KGB against policemen: how they caught Hitler's punishers
During the Great Patriotic War in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union and the countries of Eastern Europe, the Nazis and their henchmen from among the local traitors committed many war crimes against civilians and captured military personnel. The volleys of Victory in Berlin have not yet been heard, and the Soviet state security agencies already had an important and rather difficult task - to investigate all the crimes of the Hitlerites, to identify and detain the perpetrators, to bring them to justice.
The search for Nazi war criminals began during the Great Patriotic War and is not completed to this day. After all, there are no time limits and statutes of limitations for the atrocities that were committed by the Nazis on Soviet soil. As soon as the Soviet troops liberated the occupied territories, operational and investigative agencies immediately began to work on them, first of all, counterintelligence of Smersh. Thanks to the Sirshevi, as well as servicemen and police officers, a large number of Nazi Germany’s accomplices among the local population were identified.
Former policemen received criminal convictions under Article 58 of the USSR Criminal Code and were sentenced to various terms of imprisonment, usually from ten to fifteen years. Since the country ravaged by the war needed workers' hands, the death penalty was applied only to the most notorious and odious executioners. Many policemen spent their time and returned home in the 1950-e - 1960-e. But some of the collaborators managed to avoid arrest, posing as civilians or even attributing heroic biographies of participants in World War II as part of the Red Army.
For example, Pavel Aleksashkin commanded the punitive unit of policemen in Belarus. When the USSR won the Great Patriotic War, Aleksashkin was able to hide his personal involvement in war crimes. For the service of the Germans he was given a short time. After being released from the camp, Aleksashkin moved to the Yaroslavl Region, and soon, with courage, began to impersonate a veteran of World War II. Having managed to obtain the necessary documents, he began to receive all the privileges required for veterans, from time to time he was awarded orders and medals, he was invited to speak to schools in front of Soviet children - to talk about his military path. And the former Hitler punisher lied without a twinge of conscience, attributing to himself other people's exploits and carefully concealing his true face. But when the security authorities required Aleksashkin's testimony in the case of one of the war criminals, they made a request at the place of residence and found that the former policeman was pretending to be a veteran of World War II.
One of the first trials of Hitlerite war criminals took place on 14 — 17 on July 1943 of the year in Krasnodar. The Great Patriotic War was still in full swing, and in the Krasnodar cinema "Velikan" the trial of the eleven Nazi accomplices from the SS team "10" was underway. More than 7 thousands of civilians of Krasnodar and the Krasnodar Territory were destroyed in the gas vans. The direct leaders of the massacres were the officers of the German Gestapo, but executioners were executed by local traitors.
Vasily Petrovich Tishchenko, born 1914, went to serve in the occupying police in August 1942, then became a senior officer of the SS SSN team “10”, later - a Gestapo investigator. Nikolai Semenovich Pushkarev, born 1915, served as a squadron commander, Ivan Anisimovich Rechkalov, born 1911, evaded mobilization in the Red Army, and after joining the German troops he joined the Sonderkommando. Grigoriy Nikitich Misan, 1916, born, was also a volunteer policeman, as well as Ivan Fedorovich Kotomtsev, who was previously convicted, 1918, born. In torture and executions of Soviet citizens participated Yunus Mitsuhovich Naptsok, born 1914; Ignaty Kladov, born 1911; Mikhail Pavlovich Lastovina, born 1883; Grigori Petrovich Tuchkov, born 1909; Vasily Stepanovich Pavlov, born 1914; Ivan Ivanovich Paramonov, born 1923 The trial was quick and fair. 17 July 1943, Tishchenko, Rechkalov, Pushkarev, Naptsok, Misan, Kotomtsev, Kladov and Lastovina were sentenced to death and July 18 1943 were hanged on the central square of Krasnodar. Paramonov, Tuchkov and Pavlov received 20 years of imprisonment.
However, the other participants of the 10 sunder team then managed to avoid punishment. Twenty years passed before a new trial was held over the Hitlerite minions - the executioners who killed the Soviet people - in Krasnodar in the autumn of 1963. Nine people appeared before the court - former policemen Alois Weikh, Valentin Skripkin, Mikhail Yeskov, Andrei Sukhov, Valerian Surguladze, Nikolai Zhirukhin, Emelyan Buglak, Uruzbek Dzampaev, Nikolai Psarev. All of them took part in the massacres of civilians in the Rostov region, Krasnodar Territory, Ukraine, Belarus.
