“I did not know those whom I shoot. Therefore, there was no shame, ”Antonina Makarova-Ginzburg said at the trial in 1978. In one day, she turned from a respected citizen of the Byelorussian SSR, as her husband and neighbors knew her, into a cold-blooded executioner of Nazi Germany, and her husband, a hero of the Great Patriotic War, having found out the truth about the crimes of his wife, took two common daughters and disappeared.
June 18, 2018 · Text: Veronika Pylnova· A photo: Getty Images
Antonina Makarova-Ginzburg is one of three women executed in the USSR since 1960
History knows many examples when, in the most difficult times for the people, real heroes appeared in the country. During the Great Patriotic War, feats were performed not only by pilots, intelligence officers, officers, but also by civilians who became partisans or shock workers in the rear. Unfortunately, there were no less traitors - and those who not only helped the soldiers of the Third Reich, but personally killed their compatriots. Like, for example, Antonina Makarova-Ginzburg (she is also popularly known as Tonka the machine gunner). According to various sources, she shot from 168 to 1500 people, among whom were women, the elderly and children. After the war, Antonina managed to escape from the investigation and even started a new life. However, at the very moment when she least expected it, justice nevertheless overtook her.
front way
In the biography of Antonina Makarova, who was born in the village of Malaya Volkovka, Smolensk province, there are many dark spots. So, it is still not known for certain why the girl's surname suddenly differed from that worn by her brothers - the Parfenovs (according to another version of the Panfilovs). The most popular is the version according to which, out of fear and embarrassment, Antonina could not give her last name at school when the teacher asked her about it. Classmates who were sitting nearby said that she was Makarova (meaning that she was Makar's daughter), and the teacher wrote Antonina in the journal that way. This mistake also migrated to other documents - a passport, a Komsomol ticket, etc.
In her youth, Antonina, like many other girls of her age, often watched the film "Chapaev" and dreamed of being like a faithful comrade-in-arms of the head of the Red Army division Anka the machine gunner.
Therefore, it is not surprising that when the Great Patriotic War began on June 22, 1941, Makarova volunteered to go to the front from Moscow, where she studied to be a doctor. Some sources say that before becoming a nurse, Antonina served for some time as a barmaid in one of the military units. On August 13, 1941, the girl was drafted into the 422nd regiment of the 170th rifle division. However, Makarova's frontline path was not long. Less than two weeks later, the city of Velikie Luki, which her division was supposed to defend, was taken by the Germans, and Antonina herself had to experience all the horrors of the Vyazemsky cauldron.
Antonina went to the front at an early age
Few of her colleagues managed to escape from the environment, and the young girl was not at all among them. True, due to the fact that the Nazi soldiers could not establish at least some serious control over the prisoners (and there were over 600 thousand people), seizing the moment, Makarova fled with Nikolai Fedchuk. The soldier and nurse roamed the nearby woods together, trying to survive. For some unknown reason, they did not look for partisans, they did not try to get through to their own. Antonina became Nikolai's "camping wife". The wanderings continued until 1942. When Makarova and Fedchuk went to the village of Krasny Kolodets, he confessed to her that he was married and left her alone to wander around the nearby villages.
Executioner with a salary
Later, the girl stopped in the village of Lokot in the Bryansk region, where the infamous Lokot Republic, a collaborationist group of traitors who supported the fascist regime, operated. While fierce battles for life and freedom were going on in the rest of the Soviet Union, collective farms were dissolved in the “Lokot Republic”, private property was returned, they went to performances in the theater, published their own newspaper “Voice of the People” and executed executions every evening. Despite their autonomy, both local authorities and policemen were subordinate to German officers, who closely watched how representatives of the Russian Liberation People's Army (that was the name of the Lokot army) exterminated partisans.
At first, Antonina also served in the police. It is not known exactly when she retrained as an executioner. They say that neither the policemen, nor even the Germans, wanted to get their hands dirty by standing behind a machine gun every evening. But Makarova did not refuse this specific work. Rumor has it that before her first execution, Antonina drank a glass of vodka for courage, and then went to the already prepared Maxim machine gun and killed 27 people (that's how many prisoners could be kept in the local isolation ward).
