Gewaltsame Geschlechterordnung: Wehrmacht und „Flintenweiber“ an der Ostfront 1941/42

This book chapter in the 2011 edited German volume Soldatinnen: Gewalt und Geschlecht im Krieg vom Mittelalter bis heute (Female Soldiers: Violence and Gender in War from the Middle Ages to the Present) discusses the perception of Soviet "Flintenweiber" (literally "shotgun women") by soldiers of the German Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front 1941/42 during World War II. Nearly 600,000 female soldiers served during this conflict in the Soviet army, several of them as combat soldiers, which the German soldiers labeled Flintenweiber," and the official Wehrmacht propaganda depicted as the incarnation of the "evil" other of the arch enemy, the communist Red Army. These women were ardently hated by many German soldiers, because they represented for them an enemy that challenged for them the social and gender order.