The woman who shot prisoners during the war. A sadist, a victim of circumstances or a calculating cynic: who Tonka the Machine Gunner really was. Antonina's capture, investigation
Story Antonina Makarova-Ginsburg- a Soviet girl who personally executed one and a half thousand of her compatriots - the other, dark, treacherous side of the Great Patriotic War.
Tonka the machine gunner, as it was called then, worked on Soviet territory occupied by Nazi troops from 1941 to 1943, carrying out mass death sentences of fascist partisan families.
Pulling the bolt of the machine gun, she did not think about those she was shooting - children, women, old people - it was just work for her.
“What nonsense, that later you suffer from remorse. That those you kill come in nightmares at night. I still haven’t dreamed of a single one,” she told her investigators during interrogations, when she was finally identified and detained - 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 personally killed one and a half thousand people.
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. And who, if not Antonina Makarovna, knew about this best...
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 travel 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 punitive woman, you worked for the Germans, carried out mass executions. There are still legends about your atrocities in the village of Lokot, near Bryansk. We have been looking for you for more than thirty years - now it is time to answer for what we have done. Your crimes have no statute of limitations.”
“So it’s not in vain Last year“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 to 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 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..."
“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 okay? 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. She reached out to him, trembling:
“Mommy, it’s so cold!” “Well, beautiful, don’t cry. “We’ll get out together,” Nikolai answered and unbuttoned the top button of her tunic.
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. Tonya washed both of their foot wraps in cold water and prepared a simple lunch. Did she love Nikolai? Rather, she drove out, burned out with a hot iron, fear and cold from within.
“I’m almost a Muscovite,” Tonya proudly lied to Nikolai. — There are many children in our family. And we are all Parfenovs. I am the eldest, like Gorky, I came out into the public early. She grew up like such a beech, taciturn. Once I came to a village school, in 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 is Makarova, her father is Makar.”
So they wrote me down alone in all the documents. After school I went to Moscow, and then the war began. I was called to be a nurse. But I had a different dream - I wanted to shoot a machine gun like Anka the Machine Gunner from Chapaev. Do I really 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 going there now, I have a wife and children,” Nikolai told her goodbye. “I couldn’t confess to you earlier, forgive me.” Thanks for the company. Then get out on your own somehow.” “Don’t leave me, Kolya,” Tonya begged, hanging onto him. However, Nikolai shook it off like ash from a cigarette and left.
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 painful and not good,” the women said. “Whoever is not at the front pesters our men, climbs into the attic with them, asks them to warm her up.”
It is possible 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: 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 heroine, she just wanted to survive. At any cost.
In the village where Tonya stopped at the beginning, there were no policemen. Almost all its inhabitants joined the partisans. 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?"
“I’m Antonina, Makarova. From Moscow,” the girl answered.
She was brought to the administration of the village of Lokot. The policemen complimented her, then took turns “loving” her. Then they gave her a whole glass of moonshine to drink, after which they put a machine gun in her hands. As she dreamed of - to disperse the emptiness inside with a continuous machine-gun line. For living people.
“Makarova-Ginzburg said during interrogations that the first time she was taken out to be shot by the partisans she was 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.”
“I didn’t know those I was shooting. They didn't know me. Therefore, I was not ashamed in front of them. 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. Sometimes several prisoners had a piece of plywood with the inscription “partisan” hung on their chests. Some people sang something before they died. After the executions, I cleaned the machine gun in the guardhouse or in the yard. There was plenty of ammunition..."
Tony's former landlady from Krasny Kolodets, one of those who once also kicked her out of her house, came to the village of Elbow for salt. She was detained by police and taken to a local prison, citing connections with the partisans.
“I’m not a partisan. Just ask your Tonka the machine gunner,” the woman got scared. Tonya looked at her carefully and chuckled:
“Come on, I’ll give you salt.”
There was order in the tiny room where Antonina lived. There was a machine gun, glistening with machine oil. Nearby, on a chair, clothes were folded in a neat pile: elegant dresses, skirts, white blouses with ricocheting holes in the back. And a washing trough on the floor.
“If I like things from the condemned, then I take them from the dead, why would they go to waste,” explained Tonya. “Once I shot a teacher, I liked her blouse so much, it was pink, silk, but it was too covered in blood, I was afraid that I wouldn’t wash it - I had to leave it in the grave.” It’s a pity... So how much salt do you need?”
“I don’t need anything from you,” the woman backed towards the door. “Fear God, Tonya, he’s there, he sees everything—there’s so much blood on you, you can’t wash it off!”
“Well, since you are brave, why did you ask me for help when they were taking you to prison? - Antonina shouted after her. - So I would have died like a hero! So, when you need to save your skin, 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 open up with her roommate, the typist for the village elder, and she was afraid of her for some kind of spoiled look and for the wrinkle that appeared early on her forehead, as if Tonya was thinking too much.
At the dances, Tonya got drunk and changed partners like gloves, laughed, clinked glasses, and shot cigarettes from the officers. And she didn’t think about those next 27 whom she had to execute in the morning. It’s scary to kill only the first, the second, then, when the count goes into hundreds, it just becomes hard work.
Before dawn, when the groans of the partisans sentenced to execution died down after torture, Tonya quietly crawled out of her bed and spent hours wandering 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 off everything. I was just doing my job, for which I was paid. It was necessary to shoot not only the partisans, but also members of their families, women, and 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 incredibly 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 venereal disease. The Germans ordered them to be treated, sending them to a hospital in their distant rear. When they entered the village of Lokot Soviet troops, sending traitors to the Motherland and former policemen to the gallows, only terrible legends remained from the atrocities of Tonka the Machine Gunner.
Among the material things - hastily sprinkled bones in mass graves in an unmarked 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 for the in absentia prosecution of Antonina Makarovna Makarova, born in 1921, presumably a resident of Moscow. They didn't know anything else about her...
“Our employees have been conducting 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. — From time to time it ended up in the archive, then, when we caught and interrogated another traitor to the Motherland, it surfaced again. Couldn't Tonka disappear without a trace?! Now we can accuse the authorities of incompetence and illiteracy. But the work was in progress. During the post-war years, KGB officers secretly and carefully checked all 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 no use. The real Tonka the machine gunner seemed to have sunk into thin air..."
“Don’t scold Tonka too much,” Golovachev asked. - You know, I even feel sorry for her. It’s all the damned war’s fault, it broke her... She had no choice - she could have remained human and then she herself would have been among those shot. But she chose to live, becoming an executioner. But in 1941 she was only 20 years old.”
But it was impossible to just take it and forget about it.
“Her crimes were too terrible,” says Golovachev. “I just couldn’t wrap my head around how many lives she took.” Several people managed to escape and 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 woman, 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 could have gotten married a long time ago and changed her passport, so we thoroughly studied life path all her possible relatives named Makarov..."
However, none of the investigators realized that they had to start looking for Antonina not from the Makarovs, but from the Parfenovs. Yes, it was the accidental mistake of the village teacher Tony in the first grade, who wrote down her patronymic as a surname, that 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. The man was summoned to the OVIR for additional explanations. Naturally, people from the KGB in civilian clothes were also present at the fateful meeting.
