What Did German Soldiers Do with WOMEN? *Warning REAL FOOTAGE JJ

At first, the German advance across Europe looked  like a military campaign focused on winning   battles. But behind every captured city, another  story slowly unfolded. As Nazi rule tightened,   violence against women became  more than isolated wartime crimes.   What the German soldiers did to women left scars  that many survivors never spoke about for decades.

It began with the invasion of Poland on  September 1, 1939. Thousands of German tanks,   aircraft, and soldiers advanced rapidly using  a military strategy later known as Blitzkrieg,   or “lightning war,” which was designed to  overwhelm the enemy with speed and surprise.   Poland fought back, but it was heavily outmatched.  

Within just a few weeks, the country fell under  German occupation. Behind the front-line troops   came specialized German units whose main  job was not fighting on the battlefield,   but taking control of the civilian population  and crushing any possibility of resistance. Women became targets almost immediately after  the occupation began.

 In the city of Bydgoszcz,   German forces killed or abused thousands of Polish  civilians during the first months of occupation   as they carried out mass arrests, executions,  and acts of terror. Women were dragged from   their homes for interrogation, forced into  hard labor, and subjected to se*ual assault.   These attacks were part of a much broader campaign  of fear and intimidation that was meant to   break the spirit of the Polish people before any  organized resistance movement could fully develop.

By early 1940, the German government had turned  this system of exploitation into official state   policy. Polish civilians were rounded up and  transported to Germany to work as forced laborers.   A large share of these forced laborers were  women. Some were assigned to factories,   where conditions were harsh but at least somewhat  supervised.

 Others were sent alone to farms in the   German countryside, where they lived in complete  isolation. With almost no legal protection   and little chance of receiving help, many became  especially vulnerable to abuse and exploitation. This forced labor system was only the  beginning of what the Nazi regime planned. In 1942, the German military,  known as the Wehrmacht,   established an official network of  military brothels across occupied Europe.  

Historians estimated that there were around 500  of these facilities by the later years of the war.   These were officially approved by the German  military and operated under strict rules.   The women were given identification cards,  forced to undergo regular medical inspections,   and every part of the system was controlled  through regulations issued by military commanders.

The women forced into these brothels came from  countries that Germany had occupied, including   Poland, France, and later the Soviet Union. Some  women were deceived with false promises of factory   jobs or other forms of work, only to discover they  had been forced into military brothels instead.   Others never had any choice at all.

 They were  transferred directly from concentration camps   and forced into se*ual slavery  under military control. That same year, on the direct  orders of Heinrich Himmler,   the SS began establishing brothels inside  the concentration camps themselves.   These facilities were created at camps  including Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and Mauthausen.   Between 1942 and 1945, roughly 200 women were  forced into this system.

 They were promised   that after six months of “service,” they would  be released early from the camps. In reality,   almost none of them ever received that promise,  and most remained trapped inside the camp system. The records and paperwork left  behind by the Nazi government   revealed just how carefully this entire  system had been organized.

 Every transfer,   medical examination, identification card,  and regulation was documented by officials.   It was a planned and organized system run  through military and SS administration.   Over time, it became part of a much larger  strategy in which women’s bodies were treated   as another resource to be controlled and used for  Germany’s war effort, reaching into nearly every   level of the Nazi occupation system, including  areas close to the front lines of the battlefield.

On June 22, 1941, Germany launched Operation  Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union. More   than three million German soldiers crossed the  border in what became the largest land invasion   in military history. Unlike Germany’s campaigns in  Western Europe, this invasion was fought under a   much more brutal set of rules.

 Nazi leaders saw  the war in the East as both a military campaign   and an ideological struggle, meaning they believed  they were fighting not just an enemy army,   but an entire political system and the people  living under it. This belief led to a level of   violence that was far more extreme than what  had been seen in many parts of Western Europe. Before the invasion began, the German High  Command issued orders such as the Commissar Order,   along with several other directives that removed  many of the normal protections usually given   to civilians and captured political officials  during wartime. German soldiers were told that  

this was not a conventional war and that  they were expected to show little mercy. After the war, investigations carried out in  West Germany, along with evidence found in   Soviet archives, documented widespread se*ual  violence committed against women in Ukraine,   Belarus, and Russia.