The next day, Makarova learned that she now had an official position - an executioner with a salary of 30 German marks for execution.
Some parts of the case of Tonka the machine-gunner (this is how Antonina Makarova began to be called in the Lokot Republic) are still classified as “secret”, so nothing is known about the exact number of victims. Rumor has it that for all the time Makarova shot about one and a half thousand people. However, she was sentenced for the murder of 168 people.
The court found Tonka the machine-gunner guilty of 168 murders, but according to other estimates, there are about one and a half thousand of them.
Apparently, Antonina was completely satisfied with her new life. In the morning she went to the shooting, finishing off the survivors with a pistol, and then she cleaned the weapons and washed the clothes of the dead, which she was allowed to take as a reward. In the evening, Tonka the machine-gunner drank at a local club and had fun with the Germans.
Another life
And in 1943, Makarova's life again took a sharp turn. In connection with the offensive of the Soviet army, many collaborators and leaders of the "Lokot Republic" were forced to leave the Bryansk region as soon as possible. Antonina disappeared with them. According to one version, she fell ill with a venereal disease, and she was sent to be treated so that she would not re-infect the Nazi soldiers. However, it is possible that she simply fled to the Germans. They no longer needed the executioner, so Makarova was sent to a military factory in Koenigsberg, where she worked for the benefit of the Third Reich until the end of the war. In 1945, the city was taken by Soviet troops, but Antonina managed to pass a test in the NKVD filtration camps, where they tested all the people who claimed to be prisoners of the Nazis.
Rumor has it that Makarova managed to escape due to the fact that she forged or stole the documents of a certain nurse. However, the journalists managed to find out that Antonina passed all the checks under her own name. “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. She was taken prisoner on October 8, 1941. Sent for further service in the marching company of the 212th reserve rifle regiment on April 27, 1945, ”says an archival document from the base of the Ministry of Defense.
Antonina managed to pretend to be one of the German captives, so she easily disappeared after the war
Around the same time, Antonina Makarova met Viktor Ginzburg, a Red Army soldier who was awarded the Medal for Courage. Soon they got married, moved to the city of Lepel (Belarusian SSR), and the couple had two daughters.
The woman got a job at a local garment factory, where she carried out product quality control. Her photograph regularly appeared on the honor roll.
True, for many years Makarova-Ginzburg did not manage to make friends. According to former colleagues, Antonina was unsociable and withdrawn. The family of veterans was considered one of the most respected in the city. Tonka the machine-gunner did not have to invent a plausible legend - she simply kept silent about what she was doing in the Lokot Republic.
long search
Rumor has it that the Soviet authorities almost immediately learned about the atrocities of Tonka the machine gunner from the former commander of the Lokot prison. It was he who said that a certain Antonina Makarova, a former nurse from Moscow, was engaged in executions. However, they could not quickly find the perpetrator. According to one version, the Bryansk investigators mistakenly considered the woman dead, and according to another, they got confused because of the confusion with her last name. Probably, it was because of this that the search dragged on for a long 30 years.
According to the press center of the KGB of Belarus, Antonina could well have lived her whole life unexposed: neither colleagues, nor neighbors, nor her husband would have known about her past. However, due to a combination of circumstances, the secret became clear. In 1976, a resident of the capital named Panfilov needed to go on a trip abroad, for which he had to fill out a lot of documents. In one of them, the man indicated all his brothers and sisters. It was then that officials drew attention to a strange detail: all Panfilov's relatives had one last name, and his sister had another. Representatives of the OVIR (visa and registration department) called the man and asked him to explain this misunderstanding. Panfilov, who was unaware of the crimes of his relative, laid out everything he knew about his sister, who lives in Belarus. Investigators drew attention to the similarity of the woman with the criminal Tonka the machine-gunner, who had previously been put on the All-Union wanted list.