“We were terribly afraid to jeopardize the reputation of a woman respected by everyone, a front-line soldier, a wonderful mother and wife,” recalls Golovachev. “That’s why our employees went to the Belarusian Lepel secretly, watched Antonina Ginzburg for a whole year, brought there one by one the surviving witnesses, a former punisher, one of her lovers, for identification. Only when every single one of them said the same thing - it’s her, Tonka the Machine Gunner, we recognized her by a noticeable crease on her forehead - the doubts disappeared.”
Antonina's husband, Victor Ginzburg, a war and labor veteran, promised to complain to the UN after her unexpected arrest.
“We did not admit to him what they accuse the one with whom he lived happily his whole life. They were afraid that the man simply wouldn’t survive this,” 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, 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 I didn’t write any more complaints.
“The woman who was arrested did not convey a single line to her husband from the pre-trial detention center. And by the way, she also 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 finding herself surrounded by us, she 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 SO terrible thing did she do? It was as if she had some kind of block in her head since the war, so that she herself would probably not go crazy. She remembered everything, every execution, but did not regret anything. She seemed to me a very cruel woman. I don't know what she was like when she was young. And what made her commit these crimes. The desire to survive? A moment of darkness? Horrors of war? In any case, this does not justify her. She destroyed 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.”
The investigators were very afraid of any 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 attacks 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 will be tormented all his life.”
During the investigative experiment, she was taken to Lokot, to the very field where she carried out the executions. The villagers spat after her like a revived ghost, and Antonina only looked sideways at them in bewilderment, scrupulously explaining how, where, whom and with what she killed... For her it was the distant past, another life.
“They disgraced me in my old age,” she complained to her jailers in the evenings, sitting in her cell. “Now after the verdict I’ll have to leave Lepel, otherwise every fool will point a finger at me.” I think they will give me three years probation. For what more? Then you need to somehow arrange your life again. How much is your salary in the pre-trial detention center, girls? Maybe I should get a job with you - the work is familiar..."
Antonin Makarov-Ginzburg shot at six o'clock in the morning on August 11, 1978, almost immediately after the death sentence was pronounced. The court's decision came as a surprise to the defendant. 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 in the USSR. sources
“What nonsense, that then you are tormented by remorse, that those whom you kill come later at night in nightmares, I still haven’t dreamed of a single one,”— this is how Antonina Makarova (Ginzburg) answered the investigators’ questions calmly and calmly.
In the words of Antonin Makarov, the female executioner there was no remorse or regret; later operatives recalled with surprise how the suspect calmly spoke about the mass executions that she personally carried out.
Antonina Malyshkina who is this
For her, it made no difference 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 Anka the machine gunner calmed herself down at first, and then she became a habit; she even liked executing people. Usually, a young Soviet girl would shoot a group of 27 people, those arrested would be lined up, and at the command of her superiors, Tonya (Antonina Ginzburg) would kneel down and shoot at people until everyone fell dead.
— From the film “Two Lives of Tonka the Machine Gunner.” Tonka the machine gunner photo:
27 people - that’s how many were placed in the stall of the stud farm in the village of Lokot, occupied by the Germans during the Great Patriotic War, where they created a prison for prisoners and a mini-republic with its own rules. The Russians who went over to the side of the Germans were provided with favorable living conditions. Tonka the machine gunner became one of them and this is a real story. However, her role in the “creation” of the republic horrified even seasoned Germans.
We will talk about one of the most terrible characters of the Great Patriotic War.
Tonka the machine gunner real biography
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 with 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 to the Other World only according to official data more than 1,500 people. Tonka the Machine Gunner is a true story. Wikipedia provides comprehensive information regarding Anka the machine gunner and her biography.
“Antonina Makarovna Makarova (née Parfenova, according to other sources - Panfilova, married Ginzburg; 1920, Malaya Volkovka, Sychevsky district, Smolensk province (according to other sources, 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. Antonina Makarovna Ginzburg has still not been classified as secret from her case.
At the time of the executions, she was also known as “Tonka the Machine Gunner.” Tonka the Machine Gunner is an anti-hero biography, as Wikipedia says, of a young Russian girl who chose her path independently.”
Executioner Tonka
Only thanks to excerpts of interrogations that became known to the public, was it possible to plunge into this case, which occurred during the war near Bryansk. Tonka the machine gunner has a lot of information on her biography on Wikipedia. It’s hard to imagine what was going on in her head, how her consciousness could turn upside down, that a young girl had turned into an executioner. Thin Machine Gunner, where did the name come from, what Wikipedia says about her, her biography photo. How can a woman be so cruel? The most important thing in all this is how she felt after the war, when she began to live a peaceful life among people under the guise of an ordinary veteran woman. She managed to start a family and became the mother of two children.
Tonka the machine gunner information about her biography will not leave anyone indifferent. Photo
Captivity
During the war, after the bombing, Antonina Malyshkina survived and was captured. In a village in the Bryansk region, the fascist-minded population lived in prosperity and in every possible way destroyed the partisans and civilians who interfered with this. Antonina could have gone into the forest to join the partisans, but she did not do this, but wanted a satisfying life, which she later had to work for. So she began to shoot civilians on orders. The first time was hard, but after I drank a glass of schnapps in one gulp, everything went like clockwork. So at each execution, she shot up to 30 people with a Maxim machine gun; whoever remained alive, she finished off with a pistol.
Tonka the machine gunner biography of her beginnings
So she got a job with the Nazis, but before that she took the oath of allegiance to the Wehrmacht. Thin machine gunner, what is her biography. Tonka came to the village of Lokot deliberately, since the pro-fascist population had no problems with either clothing or food, at a time when there was hunger and devastation everywhere.
After the next execution, Tonka went to relax at a club, where she entertained German officers and soldiers. Having fun until she dropped, Antonina was preparing for the next execution. Before the execution, Tonka dressed up in the clothes of a Soviet officer and went to shoot the next batch of local residents.
As Tonka later said during interrogations with investigators, it was just her job, which she did well. Anka the machine gunner instilled fear in the entire village, her biography speaks about this. In this village the executioner knew who Tonka was and tried not to meet her.
After our troops captured the village of Lokot, all the Nazi accomplices were destroyed, but Antonina disappeared without a trace. For a long time after the war, terrible legends about the executioner girl circulated in the village of Lokot. They searched for her for a long time, the case was transferred to the archive several times, but was not closed. This woman's crimes were too serious. They searched for Makarova all over the country, but to no avail, and all this time she lived in the USSR.
What was Tony's mystery?
She did it simply, forged documents that said that during the war she worked as a nurse. According to these documents, in 1944 she got a job in a mobile military hospital. In which she cared for the wounded without fear of blood or mutilation of soldiers. One of these fighters fell in love with Tonya. After the war with this soldier, she moved with him to his homeland in Lepel, a small Belarusian city. She took her husband's last name, covered her tracks and began new life. Antonina and her husband received a free apartment from the state, since both were participants in the Great Patriotic War.
