History 05/01/20 in the USSR did to captured German women
On the exact number of citizens of Nazi Germany, captured and contained in the concentration camps, however they were captured as the troops of the USSR and allies, and each of the warring parties had their places of stay of prisoners. Even the number of such camps cannot be determined with precision only by the Soviet detention of prisoners of war there were over 2 million.
Available data, in particular eyewitness accounts of the content of German women prisoners testify about difficult conditions in the concentration camps.
Who were German soldiers in the great Patriotic war
As he wrote in his article “Women in combat: the experience of the Second World war in the United States, Britain, Germany and the Soviet Union” (Journal of Military History” D Ann Campbell, during the war, several hundred thousand German women were forcibly recruited as assistant gunners. At the end of the great Patriotic war, many Germans took up arms. Campbell says that it is difficult to understand whether they were volunteers or forcibly recruited, as in Nazi Germany at that time there was no law about compulsory conscription.
In the death camps Eisenhower
Martin Brech, soldiers of the army Eisenhower, at the end of the war he served as a guard in a concentration camp in the area of the German town Andernach (Rhineland-Palatinate). Bres observed the conditions of detention of about 50 thousand prisoners, among whom were German soldiers. In 1990, he published an essay “In the death camps of Eisenhower: a history of the American guard.”
the Camp was an open area, no buildings, divided into paddocks. For women there was a separate paddock. Everyone slept under the open sky, many prisoners often were not even warm clothes, and the spring of 1945 was cold, rainy and windy. Prisoners very bad phave icalis, cooked themselves a soup of grass. Exhausted, suffering from dysentery, they quickly weakened and died. Brach testified that the American command had sufficient supplies of food, medicines, but the highlight of it all for the needs of prisoners was forbidden. Martin had tried to feed the prisoners, but his military chief promised to shoot the guard for such an initiative.
Martin Brech described a case where an American officer fired on a group of civilian German women from the gun of excitement. The guard, explaining this behavior of the Americans in relation to the prisoners, saying that the USSR’s allies hated the Germans as a nation, because it was already known about Nazi atrocities in concentration camps, images of the prisoners of Buchenwald, Auschwitz and other Nazi death factories were filled with headlines of the spring of 1945.
on the Internet there are other pictures about conditions of stay of women in Nazi American camp in Vilvoorde (Netherlands), which contained former members of the SS and the Luftwaffe. The photographs of the prisoners look cheerful. However, many historians are inclined to believe that it is significant, staged photography to demonstrate a humane attitude of Americans towards prisoners.
“I don’t know why still alive”
in Addition to the female soldiers in the Soviet Union after the war were transported thousands of Germans and representatives of other nationalities of the satellite countries of Germany. Memories of Frida Helinski (city Dolice, Pomerania), which in 1945 at the age of 19 in the number of hundreds of other German women and girls of this city were forcibly taken to the Soviet Union in the labor force, a four-year stay in the Soviet Union is a nightmare.
In the East they were taken three weeks in cattle cars, were fed a “dry bread.” At stops of the cars carried the corpses. Immigrants, many of whom had no warm clothes, brought to Arkhangelsk, where the snow was still lying. Women lived in wooden barracks. Dam building. Worked on 9 hours without lunch.
Frieda Helinski worked in the forestry, felling trees, for coal mine, a bentonite plant, where they extracted the rock for construction works. Women from morning to evening dragged desyatikilogrammovye stones. For four years, Frida had no connection with his family. Postage to Germany is not reached, they slowed down at the post office and regulatory authorities. In 1949 Helinski was able to write to the Red cross about her family, and she received the answer that her relatives are alive.
In 1947, individual returnees who were seriously ill, people with disabilities had the opportunity to return home. At the end of 1949, left, and Frida Helinski. Remembering the conditions of work and life in the Soviet camps, she said: “I do Not know why still alive – dozens of my compatriots died in the Soviet Union, hard labour and disease.”
Nicholas Syromyatnikov
Source:
© Russian Seven
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