Why were the Nazis so afraid of Soviet female soldiers, and why did this turn out to be a horror for them?

 

During the war, she put on a soldier’s tunic, took up arms and became a mistake for the enemy, simply because she was a woman on the front lines.  Everything that happened after the captivity, she kept locked in  for more than 40 years. Now she agrees to remember these words of hers. My name is Nadezhda.

I was a soldier in the Red Army  and was captured by the Germans when I was still very young.  For years I pretended that all this  was left behind, but what I heard and what was done to me  never left my body and head.  Now I will tell you how for them I  stopped being just an enemy and became a target of special hatred just because I am a woman with a weapon in my hands.

For people  brought up in their order, a woman was supposed to give birth to children,  stand at the stove and go to church, and not lie in the trenches next to men.  And my very existence  in form seemed to them a perversion and a threat to their very world.

Before the war  I didn’t feel like a mistake.  I was just a daughter in an ordinary northern city, where smoke from the chimneys mixed  with fog, and people from childhood were accustomed not to complain.  Father worked in the workshop and came home permeated with the smell of oil.

Mother washed and scrubbed the floors until her hands cracked,  repeating that the main thing is to keep your head down and do your job. I was told that the world is a dangerous place, but if you study,  work and serve your country, you will have a place and protection.   I believed in this for a long time.  I remember the day when loud speakers first started blaring in the square .

War has come to us.  People were drawn to the radio like to fire, even though it was the warm season.   The faces around us changed before our  eyes. Men were taken straight from work a few days before.  Bread lines have become longer.   At school, discipline and patriotism were suddenly put above everything else.

My heart was pounding with fear and some kind of stubborn feeling was rising at the same time.  If I have to, I can do something too,  and not just wait for letters.  When they started saying that they were taking women into the army,  first to help, and then into combat units, it was like something clicked inside.

I didn’t want to spend the war listening to reports  on the radio and wiping away other people’s blood that I did n’t see spilled myself. I wanted  to be where everything is burning.  So I ended up in a unit that many Germans would later  consider to be something perverted. Women in wide tunics,  in someone else’s boots that don’t fit, but with a rifle and with orders, like everyone else.

There was nothing abnormal about this for me .   For the first time, I felt like I belonged .  At first, there was more sound than picture on the front lines.   Explosions, dry pops of gunfire, bullets whistling overhead, the smell of overturned earth, smoke  and sweat.  Everything mixed into one hum.

The first time I saw the body  lying face up at my feet, I almost stepped on it  because my biggest fear was dropping the rifle and not hearing the next command.  I was shaking,  but I couldn’t let it show.  Here men and women lay in the same mud,  ate the same meager rations and were equally afraid of not surviving until nightfall.

Even among my own people, they looked at me differently.  Some accepted us as ordinary  soldiers, others whispered that the war had reached a terrible point if girls were taken from their homes and kitchens to the trenches. I pretended not to hear [the music], but every word stuck to me like wet clay.

There was nothing to respond with except accuracy.  Every time I hit the target, I proved first of all to myself  that it was not by chance that I was here.  I understood how the Germans would look at me later  already in captivity. Later I learned that in their world a woman was supposed to be a mother and a housewife,  and not a soldier.

And they considered Soviet women with weapons to be living propaganda of Bolshevik  madness and a sign that everything was upside down here.  Therefore, we were not treated  simply as enemies, but as something that needed to be shown, humiliated and destroyed so that others would be  afraid to even think about such an example.

I was captured not in some beautiful battle, but at the end  of a day that began too normally for that end.  We sat in our trenches, waiting for orders.  Rumors were circulating that a power line had been broken somewhere along the line .  The radio was silent or wheezed, commands came in fragments, and suddenly our front line turned into an open back.

The shooting became closer and shouts in German were heard.  I didn’t understand the words, only the tone.  Drop your weapons,  hands up.  There was no heroism from the pictures.   There was dust, coughing, running and a sudden blow from a rifle butt in the back, from which I fell into the mud.

While I was flying down,  still clutching the rifle, someone from behind shouted in Russian that they should n’t let me be taken alive,  one of ours shouted, one of their own.  He thought that by doing so  would save me from something even worse. I didn’t fully understand it then.  It seemed to me that living even in captivity was still better than remaining lying  face down on the ground.

