In the fall of 1941, when the Primorsky army with great difficulty held back the pressure of German and Romanian troops rushing to Odessa, its commander, General Sofronov, together with a member of the Military Council, signed another award list with approximately the following content: “As a gunner for a heavy machine gun, Red Army soldier comrade Hitler destroyed the enemy with accurate fire for 8 days. When advancing to a height of 174 com. Hitler supported the advance of the rifle platoon with the fire of his machine gun. Once surrounded, comrade. Hitler, already wounded, showing exceptional composure, fortitude and courage, fired until he had used up all the ammunition. A brave fighter and an excellent machine gunner, comrade. Hitler deserves to be awarded the Medal for Courage.
Machine gunner scribbles
The events mentioned in the award list took place in the zone of the Tiraspol fortified area - one of the many links of a grandiose defensive system called the Stalin Line stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Artillery batteries and machine-gun points were housed in concrete casemates that stretched 150 km along the front and 6 km deep into the defense of the fortified area.
From here machine gunner Semyon Konstantinovich Hitler beat the enemy.
He was born in 1922 in the small town of Orynin, Kamenets-Podolsk (now Khmelnitsky) region. Since time immemorial, generations of Jews have replaced each other here - carriers of the odious surname Hitler that has become for some time now. In general, before the turbulent events of 1917 in the Podolsk and Volyn provinces of Russia, the surname Hitler was very common, meaning in Yiddish something like "hatter, hatter". Nowadays, the descendants of the Orynin Hitlers can hardly be found in their native places. Most of them moved to Israel, having previously changed their last name to a more euphonic one - Gitlev. Their fellow countrymen who survived the fascist invasion recalled that during the occupation, the Germans sometimes did not raise their hand to kill Jews bearing the name of the Fuhrer.
In November 1940, Semyon was drafted into the Red Army, graduated from a machine gun school and was sent to the Tiraspol fortified area as the gunner of the heavy machine gun of the 73rd separate machine gun battalion.
Semyon Hitler took part in the defense of Odessa, and after its fall as part of the Primorsky army he crossed over to the Crimea. He died on July 3, 1942 - on the last day of the defense of Sevastopol.
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He was not alone
However, the Red Army soldier Hitler in the ranks of the fighters against the German fascist invaders was far from the only bearer of a rather rare surname.
One of the key figures in Hitler's entourage was Martin Bormann, his deputy for the party and personal secretary. But Bormann was also on the other side of the front. During the war years, Major General Alexander Vladimirovich Borman became known as one of the creatively thinking Soviet aviation commanders. He commanded air divisions, then the air defense army. Under the leadership of Alexander Vladimirovich, such famous aces as Alexander Pokryshkin, brothers Boris and Dmitry Glinka, Grigory Rechkalov and many others fought. At the final stage of the war, General Bormann, as part of the 5th Air Army, directly participated in the Budapest, Vienna and Prague offensive operations, was awarded many of the highest military awards of the USSR.
Another, no less controversial figure was Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering, the holder of the title "successor to the Fuehrer", recognized as "Nazi No. 2". And in the ranks of the Red Army, Nikolai Goering, a sergeant of the reconnaissance company of the 38th Guards Rifle Division, fought. Desperate it was a guy. Once at the front in 1942, 18-year-old Nikolai soon became famous as a specialist in the capture of enemy languages. Dozens of times he had to go into the enemy's rear. For his deeds of the guard, Sergeant Nikolai Goering was awarded the Order of the Red Star and the Orders of Glory of two degrees - the only military distinction intended to award only privates and sergeants.
Another representative of the elite of the Third Reich, the vile ideologue of Nazism, the Reich Minister of the occupied eastern territories Alfred Rosenberg, with arms in hand, was opposed by his namesake Max Abramovich Rosenberg, an active participant in hostilities on the Volkhovsky, and then Stalingrad, Southern and other fronts of the Great Patriotic War, by the end of which Guards Lieutenant Colonel Rosenberg headed the artillery headquarters of the rifle corps as part of the 2nd Baltic Front. Max Abramovich is a holder of many military awards, including the Order of the Red Banner, the Order of the Patriotic War of I and II degrees.
From all over the Union
Ethnic Germans lived compactly not only on the territory of the autonomous republic of the Volga Germans (with the capital in the city of Engels), but also in many other regions of the Union. For example, in Batumi, where Alexander Borman comes from, according to the All-Russian census of 1897, at least one percent of the city's population was made up of Germans. And the future front-line intelligence agent Nikolai Goering went to the front from Astrakhan, where, according to the same census, more than 5,000 German citizens lived. In total, at the beginning of the Great Patriotic War, up to 1.5 million ethnic Germans were citizens of the USSR.
Already in our days, when access to the "People's feat" site opened, which combined the data of millions of Soviet soldiers who died in battles or awarded state awards, it turned out that soldiers, officers and even generals served in the ranks of the Red Army, whose names completely repeated the names of some the highest representatives of the party, military and state authorities of Nazi Germany. There were no less than 20 Gorings alone in the Red Army. Soviet carriers of these non-Soviet surnames did not refuse them, which did not prevent them from fulfilling their military duty on the fronts of the Great Patriotic War with dignity and honesty.
For the Soviet Motherland
As a rule, Soviet Hitlers, Bormans, Goeringes and similar carriers of surnames hated for us came from among the Jews or the so-called Russian Germans.
The latter are distant descendants of immigrants from Germany, who in the 18th-19th centuries, at the invitation of the Russian emperors Catherine the Great, and later Alexander I and Alexander II, emigrated to the Russian Empire, mastered its empty lands and firmly rooted on them. language, religion of ancestors and many elements of national culture. But with the beginning of World War II, the life of Russian Germans became seriously complicated: by the Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR dated August 28, 1941 "On the resettlement of the Volga Germans", the deportation of Germans from the areas of their compact residence to the territory of the European part of the USSR (not only the Volga region, but also the Transcaucasia and other regions of the country) to Siberia and Kazakhstan. The deportation of the civilian population was followed by the purge of the army ranks - the mass expulsion of German soldiers from the Red Army. However, a certain part of the German servicemen, true Soviet patriots, still managed by hook or by crook, often with the connivance of their direct commanders, to remain in the army battle formations.
As one of the ways to neutralize the harsh and senseless directives of Moscow, the change of German names and surnames to Russian, Ukrainian, or other of the typical peoples inhabiting the Soviet Union was used. The main thing is that it was necessary to exclude any traces of German origin from the questionnaire. This was the path that the commander of the machine-gun platoon, Vladimir Kirillovich Ventsov, had to go through, until 1941 known as Valdemar Karlovich Ventsel. On September 25, 1943, he died in the battles for the bridgehead during the crossing of the Dnieper. Vladimir-Valdemar received the title of Hero of the Soviet Union posthumously in 1944.
Magazine: All the riddles of the world №10, Konstantin Rishes