February 12, 1943, Western Russia, Smolensk region. Snow fell heavily on the ruins of the former Illiberal Factory, converted into what German military maps called Camp 23 Medical Point. But there was nothing medical there, only the cold, strong smell of disinfectant mixed with the smell of dried blood and the muffled sound of orders given in German.
Between these gray stone walls, Soviet women were stripped of their names, their clothes, and all traces of humanity, and it always began the same way. “Austen Unthinkninen, take off your clothes and get on your knees.” The phrase echoed in the narrow corridors, spoken with clinical coldness, without anger, without hatred, simply an order carried out as if it were protocol.
For a long time, no one dared to speak about what happened next. Officially, this place did not exist. There was no mention of Camp 23 Medical Point in Wehrmacht records. There were no records of how many women passed through its doors. There were no photographs, no official witnesses, but there were memories.
And these memories haunted the few who survived to the end of their days. This is the story they tried to erase from history. The story of women whose bodies were turned into experimental fields, whose cries were drowned out by the sounds of war, whose names disappeared into the silence of time.
But some stories refuse to die, and this is one of them. The winter of 1943 was particularly harsh in western Russia. The German occupation had already lasted a year and a half, and the territory under Wehrmacht control had been transformed into a network of camps, fortresses, and makeshift military installations. Among them, discreetly located 40 km south of Smolensk, was an old textile factory.
The building was ideal for what the Germans had in mind. Isolated, surrounded by forests with thick walls that muffled any sound. The factory operated until 1941, but when the Germans arrived, the workers fled or were shot. The machines were dismantled, the windows were boarded up, and the main workshop was transformed into something completely different.
In February 1943, the medical post at Camp 23 was fully operational, but the word “medical” was merely a euphemism. What was happening there had nothing to do with medicine. It was experimentation, torture disguised as scientific research. And the victims were Soviet women. The women were brought from other camps, Ravensbrück, Sachsenhausen, even from local prisons in the occupied territories.
Among them were Red Army nurses captured on the battlefield, guerrilla fighters imprisoned in the forests, teachers accused of anti-German activities, and simple peasant women who found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. They all arrived with the same hope of being sent to forced labor, that they still had a chance to survive.
But as they passed through the doors of the medical post at Camp 23, that hope vanished. In the center of this inferno stood a man in a white coat. Dr. Ernst Völker, an SS officer who graduated from the University of Berlin in 1936. In photographs taken before the war, he looked like an ordinary man. Of average height, blond hair, round glasses, nothing about him revealed the monster.
But within those stone walls, Völker transformed into something inhuman. He didn’t shout, he showed no emotion, he worked with absolute method, as if the women before him were not living beings, but simply objects to be studied. Völker kept detailed records of everything. Every injection, every reaction, every scream was recorded in his notebooks with scientific precision.
He described the experiments as if he were writing an academic paper, using cold, emotionless language that made the horror even more unbearable. One of his notes, discovered decades later, read: “Subject 47, female, approximately 28 years old. Injection of solution A into the right thigh. Time 14:37. Reaction observed after 4 minutes. Convulsions, vomiting, screams. Subject loses consciousness at 14:52. Death declared at 15:01. Tissue samples taken for analysis.”
Subject 47. Not even her name was written down. She was just a number in Völker’s notebook, but she had a name. Her name was Anna Petrovna Sokolova. She was 26 years old. She was a teacher in the village of Pod Vyazma. She left behind an eight-year-old son, who would never see her again.
Another man stood beside Völker. Klaus Rittner, an SS officer with impeccable posture and cold blue eyes. If Völker was the scientist of this hell, then Rittner was its administrator. Rittner was responsible for the documentation. He registered every woman who entered the camp, assigned her a number, and recorded her approximate age and physical condition.
He organized the schedule of experiments, ordered medical supplies, and coordinated the transport of bodies after death. He did everything with impeccable efficiency. For Rittner, the Camp 23 Medical Post was just another administrative task. He performed his duties with the same meticulousness with which other officers organized food deliveries or tank repairs.
His files, discovered after the war, contained organized tables, columns with names (though often replaced by numbers), arrival dates, and death dates. Everything organized, everything documented. A bureaucracy of death, executed with German precision. One of the survivors, Maria Ivanovna Lebedeva, remembered Rittner at her trial in 1975.
