HY 150 BISK
THE SECOND WORLD WAR
http://users.ju.edu/jclarke/hy150biskworldwarii.htm
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WESTERN WEAKNESS, DIPLOMATIC FAILURE, AND WORLD WAR II
Dramatic changes occurred in the period between the two world wars. Having suffered defeat in World War I, Germany first sought equality with the other major powers and then overturned the Treaty of Versailles. Hitler managed to expand Germany without fighting, until he precipitated World War II in Europe by invading Poland. Then his crucial weakness emerged. He lacked a good sense of limits. Disregarding the disastrous experiences of two previous invaders of Russia (Charles XII of Sweden and Napoleon), Hitler squandered most of his military resources on his Eastern Front. Germany’s complete defeat resulted not only in territorial losses but also in a partition of the country that lasted until October 1990.
The Soviet Union, which was not at the Munich
Conference of major powers in 1938, emerged during the war with enough military
power to control Eastern Europe and to pose a serious threat to its neighbors to
the west. The United States, meanwhile, emerged from its interwar isolationism
as the leading power in the West.
In the Far East, Japan’s effort to create a vast empire by military force
achieved early success but eventually failed. Just as Germany’s invasion of
Russia in 1941 led to overextension, Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor precipitated
war on a scale that Japan could not handle. One result was that Japan turned
away from militarism and concentrated on developing economic power in the
postwar years.
The cost of the Allies’ victory was high, and the defeated powers suffered even
more. The Holocaust added millions to the horrible death toll. Moreover, the
terrifying implications of modern technology reached a qualitatively new level.
While the atom bomb dramatically symbolized this, even conventional weapons had
reached a level of destructiveness that made the cost of war between major
powers seem unacceptably high. Air raids on Dresden and Tokyo had caused higher
death tolls than had the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
"Women and the Nazi State"
adapted from
Matthew Stibbe.
"Women and the Nazi State." History Today, (Nov. 1993): 35-40
Hitler may have thought that women were there for cooking, children, and church,
but recent research has shown that female attitudes to, and involvement in, the
apparatus of the Third Reich was much more significant, argues Matthew Stibbe.
Nazi Anti-Feminism
Since the 1960s, gender-based research in many areas has increasingly corrected
distortions produced by historical inquiry based exclusively on men and records
kept by men. At first sight, however, the Third Reich would seem an area in
which historians could not easily show the importance of women as actors. After
all, reactionary and repressive Nazism from the outset had totally excluded
women from holding any leading positions of power and responsibility. Indeed,
much early work on National Socialism, reflecting a traditional male bias,
tended either to ignore the importance of gender or reinforced a stereotype of
women as the passive and innocent victims of a male-dominated movement.
Nevertheless, Nazi success depended not on one single thing but on its ability
to enforce a dynamic integration of many conflicting interests, not least those
of women, who then formed over half of the German population. For example,
although the male vote for the Nazis during the Weimar Republic was always
higher than the female, in the early 1930s the difference narrowed. In some
Protestant areas it even reversed. In particular, it seems likely that many
younger women who had not voted before cast their first ballot for Nazi
candidates, which suggests that there was something in the party program that
positively attracted them.
Nazis anti-feminism was related to their racist ideology. The Nazis saw the
modern “emancipated” woman, like the Jew, as an agent of degeneracy and national
decline, bringing in her wake the “destructive” forces of Bolshevism, democracy,
and parliamentarianism. Many claimed that Jews and Marxists were luring German
women into rational thinking and an “unhealthy” preoccupation with sexuality.
They accused female emancipation of destroying “Christian-Germanic” existence
and family life.
The Nazis promised to restore the traditional balance between the sexes by
inducing women to celebrate their “natural” domestic roles as mothers and
housewives. “Equal rights for women,” Hitler declared, “means that
they receive the esteem they deserve in the sphere nature has assigned to them.”
In particular, women were to become the focus of the Nazis’ drive to boost the
birthrate. In the early years of the regime, the Nazis systematically directed
them away from the idea of a full-time career toward starting or extending a
family. To this end, they introduced a generous system of marriage loans.
Similarly, in education policy the emphasis was away from developing “unnatural”
qualities, such as academic ability and independence, in favor of training for
future maternal roles through compulsory courses in domestic science and
biology.
The Party also discouraged women from using cosmetics and wearing “decadent”
foreign modes of dress. Sex appeal was “Jewish cosmopolitanism.” The Nazis
frowned on slimming cures as counter to the birth drive. To combat clothes they
considered decadent or slavish imitations of men’s styles, the Nazis tried to
create a new “Germanic style” through a German Fashion Bureau, set up in 1933
under the honorary presidency of Magda Goebbels. The regime also stressed
physical fitness, and they encouraged women to achieve the Reich Sport Medal.
The Party strictly condemned smoking, especially while pregnant.