When the rifle was torn from my hands,  I felt not only the loss of the weapon, but also how, along with it, the right to be called a soldier,  and not prey, was leaving.  In the first minutes after our capture, they simply herded us together, as if they were collecting things forgotten in a field . Men separately, women separately.

This was not just a convenient sorting.  The views on us women were different.  There was  curiosity, contempt and some kind of restrained grin in them.  I clenched my teeth and held myself upright with all my might, but in the silence I realized:  for them I am not just a prisoner of war, I am a challenge.

I am a living person slapped by their idea of ​​what a woman should be, and therefore I deserve a separate reprisal. Later, I heard from other prisoners that among the orders there was  a simple rule: Soviet women in uniform are often not considered real soldiers.  They do n’t have to be taken into custody , but shot like bandits or used as an object lesson.

When we were lined up to march, our hands were still raised,  our shoulders were aching, and every step sent pain through our backs.   The ground beneath my feet was a mixture of mud,  sparse snow, and the debris of what had recently been someone’s life.  The clock ticked  almost silently.

The men stumbled ahead.  Some tried to maintain their bearing, others kept looking back, as if there might still be hope there.   There was silence among the women.  All I heard was the rustle of our boots.  Many of them already had their shoelaces dragging on the  ground and the heavy footsteps of the convoy behind them.

Sometimes one of the guards would suddenly speed up,  coming closer, as if sniffing our fear.  I clenched my jaw again and thought about anything but  what would happen when they took us somewhere .  We were stopped at some makeshift point.  A barbed wire fence, low barracks,  smoke rising from somewhere in the depths.

The men were pushed to one side, the women to the other.  I clung to the uniform that remained on me like thin armor, but inside I already knew that this separation meant  another sentence for us.  For male soldiers, they still had at least some rules of war, even if  they were broken.  For people like me, no.

Right at the barracks an officer  approached us with two soldiers.  He hardly needed to raise his voice.  They obeyed him anyway.  He told one of us to translate.  The girl,  who knew a little German, came forward, trembling.  His first  phrases were etched into my memory.  He asked which of us actually shot,  who was a nurse, who had a rank, what units we were from.

When the translator said that, according to him, none of us were considered  real soldiers, that we were living propaganda and an insult to order,  I felt everything inside me shrink.  They weren’t just going to interrogate us  and put us in camps.  They wanted to prove that the very idea of ​​a woman with a rifle was a crime against their world.

One by one we were called into a dark room that smelled of  sweat and smoke.  When it was my turn, my legs felt like lead.  It seemed that  I was crossing the threshold not into an office, but into another kind of war, where there is no longer a front line  and ranks are worth nothing .

The officer slowly looked me over from head to toe,  asked: “Name, position, unit.”  I answered evenly, as in a normal military survey,  but he was little interested in numbers and names.  The questions kept coming back to one thing: who allowed me to take a weapon? How many Germans did I manage to kill, how did the men from my unit treat  people like me?   There was no respect for the enemy in his voice , only personal  resentment that I had violated his idea of ​​what war should look like.

Then the blows  began without warning, without any particular reason. Each of mine, I don’t know and I can’t say, was accompanied  by a sharp pain in the face, in the ribs, in the back.  At some point he ordered me to take off my  tunic.  This was not just a check for papers or weapons.

It was a calculated humiliation.  They stood me in my underwear,  while he and the others walked around, throwing out words that I did n’t fully understand,  but the tone of which made everything clear.  The uniform, which only yesterday gave me the right  to be considered a soldier, lay in the corner like a rag.

My body  ceased to be part of the army and turned into the very proof in their eyes that the woman came out of her kitchen and must pay for it. When I  was thrown back to the others, I saw that almost every woman around me bore similar marks: bruises, blood, torn clothes, empty  eyes.

Someone was hugging their knees to their chest, trying to make themselves smaller. Someone  stared at one point. Nobody asked any unnecessary questions.  We didn’t need to describe what happened behind closed doors.  We read it in each other, because each one walked, how she sat, [the music] how she held her head.

We hardly slept that night .  We were driven into a cramped barracks  with a rotten floor and a heavy smell of dampness.  There were no beds, only bare boards and bare  ground.  We lay down close to each other to at least warm ourselves up.  Every rustle  outside, steps, the creak of metal, voices, made someone  shudder.

