Makarova by mistake
Antonina Parfenova (according to another version of Panfilov) was born in one of the Smolensk villages in 1920. It is believed that the name Makarov went to her by mistake. Allegedly, when she came to school, out of fear and excitement, she could not give her last name in response to the teacher's question. Classmates sitting nearby told the teacher that she was Makarova - in fact, that was the name of her father. However, the mistake took hold and then migrated to all other documents - a Komsomol ticket, a passport, etc.
The story is rather strange, but still not fantastic - although the inaction of Antonina's parents, who did not correct the mistake of the school teacher, is puzzling. It is rather unusual when the whole large family (she had six brothers and sisters) has one last name, and one child has a completely different one. In the end, this creates a lot of inconvenience. Again, one surname is recorded in the metric, and another in all other documents.
But theoretically this can be explained. In those days, population registration was very weak, passports were not issued to peasants, and having arrived in the city and received a passport, a person could call himself any surname, and it was recorded from his words.
The youthful biography of Antonina is not entirely clear either. According to one version, she came to Moscow with her parents. But in this case, they should have been issued passports together, and, of course, the passport officers would have paid attention to the mismatch of surnames.
According to another version, Antonina left alone and lived with her aunt. In this case, it is easier to explain the change of surname. In addition, she could get married and divorce quickly. In a word, the story of the transformation of Antonina Parfyonova / Panfilova into Makarova is still a mystery.
Front
Soon the war began. Antonina at that time was studying to be a doctor. Some sources say that initially she served as a civilian barmaid in one of the military units, and then was transferred to the orderlies.
It is known for sure that she was drafted into the 422nd Regiment of the 170th Infantry Division by the Leninsky District Military Commissariat of Moscow on August 13, 1941 with the rank of sergeant. There were two 170th divisions in the Soviet army: the first and second formations. The division of the first perished under Velikiye Luki. The division of the second formation was created in 1942 and completed its combat path in East Prussia. Makarova served in the first.
Before the war, the division was stationed in Bashkiria, and mainly local conscripts served there. Makarova got into it as a replenishment. The division in the first days of the war took on a powerful blow from the Germans in the Sebezh area. She was surrounded and managed to break through with heavy losses. In late July - early August, it was replenished and sent to defend Velikiye Luki.
The front line of the future executioner was short-lived. On August 26, the city was taken, and Makarova, who barely had time to arrive, was surrounded. Only a few hundred of her colleagues were able to break through and go out to their own. The rest either died or were captured. Later, the 170th Rifle Division was disbanded due to the fact that it ceased to exist as a combat unit.
The Germans were not able to establish serious control over the huge mass of prisoners (more than 600 thousand people were captured near Vyazma alone), who actually lived in an open field. Having seized the moment, Makarova fled with her colleague Fedchuk. Until winter, they wandered through the forests, sometimes finding shelter in the villages. Fedchuk made his way home to the Bryansk region, where his family lived. And Makarova went with him, because she had nowhere to go, and it’s difficult for a 21-year-old girl to survive alone in the autumn forest.
In January 1942, they finally reached the village of Red Well, where Fedchuk announced to her that they were breaking up and he was returning to his family. Then Makarova wandered alone through the surrounding villages.
Elbow
So Makarova got to the village of Lokot. There she found shelter with a local resident, but not for long. The woman noticed that she was looking at her brother-in-law, and even he seemed to like her. She did not want to put an "extra mouth" on the balance of the family in troubled wartime, so she drove Makarova away, advising her to go either to the partisans or to serve in the local collaborationist administration. According to another version, a suspicious girl was detained in the village by local police.
It is worth noting that Lokot was not a typical occupied settlement. Unlike the rest, where the power was wholly owned by the Germans, self-government existed in Lokot. However, it did not go beyond certain limits. Initially, the Lokot system existed only in the village, but in 1942 it was extended to the whole district. So the Lokotsky district appeared. Local collaborators did not enjoy full independence, but they had self-government in a much broader framework than in the rest of the occupied lands.
In Lokot, as elsewhere, there was a police force. Its peculiarity was that at first the line between the police and the partisans was quite illusory. In the ranks of the local police, defectors from among the partisans, tired of the hardships of life in the forest, were not uncommon. Even the former head of a department of one of the local district executive committees served in the police. In post-war trials of local collaborators, former party members and Komsomol members often acted as defendants. The opposite was also not uncommon. The policemen, having gorged themselves on "police rations", fled into the woods to the partisans.
At first, Makarova simply served in the police. The moment of her transformation into an executioner is unknown. Most likely, she was offered such a specific job because she was not local. The police could still justify themselves by saying that they went to the service under duress and that they were simply keeping order (although this was far from always the case), but the executioner is a completely different story. Few people wanted to shoot their fellow villagers. So Makarova, as a Muscovite, was offered the position of executioner, and she agreed.
Number of victims
This period is most mythologized by modern publicists. Makarova is credited with some completely "Stakhanovite" pace of executions. In this regard, the figure of one and a half thousand shot by her during the year of service as an executioner was established as the "official" figure. In fact, she shot, apparently, still less.
At the trial, Tonka the machine gunner was accused of executing 167 people (in some sources - 168). These are the persons who have been identified by the testimony of witnesses and from the surviving documents. It is very likely that several dozen more people were not included in the lists. The Lokotsky district had its own judicial system and the death penalty was sentenced only by the decision of the courts-martial.
After the war, the trial of Stepan Mosin (deputy chief burgomaster Kaminsky) took place. He claimed that during the entire existence of the Lokotsky District, military field courts sentenced about 200 people to death. At the same time, some of the executed were hanged (in which Makarova did not take part).
Mosin has every reason to downplay the number of those executed. But even according to archival data, most of the victims in the area account for punitive anti-partisan actions in the villages, where people were executed on the spot. And in the district prison, where Makarova worked as an executioner, those sentenced by the local court were executed.
The figure of 1,500 shot by Makarova, apparently, was taken from the "Act of the commission to establish the facts of the atrocities of the German occupiers in the Brasovsky district of October 22, 1945." It says: "In the autumn of 1943, during the last days of their stay in the region, the Germans shot 1,500 people in the fields of the horse farm."
It was on this field that Makarova shot her victims. And the Lokot prison itself was located in a converted building of a horse farm. However, the document states that the executions were carried out in the last days before the German retreat, in September 1943. By this time, Makarova was no longer there. According to one version, she ended up in the hospital even before the Lokot collaborators left for Belarus, according to another, she left with them. But they left Lokot back in August, a week and a half before the Germans left.
Nevertheless, the executions proven by the court are more than enough to consider her one of the bloodiest female killers. The scale of Makarova's atrocities is apparently exaggerated by publicists, but it is still terrifying. One can speak with absolute certainty of at least two hundred shot by her own hand.
disappearance
In August 1943, in connection with the offensive of the Soviet army, the situation in the Lokotsky district became critical. Several thousand collaborators and their families left for Belarus. Then Makarova also disappeared.
There are versions that describe her disappearance in different ways. According to one of them, she ended up in the hospital with a venereal disease. And then she persuaded some compassionate German corporal to hide her in the wagon train. But it is possible that she simply left with the rest of the collaborators, and then ran away to the Germans.
She was not useful to them, so she was sent to a military factory in Königsberg, where she worked until the end of the war. In 1945 the city was taken by the Soviet troops. Makarova, among the other prisoners and driven to work, was tested in the NKVD check-filtration camps.