Before the war, Valentin Skripkin lived in Taganrog, was a promising football player, and with the start of the German occupation, he signed up as a policeman. He hid until the 1956 year, before the amnesty, and then legalized, worked at the bakery. It took six years of painstaking work for the KGB to establish: Skripkin personally participated in the many murders of the Soviet people, including in the terrible slaughter in Zmievskoy gully in Rostov-on-Don.
Mikhail Yeskov was a Black Sea sailor, a member of the defense of Sevastopol. Two sailors in a trench at Pesochnaya Bay stood against German wedges. One sailor died and was buried in a mass grave, forever remaining a hero. Eskova contused. So he got to the Germans, and then out of hopelessness entered the service in the platoon of the sonderkommando and became a war criminal. In 1943, he was arrested for the first time — for serving in German auxiliary units, they were given ten years. In the 1953 year, Eskov was freed to sit down again in the 1963 year.
Nikolai Zhirukhin worked with 1959 for a year as a teacher in one of the Novorossiysk schools, in 1962 he graduated from 3 by correspondence at the Pedagogical Institute. He "split" by his own stupidity, believing that after the amnesty of 1956, he was not expected to be responsible for serving the Germans. Before the war, Zhirukhin worked in the fire department, then he was mobilized from 1940 to 1942. served as a clerk of the garrison guardhouse in Novorossiysk, and during the offensive of the German troops ran to the side of the Nazis. Andrei Sukhov, in the past - a veterinary medical assistant. In 1943, he fell behind the Germans in the Tsimlyansk region. He was detained by the Red Army soldiers, but Sukhov was sent to the penal battalion, then he was reinstated as a senior lieutenant of the Red Army, reached Berlin, and after the war he lived quietly as a veteran of the Second World War and worked in the militarized guards in Rostov-on-Don.
After the war, Alexander Veikh worked in the Kemerovo Region at the timber industry enterprise - sawmill. A tidy and disciplined employee was even chosen in the local. But one thing surprised colleagues and fellow villagers - for eighteen years he never left the village. Valerian Surguladze was arrested right on the day of his own wedding. A graduate of the sabotage school, a fighter of the 10-a Sonderkommando and a platoon commander of the SD, Surguladze was responsible for the deaths of many Soviet citizens.
Nikolai Psarev entered the service of the Germans in Taganrog - himself, voluntarily. At first he was a battalion with a German officer, then he ended up in the Sonderkommando. Being in love with the German army, he didn’t even want to repent of the crimes committed by him when he, who worked as a construction superintendent at Chimkent, was arrested twenty years after that terrible war. Yemelyan Buglak was arrested in Krasnodar, where he settled after years of wandering around the country, finding that there was nothing to fear. Uruzbek Dzampaev, who sold hazelnuts, was the most restless among all the detained policemen and, as it seemed to the investigators, even with some relief was concerned with his own arrest. October 24 1963 was the death sentence of all the defendants in the 10 Sunder Team case. Eighteen years after the war, deserved punishment still found executioners who personally killed thousands of Soviet citizens.
The Krasnodar 1963 process of the year was far from the only example of the condemnation of the Nazi executioners even many years after the victory in the Great Patriotic War. In 1976, in Bryansk, one of the local residents accidentally identified Nikolai Ivanin, the former head of the Lokot prison, in a passing man. The policeman was arrested, and he, in turn, reported interesting information about a woman for whom security officers had been hunting for since the war - about Antonin Makarova, better known as “Tonka-machine gunner”.
The former nurse of the Red Army, “Tonka-machine-gunner” was captured, then she fled, wandered through the villages, and then went to the service of the Germans. She has at least 1500 lives of Soviet prisoners of war and civilians. When the Red Army captured Koenigsberg in 1945, Antonina disguised herself as a Soviet nurse, got a job at a field hospital, where she met soldier Viktor Ginzburg and soon married him, changing her last name. After the war, Ginzburg settled in the Belarusian city of Lepel, where Antonina got a job at a sewing factory as a product quality inspector.
The real surname of Antonina Ginzburg - Makarova became known only in 1976, when her brother, who lived in Tyumen, filled out a questionnaire for traveling abroad and indicated the name of her sister - Ginzburg, nee - Makarova. This fact interested the bodies of state security of the USSR. Observation of Antonina Ginzburg lasted more than a year. Only in September 1978, she was arrested. 20 November 1978 of the year Antonina Makarova was sentenced to death and 11 of August 1979 was shot by the court. The death sentence for Antonina Makarova was one of three death sentences for women imposed in the Soviet Union in the post-Stalin era.
