“Tonka the Machine Gunner”: her name became a shame for all Soviet people. The female executioner: the story of Tonka the machine gunner, who shot our prisoners in the service of the Nazis. The marching wife of an encirclement
The Great Patriotic War - this war is riddled with both a large number of heroic deeds and a large number of vile betrayal. Some got what they deserved for their deeds, some got away different ways from justice, some were punished years and decades later.
We will further talk about a woman who served the Nazis, who mercilessly shot our compatriots, the number of whom reached 1,500 people, who hid from deserved punishment for more than three decades. This man's nickname 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 it 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 to go to 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 the notorious Vyazemsk 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, she and a soldier named Nikolai Fedchuk soon escaped captivity together.
Wanting to survive, Tonya offered herself to the 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 Krasny Kolodets, where Fedchuk’s wife and children were waiting. Returning home, the deserter abandoned his fellow traveler to the mercy of fate.
“I wasn’t ashamed in front of them”
Some forensic psychologists are confident that the heroine’s further actions were the result of psychological trauma from the horrors experienced in the “Vyazemsky Cauldron” and the blow after the break in relations with Fedchuk.
The girl continued to wander through villages and hamlets, eventually ending up in the region of the Lokot Republic, a self-government in Nazi-occupied territory.
Wanting to prove herself well and survive, Tonya agreed to participate in the execution of partisans and members of 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 Maxim machine gun, and a salary of 30 marks was assigned for each execution. To carry out the first “execution” she had to take a hefty dose of alcohol, but she completed the task. Subsequent reprisals 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 whom she had to shoot, because they were complete strangers to her.
The executioner preferred to finish off her victims:
“It happened that you would shoot, come closer, and someone else would twitch. Then she shot him in the head again so that the person would not suffer.”
Tonka had particularly “busy” days, during which he had to commit as many as three mass executions. In total, according to official data, the collaborator executed 1,500 people, of whom only 168 could be identified.
“Those arrested were placed in a line facing the pit. One of the men rolled my machine gun to the execution site. At the command of my superiors, I knelt down and shot 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 killed women and children.
Despite her bloodthirsty position, Antonina managed to retain her feminine side. After each execution, she collected the clothes and other things she liked from the dead. “Why should good things go to waste?” she reasoned. Tonka was terribly upset that after the execution, traces of blood and bullets remained on good things.
Tonka relieved the stress from 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 sent to a German hospital for treatment for a whole “collection” of venereal diseases that she had managed to pick up in the Lokot Republic.
This seemingly unpleasant fact helped her avoid retribution from the Red Army, which liberated Lokot by the beginning of autumn.
There is a version according to which in the hospital Tonka had an affair with a cook, who secretly took her to Ukraine and then to Poland, where he himself faced death and Tonka was sent to a concentration camp in Koenigsberg.
You might think that luck had turned against the enemy's accomplice. But in 1945 the camp was liberated Soviet troops, and Tonka with the help of stolen goods 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, Victor took her to the Belarusian city of Lepel.
Tonka gave birth to two daughters, worked in a garment factory, came to local schools and told tall tales about her heroic past.
Colleagues recalled that at parties she practically did not touch alcohol - apparently, she was afraid that she might get drunk and drink too much.
The culprit of the monstrous massacres would have continued to lead the life of a simple Soviet working woman, but punishment still found her 30 years later.
With a new name and place of residence, it was almost impossible to find the former female executioner, and the hunt for the punisher began almost immediately after the fall of the Lokot Republic. Even the mistake of the teacher, who changed the girl’s last name to her middle name, 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 Makarova as his sister, and Ginzburg by her husband.
“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 a cruel servant of the Nazis, the woman was arrested.
During her arrest, she behaved calmly, being confident that, due to the long history of the events and her age, she would not be given more than three years in the camps.
During the interrogation, Tonka demonstrated composure, explaining that she did not feel any guilt.
“This is how life turned out,” 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 investigators told Victor Ginzburg about his wife’s previous deeds, he and his daughters left Lepel forever, hiding in an unknown direction.