In many publications there are allegations that she allegedly either forged or stole someone's nurse's documents and thus returned to military service. These are the conjectures of modern authors. In fact, under her own name, she successfully passed all the checks. An archival document from the base of the Ministry of Defense, in which she appears, has been preserved. It reads: "Antonina Makarovna Makarova, born in 1920, non-partisan, called up to the rank of sergeant by the Leninsky district military registration and enlistment office of Moscow on August 13, 1941 in the 422nd regiment. Was captured on October 8, 1941. Sent for further service in the marching company of the 212th reserve rifle regiment April 27, 1945".
At the same time, Makarova met the Red Army soldier Ginzburg. He just distinguished himself in one of the April battles, having destroyed 15 enemy soldiers from a mortar (for which he was awarded the medal "For Courage"), and was treated for a slight shell shock. They soon got married.
Makarova did not need to compose complex legends. It was enough just to keep silent about his service as an executioner. Otherwise, her biography did not raise questions. A young nurse was captured in the first days at the front, was sent by the Germans to the factory, and worked there throughout the war. Therefore, she did not arouse any suspicions among the inspectors.
Search
At one time, there was a popular joke about the elusive Joe, whom no one was looking for. This fully applies to Makarova, who lived in the USSR openly for more than 30 years. And just a few hours drive from the place of their "glory" - after the war, she and her husband settled in Lepel.
At first, the Soviet authorities did not know anything about Makarova at all. Later, they received testimony from the former commandant of the Lokotsky district prison, who said that a certain Tonya Makarova, a former nurse from Moscow, was involved in the executions in it.
However, the search was soon abandoned. According to one version, the Bryansk security officers (it was they who investigated her case) mistakenly considered her dead and closed the case. According to another, they got confused because of the confusion with her last name. But, apparently, if they were looking for it, it was extremely careless.
Already in 1945, she "lit up" in army documents under her own name. And are there many Antonin Makarovs in the USSR? Probably several hundred. And if we subtract those who did not live in Moscow and did not serve as a nurse? Significantly less. The investigators in her case probably did not take into account that she could get married and change her last name, or were simply too lazy to check her along this line. As a result, Antonina Makarova-Ginzburg lived quietly for more than 30 years, working as a seamstress and not hiding from anyone. She was considered an exemplary Soviet citizen, her portrait even hung on the local honors board.
As in the case of another famous punisher Vasyura, a case helped to reach her. Her brother, a colonel in the Soviet army, was going abroad. In those days, all those leaving were strictly checked for reliability, forcing them to fill out questionnaires for all relatives. And high-ranking military men were checked even more strictly. When checking, it turned out that he himself was Parfyonov, and his sister was nee Makarova. How can this be? They became interested in this story, along the way it turned out that this Makarova was a prisoner during the war years, and her full namesake appeared on the lists of wanted criminals.
Antonina was identified by several witnesses who lived in the village at the time when she worked as an executioner. In 1978 she was arrested. Then the court took place. She did not deny it and admitted her guilt, explaining her actions by the fact that "the war forced her." She was declared sane and sentenced to death for the murder of 167 people. All appeals and petitions for clemency were rejected. On August 11, 1979, the sentence was carried out.
She became the only female punisher convicted by a Soviet court. In addition, she became the first executed woman in the entire post-Stalin period.
Researchers are still puzzling over what made the young girl choose such a terrible craft. After all, it wasn't a matter of her survival. Based on available information, she initially served in the police in support positions. There is no evidence that she was forcibly forced to become an executioner under threat of death. Most likely, it was a voluntary choice.
Some believe that to take up the craft, from which even the men who went to the service of the Germans shied away, Makarov was forced to cloud his mind after the horrors of the environment, captivity and wandering through the forests. Others, that the point is banal greed, because the position of the executioner was paid higher. One way or another, the true motives of Tonka the machine gunner remained a mystery.
Most recently, we read with you and discussed who was interested in this topic and who was not yet tired of the topic of the Great Patriotic War, I can offer this continuation of the discussion ...
She was arrested in the summer of 1978 in the Belarusian town of Lepel. A completely ordinary woman in a sand-colored raincoat with a shopping bag in her hands was walking down the street when a car stopped nearby, inconspicuous men in civilian clothes jumped out of it and said: “You urgently need to drive with us!” surrounded her, preventing her from escaping.
"Do you have any idea why you were brought here?" asked the Bryansk KGB investigator when she was brought in for her first interrogation. “Some mistake,” the woman chuckled in response.
“You are not Antonina Makarovna Ginzburg. You are Antonina Makarova, better known as Tonka the Muscovite or Tonka the machine gunner. You are a punisher, you worked for the Germans, you carried out mass executions. There are still legends about your atrocities in the village of Lokot, near Bryansk. We have been looking for you for more than thirty years - now it is time to answer for what we have done. Your crimes have no statute of limitations."
"So it's not in vain Last year my heart became anxious, as if I felt that you would appear,” the woman said. — How long ago was that. Like not with me at all. Almost all life has already passed. Well, write down…”
Young Tonya was not a monster from birth. On the contrary, from childhood she dreamed of being brave and courageous, like Chapaev's faithful comrade-in-arms - Anka the machine gunner. True, when she came to the first grade and the teacher asked her last name, she suddenly became shy. And smart peers had to shout instead of her: “Yes, she is Makarova.” In the sense that the daughter of Makar by the name of Panfilov. The teacher wrote down the new one in the journal, legitimizing the inaccuracy in further documents. This confusion then allowed the terrible Tonka the machine-gunner to escape the search for so long. After all, they were looking for her, known from the words of the surviving victims, as a Muscovite, a nurse, through family ties of all the Makarovs Soviet Union, not the Panfilovs.
After graduating from school, Antonina went to Moscow, where she found her on June 22, 1941. The girl, like thousands of her peers, asked to go to the front as a volunteer medical instructor to carry the wounded from the battlefield. Who knew that what awaited her was not romantic-cinematic skirmishes with the enemy cowardly fleeing at the first salvo, but bloody exhausting battles with superior German forces. After all, newspapers and loudspeakers assured of something else, completely different ... And here - the blood and dirt of the terrible Vyazma "cauldron", in which, literally in a matter of days of the war, more than a million Red Army soldiers laid their heads and another half a million were captured. She was among those half-dead, dying of cold and hunger, thrown to the Wehrmacht half a million. How she got out of the environment, what she experienced at the same time - it was known only to her and God.
However, she still had a choice. By hook or by crook, begging for accommodation in villages where policemen loyal to the new regime already stood, and in others, on the contrary, partisans preparing to fight the Germans, mostly encircled from the Red Army, were secretly grouped, she reached the Brasovsky district of the then Oryol region. Tonya chose not a dense forest, where fighters like her who had survived created partisan detachments, but the village of Lokot, which had become a stronghold of the National Socialist ideology and the "new order".
Today in the literature you can find facts published by historians about this collaborationist structure of traitors, formed in the village in November 1941 - after Lokot, together with neighboring settlements(now Lokot is part of the Bryansk region) was occupied by the Wehrmacht. The initiators of such "self-government" with a status that Himmler defined as "experimental" were former Soviet citizens: 46-year-old Konstantin Voskoboinik and 42-year-old Bronislav Kaminsky (I will try to make a separate post on the topic of "Lokot self-government")
... It was in this "Lokot Republic", where there were enough cartridges and bread, guns and butter, that Tonka Makarova, who made her final choice, wandered at the end of 1941. She was received personally by Kaminsky. The conversation was short, almost like in Taras Bulba. “Do you believe? Cross yourself. Good. How do you feel about communists? “I hate it,” the believing Komsomol member answered firmly. "Can you shoot?" "I can". "Does your hand tremble?" "Not". "Go to the platoon." A day later, she swore allegiance to the "Fuhrer" and received a weapon - a machine gun. Everything!