Years and decades passed, and security forces continued to identify executioners who were responsible for the death of Soviet citizens. The work of identifying Nazi henchmen demanded maximum attentiveness: after all, the innocent could get under the "flywheel" of the state punitive machine. Therefore, in order to eliminate all possible errors, every potential suspect candidate was monitored for a very long time before the decision to detain was made.
Antonina Makarov was led by the KGB for more than a year. At first, they set up a meeting with a disguised KGB officer who started a conversation about the war, about where Antonina served. But the woman did not remember the names of military units and the names of the commanders. Then they brought one of the witnesses of her crimes to the factory where the “Tonka-machine-gunner” worked, and she was watching from the window and was able to identify Makarova. But this identification was not enough for the investigators. Then brought two more witnesses. Makarov was summoned to his office, ostensibly to recalculate pensions. One of the witnesses was sitting in front of a police officer and identified the criminal, the second one, who played the role of a female security officer, also unequivocally stated that in front of her was “Tonka-machine-gunner”.
In the middle of 1970's. The first trials of policemen guilty of the destruction of Khatyn took place. The judge of the Military Tribunal of the Belarusian Military District Viktor Glazkov learned the name of the main participant of the atrocities - Grigory Vasyura. A man with the same name lived in Kiev, worked as deputy director of the state farm. For Vasura established observation. Respectable Soviet citizen posing as a veteran of the Great Patriotic War. However, the investigators found witnesses to Vasiur’s crimes. Former Nazi punisher arrested. As he did not unlock, but the fault of 72-year-old Vasyura managed to prove. At the end of 1986, he was sentenced to death and soon shot forty-one years after the Great Patriotic War.
Back in 1974, almost thirty years after the Great Victory, a group of tourists from the United States of America arrived in Crimea.
Among them was an American citizen Fedor Fedorenko (in the photo). His personality was interested in the security organs. It was found out that during the war years Fedorenko served as a security guard in the Treblinka concentration camp in Poland. But there were many guards in the camp and not all of them personally participated in the killings and torture of Soviet citizens. Therefore, the identity of Fedorenko began to study in more detail. It turned out that he not only protected the prisoners, but also killed and tortured the Soviet people. Fedorenko was arrested and extradited to the Soviet Union. In 1987, Fedor Fedorenko was shot, although at that time he was already 80 years old.
Now the last veterans of the Great Patriotic War are passing away, already very elderly people - and those whose share in childhood has been frightened by being subjected to Nazi war crimes. Of course, the policemen themselves are very old - the youngest of them are the same age as the youngest veterans. But even such a respectable age should not be a guarantee against accountability.
The search for Nazi war criminals began during the Great Patriotic War and is not completed to this day. After all, there are no time limits and statutes of limitations for the atrocities that were committed by the Nazis on Soviet soil. As soon as the Soviet troops liberated the occupied territories, operational and investigative agencies immediately began to work on them, first of all, counterintelligence of Smersh. Thanks to the Sirshevi, as well as servicemen and police officers, a large number of Nazi Germany’s accomplices among the local population were identified.
Former policemen received criminal convictions under Article 58 of the USSR Criminal Code and were sentenced to various terms of imprisonment, usually from ten to fifteen years. Since the country ravaged by the war needed workers' hands, the death penalty was applied only to the most notorious and odious executioners. Many policemen spent their time and returned home in the 1950-e - 1960-e. But some of the collaborators managed to avoid arrest, posing as civilians or even attributing heroic biographies of participants in World War II as part of the Red Army.
For example, Pavel Aleksashkin commanded the punitive unit of policemen in Belarus. When the USSR won the Great Patriotic War, Aleksashkin was able to hide his personal involvement in war crimes. For the service of the Germans he was given a short time. After being released from the camp, Aleksashkin moved to the Yaroslavl Region, and soon, with courage, began to impersonate a veteran of World War II. Having managed to obtain the necessary documents, he began to receive all the privileges required for veterans, from time to time he was awarded orders and medals, he was invited to speak to schools in front of Soviet children - to talk about his military path. And the former Hitler punisher lied without a twinge of conscience, attributing to himself other people's exploits and carefully concealing his true face. But when the security authorities required Aleksashkin's testimony in the case of one of the war criminals, they made a request at the place of residence and found that the former policeman was pretending to be a veteran of World War II.
One of the first trials of Hitlerite war criminals took place on 14 — 17 on July 1943 of the year in Krasnodar. The Great Patriotic War was still in full swing, and in the Krasnodar cinema "Velikan" the trial of the eleven Nazi accomplices from the SS team "10" was underway. More than 7 thousands of civilians of Krasnodar and the Krasnodar Territory were destroyed in the gas vans. The direct leaders of the massacres were the officers of the German Gestapo, but executioners were executed by local traitors.