New life of Antonina Ginzburg
Tonka is a machine gunner, her biography is many-sided. On Victory Day, both husband and wife were awarded a prize. Antonina, working at a garment factory, gave birth to two daughters. Tonka the machine gunner, her children and husband photo: 
Neither neighbors nor work colleagues had any idea what kind of person lived and worked next to them. She was so careful that even her husband had no idea about anything. The Tonka machine gunner took on the guise of Soviet man and hung on the honor board at her production. Antonina Ginzburg worked as an inspector in the workshop, checking the quality of tailoring of jackets and other products. Once upon a time, she also carefully examined the clothes from the innocent people she killed. Now she was looking for defects in factory products. Colleagues and bosses said one thing about her: she was a very conscientious and responsible worker. It’s true that Antonina didn’t have any friends, although she worked at the factory for a long time. People seemed to be repulsed by something. At work, she led a secluded lifestyle and did not participate in entertainment events, so as not to give herself away. All her life she did not live, but suffered, remembering what she had done. It is quite possible that Antonina could have lived peacefully into old age, but fate decreed otherwise, and an accident helped.
Shadowing the Executioner
In 1976, a young Muscovite named Panfilov was preparing to go on a trip abroad. This was Antonina Makarova’s brother Ginzburg, he had to fill out a form in which the man had to indicate all his relatives. This is where an interesting detail surfaced: all his brothers and sisters bore the last name Panfilov, and for some reason one sister Antonina was Makarova. At school, the teacher, according to the children, wrote down the last name incorrectly, and this confusion saved Antonina Makarova Ginzburg from retribution for so long. Investigators knew that Anka the machine gunner had sisters and brothers, but after checking a thousand namesakes they could not get to the bottom of the truth. But after an incident with a Moscow relative, investigators managed to find Makarova Ginzburg and they had to check everything carefully, since she was considered a respected person in the city. There was little evidence and no other methods other than identification. They offered to bring witnesses for identification to Lepel secretly. After the identification, another problem arose: the women who identified her, even after 30 years, were terrified of her. But the goal was achieved, Tonka the machine gunner was identified again. After that, investigators collected evidence for a whole year and kept her under lock and key. Only after all kinds of checks was an arrest order issued.
Arrest of Tonka the machine gunner
Investigative officers detained her near her house. After the arrest, she was not even afraid; her gaze was calm and defiant. She did not offer any resistance during the arrest and calmly got into the car. After the arrest, Makarova-Ginzburg was taken to Bryansk and since that time she has not seen her relatives and has never even asked to meet with them. The operatives were afraid that the defendant would commit suicide, but she did not even intend to do so. Makarova-Ginsburg thought that according to the law they would give her three years, and then she would get out and start a new life. She was sure that everyone would blame it on the war. Soon a trial took place, the female executioner was sentenced to death. Antonina did not want to die, she complained to a higher authority so that they would take into account that she was a woman. Moreover, 1979 passed under the auspices of a woman. Antonina could not imagine that she would be on the other side of the crosshairs. All her requests were rejected. The thin machine gunner was shot on August 11, 1979. After the war, she became the only woman executed in the entire Soviet Union.
The story of life in captivity
The Germans and the male “Russian traitors” had no desire to get dirty about such a bloody business as the execution of unarmed prisoners. And Tonka, who wanted to survive by any means necessary, was quite suitable for this. She was paid 30 German marks (Reichsmarks), “silver coins” (familiar figure?) for her “work”, for each execution, yearning 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 even say her soul, for minimal comfort.
The Lokot Republic existed for two years, from 41 to 43. At the former stud farm, which, according to some information, is still operating today, there was a prison and a “den” of the invaders. On the ground floor there were cells with prisoners, made from horse compartments, with bars and walls up to the ceiling. 20-30 people were crammed into one cell, naturally, they were there only standing, some fainted, some died. Women, children...
“Workers” lived on the second floor; in the evenings they went out to taverns and brothels. Tonka drowned her memories in alcohol every day and had a bad reputation among men. Executions were carried out every day. 25-30 people (one room full of people) is the minimum that Tonka “worked out” in a day. There were also three walks a day... that is, about a hundred people.
People were placed in a chain in front of the pit, facing the pit, the place of execution was about five hundred meters from the stud farm, there was no point in running: everything was cordoned off by Germans with machine guns, and the prisoners were in danger of death in any case. Haggard, despairing, ordinary people accepted their death. From the bullets of Tonka’s cranked Maxim machine gun.
From the testimony of Antonina Ginzburg
“I just did my job, for which I was paid, just like other soldiers... I had to shoot not only the partisans, but also members of their families, women, teenagers, but everyone did this, because this is war. Although I remember the circumstances of one execution - before the execution, one guy for some reason shouted to me: “We won’t see you again, goodbye, sister!”
For her, the victims were all the same, she didn’t feel sorry for anyone, except maybe the clothes:
“If I like things from the dead, then I take them off the dead, why waste them: once I shot a teacher, I liked her blouse, pink, silk, but it was too covered in blood, I was afraid that I wouldn’t wash it - I had to wash it leave it at the grave. It's a pity".
Just work... For Antonina it was “just work”
“Sometimes you’d shoot, come closer, and someone would still twitch... then she’d shoot again in the head so that the person wouldn’t suffer. It seemed to me that the war would write off everything; I was simply doing my job, for which I was paid. It’s scary to kill only the first or second, only when the count goes into hundreds it becomes just hard work...”
The hardest thing was to carry out the first execution. They gave Tonka alcohol, but after that it was easy.
Before Tonka the Machine Gunner was exposed, 36 years passed (from the day of her last execution). “She was the only woman in the USSR who was shot after the war by court decision.”
Besides her, two more women were executed: “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 Borodkina in 1983 for speculation on an especially large scale and Tamara Ivanyutina in 1987 for poisoning 9 people.”
Films about Anka the machine gunner
Several films and TV series have been made about her, albeit a negative, but very popular heroine. One of the latest and brightest is “The Executioner” of 2015.
The plot differs from reality, is embellished with “gags”, for example, Tonka shot victims in the eyes (it was this trace that helped lead to Antonina Malyshkina, 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 acted well, but it differs from the real story of Antonina.
In general, it should be noted, albeit in such a terrible way, that Tonka’s exposure brought her evil fame. There were even people who almost admired her.
“Well, such a strong-willed, decisive woman... the only woman who personally shot during the Great Patriotic War. The only one, there are no more like them...",— in these words of the investigator (from the film “Retribution. The Two Lives of Tonka the Machine Gunner”), who led Makarova’s case, admiration for the criminal appears to be evident.
Witness interviews
How did it happen that such a fierce criminal was able to escape after the Russians captured the “republic”?
A free life and connections 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 a hospital for treatment for sexually transmitted diseases.
“In the rear, Makarova started an affair with a German cook-corporal, who secretly took her in his wagon train 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 she had worked in the 422nd Medical Battalion from 1941 to 1944, and got a job as a nurse in a Soviet mobile hospital.