“He never raised his voice. He was polite, almost affable, when he spoke to us. But his eyes—his eyes were empty. He looked at us as if we were pieces of furniture, not people, just things to be cataloged.” There was another figure in this story. A woman who saw everything but had no power to stop it. Greta Hofmann, a German nurse assigned to Camp 23 Medical Point in March 1943.
Greta didn’t want to be there. She was only 23 years old. She had just finished her medical training in Hamburg when she was ordered to go to Russia. She was told she would help wounded soldiers. No one told her the truth. When Greta arrived and saw what was really happening in the camp, she was shocked. She tried to object. She told Völker that this was wrong, that this wasn’t medicine.
He looked at her with cold contempt and replied, “Frau Hofmann, you are here to follow orders, not to ask questions. If you fail to fulfill your duties, I will find you a place in another camp, as a prisoner.” Greta understood. She was imprisoned. If she refused, she would be destroyed. And so she remained. But she did something dangerous.
She began keeping a secret diary. Every night, by candlelight in her small room, Greta wrote down what she saw. She noted the names of the women when she could recognize them. She described the experiments. She documented the deaths. She did this knowing that if she were caught, she would be shot. Her diary, discovered in 1978 in a sealed box in the basement of her home in Munich, became one of the most important pieces of evidence about what happened at Camp 23 Medical Unit.
In one of her notes, dated April 15, 1943, she wrote: “Today they brought a new batch of women, 23 people. Among them was a girl who couldn’t have been more than eighteen years old. She had light braids of hair wrapped around her head. She was crying and calling for her mother. Dr. Völker chose her first. I can’t take this anymore. I can’t take it. But if I don’t continue, who will be the witness? Who will tell the world what happened here?”
Greta knew that most of the women who passed through her hands would not survive, but she also knew that she needed to remember their names, she needed to write down their stories, because if she didn’t, they would disappear forever, as if they had never existed.
The women were kept in damp stone cells in the basement of an old factory. There were no windows. There was no natural light. Only a dim lamp swayed from the ceiling as military trucks passed on the road above. The cold was so intense that some women woke up with cracked lips and shivered all night.
There were no mattresses, only old straw and torn blankets that smelled of mold and urine. The routine was always the same. At 6:00 in the morning, the soldiers banged the butts of their rifles against the iron gates of the cells. “Get out, get up.” The women were led by gruff voices through icy corridors to a large hall that had once served as a warehouse for the factory’s fabrics.
There, under the bright white light of makeshift surgical lamps, Dr. Völker conducted his experiments. Three assistants stood beside him: German nurses, forcibly recruited, who obeyed orders without raising their eyes. And in the corner of the room, always standing with his hands crossed behind his back, SS officer Klaus Rittner silently observed everything that was happening.
He never spoke, only wrote. And that was even more terrifying. “Austien Unthinknen, undress and kneel.” The order was repeated by the soldiers in broken Russian, but understandable enough. Some women submitted immediately, already resigned. Others hesitated, looking around, searching for a way to witness a miracle.
But there was nothing there, only cold, silence, and the indifferent gaze of Dr. Völker. Völker didn’t shout, didn’t threaten, he just waited. And when they were all on their knees, naked, vulnerable, he began his work, injecting unknown substances. The women received injections with solutions whose composition they knew nothing about.
Völker observed the reactions: vomiting, convulsions, loss of consciousness. He recorded everything in his notebooks: the moment the reaction began, the intensity of the symptoms, the time of death, if it occurred. Everything was recorded with scientific precision. Cold resistance tests.
Women were immersed in tanks of ice-cold water at temperatures ranging from 2 to 5 degrees Celsius, naked, immobilized with leather straps that cut into their wrists and ankles. Völker timed how long it took for them to lose consciousness. He monitored their body temperature every 5 minutes using rectal thermometers. The contact was brutal, aggressive, adding an extra layer of humiliation to the physical torture.
Some women held out for 15 minutes, others for half an hour. None of them lasted more than an hour. When they were taken out, their skin was bluish, their lips purple, their eyes glazed. Some never regained consciousness. They were returned to their cells, where they died alone in the cold at night. Völker not only observed, he also tested methods of heating.
Some women, after being submerged to the brink of death, were pressed against the naked bodies of German soldiers to gauge whether body heat could revive them. Others were immersed in hot water baths, causing thermal shock that frequently led to cardiac arrest. Völker recorded everything.
