Antonin's executioner in a hare mask, historical facts. Historian about the TV series “Executioner”: The horror is that Tonka the Machine Gunner was mentally normal

Makarov by mistake

Antonina Parfenova (according to another version of Panfilov) was born in one of the Smolensk villages in 1920. It is believed that she got the surname Makarov by mistake. Allegedly, when she came to school, out of fear and excitement she could not say her last name in response to the teacher’s question. Classmates sitting nearby told the teacher that she was Makarova - in fact, that was her father’s name. However, the error stuck and then migrated to all other documents - Komsomol card, passport, etc.

The story is quite strange, but still not fantastic - although the inaction of Antonina’s parents, who did not correct the mistake of the school teacher, is puzzling. It is quite unusual for the entire large family (she had six brothers and sisters) to have one surname, and one child to have a completely different one. In the end, this creates a lot of inconvenience. Again, one surname is recorded in the birth certificate, and another in all other documents.

But theoretically this can be explained. In those days, population registration was very weak, peasants were not issued passports, and having arrived in the city and received a passport, a person could call himself by any last name, and it was recorded from his words.

Antonina’s youthful biography is not entirely clear. According to one version, she came to Moscow with her parents. But in this case, they should have been issued passports together and, of course, passport officers would have paid attention to the discrepancy in surnames.

According to another version, Antonina left alone and lived with her aunt. In this case, it is easier to explain the change of surname. In addition, she could get married and divorce quickly. In short, the story of the transformation of Antonina Parfyonova/Panfilova into Makarova still remains a mystery.

Front

Soon the war began. Antonina was studying to become a doctor at this time. Some sources report that she initially served as a civilian barmaid in one of the military units, and then was transferred to orderly.

It is known for sure that she was drafted into the 422nd Regiment of the 170th Infantry Division by the Leninsky District Military Commissariat of Moscow on August 13, 1941 with the rank of sergeant. There were two 170th divisions in the Soviet army: the first and second formations. The division of the first died near Velikiye Luki. The division of the second formation was created in 1942 and ended its combat career in East Prussia. Makarova served in the first.

Before the war, the division was stationed in Bashkiria, and mainly local conscripts served there. Makarova got into it as a replenishment. In the first days of the war, the division took on a powerful blow from the Germans in the Sebezh area. She was surrounded and managed to break through with heavy losses. At the end of July - beginning of August, it was replenished and sent to defend Velikiye Luki.

The front-line path of the future executioner was short-lived. On August 26, the city was taken, and Makarova, who barely had time to arrive, found herself surrounded. Only a few hundred of her colleagues were able to break through and reach their own. The rest either died or were captured. Later, the 170th Infantry Division was disbanded due to the fact that it ceased to exist as a combat unit.

The Germans were unable to establish serious control over the huge mass of prisoners (over 600 thousand people were captured at Vyazma alone), who lived virtually in an open field. Seizing the moment, Makarova escaped with her colleague Fedchuk. Until winter they wandered through the forests, sometimes finding shelter in villages. Fedchuk made his way home to the Bryansk region, where his family lived. And Makarova went with him, because she had nowhere to go, and it was difficult for a 21-year-old girl to survive alone in the autumn forest.

In January 1942, they finally reached the village of Krasny Kolodets, where Fedchuk announced to her that they were breaking up and he was returning to his family. Then Makarova wandered alone through the surrounding villages.

Elbow

So Makarova reached the village of Lokot. There she found shelter with a local woman, but not for long. The woman noticed that she was looking at her brother-in-law, and even he seemed to like her. She did not want to put an “extra mouth” on the family’s balance sheet in troubled wartime, so she drove Makarova away, advising her to go either to the partisans or to serve with the local collaborationist administration. According to another version, a suspicious girl was detained in the village by local police.

It is worth noting that Lokot was not a typical occupied settlement. Unlike the others, where power belonged entirely to the Germans, there was self-government in Lokot. However, it did not go beyond certain limits. Initially, the Lokot system existed only in the village, but in 1942 it was extended to the entire region. This is how the Lokot district appeared. Local collaborators did not enjoy complete independence, but had self-government within a much broader framework than in the rest of the occupied lands.

Lokot, like everywhere else, had its own police. Its peculiarity was that at first the line between police and partisans was quite illusory. In the ranks of the local police, it was not uncommon to have defectors from among the partisans, tired of the hardships of life in the forest. Even the former head of a department of one of the local district executive committees served in the police. In the post-war trials of local collaborators, former party members and Komsomol members were often defendants. The opposite was not uncommon. The police, having eaten their fill of “police rations,” fled into the forests to join the partisans.

At first, Makarova simply served in the police. The moment of her transformation into an executioner is unknown. Most likely, she was offered this specific job because she was not local. The police could still justify themselves by saying that they went to work under duress and that they were simply maintaining order (although this was not always the case), but the executioner is a completely different conversation. Few people wanted to shoot their fellow villagers. So Makarova, as a Muscovite, was offered the position of executioner, and she agreed.

Number of victims

This period is the most mythologized by modern publicists. Makarova is credited with some completely “Stakhanovite” pace of executions. In this regard, the figure of one and a half thousand people shot during her year of service as an executioner was established as the “official” figure. In fact, she apparently shot less.