The Soviet authorities could not immediately bring charges, so they decided to have a special conversation with her. Antonina, along with other front-line soldiers, was summoned to the district military registration and enlistment office, where they began to ask about her participation in hostilities, allegedly for future award cases. While some women actively recalled everything they had to go through in the war, Makarova-Ginzburg was confused and could not even answer questions about her colleagues and the battalion commander.
The investigators had no doubts after Makarova-Ginzburg was identified by the former cohabitant of the head of the very prison where the woman worked.
The next day, Antonina was detained by agents in civilian clothes. The criminal, immediately realizing that her long and quiet life was over, was absolutely unperturbed and only asked for a cigarette. During interrogation, Makarova-Ginzburg admitted that she really was the same Tonka-machine-gunner. “All executions for me were similar to one another. Only the number of prisoners changed each time. For me, it was just a job, ”said Antonina, not hiding the fact that women, the elderly, and children were among her victims. “I did not know those whom I shoot. They didn't know me. Therefore, I was not ashamed in front of them, ”the criminal explained her indifference. After that, she was sent to Bryansk.
Crime and Punishment
Everyone there had already discussed the high-profile case, because the village of Lokot was located not far from the city. Investigators recall that local residents who recognized the executioner shied away from her in fright. Antonina herself did not understand either their fear or their hatred. The woman was sure that all her crimes should be justified by the war. She calmly talked about what she had done, as if she felt no regret, no pangs of conscience - nothing at all. Makarov-Ginzburg did not ask for meetings with relatives either. The woman was completely sure that she would get off with a three-year term. However, the court sentenced Tonka the machine-gunner to death. By the way, from 1960 to 1991, capital punishment was chosen mainly for men. There were only three such women - including Antonina.
Early in the morning of August 11, 1979, after the court finally rejected all of Makarova-Ginzburg's petitions for clemency in connection with the woman's year, the death sentence was carried out.
Antonina's husband, Viktor Ginzburg, did not go to Bryansk to fetch his wife. Upon learning of her terrible atrocities, he took his two daughters and fled in an unknown direction. Perhaps the war hero simply wanted to escape from the terrible truth about his wife, with whom he had lived for more than thirty years.
The Great Patriotic War - this war is riddled with both a lot of heroic deeds and a lot of vile betrayal. Some got what they deserved for their deeds, some evaded justice in various ways, some were punished years and decades later.
Further, we will talk about a woman who served the Nazis, who mercilessly shot our compatriots with you, whose number reached 1,500 people, who hid from well-deserved punishment for more than three decades. The nickname of this man is Tonka the machine-gunner.
Parfenova Antonina Makarovna, who mistakenly became Makarova, whose date of birth is indicated differently in different sources, but approximately 1920, in the Smolensk province.
When the girl went to the first grade of a rural school, she had to change her last name - the teacher confused her with her patronymic, and therefore in all further documents, including her passport and Komsomol card, she was listed as Antonina Makarova.
After graduating from school, Tonya dreamed of becoming a doctor. In 1941, she volunteered for the front, inspired by the then popular image of Anka the machine gunner from the movie Chapaev.
The modest and shy girl met the war as a nurse. She miraculously survived during the infamous Vyazemsky operation of 1941, which ended in the defeat of the Red Army and the encirclement of its units.
After the defeat of her unit, Tonya wandered through the forests until she was captured by the Germans. However, soon she, along with a soldier named Nikolai Fedchuk, escaped together from captivity.
Wanting to survive, Tonya offered herself to a Red Army soldier as a "camping wife", and Fedchuk did not refuse this idea. In January 1942, the wanderers managed to reach the village of Red Well, where Fedchuk's wife and children were waiting. Returning home, the deserter left his fellow traveler to the mercy of fate.
“I was not ashamed in front of them”
Some forensic psychologists are sure that the heroine's further actions were the result of psychological trauma from the horrors of the Vyazemsky Cauldron and the blow after breaking off relations with Fedchuk.
The girl continued to wander around the villages and villages, eventually ending up in the region of the Lokot Republic - self-government in the territory occupied by the Nazis.