They say that before the first execution, Antonina Makarova was given a glass of vodka. For courage. After that it became a ritual. True, with some change - in all subsequent times she drank her ration after the execution. Apparently, she was afraid to lose her victims in the sight when she was drunk.
And there were at least 27 such people at each execution - exactly as many fit into the stable stall that served as a prison cell.
“All those sentenced to death were the same for me. Only their number has changed. Usually I was ordered to shoot a group of 27 people - that's how many partisans the cell contained. I shot about 500 meters from the prison near a pit. The arrested were placed in a chain facing the pit. One of the men rolled out my machine gun to the place of execution. At the command of the authorities, I knelt down and fired at people until everyone fell dead ... ”From the protocol of the interrogation of Antonina Makarova-Ginzburg in June 1978.
It will probably sound cynical and even blasphemous, but Tonka's childhood dream came true: she, almost like Chapaev's Anka, became a machine gunner. And they even gave her a machine gun - the Soviet "maxim". Often, for greater convenience, she thoroughly aimed at people while lying down.
“I did not know those whom I shoot. They didn't know me. Therefore, I was not ashamed in front of them. Sometimes you shoot, you come closer, and someone else twitches. Then again she shot in the head so that the person would not suffer. Sometimes a few prisoners had a piece of plywood hung on their chests with the inscription "Partisan". Some people sang something before they died. After the executions, I cleaned the machine gun in the guardroom or in the yard. There were plenty of cartridges…” From the record of the interrogation of Antonina Makarova-Ginzburg in June 1978.
A symbolic coincidence: the payment assigned to her for the service was 30 marks. In every sense, Judas is an award, which amazed even the battered KGB investigator Leonid Savoskin, who interrogated the arrested "executor of sentences." So Makarova was officially named in the documents of RONA. “Not all Russian policemen wanted to get dirty, they preferred that the execution of partisans and members of their families was carried out by a woman. Makarova was given a bunk in a room at a local stud farm, where she could spend the night and store a machine gun. This is from the investigation.
There she was once found by a former landlady from the village of Krasny Kolodets, who happened to spend the night with Antonina choosing her own path in life - she somehow came to a well-fed Lokot for salt, almost ending up here in the prison of the "republic". The frightened woman asked for intercession from her recent guest, who brought her to her closet. In a cramped little room stood a polished machine gun. On the floor is a laundry trough. And nearby, on a chair, washed clothes were folded in a neat pile - with numerous bullet holes. Noticing the guest’s stare fixed on them, Tonya explained: “If I like the things of the dead, then I take them off the dead, why should the good disappear: once I shot the teacher, so I liked her blouse, pink, silk, but it was painfully covered in blood , I was afraid that I would not wash it off - I had to leave it in the grave. It's a pity".
Hearing such speeches, the guest, forgetting about the salt, backed away to the door, remembering God as she went and urging Tonka to wake up. This pissed off Makarov. “Well, since you are so brave, why did you ask me for help when you were taken to prison? she screamed. - That would die like a hero! So, when the skin needs to be saved, then Tonka's friendship is good too?
Day after day, Tonka the machine-gunner continued to regularly go out to be shot. Execute the sentences of Kaminsky. How to get to work.
“It seemed to me that the war would write everything off. I was just doing my job for which I was paid. It was necessary to shoot not only partisans, but also members of their families, women, teenagers. I tried not to remember this. Although I remember the circumstances of one execution - before the execution, the guy sentenced to death shouted to me: “We won’t see you again, goodbye, sister! ..” From the protocol of the interrogation of Antonina Makarova-Ginzburg in June 1978.
She tried not to remember those she killed. Well, all those who miraculously survived after meeting her remembered Antonina Makarova for life. Already an 80-year-old gray-haired old woman, a resident of Lokt, Elena Mostovaya, told reporters how the police seized her for drawing partisan leaflets in ink. And they threw it into the stable not far from the punisher with her machine gun. “There was no electricity, the light was only the one from the window, almost completely bricked up. And only one gap - if you stand on the windowsill, you can look in and see the world of God.
Terrible memories forever etched into the memory of another local resident, Lidia Buznikova: “The groan stood. People were stuffed into stalls so that it was impossible not only to lie down, not even to sit down ... "
When they entered Lokot Soviet troops, Antonina Makarova and the trace caught a cold. The victims she shot lay in the pits and could no longer say anything. The surviving locals remembered only her heavy gaze, no less terrible than the sight of the Maxim, and scant information about the newcomer: about 21 years old, presumably a Muscovite, dark-haired, with a sullen fold on her forehead. The same data was given by the arrested accomplices of the Germans, who are being held on other cases. There was no more detailed information about the mysterious Tonka.
“Our employees have been conducting the investigation of Antonina Makarova for more than thirty years, passing it on to each other by inheritance, - KGB veteran Pyotr Golovachev is no longer afraid to reveal the cards of a long-standing case to journalists and willingly recalls details similar to a legend. - From time to time it fell into the archive, then, when we caught and interrogated another traitor to the Motherland, it again surfaced. Couldn't Tonka have disappeared without a trace?! During the post-war years, KGB officers secretly and accurately checked all the women of the Soviet Union who bore this name, patronymic and surname and were suitable in age - there were about 250 such Tonek Makarovs in the USSR. But it's useless. The real Tonka the machine-gunner seemed to have sunk into the water ... "
“Don’t scold Tonka too much,” says Golovachev. “You know, I feel sorry for her. It's all the war, damned, to blame, she broke it ... She had no choice - she could remain a person and then she herself would be among the executed. But she chose to live, becoming an executioner. But she was only 20 years old in the 41st year.
But it was impossible to just take it and forget about it. “Her crimes were too terrible,” says Golovachev. “It just didn’t fit in my head how many lives she claimed. Several people managed to escape, they were the main witnesses in the case. And so, when we interrogated them, they said that Tonka still comes to them in dreams. Young, with a machine gun, stares intently - and does not look away. They were convinced that the executioner girl was alive, and begged to be sure to find her in order to stop these nightmares. We understood that she could have gotten married a long time ago and changed her passport, so we thoroughly studied life path all her possible relatives by the name of Makarov ... "
And she, as it turned out, was just lucky. Although, what is, by and large, luck? ..
No, at the end of 1943 she did not move from Lokt to Lepel, along with the “Russian SS brigade” that followed the Germans, led by Kaminsky. Even earlier, she managed to catch a venereal disease. After all, she drowned out post-execution everyday life with more than one glass of vodka. Forty-degree doping was not enough. And therefore, in silk outfits with traces of bullets, she went “after work” to dances, where she danced until she dropped with cavaliers - policemen and marauding officers from RONA, changing like glasses in a kaleidoscope.
Strange, and perhaps natural, but the Germans decided to save their comrade-in-arms and sent Tonka, who had caught a shameful illness, to be cured in the rear hospital. So she ended up in 1945 near Koenigsberg.