In marriage, the principle of racial awareness replaced the principle of love,
and couples applying for the marriage loan had to go through a demanding medical
examination searching for hereditary defects. A lucrative black market in
documents proving Aryan ancestry sprang up. The future wives of SS men were
subject to a particularly rigorous procedure and had to attend special bride
schools to prepare them for motherhood.
The state denied the benefits given to “racially desirable” women to those
thought to be racially or socially unsuitable for motherhood. By the end of
1934, the state had forcibly sterilized 27,958 “undesirable” women, with 5
percent of these cases resulting in death. Jewish women in particular fell
victim, not only because of their race, but because of their sex, which placed
them even lower on the scale than were Jewish men. The state encouraged Aryan
men who had married Jewish women to divorce them and often removed their
offspring from the mother. In 1939, the government announced that the strict
prohibition on abortion did not apply to Jewish women.
Non-Jewish women who chose not to marry and have children or who were unable to
have them suffered a different kind of harassment and discrimination. For one
woman, the pressure to bear children became so great that she resorted to
kidnapping. Another complained in an open letter to Hitler: “We see our
daughters growing up in stupid aimlessness, living only in the vague hope of
getting a husband and having children. If they do not succeed, their lives will
be thwarted.” Indeed, the Nazi state showed little interest in the fate of
single women beyond childbearing age and often forced them to seek the lowest
paid and most monotonous work. The clearest indication of this is Article 3 of
the Nuremburg Race Laws of 1935. This article banned Aryan women younger than
forty-five from serving as maids in Jewish houses. Those older, the Nazis
believed, no longer faced the danger of violation by their Jewish employers.
MORE COMPLEX VIEW OF WOMEN IN THE NAZI REGIME
The regime’s female opponents documented these facts while they were happening.
And the first serious attempts at a gender-based analysis of Nazism in the 1960s
and 1970s produced findings challenging the conventional view that a complete
transformation of the position of German women for the worse had taken place
after 1933. Jill Stephenson, for instance, has pointed out that the Nazis’
reactionary policies toward women were in line with a more general European
trend in the interwar years. Measures designed to curb abortions and
contraception, and a preoccupation with reversing the declining birthrate among
“healthy” sections of the community were common to dictatorships of the right
and the left, as well as to democracies. France, for instance, had even more
reason than did Germany to worry over a declining birthrate, and the French in
1920 began the practice of rewarding prolific mothers, an idea the Nazis later
borrowed. In 1939, the French increased the penalties for contraception and
abortion. The latter becoming a capital offense under the wartime Vichy regime
in 1942.
Similarly, campaigns to remove married women
from the labor market to make way for unemployed males were a European-wide
response in the early 1930s to the world recession. In Germany, Chancellor
Bruning’s government between 1930 and 1932 was already doing so. These polices
enjoyed the support among conservatives, the churches, and some trade unionists,
and some members of the women’s movement. In 1933, the Dolfuss regime in
Austria enacted measures to remove married women from the civil service. The
Nazis passed similar measures in the same year. Throughout the interwar years,
restrictions on women’s eligibility for professional positions remained in force
in many European countries, including France, Belgium, Italy, Bulgaria, Greece,
the Netherlands, and until 1938, Norway. In Britain, the government largely
excluded married women from the teaching profession until 1944. Only in the
mid-1950s did it introduce the principle of equal pay in the civil service.
Meanwhile, Stephenson argues, the most significant break in the regime’s stance
toward women came after 1936. By then, the economy had revived enough to bring
down unemployment to acceptable levels, and the Nazis began to reverse their
previous policies to support rearmament and an expanding economy. The increased
demand for female labor, she asserts, meant that, whatever the long-term
ideological goals of the Nazis may have been, in the intermediate term they
could only discriminate against women to a limited extent. Indeed, she turns the
conventional picture almost completely on its head. Women under Nazism benefited
both from a rise in the status and benefits granted to mothers and housewives,
while consolidating their position in employment outside the home, including the
professions.
A few years earlier David Schonbaum had already noted how economic pressures
helped to improve the competitive position of women in the labor market. The
gap between men and women’s wages actually decreased during the Third Reich,
although differentials remained and the average, unskilled, male worker could
still expect higher pay than could the average, skilled, female worker. The
Nazis did uphold their ideological insistence on the “natural inferiority” of
females in their total exclusion of women from positions of power and
responsibility within the party and state apparatuses. Nevertheless, Schonbaum
also claims that increased job opportunities, rising wage rates, and improved
maternity benefits and services largely offset this loss of political status.
Overall, he concludes, “the pressures of the totalitarian state combined with
those of an industrializing and industrial society to produce for women . . . a
new status of relative if unconventional equality.”
Such work has helped shed light on why some leading figures in the pre-1933
women’s movements, notably Gertrude Sumer of the Federation of German Women’s
Associations, were willing to come to a rapprochement with the regime. They
even praised some of its policies, such as the introduction in 1937of Labor
service for young women, as a step toward greater equality for women. The Nazi
regime itself, meanwhile, produced several high-profile, female personalities.
