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The story contains scenes of torture, violence, sex. If this offends your tender soul, don’t read, but get the fuck out of here!

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The plot takes place during the Great Patriotic War. In the territory occupied by the Nazis it operates partisan detachment. The fascists know that there are many women among the partisans, just how to identify them. Finally they managed to catch the girl Katya when she was trying to sketch a diagram of the location of German firing points...

The captive girl was brought into small room at the school where the Gestapo station was now located. A young officer interrogated Katya. Besides him, there were several policemen and two vulgar-looking women in the room. Katya knew them, they served the Germans. I just didn’t fully know how.

The officer instructed the guards holding the girl to release her, which they did. He motioned for her to sit down. The girl sat down. The officer ordered one of the girls to bring tea. But Katya refused. The officer took a sip, then lit a cigarette. He offered it to Katya, but she refused. The officer started a conversation, and he spoke Russian quite well.

What's your name?

Katerina.

I know that you were engaged in intelligence work for the communists. This is true?

But you are so young, so beautiful. You probably ended up in their service by accident?

No! I am a Komsomol member and I want to become a communist, like my father, Hero Soviet Union who died at the front.

I'm sorry I'm so young beautiful girl I fell for the red-ass bait. At one time, my father served in the Russian army in the first world war. He commanded a company. He has a lot to his name glorious victories and awards. But when the communists came to power, for all his services to his homeland he was accused of being an enemy of the people and shot. My mother and I faced starvation, like the children of enemies of the people, but one of the Germans (who was a prisoner of war and whose father did not allow us to be shot) helped us escape to Germany and even enlist. I always wanted to be a hero like my father. And now I have arrived to save my homeland from the communists.

You are a fascist bitch, an invader, a killer of innocent people...

We never kill innocent people. On the contrary, we are returning to them what the red-assed people took from them. Yes, we recently hanged two women who set fire to houses where our soldiers temporarily settled. But the soldiers managed to run out, and the owners lost the last thing that the war did not take away from them.

They fought against...

Your people!

Not true!

Okay, let us be invaders. You are now required to answer several questions. After that, we will determine your punishment.

I won't answer your questions!

Okay, then name with whom you are organizing terrorist attacks against German soldiers.

Not true. We've been watching you.

Then why should I answer?

So that innocent people don't get hurt.

I won't tell you anyone...

Then I will invite the boys to untie your stubborn tongue.

Nothing will work out for you!

We'll see about that later. So far there has not been a single case out of 15 and nothing has worked out for us... Let's get to work, boys!

1) Irma Grese - (October 7, 1923 - December 13, 1945) - matron Nazi camps deaths Ravensbrück, Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen.
Irma's nicknames included "Blonde Devil", "Angel of Death", and "Beautiful Monster". She used emotional and physical methods to torture prisoners, beat women to death, and enjoyed arbitrarily shooting prisoners. She starved her dogs so she could set them on victims, and personally selected hundreds of people to be sent to the gas chambers. Grese wore heavy boots and, in addition to a pistol, she always carried a wicker whip.

The Western post-war press constantly discussed the possible sexual deviations of Irma Grese, her numerous connections with the SS guards, with the commandant of Bergen-Belsen, Joseph Kramer (“The Beast of Belsen”).
On April 17, 1945, she was captured by the British. The Belsen trial, initiated by a British military tribunal, lasted from September 17 to November 17, 1945. Together with Irma Grese, the cases of other camp workers were considered at this trial - commandant Joseph Kramer, warden Juanna Bormann, and nurse Elisabeth Volkenrath. Irma Grese was found guilty and sentenced to hang.
On the last night before her execution, Grese laughed and sang songs with her colleague Elisabeth Volkenrath. Even when a noose was thrown around Irma Grese’s neck, her face remained calm. Her last word was “Faster,” addressed to the English executioner.

2) Ilse Koch - (September 22, 1906 - September 1, 1967) - German NSDAP activist, wife of Karl Koch, commandant of the Buchenwald and Majdanek concentration camps. She is best known under the pseudonym "Frau Lampshade" and received the nickname "The Witch of Buchenwald" for her brutal torture of camp prisoners. Koch was also accused of making souvenirs from human skin (however, no reliable evidence of this was presented at the post-war trial of Ilse Koch).

On June 30, 1945, Koch was arrested by American troops and sentenced to life imprisonment in 1947. However, a few years later, American General Lucius Clay, the military commandant of the American occupation zone in Germany, released her, considering the charges of ordering executions and making souvenirs from human skin insufficiently proven.

This decision caused public protest, so in 1951 Ilse Koch was arrested in West Germany. A German court again sentenced her to life imprisonment.

On September 1, 1967, Koch committed suicide by hanging herself in her cell in the Bavarian prison of Eibach.

3) Louise Danz - b. December 11, 1917 - matron of women's concentration camps. She was sentenced to life imprisonment but later released.

She began working in the Ravensbrück concentration camp, then was transferred to Majdanek. Danz later served in Auschwitz and Malchow.
Prisoners later said they were abused by Danz. She beat them and confiscated the clothes they had been given for the winter. In Malchow, where Danz had the position of senior warden, she starved the prisoners, not giving food for 3 days. On April 2, 1945, she killed a minor girl.
Danz was arrested on June 1, 1945 in Lützow. At the trial of the Supreme National Tribunal, which lasted from November 24, 1947 to December 22, 1947, she was sentenced to life imprisonment. Released in 1956 due to health reasons (!!!). In 1996, she was charged with the aforementioned murder of a child, but it was dropped after doctors said Danz would be too hard to survive again. imprisonment. She lives in Germany. She is now 94 years old.