 Many of these attacks took  place during military sweeps through villages   where German troops searched for suspected Soviet  partisans, who were resistance fighters operating   behind German lines. Although the German  military officially banned se*ual violence,   local commanders often ignored these crimes,   failed to punish those responsible, or  simply chose not to investigate them.

At the same time, the German government expanded  its forced labor program on an enormous scale.   Between 1941 and 1944, an estimated three million  civilians from the Soviet Union were taken to   Germany and forced to work as Ostarbeiter, meaning  “Eastern workers.” Most of those deported were   women and young girls.

 They were required to  wear a special badge that identified them as   Eastern workers wherever they went. They received  smaller food rations than forced laborers brought   from Western European countries and were forced  to live under much harsher conditions. They had   fewer rights, faced stricter rules, and were  treated as inferior by the Nazi racial system,   making them one of the most heavily exploited  groups inside the German wartime economy.

Not every woman caught in this  war was without power, however.   Across occupied Europe, many women  refused to accept German rule.   Some joined underground resistance movements,  worked as spies, carried messages and weapons,   hid fugitives, or even fought alongside partisan  groups in armed attacks against German forces.  

Their actions became important enough that  German troops and occupation authorities began   treating many of these women as real military and  security threats rather than simply civilians. One example is Krystyna Skarbek, also known in  Britain as Christine Granville, who became one of   the most successful female spies of the Second  World War.

 Working for British intelligence,   she spent years secretly carrying information,  messages, and supplies across enemy-controlled   borders while helping build resistance networks  in occupied Poland, France, and Hungary.   Her missions often required her to  travel through dangerous territory,   avoid German patrols, and use false  identities to escape suspicion.  

Despite being hunted by German authorities for  years, German forces never managed to capture her. In occupied France, resistance groups depended  heavily on women to keep their networks operating.   Women often worked as couriers because German  soldiers at checkpoints usually searched them   less thoroughly than men, allowing them to carry  secret messages, forged documents, weapons,   or other supplies with a better  chance of passing unnoticed.

In 1943, Lucie Aubrac, a member of the French  resistance, carried out one of the most famous   rescue operations of the war. Her husband,  Raymond Aubrac, had been arrested by the Gestapo,   Nazi Germany’s secret police. Lucie convinced  German officers that she needed a legal meeting   with him so they could marry before his  planned execution.

 The request helped   create an opportunity for the resistance to  launch an attack, and during the operation,   thirteen resistance prisoners, including  her husband, were freed from German custody. For women who were captured, the  consequences were often especially severe.   Gestapo detention centers across occupied France,  Poland, and the Netherlands carried out brutal   interrogations on female resistance members in  an effort to uncover the names of other fighters   and destroy underground resistance networks.  Many women were beaten, tortured, threatened,  

or otherwise abused during questioning. Those  who survived these interrogations were often   deported to concentration camps. One of the main  destinations was Ravensbr ck concentration camp,   which had been built by the Nazis in  1939 specifically to imprison women. Inside that same camp, another horrifying  program was taking place behind closed doors.

Starting in 1942, German doctors at  Ravensbr ck, led by Karl Gebhardt,   began carrying out a series of brutal  medical experiments on a group of prisoners,   most of whom were young Polish women. The doctors  deliberately created wounds that were meant to   imitate injuries suffered by soldiers on the  battlefield.

 They then infected these wounds   with dangerous bacteria and inserted foreign  materials such as wood splinters, glass, or dirt   to make the injuries even worse. The goal was to  test whether newly developed sulfonamide drugs,   one of the first widely used antibiotics, could  successfully treat severe battlefield infections. After the war, the women who survived these  experiments became known as the “Rabbits”   of Ravensbr ck because they had been treated like  laboratory test subjects instead of human beings.  