These included the fashion-conscious, Magda Goebbels, the screen idol turned
film producer, Leni Riefenstahl, and the air pilot, Hannah Reitsch. Above all,
Women’s Leader, Gertrude Scholtz-Klink, managed to combine her leadership of the
six to eight million members of the Nazi Women’s Bureau with her
responsibilities as a mother of four.
On a broader level too there has been a move away from the stereotyped image of
women as passive victims in the Third Reich toward women as actors in their own
right. This in turn has opened new controversies surrounding the issue of female
consent to Nazism. Claudia Koonz, for instance, has revealed the existence of
women who actively supported the movement during its rise to power. Such “Nazi
feminists,” typically sought to distinguish themselves from their religious,
bourgeois, and socialist counterparts by rejecting emancipation as a hoax. Equal
rights for women, they argued, merely meant “equal rights to be exploited.”
Paula Sieber, a Nazi activist in Dusseldorf, wrote to her local paper in 1934: “The
women’s movement of yesterday led thirty-six parliamentarians and hundred of
thousands of women out onto the streets of our great cities. It made one woman a
high-ranking civil servant and hundreds of thousands wage-slaves of the
capitalist economic order.”
More conservative figures such as Guida Diehl praised National Socialism for
restoring women to their lost dignity as defenders of “German-Christian”
spiritual values and family life. Others underlined the opportunities Nazism
offered to forge a radically new public role for women within their own separate
sphere of child care, education, and welfare work. Indeed, Koonz shows that
those women active in the Nazi movement during its rise to power rejoiced in
having “broken free” from the alienation of the modern, rationalized world and
the rigid class divisions dividing the women’s movement.
In particular, members of the League of Young German Maidens nurtured a strong
sense of peer group solidarity in the face of parental disapproval and the
snobbery of the “bluestockings” in the older, more respectable women’s
organizations. Another common theme was the sense of pride many of these women
felt in being able to contribute, however little, to the process of national
renewal. Nazi leaders themselves were often at pains to stress that women were
“different, but not inferior” to men. They often compared the “honor” of men in
performing military service to the “honor” of women in their battle as the
bearers of the next generation.
THE REALITY OF WOMEN’S ROLES IN THE THIRD REICH
In reality, women exercised little control in the Third Reich, even in the
separate sphere assigned to them. After 1933, the male-dominated Nazi leadership
preferred to recruit more passive women content to implement policies handed
down from above. Gertrude Scholtz-Klink, eventually appointed as head of the
Women’s Bureau in 1934, was typical. With her classic Aryan looks and her four
children, she represented the ideal “Gretchen” type. She displayed those simple
womanly virtues—comradeship, self-sacrifice, and devotion to family, which the
Nazis wanted to encourage. Her guiding principle was always that women should
campaign not against men but alongside them, and as Women’s Leader she tried to
preserve the illusion that she had created notable autonomy for women within
their own sphere of activity. In reality however, the regime excluded her from
all high-level discussions, even when these directly concerned women, such as
plans to mobilize female labor during the war. In 1942, for instance, she
suggested that the regime extend the benefits of child subsidies to women
factory workers. The director of the Labor Front, Robert Ley, told her that he
had to put racial-biological considerations before the needs of the war economy.
Meanwhile, forces increasingly exposed the contradictions in Nazi pro-family
rhetoric. These included the known promiscuity of top political leaders and the
divorce reform act of 1938, which increased the number of legal separations.
Official encouragement to children to inform on their parents, and conscription
that forced more and more men to live away from home, further tore apart
families. The regime expected Scholtz-Klink and her social workers to play an
active role in ideological indoctrination and in promoting eugenics and “racial
awareness” among the women in their care. At the same time, they were to
collect the names of those deemed fit for sterilization or the euthanasia
program. The Nazis also introduced the Lebensborn program, whereby the
Party selected women to “donate a baby to the Führer” by having illegitimate
children by SS officers. This also represented a radical departure from
traditional family values with no parallels either in the German past or in
contemporaneous fascist movements.
CULPABILITY OF WOMEN IN THE NAZI REGIME
Koonz, however, takes her argument one stage further. By surrendering their
political rights, in return for the honor and prestige bestowed on them as
mothers in the fatherland, she argues that German women ultimately played an
equal role in helping to make war and genocide possible. While Nazi men launched
their racially-charged war of conquest in the East, Nazi women busily created
their own domestic Lebensraum (living space) in the form of a private
retreat from the outside world. In particular, she claims, the Nazis made
efforts to select men from “good family backgrounds” to oversee the mass
killings in the concentration camps. The role of their wives was to preserve “an
illusion of love in an environment of hatred,” and “a place of contact with the
more humane self.” This provided an “ersatz sanity” for those who worked daily
with mass murder.
Controversial as Koonz’s conclusion may be, her work has undoubtedly been of
major importance in proving the importance of women’s history in examining all
historical issues, even when this might put women themselves in a bad light. As
she herself argues, it is only by examining the everyday banality of evil that
we can begin to understand the true horrors of the Holocaust.