The most effective method, according to his notes, was gradual warming with heated blankets. But this conclusion came at the cost of dozens of lives. Women died of hypothermia, of cardiac arrest caused by shock, all for the sake of writing in a black notebook. Another experiment involved deliberate infections. Völker injected live bacteria—tetanus, gangrene, septicemia—into small cuts on the legs or arms of the prisoners.
He then monitored the progress of the infection without providing treatment. He noted the speed at which the fever increased, the color of the skin around the wound, and the moment when delirium began. Some died after 3 days, others after a week. He compared the results and made diagrams. And when one of them died, he simply noted: “guinea pig number 12 died next.”
He also conducted tests of experimental antiseptics applied to open wounds without anesthesia. The women screamed, writhing against the straps that bound them to the metal tables. Völker measured the intensity of the pain by observing muscle contractions, pupil dilation, and heart rate. For him, pain was not suffering.
These were physiological data that needed to be recorded and analyzed. But perhaps the most disturbing thing was the constant presence of SS officer Klaus Rittner. He never touched anyone. He never gave orders directly. He simply observed and took notes. He carried a small black leather notebook and wrote with a fountain pen, always standing, always silent, and always with the same cold gaze, as if he were witnessing a routine surgical procedure rather than an atrocity.
Rittner represented something more insidious than Völker himself. Völker was a scientist, albeit a perverted one. Rittner was a bureaucrat. He didn’t get his hands dirty, but his presence confirmed everything. He was an official witness, the guardian of administrative legality. And it was precisely this bureaucratization of horror that made all this possible.
Without Rittner, Völker would have been just a mad doctor. With Rittner, he was an authorized investigator. And it was precisely this permission, this systemic approval, that made the Nazi machine something more dangerous than simple individual violence. The German nurses who worked under Völker’s orders had different reactions. Some refused to look the prisoners in the eye.
Others developed a mechanical rigidity, following orders with robotic precision, as if emotional disconnection were the only way to survive the situation. Greta Hoffmann kept a secret diary. She wrote: “I no longer know who I am. I have become a different person. A person who holds a woman’s hands while a doctor cuts off her fingers. A person who no longer cries. Someone I no longer recognize in the mirror.”
Greta was only 23 years old when she was assigned to the medical unit at Camp 23. Before the war, she dreamed of being a pediatric nurse, working in a hospital in Hamburg, helping children recover. But the war decided otherwise.
And now she spent her days assisting in the torture. In her diary, she describes how she tried to escape mentally. She recited poems by Goethe. She remembered songs from her childhood. She imagined she was somewhere else. But this only worked partially, because her hands were still there, holding the instruments. Her eyes still saw, and her presence, even passive, made her an accomplice.
The victims tried to protect themselves in every way possible. Some created small mental rituals, counting to the thousands, saying prayers, remembering the faces of children they might never see again. Others simply fainted, entering a state of emotional absence that was almost like death. But the body does not forget.
Even when the mind tries to escape, the body registers every pain, every humiliation, every violation. And it never goes away. In July, a prisoner, a young woman of approximately 25 years old, identified only as number 19, managed to carve a message into the wall of her cell with a rusty nail. The message read: “My name is Elizaveta Sokolova. I existed.”
When the ruins were explored in 1977, the message was still there, covered in moss, but legible. It was photographed, cataloged, and today hangs in a museum in Moscow, in a permanent exhibition dedicated to war crimes. Elizaveta was a teacher in a small village near Smolensk. She was arrested because she refused to hand over the Jewish family she was hiding in the basement. She was 26 years old.
She loved Pushkin’s poetry and played the violin. She wanted to travel around Europe after the war. She never did. She died in that cell three days after carving her name into it. But that name remained, and today it is all that is left of her. But despite everything, some survived not because they were saved, but because their bodies, for some reason, resisted more than those of others.
When the medical post at Camp 23 was evacuated in April 1944, 17 women were still alive. They were transferred to other camps, where they were lost in the chaos of the war’s end. Some were liberated by the Allies in 1945, but died soon after, physically and emotionally broken. And a few managed to return home. But they never spoke about what they had been through.
At least not publicly, because who would believe them? Postwar Soviet society didn’t want to hear about these horrors. People wanted to recover, forget, move on. And the women who survived those camps carried a shame they didn’t deserve. A shame imposed by a world that chose not to know. Moreover, under Stalin, those who survived German captivity were often considered traitors.