Wanting to prove herself well and survive, Tonya agreed to participate in the execution of partisans and their families, including children and women. The Germans “didn’t want to get their hands dirty” about these people, so the idea of appointing a Soviet girl as an executioner seemed brilliant to them.
Antonina was given a machine gun "Maxim", having appointed a salary of 30 marks for each execution. To carry out the first "execution" she had to take a hefty dose of alcohol, but she completed the task. Subsequent massacres took place in cold blood - without alcohol.
Later, during interrogations, Tonka the machine-gunner said that she did not feel any shame in front of the people who had to be shot, because they were completely unfamiliar to her.
The executioner preferred to finish off her victims:
“Sometimes, you shoot, you come closer, and someone else twitches. Then she shot in the head again so that the person would not suffer.”
There were especially “saturated” days for Tonka, during which he had to carry out as many as three mass executions. In total, according to official figures, the collaborator executed 1,500 people, of which only 168 were identified.
“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.”
Now she was closer than ever to her favorite image of Anka the machine-gunner, but Anka killed enemies, and Tonka - women and children.
Despite the bloodthirsty position, Antonina managed to retain her feminine side. After each execution, she collected clothes and other things she liked from the dead. “What good is lost?” she reasoned. Tonka was terribly upset that after the execution, traces of blood and bullets remained on good things.
Tonka relieved the stress of hard work by having fun and drinking with the Germans at a local music club.
Not a criminal, but a war heroine
Everything changed in the summer of 1943, when Makarova was seconded to a German hospital for treatment from a whole “collection” of venereal diseases that she managed to pick up in the Lokot Republic.
This seemingly unpleasant fact helped her to avoid retribution from the Red Army, which liberated Elbow by the beginning of autumn.
There is a version according to which in the hospital Tonka spun with a cook who secretly took her to Ukraine, and then to Poland, where he himself was expected to die, and Tonka was sent to a concentration camp in Koenigsberg.
You might think that luck turned away from the enemy accomplice. But in 1945, the camp was liberated by Soviet troops, and Tonka, with the help of stolen false documents, pretended to be a nurse.
Antonina managed to get a job in a military hospital, where a wounded soldier, a real war hero Viktor Ginzburg, fell in love with her. The young people signed, the woman took her husband's surname, and after the war, Viktor took her to the Belarusian city of Lepel.
Tonka gave birth to two daughters, worked at a garment factory, came to local schools and told stories about her heroic past.
Colleagues recalled that during the parties she practically did not touch alcohol - apparently, she was afraid that she could get tipsy and shake too much.
The culprit of the monstrous reprisals would have continued to lead the life of a simple Soviet working woman, but the punishment nevertheless found her 30 years later.
With a new name and place of residence, it was almost impossible to find a former female executioner, and the hunt for the punisher began almost immediately after the fall of the Lokot Republic. Even the oversight of the teacher, who changed the girl's last name to a patronymic, helped Tonka escape from justice.
The trace surfaced in 1976, when a certain citizen living in Tyumen, in a questionnaire for traveling abroad, among other Parfenovs, indicated Antonina Makarov, Ginzburg's husband, as a sister.
“For me it was just a job”
KGB officers checked the woman from all sides: surviving witnesses and her former accomplices were secretly sent to Lepel. When they confirmed that the decent and modest Antonina Ginzburg was the cruel servant of the Nazis, the woman was arrested.
During the arrest, she behaved calmly, being sure that due to the prescription of events and her age, she would not be given more than three years in the camps.
During the interrogation, Tonka showed composure, explaining that she did not feel any guilt.
“This is how life has developed,” she will say during interrogation. “For me, it was just a job.”
Antonina's husband, who at first did not know the reason for his wife's arrest, ran around the authorities, wrote letters to Leonid Brezhnev and even to the UN. When the investigators told Viktor Ginzburg about his wife's previous actions, he and his daughters left Lepel forever, hiding in an unknown direction.
