The order came down from above, and it was brutally simple. Any German soldier who captured a woman wearing the uniform of the Soviet army was to shoot her on the spot. No trial, no interrogation, no mercy. The commander of the Fourth Army, Günther von Kluge, put it in writing for his men at the very start of Operation Barbarossa: every woman found in Soviet military dress was to be executed immediately.

During the Second World War, hundreds of thousands of women served in the armed forces of many nations or alongside them. Some worked as nurses, drivers, and radio operators, and even in artillery battalions, while others served close to the front lines. Inside the Soviet Union, women became pilots, snipers, machine gunners, searchlight operators, and medics. But the reality of war was often terrifying for these soldiers if they fell into enemy hands.

Female fighters were sometimes executed after capture, particularly on the Eastern Front. Some were shot for being considered partisans or spies, and others were killed because they were seen as high-value targets, such as snipers. The German army executed female soldiers without mercy, because their presence on the battlefield contradicted Nazi beliefs about the natural order. The Germans saw women in combat as a backward policy of their enemies, one that had to be eliminated quickly.

The fighting on the Eastern Front was vicious beyond measure. When Germany launched Operation Barbarossa on June 22, 1941, it opened a new front in the war, but it also became a war of total extermination. This was the Nazi war against communists, and it quickly turned devastatingly dark. It was a battle to determine who was racially superior, and because of this, Soviet prisoners who fell into enemy hands suffered an extremely high death rate.

Around 5. 7 million Red Army soldiers fell into German hands during the war, and roughly 3 million of them died in German captivity. Starvation, exposure to the elements, disease, executions, and deliberate mistreatment all contributed to that toll. But Soviet women, if captured, often faced the same fate.

That is, if they could even make it off the battlefield in the first place. The Soviets deployed approximately 800,000 women in their armed forces during the war. Many served in support roles, but they also fought in direct combat against German troops. They carried weapons and fired on the Germans, and they waged guerrilla warfare behind enemy lines.

One Soviet sniper, Lyudmila Pavlichenko, recorded a kill count of 309 enemies with her rifle. German soldiers encountered armed women in conditions they had never imagined. The Nazi ideology regarded female fighters as a backward policy within a worldview they wanted to eradicate completely. To them, an armed Soviet woman was a sign that the Bolsheviks, the communists, had turned the natural social order upside down.

On that basis, many high-ranking German officers ordered the execution of Soviet servicewomen immediately upon capture. For the Germans, these women should have been wives and mothers at home. But if a German soldier was killed by a female fighter, imagine the message that would echo back to the German people at home. The Germans claimed to be the master race, and if their elite forces were killed by an enemy woman, it would undermine the very core of Nazi policy.

Officers within the German army issued instructions to their front-line troops on how to deal with female fighters taken prisoner. They were to be handled according to what was known as Hitler’s Commissar Order. That order stipulated that Soviet commissars and political soldiers were to be shot immediately without trial. Soldiers were encouraged to execute women on the spot, with no trial and no chance to defend themselves.

The Germans were told to exterminate them as if they were vermin. Most were led to isolated areas where they were made to kneel, and then a single German soldier shot them in the head with his pistol. The women were not executed by mass firing squads, because that was considered a waste of ammunition. Instead, one soldier delivered a single fatal shot.

Many of these women never reached prisoner-of-war camps or concentration camps at all. Some were even hanged publicly for carrying weapons against the German occupiers, their bodies strung up in trees before large crowds. Partisans were a real threat to the Germans occupying territory they knew was hostile and dangerous. These were irregular fighters who used less formal methods of warfare, such as sabotage and demolition.

Teenage girls were encouraged to take up arms and fight against the Germans, but if they were captured, they were treated with brutality. Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya was eighteen years old when the Germans captured her. She was part of a combat group in the Soviet Union carrying out a mission. Upon her capture, she was beaten severely and tortured for information, but she refused to reveal anything.

She tried to escape and even fired at one of the guards. After being recaptured, she was stripped, beaten severely, given two hundred lashes, and her body was burned. On the way to her execution, she was forced to wear a placard around her neck that read “house burner. ” In fact, Zoya was not shot; she was hanged on the gallows.

But she stood defiantly before her enemies and was considered a hero of the Soviet cause. These women were extremely dangerous opponents. The Soviets made heavy use of female snipers, and they were said to be skilled killers when slipping through the ruins of towns and cities. These women possessed incredible patience, and they were celebrated in Soviet propaganda.

Any sniper of either sex could be dangerous, but upon capture, because of their superior skill with weapons and their accuracy, they often faced enormous threats once they fell into enemy hands. German soldiers had seen their comrades, their friends, and even their commanders killed by an unseen sniper, and they sought immediate revenge once a sniper was captured. Executing these women quickly was considered a necessity by the Germans. They were Soviet fighters, women bearing arms, an extremely capable enemy too dangerous to be allowed to live or be released.

Specifically regarding the snipers, about 2,500 of them fought against the Germans, and only about 500 survived the war. Together, they eliminated 11,000 enemies, including some senior officers and even generals. The women killed in other ways as well. There was the 46th Taman Guards Night Bomber Regiment, known as the “Night Witches” for very good reason.

These pilots flew 24,000 missions. Using somewhat outdated biplanes, they attacked German positions and dropped loads of explosives on their enemies. They flew to high altitudes, then cut their engines and glided silently toward the required bombing range and altitude. Then they released their payloads, causing enormous destruction and death, before restarting their engines and flying away.

There were other groups of pilots, such as the 586th Fighter Regiment, which included three female regiments that carried out more than 4,000 sorties. A female officer also commanded the 125th Guards Bomber Regiment, and they dropped about 1,000 tons of bombs on Axis soldiers. These pilots often risked certain death if they fell into captivity. Suppose their planes were shot down and they somehow survived the landing.

The Germans, if they captured a woman inside an aircraft, took no prisoners at all. It should be noted, however, that the laws of war did not allow their execution. Being a female soldier did not cancel the right to humane treatment after surrender. Once an enemy combatant had actually surrendered and stopped fighting, shooting them was not permitted under the laws of war, even if they had killed German soldiers.

Captured servicewomen were entitled to the same levels of protection, but they were often executed immediately. At the same time, not every captured servicewoman was executed. There was no universal official practice by which every German soldier automatically shot every female Red Army prisoner. Some women were captured and survived German captivity.

Some were sent through prisoner-of-war camps, or to prisons, concentration camps, or forced labor systems. Treatment varied greatly depending on location, date, the capturing unit, and the woman’s presumed military role. In the end, female soldiers were shot during the war for many reasons. A German unit that had suffered heavy losses might act out of revenge.

In the eyes of the Germans, the presence of women on the battlefield undermined the social order, and they felt they had to deal with it. Also, these women were considered extremely dangerous. And sadly, to this day, many servicewomen lie in temporary graves, victims of the cruel German treatment they received immediately upon capture.