WOMEN AND RESISTANCE
However, German women were by no means always acted as Koonz’s work suggests.
While, undoubtedly, many women did play their part in making life unbearable for
“racially undesirable” citizens, those directly involved in carrying out Nazi
policies were at best a small minority. Rather, as an earlier study by Tim Mason
reveals, the most significant trend in Nazi family life was toward the ideal of
the small, suburban, middle-class family. This he sees as a specific reaction to
the demands made on women’s lives by increasing industrialization and
bureaucratization, not restricted to Nazi Germany, but a part of contemporary
Western life. It explains the popularity of the Nazi Marriage Loan scheme. This
enabled many young women to escape the boredom of routine work by getting
married and setting up a home. Significantly, it also led to resistance toward
the Nazi drive to increase the birthrate and later toward the regime’s efforts
to encourage women to leave their domesticity for war work. Overall, as Mason
notes, the mobilization of women for war production was strikingly inefficient
when compared with that of wartime Britain. Even after Hitler overcame his
ideological objections after the reversal of Stalingrad in 1943 to conscripting
married women, many women continued to find ways of avoiding it, some ironically
by deliberately getting pregnant.
Much early work on resistance explicitly excludes this feminine struggle against
the encroachments of a rational-bureaucratic state on their private sphere.
This work advances the conventional view that resistance was only possible among
those who were committed anti-Nazis before 1933. Even Mason argues that: “The
low level of women’s participation in the resistance groups of all political
persuasions, in particular the conservative resistance, also points toward a
high degree of passive acceptance of the regime by women.”
However, recent women’s studies of the resistance have shown how women developed
strategies for political activism within the context of their everyday lives.
They, for example, extended their roles as housewives to feeding and sheltering
Nazi victims and members of the resistance. They also exploited opportunities
arising from their employment as secretaries to provide the resistance with
distribution services, false papers, and intelligence. Similarly, those working
with the sick and mentally handicapped, often members of religious orders rather
than Party members, did not always collaborate in Nazi sterilization and
euthanasia programs. Many also often found opportunities to save at least some
by altering reports, hiding patients from the authorities, or sending them back
to their parents and warning them of the danger. During the war itself, even
providing food to foreign deportees or addressing them in their own language
became a punishable offense, and thus by definition an act of resistance.
CONCLUSION
Indeed, Koonz herself recognizes that in certain contexts motherhood could take
on a different meaning from the one which informs the main part of her book. In
her chapter on Jewish women, she notes that: “Whilst men did their best to
cope with the hostile world of business, profession and bureaucracy, women
struggled to preserve their families as a refuge from a menacing world outside.”
In the concentration camps people used to form themselves into little groups of
“ersatz families” as a source of private comfort from the sheer terror and
madness of reality. In both instances, we find women doing exactly what Koonz
attacks German women for doing—providing a private sphere of love in an
environment of hatred. Yet, here the contrast between love and terror takes on
a different meaning. The family unit, often headed by the woman if the husband
had been killed or taken prisoner, also remained the only institution left after
the war that could provide Germans with some sanity as they picked through the
ruins of the “thousand-year Reich.”
One of the major themes, then, is the essential ambiguity of women’s positions
as mothers in the fatherland. Claudia Koonz correctly suggests that the promise
of greater autonomy within the traditional sphere of female activity persuaded
many in the early 1930s to accept the removal of their recently won political
rights. However, her effort to link this to a collective female responsibility
for the crimes of Nazism breaks down because of its failure to do justice to the
wide variety of strategies women employed while struggling to define their own
Lebenstraum. This struggle did not simply stop after 1933, but
increasingly provided women with the means of creating their own opportunities
for political action. Their action followed along a broad spectrum, from
defense of their own private “space” against the intrusion of a totalitarian
state to a more conscious and active resistance to Nazism.
For more on the German Resistance Movement, see:
The Fight for Freedom
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Academy/1148/july.html
The story of the German resistance to Hitler by Danny Orbach. Somewhat marred by
bad translation from the German. Includes: The Beginning; Resistance In The
Army; Halder’s Conspiracy; General Von Treskow: The Fight For Freedom In The
East; Operation Spark; The Kreisau Circle: Building The Future; Colonel Von
Stauffenberg; The True Legend Of The White Rose; 20th July, 1944: For Freedom!;
Before the Nazi Court: Heroism In The Last Moments; Conclusion; Bibliography.
Adapted from
John Erickson.
"Night Witches, Snipers and Laundresses"
History Today, July 1990, pp. 29-35.
In its desperate battle to fight off the advancing Germans, the Soviet Union
called on its women to play as active and probably more wide-ranging a role as
its men. John Erickson records the military and civilian efforts during the
Great Patriotic War.
John Erickson is the director of the Centre for Defence Studies at the
University of Edinburgh.