...Already taken under escort to Bryansk after her arrest in Lepel, Antonina Makarova-Ginzburg told the investigators in charge of the case how she managed to escape from the German hospital when the Soviet troops approached and correct other people's documents, according to which she decided to start a new life. This is a separate story from the life of a cunning and dodgy beast.
In a completely new guise, she appeared in April 1945 in the Soviet hospital in Koenigsberg before the wounded Sergeant Viktor Ginzburg. With an angelic vision, a young nurse in a snow-white robe appeared in the ward - and the front-line soldier, rejoicing in his recovery, fell in love with her at first sight. A few days later they signed, Tonya took her husband's surname. At first, the newlyweds lived in the Kaliningrad region, and then moved to Lepel, closer to her husband's homeland, because Viktor Semenovich was from Polotsk, where his family died at the hands of punishers.
In quiet Lepel, where almost everyone knows each other and greets each other when they meet, the Ginzburg couple lived happily until the end of the seventies. A real exemplary Soviet family: both veterans of the Great Patriotic War, excellent workers, raising two daughters. Benefits, order desk, slats on the chest on holidays ... The portrait of Antonina Makarovna, as the old-timers of Lepel recall, adorned the local Honor Board. What can I say - photographs of the four veterans were even in the local museum. Later, when everything was cleared up, one of the photographs - a woman's - had to be hastily withdrawn from museum funds and sent for write-off with wording unusual for museum workers.
The exposure of the punisher was largely facilitated by chance
In 1976, a Moscow resident named Panfilov had to urgently pack up for a trip abroad. Being a disciplined man, according to all the then rules, he filled out the lengthy questionnaire that was due, without missing a single one of the relatives in the list. It was then that a mysterious detail came up: all his brothers and sisters are Panfilovs, and for some reason one is Makarova. How, pardon the pun, did it happen? Citizen Panfilov was summoned to the OVIR for additional explanations, which were attended by interested people in civilian clothes. Panfilov told about his sister Antonina living in Belarus.
What happened next, will tell the document provided by Natalya Makarova, an assistant to the press group of the KGB on Vitebsk region. So, "Information about the activities to search for" Sadists ".
“In December 1976 Ginzburg V.S. traveled to Moscow to see his wife's brother Colonel Soviet army Panfilov. It was alarming that the brother did not have the same last name as Ginzburg's wife. The collected data served as the basis for the institution in February 1977 at Ginzburg (Makarova) A.M. cases of the "Sadistka" check. When checking Panfilov, it was found out that Ginzburg A.M., as her brother indicated in his autobiography, was captured by the Germans during the war. The check also showed that she bears a strong resemblance to Makarova Antonina Makarovna, born 1920-1922, previously wanted by the KGB in the Bryansk region, a native of the Moscow region, a former nurse in the Soviet Army, who was put on the All-Union wanted list. The search for her was terminated by the KGB in the Bryansk region due to the small amount of data necessary for active search activities and death (supposedly shot by the Germans among other women with venereal disease). A group of sick women was indeed shot, but the Germans took Ginzburg (A. Makarov. - Auth.) with them to the Kaliningrad region, where she remained after the flight of the occupiers.
As we can see from the information, from time to time even the most tireless operatives, searching for the elusive Tonka, gave up. True, it immediately resumed, as soon as new facts were discovered in a history that dragged on for 33 years, which allows us to talk about the continuity of the search.
And the strange facts in the Makarova case in 1976 had already begun to pour in from a cornucopia. Contextually, collectively, so to speak, strange.
Taking into account all the conflicts that arose in the case, the investigators decided to conduct an “encrypted conversation” with her at the military registration and enlistment office. Together with Makarova, several other women, participants of the Great Patriotic War. The conversation was about participation in hostilities, ostensibly for future award cases. Front-line soldiers willingly recalled. Makarova-Ginzburg was clearly at a loss during this conversation: she could not remember either the battalion commander or her colleagues, although her military ID indicated that she fought in the 422nd sanitary battalion from 1941 to 1944 inclusive.
Further in the help it says:
“A check on the records of the military medical museum in Leningrad showed that Ginzburg (Makarova) A.M. did not serve in the 422nd sanitary battalion. However, she received an incomplete pension, which included service in the ranks of the Soviet Army during the war, while continuing to work as a senior inspector of the quality control department of the sewing workshop of the Lepel woodworking association.
Such "forgetfulness" is no longer similar to strangeness, but rather to real evidence.
But any guess requires confirmation. Now the investigators had to either obtain such confirmation, or, conversely, refute their own version. To do this, it was necessary to show your object of interest to living witnesses of the crimes of Tonka the machine gunner. Arrange, as they say, a confrontation - however, in a rather delicate form.
They began to secretly bring to Lepel those who could identify the female executioner from Loktya. It is clear that this had to be done very carefully - in order not to jeopardize, in the event of a negative result, the reputation of the “front-line soldier and excellent worker” respected in the city. That is, only one side, the identifying party, could know that the identification process was underway. The suspect was not supposed to guess anything.
Further work on the case, to put it in the dry language of the same “Information on the activities to search for the “Sadist”, was carried out in contact with the KGB in the Bryansk region. On August 24, 1977, Ginzburg (Makarova) was re-identified by Pelageya Komarova and Olga Panina, who arrived in Lepel from the Bryansk region. In the fall of 1941, Tonka filmed a corner of the first one in the village of Krasny Kolodets (remember the story about the campaign to Lokot for salt?), And the second in early 1943 was thrown by the Germans into the Lokot prison. Both women unconditionally recognized in Antonina Ginzburg Tonka the machine-gunner.
“We were terribly afraid of jeopardizing the reputation of a woman respected by all, a front-line soldier, a wonderful mother and wife,” recalls Golovachev. - Therefore, our employees traveled secretly to the Belarusian Lepel, watched Antonina Ginzburg for a whole year, brought there one by one the surviving witnesses, the former punisher, one of her lovers, for identification. Only when every single one said the same thing - this is she, Tonka the machine-gunner, we recognized her by a noticeable crease on her forehead - doubts disappeared.
On June 2, 1978, Ginzburg (Makarova) was once again identified by a woman who came from the Leningrad Region, a former cohabitant of the head of the Lokot prison. After that, the respected citizen Antonina Makarovna Lepelya was stopped on the street by polite people in civilian clothes, from whom she, as if realizing that the protracted game was over, only asked for a cigarette in a low voice. Do I need to clarify that it was the arrest of a war criminal? At the subsequent brief interrogation, she confessed that she was Tonka the machine-gunner. On the same day, officers of the KGB for the Bryansk region took Makarova-Ginzburg to Bryansk.
During the investigative experiment, she was taken to Lokot. Bryansk investigators remember well how residents who recognized her shied away and spat after her. And she walked and remembered everything. Calmly, as they remember everyday affairs.
Antonina's husband, Viktor Ginzburg, a veteran of war and labor, after her unexpected arrest, promised to complain to the UN. “We did not confess to him what the one with whom he lived happily all his life is accused of. They were afraid that the man simply would not survive this, ”the investigators said.
When the old man was told the truth, he turned gray overnight. And no more complaints.