They were interrogated by the NKVD, accused of collaborating with the enemy. Many lost their jobs, were sent to the Gulag, or lived under constant surveillance. Then they remained silent. They buried their memories. They tried to return to a normal life, but some scars never heal. Never. And the question no one wanted to ask: how many other places like this existed? How many other women disappeared in silence? The answer is horrifying.
When Allied forces liberated the territories between 1944 and 1945, thousands of Nazi documents were captured, cataloged, and archived. But not all survived. Many records were deliberately destroyed by the Germans themselves before their retreat. Others simply disappeared, lost in the chaos of the postwar period.
And some were deliberately hidden. Because they contained truths that no one—not the Allies, not the Soviet authorities, not even the Germans themselves—wanted to be revealed. Ernst Völker’s notebooks were among these missing documents. Officially, they never existed. But in 1977, nine years after the discovery of the sealed cellar at the site of the former factory, an antique dealer in Munich put a collection of historical documents from the Second World War up for sale.
Among them were three black hardcover notebooks, handwritten in German, with detailed notes on medical experiments conducted between 1943 and 1944. The buyer was the Soviet historian Nikolai Morozov, a war crimes expert working in Moscow. When he began to read, he realized he had something explosive in his hands.
The notebooks contained meticulous records, dates, code names, descriptions of procedures, and results. Völker noted everything with a clinical coldness that made reading it all the more disturbing. “Subject f. Female, estimated age 28. Experiment. Immersion in water at Chvordi Gyüyse temperature. Duration 22 minutes. Result: Loss of consciousness 18 minutes. Final body temperature 30 digi. Subject died during the night.” Page after page, the same notes were constantly repeated. The numbers, the death data, as if they were agricultural research statistics and not a record of torture. Morozov spent weeks locked in his office, reading and rereading each page.
He compared the dates with other historical documents. He looked for inconsistencies, but everything seemed authentic. The handwriting was consistent, the medical vocabulary was accurate, the anatomical details were precise. And most disturbingly, the tone. Völker didn’t write like a criminal trying to hide his actions.
He wrote as a researcher documenting a scientific experiment. There was no trace of guilt, no euphemism, no attempt at moral justification, only facts, observations, conclusions. But what was most shocking was not the experiments themselves. It was the naturalness with which they were described.
Völker showed no guilt. He didn’t use euphemisms. He simply reported, like a scientist noting a chemical reaction. And this revealed something horrifying. For him, these women weren’t really people. They were biological material. And this dehumanization wasn’t the result of hatred or sadism, but of a cold, rational, almost bureaucratic logic.
It was the banality of evil, as the philosopher Hannah Arendt would describe it years later when analyzing Nazi crimes. Morozov knew he needed to verify the authenticity of the notebooks before making them public. He consulted graphology experts, who confirmed that the inscription did indeed date from the 1940s.
He consulted experts, historians of the Wehrmacht, who recognized the codes and terminology used. He sent paper samples to a laboratory in Switzerland, which confirmed that the paper and ink matched those used in Germany during the war. Everything pointed to one thing: the notebooks were genuine. Morozov became obsessed with them.
He spent years cross-referencing information with other documents, seeking to confirm their authenticity, and found clues. Reports from German military personnel mentioned an experimental medical unit in western Russia without providing details. Testimonies from former soldiers confirmed the existence of interrogation centers where civilian prisoners were held.
And human remains found in 1978 matched the descriptions in the notebooks. Everything fit, but something was still missing. There weren’t enough living witnesses. He searched Soviet archives. He contacted some associations of former party members. He placed ads in regional newspapers. But for years he received no response. Many of the women who survived the camp had died within decades.
Others had emigrated, changed their names, severed all ties with the past. And those who were still alive often preferred to remain silent, because speaking meant reliving, and reliving was too painful. In 1991, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Morozov published an advertisement in Russian newspapers asking anyone who had been imprisoned in German camps in western Russia between 1943 and 1944 to contact him.
He wasn’t expecting much, but he received three letters. Three women, now elderly, who said they had been together, something no one would believe. Morozov went to meet them, and what they said confirmed everything. The first was Sofia Lebedeva, 78 years old, a resident of Moscow. She was captured in 1943, at the age of 21, accused of helping the guerrillas.
She was taken to an old factory and kept there for eight months. When Morozov showed her the pages from the notebooks, she began to tremble. “I remember this order,” she said, pointing to the note. “Austinhinkin, take off your clothes and get on your knees. I heard this every day, every single day.” She spoke of tanks of ice water, injections, women who were taken away and never returned.