4) Jenny-Wanda Barkmann - (May 30, 1922 - July 4, 1946) From 1940 to December 1943 she worked as a fashion model. In January 1944, she became a guard at the small Stutthof concentration camp, where she became famous for brutally beating female prisoners, some of them to death. She also participated in the selection of women and children for the gas chambers. She was so cruel but also very beautiful that the female prisoners nicknamed her “Beautiful Ghost.”

Jenny escaped from the camp in 1945 when Soviet troops began to approach the camp. But she was caught and arrested in May 1945 while trying to leave the station in Gdansk. She is said to have flirted with the police officers guarding her and was not particularly worried about her fate. Jenny-Wanda Barkmann was found guilty, after which she was given the last word. She stated, "Life is indeed great pleasure, and pleasure is usually short-lived."

Jenny-Wanda Barkmann was publicly hanged at Biskupka Gorka near Gdańsk on July 4, 1946. She was only 24 years old. Her body was burned and her ashes were publicly washed away in the latrine of the house where she was born.

5) Hertha Gertrude Bothe - (January 8, 1921 - March 16, 2000) - warden of women's concentration camps. She was arrested on charges of war crimes, but later released.

In 1942, she received an invitation to work as a guard at the Ravensbrück concentration camp. After four weeks of preliminary training, Bothe was sent to Stutthof, a concentration camp located near the city of Gdansk. In it, Bothe received the nickname "Sadist of Stutthof" due to her cruel treatment of female prisoners.

In July 1944, she was sent by Gerda Steinhoff to the Bromberg-Ost concentration camp. From January 21, 1945, Bothe was a guard during the death march of prisoners from central Poland to the Bergen-Belsen camp. The march ended on February 20-26, 1945. In Bergen-Belsen, Bothe led a detachment of 60 women engaged in wood production.

After the liberation of the camp she was arrested. At the Belsen court she was sentenced to 10 years in prison. Released earlier than stated on December 22, 1951. She died on March 16, 2000 in Huntsville, USA.

6) Maria Mandel (1912-1948) - Nazi war criminal. Occupying the post of head of women's camps in the period 1942-1944 concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau was directly responsible for the death of about 500 thousand female prisoners.

Mandel was described by fellow employees as an "extremely intelligent and dedicated" person. Auschwitz prisoners called her a monster among themselves. Mandel personally selected prisoners and sent them by the thousands to the gas chambers. There are known cases when Mandel personally took several prisoners under her protection for a while, and when she got bored with them, she put them on the list for destruction. Also, it was Mandel who came up with the idea and creation of a women’s camp orchestra, which greeted newly arrived prisoners at the gate with cheerful music. According to the recollections of survivors, Mandel was a music lover and treated the musicians from the orchestra well, personally coming to their barracks with a request to play something.

In 1944, Mandel was transferred to the post of warden of the Muhldorf concentration camp, one of the parts of the Dachau concentration camp, where she served until the end of the war with Germany. In May 1945, she fled to the mountains near her hometown of Münzkirchen. On August 10, 1945, Mandel was arrested by American troops. In November 1946, she was handed over to the Polish authorities at their request as a war criminal. Mandel was one of the main defendants in the trial of Auschwitz workers, which took place in November-December 1947. The court sentenced her to death by hanging. The sentence was carried out on January 24, 1948 in a Krakow prison.

7) Hildegard Neumann (May 4, 1919, Czechoslovakia - ?) - senior guard at the Ravensbrück and Theresienstadt concentration camps.

Hildegard Neumann began her service at the Ravensbrück concentration camp in October 1944, immediately becoming chief warden. Due to her good work, she was transferred to the Theresienstadt concentration camp as the head of all the camp guards. Beauty Hildegard, according to the prisoners, was cruel and merciless towards them.
She supervised between 10 and 30 female police officers and over 20,000 female Jewish prisoners. Neumann also facilitated the deportation of more than 40,000 women and children from Theresienstadt to the death camps of Auschwitz (Auschwitz) and Bergen-Belsen, where most of them were killed. Researchers estimate that more than 100,000 Jews were deported from the Theresienstadt camp and were killed or died at Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, with another 55,000 dying in Theresienstadt itself.
Neumann left the camp in May 1945 and faced no criminal liability for war crimes. The subsequent fate of Hildegard Neumann is unknown.

Only recently, researchers have established that in a dozen European concentration camps, the Nazis forced female prisoners to engage in prostitution in special brothels, writes Vladimir Ginda in the section Archive in issue 31 of the magazine Correspondent dated August 9, 2013.

Torment and death or prostitution - the Nazis faced this choice with European and Slavic women who found themselves in concentration camps. Of those several hundred girls who chose the second option, the administration staffed brothels in ten camps - not only those where prisoners were used as labor, but also others aimed at mass extermination.

In Soviet and modern European historiography, this topic did not actually exist; only a couple of American scientists - Wendy Gertjensen and Jessica Hughes - raised some aspects of the problem in their scientific works.

At the beginning of the 21st century, German cultural scientist Robert Sommer began to scrupulously restore information about sexual conveyors

At the beginning of the 21st century, German cultural scientist Robert Sommer began to scrupulously restore information about sexual conveyors operating in the horrific conditions of German concentration camps and death factories.

The result of nine years of research was a book published by Sommer in 2009 Brothel in a concentration camp, which shocked European readers. Based on this work, the exhibition Sex Work in Concentration Camps was organized in Berlin.

