Antonin's executioner in a hare mask, historical facts. Tonka the Machine Gunner - the bloody executioner of the Great Patriotic War

The notorious Tonka the machine gunner. Her biography and her photos are of interest to many people. It’s too scary and incredible what she did. And Antonina’s fate is simply an action-packed thriller.

Childhood and the secret of the surname

Tonya was born in the twenty-first year in the village of Malaya Volkovka, in the Smolensk region. She grew up shy and timid. Because of these qualities, I was unable to give my last name in response to the teacher’s question when I arrived in first grade. The children shouted: “She’s Makarova, Makarova...”. That was the name of the girl's father. And her last name was Parfenova. But the teacher understood everything in her own way, and wrote down the girl as Makarova. For some reason, this last name ended up in Tony's documents.

War crime

After school, Makarova went to enroll in Moscow. But then the war just started, and the girl voluntarily went to the front. She took courses for machine gunners and nurses.

Soon she ended up in the Vyazemsky Cauldron. I wandered for a long time through the forests surrounded by the Nazis with one of my comrades. And then she was completely left alone.

Having wandered into the village of Lokot in the Bryansk region, where the Germans were already in control, Tonya stayed there. She managed to gain the trust of the occupiers, to whom she provided intimate services. One day, drunk to death, the Germans took the girl out into the street, put her behind a machine gun and ordered her to shoot at people. These were local residents: women, old people, teenagers, small children. This is how Antonina Makarova became the Thin Machine Gunner (the biography and photo of the female executioner surfaced only many years later).

The Nazis liked their idea. They began to call Antonina regularly. And she didn't refuse. Every day she came to shoot innocent people. She finished off the wounded with a pistol. She even received money for her “work.” Of the 1,500 sentenced, only a few children managed to survive. They miraculously escaped and escaped.

Antonina the werewolf

When the Bryansk region was liberated, Antonina did not flee with the Nazis. She managed to gain the trust of us again – this time with ours. She began working in a hospital, where she met her future husband, a Belarusian named Ginzburg. The young couple got married and left for their husband’s estate in the town of Lepel. This is how Antonina Ginzburg was “born”.

For thirty long years she managed to pass herself off as a WWII veteran. She gave birth to two daughters and worked diligently in a garment factory. Neither relatives nor friends could even imagine who was hiding behind the mask of a decent woman, a respected veteran.

Meanwhile, the KGB was investigating the terrible deeds of the Germans in the village of Lokot. No matter how hard Tonka the Machine Gunner tried to keep her biography secret, photos of the victims from the crime scene surfaced and became the property of the authorities. For a very long time, the employees could not get on the trail of the killer. There was confusion with last names. After all, Antonina Makarova from Malaya Volkovka did not exist in nature. There was Parfenova...

Only a happy accident helped to unravel the puzzle. The “werewolf” was declassified and arrested. Witnesses identified her. On November 20, 1978, the court sentenced A. Makarova to capital punishment. At dawn on August 11, 1979, she was shot.

Thus ended the journey of a woman who, to please the enemy, took the lives of one and a half thousand of her fellow countrymen. The blood of innocent victims on her hands did not stop Antonina from building her happiness. But its end was inglorious. And the name is now cursed by millions.

The woman, who served as an executioner for the Nazis to save her own life, successfully passed herself off as a war heroine for three decades.

Incident with a surname

Antonina Makarova was born in 1921 in the Smolensk region, in the village of Malaya Volkovka, into the large peasant family of Makar Parfenov. She studied at a rural school, and it was there that an episode occurred that influenced her future life. When Tonya came to first grade, because of shyness she could not say her last name - Parfenova. Classmates began shouting “Yes, she’s Makarova!”, meaning that Tony’s father’s name is Makar.

So, with the light hand of the teacher, at that time perhaps the only literate person in the village, Tonya Makarova appeared in the Parfyonov family.

