In 1941, partisans entered the fight against fascism. The State Defense Committee issued a resolution on the organization of armed struggle in the rear of the Nazi occupiers. It spoke of the need to “create unbearable conditions for the enemy and all his accomplices, pursue and destroy them at every step.”
The traditions of the partisan movement in Russia have existed since the Napoleonic War of 1812. But thanks to the decree of 1941, for the first time in history, partisans fought as part of the army, coordinating actions with the command of the Armed Forces.
During the Great Patriotic War, more than 6 thousand operated in the occupied territories partisan detachments and underground groups. More than a million people's avengers fought in them. The partisan underground has hundreds of feats to its name. Their troops blew up bridges and derailed trains. German soldiers called the partisans the “forest front” and often feared them more than the fighters from the main front.
Lively communication with the population made these detachments elusive, since local residents promptly informed about the enemy’s punitive actions. Popular support was provided to the partisan movement everywhere, and this was its strength and invincibility. For selfless and skillful actions, courage and heroism, more than 311 thousand partisans were awarded orders and medals, 248 of them became Heroes Soviet Union.
Few people know that the first partisan detachment during the Great Patriotic War was created in Pinsk by the evening of June 22, 1941. On June 28 he entered the battle. This day is considered the date of the first partisan shot in the Great Patriotic War. I had the opportunity to talk with a participant in that battle, later Major General of State Security Eduard Nordman. Here's what he said:
The creation of the first partisan detachment is associated with the name of the legendary partisan Vasily Zakharovich Korzh. In the twenties he was a partisan in Western Belarus, in the thirties - he headed the so-called partisan direction in the Slutsk district department of the NKVD. In addition to selecting and training partisan personnel, they were engaged in laying secret NZ bases in case of war. On the morning of June 22, 1941, Korzh turned to the first secretary of the regional committee, Avksentiy Minchenko, for permission to create a partisan detachment. He first answered in the spirit of pre-war propaganda: don’t panic, the Red Army will fight back on the Bug and we will fight on foreign territory. But by evening the estimates had changed dramatically. A small detachment was created from volunteers. The district military registration and enlistment office even found “extra” weapons. Nordman, according to his story, received a rifle made in 1896, 90 rounds of ammunition and a grenade.
“On June 28, the Germans occupied Minsk,” recalled Eduard Boleslavovich. “We found ourselves in the strategic rear. In the morning, Korzh alerted the detachment. We moved onto the Pinsk-Logishin highway. We set up an ambush. German light tanks appeared. The commander ordered them to be allowed to throw a grenade. Instructor City party committee Salokhin threw a bunch of grenades under the first tank. The partisans opened aimed fire at the viewing slots. The second tank turned back. The weapons were removed from the damaged tank, the crew was captured. During interrogation, the chief lieutenant could not believe that his car was hit by civilians. He said: “This is not according to the rules, I do not surrender to civilians. Take me to the military command."
In July-September 1941, the detachment could not fight with large military units. There were not enough weapons or ammunition. They acted from ambushes, attacking single cars and motorcycles. They destroyed communication lines and burned bridges. The blows were not strong, but important. Firstly, they caused panic in the enemy. Secondly, they lifted the spirits of those who remained in the occupied territories.
Goebbels's propaganda trumpeted daily: "The Red Army is defeated. Stalin fled the capital. The Greater Reich is invincible." The cowardly gave up, the vile and cowardly went into the service of the Nazis. Courageous, honest people, gritting their teeth and gathering their will into a fist, fought. The partisans not only fought with the enemies - they instilled hope in our victory.
Today, the bourgeois evil spirits are trying to portray the partisans as bandits who were feared by the civilian population. A participant in the partisan movement responds to such attacks as follows:
From the very beginning of the creation of our detachment, which later grew into a powerful unit, Komarov (partisan pseudonym Korzha) never tired of repeating: “Never offend a man. Ask for a piece of bread, but never take it by force. If you offend a man, the end of your partisan war ". In the summer of 1941, we even paid money for food. Or the receipts wrote, for example: “A pig weighing approximately 60 kilograms was seized from citizen N... for the needs of the Red Army. The cost is subject to reimbursement after the war. Komarov.” In 1945, peasants who presented such notes were given trophy cattle that had been driven from Germany.