Someone was crying silently, burying their face in their elbow.  Someone was whispering snatches of prayers  or songs, as if clinging to the world that had existed before all this.  I lay with my eyes open and felt how every rib ached, how the skin on my face throbbed.  But the thought that ached most was: “For them, I’m not a soldier, but a mistake that needs to be  corrected, showing everyone else what happens to such women.

”  In the morning  they woke us up with shouts and kicks, pushed us out into the street, without even letting us wash.  The cold cut into our skin and steam came out of our mouths.  Another officer walked  along the line, as if through a market.  His gaze stopped on those  who looked younger, weaker, who still retained some features of their former life.

I saw his face change  when he lingered his gaze on another woman.  In those seconds there was everything  and the fear that we symbolize a woman who went beyond the kitchen and the church, and the desire to show how their  order treats those who dared to do so.

Then for the first time I clearly understood that  what was being done to me was not only revenge on an enemy soldier.  This is punishment for the fact that  I became a living refutation of their ideology.  In their minds  war was supposed to remain a man’s business.  We, Soviet women with weapons, broke this image,  and that is why we were feared and hated more.

I realized quite  quickly that the way we were being treated was in itself part of the punishment.  The arms were still raised,  the shoulders were burning, every step was a pain in the back.  The ground beneath my feet turned into a mess of mud,  thick snow and fragments of other people’s things, sometimes bodies.

We walked for hours.  The men in front stumbled, some tried to maintain their bearing, some kept looking back, as if  there was a last chance left.  There was a heavy silence among the women .  All I heard was the shuffling of our boots and the crunch of snow under the heavy steps of the convoy.

Sometimes one of the guards would come up close, as if inhaling the scent of our fear,  and throw something in German over his shoulder to his comrade.  I didn’t understand the words, but I felt the laughter.   It’s about me again, about how a woman with a rifle is a mockery of order.  When we were finally stopped, the body seemed alien.

In front of us there was some kind of reception point.  Barbed wire, low barracks, grey smoke  from the chimney.  The men were pushed to one side, the women to the other.  The gesture was more than just a convenience.   For men, there still existed the image of an enemy soldier, although hated, but inscribed in the rules of war,  which they themselves constantly violated.

For women like me, in a gymnasterka,  they haven’t even come up with a decent word.  Later, I heard a phrase from other prisoners that I remembered for the rest of my life.  Such people cannot be considered prisoners of war. We were allowed to be shot  as bandits, as abnormal, or kept as special examples of what happens to those who go beyond the kitchen and the nursery.

Right at the barracks, an officer with two soldiers approached us.  He spoke quietly,  but in such a way that each word fell like a blow.  He demanded a translator.  One of ours, a thin girl with a  narrow face, stepped forward, admitting that she understood a little German.  He started asking:  “Which of us shot? Who was a sniper? Who was a nurse? Who has a rank? What units did we come from? I heard how at every mention of a woman’s voice,  a woman’s name, he smirked.

As if all this confirmed  his picture of a crazy eastern enemy who turned women into soldiers. The translator,  turning pale, recounted that for him we were not soldiers, but a living proof of Bolshevik degeneration. And that such people must be broken especially demonstratively, so that no one else would have the desire to repeat our example.

Then they began to call us inside one by one. When my turn came,  my chest was already buzzing, as if from constant shelling. The room was low, smoky,  with bare walls. The officer, the same one who interrogated us outside, sat at  a table next to two in uniform younger. He stood up and came so close to me  that I could smell tobacco and sweat.

He asked my name, unit, position.  I answered as if I were being interrogated, but I could hear that he was least interested in the location  of the batteries or the size of the platoon. He returned to the same thing again and again :  “Who allowed me to pick up a rifle?  How many of his soldiers did I manage to kill?  “Aren’t I ashamed that I crawled out  from my kitchen?” At those moments, I understood best of all what it was  that infuriated them about me.

In their world, women were relegated to three corners: children, the kitchen, and the church. Everything else seemed to them a threat  to order itself. And I, standing before them in a rumpled tunic, was breaking several taboos at once. I was Russian, Soviet  and also a soldier. He spoke to me as if I was n’t a military enemy before him, but a personal insult.