Here, in a local hospital, she met soldier Viktor Ginzburg, who was wounded during the assault on the city. A week later they signed, Makarova took her husband’s last name.”
Afterwards she lived for 33 years in Lepel (Belarusian SSR), being quite happy marriage with her husband, gave birth to two children. She worked at a clothing factory, where she checked the quality of products, her photograph hung on the honor board. The couple are both war veterans, Antonina was invited to schools and various institutions to tell stories about the heroic past, about how she defended her homeland. An ordinary life... Only she had few friends, she seemed to push people away, many noted her piercing and somehow wild look. In groups, she tried not to overdo it with alcohol, apparently she was afraid that while intoxicated she might say too much.
It’s not for nothing that the titles 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 is Tonka in her youth
How was she found? Arrest
They were looking for her for more than 30 years... One of the clues was a surname that was “confused” in childhood: instead of Parfenova, Tonka was recorded as Makarova (and before that they were looking for Tonka as Makarova, but it was necessary as Parfenova - written down 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 form where he indicated the names of all his relatives.
So the investigators got on the trail of Makarova, and surveillance was established on her in Lepel.
Interrogation
However, she soon suspected something, and the investigators had to leave her alone for almost a year, during which time they collected evidence. After a year, operatives staged “veiled” identification parades 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 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 travel 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 punitive woman, you worked for the Germans, carried out mass executions. There are still legends about your atrocities in the village of Lokot, near Bryansk. We have been looking for you for more than thirty years - now it is time to answer for what we have done. Your crimes have no statute of limitations.”
“So it’s not in vain that last year my heart became anxious, as if I felt that I 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..."
Even after the arrest, the husband of his “exemplary” wife tried in every possible way to get Antonina out of prison, the investigators did not tell him for a long time the real reason Makarova's arrest, fearing for his condition, when they finally said - he turned gray overnight... and left with his daughters to another city.
On August 11, 1979, Antonina Makarova was shot in Bryansk, despite numerous requests for pardon.
Psychiatrists' opinions about Tonka the Machine Gunner
Psychiatrists justified the reasons for Tonka’s cold-bloodedness and inhuman cruelty by his personality, M. Vinogradov (criminologist): “She just wanted to kill, if she hadn’t been called to the front as a nurse and she hadn’t found herself on the side of the Germans, she would have happily killed the Germans. She didn't care who she killed.. This is the type of people. Antonina was terrified of dying, the other side of this fear was aggression; in ordinary life, many such people are not aware of their nature as natural-born killers. For such people, killing is the norm of life, and there is no remorse; I’m not at all sure that she had the concept of a homeland as such, like we do.”
This was justified by a split personality due to a traumatic situation: “Psychiatrist Alexander Bukhanovsky, who was an expert in the Chikatilo case, at one time wrote a whole about Makarova scientific work in a collection of articles entitled “Scientific Notes of the Phoenix Center (Russian State Medical University)”, in which he expressed the version that in Makarova’s case there was a psycho-traumatic split personality, in which the person, however, remained sane.”
Before entering the occupation, Tonka experienced the horrors of war and, escaping, became the camp wife of Nikolai Fedchuk. They wandered through the forests for several months, getting out of the German encirclement. In the series “Executioner,” Fedchuk raped Makarova (Malyshkina in the series). In January 1942, they reached the village where Fedchuk had a wife and children, and he, despite Antonina’s pleas not to leave her, responded by refusing to continue any relationship and leaving 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 her with Fedchuk.
All psychiatric examinations confirmed Antonina’s sanity, which is often equated with the fact that Makarova was absolutely mentally healthy.
Firstly, sanity does not equal 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 this. Such a tendency towards cruelty is already a natural anomaly of the psyche, the desire to destroy, kill, the love of destroying people, which was characteristic of Makarova, as M. Vinogradov says, how can this be normal? A priori, a murderer who enjoys mass death, I note - aimlessly, for the sake of his own pleasure, is a maniac, a mentally and mentally damaged person.
Even sitting in the cell, Makarova, according to the stories of the investigators (and the “whispering woman” placed in Tonka’s cell), 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... and they would give her, as she thought, no more than three years probation... why give her more? She just worked hard...
She justified herself by saying that she was just doing hard work. And indeed - after all, the war was, in fact, a bloody mess of ours and others, to give everything for your homeland without betraying it, and to become a sliver in the fire of injustice, cruelty, either ours or those of others, or try to save at least your own skin - a dilemma ambiguous. There is no need to say who would have acted and shout that none of us would have betrayed our homeland... Perhaps there would have been many traitors to our homeland, there were already many of them. But killing defenseless people, children, old people, both Germans and Russians, are already crimes that cannot be justified by any fear of the death of one’s own skin. Words from Kanevsky’s film: “You can understand, but you cannot forgive...”.
And yet, finally, I would like to say about some ambiguous moments.
The movie "The Executioner" based on true history Thin machine gunners, the KGB gave this case the name “Sadist”. It takes great skill or self-confidence to film those events. I watched the film only because of the actress Victoria Tolstoganova (+ the artists of the picture), I bet that she would turn out to be the main villain. In my opinion, “The Executioner” is very inferior to the similar Soviet film “Confrontation”. The director did not master the theme of the tragedy of betrayal and covered himself with the “tragedy of the detectives.” And a completely obscene sound came from a distance, showing L.I. Brezhnev is an idiot. For what?
Okay, let's get back to the real story.
35 years ago, for the first time in the history of capital punishment in the USSR, a female punisher was shot. Tonka the machine gunner cold-bloodedly shot captured partisans, communists, women, and children. Then fate protected her. But retribution took place on August 11, 1979. Ironically, that year was declared the Year of the Woman in the USSR.
Antonina Makarovna Makarova (surname at birth - Panfilova) was born in 1920 in Malaya Volkovka, Smolensk province. She had an ordinary, serene childhood, like all ordinary citizens of the USSR. When the girl went to school, the teacher mistakenly wrote her down as Makarova. From school documents, the incorrect last name migrated to other important papers. So Panfilova became Makarova.
When the Great Patriotic War began, the girl became a nurse. In the fall of 1941, she managed to survive in the “Vyazma Cauldron.” Having become the traveling wife of Nikolai Fedorchuk, she made her way with him to the nearest village. He became her first man and she fell in love with him. He simply took advantage of the situation. When they went to the Red Well in January 1942, Nikolai decided to end his relationship with Tonya, admitting that he was married and had children. The betrayal of Fedorchuk, who abandoned the girl to the mercy of fate, and the experience of the Vyazemsk meat grinder led to the fact that Tonya Makarova lost her mind. Wandering from one settlement to another, she was ready to give herself to everyone she met for a piece of bread. It is surprising that during her wanderings she was never wounded. So Makarova ended up in the Bryansk forests. She was arrested on the territory of the Lokot Republic formed by the Germans. 