“The arrested woman from the pre-trial detention center did not pass a single line. And by the way, she didn’t write anything to the two daughters she gave birth to after the war and didn’t ask to see him,” says investigator Leonid Savoskin. - When we managed to find contact with our accused, she began to talk about everything. About how she escaped by escaping from a German hospital and getting into our environment, she straightened out other people's veteran documents, according to which she began to live. She did not hide anything, but this was the most terrible thing. There was a feeling that she sincerely misunderstood: why was she imprisoned, what did she do SUCH terrible? It was as if she had a block of some sort from the war in her head, so that she probably wouldn’t go crazy herself. She remembered everything, each of her executions, but she did not regret anything. She seemed to me very cruel woman. I don't know what she was like when she was young. And what made her commit these crimes. Willingness to survive? Minute blackout? Horrors of war? Either way, it doesn't justify it. She killed not only strangers, but also her own family. She just destroyed them with her exposure. A psychic examination showed that Antonina Makarovna Makarova is sane.”
The investigators were very afraid of some excesses on the part of the accused: before there were cases when former policemen, healthy men, remembering past crimes, committed suicide right in the cell. The aged Tonya did not suffer from bouts of remorse. “You can’t be afraid all the time,” she said. - For the first ten years I waited for a knock on the door, and then I calmed down. There are no such sins that a person is tormented all his life.
“They disgraced me in my old age,” she complained in the evenings, sitting in her cell, to her jailers. “Now, after the verdict, I will have to leave Lepel, otherwise every fool will point his finger at me. I think they will give me three years probation. For what more? Then you need to somehow re-arrange life. And how much is your salary in the pre-trial detention center, girls? Maybe I can get a job with you - the work is familiar ... "
Her involvement in the execution of 168 people was officially proven during the investigation.
Antonina Makarova was sentenced to death. The court's decision was an absolute surprise even for the people who were investigating, not to mention the defendant herself. All petitions of 55-year-old Antonina Makarova-Ginzburg for pardon in Moscow were rejected .. The sentence was carried out on August 11, 1979
In Lokta, the Chekists took her in the old and well-known way to her - to the pit, where she carried out the sentences of Kaminsky and his gang. Bryansk investigators remember well how residents who recognized her shied away and spat after her. And she walked and remembered everything. Calmly, as they remember everyday affairs. They say that she was even surprised at people's hatred - after all, in her opinion, the war should have written everything off. And, they say, she didn’t ask for a meeting with her relatives either. Or to send word to them.
And in Lepel immediately there was talk of an event that excited everyone: it could not go unnoticed. Moreover, in Bryansk, where Antonina Makarova was tried in December 1978, Lepel residents found acquaintances - they sent the local newspaper "Bryansk Rabochiy" with a large publication under the heading "On the Steps of Betrayal." The number went from hand to hand among the locals. And on May 31, 1979, the Pravda newspaper also published a long article about the trial - under the heading "Fall". It told about the betrayal of Antonina Makarova, born in 1920, a native of Moscow (according to other sources, the village of Malaya Volkovka, Sychevsky district, Smolensk region), who worked as a senior inspector of the quality control department of the sewing workshop of the Lepel woodworking association before being exposed.
They say that she wrote appeals for pardon to the Central Committee of the CPSU, because the upcoming 1979 was supposed to be the Year of the Woman. But the judges rejected the petitions. The sentence was carried out.
This, perhaps, was not known to the newest National history. Neither all-Union, nor Belarusian. The case of Antonina Makarova turned out to be high-profile. One might even say unique. For the first time in the post-war years, a female executioner was shot by court verdict, whose involvement in the execution of 168 people was officially proven during the investigation.
However, if we approach the issue clearly from a legal point of view, then there is an opinion that, from a purely legal point of view, they did not have the right to sentence her to death. There are two reasons. The first is that more than 15 years have passed since the day the crime was committed and before the arrest, and the Criminal Code of the Soviet era did not contain rules on crimes for which the statute of limitations does not apply. A person who committed a crime punishable by shooting could be held criminally liable even after the expiration of 15 years, but in this case the death penalty was replaced by imprisonment. The second is that in the USSR in 1947 the death penalty was abolished, although it was reinstated three years later. As you know, mitigating laws are retroactive, but aggravating ones are not. Thus, since the convict was not held accountable until the abolition of the death penalty in the USSR, the abolition law applied to her in full. The law on restoration could only be applied to persons who committed crimes after its entry into force. http://www.sb.by/post/49635/
Let's remember such an operation as, as well as about, well, who cares about The original article is on the website InfoGlaz.rf Link to the article from which this copy is made -
Story Antonina Makarova-Ginzburg- a Soviet girl who personally executed one and a half thousand of her compatriots - the other, dark, treacherous side of the Great Patriotic War.
Tonka the machine gunner, as it was called then, worked on the Soviet territory occupied by the Nazi troops from the 41st to the 43rd years, carrying out the mass death sentences of the Nazis to partisan families.
Jerking the bolt of the machine gun, she did not think about those whom she was shooting - children, women, old people - it was just work for her.
“What nonsense, that then tormented by remorse. That those you kill come at night in nightmares. I still haven’t dreamed of a single one, ”she told her investigators during interrogations, when she was nevertheless identified and detained - 35 years after her last execution.
The criminal case of the Bryansk punisher Antonina Makarova-Ginzburg still rests in the bowels of the FSB special guards. Access to it is strictly prohibited, and this is understandable, because there is nothing to be proud of here: in no other country in the world has a woman been born who personally killed one and a half thousand people.
Thirty-three years after the Victory, this woman was called Antonina Makarovna Ginzburg. She was a front-line soldier, a labor veteran, respected and revered in her town. Her family had all the benefits required by status: an apartment, insignia for round dates and a scarce sausage in a grocery ration. Her husband was also a participant in the war, with orders and medals. Two adult daughters were proud of their mother.
They looked up to her, they took an example from her: still, such a heroic fate: to walk the whole war as a simple nurse from Moscow to Koenigsberg. School teachers invited Antonina Makarovna to speak on the line, to tell the younger generation that in the life of every person there is always a place for a feat. And the most important thing in war is not to be afraid to look death in the face. And who, if not Antonina Makarovna, knew about this best of all ...
She was arrested in the summer of 1978 in the Belarusian town of Lepel. A completely ordinary woman in a sand-colored raincoat with a shopping bag in her hands was walking down the street when a car stopped nearby, inconspicuous men in civilian clothes jumped out of it and said:
“You need to urgently travel with us!” surrounded her, preventing her from escaping.
"Do you have any idea why you were brought here?" asked the Bryansk KGB investigator when she was brought in for her first interrogation. “Some mistake,” the woman chuckled in response.
“You are not Antonina Makarovna Ginzburg. You are Antonina Makarova, better known as Tonka the Muscovite or Tonka the machine gunner. You are a punisher, you worked for the Germans, you carried out mass executions. There are still legends about your atrocities in the village of Lokot, near Bryansk. We have been looking for you for more than thirty years - now it is time to answer for what we have done. Your crimes have no statute of limitations."
“It means that it was not in vain that the last year my heart became anxious, as if I felt that you would appear,” the woman said. — How long ago was that. Like not with me at all. Almost all life has already passed. Well, write down…”
From the protocol of interrogation of Antonina Makarova-Ginzburg, June 1978:
“All those sentenced to death were the same for me. Only their number has changed. Usually I was ordered to shoot a group of 27 people - that's how many partisans the cell contained. I shot about 500 meters from the prison near a pit. The arrested were placed in a chain facing the pit. One of the men rolled out my machine gun to the place of execution. At the command of the authorities, I knelt down and shot at people until everyone fell dead ... "
"Drop into nettles" - in Tony's jargon, this meant to lead to execution. She herself died three times. The first time was in the fall of 1941, in the terrible "Vyazma cauldron", as a young medical instructor girl. Hitler's troops then advanced on Moscow as part of Operation Typhoon. Soviet commanders threw their armies to their deaths, and this was not considered a crime - war has a different morality. More than a million Soviet boys and girls died in that Vyazma meat grinder in just six days, five hundred thousand were taken prisoner. The death of ordinary soldiers at that moment did not solve anything and did not bring victory closer, it was simply meaningless. Just like helping a nurse to the dead...
