As deadly as the male: the story of the Red Army’s women snipers

For the duration of their titanic and ultimately unsuccessful battle with the USSR in World War II, the Nazis nursed a special strain of hatred for the women combatants who made up a large chunk of the Red Army’s troops. This wasn’t just because they were, well, Nazis and therefore pre-programmed to detest anybody who wasn’t a strapping Teutonic male.

Whenever the Wehrmacht happened to capture a female Soviet fighter, they invariably made ...