Fearing for her life, she began to blame everything Soviet power, and then agreed to work for the Nazis. She believed that in this terrible massacre everything would be written off. Later, during interrogation, she said that the Germans did not want to get dirty themselves, and a special feature in the matter of shooting partisans was that the sentence was carried out by a Soviet girl.
So Tonka the nurse turned into Tonka the machine gunner. Psychiatrist-criminologist Vinogradov, who acted as a consultant on her case, emphasized: “She wanted to kill, and if she had gone to the front as a soldier, she would have shot at the Germans just as much without hesitation as at her future victims.” 
The Nazis settled Makarova at a local stud farm, which has now become a prison, giving her a small room where she lived and kept her coveted murder weapon - a machine gun. The first time the girl could not press the trigger. It was only when the Germans gave her alcohol that things began to boil.
In Makarova’s soul there were no other feelings, regret, pain, pangs of conscience, except fear for her life. During interrogation, she admitted: “I didn’t know those I was shooting. They didn't know me. Therefore, I was not ashamed in front of them. 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. Sometimes several prisoners had a piece of plywood with the inscription “partisan” hung on their chests. Some people sang something before they died. After the executions, I cleaned the machine gun in the guardhouse or in the yard. There was plenty of ammunition..."
She considered firing a machine gun at her former fellow citizens as ordinary work. Every day she shot 27 people, receiving 30 marks for it. In addition to punitive operations, Tonka entertained German officers, providing them with bed services and being considered a VIP whore of the Lokot Republic. She took off her outfits from the victims: “Why should something go to waste?”
According to official data, Antonina Makarova shot about 1,500 people; only about 200 people were able to recover their passport data.
In the summer of 1943, Makarova was sent to a German rear hospital for treatment for venereal diseases and escaped retribution after the liberation of Lokot by the Red Army. The traitors to the Motherland were executed, and only Tonka the Machine Gunner remained alive and unharmed, turning into a terrible legend of Soviet intelligence.
Soviet troops were advancing to the West, and Makarova again faced the prospect of losing her life. And this was what she feared most. In 1945, pretending to be a nurse who had escaped from captivity, she moved eastward, towards Soviet army. The NKVD believed her and gave her a new certificate, sending her to serve in the military hospital in Koenigsberg. There Tonya met the wounded front-line soldier Ginzburg and after marriage took his last name. Life for Antonina Makarova began anew - with a different biography. 
After the war, the Ginzburgs moved to their husband’s homeland in the Belarusian town of Lepel, where Antonina Makarovna got a job at a garment factory and became a leader in production. Her life was quite happy. She raised two daughters, was respected among her colleagues, and her portrait was on the local Honor Board. The past life never reminded me of itself, either in nightmares or in reality. “It’s impossible to be afraid all the time,” she said during interrogation. “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 will be tormented all his life.”
But KGB workers have been shifting her case for more than 30 years, considering it a hanging case - Tonka the Machine Gunner disappeared without a trace, as if she had never existed at all. Investigators checked all her namesakes - about 250,000 people, but no one thought of looking for the Lokot monster under a different surname.
They were looking for the punisher among the prisoners and wounded. It was even suggested that she became an agent of Western intelligence services. And only when the case came to the attention of detective Golovachev, it got off the ground. “Our employees have been conducting the search for 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 the legend. - From time to time it ended up in the archive, then, when we caught and interrogated another traitor to the Motherland, it surfaced again. Couldn't Tonka disappear 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 thin air...”
One incident put Tonka the Machine Gunner on the trail. In 1976, a fight with a knife wound occurred in Bryansk. The hooligans were arrested. One of the rowdies was unexpectedly identified as the head of the Lokot prison, Ivanin. For thirty years he lived quietly in the Bryansk region under a different name, changing his appearance. The KGB became interested in his case. Captain Golovachev methodically conducted interrogation after interrogation - and that’s how it surfaced real name Thin machine gunners - Antonina Makarova. The former head of the Lokot prison, unfortunately, could not tell the investigation anything worthwhile, since he took his own life by hanging himself in his cell.
The second opportunity to get on the trail of Tonka presented itself soon after these events. A certain Panfilov, who was her brother, was going abroad. In that time, in the application form for leaving, you had to indicate all your relatives - this name came up again. Now the investigators had the necessary information - Antonina Makarovna Makarova. Here is the starting point of the search.
Having discovered the punisher in the person of an ordinary Soviet woman worker, the KGB men secretly monitored her in Lepel for a whole year. Then they managed to take Makarova’s fingerprints. At the factory there was a soda fountain for workers. And when Antonina quenched her thirst during the lunch break, the glass from which she drank was immediately and quietly taken away by the security officers.
But Makarova became suspicious, looked around more often, took a closer look, and then the surveillance was lifted. She had not been disturbed for a whole year, and her vigilance had weakened. The next stage of the investigation was to embarrass the military front-line soldier. Disguised as a veteran of the Great Patriotic War, the investigator was invited to a gala concert dedicated to Victory Day, where Makarova was also present. Having met Tonya, he began to casually ask about the roads. battle path, but she could not remember the names of the commanders or the names of the units. The experiment testing Makarova’s knowledge of the theater of military operations, the names of commanders and military units was a great success. 
“We were terribly afraid to jeopardize the reputation of a front-line soldier respected by all, so the surviving witnesses, a former punisher, one of her lovers, were brought one by one to the Belarusian Lepel for identification.” They all noted one external detail of the manic girl - a sullen crease on her forehead. The years have added wrinkles to her, but this feature has remained unchanged.
In July 1978, the main witness in the punisher’s case was brought to Lepel. They began to develop an operation to identify Tonka the Machine Gunner and arrest her. They decided to invite Makarova to SOBES for allegedly recalculating her pension. The role of the SOBES accountant was played by Golovachev. The witness also portrayed herself as an employee of this organization. If Makarova was successfully identified, the woman had to give the captain a prearranged signal. But she was noticeably nervous, and the security officer was afraid that she would ruin the operation.
When the unsuspecting Antonina Ginzburg entered the accounting department and began talking to Golovachev, the witness did not react at all at first. But when Ginzburg closed the office door, the woman, crying, identified the punisher. Soon Antonina Ginzburg was summoned to the head of the factory’s personnel department. There she was arrested and handcuffed. There were no emotions of surprise or indignation on the part of the detainee; she did not become hysterical, did not panic, and gave the impression of a determined and strong-willed woman. When she was brought to the Lepel KGB department, 58-year-old Antonina began to talk about her fate. The case file contains the testimony of investigator Leonid Savoskin about how the arrested woman behaved in the pre-trial detention center. She never wrote a letter to her husband or asked to see her daughters. “She didn’t hide anything, and that was the worst thing. One got the feeling that she sincerely misunderstood: why was she imprisoned, what SO terrible thing did she do? It was as if she had some kind of block in her head since the war, so that she herself would probably not go crazy. She remembered everything, every execution, but did not regret anything. She seemed to me a very cruel woman. I don't know what she was like when she was young. And what made her commit these crimes. The desire to survive? A moment of darkness? Horrors of war? In any case, this does not justify her. She destroyed 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.”