And then she said something that struck Morozov. “The worst part wasn’t the pain. The worst thing was knowing that nobody cared, that we didn’t exist for the world, that we were nothing.” Sofia described how the women tried to support each other in their cells, how they whispered prayers together in the dark, how they shared the meager rations of moldy bread they received once a day.
How could she hold one of their hands as she was being taken away, knowing she might not return? These small acts of solidarity were all that remained of their shared humanity, designed to wrest it from them. She also remembered the sounds: the clatter of boots in the hallways, the creaking of metal doors, the shouts of orders in German, the silence that followed, and sometimes, very rarely, a shout that would suddenly stop, and then nothing again.
This silence was worse than any scream, because it meant that someone had stopped fighting, someone had given up, or worse, died. Sofia remembered one night when a woman in the next cell began to sing. She sang a lullaby in a low, trembling voice. There were no words, just a melody, soft and sad.
Gradually, other women joined her. Each in her own cell, they sang the same melody. For a few minutes, the corridors were filled not with screams, but with singing, a fragile yet firm act of resistance. The following morning, the woman who had begun singing was taken away. She never returned, but the music remained. In memory of those who survived.
Sofia told Morozov: “I still remember that melody. I sometimes sing it when I’m alone, and I cry every time.” The second witness was Margarita Belogo, 75 years old, living in a nursing home in St. Petersburg. She was very frail, but still conscious. She described Völker as a man who never shouted. He was calm. Always calm.
“And it was worse than any scream,” she said. She remembered a German nurse who wept silently while holding a tray of surgical instruments. “I think she was as much a victim as we were,” said Margarita. “Only her imprisonment was invisible.” Margarita also recounted a detail that chilled Morozov to the bone. She remembered a young woman, perhaps 18 years old, who was brought to the camp in March 1944.
She was about five months pregnant. Völker was fascinated by her. He wanted to observe how the cold affected the fetus. He subjected her to repeated hypothermia tests. The young woman pleaded, she cried, she screamed that she would carry the child to term, that she would do whatever he wanted afterward, but that he had to stay with the child.
Völker didn’t answer. He simply made notes in his notebook, coldly and methodically, as if he were recording meteorological data. Two weeks later, she suffered a miscarriage. The fetus was removed and preserved in a jar of formaldehyde, and the young woman died of hemorrhage three days later. Margarita remembered her face, but not her name.
Nobody knew her name. She was just a number in Völker’s notebook. Subject 34: Margarita also recalled how the German nurse, the same one who was crying silently, tried to help after the abortion. She brought rags to stop the bleeding. She held the young woman’s hand, but Völker ordered her to stop. “Don’t interfere,” he said.
“Let the process happen naturally. I need clean data.” The nurse stepped back. She had to obey, but Margarita saw her face, saw the pain in her eyes, saw how something inside her broke at that moment. The third to speak was Elena Grishina, 69, who emigrated to Israel after the war. She never spoke about her experience, not even with her family.
“I tried to forget,” she told Morozov, “but such things are not forgotten. They just stay buried, and when someone touches them, they come back as if it were yesterday.” Elena confirmed the existence of the basement. We knew there were bodies down there. We could smell them, but we never talked about it because talking was admitting that we would be next. Elena was a literature teacher before the war. She was arrested for refusing to remove banned books from her school library.
She remembered reciting Tyutchev’s poems in her head during the experiments. It was her way of escaping, of remaining human, of remembering that there was something beyond that pain. She told Morozov that even now, almost 50 years later, she cannot read Tyutchev without trembling. “The words that once saved me now hurt me,” she whispered.
“Each verse reminds me of that place, of the cold, the pain, of the women who died beside me.” Elena also spoke about survivor’s guilt. “Why me? Why did I survive and they didn’t? What made me special? Nothing. It was just luck. A cruel and random luck. And I carry that with me every day. Every day I see their faces, hear their voices, and I wonder: do I deserve to live when they died?”
With their testimonies, Morozov was able to construct a comprehensive report. He conducted another 10 years of research, interviewing former German soldiers and scouring military archives. Finally, in 2001, he published a book called “Silent Women of Smolensk.” The book caused a great stir in Russia and abroad.