In his eyes, I wasn’t just a woman, but a symbol of the fact that our system had turned  their picture of the world upside down. That’s why they wanted to punish me. The first  blows fell almost without a pause. First, on the face, a sharp flash of pain, a ringing in the ears, the slamming of my head against the  wall, then on the ribs, in the stomach, on the back.

Every time I answered honestly: “I don’t know or I don’t remember,”  He seemed to be glad that he had found a reason  to hit me again. But what turned him on most was not these words, but  the way I clenched my teeth and tried to stand straight like a soldier. He needed to break not only my body, but the very idea that  a woman could endure the same as a man during interrogation.

At one point, he ordered that my tunic be removed. It was an unusual  test. He savored every word as he said that he wanted to see who was hiding under the  uniform. They stood me in my underwear in the middle of the room. He and the soldiers walked around, making  comments, laughing. Even when I didn’t understand him verbatim, it was clear from his intonation: “They  are not discussing my answers, but my body, as something that has gone beyond their narrow boundaries.  In  their eyes I was no longer an

enemy soldier. I was a bad woman.  who dared to stand in the same ranks with their men.  For this I needed to be put in my place with hands, fists, and boots.   When I was pushed back to the others, I saw that there were almost no  faces left in our row without bruises, torn clothes, and a blank look.

Someone sat on the floor, hugging  their knees.  Someone stared at one point, as if trying to jump out of there with his thoughts.   There was no need to ask  what was going on inside.  It was enough to see each of us return. Hunched over, limping,  with a bitten lip, with some new mark in her eyes.

That night we  spent in a barracks, where the air was heavy with dampness and human  smell.  The boards beneath us creaked and sagged in places.  I had to lie  side by side, so closely that someone else’s breath burned my cheek. Very few were able to  sleep. Every sound from outside, every step, the clanging of metal, every scream made me twitch as if I had been struck.

Someone was crying quietly, pressing their face  into their sleeve.  Some whispered the words of a prayer or simply counted their breaths to keep from going crazy.  I lay with my eyes open and felt as if [the music] inside me was also a wire, stretched to the limit.  If you pull it again, it will break. In the morning they drove us out into the yard, woke us up with shouts and blows from the panzers,  not even giving us time to get ourselves in order.

The frost nipped at the skin, and the breath immediately turned into white steam.  We lined up  in a row.  Another officer was walking along it, not the one who had interrogated him yesterday, but one of higher rank.  He moved slowly, like a man choosing what he needed today. His gaze lingered on faces, figures, hands.   I noticed that he looked especially closely at those who were younger, who still had the features of a peaceful girl.

Wherever he stayed longer, everything inside me grew cold.  It always meant  that this woman would soon be torn out of line and taken away.  Those few  minutes told me more than the entire interrogation.  I saw how two feelings were combined in one look.   Fear that we symbolize women who have broken their law of threes, and the desire to show by our example what their order does to such women.

He was afraid of us not because we could  grab a weapon now.  He was afraid of the meaning we carried.  If a woman has once stood  next to a man on the front lines, she can do it again. This means that the entire structure  collapses, where women are only relegated to birth, the kitchen and the church.

It was this  fear that turned into hatred that we felt on our own skin.   A few hours later we were dragged again  to the registration. In another room sat a man with glasses, looking more like a clerk  than a front-line soldier. He wrote down our names, our ages, where we were from, who we were in the army, whether we had any living relatives .

His voice was flat, almost dull, but the words he chose stung. One phrase has become etched in my memory.  He said that some of us would be used in a special way. He didn’t even look us in the eye while he said .  But in these dry words everything was felt: camp labor,  and interrogations.

and something that none of them said out loud, but that hung  in the air every time they looked at us for too long. When we were returned to the common barracks,  the sun was already high, and I felt as if not a few hours had passed, but several years.  I sat against the wall, trying not to move.   Every movement was painful.

A woman with very dark eyes sat down next to me.  Before this she hardly spoke.   Now turn to me.  and asked in a whisper: “Do I believe that we will ever get out of here?”  I  was silent for so long that I became afraid of my own silence.  To tell the truth would mean breaking the fragile thing that still held her together inside.

To lie,  to betray oneself .  In the end, I just exhaled that while we were alive, they did not achieve everything that [the music] wanted.  I wasn’t sure about these words, but they were the only ones I had left.   Then the days began to merge.  Interrogations, blows, ridicule, constant reminders that  we are not the women they want us to be.

