She hoped to receive a three-year suspended sentence, but a Soviet court sentenced her to capital punishment. 1979 in the USSR was declared the Year of the Woman and she hoped for the favor of the court. But on the morning of August 11, 1979, she was shot. In the USSR, this was the last major case involving traitors and executioners who collaborated with the German occupiers during the war, and the last and only case when a woman was shot.
In the Vyazemsky boiler
Even the investigators did not expect such a harsh sentence. Nobody argued that the guilt of Antonina Makarovna Makarova-Ginzburg in the massacres during the war was fully proven. But on the other hand, more than 30 years have passed since then, and the girl who was born in a simple working-class family, who turned 19 in 1941, could in no way be recognized as a convinced traitor and a Nazi. Moreover, the circumstances in which she found herself simply did not give her a choice. But the court, meanwhile, reasonably judged that the crimes committed by Tonya did not have an expiration date, but the circumstances … a person always has a choice and the court considered that in the distant 1941 Antonina Makarova made her choice. Tonya came to the front from Moscow, where, shortly before the war, she arrived from her native village of Malaya Volkovka, Smolensk region. In Moscow, the girl was going to study, and then get a job, but all plans were canceled out by the war. Tonya took machine gunner courses, then nursing courses, and already in this status, she went to the active army to defend the capital. Where she fell into the terrible meat grinder of the Vyazemsky cauldron, in which about a million soldiers and officers of the Red Army perished, there, surrounded, among a large number of corpses, the young nurse's psyche breaks once and for all. This is followed by several endless months of getting out of the encirclement, wandering through the Bryansk forests with random satellites, just like she, going to the east. In the end, Tonya was left completely alone and walked without making out the roads, begging in the Bryansk villages, until finally she reached the village of Lokot, where she fell into the hands of the police. They raped her, gave her moonshine, fed her and raped her again,and one morning, completely drunk, they took him out into the yard, put him behind a machine gun and ordered to shoot at the emaciated people standing at the end of the yard, whose hands were tied. And Tonya pulled the trigger …
I was doing work …
Record from the interrogation protocol of Antonina Makarova-Ginzburg from June 1978: “Everyone who was sentenced to death was the same for me, only their number changed. Usually I shot in groups of 27 people, as many people could fit in a police station cell. I shot people 500 meters from the prison, not far from some pit where the bodies were thrown. People were put in a chain facing the pit, one of the men was dragging a machine gun, at the command of their superiors, they opened fire and fired until everyone fell. This is how I did my job, for which I was paid. It was necessary to shoot not only male partisans, but also members of their families, children, women. Later I tried not to remember this. " For such "work" Tonya received 30 German marks a day, whether there was some symbolism in this amount or not, now no one will say. At first everything for her was like a fog,and before the execution she was given schnapps to drink, but then she got used to it and drank after the execution. Since childhood, one of Tony's heroines was Anka the machine gunner, and here you are, a real machine gun, lie down and shoot. Whom to shoot at, Tone no longer seemed important at the moment. Upon completion of the "work", she took off the clothes she liked from the corpses, washed them of blood, and changed them for herself. Gently and carefully handled the machine gun, cleaned it, in the evenings went to dances and drunkenness with policemen and occupiers. How many people she shot, Tonnaya did not count, but according to eyewitnesses, Antonina was the only executioner who carried out death sentences in Lokoti. After the war, representatives of SMERSH found about 20,000 corpses in the dug holes. Since childhood, one of Tony's heroines was Anka the machine gunner, and here you are, a real machine gun, lie down and shoot. Whom to shoot at, Tone no longer seemed important at the moment. Upon completion of the "work", she took off the clothes she liked from the corpses, washed them of blood, and changed them for herself. Gently and carefully handled the machine gun, cleaned it, in the evenings went to dances and drunkenness with policemen and occupiers. How many people she shot, Tonnaya did not count, but according to eyewitnesses, Antonina was the only executioner who carried out death sentences in Lokoti. After the war, representatives of SMERSH found about 20,000 corpses in the dug holes. Since childhood, one of Tony's heroines was Anka the machine