Be interesting with
The story of Antonina Makarova-Ginzburg, a Soviet girl who personally executed one and a half thousand of her compatriots, is another, dark side of the heroic history of the Great Patriotic War. Tonka the machine-gunner, as she was called then, worked on the Soviet territory occupied by the Nazi troops from the 41st to the 43rd years, carrying out mass death sentences of the Nazis to partisan families. Jerking the bolt of the machine gun, she did not think about those she was shooting - children, women, old people - it was just a job for her ...
"What nonsense, that then tormented by remorse. That those you kill come at night in nightmares. I still haven't dreamed of any", - she told her investigators during interrogations, when she was nevertheless calculated 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 urgently need to drive with us!" surrounded her, preventing her from escaping.
"Can you guess why you were brought here?"- asked the investigator of the Bryansk KGB, when she was brought for the first interrogation. "Some kind of mistake," the woman grinned 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's time to answer for what we have done. Your crimes have no statute of limitations".
"So, it was not in vain that the last year my heart became anxious, as if I felt that you would appear,- said the woman. - 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 the nettles" - in Tony's jargon, this meant to be taken to be shot. She herself died three times. For the first time in the fall of 1941, in a 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 intact? 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’ll 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's, 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 from the back of the desk shout: "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? That's 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 told her goodbye. - I could not confess to you earlier, forgive me. Thanks for the company. Then somehow get out yourself." "Don't leave me, Kolya", Tonya pleaded, hanging on to him. However, Nikolai shook her off himself 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.
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'm 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 - 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. She volunteered for work in the morning".
"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'm not a partisan. Ask at least your machine-gunner Tonka," the woman was frightened. Tonya looked at her attentively and chuckled: "Let's go, 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 the things of the condemned, then I take pictures from the dead, why should the good disappear, ”Tonya explained. - Once I shot a teacher, so I liked her blouse, pink, silk, but it was painfully covered in blood, I was afraid that I would not wash it - I had to leave it in the grave. Too bad... So how much salt do you need?"
"I don't need 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 it 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?"
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...
"The search case of Antonina Makarova was conducted by our employees for more than thirty years, passing it on to each other by inheritance, - said KGB Major Pyotr Nikolaevich Golovachev, who was engaged 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 ... "
“You don’t scold Tonka too much,” Golovachev asked. “You know, I even feel sorry for her. executed. But she preferred to live, becoming an executioner. But she was only 20 years old in 1941."
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 had taken. 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 their dreams. Young, with a machine gun, looks intently - and does not take her eyes off. They were convinced that the executioner girl was alive, and asked 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 a 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 Parfenovs, 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 everyone 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 didn’t confess to him, which is what the one with whom he lived happily all his life is accused of. We were afraid that the man simply wouldn’t survive this,” the investigators said.
Viktor Ginzburg 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 of money - 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 at war, - and he fell in love with her at first sight, and a few days later they signed.
Antonina took the name of her husband, and after demobilization went with him to the Belarusian Lepel, forgotten by God and people, 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 it was possible 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 has shown 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. “It is impossible to be constantly afraid,” 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 has been 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 poke a finger at me. I think that they will give me three years probation. more? Then you have to somehow re-arrange life. And how much do you get in the pre-trial detention center, girls? Maybe I should get a job with you - the work is familiar ... "
Antonina Makarova-Ginzburg was shot at six in the morning on August 11, 1978, almost immediately after the death sentence was passed. The decision of the court 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 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 in the USSR executed by a court verdict.
linkMost 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."
“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…”
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 of the Soviet Union, and 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 escaped 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, one 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 grabbed 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 Soviet troops entered Lokot, Antonina Makarova was gone. 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 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,” 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 the life path of 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.
It is 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. As 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, a table of orders, order strips 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 removed from the museum collections 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, at which interested people in civilian clothes were also present. Panfilov told about his sister Antonina living in Belarus.
What happened next, will tell the document provided by Natalia Makarova, an assistant to the press group of the KGB in the Vitebsk region. So, "Information about the activities to search for" Sadists ".
“In December 1976 Ginzburg V.S. traveled to Moscow to visit his wife's brother Colonel Panfilov of the Soviet Army. 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 who participated in the Great Patriotic War were also invited here. 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 Lepelya Antonina Makarovna 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 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.