INTRODUCTION
As the Soviet regimental commander
approached, the young girl sentry in oversize boots and overlong men’s trousers
guarding parked aircraft cried out in a mixture of panic and confusion: “Would
you please stop! Who goes there? I really must ask you to excuse me, I am going
to shoot.” Years after that wartime incident, senior pilot Guards Lieutenant
Antonina Bondareva recalled in mock despair the hapless naïveté of the
sentry. Yet, in its own way, it shows the enormous burden placed on all Soviet
women, young and old, during the war years. Historians have not yet told this
saga in all its astonishing variety and harrowing detail. Tragedy abounds. I
recall hearing German veterans of the Eastern Front, tough and
battle-tested, describe their numbed shock at coming on dead Soviet women
soldiers on the battlefield.
EXAMINATION OF WOMEN AND THE WAR BEGINS
What is undoubtedly strange is the lack of attention which not only Soviet
historians but others have paid to this extraordinary dimension of the Soviet
war effort. There are two major exceptions. Much credit must go to Svetlana
Meksievich for carrying her tape-recorder around city, town, and village to
uncover firsthand evidence of the scale and scope of the wartime experience of
Soviet women. A little later, Valentina Galagan published in 1986, a more
academic but illuminating study of Soviet womanhood at war.
WOMEN IN COMBAT?
In the 1980s and early 1990s, the combat role, actual and potential, of
women was a great controversy in the United States. Writing in the
International Herald Tribune on January 11, 1990 about recent American
operations in Panama, Edwin M. Yoder Jr. feared what might happen if women
became as expendable in war as were men. Here, the Soviet experience had
singular relevance. But this should not obscure deeper investigation by
historians, sociologists, psychologists, and medical doctors into the basic
workings of the wartime “home fronts.” There, perhaps even more than in
battlefield performance, myth and reality collide quite violently, with the
“heroic image” yielding ultimately to the humdrum and mundane.
HEAVY LOSSES
Yet, paradoxically, the mundane hides drama all its own with so many profiles of
coercion, conformity and choice inextricably bound up with the social
consequences of total war and searing “barbarization.” Daily necessity looms
large. For example, we find little of a “heroic” image in young Soviet wartime
women soldiers finding themselves in frontline without suitable clothing, until
the girls cut the bottoms out of kit bags to provide makeshift skirts.
What is gruesomely stark is that the women and young girls serving as “frontline
medics” with rifle battalions suffered losses second only to those of the
fighting troops themselves. Proportionately, women at the front suffered heavier
losses than did the men.
SUM OF FRONTLINE CONTRIBUTION
Soviet women were no strangers to “defense duties” before the war. In 1927, War
Commissar Voroshilov stressed the need for women to train to share actively in
“defense.” Nor were they strangers to backbreaking work, not merely domestic but
in factories and on the land. At the beginning of 1940, women made up 41 percent
of the labor force. The war brought them into both the factory and the
frontline. No fewer than 800,000 women saw active service on the battlefronts.
They served as nurses, combat pilots, navigators, snipers, gunners, paratroops,
tank crews. They also served as frontline “laundresses” in field bath and
laundry units, as well as cooks and sappers—the latter with a short life
expectancy clearing mines. In a ghastly war of unparalleled barbarism, women of
all ages played a prominent role in the partisan movement.
SUM OF HOMEFRONT CONTRIBUTION
Women of the homefront tended to the home fires, worked in munitions
factories, enrolled as air raid wardens, marched with the labor squads
conscripted to dig antitank ditches, and suffered in the frantic, improvised
mass evacuations eastward. With families split and dispersed, women struggled
desperately with the ghastly privations imposed by the siege of Leningrad and
elsewhere. They also came under punitive wartime legislation which “militarized”
labor. Absenteeism equaled desertion and brought the ferocity of court-martial
sentences or NKVD military tribunals. Absence without leave, even for hours,
from a war-industry enterprise was punished by five to eight years imprisonment.
The application of military disciplinary codes to workers in transport and
communications (signals), though extralegal, was draconian.
Women turned miners, welders, machine operators, and painters—like the “special
women’s brigade” which, to speed the guns to the front, painted the artillery
pieces on the flatcars as they trundled by rail to the war zone. The first ever
woman engine driver in the Soviet Union was Maria Meksandrovna Arestova who took
over the footplate in 1931 amid much cheering and flag-waving. When war came,
she drove special, highly dangerous “flying column” trains up to the front,
exposed to Luftwaffe strafing attacks aimed directly at the locomotive.
Her husband acted as senior co-driver, and their wartime home was a heated goods
van housing their tiny son.
WOMEN AND THE AGRICULTURAL HOMEFRONT
Sustained and grueling hardship fell on the women who worked the land. At the
beginning of the war, the Red Army stripped men, machines, and horses from the
collective farms. Tractors turned into gun-tows and men mobilized for the
infantry divisions left the farms literally powerless. To provide that power,
women often harnessed themselves to the plows, half a dozen at a time. Women
formed special “tractor brigades” to operate the few precious machines and the
combine-harvesters. The learned not merely to drive but to coddle the machines
without spare parts or lubricants. Not until late in the war were some new
machines forthcoming, but the “battle for bread” was critical. Thanks to women
laborers helped by the young and the old, Russia was at least fed, not grandly
or satisfyingly, but fed.