gunner, and here you are, a real machine gun, lie down and shoot. Whom to shoot at, Tone no longer seemed important at the moment. Upon completion of the "work", she took off the clothes she liked from the corpses, washed them of blood, and changed them for herself. Gently and carefully handled the machine gun, cleaned it, in the evenings went to dances and drunkenness with policemen and occupiers. How many people she shot, Tonnaya did not count, but according to eyewitnesses, Antonina was the only executioner who carried out death sentences in Lokoti. After the war, representatives of SMERSH found about 20,000 corpses in the dug holes. Upon completion of the "work", she took off the clothes she liked from the corpses, washed them of blood, and changed them for herself. Gently and carefully handled the machine gun, cleaned it, in the evenings went to dances and drunkenness with policemen and occupiers. How many people she shot, Tonnaya did not count, but according to eyewitnesses, Antonina was the only executioner who carried out death sentences in Lokoti. After the war, representatives of SMERSH found about 20,000 corpses in the dug holes. Upon completion of the "work", she took off the clothes she liked from the corpses, washed them of blood, and changed them for herself. Gently and carefully handled the machine gun, cleaned it, in the evenings went to dances and drunkenness with policemen and occupiers. How many people she shot, Tonnaya did not count, but according to eyewitnesses, Antonina was the only executioner who carried out death sentences in Lokoti. After the war, representatives of SMERSH found about 20,000 corpses in the dug holes.who carried out death sentences in Lokoti. After the war, representatives of SMERSH found about 20,000 corpses in the dug holes.who carried out death sentences in Lokoti. After the war, representatives of SMERSH found about 20,000 corpses in the dug holes.
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Second Life
In 1943, she was lucky, she contracted a venereal disease and was sent to Germany for treatment, so when the Red Army freed Tony's Elbow, the machine gunner was no longer there. Having escaped from a German hospital, Antonina was able to get her papers and disappear into the rear, she again got a job as a nurse in a military hospital, where she met her future husband, married him and took his last name.
They have been looking for her for over 35 years. There were enough facts about her existence - many of the captured policemen talked about Tonka the machine-gunner, the case of the executioner girl passed from hand to hand, was sent to the archive, again emerged. The KGB did not sit idly by; everything was thoroughly and secretly checked! Antonin Makarovs are of similar age, but the desired one was not among them.
And Antonina Makarova did not hide at all, except for the change of her surname to her husband's surname. They lived together in the quiet Belarusian town of Lepele; after the war, Antonina gave birth to her husband two daughters. Her portrait was hung on the honor board, she went to performances in front of schoolchildren, was awarded with commemorative medals and gifts. Their family was a strong and well-deserved family of city veterans. “It is impossible to be afraid all my life, for the first 10 years I was still waiting for a knock on the door, then I completely calmed down, there are no such sins in the world that would persecute a person all his life,” she said later during interrogation. Later it became clear why she managed to remain unpunished for so long. Even as a child, when she entered school, the teacher wrote it down incorrectly in the metric, she wrote down her patronymic name. In 1976, one of the Moscow officials, when traveling abroad, honestly listed the names of all his relatives, the family had five children, all of them were Parfenovs, but for some reason one was recorded by Makarova, from 45 years old by the name of her husband Ginzburg. Thus, the special services got on the trail of the executioner girl.
Honored front-line soldier
They did not detain her right away, for a whole year the investigators checked all the facts in order to remove all doubts and God forbid not to make mistakes, punishing a person respected in the city, a war veteran. The surviving policemen and other witnesses were secretly brought to Lepel for identification, they all recognized Tonka the machine-gunner in the elderly woman. When she was arrested, she did not lie and resist, at the very first interrogation she calmly and clearly began to talk about what happened in the German occupation, which she had been trying to forget for so long and persistently. Of the many thousands of corpses found in Lokotsky burials, only 168 people were identified, it was in their murder that Antonina Makarova was officially accused. In 1978, the Military Collegium of the Bryansk Regional Court issued a death sentence to the defendant; in August 1979, he was carried out.