Thousands of war criminals, collaborators who collaborated with the Germans during the war, after its end, could not escape punishment. The Soviet special services did everything possible so that none of them escaped the punishment they deserve.
A very humane court
The thesis that there is a punishment for every crime was refuted in the most cynical way during the trials of Nazi criminals. According to the protocols of the Nuremberg court, 16 of the 30 top leaders of the SS and police of the Third Reich not only saved their lives, but also remained at large.
Out of 53 thousand SS men who were executors of the order for the extermination of "inferior peoples" and were part of the "Einsatzgruppen", only about 600 people were prosecuted.
The list of the accused at the main Nuremberg trials consisted of only 24 people, this was the top of the Nazi organs. There were 185 accused at the Small Nunberg Trials. Where did the rest go?
For the most part, they ran along the so-called "rat paths". South America served as the main refuge for the Nazis.
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By 1951, only 142 prisoners remained in the prison for Nazi criminals in the city of Landsberg, in February of the same year, US High Commissioner John McCloy pardoned 92 prisoners at the same time.
Double standarts
The Soviet courts were also tried for war crimes. Sorted out, including the cases of the executioners from the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. In the USSR, the chief doctor of the camp, Heinz Baumketter, who was responsible for the deaths of a huge number of prisoners, was sentenced to long terms of imprisonment; Gustav Sorge, known as the "iron Gustav", participated in the execution of thousands of prisoners; camp guard Wilhelm Schuber personally shot 636 Soviet citizens, 33 Polish and 30 German, also participated in the executions of 13,000 prisoners of war.
Among other war criminals, the aforementioned "people" were handed over to the FRG authorities to serve their sentences. However, in the federal republic, all three did not remain behind bars for long. They were released, and each was given an allowance in the amount of 6 thousand marks, and "doctor-death" Heinz Baumketter even got a place in one of the German hospitals.
During the war
War criminals, those who collaborated with the Germans and were guilty of the destruction of civilians and Soviet prisoners of war, the Soviet state security agencies and SMERSH began looking for them even during the war. Starting from the December counter-offensive near Moscow, NKVD operational groups arrived in the territories liberated from the occupation.
They collected information about persons who collaborated with the occupation authorities, interrogated hundreds of witnesses to crimes. Most of those who survived the occupation willingly made contact with the NKVD and the ChGK, showing loyalty to the Soviet regime.
In wartime, war criminals were tried by military tribunals of active armies.
Travnikovtsi
At the end of July 1944, documents from the liberated Maidanek and the SS training camp, which was located in the town of Travniki, 40 km from Lublin, fell into the hands of SMERSH. Here, Wakhmans were trained - guards of concentration camps and death camps.
In the hands of the SMERSH members was a card index with five thousand names of those who were trained in this camp. These were mainly former Soviet prisoners of war who signed a pledge to serve in the SS. SMERSH began searching for "Travnikovites", after the war the MGB and KGB continued the search.
The investigating authorities have been looking for the "Travnikovites" for over 40 years, the first trials in their cases date back to August 1944, the last trials took place in 1987. Officially, the historical literature recorded at least 140 trials in the case of the "Travnikovites", although Aaron Schneer, an Israeli historian who closely dealt with this problem, believes that there were many more.
How did you search?
All repatriates who returned to the USSR went through a complex filtration system. This was a necessary measure: among those who ended up in the filtration camps were former punitive forces, and accomplices of the Nazis, and the Vlasovites, and the same Travnikovites.
Immediately after the war, on the basis of trophy documents, acts of the ChGK and eyewitness accounts, the state security agencies of the USSR compiled lists of Nazi accomplices to be wanted. They included tens of thousands of surnames, nicknames, names.
For the initial screening and subsequent search for war criminals in the Soviet Union, a complex but effective system was created. The work was carried out serious and systematic, search books were created, strategy, tactics and methods of search were developed. Operatives sifted through a lot of information, checking even rumors and information that was not directly related to the case.
Investigative authorities searched for and found war criminals throughout the Soviet Union. The special services worked among the former Ostarbeiters, among the inhabitants of the occupied territories. Thus, thousands of war criminals, associates of the fascists, were identified.
Tonka machine gunner
Indicative, but at the same time unique is the fate of Antonina Makarova, who for her "merits" received the nickname "Tonka machine gunner". During the war years, she collaborated with the Nazis in the Lokot Republic and shot more than one and a half thousand captured Soviet soldiers and partisans.
A native of the Moscow region, Tonya Makarova herself went to the front as a nurse in 1941, ended up in the Vyazemsky boiler, then was arrested by the Nazis in the village of Lokot, Bryansk region.
The village of Lokot was the "capital" of the so-called Lokot republic. In the Bryansk forests there were many partisans, whom the fascists and their associates managed to catch regularly. To make the executions as revealing as possible, Makarova was given a Maxim machine gun and was even given a salary of 30 marks for each execution.
Shortly before Elbow was released by the Red Army, Tonka the machine-gunner was sent to a concentration camp, which helped her - she forged documents and pretended to be a nurse. After her release, she got a job in a hospital and married a wounded soldier Viktor Ginzburg. After the Victory, the family of the newlyweds left for Belarus. Antonina in Lepel got a job at a garment factory, led an exemplary lifestyle.
The KGB officers came out on her tracks only after 30 years. The accident helped. On the Bryansk square, a man attacked a certain Nikolai Ivanin with fists, recognizing him as the head of the Lokotsky prison. From Ivanin, a thread began to unravel to Tonka the bullet. Ivanin remembered the last name and the fact that Makarova was a Muscovite.
The search for Makrova was intense, at first they suspected another woman, but the witnesses did not identify her. Chance helped again. The brother of the "machine gunner", filling out a questionnaire for traveling abroad, indicated the surname of her husband. Already after the investigating authorities found Makarova, she was "led" for several weeks, held several confrontations to establish her identity.
On November 20, 1978, 59-year-old Tonka the machine gunner was sentenced to capital punishment. At the trial, she remained calm and was sure that she would be acquitted or her sentence would be reduced. She treated her activities in Lokte as work and argued that her conscience did not torment her.
In the USSR, the Antonina Makarova case was the last major case of traitors to the Motherland during the Second World War and the only one in which a woman punisher was involved.