The most interesting thing is that she could not even imagine that she herself would be shot. “They disgraced me in my old age. Now after the verdict I will have to leave Lepel, otherwise every fool will point a finger at me. I think they will give me three years probation. For what more? Then you need to somehow arrange your life again. How much is your salary in the pre-trial detention center, girls? Maybe I should get a job with you - the work is familiar..."
Antonina's husband, Victor Ginzburg, a war and labor veteran, promised to complain to the UN after her unexpected arrest. “We did not admit to him what they accuse the one with whom he lived happily his whole life. They were afraid that the man simply wouldn’t survive this,” investigators said. But when he finally had to reveal the terrible details, he turned gray overnight. In the USSR, 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. She was shot at six o'clock in the morning on August 11, 1979.
P.S. Almost 30 years later, after Tonka the Machine Gunner was found, journalists met with her family and friends. They lived a life full of sadness and shame, were seriously ill and died terribly. “Somehow everything fell apart at once,” said the daughter of Tonka the Machine Gunner, who is now the same age as her mother was when they came for her. - Pain, pain, pain... She ruined the lives of four generations... You want to ask, would I accept her if she suddenly returned? I would accept it. She’s a mother... But I don’t even know how to remember her: as alive or as dead? You don't know what's wrong with her? After all, according to the unspoken law, women were not shot anyway. Maybe she is still alive somewhere? And if not, then you tell me, I’ll finally go and light a candle for the repose of her soul.”
Antonina Makarova - Tonka the machine gunner
The fate of Antonina Makarova, who shot one and a half thousand civilians during the war, formed the basis of the series “The Executioner.” In 2006, the program “The Investigation Conducted...” with Leonid Kanevsky also spoke about the female executioner, whom everyone called “The Thin Machine Gunner.” ...Antonina went to the front voluntarily at a young age, ended up in the “Vyazemsky Cauldron”, where she miraculously escaped and wandered through the forest for a long time until in the Bryansk region she was captured by the Germans in the so-called Lokot Republic, in which they were engaged in the extermination of Soviet partisans, prisoners, communists and people simply disliked by the fascists.
The Germans did not shoot Tonya, like many other prisoners, but made her their servant. Over time, Makarova, who had courses in nurses and machine gunners, was assigned to shoot prisoners of war. She didn't refuse. Soviet investigators learned about the monstrous acts of “Tonka the Machine Gunner” immediately after those places were liberated from the enemy. The remains of about one and a half thousand people were found in mass graves. They interrogated witnesses, checked, clarified, but they could not find the trail of the female punisher for more than 30 years.
According to the memoirs of investigator Pyotr Golovachev, the case was passed on “by inheritance” to new generations of employees. Every time another war criminal was caught, they tried to find new information about Makarova. However, they didn’t recognize the name right away either. In the 1950s, one of the war criminals said during interrogation that the machine gunner was a former nurse Makarova, who came from the encirclement. They checked all the women of the USSR named Antonina Makarova who matched the age of the person involved in the investigation. There were about 250 such people. Not found.
Chance helped get on the trail of the female punisher. In 1976, her relative was planning to go abroad. In one of the questionnaires, he indicated that he had a sister, Antonina Ginzburg, whose maiden name was Makarova. The security officers were in no hurry to accuse the woman of serious crimes. Witnesses were secretly brought to the city where she lived, even a former policeman-lover.
And only after everyone confirmed that this was “Tonka the Machine Gun”, they arrested her. It was then that it turned out that Antonina, at the very end of the war, managed to get a military ID, from which it followed that she was “one of us” throughout the war - she worked as a nurse. The document allowed her to enlist in a Soviet hospital in Germany, where at the beginning of 1945 a soldier, a real war hero, fell in love with her. The guy proposed to Tonya, and she agreed.
Death of Tonka the Machine Gunner
Having got married, after the end of the war the young couple left for the Belarusian city of Lepel, their husband’s homeland. So the female executioner Antonina Makarova disappeared, and her place was taken by the honored veteran Antonina Ginzburg. She led ordinary life Soviet person - she worked as a seamstress, and her portrait hung on the honor board for a long time, raised two daughters, even met with schoolchildren, talking about her heroic military past.
She took the arrest calmly: she asked one of the KGB officers for a cigarette, and on the way to the local office she solved a crossword puzzle. In conclusion, as investigator Leonid Savoskin recalled, she sincerely did not understand why she was arrested - there was a war, she had to survive. She believed that due to the passage of time the punishment could not be too severe, she even believed that she would receive a suspended sentence. I regretted that because of the shame I had to move again. However, many, knowing about Antonina Ginzburg’s exemplary post-war biography, believed that the court would show leniency. We made a mistake. Makarova’s involvement in the murder of 168 people whose identities were established was documented. More than 1,300 more remain unknown victims.
Antonina Makarova - Ginzburg shows investigators the place where Soviet citizens were executed. July 1978 Lokot village
The verdict was handed down on November 20, 1978. Several requests for clemency were rejected. Makarova was shot on August 11, 1979. The case is in the archives of the FSB, and some of the documents are still marked “top secret”.
To save her own life, she began to serve as an executioner for the German occupiers. For one execution she received real money. She shot almost 1,500 people. And all this in a year and a half. During the war she was nicknamed the Thin Machine Gunner. For the next three decades she was exemplary Soviet woman. She is Antonina Makarova-Ginsburg, Tonka the Machine Gunner, a biography, the real story of which will be told in the article.
Makarova’s ideal was Anka the machine gunner
Antonina Makarova was born in 1920 in one of the villages of the Smolensk province. However, according to some other information, she was born in the capital in 1923.
In the metric, her last name was indicated as Parfenova. The fact is that when she started studying at school, due to an oversight, the teacher mixed up not only her middle name, but also her last name. In the class journal, she wrote her down as Makarova. It was because of this that in all subsequent official documents Tonya was listed under that last name. This absurd accident subsequently helped her escape justice for three decades.
Tonka the machine gunner, biography, whose family was unremarkable, did not have a happy childhood. The family of the future punisher lived quite poorly. Her mother had to work hard to raise her children. My small garden helped in this regard. But they also needed to be constantly engaged. Accordingly, combining household chores with raising a daughter was very difficult. She didn't have enough time for everything. And young Tonya, in her dreams, like any girl, hoped that her mother would buy her a beautiful dress and new shoes with the goal of appearing in this attire on the local dance floor...
In addition to such hobbies, she also had her own ideal - Anka the machine gunner. As you know, this movie character also had a prototype. We are talking about Maria Popova. During civil war in one of the battles she replaced the deceased machine gunner. Ahead of events, let's say one thing: inspired by the image of M. Popova, Antonina also received a machine gun. Only now the character and prototype of the book and film “Chapaev” fought with enemies, and Makarova shot the condemned...
At school, young Tonya studied very diligently. True, she did not show much zeal for the exact sciences. She preferred subjects such as geography and history.
For eight years, Tonka the Machine Gunner, whose biography was not rosy, studied at a village school. In high school, she already studied at a Moscow school. The whole family moved there.