19-year-old nurse Tonya Makarova woke up after a fight in the forest. The air smelled of burning flesh. Nearby lay an unfamiliar soldier. "Hey, are you still whole? My name is Nikolai Fedchuk. “And I’m Tonya,” she didn’t feel anything, didn’t hear, didn’t understand, as if her soul had been shell-shocked, and only a human shell remained, and inside - emptiness. She reached out to him, trembling.
“Ma-a-amochka, how cold it is!” “Well, beautiful, don’t cry. We will get out together, ”Nikolai answered and unbuttoned the top button of her tunic.
For three months, before the first snow, they wandered together through the thickets, getting out of the encirclement, not knowing either the direction of movement, or their ultimate goal, or where their own, or where the enemies were. They starved, breaking for two, stolen slices of bread. During the day they shied away from military convoys, and at night they warmed each other. Tonya washed footcloths for both of them in icy water, and prepared a simple dinner. Did she love Nicholas? Rather, she drove out, burned out with a red-hot iron, fear and cold from the inside.
“I’m almost a Muscovite,” Tonya proudly lied to Nikolai. There are many children in our family. And we are all Parfenovs. I am the eldest, like Gorky, I went out to people early. Such a beech grew, taciturn. Once I came to a village school, in the first grade, and I forgot my last name. The teacher asks:
"What's your name, girl?"
And I know that Parfyonova, but I'm afraid to say. The kids in the back are screaming:
“Yes, she is Makarova, her father is Makar.”
So they recorded me alone in all the documents. After school, she left for Moscow, then the war began. They called me to be a nurse. And I had a different dream - I wanted to scribble on a machine gun, like Anka the machine gunner from Chapaev. Do I really look like her? When we get out to ours, let's ask for a machine gun ... "
In January 1942, dirty and ragged, Tonya and Nikolai finally reached the village of Red Well. And then they had to leave forever.
“You know, my native village is nearby. I’m going there now, I have a wife, children, ”Nikolai said goodbye to her. - I could not confess to you earlier, forgive me. Thanks for the company. Then choose your own way." “Don’t leave me, Kolya,” Tonya pleaded, hanging on to him. However, Nikolai shook it off him like ashes from a cigarette and left.
For several days, Tonya wandered around the huts, christened, and asked to stay. Compassionate housewives at first let her in, but after a few days they invariably refused shelter, explaining that they themselves had nothing to eat.
“It hurts her look is not good,” the women said. “They pester our peasants who are not at the front, climb with them into the attic, ask them to warm her up.”
It is possible that Tonya at that moment was really moved by her mind. Perhaps Nikolai's betrayal finished her off, or her strength simply ran out - one way or another, she only had physical needs left: she wanted to eat, drink, wash with soap in a hot bath and sleep with someone, so as not to be left alone in the cold darkness. She didn't want to be a hero, she just wanted to survive. At any price.
In the village where Tonya stopped at the beginning, there were no policemen. Almost all of its inhabitants went to the partisans. In the neighboring village, on the contrary, only punishers were registered. The front line here was in the middle of the outskirts. Somehow she wandered along the outskirts, half-mad, lost, not knowing where, how and with whom she would spend that night. She was stopped by people in uniform and asked in Russian:
"Who is this?"
“I am Antonina, Makarova. From Moscow,” the girl replied.
She was brought to the administration of the village of Lokot. The policemen complimented her, then took turns "loving" her. Then they gave her a whole glass of moonshine to drink, after which they put a machine gun in her hands. As she dreamed of - to disperse the emptiness inside with a continuous machine-gun line. For living people.
“Makarova-Ginzburg told during interrogations that the first time she was taken to the execution of partisans completely drunk, she did not understand what she was doing,” recalls the investigator in her case, Leonid Savoskin. - But they paid well - 30 marks, and offered cooperation on a permanent basis. After all, none of the Russian policemen wanted to get dirty, they preferred that the execution of partisans and members of their families was carried out by a woman. Homeless and lonely Antonina was given a bunk in a room at a local stud farm, where she could spend the night and store a machine gun. In the morning she voluntarily went to work.”
“I did not know those whom I shoot. They didn't know me. Therefore, I was not ashamed in front of them. Sometimes you shoot, you come closer, and someone else twitches. Then again she shot in the head so that the person would not suffer. Sometimes a few prisoners had a piece of plywood hung on their chests with the inscription "Partisan". Some people sang something before they died. After the executions, I cleaned the machine gun in the guardroom or in the yard. There were plenty of ammo…”
The former landlady of Tony from the Red Well, one of those who once also kicked her out of her house, came to the village of Lokot for salt. She was detained by the police and taken to a local prison, attributing her connection with the partisans.
“I am not a partisan. Ask at least your machine-gunner Tonka, ”the woman was frightened. Tony looked at her carefully and chuckled.
"Come, I'll give you salt."
In the tiny room where Antonina lived, order reigned. There was a machine gun, shining with engine oil. Clothes were folded in a neat pile on a chair nearby: elegant dresses, skirts, white blouses with holes ricocheting in the back. And a laundry trough on the floor.
“If I like things from the condemned, then I take pictures from the dead, why should the good disappear,” Tonya explained. - Once I shot a teacher, I liked her blouse so much, pink, silk, but it was painfully covered in blood, I was afraid that I would not wash it off - I had to leave it in the grave. Too bad… So how much salt do you need?”
“I don’t want anything from you,” the woman backed towards the door. - Fear God, Tonya, he is there, he sees everything - there is so much blood on you, you can’t wash off!
“Well, since you are brave, why did you ask me for help when you were taken to prison? Antonina shouted after her. - That would die like a hero! So, when the skin needs to be saved, then Tonka's friendship is good too?
In the evenings, Antonina dressed up and went to a German club to dance. Other girls who worked as prostitutes for the Germans were not friends with her. Tonya turned up her nose, boasting that she was a Muscovite. She also did not speak frankly with her roommate, the typist of the village headman, but she was afraid of her for some kind of spoiled look and for the crease on her forehead that had cut through too early, as if Tonya was thinking too much.
At the dances, Tonya got drunk, and changed partners like gloves, laughed, clinked glasses, fired cigarettes at the officers. And she did not think about those next 27, whom she had to execute in the morning. It's scary to kill only the first, second, then, when the number goes to hundreds, it becomes just hard work.
Before dawn, when the groans of the partisans sentenced to death died down after torture, Tonya quietly got out of her bed and wandered for hours around the former stable, hastily converted into a prison, peering into the faces of those whom she was to kill.
From the interrogation of Antonina Makarova-Ginzburg, June 1978:
“It seemed to me that the war would write everything off. I was just doing my job for which I was paid. It was necessary to shoot not only partisans, but also members of their families, women, teenagers. I tried not to remember this. Although I remember the circumstances of one execution - before the execution, the guy sentenced to death shouted to me:
“We won’t see you again, goodbye, sister!”