The girl studied diligently, with diligence. She also had her own revolutionary heroine - Anka the machine gunner. This film image had a real prototype - a nurse from the Chapaev division, Maria Popova, who once in battle actually had to replace a killed machine gunner.

After graduating from school, Antonina went to study in Moscow, where she was caught by the beginning of the Great Patriotic War. The girl went to the front as a volunteer.

Camping wife of an encirclement

19-year-old Komsomol member Makarova suffered all the horrors of the infamous “Vyazma Cauldron.”

After the hardest battles, completely surrounded, of the entire unit, only soldier Nikolai Fedchuk found himself next to the young nurse Tonya. With him she wandered through the local forests, just trying to survive. They didn’t look for partisans, they didn’t try to get through to their own people - they fed on whatever they had, and sometimes stole. The soldier did not stand on ceremony with Tonya, making her his “camp wife.” Antonina did not resist - she just wanted to live.

In January 1942, they went to the village of Krasny Kolodets, and then Fedchuk admitted that he was married and his family lived nearby. He left Tonya alone.

Tonya was not expelled from the Red Well, but the local residents already had plenty of worries. But the strange girl did not try to go to the partisans, did not strive to make her way to ours, but strived to make love with one of the men remaining in the village. Having turned the locals against her, Tonya was forced to leave.

Salary killer

Tonya Makarova’s wanderings ended in the area of the village of Lokot in the Bryansk region. The notorious “Lokot Republic”, an administrative-territorial formation of Russian collaborators, operated here. In essence, these were the same German lackeys as in other places, only more clearly formalized.

A police patrol detained Tonya, but they did not suspect her of being a partisan or underground woman. She attracted the attention of the police, who took her in, gave her drink, food and rape. However, the latter is very relative - the girl, who only wanted to survive, agreed to everything.

Tonya did not play the role of a prostitute for the police for long - one day, drunk, she was taken out into the yard and put behind a Maxim machine gun. There were people standing in front of the machine gun - men, women, old people, children. She was ordered to shoot. For Tony, who completed not only nursing courses, but also machine gunners, this was not a big deal. True, the dead drunk woman didn’t really understand what she was doing. But, nevertheless, she coped with the task.

The next day, Makarova learned that she was now an official - an executioner with a salary of 30 German marks and with her own bed.

The Lokot Republic ruthlessly fought the enemies of the new order - partisans, underground fighters, communists, other unreliable elements, as well as members of their families. Those arrested were herded into a barn that served as a prison, and in the morning they were taken out to be shot.

The cell accommodated 27 people, and all of them had to be eliminated in order to make room for new ones.

Neither the Germans nor even the local policemen wanted to take on this work. And here Tonya, who appeared out of nowhere with her shooting abilities, came in very handy.

The girl did not go crazy, but on the contrary, felt that her dream had come true. And let Anka shoot her enemies, and she shoots women and children - the war will write off everything! But her life finally got better.

1500 lives lost

Antonina Makarova's daily routine was as follows: in the morning, shooting 27 people with a machine gun, finishing off the survivors with a pistol, cleaning weapons, in the evening schnapps and dancing in a German club, and at night making love with some cute German guy or, at worst, with a policeman.

As an incentive, she was allowed to take the belongings of the dead. So Tonya acquired a bunch of outfits, which, however, had to be repaired - traces of blood and bullet holes made it difficult to wear.

However, sometimes Tonya allowed a “marriage” - several children managed to survive because, due to their small stature, the bullets passed over their heads. The children were taken out along with the corpses by local residents who were burying the dead and handed over to the partisans. Rumors about a female executioner, “Tonka the machine gunner”, “Tonka the Muscovite” spread throughout the area. Local partisans even announced a hunt for the executioner, but were unable to reach her.

In total, about 1,500 people became victims of Antonina Makarova.