Be interesting with
Her story illustrates like nothing else how terrible the war was. This is the story of the only woman in the world who personally killed one and a half thousand people, mostly her compatriots...
"REMEN OF CONSCIENCE IS COMPLETE BULLSHIT"
With the beginning of the Great Patriotic War a modest and shy girl Tonya was called to the front. In 1941, during the Great Patriotic War, as a nurse, she was surrounded and found herself in occupied territory. She voluntarily joined the auxiliary police of the Lokot district of the Lokot district, where she carried out death sentences, executing about 1,500 people (according to official data). For executions she used a Maxim machine gun, given to her by the police at her request. At the end of the war, Makarova got a fake nurse’s ID and got a job in a hospital, married front-line soldier V.S., who was being treated in her hospital. Ginzburg, changed her last name.
Her cruelty is amazing... Tonka the Machine Gunner, as she was called then, worked on Soviet territory occupied by German troops from 1941 to 1943, carrying out mass death sentences of fascist partisan families.
Jerking the bolt of the machine gun, she did not think about those whom she was shooting - children, women, old people - it was just work for her. “What nonsense that you are then tormented by remorse. That those you kill come at night in nightmares. I still haven’t had a single dream,” she told her investigators during interrogations, when she was finally identified and detained - through 35 years after her last execution.
The criminal case of the Bryansk punisher Antonina Makarova-Ginzburg still rests in the depths of the FSB special storage facility. 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 has personally killed so many people.
ANOTHER NAME – ANOTHER LIFE
Thirty-three years after the Victory, this woman’s name was 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 their status: an apartment, insignia for milestone dates, and scarce sausage in their food rations. Her husband was also a participant in the war, with orders and medals. The two adult daughters were proud of their mother.
They looked up to her, they took an example from her: what a heroic fate: to march throughout the war as a simple nurse from Moscow to Koenigsberg. School teachers invited Antonina Makarovna to speak at the line, to tell the younger generation that in the life of every person there is always a place for heroic deeds. And the most important thing in war is not to be afraid to look death in the face.
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 string bag in her hands was walking down the street when a car stopped nearby and inconspicuous men in civilian clothes jumped out of it and said: “You urgently need to come with us!” surrounded her, not allowing her to escape.
"Can you guess why you were brought here?" - asked the investigator of the Bryansk KGB when she was brought in 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, carried out mass executions. Your atrocities in the village of Lokot, near Bryansk, are still being talked about legends. We have been looking for you for more than thirty years - now the time has come to answer for what we have done. Your crimes have no statute of limitations."
"So it's not in vain Last year“I felt anxious in my heart, as if I felt that you would appear,” the woman said. - How long ago it was. It’s as if it’s not with me at all. Almost my whole life has already passed. Well, write it down..."
From the interrogation protocol of Antonina Makarova-Ginzburg, June 1978:
“All those sentenced to death were the same for me. Only their number changed. Usually I was ordered to shoot a group of 27 people - that’s how many partisans the cell could accommodate. I shot about 500 meters from the prison near some pit. Those arrested were placed in a chain facing pit. One of the men rolled out my machine gun to the execution site. At the command of my superiors, I knelt down and shot at people until everyone fell dead..."
LOVE DRIVEN TO MADNESS
“Lead into nettles” - in Tony’s jargon this meant leading to execution. She herself died three times. The first time was in the fall of 1941, in the terrible “Vyazma cauldron,” as a young girl-medicine instructor. Hitler's troops were then advancing on Moscow as part of Operation Typhoon. Soviet commanders they abandoned their armies to death, and this was not considered a crime - war has a different morality. More than a million Soviet boys and girls died in that Vyazemsk meat grinder in just six days, five hundred thousand were captured. The death of ordinary soldiers at that moment did not solve anything and did not bring victory closer, it was simply meaningless. Just like a nurse helping the dead...
19-year-old nurse Tonya Makarova woke up after a battle in the forest. The air smelled of burnt flesh. An unfamiliar soldier lay nearby. “Hey, are you still safe? 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 was left, and inside there was emptiness.