For the first time, the story of Camp 23 Medical Point was told publicly, and the reaction was shocking. Not because people didn’t know the Nazis were committing atrocities—that was already known—but because this particular story had been completely erased. These women died nameless, unregistered, without memory.
And if it weren’t for these notebooks, found by chance, they would never have existed. The book was translated into several languages, discussed at universities, documentaries were made, and exhibitions were organized. And suddenly these forgotten women began to find their names. Families sought out Morozov, saying that their grandmother, their aunt, their mother had disappeared during the war and never returned.
Some finally managed to give the number a name. Some finally managed to mourn someone they had lost without ever knowing how. But one question remained unanswered. What happened to Völker? He disappeared after the camp was evacuated in 1944. There was no record of his arrest, trial, or death.
Some speculated that he had fled to South America like other Nazi war criminals. Others believed that he adopted a new identity and lived peacefully in West Germany until he died of old age. But the truth is that nobody knows, and this impunity can be as horrific as the crimes themselves. Morozov spent years searching for traces of Völker.
He consulted the Nuremberg trial lists. He searched the archives of Mossad, which pursued Nazi fugitives. He contacted investigators in Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay. But he found nothing. Völker disappeared as if he had never existed. And somewhere, perhaps, he lived to a peaceful old age, without having to face what he had done, without paying, without answering.
It was yet another wound that would never heal. But the story didn’t end there, because decades passed and one of the survivors did something that changed everything. She decided to return. Spring 2005. Sofia Lebedeva was 83 years old. She had spent 62 years trying to forget that place. But she couldn’t.
The images kept returning to her in her dreams. The voices echoed when she was alone. And the more time passed, the more she felt she needed to return. Not for revenge, not to confront ghosts, but to close a cycle that was never truly closed. For years she rejected the idea. She told herself it was useless, that it wouldn’t change anything, that the dead were dead, and that awakening the past would only reopen old traumas.
But something inside her refused to let go. It was like an unpaid debt, a promise that hadn’t been kept. She survived. So many others didn’t. And she felt she owed them something. She needed to bear witness. She needed to return to the place where it all happened and say, “I remember, you existed, you haven’t been forgotten.”
She invited Morozov to accompany her. He agreed. And together, on a cold April morning, they traveled to the Smolensk region, to the land where an old textile factory once stood. The parking lot built in the eighties was still there. Cracked asphalt, several empty spaces. No plaque, no memorial, no sign that something terrible had happened there.
Sofia stood motionless in the middle of the parking lot, looking around, trying to recognize something. “It was here, Ki,” she said. “I’m sure of it. There was a gate there, there was an entrance to the basement. I remember every stone.” The journey to this place had been difficult for her. On the train, she remained silent, looking out the window, her arms tightly wrapped around her knees.
Morozov didn’t try to speak. He knew that some things couldn’t be expressed in words. When they arrived at the nearest train station, she hesitated before getting off. “I don’t know if I can do this,” she whispered, but she got off anyway, because she knew she had to. Morozov brought photographs of old things, maps, and documents.
He managed to pinpoint the exact location of the factory entrance. And Sofia slowly approached that place, leaning on her cane. When she reached the spot, she fell to her knees and began to cry. This was not a recent pain. It was an old pain, accumulated, compressed for decades.
And now she could finally let her go. Her hands trembled, her body gave way under the weight of memories. She touched the asphalt as if she could smell, through the layers of concrete and time, the scent of the earth where so many women were buried. She closed her eyes and saw them: Elizabeth, Margaret, Anna, Clara, Isabella, Jeanne.
Blurred faces, muffled voices, ghosts that never left her. “They didn’t deserve this,” she said between sobs. “None of us deserved this, but they deserve it even less because I survived. They didn’t.” She stood there for almost an hour in silence, just breathing, as if she were saying goodbye. And then she did something unexpected.
She pulled a small list of names from her bag. Names she had memorized over the years. Women she had known, women she had met in this place. Women who never returned. And she began to read the names aloud, one by one: Elizaveta Sokolova, Margarita Ivanova, Anna Petrovna, Klara Smirnova, Izabella Kuznetsova, Zhanna Volkova.
They were names without surnames, sometimes without dates, without faces. But she remembered them, and now, finally, they were spoken aloud, right there in the same place where they had been crushed. Morozov wrote everything down. He filmed it with the small camera he had brought. He knew that this moment was historic not only for Sofia, but for all those women whose names were being recited.