In total, seventy-four women  underwent these procedures,   and at least five died as a  direct result of the experiments. Other experiments at the camp focused on  bone, muscle, and nerve transplantation.   German doctors deliberately broke the bones of  healthy prisoners or surgically removed pieces   of bone, muscle, and tissue so they could study  how the human body healed and whether damaged body   parts could be transplanted. These operations  were not performed to help the prisoners.  

They were conducted solely for research.  Survivors who testified after the war   described being left in extreme pain, with  little or no anesthesia during some procedures,   and receiving almost no proper medical care  afterward. Many remained untreated for weeks,   suffering from serious infections, permanent  disabilities, and lifelong physical damage.

At Auschwitz concentration camp,  Carl Clauberg, a German gynecologist,   began running a separate medical program in  1943 that focused on forced sterilization.   He tested chemical sterilization  methods on hundreds of Jewish women   by injecting irritating chemical substances  directly into their reproductive organs.  

These injections often caused severe pain,  infections, permanent injuries, and infertility.   The purpose was not medical treatment. Nazi  planners wanted to develop a cheap, fast, and   simple method to sterilize entire populations they  considered racially undesirable without having to   perform surgery, making it easier to carry out  their racial policies on a much larger scale.

The experiments were directly  connected to Nazi racial ideology,   which claimed that some groups of  people were biologically superior   while others were considered inferior or unworthy  of having children. That same ideology also shaped   another program that was very different in  its methods but served the same racial goals.

It was called the Lebensborn program, which  was launched in 1935 by Heinrich Himmler,   and it meant “Fountain of Life.” The program was  created to increase the number of children whom   the Nazi regime believed belonged to the so-called  “Aryan” or racially “pure” population. To achieve   this, the SS established special maternity homes  across Germany where women who met the Nazi racial   standards were encouraged to have children,  whether they were married or unmarried.

 The   mothers received medical care, financial support,  and a place to give birth, as long as they fit the   racial requirements set by the Nazi government.  By the height of the Second World War, more than   twenty of these Lebensborn homes were operating  across Germany, Austria, and occupied Norway. In occupied Norway, German authorities encouraged  German soldiers to have children with local   Norwegian women because Nazi racial theory claimed  that Norwegians closely matched the physical   characteristics the regime considered racially  desirable. Between 10,000 and 12,000 children, who  

later became known as “war children,” were born  from these relationships during the occupation. After the war ended, however, many of these  mothers and their children were treated harshly   by Norwegian society. They faced discrimination,  bullying, social rejection, and, in some cases,   abuse for decades because many people viewed  them as symbols of the German occupation,   even though many had no control over  the circumstances of their births.

In occupied Poland, the Lebensborn  program became something far more violent.   Instead of encouraging births, German authorities  began kidnapping children whom they believed   looked “racially Germanic” based on Nazi racial  standards, such as their hair color, eye color,   or other physical features.

 These children  were taken away from their families, given   new names and identities, and sent to Germany,  where they were adopted by German families   or placed in institutions to be raised as  Germans. Historians estimated that as many as   200,000 Polish children were taken in this way. In  many cases, their biological mothers and families   were never told where the children had  gone or whether they were still alive,   leaving countless parents searching  for them long after the war had ended.

As 1943 arrived, the war itself  began turning against Germany.   German forces started suffering major defeats,  and the possibility of victory grew smaller.   This change on the battlefield also  affected life in the occupied territories.   As Germany’s military situation  became more desperate,   occupying forces often responded with even  harsher measures against civilian populations.

German authorities increasingly relied on  intimidation, mass arrests, executions,   and collective punishment in an  effort to crush growing resistance   before it could weaken their control even further. In Italy, the situation changed dramatically  after the country switched sides in September 1943   and joined the Allies following the fall of Benito  Mussolini’s government.

 Germany quickly occupied   northern and central Italy and responded to  increasing partisan attacks with brutal reprisals   against entire villages. Instead of targeting only  suspected resistance fighters, German forces often   punished entire communities, believing that  fear would discourage civilians from helping   the resistance.