For three months, until the first snow, they wandered together through the thickets, getting out of the encirclement, not knowing either the direction of movement, or their final goal, or where their friends were, or where their enemies were. They were starving, breaking stolen slices of bread for two. During the day they shied away from military convoys, and at night they kept each other warm.
“I’m almost a Muscovite,” Tonya proudly lied to Nikolai. “There are many children in our family. And we are all Parfenovs. I’m the eldest, like Gorky, I came out into the world early. I grew up like a beech, taciturn. Once I came to a village school, to first grade, and forgot my last name. The teacher asks: “What’s your name, girl?” And I know that Parfenova, I’m just afraid to say. The kids from the back row shout: “Yes, she’s Makarova, her father is Makar.” So I one in all the documents and wrote it down. After school, I left for Moscow, then the war began. I was drafted to be a nurse. But I had a different dream - I wanted to use a machine gun, like Anka the Machine Gunner from Chapaev. True, I look like her "When we get to our people, let's ask for a machine gun..."
In January 1942, dirty and ragged, Tonya and Nikolai finally came to the village of Krasny Kolodets. And then they had to part forever. “You know, my home village is nearby. I’m there now, I have a wife and children,” Nikolai told her goodbye. “I couldn’t confess to you before, forgive me. Thank you for the company. Then you’ll get out on your own somehow.” The girl begged not to leave her, confessed her love and said that she would be lost without him... But Nikolai was in a hurry home - to the woman he loved and his adored children...
For several days, Tonya wandered around the huts, rejoiced in Christ, and asked to stay. The compassionate housewives let her in at first, but after a few days they invariably refused the shelter, explaining that they themselves had nothing to eat. “Her look is bad,” the women said.
Rumor has it that Tonya really lost her mind at that moment. Perhaps Nikolai’s betrayal finished her off, or she simply ran out of strength - one way or another, she only had physical needs left. And she was also desperately trying to hook up with at least some man in the village - and it didn’t matter at all that everyone who remained lived with wives and families. Tonya didn’t want to be alone so much that she simply didn’t care about the feelings of others...
WHERE DREAMS LEAD
In the village where Tonya stopped at the beginning, there were no policemen. In the neighboring village, on the contrary, only punitive forces were registered. The front line here ran in the middle of the outskirts. One day she wandered around the outskirts, half-mad, lost, not knowing where, how and with whom she would spend that night. People in uniform stopped her and asked in Russian: “Who is she?” The girl said that her name was Antonina Makarova and that she was from Moscow, but for some reason she was absolutely not afraid...
She was brought to the village administration. The policemen complimented her, then took turns “loving” her. Then they gave her a whole glass of moonshine to drink and put a machine gun in her hands. As she dreamed of - to disperse people with a continuous machine-gun line. Living people.
Makarova-Ginzburg said during interrogations that the first time she was taken out to be shot by the 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 an ongoing basis. After all, none of the Russian policemen wanted to get dirty; they preferred that the executions of partisans and members of their families be carried out by a woman. Homeless and lonely, Antonina was given a bed in a room at a local stud farm, where she could spend the night and store a machine gun. In the morning she voluntarily went to work
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 and wore the most beautiful clothes. She often removed it from those whom she doomed to death.
At the dances, Tonya got drunk and changed partners like gloves... And in the morning she again went “on duty” and shot dozens of people... It’s scary to kill only the first, the second, then, when the count goes into hundreds, it becomes just hard work, - Tonya said later.
“It seemed to me that the war would write off everything. I was simply doing my job, for which I was paid. I had 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 By shooting, a guy sentenced to death shouted to me: “We won’t see you again, goodbye, sister!”
PUNISHMENT
“Our employees conducted the search for Antonina Makarova for more than thirty years, passing it on to each other by inheritance,” said KGB Major Pyotr Nikolaevich Golovachev, who was involved in the search for Antonina Makarova in the 70s. “Periodically it ended up in the archive, then when we caught and interrogated another traitor to the Motherland, it again surfaced. Couldn't Tonka have disappeared without a trace?! Now we can blame the authorities for incompetence and illiteracy. But the work was brilliant. During the post-war years, KGB officers secretly and carefully checked all the women 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 thin air..."