It was an act of resurrection, an act of resistance against oblivion, and he knew he needed to preserve it. After reading all the names, Sofia took a small envelope from her bag. Inside was a lock of hair. Her own lock of hair, cut in 1943 when she arrived at the camp. She had kept it for 62 years. She didn’t know why.
Perhaps as proof. Perhaps as a connection to the young woman she had been. Perhaps simply because she couldn’t let go of it. But now she knew what she had to do. She buried the lock of hair in a small crack in the asphalt. “You are finally free,” she murmured. “Me too.” Morozov used this material to pressure Russian authorities to create a memorial.
It took time: bureaucracy, discussion, budget, resistance from those who didn’t want to revisit the past. But Morozov didn’t give up. He wrote articles, gave lectures, convinced politicians, mobilized survivors’ associations. And finally, in 2010, a small bronze memorial plaque was installed at the site.
The inscription read: “Here, between 1943 and 1944, dozens of Soviet women were tortured and murdered on orders from the Nazi occupation forces. May their names, even forgotten, never be erased.” The inauguration of the memorial was a very emotional moment. Dozens of people were present: relatives of the victims, historians, students, journalists, and Sofia.
She sat in the front row, very upright despite her age, her gaze fixed on the memorial plaque. When the city mayor removed the veil covering her, she closed her eyes and murmured something no one heard. But Morozov, who was beside her, saw her lips. She said, “Thank you.”
After the ceremony, several people approached Sofia. Some were descendants of victims who disappeared during the war. Others were simply people touched by her story. A young woman, perhaps in her twenties, shook her hand and said, “My grandmother disappeared in 1943. Her name was Klara Dubova. I don’t know if she was here, but thank you for remembering.”
“Kla? Yes, I knew Klara. She sang, even in the dark, she sang.” The young woman began to cry, and Sofia held her in her arms. Sofia died in 2013, at the age of 91. But before her death, she gave one last interview. She said: “I don’t want people to feel sorry for me. I want them to understand what happened because it wasn’t just us. It was about what happens when humanity is thrown in the trash, when ordinary people accept orders without questioning, when silence becomes complicity. And I need you to know, this can happen anytime, anywhere, if we are not careful.”
This interview was broadcast on Russian television. It moved millions of people. Schools began inviting historians to talk about the history of Camp 23 Medical Point, and textbooks were updated to include this story. And slowly, very slowly, these forgotten women began to find their way back into the collective memory.
But the story doesn’t end with Sofia. In 2017, another survivor came forward. Her name was Louise Petrova. She was 93 years old and lived in a small village in Siberia. She read Morozov’s book and watched an interview with Sofia. And she decided she had to speak up too. She contacted Morozov and told him her story. She spent 6 months imprisoned at medical camp 23 in 1944.
She survived, but never spoke. “Never, not even to my husband who died 20 years ago, not to my children, not even to myself.” Louise buried her memories so deep that she almost managed to forget them. Almost. But they kept coming back in nightmares, in moments of silence, in smells that reminded her of disinfectant, in sounds that reminded her of boots in the hallways.
And now, at 93, she knew she didn’t have much time left. If she didn’t speak now, she never would, and these women’s stories would be forgotten. She told Morozov details he had never heard before. She remembered the German nurse who secretly slipped a piece of bread into her hand late at night.
She remembered the woman who sang a lullaby before she died. She remembered Völker’s face, always calm, always dispassionate, as if he were observing insects under a microscope. And she remembered the phrase, that phrase: “Austin undhinkniin, undress and kneel.” She could still hear it even now, even years later.
“It’s an echo that never stops,” she said. “It lives in me and will only die when I die.” Morozov recorded Louise’s testimony and added it to the second edition of his book, published in 2018. This edition also contained family letters from the victims, discovered photographs, and newly discovered documents.
The book became even more complete, even more powerful, and continued to move people around the world. Today, the story of Camp 23 Medical Point is taught in some Russian schools as part of the war crimes curriculum, but it remains relatively unknown. And many victims whose names remain unknown. There are projects by historians trying to identify more women by cross-referencing lists of missing persons with found records.
But it’s a slow process because at the time these women weren’t counted, and it’s easy to erase someone from history. It’s almost impossible to recover them. History students at Moscow State University created a digital project called Forgotten Voices of Smolensk. It collects evidence, digitizes documents, and creates archives accessible online.