Vasily Petrovich Tishchenko, born 1914, went to serve in the occupying police in August 1942, then became a senior officer of the SS SSN team “10”, later - a Gestapo investigator. Nikolai Semenovich Pushkarev, born 1915, served as a squadron commander, Ivan Anisimovich Rechkalov, born 1911, evaded mobilization in the Red Army, and after joining the German troops he joined the Sonderkommando. Grigoriy Nikitich Misan, 1916, born, was also a volunteer policeman, as well as Ivan Fedorovich Kotomtsev, who was previously convicted, 1918, born. In torture and executions of Soviet citizens participated Yunus Mitsuhovich Naptsok, born 1914; Ignaty Kladov, born 1911; Mikhail Pavlovich Lastovina, born 1883; Grigori Petrovich Tuchkov, born 1909; Vasily Stepanovich Pavlov, born 1914; Ivan Ivanovich Paramonov, born 1923 The trial was quick and fair. 17 July 1943, Tishchenko, Rechkalov, Pushkarev, Naptsok, Misan, Kotomtsev, Kladov and Lastovina were sentenced to death and July 18 1943 were hanged on the central square of Krasnodar. Paramonov, Tuchkov and Pavlov received 20 years of imprisonment.
However, the other participants of the 10 sunder team then managed to avoid punishment. Twenty years passed before a new trial was held over the Hitlerite minions - the executioners who killed the Soviet people - in Krasnodar in the autumn of 1963. Nine people appeared before the court - former policemen Alois Weikh, Valentin Skripkin, Mikhail Yeskov, Andrei Sukhov, Valerian Surguladze, Nikolai Zhirukhin, Emelyan Buglak, Uruzbek Dzampaev, Nikolai Psarev. All of them took part in the massacres of civilians in the Rostov region, Krasnodar Territory, Ukraine, Belarus.
Before the war, Valentin Skripkin lived in Taganrog, was a promising football player, and with the start of the German occupation, he signed up as a policeman. He hid until the 1956 year, before the amnesty, and then legalized, worked at the bakery. It took six years of painstaking work for the KGB to establish: Skripkin personally participated in the many murders of the Soviet people, including in the terrible slaughter in Zmievskoy gully in Rostov-on-Don.
Mikhail Yeskov was a Black Sea sailor, a member of the defense of Sevastopol. Two sailors in a trench at Pesochnaya Bay stood against German wedges. One sailor died and was buried in a mass grave, forever remaining a hero. Eskova contused. So he got to the Germans, and then out of hopelessness entered the service in the platoon of the sonderkommando and became a war criminal. In 1943, he was arrested for the first time — for serving in German auxiliary units, they were given ten years. In the 1953 year, Eskov was freed to sit down again in the 1963 year.
Nikolai Zhirukhin worked with 1959 for a year as a teacher in one of the Novorossiysk schools, in 1962 he graduated from 3 by correspondence at the Pedagogical Institute. He "split" by his own stupidity, believing that after the amnesty of 1956, he was not expected to be responsible for serving the Germans. Before the war, Zhirukhin worked in the fire department, then he was mobilized from 1940 to 1942. served as a clerk of the garrison guardhouse in Novorossiysk, and during the offensive of the German troops ran to the side of the Nazis. Andrei Sukhov, in the past - a veterinary medical assistant. In 1943, he fell behind the Germans in the Tsimlyansk region. He was detained by the Red Army soldiers, but Sukhov was sent to the penal battalion, then he was reinstated as a senior lieutenant of the Red Army, reached Berlin, and after the war he lived quietly as a veteran of the Second World War and worked in the militarized guards in Rostov-on-Don.
After the war, Alexander Veikh worked in the Kemerovo Region at the timber industry enterprise - sawmill. A tidy and disciplined employee was even chosen in the local. But one thing surprised colleagues and fellow villagers - for eighteen years he never left the village. Valerian Surguladze was arrested right on the day of his own wedding. A graduate of the sabotage school, a fighter of the 10-a Sonderkommando and a platoon commander of the SD, Surguladze was responsible for the deaths of many Soviet citizens.