At the trial, Tonka the Machine Gunner was accused of executing 167 people (in some sources - 168). These are the persons who were identified through testimony and surviving documents. It is very likely that several dozen more people were not included in the lists. The Lokot district had its own judicial system and the death penalty was imposed only by the decision of military courts.

After the war, the trial of Stepan Mosin (deputy mayor of Kaminsky) took place. He claimed that during the entire existence of the Lokot District, military courts sentenced about 200 people to death. At the same time, some of those executed were hanged (in which Makarova did not take part).

Mosin has every reason to downplay the number of executed people. But even according to archival data, most of the casualties in the region were due to punitive anti-partisan actions in villages, where people were executed on the spot. And in the district prison, where Makarov worked as an executioner, those sentenced by the local court were executed.

The figure of 1,500 executed by Makarova was apparently taken from the “Act of the Commission to establish the facts of the atrocities of the German occupiers in the Brasovsky district dated October 22, 1945.” It says: “In the fall of 1943, in the last days of their stay in the region, the Germans shot 1,500 people in the fields of the horse farm.”

It was in this field that Makarova shot her victims. And the Lokot prison itself was located in a converted horse farm building. However, the document states that the executions took place in the last days before the Germans retreated, in September 1943. By this time, Makarova was no longer there. According to one version, she ended up in the hospital before the Lokot collaborators left for Belarus; according to another, she left with them. But they left Lokot back in August, a week and a half before the Germans left.

Nevertheless, the executions proven by the court are more than enough to consider her one of the bloodiest female killers. The scale of Makarova’s atrocities has apparently been exaggerated by publicists, but is still horrifying. We can speak with absolute confidence about at least two hundred who were shot by her with her own hands.

Disappearance

In August 1943, due to the offensive of the Soviet army, the situation in the Lokot district became critical. Several thousand people from among the collaborators and their families left for Belarus. Then Makarova also disappeared.

There are versions that describe her disappearance in different ways. According to one of them, she was hospitalized with a venereal disease. And then she persuaded a certain compassionate German corporal to hide her in the convoy. But it is possible that she simply left with the rest of the collaborators, and then ran away to the Germans.

They had no use for her, so she was sent to a military factory in Königsberg, where she worked until the end of the war. In 1945, the city was taken by Soviet troops. Makarova, along with other prisoners and deportees, was tested in the NKVD testing and filtration camps.

In many publications there are allegations that she allegedly either forged or stole someone’s nursing documents and thus returned to serve in the army. These are speculations of modern authors. In fact, she successfully passed all the checks under her own name. An archival document from the Ministry of Defense database in which she appears has been preserved. It reads: “Antonina Makarovna Makarova, born in 1920, non-party, conscripted with the rank of sergeant by the Lenin District Military Commissariat of Moscow on August 13, 1941 to the 422nd Regiment. She was captured on October 8, 1941. Sent for further service in the marching company of the 212th reserve rifle regiment on April 27, 1945."

At the same time, Makarova met the Red Army soldier Ginzburg. He had just distinguished himself in one of the April battles, destroying 15 enemy soldiers with a mortar (for which he was awarded the medal “For Courage”), and was being treated for a slight concussion. Soon they got married.

Makarova did not need to compose complex legends. It was enough just to keep silent about his service as an executioner. The rest of her biography did not raise any questions. A young nurse was captured in the first days at the front, was sent by the Germans to a factory, and worked there throughout the war. Therefore, she did not arouse any suspicion among the inspectors.

Search

At one time, there was a popular joke about the elusive Joe, whom no one was looking for. This fully applies to Makarova, who openly lived in the USSR for more than 30 years. Moreover, just a few hours’ drive from the place of their “glory” - after the war, she and her husband settled in Lepel.

At first, the Soviet authorities knew nothing at all about Makarova. Later, they received testimony from the former commandant of the Lokot district prison, who said that a certain Tonya Makarova, a former nurse from Moscow, was involved in the executions there.

However, the search was soon abandoned. According to one version, the Bryansk security officers (it was they who investigated her case) mistakenly considered her dead and closed the case. According to another, they got confused due to confusion with her last name. But, apparently, if they were looking for her, it was extremely carelessly.

Already in 1945, she appeared in army documents under her own name. And are there many Antonin Makarovs in the USSR? Probably several hundred. What if we subtract those who did not live in Moscow and did not serve as a nurse? Significantly less. The investigators in her case probably did not take into account that she could have gotten married and changed her last name, or were simply too lazy to check her along this line. As a result, Antonina Makarova-Ginzburg lived quietly for more than 30 years, working as a seamstress and not hiding from anyone. She was considered an exemplary Soviet citizen, her portrait even hung on the local honor board.

As in the case of another famous punisher Vasyura, chance helped to find her. Her brother, a colonel in the Soviet army, was going abroad. In those days, everyone traveling was strictly checked for trustworthiness, forced to fill out forms for all relatives. And high-ranking military personnel were checked even more strictly. Upon verification, it turned out that he himself was Parfenov, and his sister’s maiden name was Makarova. How can this be? They became interested in this story, and along the way it turned out that this Makarova was in captivity during the war, and her full namesake appeared on the list of wanted criminals.