“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, did not know the latest domestic 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 -“What nonsense, that then remorse is tormented, that those whom you kill come later at night in nightmares, I still have not dreamed of a single one,”- Anthony Makarova (Ginzburg) answered the questions of the investigators so calmly and calmly.
There was no remorse or regret in her words, later the operatives recalled with surprise how the suspect calmly spoke about the mass executions that she personally committed. It made no difference to her who was standing in front of the sight - all those sentenced to death were the same, she did not know those whom she was shooting, they did not know her.
At least that's how Tonya calmed herself at first, and then she got into the habit, she even liked executing people. Usually a young Soviet girl shot a group of 27 people, the arrested were placed in a chain, at the command of her superiors, Tonya knelt down and shot at people until everyone fell dead.
- From the film "Two Lives of Tonka the Machine Gunner".
27 people - so many were placed in the stall of the Lokot stud farm, occupied by the Germans during the Great Patriotic War, where they created a prison for prisoners and a mini-republic with their own rules. The Russians who went over to the side of the Germans were provided with favorable living conditions, Tonka became one of those. However, her role in the "creation" of the republic horrified even worldly-wise Germans.
It will be about one of the most terrible characters of the Great Patriotic War. It was a woman, she was Russian, young (according to some sources, she was 19 years old at the time the executions began, according to others - 21 years old), either driven into a corner by the horrors of that time, or a predator by nature ... She killed (shot from a machine gun ) captured Russians - men, women, old people, children ... The number of victims per day reached 90-100 people, in total, "Tonka the machine gunner" sent more than 1,500 people to the Other World, according to official data.
“Antonina Makarovna Makarova (nee Parfenova, according to other sources - Panfilova, married Ginzburg; 1920, Malaya Volkovka, Sychevsky district, Smolensk province (according to other sources, was born in 1923 in Moscow) - August 11, 1979, Bryansk) - executioner of Lokotsky district during the Great Patriotic War, who shot more than 1,500 people in the service of the German occupation authorities and Russian collaborators.
At the time of the executions, she was also known as "Tonka the machine gunner".
The Germans and the male “traitors to the Russians” had no desire to mess around with such a bloody deed as the execution of unarmed prisoners. And Tonka, who wanted to survive by any means, was quite suitable for this. She was paid 30 German marks (Reichsmarks), “silver pieces” (a familiar figure?) for her “work”, for each execution, longing for a warm bed and food, spending a lot of time wandering through damp, cold forests, suffering from hunger, humiliation - she “sold” everything, one might say her soul, for minimal comfort.
The Lokot Republic existed for two years, from the 41st to the 43rd year. At the former stud farm, which, according to some information, is still working, there was a prison and a "den" of the occupiers. On the first floor there were cells with prisoners, made of horse boxes, with bars and walls up to the ceiling. 20-30 people were stuffed into one cell, naturally, they were only standing there, someone fainted, someone died. Women, children...
On the second floor lived "workers", in the evenings they walked in taverns and brothels. Tonka drowned her memories in alcohol every day, among men she had a bad reputation. Shootings were carried out every day. 25-30 people (one room full of people) - this is the minimum that Tonka "worked out" in a day. There were even three walkers a day ... that is, about a hundred people.
People were put in chains in front of the pit facing the pit, the place of execution was five hundred meters from the stud farm, it was pointless to run: everything was cordoned off by the Germans with machine guns, the prisoners were in any case threatened with death. Haggard, desperate, ordinary people accepted their death. From the bullets wound up by Tonkaya machine gun "Maxim".
“I just did my job, for which I was paid, just like other soldiers .. I had to shoot not only partisans, but also their families, women, teenagers, but everyone did it, because this is war. Although I remember the circumstances of one execution - before the execution, for some reason, one guy shouted to me: “We won’t see you again, goodbye, sister!”.
