Being a sniper in the Second World War meant being hated more than any other soldier on the battlefield, and you had to live with the consequences of what you did for the rest of your life.

That is, of course, if you were lucky enough to survive.

We’re going to show you what sniping actually did to the men and women behind the scope, what it did to the soldiers on the receiving end, and why this was followed by some of the worst horrors that could happen in a war.

When the First World War ended in 1918, the Great Powers did something strange because they abandoned their best killers almost overnight.

Britain’s sniper capability stood at its peak by the time of the armistice with specialized rifles, carefully calibrated telescopes, and trained marksmen who had spent years perfecting their craft.

But within months, all of it was dismantled.

The conversion rifles taken apart, the telescopes sold off for civilian hunters.

And the knowledge built through 4 years of experience simply allowed to fade away.

This wasn’t entirely surprising if you understood British military culture at the time because the high command had resisted sniping from the very beginning and viewed it as ungentlemanly warfare.

There was something about a hidden shooter deliberately selecting individual targets that didn’t sit well with officers raised on cavalry charges and bayonet assaults.

So when the war ended, they were happy to let the whole thing disappear.

By the time 1939 came around and war returned, Britain found itself with almost no sniping capability at all.

And German snipers would punish them badly for that.

The United States followed a similar path.

And when the Second World War began, the American army was even less prepared for precision shooting than the British.

But here’s what makes this truly remarkable.

Even Germany, whose sharpshooters had devastated Allied troops throughout the First World War, also dropped its specialized sniper units during the interwar period.

It would take significant losses to Soviet snipers before German training resumed at the highest level, and that wouldn’t happen until 1943.

There was one exception to this collective forgetting, and it came from the nation you might least expect.

The Soviet Union remembered its humiliation because during the First World War, Russia had employed no dedicated snipers at all, and Russian soldiers suffered terribly from wellequipped German and Austrian marksmen who picked them off with impunity.

Soviet military planners looked at that experience and made a decision that they’d never let it happen again.

So while Western powers were dismantling their sniper programs, the Soviets were building theirs from the ground up.

But before the Second World War began in earnest, there would be a demonstration of just how effective trained snipers could be.

It came in the winter of 1939 in a small war that most of the world barely noticed.

And there is no better example of the horrors that trained snipers could inflict than the infamous Simo Heiha, a man we have to talk about before the real nightmare of sniping in the Second World War even began.

When the Soviet Union invaded Finland in November 1939, they expected a quick victory because they had overwhelming numerical superiority.

More tanks, more aircraft, more of everything.

By every conventional measure, the outcome should have been obvious.

But conventional measures didn’t account for men like Heiha.

Heihar had joined the Finnish Civil Guard at 17, and when the Soviets invaded, he was ready.

His weapon was a Finnish variant of the Mosen Nagant rifle, nicknamed the Spitz, because its front sight resembled a Spits dog’s head.

He didn’t use a telescopic sight, which seems counterintuitive for a sniper.

But there were good reasons for this.

A scope requires the shooter to raise his head higher, making detection easier.

In the Finnish winter, scopes would fog up and become useless, and sunlight could reflect off the glass and give away a position.

His concealment techniques were meticulous.

He kept snow in his mouth while sniping to prevent his breath from forming visible vapor.

And he packed dense mounds of snow in front of his position to conceal himself and absorb the puff of snow that a muzzle blast would kick up.

His routine was to move well before daybreak to a prepared position and remain completely still until after sunset.

The [music] results were devastating.

Finnish army documents recorded 259 confirmed rifle kills, and his commander credited him with an equal number using a submachine gun in closer engagements.

Hehar’s own war memoir estimated approximately 500 total, and his highest single day count was 25 Soviet soldiers.

The Soviets called him Blay Smur, the White Death, and they threw everything at trying to kill him.

They deployed counter sniper teams, directed heavy machine gun fire at suspected positions, called in mortars, placed a bounty on his head, and ordered entire artillery barges against areas where commanders thought he might be operating.

But nothing worked, and Heiha kept killing.

At one point, the Soviets sent one of their best snipers specifically to eliminate Heiha, and the two men played a deadly cat-and- mouse game.