By the summer of 1943, Tony's life again took a sharp turn - the Red Army moved to the West, beginning the liberation of the Bryansk region. This did not bode well for the girl, but then she conveniently fell ill with syphilis, and the Germans sent her to the rear so that she would not re-infect the “valiant” sons of Greater Germany.

Honored veteran instead of a war criminal

In the German hospital, however, it also soon became uncomfortable - the Soviet troops were approaching so quickly that only the Germans had time to evacuate, and there was no longer any concern for the accomplices.

Realizing this, Tonya escaped from the hospital, again finding herself surrounded, but now Soviet. But her survival skills were honed - she managed to obtain documents proving that all this time Makarova was a nurse in a Soviet hospital.

Antonina successfully managed to enlist in a Soviet hospital, where at the beginning of 1945 a young soldier, a real war hero, fell in love with her.

The guy proposed to Tonya, she agreed, and, having gotten married, after the end of the war, the young couple left for the Belarusian city of Lepel, her husband’s homeland.

So the female executioner Antonina Makarova disappeared, and her place was taken by the honored veteran Antonina Ginzburg.

They searched for her for thirty years

Soviet investigators learned about the monstrous acts of “Tonka the Machine Gunner” immediately after the liberation of the Bryansk region. The remains of about one and a half thousand people were found in mass graves, but the identities of only two hundred could be established.

They interrogated witnesses, checked, clarified - but they could not get on the trail of the female punisher.

Meanwhile, Antonina Ginzburg led the ordinary life of a Soviet person - she lived, worked, raised two daughters, even met with schoolchildren, talking about her heroic military past. Of course, without mentioning the actions of “Tonka the Machine Gunner”.

The KGB spent more than three decades searching for her, but found her almost by accident. A certain citizen Parfyonov, going abroad, submitted forms with information about his relatives. There, among the solid Parfenovs, for some reason Antonina Makarova, after her husband Ginzburg, was listed as her sister.

Yes, how that teacher’s mistake helped Tonya, how many years thanks to it she remained out of reach of justice!

The KGB operatives worked like a jewel - it was impossible to accuse an innocent person of such atrocities. Antonina Ginzburg was checked from all sides, witnesses were secretly brought to Lepel, even a former policeman-lover. And only after they all confirmed that Antonina Ginzburg was “Tonka the Machine Gunner”, she was arrested.

She didn’t deny it, she talked about everything calmly, and said that nightmares didn’t torment her. She didn’t want to communicate with either her daughters or her husband. And the front-line husband ran through the authorities, threatened to complain to Brezhnev, even to the UN - demanded the release of his wife. Exactly until the investigators decided to tell him what his beloved Tonya was accused of.

After that, the dashing, dashing veteran turned gray and aged overnight. The family disowned Antonina Ginzburg and left Lepel. You wouldn’t wish what these people had to endure on your enemy.

Retribution

Antonina Makarova-Ginzburg was tried in Bryansk in the fall of 1978. This was the last major trial of traitors to the Motherland in the USSR and the only trial of a female punisher.

Antonina herself was convinced that, due to the passage of time, the punishment could not be too severe; she even believed that she would receive a suspended sentence. My only regret was that because of the shame I had to move again and change jobs. Even the investigators, knowing about Antonina Ginzburg’s exemplary post-war biography, believed that the court would show leniency. Moreover, 1979 was declared the Year of the Woman in the USSR.

However, on November 20, 1978, the court sentenced Antonina Makarova-Ginzburg to capital punishment - execution.

At the trial, her guilt in the murder of 168 of those whose identities could be established was documented. More than 1,300 more remained unknown victims of “Tonka the Machine Gunner.” There are crimes that cannot be forgiven.

At six in the morning on August 11, 1979, after all requests for clemency were rejected, the sentence against Antonina Makarova-Ginzburg was carried out.

