On February 8, 1945, an incident occurred in the German Peenemünde concentration camp on the Baltic island of Usedom, which shocked the Reich Aviation Minister of Germany Hermann Goering himself. Deciding to sort things out personally, he arrived at the scene, taking with him the SS military judges. The commander of the POW camp, four SS guards and several other soldiers were sentenced to death.
“You bastards! You let some lousy Russian prisoner of war steal a bomber! You will pay for this,”shouted Goering.
Guard Senior Lieutenant, fighter pilot, Hero of the Soviet Union Mikhail Petrovich Devyatayev left memories of the day when he made the top of Nazi Germany and the monsters who controlled the POW camp seriously nervous. Until the very last moment, he was not sure that he could carry out his plans and escape from this hell, while creating so much noise in the Third Reich. But he also could not imagine that upon arrival in his homeland he would again have to return to the bunk, to the same camp, where he had once been, being held captive by the Nazis.
Under the Germans, Sachsenhausen was the central political experimental death camp, where the most sophisticated methods of killing were tested on prisoners. The prisoners were shot from machine guns in special shooting galleries, poisoned with poisonous gases, placed in gas-powered gas vans with mobile crematoria, all kinds of poisonous substances, high-explosive grenades were tested on people, and devilish medical experiments were performed. Sachsenhausen was personally run by the head of the SS, Himmler. Of the 200 thousand people who passed through this forge of death, 100 thousand were brutally killed.
Camp Sachsenhausen.
At the end of April 1945, Sachsenhausen was liberated by Soviet troops and until 1950 operated as a filtration camp for the NKVD. Twice a miracle helped Mikhail Devyatayev to get out of this terrible place. The first time he got there was because he tried to organize an escape in another camp - Kleinkenigsberg. Together with his accomplices, he dug a tunnel at night under a fence with barbed wire and under the commandant's office, planned to seize weapons from the Germans and free the prisoners. Here is how Devyatayev described in his book "Escape from Hell" the conditions in which people, tired of day work, dug a tunnel to freedom at night:
The conspirators were identified, brutally tortured and sent to Sachsenhausen for sophisticated killing. An ordinary prisoner of war who worked under the Germans in a sanitary barrack saved Devyatayev from death there. He secretly changed the death bomber's tag on a striped robe of a pilot sentenced to death for a penalty box tag that belonged to a certain deceased Grigory Nikitenko. It was under this name that Devyatayev went on in the camp lists.
Having established contacts with the camp underground, the lieutenant revealed all the cards and told who he really was: not at all the Ukrainian teacher Nikitenko, but the Soviet fighter pilot Mikhail Devyatayev, who had dreamed of the sky and airplanes since childhood, who graduated from the First Chkalov Military Aviation school named after K. E. Voroshilov, who was in the army since June 22, 1941, received the Order of the Red Star for his distinction in battles, which shot down 9 German planes, including three bombers, who flew in Pokryshkin's air division with the call sign "Mordvin", captured by German captives on July 13, 1944 (was shot down in the Lvov region and was wounded), passed through two concentration camps - Lodz and Kleinkenigsberg, and sent to Sachsenhausen for liquidation.
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- later recalled Devyatayev in the book "Escape from Hell".
M. Devyatayev.
People like him are also referred to as "lucky" - otherwise how to explain that the underground workers who listened to his story, sentenced to death, gave him the idea of hijacking an airplane and, through secret camp networks, contributed to his transfer to a German concentration camp on the Baltic island of Usedom, where in the Peenemunde rocket center The Nazis developed a new weapon for the Reich - the V-1 and V-2 cruise missiles. Devyatayev was hired, as he later said, "just by order" - in the airfield team. There he, together with other prisoners, unloaded cement, concreted the runways and … watched the daily routine of the Germans. The work was exhausting, an icy wind blew from the sea, arms and legs were numb from the cold. In order to somehow warm up, the prisoners put on paper bags of cement under rags, for which they were brutally beaten and threatened with even more severe punishments.
Devyatayev managed to assemble a team of like-minded people, which he dedicated to his plan to capture an enemy plane, and personally enlightened each of them in aviation matters. Once, while camouflaging the equipment, he even managed to spy on how the German pilots connected the battery trolley to the onboard network, how they started the motors, how they treated the cockpit fittings. Attention was paid to every little detail, because the bomber was to be hijacked, and Devyatayev was a fighter and did not know the nuances of controlling the German Heinkel-111. The planned escape was nearly disrupted by an incident in the barracks. Devyatayev entered into a fight with a prisoner who spoke out in support of the Germans and was going to cooperate with them:
Heinkel-111.
The Germans raised their fighters into the sky. Clouds saved from the pursuit of the hijackers. However, the plane found itself in blind flight conditions and almost fell into a tailspin. Devyatayev mastered the control of the car right in the air. German Focke-Wulfs, returning from a mission, flew past. The Luftwaffe pilots were extremely surprised to see people in prison uniforms in the Heinkel-111 cockpit. Those who were given an urgent order to shoot down the hijacked bomber could not do this, since their ammunition was already used up. Already on Russian territory, our anti-aircraft guns began to shoot at the plane. Fire pierced the right wing and the right landing gear. Having miraculously landed on their native land and found themselves with their own, the former fascist prisoners began to tell the incredible story of their escape.
- later recalled Devyatayev.
However, the feeling of freedom was short-lived. The pilot had to return to his painfully familiar Sachsenhausen, who after the victory worked as a filtration camp for the NKVD. He and the other participants in the escape had to undergo a check, which could have dragged on for a long time, if the famous aircraft designer Sergei Korolev had not intervened in the case by chance. In September 1945, he came to the island of Usedom to get acquainted with the secret developments of the Wehrmacht. There he was told that a pilot was sitting in a camp nearby, who had managed to hijack an aircraft from a strategic island for the Germans.
So there was a meeting between Korolev and Devyatayev. As it later became known, it was not just a fascist bomber that was hijacked, but a secret aircraft with an integrated radio control and target designation system from a secret long-range cruise missile "V-2" on board. Devyatayev obtained the exact coordinates of the location of the launch sites for strategic missiles for the Reich at the Peenemünde base, which allowed our military to destroy not only the V-2, but also the underground workshops for the production of the uranium bomb, and with them all Hitler's hopes for the continuation of the war.
Mikhail Petrovich Devyatayev, at the request of Korolev, received in 1957 the Star of the Hero of the Soviet Union. He lived to be 85 years old and was buried with honors in 2002 in Kazan. The feat he accomplished made the entire Third Reich shudder, and Hitler and Goering declared the pilot their personal enemy - after all, he so impudently interfered in their far-reaching plans!
Loseva Olesya