Antonina was identified by several witnesses who lived in the village at the time when she worked as an executioner. In 1978 she was arrested. The trial took place then. She did not deny it and admitted her guilt, explaining her actions by saying that “the war forced her.” She was found sane and sentenced to death for the murder of 167 people. All appeals and requests for clemency were rejected. On August 11, 1979, the sentence was carried out.

She became the only female punisher convicted by a Soviet court. In addition, she became the first woman executed in the entire post-Stalin era.

Researchers are still puzzling over what made the young girl choose such a terrible craft. After all, it wasn't a matter of her survival. Based on available information, she initially served in the police in auxiliary positions. There is no evidence that she was forced to become an executioner by threats of death. Most likely, this was a voluntary choice.

Some believe that Makarova was forced to take up the craft, which even men who went to serve the Germans shied away from, due to the darkness of her mind after the horrors of encirclement, captivity and wanderings through the forests. Others say that it was a matter of banal greed, because the position of executioner was paid higher. One way or another, the true motives of Tonka the Machine Gunner remained a mystery.

For those who are interested in this topic and for those who are not yet tired of the topic of the Great Patriotic War, I can offer this continuation of the discussion...

She was arrested in the summer of 1978 in the Belarusian town of Lepel. A completely ordinary woman in a sand-colored raincoat with a 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 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..."

Young Tonya was not a monster from birth. On the contrary, since childhood I dreamed of being brave and courageous, like Chapaev’s faithful ally, Anka the machine gunner. True, when she came to first grade and the teacher asked her last name, she suddenly became shy. And her smart peers had to shout instead of her: “Yes, she’s Makarova.” I mean, Makar’s daughter’s last name is Panfilov. The teacher wrote the new girl down in the journal, legitimizing the inaccuracy in further documents. This confusion is what subsequently allowed the terrible Tonka the machine gunner to evade search for so long. After all, they were looking for her, known from the words of surviving victims, as a Muscovite, a nurse, through family ties of all the Makarovs of the Soviet Union, and not the Panfilovs.

After finishing school, Antonina moved to Moscow, where she found herself on June 22, 1941. The girl, like thousands of her peers, asked to go to the front as a volunteer medical instructor to carry the wounded from the battlefield. Who knew that what awaited her was not romantic, cinematic skirmishes with the enemy cowardly running away at the first salvo, but bloody, exhausting battles with superior German forces. Newspapers and loudspeakers assured of something else, something completely different... And here is the blood and dirt of the terrible Vyazma “cauldron”, in which literally in a matter of days of the war more than a million Red Army soldiers laid down their lives and another half a million were taken prisoner. She was among those half-dead, dying of cold and hunger, half a million thrown to be torn to pieces by the Wehrmacht. How she got out of the encirclement, what she experienced at the same time - only she and God knew.

However, she still had a choice. By hook or by crook, begging for an overnight stay in villages in which there were already policemen loyal to the new regime, and in others, on the contrary, partisans, mostly encircled men from the Red Army, were secretly grouped preparing to fight the Germans, she reached the Brasovsky district of the then Oryol region. Tonya chose not the dense forest, where survivors like her formed partisan detachments, but the village of Lokot, which had become a stronghold of National Socialist ideology and the “new order.”

Today in the literature you can find facts published by historians about this collaborationist structure of traitors, formed in the village in November 1941, after Lokot, together with neighboring settlements (now Lokot is part of the Bryansk region) was occupied by the Wehrmacht. The initiators of such “self-government” with a status that Himmler defined as “experimental” were former Soviet citizens: 46-year-old Konstantin Voskoboynik and 42-year-old Bronislav Kaminsky (I will try to make a separate post on the topic of “Lokotsky self-government”)

...It was to this “Lokot Republic”, where there was enough ammunition and bread, guns and butter, that Tonka Makarova, who made her final choice, wandered at the end of 1941. She was received personally by Kaminsky. The conversation was short, almost like in Taras Bulba. “Do you believe it? Cross yourself. Fine. How do you feel about communists? “I hate it,” the Komsomol believer answered firmly. “Can you shoot?” "Can". “Won’t your hand tremble?” "No". "Go to the platoon." A day later, she swore allegiance to the “Führer” and received a weapon - a machine gun. All!

They say that before the first execution, Antonina Makarova was given a glass of vodka. For courage. After which it became a ritual. True, with some changes - all subsequent times she drank her rations after the execution. Apparently, she was afraid of losing her victims in the crosshairs while she was drunk.

And at each execution there were at least 27 people - exactly the same number that fit into the stable stall that served as a prison cell.

“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 was rolling 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...” From the interrogation protocol of Antonina Makarova-Ginzburg in June 1978.

This will probably sound cynical and even blasphemous, but Tonka’s childhood dream came true: she, almost like Chapaev’s Anka, became a machine gunner. And they even gave her a machine gun - a Soviet Maxim. Often, for greater convenience, she carefully aimed at people while lying down.

“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 would still 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 sang something before they died. After the executions, I cleaned the machine gun in the guardhouse or in the yard. There was plenty of cartridges...” From the interrogation protocol of Antonina Makarova-Ginzburg in June 1978.

A symbolic coincidence: the payment assigned to her for her service was 30 marks. In every sense, Judas is a reward, which amazed even the seasoned KGB investigator Leonid Savoskin, who conducted the interrogations of the arrested “executor of sentences.” This is how Makarova was officially named in RONA documents. “Not all Russian policemen wanted to get dirty; they preferred that the executions of partisans and members of their families be carried out by a woman. Makarova was given a bed in a room at a local stud farm, where she could spend the night and store a machine gun.” This is from an investigation file.

