Some divisions, knowing full well that following this order amounted to committing war crimes, chose to send the captured soldiers and officers to concentration camps such as Auschwitz and Treblinka, which were close to the Eastern Front.

The Nazis also saw women as disruptive.

This is why Himmler also ordered that female combatants in the Soviet army were shot on sight rather than captured and brought to the camps.

And again, while some units did not execute these female soldiers, few survived to reach prisoner of war camps in Germany or Poland.

There was another reason for the cruelty with which Soviet prisoners of war, and especially women, were treated.

The Nazi regime claimed that it was under no obligation for the humane care of prisoners of war from the Red Army because the Soviet Union had not ratified the 1929 Geneva Convention on prisoners of war, nor had it specifically declared its commitment to the 1907 Hague Convention on the rules of war.

Technically, both nations, therefore, were bound only by the general international law of war as it had developed in modern times.

Yet, even under that law, prisoners of war were to be protected.

Red Army women were often pressured to renounce their prisoner of war status to be transferred to civilian forced labor programs.

Some refused and were sent to gas chambers inside the concentration camps.

About 1,000 Soviet women were imprisoned at Ravensbrück, and others at Auschwitz, Minden, and Mauthausen.

Few of them were reported to survive.

Every morning, the guards would do a roll call and have every female prisoner form a line in front of the barracks.

Then, they would select which of the prisoners went to the gas chambers and who would go to the work commandos chopping wood in the neighboring forests or fetching water from a nearby river.

Females deported from the occupied parts of the Soviet Union for forced labor in the Reich were often beaten or sexually assaulted, or forced to submit to sexual relations for food or other necessities or basic comforts.

Pregnancy sometimes resulted for Polish, Soviet, or Yugoslav forced laborers from sexual relations with German men.

Women were generally forced to have abortions, sent to give birth in makeshift nurseries where conditions would guarantee the death of the infants, or simply shipped to the region they came from without food or medical care.

The Germans established brothels in some concentration and labor camps, and the German army ran roughly 500 brothels for soldiers in which Soviet women were forced to do sexual work for Nazis.

According to the German racial laws of 1938, it was illegal for German Aryans to have sexual relations with Jews, Romani, gypsies, Asians, and blacks.

But rules were less strict when it came to sex with Russian women.

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