Red Army female soldiers did not have a life to envy. The Germans called them “rifle broads.” I believe there was actually a German Directive to kill female soldiers outright, similar to the ‘commando order’.
Their fellow Russian male soldiers called them “field mattresses.” The propaganda machine is quick to replace that with the timeless woman-knight archtype (‘polianitsy’). Behind the lie of smiling hyper-snipers was a war against life itself.
Nobody knows how many times it ended like this. You see a photograph like this and wonder about the human mind on the other side of the lens. Was he documenting reality, possibly the nihilism of war? Or is she a hunting trophy. Imagine how many hands and minds a photo from early 1940s, taken by a nobody halfway around the world and long dead, of 1 subject out of tens of millions, has to go through before it meets us here I remember Mark Felton did a thing on Russian women soldiers.
I remember him saying the Germans were very surprised to find women as soldiers during Barbarossa. This did not happen in their invasions of France and Poland.
They did not expect this and were unsure what to do with them. I thought he said Himmler and then Field Marshall Keitel made a directive that women POWs were not to be brought to POW camps but shot in the field immediately on capture.
The idea of women on the battlefield was absurd to nazi ideology, and they saw it as an example of Bolshevik
Immorality to put a woman on the battlefield.
The communists saW men and women as equals – they saw all people as equals – under the theories of communism. Later in the war, the Soviet Union had all female sniper units, all female antiaircraft batteries, some tank personnel and even fighter pilots. For contrast, not even the US or Gr Britain allowed women to fly planes.
But these women knew very well to not be captured and what awaited them. Having said that, the mortality of Russian men who made it to POW camps was around 50% in this self described War of Annihilation.
The weird thing about this is that the Nazis were absolutely obsessed with the Teutonic past. They were obsessed with Germanic paganism, the Germanic warrior ideal, and all of that. And then were like, ‘But women can’t fight. They’re too pretty and weak to fight.” Meanwhile, the old Teutonic tribes (and their Celtic cousins)…oh, the women could absolutely hold their own in battle! To the point that the warrior woman became a staple of their legends and myths! We see this reflected in later Viking legends and mythology as well (the concept of the Shieldmaiden, the Valkyries, Brynhilde in the Volsungasaga, Lagertha). And let’s not forget that Saxon England (the Saxons being descendants of the Teutonic tribes) had Aethelflaed well into the Christian era (not to mention an entire history of both real and legendary Celtic and Briton warrior queens before her like Gwendolyn and Boudica).
The warrior woman never stopped being a part of that Germanic spirit. In fact, if you read the Roman histories, in both their encounters with the Celts and the Teutonic tribes, they were more terrified of the women soldiers than the men. By many, many leagues. Tacitus said of the Celts, “A single Celt could fight off an entire Legion if he called on the aid of his wife.”
The weird thing about this is that the Nazis were absolutely obsessed with the Teutonic past. They were obsessed with Germanic paganism, and the.Germanic warrior ideal, and all of that. And then were like, “But women can’t fight. They’re too pretty and weak to fight.” Meanwhile, the old Teutonic tribes (and their Celtic cousins)…oh, the women could absolutely hold their own in battle! To the point that the warrior woman became a staple of their legends and myths! We see this reflected in later Viking legends and mythology as well (the concept of the Shieldmaiden, the Valkyries, Brynhilde in the Volsungasaga, Lagertha).
And let’s not forget that Saxon England (the Saxons being descendants of the Teutonic tribes) had Aethelflaed well into the Christian era (not to mention an entire history of both real and legendary Celtic and Briton warrior queens before her like Gwendolyn and Boudica). The warrior woman never stopped being a part of that Germanic spirit.
In fact, if you read the Roman histories, in both their encounters with the Celts and the Teutonic tribes, they were more terrified of the women soldiers than the men. By many, many leagues. Tacitus said of the.Celts, “A single Celt could fight off an entire Legion, if he called on the aid of his wife.”
The weird thing about this is that the Nazis were absolutely obsessed with the Teutonic past. They were obsessed with Germanic paganism, and the Germanic warrior ideal, and all of that. And then were like, “But women can’t fight. They’re too pretty and weak to fight.”
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