Bed motivation

“Legalized sex” appeared in Nazi concentration camps in 1942. The SS men organized houses of tolerance in ten institutions, among which were mainly so-called labor camps - in the Austrian Mauthausen and its branch Gusen, the German Flossenburg, Buchenwald, Neuengamme, Sachsenhausen and Dora-Mittelbau. In addition, the institution of forced prostitutes was also introduced in three death camps intended for the extermination of prisoners: in the Polish Auschwitz-Auschwitz and its “companion” Monowitz, as well as in the German Dachau.

The idea of ​​creating camp brothels belonged to Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler. The researchers' findings suggest that he was impressed by the system of incentives used in Soviet forced labor camps to increase prisoners' productivity.

Imperial War Museum
One of his barracks in Ravensbrück, the largest women's concentration camp Nazi Germany

Himmler decided to adopt experience, simultaneously adding to the list of “incentives” something that was not in the Soviet system - “incentive” prostitution. The SS chief was confident that the right to visit a brothel, along with receiving other bonuses - cigarettes, cash or camp vouchers, an improved diet - could force prisoners to work harder and better.

In fact, the right to visit such institutions was predominantly held by camp guards from among the prisoners. And there is a logical explanation for this: most of the male prisoners were exhausted, so they did not think about any sexual attraction.

Hughes points out that the proportion of male prisoners who used the services of brothels was extremely small. In Buchenwald, according to her data, where about 12.5 thousand people were kept in September 1943, 0.77% of prisoners visited the public barracks in three months. A similar situation was in Dachau, where as of September 1944, 0.75% of the 22 thousand prisoners who were there used the services of prostitutes.

Heavy share

Up to two hundred sex slaves worked in brothels at the same time. The largest number of women, two dozen, were kept in a brothel in Auschwitz.

Only female prisoners, usually attractive, aged 17 to 35, became brothel workers. About 60-70% of them were of German origin, from among those whom the Reich authorities called “anti-social elements.” Some were engaged in prostitution before entering the concentration camps, so they agreed to similar work, but behind barbed wire, without problems, and even passed on their skills to inexperienced colleagues.

The SS recruited approximately a third of the sex slaves from prisoners of other nationalities - Polish, Ukrainian or Belarusian. Jewish women were not allowed to do such work, and Jewish prisoners were not allowed to visit brothels.

These workers wore special insignia - black triangles sewn onto the sleeves of their robes.

The SS recruited approximately a third of the sex slaves from prisoners of other nationalities - Poles, Ukrainians or Belarusians

Some of the girls voluntarily agreed to “work.” Thus, one former employee of the medical unit of Ravensbrück - the largest women's concentration camp of the Third Reich, where up to 130 thousand people were kept - recalled: some women voluntarily went to a brothel because they were promised release after six months of work.

Spaniard Lola Casadel, a member of the Resistance movement who ended up in the same camp in 1944, told how the head of their barracks announced: “Whoever wants to work in a brothel, come to me. And keep in mind: if there are no volunteers, we will have to resort to force.”

The threat was not empty: as Sheina Epstein, a Jew from the Kaunas ghetto, recalled, in the camp the inhabitants of the women’s barracks lived in constant fear of the guards, who regularly raped the prisoners. The raids were carried out at night: drunken men walked along the bunks with flashlights, choosing the most beautiful victim.

“Their joy knew no bounds when they discovered that the girl was a virgin. Then they laughed loudly and called their colleagues,” Epstein said.

Having lost honor, and even the will to fight, some girls went to brothels, realizing that this was their last hope for survival.

“The most important thing is that we managed to escape from [the camps] Bergen-Belsen and Ravensbrück,” said Liselotte B., a former prisoner of the Dora-Mittelbau camp, about her “bed career.” “The main thing was to somehow survive.”

With Aryan meticulousness

After the initial selection, the workers were brought to special barracks in the concentration camps where they were planned to be used. To bring the emaciated prisoners into a more or less decent appearance, they were placed in the infirmary. There, medical workers in SS uniforms gave them calcium injections, they took disinfectant baths, ate and even sunbathed under quartz lamps.

There was no sympathy in all this, only calculation: the bodies were being prepared for hard work. As soon as the rehabilitation cycle ended, the girls became part of the sex conveyor belt. Work was daily, rest was only if there was no light or water, if an air raid warning was announced or during the broadcast of speeches by the German leader Adolf Hitler on the radio.

The conveyor worked like clockwork and strictly according to schedule. For example, in Buchenwald, prostitutes got up at 7:00 and took care of themselves until 19:00: they had breakfast, did exercises, underwent daily medical examinations, washed and cleaned, and had lunch. By camp standards, there was so much food that prostitutes even exchanged food for clothes and other things. Everything ended with dinner, and at seven in the evening the two-hour work began. The camp prostitutes could not go out to see her only if they had “these days” or fell ill.

AP
Women and children in one of the barracks of the Bergen-Belsen camp, liberated by the British

The procedure for providing intimate services, starting from the selection of men, was as detailed as possible. The only people who could get a woman were the so-called camp functionaries - internees, those involved in internal security, and prison guards.

Moreover, at first the doors of the brothels were opened exclusively to the Germans or representatives of the peoples living on the territory of the Reich, as well as to the Spaniards and Czechs. Later, the circle of visitors was expanded - only Jews, Soviet prisoners of war and ordinary internees were excluded. For example, logs of visits to a brothel in Mauthausen, which were meticulously kept by representatives of the administration, show that 60% of the clients were criminals.