Having received a matriculation certificate, she entered college, then a technical school. She planned to become a doctor.
"Vyazemsky Cauldron" and retreat
When the war began, she went to the front, becoming a medical instructor. German army then attacked the Soviet capital.
As a result, Makarova and her units found themselves completely surrounded, in the so-called. "Vyazma Cauldron" At some point, while retreating, she fell into the hands of the Germans. After some time, she managed to escape. Moreover, she escaped not alone, but together with soldier Nikolai Fedchuk.
Together they wandered through the forests, sometimes stealing to feed themselves. At the same time, they did not look for an opportunity to find partisans or break through to units of the Red Army.
In the process of this wandering, Fedchuk stopped standing on ceremony with the fairer sex and made her his “camp wife.” True, the involuntary “wife”, in fact, did not particularly resist.
At the beginning of 1942, the encirclement found themselves in the village where Fedchuk lived before the war. It was there that he admitted to Tonya that he was married and his family lived nearby. In a word, Makarova was left completely alone.
For several days, Antonina went home. At first, the villagers did not kick her out, but since they had enough worries of their own without her, they did not dare to keep the unknown woman for a long time. She tried to have an affair with one of the villagers. But in the end, she was able to turn almost all the local residents against her. She had to leave the village.
They say that Fedchuk’s betrayal and lack of physical and moral strength at that time finished her off. They say she has truly lost her mind. But it was only temporary. She wanted to survive. And at any cost.
Executioner's Rate
Antonina’s wanderings ended in the vicinity of the Bryansk village of Lokot. Let us remember that during the war, the so-called The Lokot Republic, which was founded by Russian collaborators, that is, henchmen of the Nazis.
The unfortunate nurse was detained by the police who took a fancy to her. They took me in, gave me food, offered me alcohol and raped me. True, the fact of this violence was very controversial. Because at that moment Tonya agreed to absolutely everything.
Thus, for some time, the former medical instructor worked with the police as a prostitute.
One day, very drunk, she was taken out into the street and given a Maxim machine gun - exactly the same as that of Anka the machine gunner.
In front of her stood people who were now about to be executed. Tonya was given the order: shoot. The massacre was not a big deal for her. And she felt no remorse. Of course, Makarova had a choice. She could have been among those shot. She could also become an executioner, which is exactly what happened. She chose the second option, hoping that later the war would write everything off anyway. Well, in the end, her old dream somehow came true - she became a machine gunner, like her favorite character. Her life also began to improve.
For the next day her superiors decided that working as a prostitute was not a suitable occupation for her. She does other jobs much better. In a word, she was offered to participate in executions on an ongoing basis. According to Makarova herself, the occupiers did not want to get their hands dirty. They believed that it would be more convenient if the condemned were shot by a Soviet woman.
As a result, when she agreed to the Germans’ offer, she was given a machine gun for her personal keeping. From now on she was an official - an executioner. The management offered her a salary of thirty marks. Also, after many months, she was finally given a bed. And Tonka the machine gunner lived (biography, photo - in the article) in a separate room at a local factory.
"Lead into nettles"
Antonina's daily routine as an executioner was too monotonous. She woke up, had breakfast, and then prepared her machine gun for execution. Meanwhile, the condemned were in the barn. In fact, it served as a kind of prison. This “chamber” accommodated exactly twenty-seven people. According to eyewitnesses, there was a constant eerie groan in the dungeon. The prisoners were crammed into the room until it was impossible to even sit down. And since the prison was never empty, the condemned were quickly dealt with. And immediately new unfortunates arrived on this death row.
When Antonina's machine gun was ready for execution, the condemned were taken to the execution pit and the sentence itself was carried out. Tonka the machine gunner finished off the survivors with a pistol to the head. By the way, the story of execution in Makarova’s jargon is “to lead into nettles.”
According to her testimony, she was just doing her job conscientiously. Moreover, for this “work,” as mentioned above, she received real German money.
At times she executed not only Soviet partisans, but also members of their families. True, she did not want to remember this at all and tried to forget about those whom she shot. And the doomed themselves did not know her. Therefore, she never felt remorse. However, I remembered the circumstances of one massacre until the last moment. An unknown young guy, who was sentenced to death, managed to shout to her: “We won’t see you now! Goodbye, sister!”
At times, Antonina Makarova (Tonka the Machine Gunner, whose biography is described in the article) allowed “marriage” in her work. So, several children were able to survive in this meat grinder. There was only one reason: due to their short stature, the bullets passed over their heads...
The villagers who buried the executed were able to take the unfortunate teenagers out and hand them over to the Soviet partisans.
The rumor about the bloody punisher Tonka the Machine Gunner spread throughout the Bryansk region. The partisans even decided to hunt her. Unfortunately, these searches seemed futile.
When Tonya finished her reprisal, she cleaned her favorite machine gun. In the evenings, she came to a German club, danced, drank with representatives of the Aryan nation, and then relaxed in the arms of officers and policemen.
Also, often at night Tonka the Machine Gunner, whose biography and life story are described in many historical documents, came to the death row and carefully examined the condemned. Either she was mentally preparing for the morning execution, or she was looking after the things of the doomed in advance. In any case, as an encouragement, she was given the opportunity to take the clothes of the dead. Over time, she acquired a colossal number of outfits.
Although there were serious disappointments in her work. Sometimes she complained that not only large blood stains remained on the clothes of those shot, but also holes from bullets...
Metamorphoses of the executioner
In the summer of 1943, Makarova’s life took another turn. Soviet troops began to liberate the Bryansk region. Accordingly, in light of the latest reports from the front, this did not bode well for her. But that same summer she was sent to a rear hospital to be treated for sexually transmitted diseases. In a word, she managed to escape from retribution at that time. Let us note right away that the Red Army and the partisans liberated Lokot in early September.
Makarova felt more than uncomfortable within the hospital walls. After all, Soviet troops were approaching very quickly. The Nazis began evacuating, but they only transported Aryans.
Meanwhile, in the rear, Antonina managed to start another love story. The German chef became his lover. He was able to secretly take her to Ukraine, and then to Poland.
But she was very unlucky here. Her lover was killed, and the Nazis sent her to the death camp in Koenigsberg.
In 1945, the Red Army captured this city. Then Makarova used a stolen Soviet military ID. In this document it was written that from 1941 to 1944 she served in one of the medical battalions. Thus, Tonka managed to pass herself off as a Russian nurse, and she began working in a mobile hospital.
During the same period, the executioner Tonka the Machine Gunner, whose biography makes even the most cold-blooded people horrified, met one of the wounded soldiers. His name was Viktor Ginzburg. Just one week later, the lovers got married. Of course, the bride decided to take her groom's surname. And when the war finally ended, the young couple went to the city of Lepel - Ginzburg’s homeland.
Thus, Antonina Makarova, Tonka the Machine Gunner, whose biography aroused the contempt of everyone and who was hunted by the partisans for a long time, disappeared. Honored veteran, front-line soldier Antonina Ginzburg appeared. Only three decades later, Tonka the Machine Gunner, her biography and her wartime sacrifices unexpectedly surfaced...