There she was once found by a former landlady from the village of Krasny Kolodets, with whom Antonina, who was choosing her path in life, happened to spend the night - she once came to well-fed Lokot for salt, almost ending up in the prison of the “republic” here. The frightened woman asked her recent guest for intercession, who brought her to her closet. In a cramped room there was a machine gun, polished to a shine. There is a washing trough on the floor. And next to it, on a chair, washed clothes were folded in a neat pile - with numerous bullet holes. Noticing the guest’s frozen gaze on them, Tonya explained: “If I like things from the dead, then I take them off the dead, why waste it: once I shot a teacher, I liked her blouse, pink, silk, but it was too smeared with blood.” , I was afraid that I wouldn’t wash it - I had to leave it in the grave. It's a pity".

Hearing such speeches, the guest, forgetting about the salt, retreated to the door, remembering God as she went and calling on Tonka to forgive herself. This infuriated Makarova. “Well, since you are so brave, why did you ask me for help when they were taking you to prison? - she screamed. - So I would have died like a hero! So, when you need to save your skin, then Tonka’s friendship is good?”
Day after day, Tonka the machine gunner continued to regularly go out for executions. Carry out Kaminsky's sentences. How to get to work.

“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!..” From the interrogation report of Antonina Makarova-Ginzburg in June 1978.

She tried not to remember those she killed. Well, all those who miraculously survived after meeting her remembered Antonina Makarova for the rest of their lives. Already an 80-year-old gray-haired old woman, Elena Mostovaya, a resident of Lokot, told reporters how the police seized her for drawing partisan leaflets with ink. And they threw him into a stable not far from the punisher with her machine gun. “There was no electricity, the only light was that from the window, which was almost completely bricked up. And there is only one gap - if you stand on the windowsill, you can look in and see God’s world.”

Terrible memories were forever etched in the memory of another local resident, Lydia Buznikova: “There was a groan. People were crammed into stalls so that it was impossible to lie down, let alone sit down...”

When Soviet troops entered Lokot, there was no trace of Antonina Makarova. The victims she shot lay in the pits and could no longer say anything. The surviving local residents remembered only her heavy gaze, no less terrible than the Maxim's sights, and scant information about the newcomer: approximately 21 years old, presumably a Muscovite, dark-haired, with a gloomy crease on her forehead. The same data was provided by arrested collaborators of the Germans who were arrested on other cases. There was no more detailed information about the mysterious Tonka.

“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..."
“Don’t scold Tonka too much,” says Golovachev. - 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 the life path of all her possible relatives named Makarov...”

And she, as it turned out, was just lucky. Although, what is luck, in the grand scheme of things?..

No, she did not move at the end of 1943 from Loktya to Lepel along with the “Russian SS brigade” led by Kaminsky, which followed the Germans. Even earlier, she managed to catch a venereal disease. After all, she drowned out her post-execution days with more than one glass of vodka. Forty degrees of doping was not enough. That’s why, in silk outfits with traces of bullets, she went “after work” to the dance, where she danced until she dropped with her changing gentlemen, like glass in a kaleidoscope - policemen and marauding officers from RONA.

It’s strange, and maybe logical, but the Germans decided to take care of their comrade-in-arms and sent Tonka, who had contracted a shameful illness, to a rear hospital for treatment. So she ended up in 1945 near Koenigsberg.

...Already taken under escort to Bryansk after her arrest in Lepel, Antonina Makarova-Ginzburg told the investigators leading the case how she managed to escape from a German hospital when the Soviet troops approached and corrected someone else’s documents, according to which she decided to start a new life. This is a separate story from the life of a cunning and resourceful beast.

In a completely new guise, she appeared in April 1945 in a Soviet hospital in Koenigsberg in front of the wounded Sergeant Viktor Ginzburg. Like an angelic vision, a young nurse in a snow-white coat appeared in the ward - and the front-line soldier, rejoicing in his recovery, fell in love with her at first sight. A few days later they signed, Tonya took her husband’s last name. At first, the newlyweds lived in the Kaliningrad region, and then moved to Lepel, closer to her husband’s homeland, because Viktor Semenovich was from Polotsk, where his family died at the hands of punitive forces.

In quiet Lepel, where almost everyone knows each other and greets each other when they meet, the Ginzburg couple lived happily until the end of the seventies. A real exemplary Soviet family: both are veterans of the Great Patriotic War, excellent workers, raising two daughters. Benefits, an order table, order bars on the chest on holidays... The portrait of Antonina Makarovna, as the old-timers of Lepel remember, adorned the local Honor Board. What can I say - photographs of the four veterans were even in the local museum. It was later, when everything was clarified, that one of the photographs - a woman's - had to be hastily removed from the museum collections and sent for decommissioning with wording that was unusual for museum workers.

Accident largely contributed to the exposure of the punisher

In 1976, a Moscow resident named Panfilov had to urgently get ready for a voyage abroad. Being a disciplined person, he filled out the required lengthy questionnaire according to all the rules of that time, without missing a single relative in the list. This is where a mysterious detail emerged: all his brothers and sisters are Panfilovs, and for some reason one is Makarova. How, pardon the pun, did this happen? Citizen Panfilov was summoned to the OVIR for additional explanations, which were attended by interested people in civilian clothes. Panfilov told about his sister Antonina living in Belarus.

