26. One of the Red Army’s Deadliest Women
Roza Shanina was assigned to a sniper platoon in the spring of 1944, and by early April, she had killed her first German. That first dead Nazi unnerved her, but before long, she was knocking off Germans with as much detachment as if they had been tin cans on a fence. During a five-day stretch, Roza shot dead 13 Germans while under near-constant artillery and machinegun fire. For that feat of bravery under fire, she was decorated with the Order of Glory.
By the summer of 1944, as her body count climbed, Roza Shanina became a national heroine, with her photo featured on the front pages of Soviet newspapers. By the end of August, 1944, she had killed 42 Nazis. She was killed in East Prussia in January of 1945, while trying to shield a wounded comrade with her body. By then, she had been credited with 59 confirmed kills.