But it was impossible to just take it and forget about it. “Her crimes were too terrible,” says Golovachev. “It was simply impossible to comprehend how many lives she took. 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. The young girl, with a machine gun, looks intently - and does not look away. 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 I could have gotten married a long time ago and changed my passport, so we thoroughly studied life path all her possible relatives named Makarov..."
However, the accidental mistake of the village teacher Tony in the first grade, who wrote down her patronymic as a surname, 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 Parfenov was going abroad. When filling out the application form for a foreign 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 for some reason only one was Antonina Makarovna Makarov, married to Ginzburg in 1945, now living in Belarus.
Antonina's husband, Victor Ginzburg, a war and labor veteran, promised to complain to the UN after her unexpected arrest. “We didn’t admit to him what they were accusing the one with whom he had lived a happy life. We were afraid that the man simply wouldn’t survive this,” the investigators said.
|
Victor Ginzburg bombarded various organizations with complaints, assuring that he loved his wife very much, and even if she had committed some crime - for example, embezzlement - he would forgive her everything. He also talked about how, as a wounded boy in April 1945, he was lying in a hospital near Koenigsberg, and suddenly she, a new nurse, Tonechka, entered the room. Innocent, pure, as if she had not been at war - and he fell in love with her at first sight, and a few days later they married.
Antonina took her husband’s surname, and after demobilization she went with him to the Belarusian Lepel, and not to Moscow, from where she was once called to the front. When the old man was told the truth, he turned gray overnight. And I didn’t write any more complaints.
“The woman who was arrested did not give a single line to her husband from the pre-trial detention center. And, by the way, she also did not write anything to her two daughters, whom she gave birth to after the war, and did not ask to see him,” says investigator Leonid Savoskin. “When we managed to find contact with our accused, she started talking about to tell everyone. About how she escaped by escaping from a German hospital and finding herself surrounded by us, straightened out someone else’s veteran’s documents, according to which she began to live. She didn’t hide anything, but that was the worst thing. One got the feeling that she sincerely misunderstood: "Why was she imprisoned, what was SUCH a terrible thing she did? She killed not only strangers, but also her own family. She simply destroyed them with her exposure. A mental examination showed that Antonina Makarovna Makarova is sane."
EPILOGUE
Antonina Makarova-Ginzburg was shot at six o'clock in the morning on August 11, 1978, almost immediately after the death sentence was pronounced. The court's decision came as a complete surprise even to the people who led the investigation. All requests for clemency from 55-year-old Antonina Makarova-Ginzburg in Moscow were rejected.
In the Soviet Union, this was the last major case of traitors to the Motherland during the Great Patriotic War, and the only one in which a female punisher appeared. Never later were women executed by court order in the USSR.
When preparing the material, open sources on the history of the USSR, materials from the sites renascentia.ru, Wikipedia were used
Photo NTV, Wikipedia, Rusinka
After the end of World War II Soviet authorities launching punitive operations and searching for criminal collaborators. The country is shaken by public executions; one of the most famous was the execution at the Leningrad Gigant cinema. These processes are filmed and shown in newsreels. A real hunt and investigation begins for the traitors. One of these criminals, who for a long time could not be caught and convicted of crimes, turned out to be the only woman - the executioner Tonka the Machine Gunner.
Lokot Republic
The elbow of the Bryansk region was captured by the Nazis. At its base, Reichsführer SS Himmler ordered the creation of a republic under local population. Such an organization was supposed to show the locals that it was free of communists. Autonomous became a place where peasants were allowed to work on their own land. But not all residents supported the new order; some went to the forests to continue, which was quite active in the Bryansk region.
Bronislav Kaminsky, a former technologist at a local distillery, became the new burgomaster of the republic. The German generals showed him the highest confidence and allowed him to build a new future.
Private trade was allowed in the republic, and only a small tax was collected in favor of the new authorities. Against this background, constant partisan battles took place, as a result of which the new leadership captured partisans and other suspects. Mass extermination of dissenters was the order of the day and occurred regularly.