The victims for her were all the same person, she did not feel sorry for anyone, except for clothes:
“If I like things from the dead, then I take them off the dead, why should the good disappear: once I shot a teacher, so I liked her blouse, pink, silk, but it was painfully stained with blood, I was afraid that I wouldn’t wash it - I had to leave the grave. It's a pity".
Just a job… For Antonina, it was “just a job”.
“Sometimes you shoot, you come closer, and someone else twitches .. then she shot again in the head so that the person would not suffer. It seemed to me that the war would write everything off, I was just doing my job, for which I was paid. It’s scary to kill only the first or second, only when the score goes to hundreds it becomes just hard work ..”.
The most difficult thing was to carry out the first execution, they gave Tonka alcohol to drink, after which it was easy.
Before Tonka the machine-gunner was exposed, 36 years had passed (since the day of her last execution). "She was the only woman in the USSR who was shot after the war by a court decision."
In addition to her, two more women were executed after: “The case of Antonina Makarova was the penultimate major case of traitors to the Motherland during the Great Patriotic War - and the only one in which a female punisher appeared. After Tonka, two more women were executed: Berta Borodkin in 1983 for speculating on an especially large scale and Tamara Ivanyutina in 1987 for poisoning 9 people.
About her, albeit a negative, but very popular heroine, several films and series have been shot. One of the latest and brightest is The Executioner of 2015.
The plot differs from reality, embellished with “gag”, for example, Tonka shot the victims in the eyes (it was this trail that helped to reach Antonina Malyshkin, whose prototype was Makarova), during the executions she got drunk and worked only in a mask, a child’s, or a mouse or some kind of animal. She was very afraid that she would be recognized, that she would remain in the eyes of the victims. The series is very interesting, exciting, well filmed and played with high quality, but it differs from the real story of Antonina.
In general, it should be noted, albeit in such a terrible way, but the exposure of Tonka brought her evil fame. There were even people who almost admired her.
“Well, such a strong-willed, determined woman ... the only woman who personally shot during the Great Patriotic War. The only one, there are no more ... ",- in these words of the investigator (from the film "Retribution. The Two Lives of Tonka the Machine-Gunner"), who led the case of Makarova, it is as if admiration for the criminal comes through.
How did it happen that such a fierce criminal was able to escape after the capture of the “republic” by the Russians?
Free life and communication with German soldiers led to the fact that in the summer of 1943, before the liberation of Lokot by the Red Army, Makarova was sent to the hospital for treatment of venereal diseases.
“In the rear, Makarova started an affair with a German cook-corporal, who secretly took her in his convoy to Ukraine, and from there to Poland. There, the corporal was killed, and the Germans sent Makarov to a concentration camp in Königsberg. When the Red Army captured the city in 1945, Makarova posed as a Soviet nurse thanks to a stolen military ID, in which she indicated that from 1941 to 1944 she worked in the 422nd sanitary battalion, and got a job as a nurse in a Soviet mobile hospital.
Here, in the local hospital, she met the soldier Viktor Ginzburg, who was wounded during the assault on the city. A week later they signed, Makarova took her husband's surname.
After that, she lived for 33 years in Lepel (Belarusian SSR), being in a rather happy marriage with her husband, she gave birth to two children. She worked at a garment factory, where she checked the quality of products, her photo hung on the honor roll. The family couple - both veterans of the war, Antonina was invited to schools, various institutions for stories about the heroic past, about how she defended her homeland. Ordinary life ... Only she had few friends, she seemed to repel people, many noted her piercing and some kind of wild look. In companies, she tried not to overdo it with alcohol, apparently she was afraid that in a state of intoxication she could say too much.
It is not without reason that the names of films and stories about Makarova are called “two lives of a female executioner”: she really seemed to live the lives of two different people.
In the photo Tonka in his youth
How was she found? They searched for her for more than 30 years ... One of the clues was the surname “confused” in childhood: instead of Parfenova, Tonka was recorded as Makarov (and before that they were looking for Tonka exactly as Makarov, but it was necessary as Parfenov - recorded like that at birth), once Makarova’s brother (Parfenov ), being an employee of the Ministry of Defense, when traveling abroad in 1976, he filled out a questionnaire, where he indicated the names of all relatives.