She was amazingly lucky. In the summer of 1943, when the battles for the liberation of the Bryansk region began, Tony and several local prostitutes were diagnosed with a venereal disease. The Germans ordered them to be treated, sending them to a hospital in their distant rear. When Soviet troops entered the village of Lokot, sending traitors to the Motherland and former policemen to the gallows, only terrible legends remained from the atrocities of Tonka the machine gunner.
Of the material things - hastily sprinkled bones in mass graves on an unnamed field, where, according to the most conservative estimates, the remains of one and a half thousand people rested. It was possible to restore the passport data of only about two hundred people shot by Tonya. The death of these people formed the basis of the prosecution in absentia of Antonina Makarovna Makarova, born in 1921, presumably a resident of Moscow. Nothing else was known about her...
“Our employees conducted the search case for Antonina Makarova for more than thirty years, passing it on to each other by inheritance,” said KGB Major Pyotr Nikolaevich Golovachev, who was involved in the search for Antonina Makarova in the 70s. - From time to time it fell into the archive, then, when we caught and interrogated another traitor to the Motherland, it again surfaced. Couldn't Tonka have disappeared without a trace?! It is now possible to accuse the authorities of incompetence and illiteracy. But the work was jewelry. During the post-war years, KGB officers secretly and carefully checked all the women of the Soviet Union who bore this name, patronymic and surname and were suitable in age - there were about 250 such Tonek Makarovs in the USSR. But it's useless. The real Tonka the machine gunner seemed to have sunk into the water ... "
“Don’t scold Tonka too much,” Golovachev asked. “You know, I feel sorry for her. It's all the war, damned, to blame, she broke it ... She had no choice - she could remain a person and then she herself would be among the executed. But she chose to live, becoming an executioner. But she was only 20 years old in the 41st year.
But it was impossible to just take it and forget about it.
“Her crimes were too terrible,” says Golovachev. “It just didn’t fit in my head how many lives she claimed. Several people managed to escape, they were the main witnesses in the case. And so, when we interrogated them, they said that Tonka still comes to them in dreams. Young, with a machine gun, stares intently - and does not look away. They were convinced that the executioner girl was alive, and begged to be sure to find her in order to stop these nightmares. We understood that she could have gotten married a long time ago and changed her passport, so we thoroughly studied the life path of all her possible relatives by the name of Makarov ... "
However, none of the investigators guessed that it was necessary to start looking for Antonin not from the Makarovs, but from the Parfenovs. Yes, it was the accidental mistake of the village teacher Tonya in the first grade, who wrote down her middle name as a surname, and allowed the “machine gunner” to elude retribution for so many years. Her real relatives, of course, never fell into the circle of interests of the investigation in this case.
But in 1976, one of the Moscow officials named Parfyonov was going abroad. Filling out the questionnaire for a passport, he honestly listed the names and surnames of his siblings, the family was large, as many as five children. All of them were Parfyonovs, and only one, for some reason, Antonina Makarovna Makarova, from the 45th year by her husband Ginzburg, now lives in Belarus. The man was summoned to the OVIR for additional explanations. The fateful meeting was attended, of course, by people from the KGB in civilian clothes.
“We were terribly afraid of jeopardizing the reputation of a woman respected by all, a front-line soldier, a wonderful mother and wife,” recalls Golovachev. - Therefore, our employees traveled secretly to the Belarusian Lepel, watched Antonina Ginzburg for a whole year, brought there one by one the surviving witnesses, the former punisher, one of her lovers, for identification. Only when every single one said the same thing - this is she, Tonka the machine-gunner, we recognized her by a noticeable crease on her forehead - doubts disappeared.
Antonina's husband, Viktor Ginzburg, a veteran of war and labor, after her unexpected arrest, promised to complain to the UN.
“We did not confess to him what the one with whom he lived happily all his life is accused of. They were afraid that the man simply would not survive this, ”the investigators said.
Viktor Ginzburg he bombarded various organizations with complaints, assuring that he loved his wife very much, and even if she committed some kind of crime - for example, embezzlement - he would forgive her everything. And he also talked about how, as a wounded boy, in April 1945, he was in a hospital near Koenigsberg, and suddenly she, a new nurse, Tonechka, entered the ward. Innocent, pure, as if not in the war - and he fell in love with her at first sight, and a few days later they signed.
Antonina took her husband's surname, and after demobilization went with him to godforsaken and people Belarusian Lepel, and not to Moscow, from where she was once called to the front. When the old man was told the truth, he turned gray overnight. And no more complaints.
“The arrested woman from the pre-trial detention center did not pass a single line. And by the way, she didn’t write anything to the two daughters she gave birth to after the war and didn’t ask to see him,” says investigator Leonid Savoskin. - When we managed to find contact with our accused, she began to talk about everything. About how she escaped by escaping from a German hospital and getting into our environment, she straightened out other people's veteran documents, according to which she began to live. She did not hide anything, but this was the most terrible thing.
There was a feeling that she sincerely misunderstood: why was she imprisoned, what did she do SUCH terrible? It was as if she had a block of some sort from the war in her head, so that she probably wouldn’t go crazy herself. She remembered everything, each of her executions, but she did not regret anything. She seemed to me to be a very cruel woman. I don't know what she was like when she was young. And what made her commit these crimes. Willingness to survive? Minute blackout? Horrors of war? Either way, it doesn't justify it. She killed not only strangers, but also her own family. She just destroyed them with her exposure. A psychic examination showed that Antonina Makarovna Makarova is sane.”
The investigators were very afraid of some excesses on the part of the accused: before there were cases when former policemen, healthy men, remembering past crimes, committed suicide right in the cell. The aged Tonya did not suffer from bouts of remorse.
“You can’t be afraid all the time,” she said. - For the first ten years I waited for a knock on the door, and then I calmed down. There are no such sins that a person is tormented all his life.
During the investigative experiment, she was taken to Lokot, to the very field where she conducted executions. The villagers spat after her like a revived ghost, and Antonina only looked at them in bewilderment, scrupulously explaining how, where, whom and with what she killed ... For her, it was a distant past, a different life.
“They disgraced me in my old age,” she complained in the evenings, sitting in her cell, to her jailers. “Now, after the verdict, I will have to leave Lepel, otherwise every fool will point his finger at me. I think they will give me three years probation. For what more? Then you need to somehow re-arrange life. And how much is your salary in the pre-trial detention center, girls? Maybe I can get a job with you - the work is familiar ... "
Antonin Makarov-Ginzburg shot at six o'clock in the morning on August 11, 1978, almost immediately after the death sentence was pronounced. The decision of the court came as a surprise to the defendant. All petitions of 55-year-old Antonina Makarova-Ginzburg for clemency in Moscow were rejected.
In the Soviet Union, this was the last major case of traitors to the Motherland during the Great Patriotic War, and the only one in which a female punisher appeared. Never later were women executed in the USSR by court order.
The notorious Tonka the machine gunner. Biography, her photos are of interest to many. It's too scary and unbelievable what she's done. And the fate of Antonina is just an action-packed thriller.
Childhood years and the secret of the surname
Tonya was born in the twenty-first year in the village of Malaya Volkovka, in the Smolensk region. She grew up shy and timid. Because of these qualities, she could not give her last name in response to the teacher's question when she came to the first grade. The children shouted: "She is Makarova, Makarova ...". That was the name of the girl's father. And her last name was Parfenova. But the teacher understood everything in her own way, and recorded the girl as Makarova. For some reason, this surname ended up in Tony's documents.
war crime
After school, Makarova went to enter Moscow. But just then the war began, and the girl voluntarily went to the front. She took courses for machine gunners and nurses.