Tonya Makarova could well have been among those executed, but she decided to survive at any cost, which turned out to be too high. Kaminsky personally invited her to perform the work of the executioner of the new regime. The nineteen-year-old girl agreed. She could have gone into the forests with the partisans, but began to serve the new authorities. She jumped at the chance to save her life.
She was assigned to carry out death sentences and was given a machine gun, and before that she took the oath of allegiance to Germany.
Female executioner
The local population had no problems with either clothing or food. The Germans uninterruptedly supplied the region with essential goods.
Tonya was given a room at a local stud farm and a salary of 30 marks. After long wanderings through the forests, after the Vyazemsky Cauldron, it seemed to the girl that Kaminsky’s proposal was not the worst option. By those standards, she lived in luxury. She had absolutely everything. But when it came to executions, there was no turning back.
And when Tonya already believed that luck had smiled on her, a machine gun was placed between her and the prisoners. Despite the fact that she was drunk, she remembered this day well. No one was going to show mercy to the doomed, and Tonya Makarova forgot about all her doubts.
At each execution, she shot about 30 prisoners with a Maxim machine gun. This is exactly how much was placed in the stall of the former stud farm of Mikhail Romanov. In two years, according to official data, the girl killed about 1,500 thousand prisoners. This category included partisans, Jews and persons suspected of having links with partisans, and their families.
New life
Wild life and prostitution in an entertainment establishment led to venereal disease. And Antonina was sent to Germany for treatment. But she managed to escape from the hospital, made herself new documents, and got a job in a military hospital. There she met her future husband. It was a Belarusian soldier who was in the hospital after being wounded - Viktor Ginzburg. The biography of his future wife was unknown to him.
A week later, the couple signed, the girl took her husband’s last name, which helped her get even more lost and escape justice.
During her work at the hospital, she earned a good reputation as a front-line soldier, and Viktor Ginzburg, Makarova’s husband, could not believe that his beloved wife was involved in such crimes.
Family
Victor Ginzburg, whose biography is practically unknown, was a native of a small Belarusian town, it was here that the family began a new life.
After the end of the war, the family went to Lepel, where Antonina got a job in a garment factory. The woman’s family - Victor Ginzburg, Makarova’s husband, their children - lived in this city for 30 years and established themselves as an exemplary family. She was in good standing with the factory management and never aroused any suspicion. From the memoirs of contemporaries, everyone characterized the Ginzburg family as exemplary.
Arrest
State security agencies opened a criminal case against Antonina Makarova in absentia, but they could not get on her trail. The case was transferred to the archive several times, but was not closed, the crimes she committed were too terrible. Neither Victor Ginzburg nor her immediate circle even knew about the woman’s involvement in the brutal murders.
The investigators did not admit to the family why they arrested the woman, so Viktor Ginzburg, Tonka the Machine Gunner’s husband, a war and labor veteran, threatened to complain to the UN after his wife’s unexpected arrest. Despite the fact that the traces were lost, surviving witnesses pointed to the criminal without doubt.
Victor Ginzburg wrote complaints to various organizations, assuring that he loved his wife very much and was ready to forgive her all her crimes. But I didn’t know how serious it was.
When Victor Ginzburg, Makarova’s husband, learned the terrible truth, the man turned gray overnight.
Surname
There are some ambiguities in the biography of Antonina Makarova. She was approximately born in the early 20s in Moscow. Her mother was a native of Sychevsky. After finishing the seventh grade, Antonina lived in Moscow with her aunt.
As for her surname, the large family bore the surname Panfilov, patronymic - Makarovna / Makarovich. But at school the girl was registered as Makarova, either by accident or due to inattention. This surname was transferred to the girl’s passport.
Finally, Antonina was sentenced to death, and Victor Ginzbrug, Makarova’s husband, and his two daughters left the city in an unknown direction. Their fate is still unknown.
Antonina Makarova (or Antonina Ginzburg) is a woman who became an executioner for many Soviet partisans during the war and received the nickname “Tonka the Machine Gunner” for this. She carried out more than 1.5 thousand sentences of the Nazis, forever covering her name with indelible shame.
