what happened during the war in the state archive building.



The layout of the basement corridors has been left unchanged. Only new lights and doors appeared. In the main corridor there is a main exhibition with archival materials, photographs, and posters.

Thus, a suspended prisoner was beaten with a chain.

This is how they tortured us with electric stoves. If the executioners were especially zealous, the hair on a person’s head could catch fire.

Fingers were pinched in this device and 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 place and was preserved.

Nearby are other devices for conducting interrogation with “bias.”

Reconstructions have been carried out in several basement rooms - how it looked then, in this very place. This is a cell where especially dangerous prisoners were kept - members of the Norwegian Resistance who fell into the clutches of the Gestapo.

In the next room there was a torture chamber. Here, a real scene of torture of a married couple of underground fighters, taken by the Gestapo in 1943 during a communication session with the 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, suspended from an iron beam, is another member of the failed underground group. They say that before the interrogations, the Gestapo officers were pumped up with alcohol and drugs.

Everything in the cell was left as it was then, in 1943. If you turn over that pink stool standing at the woman's feet, you can see the Gestapo mark of Kristiansand.

This is a reconstruction of an interrogation - a Gestapo provocateur (on the left) presents the arrested radio operator of an underground group (he sits on the right, in handcuffs) with his radio station in a suitcase. In the center sits the chief of the Kristiansand Gestapo, SS Hauptsturmführer Rudolf Kerner - I’ll tell you about him later.

In this display case 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.

System for designating different groups of prisoners in the Auschwitz concentration camp (Auschwitz-Birkenau). Jew, political, gypsy, Spanish Republican, dangerous criminal, criminal, war criminal, Jehovah's Witness, homosexual. The letter N was written on the badge of a Norwegian political prisoner.

School excursions are conducted to the museum. I came across one of these - several local teenagers were walking along the corridors with Toure Robstad, a volunteer from local war survivors. It is said that about 10,000 schoolchildren visit the museum at the Archives per year.

Toure tells the kids 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 showcase are things made by the hands of Russian prisoners of war in Norwegian concentration camps. The Russians exchanged these crafts for food from local residents. Our neighbor in Kristiansand still had a whole collection of these 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 toys carved from wood.

Reconstruction of a partisan radio station. Partisans in southern Norway transmitted information to London about the movements of German troops, the deployment of military equipment and ships. In the north, the Norwegians supplied intelligence to the Soviet Northern Sea Fleet.

"Germany is a nation of creators."
Norwegian patriots had to work under conditions of intense pressure on the local population from Goebbels propaganda. The Germans set themselves the task of quickly Nazifying the country. The Quisling government made efforts for this in the fields of education, culture, and sports. Even before the war, Quisling's Nazi party (Nasjonal Samling) convinced the Norwegians that the main threat to their security was the military power of the Soviet Union. It should be noted that the Finnish campaign of 1940 contributed greatly to intimidating the Norwegians about Soviet aggression in the North. Since coming to power, Quisling only intensified his propaganda with the help of 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” – “New Norwegian Neighbor”, 1940. Pay attention to the now fashionable technique of “reversing” Latin letters to imitate the Cyrillic alphabet.

“Is this how you want it to be?”

The propaganda of the “new Norway” strongly emphasized the kinship of the two “Nordic” peoples, their unity in the fight 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 a temporary phenomenon and Vidkun Quisling was the new leader of the nation.

Two walls in the gloomy corridors of the museum are devoted to the materials of the criminal case in which the seven main Gestapo men in Kristiansand were tried. There have never been such cases in Norwegian judicial practice - Norwegians tried Germans, citizens of another state, accused of crimes on Norwegian territory. Three hundred witnesses, about a dozen lawyers, and the Norwegian and foreign press participated in the trial. The Gestapo men were tried for torture and abuse of those arrested; there was a separate episode about the summary execution of 30 Russians and 1 Polish prisoner of war. On June 16, 1947, all were sentenced to death, which was first and temporarily included in the Norwegian Criminal Code immediately after the end of the war.

Rudolf Kerner is the chief of the Kristiansand Gestapo. Former shoemaker teacher. A notorious sadist, he had a criminal record in Germany. He sent several hundred members of the Norwegian Resistance to concentration camps, and was responsible for the death of an organization of Soviet prisoners of war discovered by the Gestapo in one of the concentration camps in southern Norway. He, like the rest of his accomplices, was sentenced to death, which was later commuted to life imprisonment. He was released in 1953 under an amnesty declared by the Norwegian government. He left for Germany, where his traces were lost.

Next to the Archives building 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, lie the ashes of Soviet prisoners of war and British pilots shot down by the Germans in the skies over Kristiansand. Every year on May 8th, the flags of the USSR, Great Britain and Norway are raised on flagpoles next to the graves.
In 1997, the Archive building, from which the state archive moved to another location, was decided to be sold to private hands. Local veterans and public organizations came out sharply against it, organized themselves into a special committee and ensured that in 1998, the owner of the building, the state concern Statsbygg, transferred the historical building to the veterans committee. Now here, along with the museum I told you about, there are offices of Norwegian and international humanitarian organizations - the Red Cross, Amnesty International, the UN