Soon got into the Vyazemsky cauldron. For a long time she wandered through the forests surrounded by the Nazis with one of her comrades. And then she was left alone.
Having strayed to the village of Lokot in the Bryansk region, where the Germans were already in charge, Tonya remained there. She managed to ingratiate herself with the invaders, to whom she provided services of an intimate nature. Once, drunk to death, the Germans took the girl out into the street, put her behind a machine gun and ordered to shoot at people. They were locals: women, old people, teenagers, small children. So Antonina Makarova became a thin machine-gunner (a biography, a photo of a female executioner surfaced only many years later).
The Nazis liked their idea. They began to call Antonina regularly. And she didn't refuse. Every day she came to shoot innocent people. The wounded were finished off with a pistol. She even received money for her "work". Of the 1500 sentenced, only a few children managed to survive. They miraculously escaped.
Antonina the Werewolf
When the Bryansk region was liberated, Antonina did not flee with the Nazis. She managed to ingratiate herself again - now to ours. She began working in a hospital, where she met her future husband, a Belarusian named Ginzburg. The young people got married and left for the husband's patrimony in the town of Lepel. This is how Antonina Ginzburg was “born”.
For a long thirty years, she managed to impersonate a veteran of the Second World War. She gave birth to two daughters, worked diligently in a garment factory. Neither relatives nor acquaintances could even imagine who was hiding behind the mask of a decent woman, a respected veteran.
Meanwhile, the KGB was investigating the terrible deeds of the Germans in the village of Lokot. No matter how hard Tonka the machine-gunner tried to classify her biography, photos of the victims from the crime scene surfaced and became the property of the authorities. Employees for a very long time could not get on the trail of the killer. There was confusion with surnames. After all, Antonina Makarova from Malaya Volkovka did not exist in nature. There was Parfenova ...
Only a happy accident helped unravel the puzzle. "Werewolf" declassified and arrested. Witnesses identified her. On November 20, 1978, the court sentenced A. Makarova to capital punishment. At dawn on August 11, 79, she was shot.
Thus ended the path of a woman who, for the sake of the enemy, took the lives of one and a half thousand of her fellow countrymen. The blood of innocent victims on her hands did not prevent Antonina from building her happiness. But her end was inglorious. And the name is now cursed by millions.
After the end of the Great Patriotic War, the Soviet authorities launched punitive operations and the search for criminal collaborators. The country is shaking from public executions, one of the most famous was the execution at the Leningrad cinema "Giant". These processes are filmed and shown in newsreels. A real hunt and investigation begins on traitors. One of these criminals, who for a long time could not be caught and convicted of crimes, turned out to be the only woman - the executioner Tonka the machine gunner.
Lokot Republic
The elbow of the Bryansk region was captured by the Nazis. On its basis, the Reichsführer SS Himmler ordered the creation of a republic under the control of the local population. Such an organization was supposed to show the locals, without the communists. Autonomous became a place where peasants were allowed to work for own land. But not all residents supported the new order, some went to the forests to continue which was quite active in the Bryansk region.
Bronislav Kaminsky, a former technologist at a local distillery, became the new burgomaster of the republic. The German generals gave him the highest confidence and allowed him to build a new future.
Private trade was allowed in the republic, and only a small tax was collected in favor of the new authorities. Against this background, constant partisan battles took place, as a result of which the new leadership captured partisans and other suspicious ones. The mass destruction of dissenters was in the order of things and happened regularly.
Tonya Makarova could well have been among those executed, but she decided to survive at any cost, which turned out to be too high. Kaminsky personally invited her to do the work of the executioner of the new regime. The nineteen-year-old girl agreed. She could go into the forests to the partisans, but she began to serve the new authorities. She jumped at the opportunity to save her life.
She was assigned to carry out death sentences and given a machine gun, and before that she took an oath of allegiance to Germany.
Executioner woman
The local population had no problems with clothing or food. The Germans uninterruptedly supplied the region with essential goods.
Tonya was given a room at a local stud farm and was given a salary of 30 marks. After long wanderings through the forests, after the Vyazemsky boiler, it seemed to the girl that Kaminsky's proposal was not the worst option. By those standards, she lived in luxury. She had absolutely everything. But when it came to executions, there was no turning back.
And when Tonya already believed that luck smiled at her, a machine gun was placed between her and the prisoners. Even though she was drunk, she remembered that day well. No one was going to pardon the doomed, and Tonya Makarova forgot all her doubts.
At each execution, she shot about 30 prisoners with a Maxim machine gun. That is how much was placed in the stall of the former stud farm of Mikhail Romanov. In two years, according to official figures, the girl killed about 1,500 thousand prisoners. This category included partisans, Jews and persons suspected of having links with partisans and their families.
New life
A wild life and prostitution in an entertainment establishment led to a venereal disease. And Antonina was sent to Germany for treatment. But she managed to escape from the hospital, having made new documents for herself, she got a job in a military hospital. There she met her future husband. They became a Belarusian soldier who was in the hospital after being wounded - Viktor Ginzburg. The biography of his future wife was not known to him.
A week later, the couple signed, the girl took her husband's surname, which helped her get even more lost and hide from justice.
During her work in the hospital, she earned a good reputation as a front-line soldier, and Viktor Ginzburg, Makarova's husband, could not believe that his beloved wife was involved in such crimes.
Family
Viktor Ginzburg, whose biography is practically unknown, was a native of a small Belarusian town, it was here that the family began a new life.
After the end of the war, the family went to Lepel, where Antonina got a job at a garment factory. The woman's family - Viktor Ginzburg, Makarova's husband, their children - have lived in this city for 30 years and have established themselves as an exemplary family. She was in good standing with the factory management and never aroused any suspicion. From the memoirs of contemporaries, everyone characterized the Ginzburg family as exemplary.
Arrest
The state security authorities opened a criminal case against Antonina Makarova in absentia, but they could not get on her trail. The case was transferred to the archive several times, but they did not close it, she committed too terrible crimes. Neither Viktor Ginzburg nor her inner circle even suspected the woman's involvement in the brutal murders.
The investigators did not confess to the family why they arrested the woman, so Viktor Ginzburg, the husband of Tonka the machine-gunner, a war and labor veteran, threatened to complain to the UN after the unexpected arrest of his wife. Despite the fact that traces were lost, surviving witnesses pointed to the perpetrator without a doubt.
Viktor Ginzburg wrote complaints to various organizations, assuring him that he loved his wife very much and was ready to forgive her for all her crimes. But I didn't know how serious it was.
When Viktor Ginzburg, Makarova's husband, learned the terrible truth, the man turned gray overnight.
Surname
There are some ambiguities in the biography of Antonina Makarova. She was approximately born in the early 1920s in Moscow. Her mother was a native of Sychevsky. After graduating from the seventh grade, Antonina lived in Moscow with her aunt.
As for her surname, the large family bore the surname Panfilovs, patronymic - Makarovna / Makarovich. But at school, the girl was recorded by Makarova, either by accident, or because of inattention. This surname passed into the girl's passport.
Finally, Antonina was sentenced to death, and Viktor Ginzbrug, Makarova's husband, left the city with his two daughters in an unknown direction. Their fate is still unknown.