Tonka the machine gunner was born in the Smolensk region, in the small village of Malaya Volkovka in 1920. At birth her surname was Parfenova. Due to an incorrect entry in school magazine Antonina Makarovna Parfenova “lost” her real name and turned into Antonina Makarovna Makarov. This surname was used by her in the future.
After graduating from school, Antonina went to study at a technical school, intending to become a doctor. When the war began, the girl was 21 years old. Inspired by the image of Anka the machine gunner, Makarova went to the front to “beat the enemies.” Presumably, this is what prompted her to pick up a weapon such as a machine gun. Professor of psychiatry Alexander Bukhanovsky at one time investigated the personality of this woman. He suggested that she might have a mental disorder.
In 1941, Makarova managed to escape in the Vyazemsk operation, a catastrophic defeat Soviet army near Moscow. She hid in the forests for several days. Then she was captured by the Nazis. With the help of Private Nikolai Fedchuk, she managed to escape. Wanderings through the forests began again, which had a bad effect on Antonina’s psychological state.
After a few months of such a life, the woman ended up in the Lokot Republic. After living with a local peasant woman for some time, Antonina noticed that the Soviet citizens who collaborated with the Germans settled well here. Then she went to work for the Nazis.
Later at the trial, Makarova explained this act with the desire to survive. At first she served in the auxiliary police and beat prisoners. The chief of police, appreciating her efforts, ordered the zealous Makarova to be given a machine gun. From that moment on, she was officially appointed executioner. The Germans thought that it would be much better if a Soviet girl shot the partisans. And you don’t need to get your hands dirty, and this will demoralize the enemy.
In her new position, Makarova received not only a more suitable weapon, but also a separate room. To make the first shot, Antonina had to drink heavily. Then things went like clockwork. All other executions were carried out by Tonka the Machine Gunner while sober. Later at the trial, she explained that she did not treat those she shot as ordinary people. For her they were strangers, and therefore she did not feel sorry for them.
Antonina Makarova “worked” with rare cynicism. She always personally checked whether the “work” was done well. In case of a miss, she would definitely finish off the wounded. At the end of the execution, she removed good things from the corpses. It got to the point that on the eve of the executions Makarova began to go around the barracks with prisoners and select those who had good clothes.
After the war, Tonka the Machine Gunner said that she never regretted anything or anyone. She didn’t have nightmares, and the people she killed didn’t appear in visions. She did not feel any remorse, which indicates a psychopathic personality type.
Antonina Makarova “worked” extremely hard. She shot Soviet partisans and their relatives three times a day. She has more than 1.5 thousand ruined souls to her name. For each executioner in a skirt she received 30 German Reichsmarks. In addition, Tonka provided intimate services to German soldiers. By 1943, she had to be treated for a whole bunch of venereal diseases in the German rear. Just at this time, Elbow was recaptured from the Nazis.
Then Makarova began to hide from both the Russians and the Germans. She stole a military ID somewhere and pretended to be a nurse. At the end of the war, using this card, she worked as a nurse in one of the hospitals for Red Army soldiers. There she met Private Viktor Ginzburg and soon became his wife.
After the war, the Ginzburgs settled in the Belarusian city of Lepel. Antonina gave birth to 2 daughters and began working as a quality controller at a clothing factory. She had an extremely reserved character. I never drank, probably for fear of spilling the beans about my past. For a long time no one knew about him.
Security authorities searched for Tonka the Machine Gunner for 30 years. Only in 1976 were they able to trace her. 2 years later she was found and identified. Several witnesses immediately confirmed the identity of Makarova, who was already Ginzburg at that time. During the arrest, and then the investigation and trial, she behaved surprisingly calmly. Tonka the machine gunner could not understand why they wanted to punish her. She considered her actions in wartime to be quite logical.