As the sun began to set, the Soviet sniper apparently decided to withdraw and rose from his position to leave.

Heiiha shot him through the head.

Just one week before the war ended, an explosive bullet hit Heiha in the face and shattered his lower left jaw.

His fellow soldiers said half his face was missing and they placed him on a pile of corpses, assuming he was dead.

It was only when someone noticed his foot moving that they realized he was still alive.

He fell into a coma and didn’t regain consciousness until March 13th, 1940, the same day peace was declared.

He required 26 surgical operations to reconstruct his jaw and his speech was never fully restored.

But Simo Heiha survived to age 96, finally dying in 2002.

You would think the Winter War would have taught the world a lesson about what trained snipers could accomplish, and military observers did study the campaign closely, but Western powers focused almost entirely on what the war revealed about Soviet weaknesses.

Hitler himself read it as proof of Slavic inferiority, which pushed him toward invading the Soviet Union.

Only the Soviets learned what they should have from [music] Finland.

After encountering Finnish snipers, they accelerated their sniper training programs and improved their rifles and optics.

Germany had retained sniping between the wars, but there was little enthusiasm for it, and the rapid campaigns in Poland and France moved too quickly for snipers to matter.

This would prove catastrophically wrong, and the place where it would fail most spectacularly was a city on the Vulgar River.

The horrors of the Winter War had been merely a preview of what was coming.

When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, everything Western observers had predicted seemed to come true at first.

The Red Army collapsed, entire armies were encircled, and it looked like the quick victory Hitler had promised.

But then came Stalingrad, and everything changed.

The Luftvafa dropped thousands of tons of explosives on the city, and by the time they finished, most buildings had been reduced to rubble.

German commanders thought they were softening up the target.

But what they actually did was create perfect terrain for the defenders.

The bombing transformed Stalingrad into a nightmare landscape of shattered walls, collapsed floors, and endless hiding places.

And every ruined building became a potential sniper’s nest.

It became building to building, roomto- room fighting.

and German soldiers called it rateng rat war.

In this war the rats with rifles held all the advantages.

Lieutenant General Vasili Chuikov took command of the Soviet defense and his doctrine was built around two ideas.

First, hugging the enemy, ordering troops to engage at 50 to 100 m so German artillery couldn’t strike without hitting their own men.

Second, active defense through snipers.

Because in Chuikov’s view, they were essential to harass the Germans constantly, prevent them from ever feeling [music] safe, and slowly bleed their forces through steady attrition.

What Soviet snipers did at Stalingrad goes beyond what most people imagine.

You see, the killing was only part of it because the real goal was making the Germans afraid to do anything at all.

Soviet snipers specifically targeted soldiers, bringing food and water to forward positions.

So any movement during daylight invited a bullet.

But that was just the beginning because after wounding a soldier, snipers would wait patiently, watching as the wounded man screamed for help.

And when medics or comrades attempted rescue, the sniper would shoot them too.

Do you leave your wounded friend to die slowly, or do you risk more men trying to save him knowing the sniper is watching? The target priority system was designed for maximum damage.

Artillery spotters were the most prized kills because eliminating them blinded German indirect fire.

Officers came next, identifiable by their behavior.

Then non-commissioned officers because armies struggled to replace experienced NCOS during wartime.

After that, machine gun crews, enemy snipers, anyone carrying food or water, and communications personnel.

There is one documented tactic from Stalingrad we have to mention, even though it’s deeply disturbing.

We’ll be careful how we describe it because this video would certainly be restricted otherwise.

But you need to understand how dark this fighting became.

German soldiers discovered that using Stalingrad’s orphaned children to perform dangerous tasks kept them alive longer.

And for the promise of bread, starving Russian boys would fill water bottles from the vulgar, a task that would get a German soldier killed by a watching sniper.

Soviet commanders learned about this and they ordered their snipers to shoot these children to end the practice.

We won’t say more, but let it sink in and understand what kind of war this had become.

German soldiers grew afraid to lift their heads during daylight.

And the fear wasn’t like artillery where death felt random.