Declining conditions inflicted grim impoverishment. The State, the Party, and
the NKVD rigorously enforced grain collections. Bad policies compounded
shortages, while the army continued to drain off labor—including at least 1
million women. The land suffered the chaos of evacuation in 1941, the ravages of
German occupation, and then the bouts of “recollectivization” as the Red Army
recovered Soviet territory. The labor force continued to fall, down to 4 million
men and 11 million women in 1943. For exhausting labor and fulfilling mandatory
“labor days,” the peasant household received “payment in kind” when
available—200 grams of grain, 100 grams of potatoes. One hundred grams equals 4
ounces, in effect, one potato and a cupful of grain. Not a single tractor went
to the farms between 1941-42. As “militarization” bit into the industrial labor
force, on the land the penalties for failing to meet the “labor days”
requirement and grain requisitions meant the punitive hand of the NKVD—or a
deadlier threat. The state would take away the vital “private plots.”
WOMEN IN PARTISAN UNITS
The women fighting with the partisan movement or working with the underground
resistance, faced the prospect of death or betrayal and arrest.A martyrdom of
torture began with the horrible, “Fascist manicure.” Though women and girls
played a large part in the partisan movement, only one woman—Aleksandra
Zakharova—became a commissar of a partisan unit, the 225th Gomel Region Partisan
Regiment. The commissar, entrusted with both party-political and military
duties, was the heart of the units. For so many others, fate and German rule
with its forced deportations consigned them to the Reich in a
slave labor system for house, farm, and factory. These deportations ripped
families apart, igniting a passionate hatred of German domination, despite the
early promises which had beguiled many in the first days of occupation.
WOMEN AND EVACUATION TO THE EAST
Not only German occupation but the huge, hastily improvised, mass evacuation
into the Soviet hinterland early in the war brought fresh suffering. The flood
of evacuees and a relocated labor force brought chaos to housing,
transportation, and feeding arrangements. Workers clogged factory canteens, and
housing—a chronic problem—became desperate as people poured into the Volga
region, the Urals, and Siberia. In September 1941, the government reacted to
this mounting crisis, assigning 200 million rubles for housing in the east,
setting up a separate commissariat for building programs. The Soviets
frantically built new factories in the East or reassembled them after
evacuation. Families dug earth shelters as “homes” or used derelict barracks. In
one giant tank factory, 8,500 workers and their families lived in mere holes in
the ground, or in “worker settlements,” which housed 15,000. They had only six
stands with pipes for water, no furniture, and no fuel for heating in a Siberian
winter.
WARTIME STRINGENCY AND RATIONING
Wartime stringency savagely bit the Soviet Union. Sugar, jam, matches, knitwear,
and meat vanished from sight. Unbelievably ghastly conditions prevailed in
Leningrad, ringed by German guns and troops, where the first deaths from
starvation occurred in the late autumn of 1941. Here heroic myth and unbearable
reality met and fused, creating the unrelieved horror of a siege filled with
medieval nightmares. Leningrad women produced vile jellies from sheep gut as
food. For baking, without vegetable oils, they used an emulsion of sunflower
oil, soap stock, and corn flour. They use everything remotely edible, even the
scrapings of wallpaper paste. Not only did the Leningraders tighten their belts,
they ate them.
Sieges, proliferated. In Odessa, women dished out the meager water ration. In
Moscow siege conditions prevailed for many months, with the breakdown of
transport in the winter of 1941-42 bringing added hardship. Only 30 percent of
the meat ration and 34 percent of the sugar ration was “honored.”
Not that rationing was new, the state having introduced bread rationing in 1929
and rationing for grain, meat, herring, and sugar in 1932. But in 1935,
foodstuffs had come off the ration. Soviet women had to struggle anew, shuttling
between home, factory, and air raid post. They dug defensive positions and
coped with differentiated rationing systems—the “bread norms” were between 800
grams and 1.2 kilo per day for “special categories,” such as miners and workers
in heavy industry. Industrial workers received 500 grams, the remainder 400
grams. Children and expectant mothers got 300-400 grams. Communal feeding
lightened the burden a little, but for “shopping,” the housewife had to go to
the peasant kolkhoz markets. In 1942, a kilo of grain cost 53 rubles 80
kopek (1 ruble 88 kopek in 1940), a liter of milk 38 rubles (2 rubles in 1940),
a kilo of mutton 196 rubles. The Soviet trade unions worked strenuously to bring
some order into factory supply committees, to organize communal feeding, to
combat black marketeering, and to check on the illegal use of ration cards. In
1944, things eased somewhat with a freer sale of foodstuffs and some consumer
goods, again at higher prices in the “off-the-ration markets.” More fish
and a little more meat lifted some of the gloom, but we have yet to hear in full
the saga of the indomitable Soviet housewife.