Men who wanted to indulge in carnal pleasures first had to get permission from the camp leadership. Afterwards, they bought an entrance ticket for two Reichsmarks - this is slightly less than the cost of 20 cigarettes sold in the canteen. Of this amount, a quarter went to the woman herself, and only if she was German.

In the camp brothel, clients first of all found themselves in a waiting room, where their data was verified. They then underwent a medical examination and received prophylactic injections. Next, the visitor was given the number of the room where he should go. There the intercourse took place. Only the “missionary position” was allowed. Conversations were not encouraged.

This is how Magdalena Walter, one of the “concubines” kept there, describes the work of the brothel in Buchenwald: “We had one bathroom with a toilet, where the women went to wash themselves before the next visitor arrived. Immediately after washing, the client appeared. Everything worked like a conveyor belt; men were not allowed to stay in the room for more than 15 minutes.”

During the evening, the prostitute, according to surviving documents, received 6-15 people.

Body to work

Legalized prostitution was beneficial to the authorities. So, in Buchenwald alone, in the first six months of operation, the brothel earned 14-19 thousand Reichsmarks. The money went to the account of the German Economic Policy Directorate.

The Germans used women not only as objects of sexual pleasure, but also as scientific material. The inhabitants of the brothels carefully monitored their hygiene, because any venereal disease could cost them their lives: infected prostitutes in the camps were not treated, but experiments were performed on them.

Imperial War Museum
Liberated prisoners of the Bergen-Belsen camp

Reich scientists did this, fulfilling the will of Hitler: even before the war, he called syphilis one of the most dangerous diseases in Europe, capable of leading to disaster. The Fuhrer believed that only those nations would be saved who would find a way to quickly cure the disease. In order to obtain a miracle cure, the SS turned infected women into living laboratories. However, they did not remain alive for long - intensive experiments quickly led the prisoners to a painful death.

Researchers have found a number of cases where even healthy prostitutes were given over to sadistic doctors.

Pregnant women were not spared in the camps. In some places they were immediately killed, in some places they were artificially aborted, and after five weeks they were sent back into service. Moreover, abortions were performed on different dates And in different ways- and this also became part of the research. Some prisoners were allowed to give birth, but only then to experimentally determine how long a baby could live without nutrition.

Despicable prisoners

According to former Buchenwald prisoner Dutchman Albert van Dyck, camp prostitutes were despised by other prisoners, not paying attention to the fact that they were forced to go “on panel” by cruel conditions of detention and an attempt to save their lives. And the very work of the brothel dwellers was akin to repeated daily rape.

Some of the women, even finding themselves in a brothel, tried to defend their honor. For example, Walter came to Buchenwald as a virgin and, finding herself in the role of a prostitute, tried to defend herself from her first client with scissors. The attempt failed, and according to accounting records, the former virgin satisfied six men that same day. Walter endured this because she knew that otherwise she would face a gas chamber, a crematorium, or a barracks for cruel experiments.

Not everyone had the strength to survive the violence. Some of the inhabitants of the camp brothels, according to researchers, took their own lives, and some lost their minds. Some survived, but remained captive for life psychological problems. Physical liberation did not relieve them of the burden of the past, and after the war, camp prostitutes were forced to hide their history. Therefore, scientists have collected little documented evidence of life in these brothels.

“It’s one thing to say ‘I worked as a carpenter’ or ‘I built roads’, but quite another to say ‘I was forced to work as a prostitute,’” says Insa Eschebach, director of the Ravensbrück former camp memorial.

This material was published in No. 31 of the Korrespondent magazine dated August 9, 2013. Reproduction of Korrespondent magazine publications in full is prohibited. The rules for using materials from the Korrespondent magazine published on the Korrespondent.net website can be found .

Torture is often called various minor troubles that happen to everyone in everyday life. This definition is given to raising disobedient children, standing in line for a long time, doing a lot of laundry, then ironing clothes, and even the process of preparing food. All this, of course, can be very painful and unpleasant (although the degree of debilitation largely depends on the character and inclinations of the person), but still bears little resemblance to the most terrible torture in the history of mankind. The practice of interrogation with prejudice and other violent actions against prisoners took place in almost all countries of the world. The time frame is also not defined, but since to modern man psychologically closer to the relatively recent events, then his attention is drawn to the methods and special equipment, invented in the twentieth century, in particular in the German concentration camps of the times. But there were also ancient Eastern and medieval tortures. The fascists were also taught by their colleagues from Japanese counterintelligence, the NKVD and other similar punitive bodies. So why was all this mockery of people?

Meaning of the term

To begin with, when starting to study any issue or phenomenon, any researcher tries to define it. “To name it correctly is already half to understand” - says

So, torture is the deliberate infliction of suffering. In this case, the nature of the torment does not matter; it can be not only physical (in the form of pain, thirst, hunger or deprivation of sleep), but also moral and psychological. By the way, the most terrible tortures in human history, as a rule, combine both “channels of influence.”

But it is not only the fact of suffering that matters. Senseless torment is called torture. Torture differs from it in its purposefulness. In other words, a person is beaten with a whip or hung on a rack for a reason, but in order to get some result. Using violence, the victim is encouraged to admit guilt, divulge hidden information, and sometimes they are simply punished for some misdemeanor or crime. The twentieth century added one more item to the list of possible purposes of torture: torture in concentration camps was sometimes carried out with the aim of studying the body's reaction to unbearable conditions in order to determine the limits of human capabilities. These experiments were recognized by the Nuremberg Tribunal as inhumane and pseudoscientific, which did not prevent their results from being studied by physiologists from the victorious countries after the defeat of Nazi Germany.

