An unfortunate Soviet female soldier lies dead, shortly after being executed by her German captors. 1941

Around 200K Red Army Female Soldiers. 50K Nurses probably, and 50k truck drivers, anti aircraft battery operators and so on. Around 7 Million women totally died, which includes 1 Million caught in an urban battle for example. 3 Million Genocided and 4 million starved or worked to death.

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 1940's, 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 POW's 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, 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."

During the war the Communist Party had a vested interest in portraying all women soldiers as the archetype warrior. This wasn't total lip service, as many served the same as their male counterparts. The propaganda and memoirs written during the USSR leaves out a major piece of the picture: the systematic abuse against women Soviet Soldiers by male Soviet Soldiers, particularly by the Political Officers. The negative stereotype of "field mattresses" / "field wives" / "field whores" was only spoken of during the war rather than exposed on paper, but immediately after the war women veterans were expunged from society so as to not create a privileged class which presented a risk to the Party. After the war, if a woman veteran wore her medals on the street in the USSR she would be catcalled as a whore. I'm sure this comes as a saddening shock if you are in Russia where there is less objective history, especially given Putin's romanization of Stalin. So don't take my word for it, but I have sources for all the specifics:

Experiences of Soviet Women Combatants During World War II (2017) Michelle De Jesus Reyes

"I Am Loathe To Recall: Russian Woman Soldiers in World War II." Woman's Studies Quarterly Vol.23 No.3 and 4 (1995) Ludmila Lezhneva, Svetlana Alexievich

The Unwomanly Face Of War (1988) Svetlana Alexievich

"Our Brigade Will Not Be Sent To The Front" The Russian Review Vol.68 No.2 (2009) Roger Markwick

On "polianitsy" that is a flawed english spelling of a Russian word which may even be archaic so I googled it for you to give a better understanding:

1. The image of a female warrior was created not by the party, but by the selfless labor of women on the battlefields and in the rear. From the very beginning of the war, women nurses dragged wounded Soviet soldiers to the rear under fire. Washerwomen washed their hands to the bone, but provided the soldiers with clean linen. Women workers worked tirelessly in the fields and factories while the men were at the front. Women partisans and radio operators fought behind enemy lines.

2. Liberal propaganda overlooks the fact that such phenomena were not systematic, but sporadic. The punishment in the Soviet army for rape is execution. And if it was normal for US troops to have sex with German women in exchange for a chocolate bar or cigarettes, in the USSR they strictly monitored the execution of punishment.

Gorbachev's task was to complete the destruction of the USSR, during perestroika many lies appeared, which still have to be exposed.

3. The word polyanica exists only in Russian folklore and was not widely used either in the 20th century or in the 21st.

4. I don't want to upset you, but the current Russian government is pursuing an anti-communist line. At the state level, there is not a single person who would exalt Stalin or praise the Soviet Union. On the contrary, there is a policy of repentance for the actions of the USSR, pouring slop on the communists and the achievements of the Soviet peoples.

Losing men is not the only criteria tho, it makes up a plurality in the effects of winning a war, but not a majority.

Industrial Power, Intelligence, Strategies and deception are also important and USSR was always second or third in these regions.

China, lost the second highest men(around 20 Million), but it had less effect in the pacific war as only 20% of all Japanese industries were for China and other was for US-Commonwealth which lost 500K in the pacific. Most Japanese intelligence was against Americans, higher command was barely aware where their troops are in china.

A similar thing (but not the same as USSR was industrialized) could be said to USSR. During the Africa campaign and Stalingrad (both happened at the same time), 70% of all German oil spent was sent to Africa, One U-Boat Against USA and UK could have been made into 30 Tanks against Russians, Resistance to Nazi rule from france to Baltics to Balkans almost fully coordinated by british tied up one tenth of the forces, One V-series rocket could have made a 250,000 Bullets to fight the Soviets and so on.

If you consider all these, USSR did far less than 40 times the americans as the death count would suggest, they did like twice that of Americans (still higher than Americans tho)

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