Female Soviet prisoners of war in the Second World War

PhD project of Muriel Nägler
Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Susanne Schattenberg

During the Second World War, for the first time in modern warfare, a large number of women served as regular soldiers in the Red Army, many of whom were taken prisoner of war by the Germans. For the female Red Army soldiers, capture meant physical, emotional and often sexualised experiences of violence. While the treatment of women in German captivity is now receiving increasing attention in research, their perspective, such as the experiences they had in captivity and the impact these had on their subsequent lives, are rarely addressed. This is because their liberation in no way meant that they regained control over their lives. On their return, they were also confronted with the blanket accusation of betraying the fatherland and first had to go through the Soviet repatriation system, which for some ended in repression and renewed imprisonment. It was also difficult for them to come to terms with their imprisonment, as post-war society stigmatised the former female Red Army prisoners of war in several ways - because they had served as women in the army and because they had been taken prisoner of war. Their experiences did not fit into the state's heroisation of the Great Patriotic War and therefore received no attention in the culture of remembrance. The lack of representation and the great discrepancy between what they experienced and the official narrative led the women to develop various strategies for creating meaning in order to integrate their experiences into their own identity. This doctoral project aims to analyse the experiences of female Red Army prisoners of war from a gender-historical perspective by analysing their testimonies.