What happened next will be explained in a document provided by Natalya Makarova, a representative of the KGB press group for the Vitebsk region. So, “Information about the activities to search for the “Sadist”.
“In December 1976, Ginzburg V.S. went to Moscow to visit his wife’s brother, Colonel of the Soviet Army Panfilov. It was alarming that the brother did not have the same surname as Ginzburg’s wife. The collected data served as the basis for the establishment in February 1977 of Ginzburg (Makarov) A.M. “Sadist” audit cases. When checking Panfilov, it was found that Ginzburg A.M., as her brother indicated in his autobiography, was captured by the Germans during the war. The check also showed that she has a great resemblance to Antonina Makarovna Makarova, who was previously wanted by the KGB in the Bryansk region, born 1920 - 1922, a native of the Moscow region, a former nurse of the Soviet Army, who was put on the all-Union wanted list. The search for her was stopped by the KGB in the Bryansk region due to the small amount of data necessary for active search activities and her death (allegedly she was shot by the Germans along with other women suffering from venereal disease). A group of sick women were indeed shot, but the Germans took Ginzburg (A. Makarova - author) with them to the Kaliningrad region, where she remained after the occupiers fled.”

As we can see from the certificate, from time to time even the most tireless operatives searching for the elusive Tonka gave up. True, it was immediately resumed, as soon as new facts were discovered in a history that had lasted for 33 years, which allows us to talk about the continuity of the search.

And strange facts in the Makarova case in 1976 have already begun to pour out of a cornucopia. Contextually, in totality, they are, so to speak, strange.

Taking into account all the conflicts that arose in the case, the investigators decided to conduct an “encrypted conversation” with her at the district military registration and enlistment office. Together with Makarova, several other women who participated in the Great Patriotic War were also invited here. The conversation was about participation in hostilities, supposedly for future rewards. The front-line soldiers readily recalled. Makarova-Ginzburg was clearly at a loss during this conversation: she could not remember either the battalion commander or her colleagues, although her military ID indicated that she fought in the 422nd Medical Battalion from 1941 to 1944 inclusive.

Further in the certificate it is written:
“A check of the records of the military medical museum in Leningrad showed that Ginzburg (Makarova) A.M. She did not serve in the 422nd sanitary battalion. However, she received a partial pension, which included service in the ranks of the Soviet Army during the war, while continuing to work as a senior inspector of the quality control department of the sewing shop of the Lepel woodworking association.”
Such “forgetfulness” no longer looks like an oddity, but rather like real evidence.
But any guess requires confirmation. Now the investigators had to either obtain such confirmation, or, conversely, refute their own version. To do this, it was necessary to show your object of interest to living witnesses of the crimes of Tonka the Machine Gunner. Arrange what is called a confrontation - albeit in a rather delicate manner.
They began to secretly bring to Lepel those who could identify the female executioner from Lokot. It is clear that this had to be done very carefully - so as not to jeopardize the reputation of a respected “front-line soldier and an excellent worker” in the city in the event of a negative result. That is, only one party could know that the identification process was underway - the identifying party. The suspect should not have guessed anything.

Further work on the case, to put it in the dry language of the same “Information on the activities to search for the “Sadist,” was carried out in contact with the KGB for the Bryansk region. On August 24, 1977, Ginzburg (Makarova) was re-identified by Pelageya Komarova and Olga Panina, who arrived in Lepel from the Bryansk region. Tonka rented a corner from the first in the fall of 1941 in the village of Krasny Kolodets (remember the story about the trip to Lokot for salt?), and the second was thrown by the Germans into Lokot prison at the beginning of 1943. Both women unconditionally recognized Antonina Ginzburg as Tonka the Machine Gunner.

“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.”

On June 2, 1978, Ginzburg (Makarova) was once again identified by a woman who had come from the Leningrad region, a former partner of the head of the Lokot prison. After which the respected citizen Lepel Antonina Makarovna was stopped on the street by polite people in civilian clothes, from whom she, as if realizing that the protracted game was over, only asked in a quiet voice for a cigarette. Do I need to clarify that this was the arrest of a war criminal? During a subsequent brief interrogation, she admitted that she was Tonka the machine gunner. On the same day, KGB officers for the Bryansk region took Makarova-Ginzburg to Bryansk.

During the investigative experiment, she was taken to Lokot. Bryansk investigators well remember how the residents who recognized her shied away and spat after her. And she walked and remembered everything. Calmly, as one remembers everyday affairs.

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.

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.”

“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..."

Her involvement in the execution of 168 people was officially proven during the investigation.

Antonina Makarova was sentenced to death. The court's decision came as an absolute surprise even to the people who led the investigation, not to mention the defendant herself. All requests for clemency from 55-year-old Antonina Makarova-Ginzburg in Moscow were rejected. The sentence was carried out on August 11, 1979

In Lokt, the security officers took her along the old and well-known path to her - to the pit where she carried out the sentences of Kaminsky and his gang. Bryansk investigators remember well how residents who recognized her shied away and spat after her. And she walked and remembered everything. Calmly, as one remembers everyday affairs. They say that she was even surprised at people’s hatred - after all, in her opinion, the war should have written off everything. And, they say, she didn’t ask to see her family either. Or to convey the message to them.

