Before World War I, there were no women in the military, both in China and Europe and the United States. After World War I, some countries began to allow women to carry out military activities, but the number was not large. And these women who joined the military were largely seen as wartime workers and would not participate in military operations.
By World War II, Germany had 500,000 female Aides of the Wehrmacht. In addition to a great breakthrough in the size of the numbers, these "female assistants" can also undertake many more tasks than when they were "wartime workers".
But there is a strange phenomenon that these female assistants, although they participated in the army, still did not have the right to serve as officers, and after the end of Germany, these 500,000 people disappeared, as if they never existed. What is the secret behind this?
First, why there were women in the German army
On the surface, Germany had just started the war with a ferocious offensive, and it seemed as if its strength was far superior to that of other countries. In fact, on the contrary, Germany has no way to support Germany to wage a long war with so many countries at the same time, whether in terms of population or resource abundance.
Therefore, the German army could only adopt the method of quick battle and quick decision, using the "blitzkrieg" strategy to quickly solve the target.
In the beginning, this German strategy really worked. In a short period of time, Germany changed its flag overnight, even to several countries, even France, once the hegemon of the European continent.
Successive victories and minimal casualties have inflated many German high-level people, and in their view, victory can be easily obtained, and Germany can continue to increase its attack surface and occupy more countries.
As the Germans occupied more and more land, a problem arose, that is, the Germans were not enough.
After Germany occupied other countries, it naturally had to administer these countries, and it was necessary for the German army to allocate a part of the people to serve as local administrators, which was a huge loss of German combat effectiveness.
Therefore, with the expansion of the occupied territory, Germany had to break the original tradition of prohibiting women from participating in military operations, recruiting a large number of staff from German women to fill the vacancies in the administrative staff of the occupied areas and free German soldiers from the tedious administration.
After the outbreak of the war between Germany and the Soviet Union, the casualties of the Wehrmacht became larger and larger, and the demand for workers in the military industry increased greatly. As a result, more and more German men were recruited into the army, and even many men of the right age who were originally engaged in production work were also on the battlefield. The vacancies left by these men who have gone to war can only be filled by women.
Throughout World War II, the German army recruited about 17.3 million German men, most of whom died on the battlefield, especially after the start of the Soviet-German War, and the rapidly rising death toll depleted the German reserve.
In this context, the German government had to place women in the same position as men, completely lifting the restrictions on women's participation in military operations.
As a result, the group of female aides of the Defence Forces came into being. Especially in the late second period of World War II, more and more German men died on the battlefield, and more and more women in the German army. These women played entirely male roles, being used by Nazi Germany as war machines, giving their lives for their evil thoughts.
Second, what role they played
Although Germany does not regard these "female assistants" as women, after all, as women, there is still a gap between them and men. Can they really play the same role as men in war?
As early as the beginning of World War II, the German army had begun to recruit women into the army as female assistants. These women followed the victorious Wehrmacht to the conquered territories. In these places, he served as a typist, administrator, etc., similar to the civilian staff of the army. But as the war progressed, the work of these female assistants became more and more extensive.
In particular, after 1941, male workers who had previously served in the F-FDTL were recalled to the military-industrial factories again, resulting in a serious shortage of personnel in the F-FDTL. So the German army had to involve women in part of the army's work, replace these recalled workers, and on a larger scale, loosen gender restrictions, and replace German men from office, administration, communications and other industries to the front.
This plan of the German army greatly alleviated the shortage of people on the front line, but because of the tightness of the war, the German economy became very bad. More and more people did not want to join the army, and the German army failed to recruit too many people. To this end, the Nazis issued a decree to the whole country, allowing the German army to forcibly recruit women of the right age to serve as "female assistants".
The implementation of this decree has led to the sheer size of the F-FDTL's female aides, and as the war situation on the front line has intensified, the scope of their military activities has become larger and larger. By 1943, F-FDTL female aides already had the right to issue orders in place of orders, control the launch of anti-aircraft missiles, and use searchlights.
By 1944, the total number of female assistants in the Wehrmacht had exceeded 500,000, and these female assistants had been widely distributed in various departments of the Wehrmacht, and they had almost supported the day-to-day operations of the Wehrmacht, except that they did not go to the front line.
But within a year, Nazi Germany had collapsed.
After Germany's defeat, where did they go?
In the last year of the war, before the Allies could advance, the German armed forces were gradually withdrawn to the country. In July 1944, the Germans announced the dismissal of all female Wehrmacht aides under the age of 21 deployed outside Germany. This order largely enabled a large number of female Wehrmacht assistants to take off their uniforms before the defeat of Germany and return to their families to avoid the war.
Second, a considerable number of female aides were captured on the spot as a result of the German surrender. When the Allies received the Germans, they did not treat these female assistants as military personnel, but treated them as civilians, gave them travel expenses, and sent them back to Germany. However, there are also a considerable number of female assistants, after being captured, forced to participate in labor camps, mistreated in labor camps, and eventually disappeared, and few survived.
Some female assistants have become lonely ghosts wandering away, and those female assistants who return home have also encountered great difficulties in their subsequent lives, because many German people believe that these female assistants are in the military, playing the role of "lovers" of German officers, feeling that they are engaged in very disgraceful occupations, and constantly excluding them in their daily lives, causing them to be difficult to move forward, and even work is difficult to find.
These female assistants were actually victims of the Nazi war, and they were forced to pay their youth for the unjust war, and at the same time they were subjected to a lot of unfair speculation and treatment because of their female identity. Even if he is lucky enough to return to his hometown alive, he can only spend his life in a skeptical gaze.
The F-FDTL female aides were actually a group of tragic women, many of whom died on the front lines, in other places, in the road, in the doubts of their loved ones, who became symbols of shame and still bear the infamy to this day.
Text/Leyu
Source: A Study of german Women's Auxiliary Forces during World War II, Gao Juan