Antonina's husband did not know why his wife was arrested. When investigators told the man the truth, he took the children and left the city forever. It is not known where he began to live subsequently. At the end of November 1978, the court sentenced Antonina Ginzburg to death. She took the verdict calmly. Later she wrote several petitions for pardon. On August 11, 1979 she was executed.
The Great Patriotic War became a severe test for everyone Soviet people. And people were not always on the side of heroism and courage.
In the service of the Nazis, this woman personally executed one and a half thousand soldiers and partisans, and then became an exemplary Soviet woman
In the series “The Executioner,” which was just shown on Channel One, Soviet investigators are looking for the mysterious Tonka the Machine Gunner. During the Great Patriotic War, she collaborated with the Nazis and shot captured Soviet soldiers and partisans. For the most part, this series is a figment of the writer's imagination. However, the main character of “The Executioner” had a real prototype. After the war, the traitor skillfully covered her tracks and calmly got married, gave birth to children, and became a leader in production.
On November 20, 1978, 59-year-old Antonina Ginzburg (nee Makarova*) was sentenced to capital punishment - execution. She listened to the judge calmly. At the same time, I sincerely did not understand why the sentence was so cruel.
“There was a war...” she sighed. - And now my eyes are sore, I need surgery - will they really not have mercy?
During the investigation, the woman did not deny it, did not play around, and immediately admitted her guilt. But, it seems, she never understood the scale of this guilt. It seems that in the understanding of the venerable mother of the family, her own crimes occupied a place somewhere between stealing candy from a store and adultery.
During her service with the German occupation authorities, Antonina Makarova shot, according to some sources, about 1,500 people with a machine gun. Petitions for clemency were rejected, and a year after the trial the sentence was carried out.
Confrontation: a witness to the bloody events in the village of Lokot identified Antonina Makarova (far right of those sitting). Photo: archive of the FSB Directorate for the Bryansk Region.
Tonya Makarova went to the front voluntarily, wanting to help the wounded Soviet soldiers, but became a murderer. “Life turned out this way...” she will say during interrogation. Photo: archive of the FSB Directorate for the Bryansk Region.
In “The Executioner,” the heroine is still tormented by some spiritual doubts, and before the executions she puts on a bunny mask. In fact, Makarova did not hide her face. It’s necessary, it’s necessary, she reasoned, firmly deciding to prove herself from the best side in order to survive. In the series, she finishes off the wounded with shots in the eyes with a revolver - believing that her image is fixed in the pupils of the victims. In reality, the machine gunner was not superstitious: “It happened that you would shoot, come closer, and someone else would twitch. Then she shot him in the head again so that the person would not suffer.”
There were also disappointments in her work. For example, Makarova was very worried that bullets and blood greatly damaged clothes and shoes - after the executions, she took for herself all the good stuff. Sometimes she looked at those sentenced to prison in advance, looking for new clothes. In her free time, Tonka had fun with German soldiers in a music club.
The search for Antonina Makarova began immediately after the fall of the Lokot Republic. There were plenty of eyewitnesses to the atrocities, but she brilliantly burned the bridges leading to her. New surname new life. In Belarusian Lepel, she got a job as a seamstress in a factory.
She was respected at work, her photo was constantly hung on the honor board. The woman gave birth to two daughters. True, I tried not to drink at parties - apparently, I was afraid of letting it slip. So, sobriety only makes a lady beautiful.
Retribution overtook her only 30 years after the executions. An ominous irony of fate: they came for her when she had completely disappeared among millions of middle-aged Soviet women. I was just applying for my pension. She had just been called to the security service: supposedly something needed to be counted. Behind the window, under the guise of an employee of the institution, sat a witness to the events in Lokte.
The security officers worked day and night, but they found her by accident. The machine gunner’s brother filled out a form to travel abroad and indicated the surname of his married sister. She really adored her family: having seemingly provided for everything, Makarova-Ginzburg never found the strength not to communicate with her relatives.
The sentence was carried out in 1979. Her husband, having finally learned why his wife was arrested, left Lepel with his daughters forever.
*Her name at birth is Antonina Makarovna Parfenova. But at school the girl was mistakenly registered as Makarova, having confused her last name with her patronymic.
Loading...