And in Lepel there was immediate talk about the event that excited everyone: it could not go unnoticed. Moreover, in Bryansk, where the trial of Antonina Makarova took place in December 1978, the Lepel residents found acquaintances - they sent the local newspaper “Bryansky Rabochiy” with a large publication under the heading “On the Steps of Betrayal.” The number was passed around among local residents. And on May 31, 1979, the Pravda newspaper published a large article about the trial under the heading “The Fall.” It told about the betrayal of Antonina Makarova, born in 1920, a native of the city of Moscow (according to other sources, the village of Malaya Volkovka, Sychevsky district, Smolensk region), who worked before the exposure as a senior inspector of the quality control department of the sewing shop of the Lepel woodworking association.

They say that she wrote appeals for pardon to the CPSU Central Committee, because the coming 1979 was supposed to be the Year of the Woman. But the judges rejected the requests. The sentence was carried out.

This, perhaps, has not been seen in recent Russian history. Neither all-Union, nor Belarusian. The case of Antonina Makarova turned out to be high-profile. One might even say unique. For the first time in the post-war years, a female executioner was executed by court verdict, whose involvement in the execution of 168 people was officially proven during the investigation.

However, if we approach the issue from a strictly legal perspective, there is an opinion that from a purely legal point of view, she had no right to be sentenced to death. There are two reasons. The first is that more than 15 years passed from the day the crime was committed until the arrest, and the Soviet-era Criminal Code did not contain provisions on crimes for which statutes of limitations do not apply. A person who committed a crime punishable by execution could be brought to criminal liability even after the expiration of 15 years, but in this case the death penalty was replaced by imprisonment. The second is that in the USSR the death penalty was abolished in 1947, although it was restored three years later. As you know, laws that mitigate punishment have retroactive force, while aggravating ones do not. Thus, since the convicted woman was not brought to justice before the abolition of the death penalty in the USSR, the abolition law applied to her in full. The Restoration Act could only be applied to persons who committed crimes after it came into force. Let's remember this operation, how, and also about, well, who cares about The original article is on the website InfoGlaz.rf Link to the article from which this copy was made -

Story Antonina Makarova-Ginsburg- a Soviet girl who personally executed one and a half thousand of her compatriots - the other, dark side of the heroic history 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.

Jerking 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 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 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...

"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 it is time to answer for what you have committed.

“So, it’s not in vain that last year my heart became anxious, as if I felt that you would appear,” the woman said. “How long ago it was. It’s like it wasn’t 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 the 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 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. She reached out to him, trembling: “Mom, 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’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 the first grade, and I forgot my last name. The teacher asks: “What is your name, girl?” And I know that it’s Parfenova, but I’m afraid to say. The kids from the back desk shout: “Yes, she’s 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 native 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.” “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. “She has a bad look in her eyes,” the women said. “She pesters our men, who is not at the front, 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 completely drunk, she did not understand what she was doing,” recalls the investigator on her case, Leonid Savoskin. “But they paid me 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. That’s why I wasn’t ashamed in front of them. Sometimes, I’d shoot, come closer, and someone would still twitch. Then I’d shoot again in the head so that the person wouldn’t suffer. Sometimes several the prisoners had a piece of plywood hung on their chests with the inscription “partisans.” Some of them sang something before their death. After the executions, I cleaned the machine gun in the guardhouse or in the yard. There was plenty of cartridges..."

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 was frightened. 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 off the dead, why waste them,” explained Tonya. “Once I shot a teacher, I liked her blouse, pink, silk, but it was too covered in blood, I was afraid that I didn’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 him. “You 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 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!”

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 Soviet troops entered the village of Lokot, sending traitors to the Motherland and former policemen to the gallows, only terrible legends remained from the atrocities of Tonka the Machine Gunner.

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 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 during the post-war years, the KGB officers secretly and carefully checked all the women of the Soviet Union. who bore this name, patronymic and surname and who were suitable in age - there were about 250 such Tonka Makarovs in the USSR. But it’s useless. The real Tonka the machine gunner disappeared 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 one of the shot. But she chose to live, becoming an executioner. But she was only 20 years old in 1941.”

But it was impossible to just take it and forget about it.

“Her crimes were too terrible,” says Golovachev. “It 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, young, with a machine gun, looking intently - and does not take her eyes off. They were convinced that the executioner girl was alive, and they asked that they find her in order to stop these nightmares. could have gotten married a long time ago and changed her passport, so we thoroughly studied the life path of 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. “Therefore, our employees went to the Belarusian Lepel secretly, watched Antonina Ginzburg for a whole year, brought there one by one the surviving witnesses, the former punisher, one of her lovers, for identification. Only when everyone said the same thing - it’s her, Tonka the Machine Gunner, we recognized her by a noticeable crease on her forehead - doubts disappeared.”

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, 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 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 tell everyone about how she escaped from a German hospital and got into our surroundings, 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. “It’s impossible to be constantly afraid,” she said. “For the first ten years I waited for a knock on the door, and then I calmed down. There are no such sins that a person 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 in the evenings, sitting in her cell, to her jailers. “Now after the verdict I’ll have to leave Lepel, otherwise every fool will point a finger at me. I think they’ll 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 - it’s a familiar job..."