At some point I  stopped counting how much time had passed since the moment of capture.  I only understood the main thing more and more clearly.  What  does to me is not just the cruelty of war.  This is a deliberate reprisal against a woman who dared to cross their boundaries.  They feared us not as shooters, but as a sign that a woman could leave their  cramped cage and take up arms.

That is why they did not forgive us for our uniforms, our rifles, or even the fact that we once stood in the same line with men. The most  terrible thing about those months was how pain and humiliation became  part of the daily routine.  I woke up and automatically calculated how much time would pass  until the next call: to the interrogation room, to work, to the construction site in the yard.

Life has become a  countdown of intervals between violence.  Sometimes it seemed that this was the main thing they were trying to achieve, so that we ourselves would accept their order  as the only possible one, where a woman who once dared to become  a soldier no longer has the right to peace or to her own skin.

Over time, interrogations almost ceased to concern the front.  Nobody needed exact coordinates or the number of units anymore. They were interested in something else: how did I end up in the army?   who allowed me to wear the uniform, how did the torishi men treat me. They asked,  laughing, if I wasn’t ashamed that instead of giving birth to children, I lay in the trenches.

In each such question, I heard an echo of their world, where women were relegated to the role of mothers and servants.  And everything that went beyond the children’s kitchen and the church was declared a threat that had to be dealt with  especially harshly.  Sometimes the interrogation did not end when the questions ended.

It ended when they decided to use my body as a continuation of the punishment.  I don’t  want to unravel every detail. Even years later, the memories alone make me feel sick.  I only remember hands  that held too tightly, laughter that sounded as if it came from far away, and individual phrases that didn’t need translation  to be understood.

This is no longer about the secrets of war, it is about what, in their opinion, should happen to a bad woman  who dared to stand in line with men and shoot at them. When I returned  from such sessions, I learned not to look around, but still, out of the corner of my eye, I saw how other women recognized  in me what they themselves had already experienced or knew that they still had to go through.

By the way I walked, because I was holding onto the wall,  because I was clenching my chin, we were divided into those who were already there and those who were still just waiting for their  turn.  This invisible line between before and after another wound.   Sometimes, watching someone being led for the first time, I caught a terrible thought in myself: “Let them follow her today,  then maybe today will get by without me.

” For this  thought I later hated myself no less than them.  And yet, even there, we found tiny  ways not to dissolve into their logic. One night, when it was especially damp and cold in the barracks, one  woman, her name was Irina, suddenly began to quietly tell how, as a child,  she swam in the river near her village.  Nothing special.

The water that made my skin ache, the smell of grass,  the cries of birds overhead.  But while she was speaking, for a moment the walls,  bunks, the smell of sweat and mold disappeared.  I could almost feel the icy water on my dirty  skin. Then I realized that the memory of life before the war and before captivity can be not only a source of pain,  but also a last refuge where they cannot reach.

The guards would not tolerate any sign that we were still holding on to each other.  Any attempt  to share a piece of bread, to hug a crying person, to say something comforting, could end for everyone  with hours of standing in the cold or beatings. One day we were caught passing a crust of bread around,  nibbling on the crumbs.

As punishment, everyone was driven out into the yard, made to stand facing the wind, and forced to stand up to their feet. The officer walked along the line  and said that there can be no solidarity between people like you .  You are the mistake, not the women. I heard in his words not only hatred,  but also fear.

He was afraid of the very possibility that even in such conditions we still saw each other as people, soldiers, and not the deformities he called us.  Over time, the sounds of war behind the barbed wire began to change.   The canon would sometimes quiet down, sometimes, on the contrary, it would come closer.

Sometimes we heard planes that flew differently from the ones we were used to.  The guards became more nervous, shouted  more often, and smoked one cigarette after another.  We didn’t know anything for sure , but we felt that the front was moving.   The same expression appeared in their eyes that I saw in our boys in  the first weeks of the war.

A mixture of confusion and anger.  Only if ours were angry at the enemy,  then these were even more angry at us, as if we were to blame for the fact that their world was collapsing.  This time turned out to be the most  dangerous.  When such a regime begins to falter, it clings to violence even more tightly.

