As a lifelong gaming enthusiast, I appreciate courage and valor in the face of impossible odds. So when over 1 million Soviet women took up arms to defend their motherland from the Nazi invasion of 1941, their back-to-the-wall defiance should have earned them immortal glory in history‘s hall of fame.
Instead, German soldiers subjected these women warriors to a campaign of dehumanization, abuse and extermination explicitly condoned by fascist high command. They unleashed brute violence to crush the spirit of Slavic resistance. This article pays tribute to the Soviet sisters-in-arms whose suffering has been overlooked for too long.
Dehumanization: Nazi Racial Politics Against Slavs
Hitler‘s vision for Eastern Europe was its comprehensive ethnic cleansing and repopulation by ‘racially superior‘ Germanic settlers. Hence the peoples of Poland, Ukraine and Russia were classified as Untermensch (subhumans) to justify their dispossession and enslavement under harsh occupation regimes.
While Jews endured outright extermination in the Holocaust, Slav civilians too faced genocide through summary executions, starvation, disease epidemics and inhumane exploitation as slave labor. Over 13.7 million Soviet citizens would perish in the ‘war of annihilation‘ waged by Germany. This apocalypse of violence was particularly unleashed on Russian women, military or civilian.
The ‘Bolshevik Virago‘: Nazi Propaganda Against Armed Women
Long before the war, the Russian Revolution‘s promotion of women‘s rights and gender equality – including opening all military roles to women – had outraged conservative German opinon. Women with authority contradicted the patriarchal Kinder, Küche, Kirche (children, kitchen and church) which National Socialists championed.
When the Wehrmacht invaded in 1941, Nazi propaganda sketched Russian female soldiers and partisans as amoral monsters, murdering German troops in cold blood. Newsreels portrayed them bullying limp POWs while anarchist women communists executed bound German captives. This aimed to trigger vengeance amongst occupation forces and desensitize them from war crimes against ‘Bolshevik viragos‘.
A 1942 black propaganda feature film, G.P.U (a Soviet spy agency), depicted female Russian agents using their wiles to seduce and assassinate upright German officers. This mix of lurid fantasy and fear mongering further inflamed Axis antipathy towards armed Slavic women as an embodiment of supposed Communist depravity.
The Eastern Hordes: Nazi Justification of Extermination Methods
Nazi general Erich Ludendorff described Slavs as ‘prolific, tough and resilient like ants‘ – implying endless reserves of subhuman troops fit only for grinding down through attrition. He referred to Russian POWs as ‘unused fertilizer‘ i.e expendable slave labor before they expired from overwork and starvation.
SS chief Heinrich Himmler too urged his men onwards against the Slavic floodwaters. Such pest control metaphors underscored an exterminationist vision that demanded radical solutions like initial SS death squads (Einsatzgruppen) which machine gunned over a million civilians by 1942.
This apocalyptic framing spread through the ranks, from field marshal to footsoldier, colorizing the campaign as an epic crusade against Bolshevism‘s demonic younger sisters swarming the earth. It mentally primed men for acts of cruelty that would be unthinkable against fellow Europeans.
Violence Unleashed: The Nazi Death Warrant Against Soviet Women Soldiers
On October 10, 1941 the High Kommando of the Wehrmacht officially ordered all political commissars identified among Soviet prisoners of war to be separated and executed immediately. The decree also denied POW protections to all captured Russian female combatants who were likewise to be shot out of hand.
While some German general staff protested this breached martial codes, partisan hatreds ran too deep. Nazi commissar Adolf Strauss raged that "German soldiers should not care if one wears women‘s clothes – Bolshevism is the enemy of all culture and the woman in battle is the knife in our spine! No false chivalry towards this opponent!"
His rant epitomized the vitriolic misogyny activated by this existential struggle against ‘Judaeo-Bolshevism‘, the Nazi shibboleth for Communist Russia‘s leadership which Hitler (falsely) blamed upon a Jewish conspiracy. Hardline strategists argued for unrestricted atrocities to shatter this supposed information stronghold. Thus Russia‘s woman warriors faced extermination for their symbolic as well as literal battlefield defiance.
Field units enthusiastically complied, offsetting any criticism back in Germany. In October 1941 itself, the commander of the German Fourth Panzer Division reported: "insidious…Russian women communists do not merit prisoner of war status but should be hung from the nearest tree." His division had already executed 30 female Red Army captives in this manner.
Now woman prisoners faced generalized abuse by enemy troops unleashed from ethical constraints upon the feminine – exactly as Nazi propagandists had intended.
Brutality Unveiled: Personal Testimony Of Soviet Sisters Mistreated
"When their remaining clothing was removed, it turned out that they were women. That didn‘t prevent the Hitlerite barbarians from carrying out their brutal intention. They slit their throats…" – Natalia Kovshova, Soviet infantry officer, stabbed multiple times by German soldiers.
Lt Kovshova‘s bitter account exposes the free hand given to Nazi troops on the Eastern Front to indulge pathological hatred against young Russian females fighting back against their invasion. Kovshova miraculously survived her ordeal but 13 million Soviet women were less lucky over 1941-45.
Galina Dokutovich, an 18 year old marksman credited with 40 Nazi kills, was captured by troops of the German Grossdeutschland division in 1943. Instead of honorably executing a fellow sniper, the soldiers handed her over to wartime brothels as a sex slave after horribly mutilating her face with bayonets. This brave teenage fighter took her own life shortly after.
Nina Soloviova served in an all-woman night bomber regiment before being shot down on a raid. Captured gratefully alive by German soldiers, this relief rapidly transitioned to repeated gang rape by the entire company for days. After the war, a traumatized Soloviova was unable to settle into civilian life. Her story repeated itself across hundreds more pilots and air crew from the Night Witches unit.
Across partisan groups and regular forces, Red Army women endured sexual violence on a staggering scale from 1941 onwards. Those not executed as Russian command had warned them to expect, became prey for brutalization by an enemy that saw them as subhuman filth, not enemy combatants deserving honor.
Modern records confirm over 240,000 rapes of young Russian and Polish girls in occupied territories. For Russian women who had fought back with rifle or tank regiments, the retribution was even more sadistic. They had symbolically ‘emasculated‘ the proud Wehrmacht by wounding its soldiers and generals – now animal aggression to reassert masculine domination was unleashed without restraint.
Legacies: Trauma & Defiance
By 1945, over a million Soviet women soldiers and officers gained hard won victory over Nazi Germany on the battlefield. Their mixed cavalry, infantry, marines, tank, gunner and pilot units saw frontline action unmatched by Western women auxiliaries confined to administrative support roles far from combat.
These triumphant survivors had matched the enemy kill for kill, tank for tank, and never relented in pursuing the hated fascisti back to their lair for the final epic showdown in Berlin. Their banner flew victorious over the Reichstag ruins.
Yet the scars endure. Physical and mental trauma of horrific abuse were silently borne for lack of societal understanding. Families broken by loss carry bitterness against old enemy regimes who sponsored atrocities rather than admitting the failures of their fathers and grandfathers seduced by Nazi lies.
And we must educate new generations against ever repeating this collapse of conscience faced by young soldiers barely out of school who found themselves complicit in concentration camp atrocities because they bought the party propaganda.
While Hollywood lionizes the glories of America‘s march into Germany, Russia‘s formidable woman warriors who fought longest and sacrificed most remain unsung. Only through reconciling these perspectives can we redeem humanity after its darkest modern hour. I salute those Soviet sisters-in-arms.