Death or trial

The purposeful nature of the actions suggests that after receiving the result, even the most terrible tortures stopped. There was no point in continuing them. The position of executioner-executor, as a rule, was occupied by a professional who knew about painful techniques and the peculiarities of psychology, if not everything, then a lot, and there was no point in wasting his efforts on senseless bullying. After the victim confessed to a crime, depending on the degree of civilization of society, she could expect immediate death or treatment followed by trial. Legally formalized execution after biased interrogations during the investigation was characteristic of the punitive justice of Germany in the initial Hitler era and for Stalin’s “open trials” (the Shakhty case, the trial of the industrial party, reprisals against Trotskyists, etc.). After giving the defendants a tolerable appearance, they were dressed in decent suits and shown to the public. Broken morally, people most often obediently repeated everything that the investigators forced them to admit. Torture and executions were rampant. The veracity of the testimony did not matter. Both in Germany and in the USSR in the 1930s, the confession of the accused was considered the “queen of evidence” (A. Ya. Vyshinsky, USSR prosecutor). Brutal torture was used to obtain it.

Deadly torture of the Inquisition

In few areas of its activity (except perhaps in the manufacture of murder weapons) humanity has been so successful. It should be noted that in recent centuries there has even been some regression compared to ancient times. European executions and torture of women in the Middle Ages were carried out, as a rule, on charges of witchcraft, and the reason most often became the external attractiveness of the unfortunate victim. However, the Inquisition sometimes condemned those who actually committed terrible crimes, but the specificity of that time was the unequivocal doom of the condemned. No matter how long the torment lasted, it only ended in the death of the condemned. The execution weapon could have been the Iron Maiden, the Brazen Bull, a bonfire, or the sharp-edged pendulum described by Edgar Poe, which was methodically lowered onto the victim’s chest inch by inch. The terrible tortures of the Inquisition were prolonged and accompanied by unimaginable moral torment. The preliminary investigation could be carried out using other ingenious mechanical devices to slowly split the bones of the fingers and limbs and tear the muscle ligaments. The most famous weapons were:

A metal sliding bulb used for particularly sophisticated torture of women in the Middle Ages;

- “Spanish boot”;

A Spanish chair with clamps and a brazier for the legs and buttocks;

An iron bra (pectoral), worn over the chest while hot;

- “crocodiles” and special forceps for crushing male genitals.

The executioners of the Inquisition also had other torture equipment, which it is better not for people with sensitive psyches to know about.

East, Ancient and Modern

No matter how ingenious the European inventors of self-harm techniques may be, the most terrible tortures in the history of mankind were still invented in the East. The Inquisition used metal tools, which sometimes had a very intricate design, in Asia they preferred everything natural, natural (today these products would probably be called environmentally friendly). Insects, plants, animals - everything was used. Eastern torture and execution had the same goals as European ones, but technically differed in duration and greater sophistication. Ancient Persian executioners, for example, practiced scapism (from Greek word"scaphium" - trough). The victim was immobilized with shackles, tied to a trough, forced to eat honey and drink milk, then the whole body was smeared with a sweet mixture and lowered into the swamp. Blood-sucking insects a person was slowly eaten alive. The same thing was done in the case of execution on an anthill, and if the unfortunate person was to be burned in the scorching sun, his eyelids were cut off for greater torment. There were other types of torture that used elements of the biosystem. For example, it is known that bamboo grows quickly, a meter per day. It is enough to simply hang the victim on a short distance above the young shoots, and cut off the ends of the stems under acute angle. The person being tortured has time to come to his senses, confess everything and hand over his accomplices. If he persists, he will slowly and painfully be pierced by the plants. This choice was not always provided, however.

Torture as a method of inquiry

Both in and at a later period various types Torture was used not only by inquisitors and other officially recognized savage structures, but also by ordinary government bodies, today called law enforcement. It was part of a set of investigation and inquiry techniques. From the second half of the 16th century in Russia they practiced different types bodily influence, such as: whipping, hanging, racking, burning with pincers and open fire, immersion in water, and so on. Enlightened Europe was also by no means distinguished by humanism, but practice showed that in some cases torture, bullying and even the fear of death did not guarantee finding out the truth. Moreover, in some cases the victim was ready to confess to the most shameful crime, preferring a terrible end to endless horror and pain. There is a well-known case with a miller, which the inscription on the pediment of the French Palace of Justice calls for to be remembered. He took upon himself someone else's guilt under torture, was executed, and the real criminal was soon caught.

Abolition of torture in different countries

At the end of the 17th century, a gradual shift away from the practice of torture and a transition from it to other, more humane methods of inquiry began. One of the results of the Enlightenment was the realization that it is not the severity of punishment, but its inevitability that influences the reduction of criminal activity. In Prussia, torture was abolished in 1754; this country became the first to put its legal proceedings at the service of humanism. Then the process went progressively, different states followed her example in the following sequence:

Note:

*) the legislation of the various cantons of Switzerland changed at different times during this period.

Two countries deserve special mention - Britain and Russia.

Catherine the Great abolished torture in 1774 by issuing a secret decree. By this, on the one hand, she continued to keep criminals at bay, but, on the other, she showed a desire to follow the ideas of the Enlightenment. This decision was formalized legally by Alexander I in 1801.

As for England, torture was prohibited there in 1772, but not all, but only some.