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, not to mention the defendant herself. 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.

The story of Antonina Makarova-Ginzburg, a Soviet girl who personally executed one and a half thousand of her compatriots, is the other, dark side of the heroic history of the Great Patriotic War. Tonka the Machine Gunner, as she was called then, worked on Soviet territory occupied by Nazi troops from 1941 to 1943, carrying out mass death sentences of Nazis on partisan families. Jerking the bolt of the machine gun, she didn’t think about those she was shooting - children, women, old people - it was just work for her...

"What nonsense, that then you are tormented by remorse. That those you kill come in nightmares at night. I still haven't dreamed of one“,” she told her investigators during interrogations, when she was finally identified and detained - 35 years after her last execution.

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.

"Can you guess why you were brought here?"- asked the Bryansk KGB investigator 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 for nothing that last year my heart became anxious, as if I felt that you would appear,- said the woman. - 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..."

Soviet commanders 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...

"“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 is 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 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 on him. However, Nikolai shook her off like ash from a cigarette and left.

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 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 would still 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..."

"If I like things from the condemned, then I take them from the dead, so why should they go to waste,” Tonya explained. “Once I shot a teacher, I liked her blouse so much, it was pink and 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’re 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?”

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!”

"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. - 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 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..."

But it was impossible to just take it and forget about it.

"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.”

"The arrested woman 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. “It’s impossible to be constantly afraid,” she said. “For the first ten years I waited for a knock on the door, and then I calmed down. There are no such sins that a person will be tormented all his life.”

“They disgraced me in my old age,” she complained in the evenings, sitting in her cell, to her jailers. “Now after the verdict I’ll have to leave Lepel, otherwise every fool will point a finger at me. I think they’ll 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 - it’s a familiar job..."

A very sensational story - I know it first hand. I was born in Lepele - and this story is very familiar to me. The whole city followed the publication of investigative articles in the Tonka case. My mother’s friend (Aunt Rose) even had a chance to work with her in production. She worked there as a shift foreman. She retained the habit of putting her hands behind her back from the time of her punitive cases. Aunt Rosa called her “Gestapo” behind her back - for which she simply hated her. As it turned out, that’s exactly what happened.

The killer of one and a half thousand people was considered an exemplary mother and wife for 30 years

The name of this woman inspired horror and some kind of sacred awe. Of course: a person who considered murder his profession cannot be simply condemned. And she thought that during war any way to survive was considered acceptable. And she killed. More precisely, she executed her. Where did Tonka the Machine Gunner come from and how did she manage to turn into a “heroine” of the Great Patriotic War?

Second surname

Tonya was born into a large family in a small village in the Smolensk region. She was the youngest, seventh, child, and grew up as a reserved and very shy girl. When she went to first grade on September 1, 1927, a story happened to her that played a big role in her future fate.

The teacher was taking a roll call of the students. Antonina, embarrassed, could not say her name. Then the guys started shouting that she was the daughter Makara Parfenova, something like: “She’s from the Makarovs.” And the teacher wrote down the girl as Antonina Makarova. The parents did not bother to deal with the confusion of surnames, since they were illiterate and embarrassed by the authority of the teacher. As a result, a daughter appeared in the Parfenov family with a different surname - Antonina Makarovna Makarova.

Tonya was an average student: she was not a poor student, but she also did not stand out in intelligence among the rest of her peers. A few years later, the family decided to move to Moscow for a better life. Antonina already graduated from school in the capital, and then entered a medical school, where she studied to be a nurse.

I fucked it up and threw it away

In the first half of October 1941, the German Army Group Center broke through the defenses of the Soviet troops and surrounded four of our armies in the area of the city of Vyazma. Today, historians give approximate figures for the deaths of Red Army soldiers - about 1 million soldiers, among whom about 400 thousand were killed immediately, about 600 thousand were captured.

In this terrible meat grinder, which is called the “Vyazemsky Cauldron,” 20-year-old Antonina Makarova found herself. She volunteered to go to the front to pull the wounded from the battlefield. When their unit was defeated, the girl wandered through the forest for several days, was captured, but together with the Red Army soldier Nikolay Fedchuk she managed to escape. Now the two of them were hiding in the forests, trying to get out of the encirclement.

So that the man would not leave her to die in the forest thicket, she became his mistress. For three months they lived like animals. Constantly hungry, they ate what they could collect in the forest or steal; they drank water from streams or puddles; without warm clothes and a roof over your head.

They were able to reach people only in January 1942. The girl and her friend ended up in the Bryansk region, in the village of Krasny Kolodets. But Fedchuk immediately abandoned Makarova, saying that he “went to his family” - his wife and children. Antonina, having wandered around the villages, ended up in the village of Lokot - the so-called capital.

This Nazi-occupied territory differed from the rest in that the volost was led not by German commandant’s offices, but by local authorities. That is, the territory officially went over to the German side. It had its own army and had its own criminal code.

Beaten and danced

And again, Tonya Makarova had to make a difficult choice: be captured as a private in the Red Army and be executed; or get a job with the local police. She chose life.