Reinterpreting the events of the war years is not an easy task, requiring exceptional knowledge of history and an impartial look at the past. A year ago, the series “Executioner” was released, telling about the fate Antonina Makarova-Ginsburg by nickname Tonka the Machine Gunner. Having gone to the front, she initially fought for her Motherland, but then became a traitor, went over to the Nazi side and... shot more than 1,500 compatriots.

It was not for nothing that Antonina took the pseudonym “Machine Gunner”: her ideal for many years was Anka, the heroine of the film “Chapaev”, who in real life had a prototype - a young nurse who replaced a killed machine gunner in battle. Tonya dreamed of the same military exploits, and life, unfortunately, provided her with such an opportunity. As soon as war was declared, the girl went to the front of her own free will.

Antonina's military life began with a tragic battle; she ended up in the Vyazemsky cauldron, formed during the defense of Moscow in October 1941. The girl managed to survive the bloody massacre, and soldier Nikolai Fedchuk survived with her. The couple spent the next year constantly wandering around nearby villages. Not trying to get through to their own, they lived, hiding wherever they had to, until they reached the village of Krasny Kolodets. Fedchuk had an official family here, and he went to join his family, but Antonina now had to survive on her own.

From now on, the terrible pages of the biography of Antonina Makarova begin. Having reached the Bryansk region in the village of Lokot, she fell into the hands of German policemen. They, without ceremony, offered cooperation. It is difficult to judge how Antonina found the strength to agree to go into their service, but the reality is that one day she was placed at a machine gun and forced to shoot the first “traitors.” Those who fought on the side of the Red Army - partisans, underground fighters and their relatives - were considered traitors. The Nazis sentenced everyone to death indiscriminately; women and children often found themselves in front of the machine gun.

Antonina received an official salary for her work. It is difficult to describe the level of cynicism and cruelty with which she shot her compatriots every day (as a rule, 27 people had to be killed, the number of places there were in the preliminary detention barracks). After a machine-gun burst, she finished off everyone who survived, and then she could take the things or shoes she liked from the dead bodies. In total, she is responsible for more than 1,500 murders.

Despite all the murders committed, retribution did not immediately come to Antonina. At first, she managed to move to the Soviet rear using fake documents. Posing as a nurse, she was able to marry the young soldier she liked and even receive an award as a veteran, Antonina Ginzburg.

Rumors about Tonka the Machine Gunner circulated for a long time, especially after mass graves with huge burials were discovered in Bryansk. For a long time, the intelligence services could not figure out who was behind these crimes, but by a happy coincidence, her brother, whose last name was Parfenov (Antonina’s real last name), when submitting documents to travel abroad, indicated his sister’s name. Then the case was resumed, appropriate examinations were carried out, and Antonina Ginzburg’s guilt was established. In 1978, the court sentenced her to death for the atrocities committed, but Tonka the Machine Gunner could not fully understand this and filed an appeal. She justified herself by saying that she simply had no other choice but to kill in that situation. Despite appeals, the guilt was confirmed and the sentence was carried out.

We have collected. These pictures will tell the younger generation more about the real exploits of Soviet soldiers!

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.

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...

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 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..."

“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 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.

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 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 else would 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..."

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 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, 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?”

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 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!”

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. - 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..."

“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 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. “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. The young girl, 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..."

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. “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.”

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 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.”

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 - the work is familiar..."

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.

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.

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.

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 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 the time has come 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 began to feel 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 people until everyone fell dead..."

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...

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.

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, 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 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.

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 prisoners had a piece of plywood with the inscription “partisan” hung on their chests. Some 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..."

“If I like things from the condemned, then I take them off the dead, why should I 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’re 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?” .

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.

Before dawn, when the groans of the partisans sentenced to execution died down after the 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!”

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.

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 floated to the surface. 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..."

“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 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. “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.

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..."

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 was she, Tonka the Machine Gunner, we recognized her by a noticeable crease on her forehead - doubts disappeared."

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.

“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 the two daughters 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 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."

“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 - the work is familiar..."