So the investigators got on the trail of Makarova, in Lepel she was followed.
However, she soon became suspicious of something, and the investigators had to leave her alone for almost a year, during which time they collected evidence. After a year, investigators arranged “veiled” identifications with three witnesses who recognized Makarova as Tonka the machine gunner: one witness met Makarova under the guise of a Social Security employee, the other watched from the sidelines.
In September 1978, Makarova was arrested:“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."
“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…”
Even after the arrest, the husband of the “exemplary” wife tried in every possible way to get Antonina out of prison, the investigators did not tell him the true reason for Makarova’s arrest for a long time, fearing for his condition, when they nevertheless said that he turned gray overnight ... and left with his daughters to another city.
On August 11, 1979, in Bryansk, Antonina Makarova was shot, despite numerous petitions for clemency.
The reasons for Tonka's cold-bloodedness and inhuman cruelty were justified by psychiatrists by his personality, M. Vinogradov (forensic expert): “She just wanted to kill, if she hadn’t been called to the front as a nurse and she hadn’t been on the side of the Germans - she would have been happy to kill the Germans. She didn't care who she killed.. This is the type of people. Antnonina was terribly afraid of dying, the reverse side of this fear was aggression; in ordinary life, many such people are not aware of their nature as born killers. For such people, murder is the norm of life, and there is no remorse, I’m not at all sure that she had the concept of the motherland as such as we do. ”
That was justified by a split personality due to a traumatic situation: “Psychiatrist Alexander Bukhanovsky, who was an expert in the Chikatilo case, once wrote a whole scientific work about Makarova in a collection of articles called “Scientific Notes of the Phoenix Center (Russian State Medical University)”, in which he expressed the version that in the case of Makarova there was a psycho- traumatic split personality, in which the person, however, remained sane.
Before falling into the occupation, Tonka experienced the horrors of the war and, escaping, became the marching wife of Nikolai Fedchuk. For several months they wandered through the forests, getting out of the German encirclement. In the series "The Executioner" Fedchuk raped Makarova (Malyshkina in the series). In January 1942, they reached the village where Fedchuk had a wife and children, and despite Antonina's pleas not to leave her, he refused to continue any relationship and left the girl to her fate.
There are even suggestions that Antonina could have gone crazy from the horrors of the war she experienced and everything that happened to Fedchuk.
All psychiatric examinations confirmed Antonina's sanity, which is often equated with the fact that Makarova was absolutely mentally healthy.
Firstly, sanity is not equal to mental health, and secondly, it is impossible to believe that the person who created everything that is attributed to Tonka the machine gunner is mentally normal. I don't believe in it. Such a tendency to cruelty is already a natural anomaly of the psyche, the desire to destroy, kill, love to destroy people, which was characteristic of Makarova, as M. Vinogradov says, can this be normal? A priori, a killer enjoying mass death, I note - aimless, for his own pleasure, is a maniac, a mentally and spiritually affected person.
Even sitting in the cell, Makarova, according to the stories of the investigators (and the “whisperer woman” who was placed in the cell with Tonka), did not understand what she had done wrong, they say, they disgraced her in her old age, how to work now, live when they are released ... but they would give her, as she thought, no more than three years probation ... why give more? She just worked hard...
She justified herself by doing just hard work. And indeed - after all, the war was, in fact, a bloody mess of ours and others, to give everything for the motherland without betraying it, and become a sliver in the fire of injustice, cruelty, either ours or others, or trying to save at least our own skin - a dilemma ambiguous. There is no need to say who would have done what and shout that none of us would have betrayed the motherland ... Perhaps there would have been many traitors to the motherland, there were already many of them. But to kill defenseless people, children, old people, both Germans and Russians, is already a crime not justified by any fear of the death of one's own skin. Words from Kanevsky's film: "You can understand, you can't forgive ...".
And yet, in the end, I want to say about some ambiguous points.
Some of the materials of the case are still classified… Why?