This meant knowing that somewhere out there, invisible, a man was looking through a scope and deciding whether you specifically would live or die.

You might wonder why snipers were hated so intensely that capture almost always meant death.

Well, artillery might kill you, but it felt like bad luck.

A sniper’s shot always felt personal because it was.

Someone had looked at you through a scope, decided you were worth a bullet, and pulled the trigger.

You couldn’t fight back against someone you couldn’t find.

And here’s what makes the Soviet sniper accomplishments remarkable.

They did all this with equipment that would be considered primitive today.

The standard Soviet rifle was the most inant with a scope offering just 3.

5 times magnification, and German optics during Stalingrad were actually worse at only 1.

5 times.

There were no rangefinders or ballistic calculators, so everything depended on raw skill and experience.

The most famous Soviet sniper to come out of Stalingrad was Vasili Zaitzv, who arrived as an ordinary rifleman, but in his first 10 days killed 40 Germans.

That earned him a scoped rifle, and he went on to kill 225 enemy soldiers, including 11 enemy snipers.

But Zitzv wasn’t alone because Sergeant Fedor Peekov achieved 344 confirmed kills and Sergeant Mikail Marovichenko reached 210.

Stalingrad produced dozens of highly effective snipers because the conditions were perfect for their work.

Because of this hatred, snipers were almost never taken prisoner in the normal way.

And if captured, they faced things we can’t describe here.

Everyone knew this and snipers took great care to hide their rifles because being caught with a scoped weapon was a death sentence.

And yet snipers suffered too in ways unique to their role.

The cold at Stalingrad was brutal and snipers had to remain motionless for hours while waiting for the right shot.

You couldn’t move to relieve yourself without risking detection, and you couldn’t shift position to get the blood flowing again.

You simply had to endure.

Then there was the psychological weight of killing through a scope.

When you kill from a distance without a scope, you often don’t see the face, but with a scope, you do.

You might observe your target for hours watching him eat, talk to friends, write a letter, you humanize him, and then you kill him anyway.

Most snipers from the Second World War never talked about these experiences.

Perhaps the most distinctive aspect of Soviet sniper warfare was something the Germans were completely unprepared for, [music] and that was women.

Around 2,000 Soviet female snipers served from 1941 to 1945.

And these weren’t support personnel pressed into emergency roles.

They were trained marksmen deployed specifically to kill.

The casualty rates tell you everything about what these women faced.

Of those, only about 500 survived, which means roughly 75 to 80% were killed.

They knew exactly what Germans would do to captured female snipers because Nazi ideology viewed women fighters as everything they hated about the Soviet system.

Germans use the term flint and viber roughly rifle [ __ ] to delegitimize them.

And Field Marshall Fonbach issued instructions that captured Soviet female soldiers should be killed immediately.

That’s why they were issued two grenades, one for the Germans and one for themselves as a last resort.

They knew what capture meant.

Leuda Pavlichenko, called the Russian [ __ ] from hell by the Germans, achieved 309 confirmed kills, including 36 enemy snipers.

She was wounded four times and eventually evacuated by submarine.

But the war followed her home, and she suffered from what we’d now recognize as severe post-traumatic stress for years afterward.

Rosa Shenina, the unseen terror of East Prussia, achieved between 59 and 75 confirmed kills.

Her story began when at 14 she walked 120 mi alone to reach a train station to enroll in college.

And when her brother was killed, she volunteered for sniper training.

She was mortally wounded while shielding a wounded officer with her own body at 20 years old.

Her mother’s response, “Maybe it is for the best that Rosa has died.

How could she have lived after the war? She shot so many people.

” Clavia Kalugginina entered sniper school at 17 and achieved 257 confirmed kills.

When she returned home at 21, her hair had turned completely white.

And then there was Tatiana Baramzina, a former kindergarten teacher with 36 kills before volunteering for a mission behind enemy lines.

When the position was overrun, she defended wounded soldiers, killing 20 Germans before running out of ammunition.

She was captured wounded and they wanted information about troop numbers but she refused to speak.

What they did to her after that is something we cannot describe.

When her body was recovered, identification was only possible through personal effects.