They contacted families throughout Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine. They found letters written by the women shortly before their arrest: photographs, marriage certificates, birth certificates. Small fragments of life that existed before the horror. One of the students, Alexei Kuznetsov, dedicated his doctoral thesis to the medical post at Camp 23.
He spent five years conducting research in military archives in Germany, France, and Poland. He asked questions of the descendants of German soldiers. He searched for traces of Völker. He never found any. But he did find evidence that the medical camp 23 was not an isolated case, that there were other similar places, other hidden laboratories, other missing women.
And the scale of these crimes was far more serious than we imagined. In his dissertation, Kuznetsov writes: “What happened at Camp 23 Medical Point was not an anomaly. It was a system. A system that turned human beings into guinea pigs. A system that functioned with bureaucratic efficiency. And the most horrifying thing of all is that it was not the work of monsters. It was the work of ordinary people who accepted the abnormal as the norm.”
Kuznetsov also discovered something surprising. In 2019, while working in a German archive in Berlin, he found the personal file of Greta Hoffmann, the German nurse who kept a secret diary. After the war, she returned to Hamburg.
She never married. She never had children. She worked as a nurse in a children’s hospital until her retirement in 1978. In 1985, she committed suicide. She left a note: “I can no longer carry this burden. I have seen what no one should have seen. I have done what no one should have done. I thought time would heal the wounds, but some wounds are too deep. Forgive me.”
Greta’s diary was found after her death by her niece, who donated it to an archive in Munich in 1982. It remained there unnoticed until Kuznetsov discovered it in 2019. The diary contained a detailed description of what happened in the medical unit of Camp 23. Women’s names, dates, experiments and, most importantly, her internal struggle.
In one of her last entries, dated May 1944, shortly before the camp was evacuated, she wrote: “I no longer know who I am. I have become complicit in the horror. I told myself I had no choice. But that is a lie. I had a choice. I could have refused, I could have died, but I chose to live. And that choice cost me my soul.”
Greta’s diary was published in 2020 under the title “Witness in White: The Diary of a German Nurse in Smolensk.” The book sparked a major debate in Germany about responsibility, complicity, and moral boundaries in extreme situations. But people continue to read Morozov’s book. Greta Hoffmann’s diary was published. Völker’s notebooks are kept in a museum in Moscow and are available for consultation.
These are testimonies, reminders, open wounds that cannot be ignored. In 2021, a special ceremony was held at the memorial. Candles were lit, names were read, and a new plaque was added with the names of the thirty-seven women who were identified through the work of historians. 37 names among dozens. But this was only the beginning.
It was a victory over oblivion. And the phrase that was repeated on the walls, in the newspapers, in memories: “Austiininukhinin, undress and kneel.” This is no longer just an order, it is a silent cry. A cry that spanned a decade, buried, forgotten, but that still resonates today because these women existed, they loved, they dreamed, they resisted.
And their story is not just a story of the past. It’s a warning for the future. A warning about what happens when humanity is forgotten, when orders are followed without question, when silence becomes complicity. Today, if you visit the site of the old textile factory, you will see a small bronze plaque, you will see names, you will see dates, but you will also feel something more.
You will feel the presence of those who have disappeared. You will hear the echo of their voices. And perhaps, if you stop for a moment, if you close your eyes, you will hear a soft song, a lullaby, a song of resistance, a song of memory, because memory is the only weapon against forgetting, and as long as we remember, they live on.
Names we know today thanks to the work of historians: Elizaveta Sokolova. The teacher, 26, died in July 1943. Anna Petrovna, Red Army nurse, 28, died in February 1943. Klara Smirnova, partisan, 25, died in March 1944. Isabella Kuznetsova, peasant, 32. She died in December 1943.
Zhanna Volkova, a teacher, 45 years old. She died in August 1943. Maria Petrova, a pregnant woman, 18 years old, died in March 1944, and 31 others, and dozens more whose names we will never know. But they existed, they mattered, and their story will not be forgotten. This is not just a war story, it is a story of what happens when humanity is forgotten, when victims become numbers, when silence becomes the norm.
And this is the story of why we must remember, why we must speak out, why we must never let this happen again. Because history repeats itself over and over again in different ways, in different places, but always the same thing: dehumanization, indifference, silence. And the only way to stop it is to remember, to bear witness, to speak out.
These women can no longer speak, but we can. We owe it to them, to ourselves, to the future. Don’t forget. Never forget. M.