MASS MOBILIZATION OF WOMEN
It was 1942, the year of looming catastrophe as the German armies drove deeper
and deeper, coiling round Stalingrad. The State Defense Committee ordered mass
mobilization for Soviet women. Long before this, the Komsomol (Young Communist
League), had gone on a war footing. Many young women volunteered for frontline
duty, much to the consternation of the flustered, overworked mobilization and
recruiting centers. Infused with genuine patriotic fever and urged on by the
sights and sounds of universal destruction about them, the young marched to war
and to a massacre of the innocents which scythed down the seventeen to
twenty-one year olds.
Often it became a question of the “long and the short and the tall” in this
muster of young women—lined up by height, Polina Nazdrecheva heard the officer
say "And who is this Thumbelina? What are you going to do here? Perhaps you
had better go back to your mum and grow a bit bigger." This same
“Thumbelina” went on to become a highly-decorated frontline veteran. Thousands
of Thumbelinas went to war.
Junior Lieutenant Aleksandra Boiko graduated from the Chelyabinsk Armored
Mechanical School with her husband. She went on to become the commander of a
JS-122 (Joseph Stalin-122) heavy tank, the sole woman Red Army commander of a
heavy tank. Her husband was her driver-mechanic. However, other girls crewed
the medium T 34 tanks. Machines also dominated the lives of women on the land,
the precious, aging, quirky temperamental tractors. “Work was hard. We slept
three or four hours a day. For a long time we warmed up the engines with naked
flames, strictly against the rules . . . lubricants and fuel were rationed. You
answered with your head for every drop just as for every melted bearing.”
The same women and girls in the “tractor brigades” also donated large sums from
their wages to the Soviet Defense Fund. Over four years, the fund reached the
staggering total of 94.5 billion rubles, the sum of donations, proffered wages
and gifts, and jewelry.
STATISTICS
Statistics shed some light. The young women of the Komsomol provided 43,662 of
their members to the Red Army in 1942, with 8,683 at the front and 34,979 in the
various military districts. In two years those figures shot up to 247,551 at the
front and 85,921 in the districts. Both within and without the Komsomol women
and girls played an increasingly important role in the antiaircraft defenses,
crewing the guns and operating passive defenses—more than 300,000 women all
told. As for that distinction between “young girl” and “woman soldier,” the Red
Army had its own way—cutting off the girls’ plaits, the sign and symbol of the
advance into military womanhood.
As he war drew on and as casualties mounted, “women-soldiers” appeared in
greater numbers in the Red Army’s frontline divisions, with an average of
2-3,500 in each army. In 1944, on the 1st Belorussian Front, about to smash into
the formidable Army Group Center, some 3,000 women served with the front’s
armies. In January 1944, in the offensive to relieve Leningrad, 22,000 women
served at the front. More than 20,000 women served on the 2nd Belorussian Front
(3,636 officers, 5,081 sergeants). The Soviet navy mustered 25,000 women. The
partisan movement directly involved at least 100,000 women, including the woman
doctor enticed with a literal “sweetener” (the chocolate issued to paratroops)
to go for parachute training and drop behind the lines. Women provided 41
percent of the Red Army’s doctors and 43 percent of the frontline medical
personnel. Working under fire, they brought in not only the wounded but also
their weapons. “I was my mother’s darling and had never left the city before
being appointed junior medical officer at a mortar battery. Well, what I went
through . . .,” a far from uncommon comment from a Soviet woman doctor.
Some eighty-eight women received the highest Soviet decoration, Hero of the
Soviet Union—drawn from pilots, scouts, partisans, machine gunners, snipers,
tommy-gunners, tank crews, medical assistants, nurses, radio operators.
WOMEN PILOTS
Soviet woman served in some of the most dangerous operational roles and many
famous names abound, especially among the pilots, navigators, mechanics, and
armorers of the all-women 46th Guards Taman Women’s Air Regiment. They flew
their “swallows” (the Lastochki), wooden U-2 biplanes, unarmed until
1944, when they got a defensive machine-gun.
Carrying out low-level bombing and strafing attacks, flying largely by night,
and stirring up the defenses, wearied German troops nicknamed these women fliers
the “night witches.” But again, the survivor suffered a heavy toll. “After a
mission an aircraft stayed on the ground for a few minutes and then was back in
the air. Imagine how our girl armorers worked! During those few minutes they had
to load the bomb racks with four bombs—400 kilos—by hand . . . the body
reorganized itself to the extent that we ceased to be women throughout the war .
. . we had no female functions at all. We all smoked . . . I smoked too, it made
you feel a little calmer.”
Thus Alexandra Semyonova Popova, combat pilot
who flew 365 missions, her last over Berlin in 194§.