We will leave it at that.

The Eastern Front showed what snipers could do when conditions favored them.

But the war wasn’t over.

In the Pacific, American soldiers were about to discover a completely different kind of sniper nightmare.

The Pacific theater was a different world entirely.

Instead of frozen rubble, American soldiers found themselves fighting in dense jungle and volcanic rock.

But the terror of the hidden shooter was exactly the same.

If anything, the jungle made it worse because at least in Stalingrad, you could see the buildings where snipers might be hiding.

In the Pacific, they could be anywhere.

Japanese snipers developed after fighting German trained Chinese marksmen in Manuria.

And by 1941, each infantry platoon typically included one sniper selected for marksmanship, the ability to survive on little more than water and rice, and the psychological capacity to remain hidden for extended periods.

They tied themselves to trees so that if they were shot and wounded, they wouldn’t fall and reveal their position.

These positions were also meant to be occupied for days, and small chairs were sometimes rigged among the branches.

Years after the battles ended, remains of Japanese snipers were still being found tied to trees, sometimes as mummified corpses still secured in position.

On Ewima, the tunnel system made [music] things worse with spider holes everywhere that allowed Japanese to appear, fire, disappear, and attack again from entirely different locations.

American troops never knew where the next shot would come from.

Japanese snipers specifically targeted officers and medics and in training soldiers were shown photographs of American medics and taught that the enemy would sacrifice many men trying to save one.

American officers quickly learned to conceal rank insignia and troops were instructed never to salute officers near the front because a salute pointed out exactly who the sniper should.

The psychological effect was crushing.

The result was sniper hysteria where troops rad treetops with machine gun fire at the slightest provocation, fired anti-tank guns loaded with grapeshot into the canopy, and called artillery on every ravine suspected of harboring the enemy.

Green troops made things worse because when one of their number was hit, inexperienced soldiers would go to ground seeking cover.

This was exactly wrong because a motionless group gave the sniper easy targets.

Experienced troops learned the best chance was to keep moving and make themselves harder to hit.

But that lesson cost lives.

Prisoners were rarely taken on either side.

The Japanese booby trapped their dead and wounded.

Fain surrender to lure Americans into ambushes and some of them detonated grenades when medics approached.

After enough incidents, Allied troops became understandably reluctant to take prisoners at all.

But if the Japanese sniper threat was horrifying, what emerged in the final months of the European War was something else entirely, something Allied soldiers found almost impossible to process.

Because in the desperate last days of the Third Reich, the Germans turned to their children.

We need to be careful about how we discuss what follows because this is a delicate thing to talk about.

What happened was one of the most disturbing chapters of the entire war.

The Hitler youth had received military training for years with German boys taught to shoot, to march, to follow orders.

By December 1944, girls as young as 14 were training with small arms and grenades.

And when the war turned decisively against Germany, those reserves were called up.

In the Battle for Berlin, 40,000 Vulker militia participated, including 5,000 Hitler youth detailed to defend bridges over the Harl River.

These weren’t hardened soldiers.

They were children wearing oversized uniforms, helmets flopping around on their heads, carrying rifles they had barely learned to use.

These young soldiers lacked training for complex tactics.

But what they could do after years of marksmanship practice was shoot.

So, German commanders used them as snipers left behind in concealed positions as the front line shifted.

An experienced sniper understands restraint, taking a few well- aimed shots and then withdrawing to fight another day.

These boys had no such instincts, and whether from lack of training, ideological conditioning, or simply not knowing better, they would remain in position and continue firing until they ran out of ammunition or were killed.

At the Peishdorf bridges, 5,000 boys stood ready with rifles and panzerasts.

Within 5 days, 4,500 were dead or wounded, a 90% casualty rate.

We can’t properly convey what Allied soldiers felt when they realized they were fighting children who wouldn’t surrender and wouldn’t stop firing.

This is something the men who experienced it rarely discussed afterward.

The scale of sniper warfare in the Second World War was like nothing the world had seen before, and nothing before or since has come close.

Trained marksmen killed thousands and traumatized countless more.

And it remains the deadliest era of precision killing the world has ever seen.