 Decades after the war, Italian  courts investigated many of these massacres   and war crimes. Women, children, and elderly  civilians were frequently caught up in these   acts of collective punishment alongside the men,  even when they had taken no part in the fighting. In occupied France, the Milice, a  French paramilitary organization   that collaborated with the German occupation  authorities, worked closely with German soldiers   and the Gestapo throughout 1943 and 1944 to  hunt down members of the French Resistance.  

Together, they carried out raids, arrests,  and interrogations across the country.   Women who were captured because of  their involvement in the resistance,   or even suspected of helping it, often endured  the same brutal interrogations as male prisoners.   In many cases, se*ual violence was deliberately  used as an additional method of intimidation   and torture to force confessions or obtain  information about underground resistance networks.

During the final months of the collapsing Nazi  regime in 1945, German leaders continued issuing   strict racial policies even as their government  was falling apart. German military and SS   authorities repeated orders forbidding romantic  or se*ual relationships between Germans and the   millions of foreign forced laborers who had been  brought into the country from occupied Europe.  

These rules reflected the Nazi obsession with  racial ideology, but by this stage of the war,   Germany’s government, military, and  police system were rapidly breaking down.   Cities were being bombed, communication was  collapsing, and advancing Allied and Soviet   armies were overrunning German territory,  making it increasingly difficult for the   regime to enforce many of the policies  it had once controlled so strictly.

Germany officially surrendered on May 8, 1945,  bringing the war in Europe to an end after   nearly six years of conflict. For millions  of people, the fighting was finally over,   but the suffering did not end overnight. The world  now faced the enormous task of confronting the   crimes committed under the Nazi regime, including  mass murder, forced labor, medical experiments,   se*ual violence, and countless other abuses  carried out with the support of the state.

In November 1945, the International Military  Tribunal opened in the German city of Nuremberg.   Its purpose was to prosecute the  highest-ranking Nazi political, military,   and government leaders for war crimes, crimes  against humanity, and crimes against peace.   For the first time, the international  community attempted to hold the leaders   of an entire government legally responsible for  the crimes committed during the Second World War.  

However, despite the enormous scale of se*ual  violence committed against women during the   conflict, these early trials devoted very little  attention to it as a separate category of crime.   Instead, such abuses were often mentioned  only as part of broader discussions about   war crimes or persecution.

 Legal historians  later criticized this omission, arguing that   the suffering of countless women was never fully  recognized during the main Nuremberg proceedings. It was not until the Ravensbr ck trials, held  by British military courts beginning in 1946,   that crimes committed specifically against female  prisoners received much greater attention. One of   the defendants was Dorothea Binz, a senior camp  guard who became notorious for her extreme cruelty   toward prisoners.

 Witnesses described severe  beatings, torture, and other acts of violence   carried out under her authority. She was found  guilty of war crimes and was executed in 1947. Karl Gebhardt, the doctor who directed the  medical experiments on the women later known   as the “Rabbits” of Ravensbr ck, was  prosecuted during the Doctors’ Trial,   one of the later Nuremberg trials that began  in December 1946.

 He was found guilty of war   crimes and crimes against humanity,  and he was executed in June 1948. Carl Clauberg, who had overseen the forced  sterilization experiments at Auschwitz,   was captured by Soviet forces after the war  and sentenced to twenty-five years in prison   in the Soviet Union.

 However, he was released  early in 1955 as part of a prisoner exchange   between East and West. After returning to West  Germany, he faced new criminal investigations,   but he died before those cases  could reach a final conclusion. For most survivors, however, formal justice never  truly arrived. Many of the people responsible for   crimes against women were never identified, never  prosecuted, or received only light punishments.

 At   the same time, countless survivors remained silent  because of trauma, fear, or the social stigma   surrounding se*ual violence. As a result, it took  historians many decades to begin fully documenting   what had happened to them and preserving their  experiences as part of the historical record.