Illegal torture

The legislative ban did not mean their complete exclusion from the practice of pre-trial investigation. In all countries there were representatives of the police class who were ready to break the law in the name of its triumph. Another thing is that their actions were carried out illegally, and if exposed, they were threatened with legal prosecution. Of course, the methods have changed significantly. It was necessary to “work with people” more carefully, without leaving visible traces. In the 19th and 20th centuries, heavy objects were used, but with soft surface, such as sandbags, thick volumes (the irony of the situation was manifested in the fact that most often these were codes of laws), rubber hoses etc. Methods were not ignored either moral pressure. Some investigators sometimes threatened severe punishments, long sentences, and even reprisals against loved ones. This was also torture. The horror experienced by those under investigation prompted them to make confessions, incriminate themselves and receive undeserved punishments, until the majority of police officers performed their duty honestly, studying the evidence and collecting testimony to bring a substantiated charge. Everything changed after totalitarian and dictatorial regimes came to power in some countries. This happened in the 20th century.

After the October Revolution of 1917, on the territory of the former Russian Empire broke out Civil war, in which both warring parties most often did not consider themselves bound by the legislative norms that were mandatory under the tsar. Torture of prisoners of war in order to obtain information about the enemy was practiced by both the White Guard counterintelligence and the Cheka. During the years of the Red Terror, executions most often took place, but mockery of representatives of the “exploiter class,” which included the clergy, nobles, and simply decently dressed “gentlemen,” became widespread. In the twenties, thirties and forties, the NKVD authorities used prohibited methods of interrogation, depriving those under investigation of sleep, food, water, beating and mutilating them. This was done with the permission of management, and sometimes on his direct orders. The goal was rarely to find out the truth - repressions were carried out to intimidate, and the investigator's task was to obtain a signature on a protocol containing a confession of counter-revolutionary activities, as well as slander of other citizens. As a rule, Stalin’s “backpack masters” did not use special torture devices, being content with available objects, such as a paperweight (they beat them on the head), or even an ordinary door, which pinched fingers and other protruding parts of the body.

In Nazi Germany

Torture in the concentration camps created after Adolf Hitler came to power differed in style from those previously used in that they were a strange mixture of Eastern sophistication and European practicality. Initially, these “correctional institutions” were created for guilty Germans and representatives of national minorities declared hostile (Gypsies and Jews). Then came a series of experiments that were somewhat scientific in nature, but in cruelty exceeded the most terrible tortures in the history of mankind.
In an attempt to create antidotes and vaccines, Nazi SS doctors administered lethal injections to prisoners, performed operations without anesthesia, including abdominal ones, froze prisoners, starved them in the heat, and did not allow them to sleep, eat or drink. Thus, they wanted to develop technologies for the “production” of ideal soldiers, not afraid of frost, heat and injury, resistant to the effects of toxic substances and pathogenic bacilli. The history of torture during the Second World War forever imprinted the names of doctors Pletner and Mengele, who, along with other representatives of criminal fascist medicine, became the personification of inhumanity. They also conducted experiments on lengthening limbs by mechanical stretching, suffocating people in rarefied air, and other experiments that caused painful agony, sometimes lasting for long hours.

The torture of women by the Nazis concerned mainly the development of ways to deprive them reproductive function. Studied different methods- from simple ones (removal of the uterus) to sophisticated ones, which had the prospect of mass use in the event of a Reich victory (irradiation and exposure to chemicals).

It all ended before the Victory, in 1944, when Soviet and allied troops began to liberate the concentration camps. Even appearance prisoners spoke more eloquently than any evidence that their very detention in inhuman conditions was torture.

Current state of affairs

The torture of the fascists became the standard of cruelty. After the defeat of Germany in 1945, humanity sighed with joy in the hope that this would never happen again. Unfortunately, although not on such a scale, torture of the flesh, mockery of human dignity and moral humiliation remain some of the terrible signs modern world. Developed countries, declaring their commitment to rights and freedoms, are looking for legal loopholes to create special territories where compliance with their own laws is not necessary. Prisoners of secret prisons have been exposed to punitive forces for many years without specific charges being brought against them. The methods used by military personnel of many countries during local and major armed conflicts in relation to prisoners and those simply suspected of sympathizing with the enemy are sometimes superior in cruelty to the abuse of people in Nazi concentration camps. In international investigations of such precedents, too often, instead of objectivity, one can observe a duality of standards, when war crimes of one of the parties are completely or partially hushed up.

Will the era of a new Enlightenment come when torture will finally be finally and irrevocably recognized as a disgrace to humanity and banned? So far there is little hope for this...

One of the most tragic and cynical pages in the annals of the Gulag is undoubtedly the one that tells about the fate of a woman behind barbed wire. A woman in the camps is a special tragedy, a special topic. Not only because a camp, a thorn, a logging site or a wheelbarrow do not fit with the idea of ​​the purpose of the fair sex. But also because a woman is a mother. Either the mother of children left in the wild, or giving birth in the camp.

The presence of women in camps and prisons for the leadership of the Gulag turned out to be a kind of “failure in the system”, because every year, and especially during periods of massive replenishment of the prison population, it caused a lot of problems, the solution to which could not be found.

Availability huge amount women in the camps, where there were minimal conditions for the existence of even a healthy man engaged in heavy physical labor, made the situation unpredictable and dangerous.

According to the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs, the total number of female prisoners held in camps and colonies for the period 1946 - 1950. characterized by the following data: as of January 1, 1946, 211,946 people, as of January 1, 1947 - 437,127 people, as of January 1, 1948 - 477,648 people, as of January 1, 1949 - 528,037 people, on January 1, 1950 - 521,588 people.