Nikolai Psarev entered the service of the Germans in Taganrog - himself, voluntarily. At first he was a battalion with a German officer, then he ended up in the Sonderkommando. Being in love with the German army, he didn’t even want to repent of the crimes committed by him when he, who worked as a construction superintendent at Chimkent, was arrested twenty years after that terrible war. Yemelyan Buglak was arrested in Krasnodar, where he settled after years of wandering around the country, finding that there was nothing to fear. Uruzbek Dzampaev, who sold hazelnuts, was the most restless among all the detained policemen and, as it seemed to the investigators, even with some relief was concerned with his own arrest. October 24 1963 was the death sentence of all the defendants in the 10 Sunder Team case. Eighteen years after the war, deserved punishment still found executioners who personally killed thousands of Soviet citizens.
The Krasnodar 1963 process of the year was far from the only example of the condemnation of the Nazi executioners even many years after the victory in the Great Patriotic War. In 1976, in Bryansk, one of the local residents accidentally identified Nikolai Ivanin, the former head of the Lokot prison, in a passing man. The policeman was arrested, and he, in turn, reported interesting information about a woman for whom security officers had been hunting for since the war - about Antonin Makarova, better known as “Tonka-machine gunner”.
The former nurse of the Red Army, “Tonka-machine-gunner” was captured, then she fled, wandered through the villages, and then went to the service of the Germans. She has at least 1500 lives of Soviet prisoners of war and civilians. When the Red Army captured Koenigsberg in 1945, Antonina disguised herself as a Soviet nurse, got a job at a field hospital, where she met soldier Viktor Ginzburg and soon married him, changing her last name. After the war, Ginzburg settled in the Belarusian city of Lepel, where Antonina got a job at a sewing factory as a product quality inspector.
The real surname of Antonina Ginzburg - Makarova became known only in 1976, when her brother, who lived in Tyumen, filled out a questionnaire for traveling abroad and indicated the name of her sister - Ginzburg, nee - Makarova. This fact interested the bodies of state security of the USSR. Observation of Antonina Ginzburg lasted more than a year. Only in September 1978, she was arrested. 20 November 1978 of the year Antonina Makarova was sentenced to death and 11 of August 1979 was shot by the court. The death sentence for Antonina Makarova was one of three death sentences for women imposed in the Soviet Union in the post-Stalin era.
Years and decades passed, and security forces continued to identify executioners who were responsible for the death of Soviet citizens. The work of identifying Nazi henchmen demanded maximum attentiveness: after all, the innocent could get under the "flywheel" of the state punitive machine. Therefore, in order to eliminate all possible errors, every potential suspect candidate was monitored for a very long time before the decision to detain was made.
Antonina Makarov was led by the KGB for more than a year. At first, they set up a meeting with a disguised KGB officer who started a conversation about the war, about where Antonina served. But the woman did not remember the names of military units and the names of the commanders. Then they brought one of the witnesses of her crimes to the factory where the “Tonka-machine-gunner” worked, and she was watching from the window and was able to identify Makarova. But this identification was not enough for the investigators. Then brought two more witnesses. Makarov was summoned to his office, ostensibly to recalculate pensions. One of the witnesses was sitting in front of a police officer and identified the criminal, the second one, who played the role of a female security officer, also unequivocally stated that in front of her was “Tonka-machine-gunner”.
In the middle of 1970's. The first trials of policemen guilty of the destruction of Khatyn took place. The judge of the Military Tribunal of the Belarusian Military District Viktor Glazkov learned the name of the main participant of the atrocities - Grigory Vasyura. A man with the same name lived in Kiev, worked as deputy director of the state farm. For Vasura established observation. Respectable Soviet citizen posing as a veteran of the Great Patriotic War. However, the investigators found witnesses to Vasiur’s crimes. Former Nazi punisher arrested. As he did not unlock, but the fault of 72-year-old Vasyura managed to prove. At the end of 1986, he was sentenced to death and soon shot forty-one years after the Great Patriotic War. Back in 1974, almost thirty years after the Great Victory, a group of tourists from the United States of America arrived in Crimea.
Among them was an American citizen Fedor Fedorenko (in the photo). His personality was interested in the security organs. It was found out that during the war years Fedorenko served as a security guard in the Treblinka concentration camp in Poland. But there were many guards in the camp and not all of them personally participated in the killings and torture of Soviet citizens. Therefore, the identity of Fedorenko began to study in more detail. It turned out that he not only protected the prisoners, but also killed and tortured the Soviet people. Fedorenko was arrested and extradited to the Soviet Union. In 1987, Fedor Fedorenko was shot, although at that time he was already 80 years old. Now the last veterans of the Great Patriotic War are passing away, already very elderly people - and those whose share in childhood has been frightened by being subjected to Nazi war crimes. Of course, the policemen themselves are very old - the youngest of them are the same age as the youngest veterans. But even such a respectable age should not be a guarantee against accountability.
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