Double life
When Soviet troops liberated not only Bryansk, but also Lokot, investigators discovered the remains of 1.5 thousand execution victims. Unfortunately, the investigation was able to identify only 200 of those executed. In addition, witnesses were summoned for questioning. The information was constantly updated and rechecked. But Tonka the Machine Gunner disappeared into thin air. There was no way they could find her trail.
And Tonka the machine gunner herself, whose biography and life after the war were getting better, became an ordinary, simple Soviet woman. She was raising her two daughters; she was invited to a meeting with schoolchildren, where she talked about her heroic past. She worked. She managed to find a job at the Lepel sewing factory. Antonina was responsible for product quality at the enterprise.
By and large, she was considered not only a very responsible, but also a conscientious worker. Her photograph was repeatedly hung on the honor board.
According to her former colleagues, Antonina always seemed withdrawn. She didn't talk much during the conversation. And when there were corporate holidays at the company, she hardly drank alcohol (apparently, so as not to let it slip).
In general, the Ginsburgs were respected people. And since they were front-line soldiers, they received all the benefits that veterans were entitled to. And, of course, neither the husband, nor family acquaintances, nor neighbors were completely aware that the honored person Antonina Ginzburg was the notorious Tonka the Machine Gunner...
Unexpected turn
Only in 1976 did the case of the Lokot punisher move forward. And the following happened. On one of the squares of Bryansk, an unknown man suddenly attacked a certain Nikolai Ivanin with his fists. The fact is that he was able to recognize the head of the German prison Lokot during the war. Ivanin, who had been hiding all this time, like Antonina, did not deny it and gave his testimony to the investigation. At the same time, he also mentioned Tonka the machine gunner (he had a short love affair with her). Of course, the suspect also told the investigators her last name.
It was this clue that made it possible to develop a complete list of USSR citizens who bear this name. Alas, law enforcement officers did not find the Makarova they needed on this list. They did not yet know that there were representatives of the fairer sex here who were registered under this surname at birth. Well, Tonka the Machine Gunner, as mentioned above, was originally recorded as Parfenova.
However, at first the investigators mistakenly managed to get on the trail of another Makarova, who lived in the city of Serpukhov. Ivanin had to agree to conduct an identification parade in this city. He was placed in one of the hotels, and the next day in his room he took his own life. The reasons for this suicide remain unclear to this day.
After these events, investigators began to look for all surviving witnesses who could remember Makarov's face. However, they did not identify her either.
But the search continued. We found the real Antonina almost by accident.
A certain Soviet citizen Parfenov was going abroad. To obtain permission to leave, he sent the appropriate form, which contained information about his relatives. This profile also included Parfenov’s sister, Antonina Makarova. Then it became clear that the school teacher, young Tonka, had made a mistake...
Jewelry work of operatives
Investigators had to work hard to find the Lokot executioner. They could not accuse an innocent person of such atrocities. Therefore, the honored veteran Antonina Ginzburg began to be carefully checked. Secretly, operatives brought witnesses to Lepel.
So, in 1978, law enforcement officers conducted an experiment. One of the direct witnesses came to the city. At the same time, under a fictitious pretext, Makarova was asked to go outside. And an eyewitness to the crimes watched Antonina from the window. She confirmed that the clothing factory employee is Tonka the Machine Gunner. However, this fact was not enough for an arrest.
Then the investigation decided to conduct another experiment. Two more witnesses arrived in Lepel. One woman pretended to be a social security employee. Makarova was summoned to allegedly recalculate her pension. Tonka the machine gunner was immediately recognized. Another eyewitness was on the street next to the building. She also identified Antonina. And only after that they decided to detain her. On this day, Makarova-Ginzburg went to see the head of the personnel department. The operatives stopped her and presented her with an arrest warrant. According to investigators, when she was arrested, she immediately understood everything and behaved absolutely calmly.
Renunciation
When Makarova ended up in the cell, she was transferred to Bryansk. At first, law enforcement officers were very afraid that the defendant would commit suicide. To prevent a possible suicide, a woman “whisperer” was placed with her. According to her, Makarova had no intention of taking her own life. She was absolutely sure that due to her retirement age, the court would give her a minimum sentence of three years. At the same time, she volunteered herself for questioning by the investigator. Tonka the Machine Gunner demonstrated enviable composure when answering direct questions. The biography (a documentary filmed in 2010) is told in the film “Retribution. Two lives of Tonka the Machine Gunner.” The presenter said that Makarova believed that there was simply nothing to punish her for. And, accordingly, all the sad events that happened were attributed solely to the war by Tonka the Machine Gunner.
The biography (the film tells details about this woman) said that when she was brought to Lokot, she also behaved very calmly. She herself admitted that during the war she was called the Thin Machine Gunner. Then the investigators led her to the execution ditch, near which she carried out the sentences. And the Lokot residents, seeing and recognizing her, spat after her.
Investigators asked her if she had nightmares after the mass shootings. Makarova said that this had never happened. By the way, a mental examination confirmed that Tonka the Machine Gunner is absolutely sane.
Investigators suggested that she communicate with her husband and children. She refused. And she decided not to even convey the news.
Meanwhile, Makarova’s unhappy husband was running around all the authorities. He was ready to write a complaint to Brezhnev himself and to the UN. He demanded the immediate release of his beloved wife and mother of his children. Investigators were forced to report what his wife was accused of. They say that the brave veteran, having learned the truth, turned gray overnight. The entire family renounced Antonina and left Lepel forever.
Inevitable Retribution
In the fall of 1978, the trial of Antonina Makarova-Ginzburg began in Bryansk, which turned out to be not only the last major trial in the Soviet Union of traitors to the Motherland, but also the only one when the punisher was tried.
Tonka the Machine Gunner's guilt in the execution of 168 people was documented. In addition, almost 1,300 civilians remained unknown victims of Makarova.
Tonka the Machine Gunner herself, whose biography appeared in many investigative reports, was sure that the punishment a priori could not be severe due to the passage of time. She was only worried that because of the shame she would have to move to another city and, accordingly, look for a new job. To be honest, the investigators themselves believed that the court would show her leniency. Moreover, her post-war biography turned out to be exemplary.
But the court decided to impose a harsh sentence. On November 20, 1978, Tonka the Machine Gunner was sentenced to death. Makarov listened to Judge Makarov’s words absolutely calmly, but at the same time did not understand why this measure was so cruel. Then she explained: “After all, there was a war. Life turned out that way. And now my eyes hurt. I need surgery. Will they really not have mercy?
After the trial, Tonka the Machine Gunner, a biography whose history does not cause any regret, wrote appeals. She hoped for forgiveness, because the coming 1979 was supposed to be the Year of the Woman.
Unfortunately, the court decided to reject these requests. And on August 11, 1979, in the morning, at 6.00, the sentence was carried out... This is the life Tonka the Machine Gunner lived. A biography or documentary should be of interest to anyone who studies history. But no one will regret the fate of this woman.
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