Until 1947, the NKVD instruction of 1939 “On the regime of detention of prisoners” No. 00889 was in effect in camps and prisons. According to this instruction, the joint placement of female and male prisoners was allowed in common areas, but in separate barracks. It was also allowed to house prisoners on the territory residential areas in cases caused by the interests of production.

After the end of World War II, in the conditions of a new massive filling of the camps, the old rules were unable to effectively regulate the situation in the zones. The problem of cohabitation between prisoners and, quite naturally, a sharp increase in the number of pregnant women in camps and prisons became especially clear.

The reasons for such a sharp increase in the number of women becoming pregnant in prison lay, as they say, on the surface and were not a secret to the Gulag authorities.

“Before the war and even before 1947, a significant mass of the female contingent was condemned to comparatively short terms conclusions. This was a serious deterrent for women to cohabitate, as they had the prospect of quickly returning to their family and normalizing their lives. Those sentenced to long terms lose this prospect to a certain extent and more easily commit violations of the regime and, in particular, cohabitation and pregnancy, counting on this for a lighter situation and even early release from prison. Increasing the sentences of the majority of imprisoned women certainly affects the increase in pregnancy in camps and colonies” (GARF. Report on the state of isolation of imprisoned women and the presence of pregnancy in camps and colonies of the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs. F. 9414 D. 2549).

The last statement was not groundless, after a significant influx of women into the camps in 1945 - 1946 and the complications caused by this circumstance in the well-functioning mechanism of the prison economy, the authorities relented and in record time carried out two partial amnesties (in 1947 and 1949) for pregnant women and women with young children.

The response was not long in coming. According to the guards themselves, this measure “increased the desire of imprisoned women for cohabitation and pregnancy.”

The statistics for the camp authorities looked depressing.

As usual, after receiving the relevant information, on-site inspections were carried out and a thorough analysis of the current situation was made. Sometimes quite piquant details emerged.

“Facts of forcing women to commit are isolated. Such facts were revealed in the construction labor camp No. 352 of the Glavpromstroy Ministry of Internal Affairs, when the foremen of male brigades, long time working together with women's teams on one construction site, forced individual women to cohabitate either through threats or through promises of certain material benefits (for example, one male brigade wrote off part of its output to the female brigade because the foreman of the male brigade cohabited with one of the female prisoners of the female brigade).”

In general, the situation threatened to completely get out of control. Due to the fact that the procedure for placing female prisoners, which was in force until 1947, in conditions of increasing prison terms, contributed to the rapid growth of cohabitation, the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs in 1947 took measures to strengthen the isolation of female prisoners from men. This was expressed in the newly published “Instructions on the regime of detention of prisoners in forced labor camps and colonies,” announced by order of the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs No. 0190 of 1947.

This instruction provided for the creation of special women's units and only in exceptional cases was it allowed to place women in men's units, but in separate isolated areas.

“As of January 1, 1950, 545 separate women’s camp units were organized in camps and colonies, which housed 67% of female prisoners.

The remaining 33% of women are kept in common units with men, but in separate fenced off areas.”

During construction No. 501 (“Dead Road”), approximately every fourth or fifth camp was for women. The women's areas were no different from the men's. The same structure and, as a rule, the same work. In some cases, this could be work in sewing workshops, in others - logging, building embankments, “snow fighting” (that is, clearing fabric railway from snow) in winter.

35 kilometers south of the Nadym pier, near the bank of the river. Heygiyaha (Longyugan) a women's logging column was built with three subdivisions. The terms of the “indictees”, who made up the overwhelming majority here, as stated by the former civilian cultural worker of the 9th camp department M.M. Solovyova, prevailed from 10 to 15 years. Women felled wood and took it to right place using horses.

Nikita Petrov’s study “GULAG” provides data on women in prisons in the USSR during the period we are considering. From January 1, 1948 to March 1, 1949, the number of convicted women with children increased by 138% and pregnant women by 98%. As of January 1, 1948, to March 1, 1949, there were 2,356,685 prisoners in the ITL and ITC. Women with children and pregnant women made up 6.3% of the total number of female prisoners held in camps and colonies. Convicted women with children and pregnant women held in places of detention were housed in 234 specially adapted premises (baby houses) and less often in separate sections of barracks.

Today there are ruins of the women's logging camp south of the city of Nadym, which allow us to get some idea of ​​the conditions in which the prisoners were kept. The women here were placed in dugout barracks, deepened by about 1 m 30 cm. The size of the dugouts varies, reaching a length of 15 meters.

Former from 1950 to 1953 in this camp, a civilian, Margarita Mikhailovna Solovyova, who served as a cult organizer here, reported that the dugouts were divided into two sections - 60 places each, each prisoner had their own bunks.

A former civilian worker reported about the work of women in this camp: “The camp included three subdivisions, i.e. work area. In the mornings, after roll call, they, led by the foreman, were taken out of the zone, where the prisoners were received by a convoy and taken to work. The women felled the wood all day and then took it to the shore. Lunch was delivered to the place of work. Rafts were made from fallen timber and sent to Nadym for sleepers. And cutting down wood is not a woman’s job. Try to pull this forest out on horseback. There were no tractors. They harnessed the horse to the drag and urged it on. And then the women work for a day, they come, and they are given gruel.”

