Part 1/2

Yes, they treated them differently. The German leadership and Army as institutions and on the level of the vast majority of their individual members embraced a deeply misogynist, sexist, chauvinist, and patriarchal world-view that was – as toxic masculinity is wont to be – threatened and challenged by the existence of female soldiers of the Red Army. In lashing out against this threat, the women of the Red Army more often than not payed with their lives in that the Wehrmacht shot most of them after taking them prisoner. And if they survived, they were in addition to becoming the victims of massive sexual violence, not treated like their male compatriots but – if they survived – taken to Concentration Camps to be imprisoned there.

The term the German Army used for female soldiers of the Red Army alone speaks volumes. In official documents of the Wehrmacht, rather than refer to them as "Soldatinnen" (female Soldiers) or "Rotarmistinnen" (female members of the Red Army), by far the most common term applied to them is "Flintenweiber" (Rifle Broad – "Weib" is a pejorative German term for a woman). While the exact origin of the term is unknown and lies most likely in the one of the popular wars (Volkskriege) of the 19th century, it was massively popularized in Germany, especially in a military context through the mass of Freikorps literature, describing the murderous activities of the German Freikorps after WWI fighting in the Baltics and Poland against the Soviets and the Polish state.

German sociologist Klaus Theweleit has analyzed this type of literature as well as the members of the Freikorps for his book Männerphantasien, Munich 2000, originally published in 1977 and translated into English as Male Fantasies. Minneapolis 1987. Theweleit using concepts borrowed from Margaret Mahler, Wilhelm Reich, Deleuze and Foucault aims in essence at establishing the fascist male consciousness. Drawing on the literature written by Free Corps members and other later Nazis, Theweleit asserts that in part due to the highly militarized male culture of the time as well as the experiences that shaped the "fascist male", these men formed what he called a secondary ego in form of a body armor (imagine knights and not today's soldiers), which dictates military habitus, the inability to sustain normal human relations outside of a strict hierarchical environment, and libidinous world of aggression, meaning simply put a derival of pleasure from hatred and aggression. In essence, he purports that the gender norm of the male soldier of the time destroyed the ability of the Free Corps member and Nazi to empathize.

Within this chauvinist and toxically masculine world-view, the Flintenweib represents the "anti-man", the greatest transgression of the existing and utopian patriarchal order. Women in the view of the fascist man fall stringently within a very strict "virgin-whore" dichotomy, meaning women are either "worthless whores" to be used for one's pleasure and then discarded after or "virtuous virgins" to be protected against the world. The women deemed Flintenweiber violate this dichotomy for by taking up the activity of soldering, wearing a uniform, fighting in the field – all activities highly coded male – they refuse to fall into any category within the accepted dichotomy of women. Their very existence is a violation and a threat to the order of gender in the patriarchy.

Additionally, this perceived "deviance" was seen by the Freikorps and the German military as a direct result of the evils and degeneracy of Bolshevism. As Roger Marwick and Euridice Cardon write in their book about Soviet women on the front line of WWII:

For Nazism, the deployment of women was confirmation of the moral bankruptcy of Bolshevism: ‘a state that could sacrifice on the battlefield its most precious goods in this dissolute form was doomed’. In keeping also with Hitler’s injunction that the Eastern Front was a ‘war of extermination’ in which the summary execution of Jews, Communist commissars and partisans was obligatory, no quarter was to be given to the captured ‘cruel’, ‘Jewish riflewoman’, particularly female partisans. [...] Neither the wounded nor the dead were spared vicious desecration, sexual and otherwise. Such was the visceral fear, ferocity and hatred which women warriors provoked in the Nazified Wehrmacht. To the Nazi mind, Flintenweiber were ‘not women but monsters – Russian fanatics’ that embodied the unnatural barbarism of Bolshevism.

What Marwick and Cardon call "ruthless, lethal misogyny" began to manifest virtually immediately with the invasion of the Soviet Union. On June 29, 1941, Günther von Kluge, commander in chief of the German 4th Army, ordered his subordinates: "Women in uniform are to be shot". While a confirmation request of this policy by his intelligence officer with the Command of the Army (OKH) produced an order that rescinded this policy, this OKH response did not stop further generals and units instituting a similar policy. Walther von Reichenau, commander of the 6th Army, issued an infamous order "on the treatment of Partisans, Flintenweiber and Political Commissars" in October 1941 that stated that "degenerate broads made into POWs" were to be executed on the spot. Ernst hammer, commander of the 75th Infantry Division issued a similar order around the same time stating that "womenfolk in Russian uniforms are to be shot immediately on principle". The 4th Panzer Division had a similar order in effect also from October 1941 that said: "Insidious and cruel partisans as well as degenerate Flintenweiber don't belong in a POW camp but hung from the nearest tree."

These orders were willingly made reality by the German Wehrmacht and its members. The 122nd Infantry Divison reported in July that they shot about 30 female soldiers of the Red Army after they had refused them the right to surrender. The 167. Infantry Divison simply reported after taking a village in mid-August 1941 that "a 14-year-old Flintenweib has been shot." The Army Command 16 reported for November 1941 that in the last 15 days "80 partisans, 3 commissars and 3 women" were shot.

The last passage is especially pertinent because it shows that female soldiers of the Red Army belonged in a similar category for the Germans as political commissars of the Red Army. While no overarching order for all troops of the Wehrmacht ordering the murder of female soldiers existed like it did with the commissars (rather they existed on the army or divisional level as shown above), like the commissars, they were on the whole denied treatment as POWs or legitimate combatants. When not described as Flintenweiber, they are simply called "women in uniform" within the official documentation. When taken into captivity by unit that was under a standing kill order for women, they were initially processed together with the male POWs and brought to the POW camps for Soviet soldiers. While this, especially in 1941 and the initial months of 1942 was also virtually a death sentence as the Wehrmacht let Soviet prisoners starve to death as a matter of established policy during that time (about half of the initially captured 3 million Soviet POWs in 1941 and early 1942 starved to death, while of the total 6 million Soviet POWs, 3 million did not survive the war), it became established policy that after some time in these initial processing camps, female soldiers would be handed over to the Reich Security Main Office to be imprisoned in Concentration Camps.

No Stalags or Offlags (POW camps for soldiers/NCOs and officers respectively) for women existed in the Wehrmacht structure of administering Soviet POWs. Rather, female Soviet soldiers were sent either to the Ravensbrück Concentration Camp – the CC established initially specifically as a women's concentration camp – or to Auschwitz-Birkenau, the other camp that had a significant and separate women's camp within its structure. The Auschwitz camp gave out numbers for 90.000 women – meaning those that survived arrival and were registered at the camp – and after Jewish women, Poles and Soviets constituted the highest numbers of prisoners, although it is impossible to find out how many of the Soviet women had been members of the Red Army as that is not listed within the entry books. In Ravensbrück about 18.000 female Soviet prisoners are known to have been incarcerated there, a considerable part of them most likely former Red Army members. These numbers also go to establish how few of them survived initial contact with the members of the German Wehrmacht. The exact number of female soldiers taken into German captivity as well as the number of women shot immediately after capture is unknown but is regularly estimated in the high ten thousands if not low hundred thousands. Furthermore, from the German files we can reconstruct that female soldiers of the Red Army tended to fight until death or commit suicide in order to escape capture by the Germans, no doubt because they knew what awaited them was death and/or rape and sexual assault, the extent of which is also not known but is estimated to have been almost ubiquitous. Wendy Jo Gertejanssen also showed that at least 15.000 Soviet women, among them at least 1000 Soviet Red Army members were forced by the Germans to serve as forced prostitutes in the German's field brothels for the army.