Branded in Ravensbrück: Sexual Enslavement, War Crimes Evidence, and Why Nazi Officials Marked Young Soviet Women as “Field Wives”

My name is Elena Vasilyeva. I am sixty-seven years old, writing in 1990 as the Soviet archives begin to open and long-buried war crimes evidence surfaces across Eastern Europe. Doctors say my heart is failing. They do not know it fractured in 1942 inside a brick building at Ravensbrück concentration camp, the largest women’s concentration camp in Nazi Germany.

For forty-five years I lived with a secret burned into my skin—an identifying brand placed there by German officials who decided that my youth and appearance made me “useful.” They called girls like me Feldhure—“field wife.” The term appeared in camp records and postwar testimony describing organized sexual exploitation programs run in concentration camps and military brothels. What happened to us was not rumor. It was a system.

This is not written for pity. It is written as witness testimony—about sexual slavery, crimes against humanity, human trafficking under occupation law, and the legal reckoning that followed at the Nuremberg Trials. These crimes have no statute of limitations under international criminal law.

Before the Arrest: Occupied Smolensk and the Machinery of Deportation

In 1941 I was eighteen, living near Smolensk. My father believed education would defeat cruelty. When German forces entered our village, they did not come as abstractions of geopolitics. They came with arrest lists, forced labor quotas, and deportation transports.

I was taken after soldiers searched our home. My father was killed. I was loaded into a livestock railcar with dozens of women and girls—classic elements of wartime deportation now recognized as unlawful forced transfer under the Hague Conventions and later codified as crimes against humanity.

The train moved west for days without adequate food or water. Survivors of these transports later testified about dehydration, disease exposure, and selection procedures conducted at intermediate rail stops by SS officers who evaluated prisoners for labor, medical experimentation, or other “special purposes.”

At the time, we did not understand what “special purposes” meant.

Selection: “Too Beautiful for Labor”

When we arrived at Ravensbrück concentration camp, the intake procedure followed a rigid administrative structure: confiscation of property, head shaving, disinfection showers, prisoner numbering. But selection did not end there.

Several months later, during a winter inspection, SS officials and camp doctors conducted what survivors later described in affidavits as a “secondary screening.” Women deemed physically fit or conventionally attractive were separated from general labor detachments. The language used was chillingly bureaucratic—“reassignment,” “transfer,” “special housing.”

One officer examined me and said in German that it was a waste to let me “rot in labor.” I was moved to a separate barracks building historically associated with the Ravensbrück camp brothel system established in 1942.

The Brand: Property Marking as Coercive Control

Inside a tiled room resembling a medical office, several of us were ordered to undress. A doctor prepared a needle apparatus connected to an ink reservoir—similar to a tattooing instrument.

I was branded on the left side of my chest with letters identifying my status. The procedure was deliberate. Blood mixed with ink. An SS official observed and remarked that the mark would ensure “no one forgets her place.”

From a modern legal standpoint, this act constitutes:

·         Assault and aggravated battery

·         Forced bodily marking

·         Sexual enslavement

·         Degrading treatment under the Geneva framework

·         Crimes against humanity under Article 7 of the Rome Statute

Branding served both psychological domination and administrative tracking. It reduced us to inventory.

The Camp Brothel System: Organized Sexual Slavery

The Ravensbrück brothel functioned under regulated schedules. Prisoners were required to undergo weekly medical examinations to prevent disease transmission among visiting soldiers. Refusal resulted in punishment or return to hard labor, often followed by execution.

The program intersected with broader SS-controlled camp brothels documented in Buchenwald, Dachau, and other sites. Historians and prosecutors later classified the system as institutionalized sexual slavery—a component of Nazi concentration camp administration.

The women selected were often Eastern European prisoners, including Soviet citizens, targeted under racial policy frameworks that combined exploitation with ideological contempt.

We were fed better than labor prisoners. That fact created moral torment. Survival felt like betrayal. But coercion under threat of death eliminates legal consent.

Evidence and Postwar Accountability

After liberation in 1945, documentation emerged through captured SS records, survivor testimony, and Allied investigative reports. At the Nuremberg Trials, prosecutors introduced evidence of forced labor, medical experimentation, and systemic abuse within concentration camps. Sexual enslavement was less thoroughly prosecuted at the time, but it has since been recognized in international jurisprudence as a prosecutable crime against humanity.

Ravensbrück itself held over 130,000 women prisoners from more than 40 nations. Tens of thousands died from starvation, execution, forced labor, medical experimentation, and disease. Soviet women formed a significant percentage of detainees after 1941.

Modern human rights law—shaped by these cases—recognizes:

·         Sexual slavery as a war crime

·         Forced prostitution as a crime against humanity

·         Coercive medical procedures as grave breaches

·         Enslavement and deportation as prosecutable offenses without statute of limitations

The legal vocabulary did not exist in 1942. But the crimes did.

Liberation and Secondary Fear

When Soviet forces advanced in 1945, chaos overtook the camp. Guards fled. Some destroyed records. Many perpetrators avoided immediate accountability.

For survivors, liberation did not guarantee safety. Soviet repatriation processes included filtration camps and interrogations by security services. Former prisoners of war and detainees were often viewed with suspicion. Many women concealed evidence of sexual exploitation to avoid stigma or accusations of collaboration.

I survived by silence.

The Long-Term Impact: Trauma, Identity, and Postwar Justice

The psychological effects of sexual enslavement are now documented in trauma research: dissociation, survivor’s guilt, chronic shame, and complex post-traumatic stress disorder. For decades, survivors rarely spoke publicly.

I married. I worked in a hospital. I wore high collars. I avoided communal baths and medical examinations. The brand never disappeared. I attempted chemical removal once, leaving scar tissue—but the letters remained visible beneath it.

My husband never knew the truth. He sensed pain but did not demand confession.

Only in 1990, amid glasnost and renewed historical investigations into Nazi war crimes, did I allow a doctor to see the scar without concealment. He did not look at me with contempt. He looked at the mark as evidence.

That moment shifted something fundamental: the shame was never mine.

Legal and Historical Context

Scholarly research confirms that the Ravensbrück brothel operated as part of a broader SS policy beginning in 1942. Archival material and postwar court records identify forced recruitment, coercion, and physical abuse of women designated for sexual labor.

The crimes align with modern definitions of:

·         Enslavement

·         Persecution

·         Inhumane acts

·         Gender-based violence in armed conflict

International criminal tribunals established after World War II laid groundwork later expanded by ad hoc tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, where sexual slavery and forced prostitution were prosecuted explicitly.

There is no expiration date on accountability for crimes against humanity.

Why the Branding Happened

Branding served multiple purposes:

1.    Administrative tracking – identification within brothel rosters

2.    Psychological degradation – enforced internalization of status

3.    Ownership signaling – marking women as Reich property

4.    Postwar silencing – visible stigma designed to follow survivors

The phrase I was told—“too beautiful to be free”—was not romantic. It was an operational classification within a regime that commodified bodies for state use.

Beauty was not the reason. Availability under total control was.

Final Statement

I was prisoner number 75439. I was marked as a field wife. I survived sexual enslavement in a Nazi concentration camp. I lived decades believing the brand erased my honor.

It did not.

The dishonor belongs to the system that institutionalized rape, human trafficking, forced prostitution, and bodily branding under military authority. Those acts meet every definition of war crimes and crimes against humanity under modern international law.

If these words endure, let them serve as documented memory—not spectacle, not scandal, but record.

What was burned into my skin was meant to silence me.

Instead, it became evidence.