The strictness of the camp rules could not exclude contacts between female prisoners and guards and with male prisoners. Here, for example, is the story told by Margarita Mikhailovna Solovyova: “Basically, women considered each other. There were sometimes clashes and scandals, but all this quickly stopped. It was difficult in the fall when male prisoners brought hay for the horses on pontoons. Women unloaded. There was enough to do here. Here “love” began, running, fighting and massacre between women.

They ran to the pontoon, and the bank was steep... The soldiers shot upward so that they would disperse, but where would they go... Shoot, don’t shoot - they won’t leave. If she’s been sitting there for eight years and hasn’t seen anyone or anything, she doesn’t care if you kill her now or shoot her in a day. They attacked the men so much that at first it was scary.”

Some details of the situation of women in the “Construction 501” camps are presented, for example, “Protocol of the second party conference of the Obsky ITL Construction 501 of the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs. June 2 - 4, 1951, Salekhard."

It reports: “At the 34th women’s camp, when Ershov was the head of the camp, 59 men were kept for a long time, of which: 21 people, mostly convicted of criminal offenses - treason, were used in lower management, administrative work. And the camp was in the hands of these prisoners. Ershov himself used female prisoners for personal purposes as housekeepers and embroiderers of personal items.

Prisoners from the lower administration, taking advantage of Ershov’s patronage, took away parcels from prisoners, wages, persuaded women to cohabitate - arbitrariness reigned. All this led to mass promiscuity among female prisoners.

Only this can explain that prisoner Egorova T.I., convicted of a minor crime, 19 years old, under the influence of criminal recidivism, committed the murder of prisoner Dunaeva M.V. etc.”

In the system of the Ob ITL, female prisoners were not trained at all as stove makers, carpenters, electricians, or track crew foremen. Therefore, in a number of cases, the local administration was simply forced to keep men in women’s camps.

The “Report on the state of the Construction Camp No. 503 of the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs,” compiled in June 1951, in particular, analyzed the implementation of Ministerial Order No. 80 on the procedure for keeping female prisoners. The document reported that the order to separate women from men was not fully implemented, and, as a result, in column No. 54 “on the day of the inspection, 8 pregnant women were registered, in addition, in April, 11 pregnant women were transferred to another column... At column no. 22...14 cases of pregnancy were registered.”

In the book by Kurt Baerens, “The Germans in the Penal Camps and Prisons of the Soviet Union,” a former German prisoner deported from East Prussia and serving a sentence in the Salekhard region testifies: “The death threat to life from a gang of seventy-eight Russian criminals is recalled as a special experience. who made up the contingent of the men's camp. They were not properly indicated in the accompanying papers. They tried to enter our home by all means, including using homemade master keys, and were able to get into both halves of the women’s barracks, breaking into the floor and walls, and breaking out parts of the ceiling. The Russian guards did not protect us. Only twelve days after our appeal, employees of the Ministry of Internal Affairs took the criminals out of the camp.”

Documents from the Ministry of Internal Affairs, dated 1952 and 1953, shed some light on the situation of women and children in the system of the Main Directorate of Railway Construction Camps at the end of the Stalin era.

“An extract from the report of the commission addressed to the Minister of Internal Affairs, Comrade S.N. Kruglov, dated December 4, 1952, No. 50/2257 c,” indicated that the cost of keeping prisoners in the northern and Far Eastern camps of the GULZhDS is approximately twice as expensive as their maintenance in other camps. Based on this, it was concluded that it was necessary to place, in particular, mothers with children in Gulag camps located in more favorable conditions. climatic conditions. For reasons unknown to us, the conclusion to this proposal was negative.

As a result of severe living conditions In just 10 months of 1952, 1,486 cases of primary diseases were registered for an average monthly number of children - 408 people. Considering that during the same period 33 children died (or 8.1 percent of the total), it turns out that on average during this period each child was ill various diseases four times. Among the causes of death, the leading causes were dysentery and dyspepsia - 45.5 percent, as well as pneumonia - 30.2 percent.

We would like to add the following: given that the mortality rate among prisoners was about 0.5 percent per year, we have to admit that children died 16 times more often.

In a report dated February 9, 1953, the Obskaya ITL and Construction Department 501 reported an improvement in the living conditions of mothers with children as a result of their relocation to newly converted premises from the Obskaya station to Salekhard and from Igarka to Ermakovo.
The so-called “Column of the Mother and Child Home” was built in Salekhard, in the Angalsky Cape area. There was also a maternity hospital there.

As N. Petrov notes in his study “GULAG”, the continuously increasing number of convicted women with children and pregnant women throughout the country put the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs in a difficult situation due to exceptional difficulties in providing proper education children, their normal placement and medical care. The average cost of maintaining one female prisoner with a child was 12 rubles per day. 72 kopecks or 4,643 rubles per year.

On August 28, 1950, the Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR prescribed the release from punishment of convicted pregnant women and women with young children. A certificate signed by the deputy head of the 2nd Directorate of the Gulag of the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs, Colonel Nikulochkin, stated that on April 24, 1951, in pursuance of this decree, 100% of pregnant women and women with children in prison were released from places of detention, as well as 94 .5% of women who have children outside the colony camp. A total of 119,041 women were released out of 122,738 who fell into the listed categories.

On May 3, 1951, the head of the Gulag, Lieutenant General I. Dolgikh, documented: “3,697 women with children outside the camp colony were not released due to failure to receive documents confirming the presence of children.

The work to free women with children continues.”

No matter how harshly the then state, represented by its highest representatives, treated lawbreakers, it could not ignore the enormous demographic damage caused by the war. This damage had to be compensated, or at least not interfere with its compensation.