SNIPERS
Red Army women snipers took a special place for themselves but their fate too
was often pitiful. One captured German officer, astounded that so many of his
men had been killed by head wounds, asked to see the marksman who was so deadly
with a rifle. The Soviet commander could not oblige him. The “marksman,” girl
sniper Sasha Shlyakova, had just been killed in a sniper duel, betrayed by her
sole concession to femininity, a red scarf. The doyen of Red Army women snipers,
all graduates of sniper school, was Nina Pavlovna Petrova. She was forty-eight
when she first went to the front, notched up 122 kills and, as an instructor to
Red Army men, became “the sniper’s Mum,” teaching her trade. She died in a truck
crash in February 1945.
SAPPERS
Less dramatic but equally spine-chilling were the duties of the women Red Army
sappers in field engineering companies like that commanded by Lieutenant
Stanislava Volkov. When the Soviet general bellowed for the sapper commander to
report, he brushed aside a grubby, disheveled, grime-streaked girl soldier, only
to be told that he was indeed looking at the platoon commander. She duly cleared
the mines for his advancing tanks.
LAUNDRESSES
All fell rightly heir to decorations and awards, all save the laundresses,
tubbing, scrubbing, and rubbing away in field laundries with the thunder of the
battlefield rolling about them. Organized into detachments with their own
political officers, they finally got campaign medals and justifiably so, for as
Aleksandra Mishutina said, “if a soldier is to fight well, he must be
clothed, shod, fed, his clothes must be washed . . .” And the Red Army did
fight well.
DESTRUCTION OF COUNTRY AND WOMEN
With the coming of victory, or the prospect of it, relief came mixed with
sadness. The liberated areas were devastated, houses burned, gutted, mined,
schools ruined, orphans in need of care and mothering. Anti-epidemic measures
were a high priority. The regime intensified the campaign against tuberculosis
and treated the 350,000 infectious cases in the liberated areas. Housewives did
what they could in towns and villages turned into moonscapes by German
demolition squads in full retreat, dynamiting and booby-trapping. Wartime
ruination pulverized 1,170 towns, 70,000 villages, and 7 million dwellings
While the housewives sought some normality, postwar life for the frontline women
proved to be harsh and unyielding. Many hoped to return from the front as
“marriageable girls,” but were prematurely aged and gray-haired. Those badly
wounded hid themselves and their infirmities. Others lived as best they might
with persistent traumas or, like one grandmother, never spoke of her days at
war.
We have much more to learn about Soviet women at war. Their stories would tell
us more not only about individual behavior, motivation, morale, response to
maximum stress, and the mechanisms of the family, but also more about the
fundamental nature of Soviet society.
In sum, investigation Soviet women at war is not an excursion into “heroic
imagery.” It is an evaluation of heroism in all its forms, the dramatic, the
self-sacrificing, the compassionate and, so far from being least, the plain,
dogged, dutiful humdrum—embracing the washerwoman and the machine gunner alike.
For more on Russian women in combat, especially aviation, see:
New Zealand Fighter Pilot Museum
http://www.nzfpm.co.nz/theatres/theatres.htm
Contains information about women pilots. There is also some information about
Lilya Litvyak- the "White Rose of Stalingrad" who died in battle there.
Soviet Women
Combat Pilots—The Battle for Moscow
http://www.nzfpm.co.nz/theatres/tow_tbfm.htm
Lilya Litvyak—The White Rose of Stalingrad
http://www.nzfpm.co.nz/theatres/tow_twrs.htm
Soviet Women Pilots in the Great Patriotic
War
http://pratt.edu/~rsilva/sovwomen.htm
Part of the Aero Ring. Great site and links.
Also read:
Marriage Alliance: The Union of Two Imperiums: Japan and Ethiopia?"
http://users.ju.edu/jclarke/wizzs.html
"Seeking a Model for Modernization: The
Japanizers of Ethiopia."
http://users.ju.edu/jclarke/model.html
"Japan, Collective Security, and the
Italo-Ethiopian War of 1935-36."
http://users.ju.edu/jclarke/wizzatb.html
JOURNAL 15 QUESTIONS
Read the articles: "Marriage Alliance: The
Union of Two Imperiums: Japan and Ethiopia?"; "Seeking a Model for
Modernization: The Japanizers of Ethiopia"; and "Japan, Collective Security, and
the Italo-Ethiopian War of 1935-36," plus the two articles above, "Women and the
Nazi State" and "Night Witches, Snipers and Laundresses." Then please answer the
following questions.
1. How did Italy, Japan, the USSR, and Ethiopia interact in the 1930s? Justify
assigning these articles centering on Ethiopia and Japan under the title of "The
Second World War." In other words, when and where did World War II begin? You
might offer several possibilities and justify each.
2. How did much of the "colored," colonial world look at Japan? How did Japan
react? As described in these articles, how do international diplomacy,
imperialism, and the drive toward modernization interact?
3. Compare and contrast the experiences and roles of women in Communist Russia
and Nazi Germany before and during World War II. What do the two articles about
women at war say about the capacity of women to handle important functions
during wartime, including combat?
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