The interrogations became shorter, but harsher.  On some days, two or three women would simply disappear.   Someone whispered that they heard shots behind the barracks.  Someone claimed that they were taken away somewhere.   There was no confirmation, only a new emptiness on the bunks and another name,  which we tried to remember so that it would not perish with the body.

I remember my liberation as if through thick glass.  The morning was different  from the others already in that instead of the usual commands we heard a chaotic  noise, shouts, shots, stomping, some kind of metallic clanging.  They locked us in barracks and  didn’t let us out for a long time.

There was a dead silence inside.  No one dared even whisper.  Then  the door finally swung open. Alien silhouettes appeared in the opening.  For a moment I didn’t understand who was in front of me: a new shift of security or someone else.  I looked  at the gymnasterkas, the buttonholes, the faces and couldn’t believe that all this was n’t just another game, after which they would drive us out into the yard again.

When it dawned on me that this was the end  of the camp, I didn’t feel that wave of joy that they like to write about in books. I felt  emptiness. My body was still waiting for the order to stand up,  lie down, turn over, open my mouth.  The head  was still preparing for the blow, the scream, the kick.

Freedom at first seemed like an unbearable space without walls, as if  I had been pulled out of a cramped cage and taken to the edge of a cliff.  I didn’t know who I was now.  Neither a soldier nor a prisoner, nor an interrogated enemy.  Just a woman who  took away the years and the confidence that her body belonged to her. Returning home was another blow.

I naively thought that they would greet me there as a person who had been through fire and captivity.  Instead  of this I saw wary glances and heard questions with the same coldness  as the enemy, only in my native language. I was asked where exactly I had been, who I had been in contact with, why I had survived when so many others had died.

There was less shouting in these interrogations , but the same logic.  Once you have been in the hands of the enemy, a  shadow remains on you .  And if you’re also a female soldier, then things are already complicated for you.  I quickly realized that it was better not to tell the details  of what happened in the camp .

No one asked what it means for a woman to be held captive by those who  consider her a perversion and living proof of an alien ideology. We could talk about the battles,  about hunger sometimes, about how they touched us, how they laughed, how they punished us for  the very fact that we once took up arms, it was easier to remain silent about this.

I built a wall of short phrases around these events, I was at the front,  was captured, returned.  Behind them remained everything that  could not fit into decent words. This is how the years began that I call my  second life.  From the outside it looked like many others: work, rooms, queues,  rare holidays.

Inside, she was filled with the echo of those screams, footsteps, and clicks of the shutter.  Sometimes I would be walking down the street and suddenly, hearing some particularly sharp male laughter behind me, I would find myself back in that dark  room in front of a table where a man in uniform would sit and decide how many more punishments I would receive today for who  I dared to be.

At night, I dreamed not so much of the war itself, but of the moments when they told me that I was not a soldier, but a mistake that needed to be corrected by the hands of men.  For many years I was not ready to remember this out loud.  It seemed that if I opened my mouth, I would find myself there again, in that uniform, with those bruises, under that gaze.

But over time, I noticed that silence doesn’t make the past any easier.  It only helps those who still believe that a woman’s place is strictly in the corners assigned to them, and that what we did at the front was a distortion of nature.  While I remained silent, their version remained the only one: that we, female soldiers, were an episode, a mistake that was not worth remembering.

Over the years, I increasingly remembered not only those who broke me, but also those who helped me not fall apart. the women from the barracks who shared their last piece of bread, Irina with her little river, the one who sang in a whisper to drown out someone’s sobs in the corner. We were everything they feared: Soviets, prisoners, and, what’s more, armed women.

But it was precisely what we endured together that was what they could never take away from us.  We have proven, at least to each other, that a woman can not only give birth and feed a child, but also withstand what many men cannot. Now that I finally say, “I don’t expect sympathy.”  I want it to be clear why exactly we were hated so much and what exactly they feared about us.

They weren’t afraid of our rifles; they had been taken away from us long ago.  They were afraid of the very fact that we would one day put on a uniform and take our place on the front line.  As long as this truth sounds in my voice, I remain not an example of their punishment, but a witness.  And this is the only title that they can no longer take away from me.

Nadezhda died in the early nineties, having lived a long life far from the front and the camps.  She wrote down this story in the late eighties, more than forty years after her captivity.  Her words have been preserved so that such women are remembered not as mistakes, but as witnesses.