Female Sniper Facts

  • The Central Women’s Sniper Training School operated from 1942-1945 and trained 1,061 snipers; one in five survived the war

  • In 1943, students at the school pooled 69,260 rubles from their savings to manufacture additional rifles for the Red Army

  • Female snipers on the Kalinin Front destroyed 433 enemy soldiers and officers by August, 1943

  • Shura Erensteine was the only Jewish female sniper in her division, and there were others in different platoons including Bella Epstein, Genya Peretyatko, and Nadezhda Volkova; overall, 500,000 Jews served in the Red Army during WWII, Yad Vashem (The World Holocaust Remembrance Center) estimates, with more than 32,000 receiving military decorations, and approximately one-third of Soviet Jews in the military killed

  • The oldest female sniper was Nina Petrova, 48, when the war began; she trained 512 other snipers during her career, killed 122 during WWII, and died after a mortar attack on May 1, 1945

  • School graduates exterminated more than 11,280 enemy soldiers and officers during WWII

  • The most glorified female sniper was Lyudmila Pavlichenko, ‘Lady Death’ with a tally of 309 kills (eloquently portrayed in Kate Quinn’s, The Diamond Eye)

  • A platoon of female snipers destroyed 259 enemy soldiers and officers over a month and a half in 1944