The history of the persecution of traitors to the USSR, who sold themselves to the Nazis

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

One and a half thousand victims, more than 30 years on the run and no remorse - 40 years ago, on August 11, 1979, Antonina Makarova, the notorious executioner of the Lokotsky district, was shot by the verdict of a Soviet court. Tonka the machine gunner is one of three women executed in the USSR in the post-Stalin era.

For a long time they could not find a collaborator who went over to the side of the invaders. About how the NKVD and the KGB caught traitors - in the material of RIA Novosti.

Antonina Makarova

In the so-called Lokot Republic created by the Nazis on the territory of the Bryansk region, Antonina Makarova, better known under the nickname Tonka the Machine Gunner, was an executioner - she shot partisans and their relatives. The victims were sent to her by 27 people. There were days when she carried out death sentences three times. After the executions, she took off the clothes she liked from the corpses. The partisans announced a hunt for her. But it was not possible to catch Tonka the machine-gunner.

Antonina Makarova-Ginzburg (Tonka-machine gunner)

After the war, her trace was lost. The search was carried out by a special group of KGB officers - the state security bodies began to look for a collaborationist immediately after Elbow was freed from the Germans. The prisoners and the wounded were checked, versions were put forward that she was killed or taken abroad by the Germans.

And Antonina Makarova, meanwhile, married Sergeant Viktor Ginzburg, took his last name and lived quietly in the Belarusian Lepel. She worked as an inspector at a local garment factory, enjoyed all the benefits of a war veteran.

However, in 1976, one of the residents of Bryansk identified the former head of the Lokotsky prison, Nikolai Ivanin, as a bystander. The traitor was detained. During interrogations, he recalled that Antonina Makarova had lived in Moscow before the war. The operatives checked all the Muscovites with this surname, but no one matched the description. KGB investigator Pyotr Golovachev drew attention to the questionnaire of one resident of the capital, filled out to travel abroad.

In the document, a Muscovite named Makarov indicated that his own sister lives in Belarus. Operatives have established covert surveillance of the suspect. They showed her to several former inmates of the Lokotsky prison, and they identified her as Tonka the machine-gunner. When all doubts disappeared, Makarova was detained. During interrogations, Tonka the machine-gunner admitted that she was never tormented by remorse. She perceived the executions as a cost of war, did not feel guilty and until the last was sure that she would get off with a short term of imprisonment. On August 11, 1979, she was shot.

Vasily Meleshko

Junior Lieutenant Vasily Meleshko met the Great Patriotic War as the commander of the machine-gun platoon of the 140th separate machine-gun battalion. On the very first day, he was captured near the village of Parkhachi, Lviv region of Ukraine. In a concentration camp for prisoners of war, Soviet officers went to cooperate with the Germans. He was appointed platoon commander of the 118th Schutzmannschaft Battalion, an auxiliary security police unit formed in Kiev in the summer of 1942. In December of the same year, the battalion was transferred to occupied Belarus for punitive operations against local partisans.

Memorial complex "Khatyn"

From January 1943 to July 1944, Meleshko, as part of a punitive battalion, participated in dozens of operations within the framework of the “scorched earth” strategy, during which hundreds of Belarusian villages were destroyed. A former Soviet junior lieutenant personally shot from a machine gun a burning shed in Khatyn, into which the Nazis drove local residents.

In 1944, foreseeing the inevitable collapse of the Third Reich, he was one of the initiators of the transition of the punishers to the side of the partisans. The 2nd Ukrainian battalion named after Taras Shevchenko was formed, which later became part of the French Foreign Legion.

After the war, Meleshko managed to hide the truth about his past. He worked as an agronomist on the Kirov farm in the Rostov region. They exposed him by accident. In the 1970s, a photograph of the chief agronomist of the farm got on the pages of the regional newspaper Molot. They identified him by it. Meleshko was arrested in 1974. The surviving residents of Khatyn and surrounding villages, as well as his former colleagues in the police battalion, were brought into the trial as witnesses. The punisher was shot in 1975.

Grigory Vasyura

The materials of the trial of Vasily Meleshko helped to get on the trail of another war criminal - the chief of staff of the battalion who led the massacre in Khatyn, Grigory Vasyura. After the war, he lived and worked near Kiev, held the position of deputy director of a state farm. And during the Great Patriotic War, he participated in most of the punitive operations of his battalion, gave orders for executions.

He personally mocked people, shot them, often in front of his subordinates, to set an example. I was looking for Jews hiding in the forests, and once, for some minor offense, he killed a teenage boy at the Novoelnya railway station.

Grigory Nikitovich Vasyura

In 1985, as a "veteran of military operations", he demanded the Order of the Patriotic War. They raised the archives, but found out only that Vasyura disappeared without a trace in June 1941. The investigation and testimony of other punishers from the 118th battalion led to the true past of the "veteran". In November 1986, he was arrested. The court proved that in the course of punitive operations on his order and he personally killed at least 360 peaceful Soviet citizens. Vasyura was shot on October 2, 1987.

Alexander Yukhnovsky

Born and lived in the village of Zelenaya, Volyn province of the Ukrainian SSR. After the outbreak of war and the occupation of Ukraine by the Germans, his father formed a local police from his acquaintances, where he attached his 16-year-old son. From September 1941 to March 1942, Yukhnovsky Jr. served as a clerk and translator at the German headquarters, occasionally getting into a cordon during the executions of Jews or partisans. But in March 1942 he was appointed an interpreter at the headquarters of the secret field police.

He actively participated in interrogations and executions, was distinguished by a special sadism. He personally shot and beat to death over a hundred detained Soviet citizens.

In August 1944, during the retreat of the Wehrmacht, the punisher managed to desert. In September, he voluntarily joined the Red Army under the name of his stepmother, Mironenko. The recruiting officers believed his legend that his father was killed at the front, his mother was killed in the bombing, and all documents were burned. Yukhnovsky was enrolled in the machine gunners of the 191st Infantry Division of the 2nd Belorussian Front. Then he served as a clerk at the headquarters. After the war, he lived for several years in the Soviet zone of occupation of Germany, from 1948 to 1951 he worked in the international department of the newspaper "Soviet Army". In 1952 he moved with his family to Moscow.

In the early 1970s, Yukhnovsky was offered to join the CPSU. He was exposed during interrogation by the KGB, when it turned out that he had hidden a lot from his military biography. In addition, there were witnesses who identified the punisher. Yukhnovsky was arrested on June 2, 1975. Found guilty of participation in at least 44 punitive operations and complicity in the murder of more than 2,000 Soviet citizens. Shot on June 23, 1977.