There is evidence that at first Antonina was sent to the Lokot auxiliary police - a punitive battalion reporting directly to the German police. She had to beat prisoners of war, partisans and members of their families. At the same time, the 21-year-old girl did not deny herself pleasures; in the evenings she danced in a club and met with handsome Germans or policemen.

Soon she was “promoted” to her position. The Germans thought that it would be much more terrible and instructive if Soviet soldiers and partisans were shot by a Soviet girl. Tonya agreed to the offer to participate in the executions. She was given her own room and given a Maxim machine gun.

Ironically, when Makarova was still in school, her heroine was Anka the machine gunner from the film "Chapaev". She dreamed of becoming the same. Psychiatrists later suggested that Antonina agreed to work as an executioner because it partially fulfilled her dream of becoming a machine gunner.

"Regular" work

Antonina was given a salary of 30 Reichsmarks for each execution. The execution took place in the morning. After her arrest in 1978, Makarova calmly told investigators: “Usually they brought me 27 people to be shot. Approximately the same number of prisoners could be accommodated in the cell. Not far from the barn where they were kept, a hole was dug. The partisans were lined up with their backs to me. One of the men rolled out a machine gun for me. After the command, I shot until everyone fell dead.” She was only scared the first time. To carry out the order, she had to drink heavily.

After that, she treated killings like regular work. She didn’t care who she shot: teenagers, women, old people, partisans. She didn't pay attention to people, she looked at who was wearing what. Makarova removed things she liked from the corpses, washed them off the blood and sewed up bullet holes.

They say that she loved to come to the prisoners at night and choose outfits for herself in advance. After the execution, Tonka the Machine Gunner always checked the quality of her work and finished off those who were wounded. Then she cleaned her machine gun, which stood in her room, next to the laundry trough and a chair with clothes.

In the evening, Tonka dressed up and went to the men’s club, where she picked up her next lover. Psychiatrists, in order to somehow explain the behavior of this woman, assumed that at that time she could have lost her mind due to the horror of her environment, survival in the forest, captivity and murder. But, as the surviving witnesses said, Antonina did not look like a madwoman.

And Makarova herself, after her arrest, described her life at that time in great detail. It is unlikely that, being in an inadequate state, she could remember everything like that.

In the turmoil of war

Antonina Makarova worked as an executioner for about a year. When the Red Army entered Lokot, the soldiers found a huge hole in the field with shot people. The remains were hastily covered with earth. Of the 1,500 executed, only 168 people were able to recover their names. These were the results of the work of Tonka the machine gunner, who by that time was already far away.

In the summer of 1943, the Germans sent her to the rear to be treated for a venereal disease, which she received due to promiscuous relationships. In the hospital she became the field wife of a German corporal. She went with him to Ukraine, then to Poland. After the murder of her German “husband,” Makarova soon found herself in the Koenigsberg concentration camp. And when the city was liberated in April 1945, Tonka introduced herself as a nurse who served for three years in a medical battalion. After which she was immediately sent to work in a hospital, where a week later she met a wounded soldier Victor Ginzburg. Soon she married a war hero and became Antonina Ginzburg.

Exemplary wife

After the war, Antonina Makarovna went to her husband’s homeland in Belarus, to the city of Lepel. She got a job at a factory and became a supervisor in a sewing workshop. Her portrait always hung on the Honor Board.

She gave birth to two daughters to her husband. Their family was considered prosperous and respected. War heroes often came to school and talked about their exploits. Antonina Ginzburg was the guest of honor at school functions, competitions and meetings. As veterans, they had benefits and received holiday packages and gifts. So they lived in peace and harmony for 30 years.

All these years, KGB officers were looking for Tonka the Machine Gunner. Secretly, they checked the stories of all women living in the USSR with the name Antonina Makarovna Makarova and approximately the same age. There were 250 of them.

And only in 1976 was it possible to pick up the trail of Tonka the Machine Gunner. A certain official named Parfenov, when preparing documents to travel abroad, he listed all his relatives. Among the huge number of Parfenovs was a certain Antonina Makarova, who in 1945 got married and became Ginzburg, leaving with her husband for Belarus. So the village teacher’s mistake delayed the investigation for three decades. And it took the security officers two years to collect evidence.

They did not want to disgrace a woman respected by everyone, a leader in production, an exemplary mother and wife. KGB officers secretly brought witnesses to Lepel, a policeman who was her lover. And when everyone as one confirmed that Antonina Makarovna Ginzburg was Tonka the Machine Gunner, an arrest was made.

Antonina did not deny anything, but she did not feel any guilt. She sincerely believed that the war had written off all her sins. She complained to her cellmates that she had been disgraced in her old age and now she would have to move to another city. She felt neither fear nor remorse. “Three years probation. And for what more? - the executioner reasoned.

Her husband, Viktor Ginzburg, visited all sorts of authorities, wrote letters to party leaders and talked about his beautiful wife, a war hero. When investigators decided to tell the man who he had actually lived with all these years, he turned gray in one day. After that, he and his daughters left Lepel forever.

Antonina Parfenova-Makarov-Ginzburg was shot at 6 a.m. on August 11, 1979. The elderly woman listened to her verdict calmly. She wrote several petitions for pardon, but they were all rejected. The case of Tonka the Machine Gunner was the last major case of traitors to the Motherland during the Great Patriotic War.