Korzh was merciless to the looters. Actually, we almost didn’t have any of those. I remember only one case when in the winter of 1942 he shot a senior lieutenant in front of the formation because he had ruined the hives in a peasant’s apiary. Cruel? Yes. But this turned out to be enough so that no one else would even think of offending any villager.
Since January 1942, a partisan zone began to form at the junction of the Minsk, Pinsk and Polesie regions. Soon it grew to the size of a medium European state. The Nazis were never able to conquer this unique partisan republic. Partisan commandant's offices were formed in the zone, which ensured order in the villages. Without their permission, the partisans had no right to procure food, take horses, and so on. Collective farms worked under the protection of partisans, and children studied in schools. No anarchy.
Those scoundrels who these days are trying to label partisans as bandits should be reminded in whose footsteps they are following: on August 25, 1942, Hitler issued a directive prohibiting the use of the terms “partisans” and “partisan detachment.” Partisans were ordered to be called “bandits”, “bandit gangs”.
Walter Scott also wrote that trying to surround partisans is like carrying water in a sieve. Army officers will assess the situation on the map, and the local partisan is not looking for a road, but a path along which he can slip through unnoticed. That is why neither Napoleon nor Hitler with their powerful armies could cope with the partisans.
There are also examples that are closer to today. The United States was never able to cope with the Vietnamese guerrillas. They pushed them out of the country.
As for the Pinsk partisans, they showed maximum effectiveness during the war. By 1944, the Pinsk formation had eight brigades. They destroyed about 27 thousand Nazis, defeated more than 60 large enemy garrisons, derailed about 500 trains with manpower and military equipment, blew up 62 railway bridges and about 900 on highways. But the main achievement of the partisans is not even in inflicting losses on the enemy, but in diverting large forces of the regular army to themselves.
According to the German General Staff, as of October 1, 1943, 52 divisions were engaged in the fight against partisans. For comparison: after the opening of the second front, Hitler fielded up to 50 divisions against our allies. I would like to recall the assessment of the great Zhukov: “The command of the enemy troops actually had to create a second front in their rear to fight the partisans, which diverted large forces of troops. This seriously affected the general condition of the German front and, ultimately, the outcome of the war.”
The most famous case of a voluntary transfer to fight on the side of the USSR is the story of the German corporal Fritz Hans Werner Schmenkel.
Fritz was born on February 14, 1916 in the town of Warzovo near the city of Stettin, now Szczezi; his communist father was killed in 1923 in a skirmish with the Nazis. In November 1941, F. Shmenkel deserted from the ranks of the German army and in the area of the city of Bely, Kalinin (now Tver) region, intending to cross the front line in order to join the ranks of the Red Army, but ended up among the Soviet partisans. On February 17, 1942, he was accepted into the partisan detachment “Death to fascism,” and from that time until March 1943 he was a scout, machine gunner, participant and leader of many military operations in the Nelidovsky and Belsky districts of the Kalinsk (now Tver) region and in the Smolensk region. The partisans gave him the name “Ivan Ivanovich?”.
From the testimony of partisan Viktor Spirin: - At first they didn’t trust him and didn’t give him weapons. They even wanted to shoot me if the situation became difficult. Local residents, whom he helped with housework while he was wandering in the fall and winter of 1941, interceded. At the end of February we were attacked and fired upon by a German reconnaissance detachment. Shmenkel had only one binoculars, through which he observed the battle. Having noticed a German hiding behind a Christmas tree and conducting aimed fire at the house, he asked for a rifle. They allowed him to take them - they were lying in a heap in the entryway, but I didn’t give him mine. He killed the German with one shot. After that, we began to trust him (although from the testimony of another partisan we did not trust him for a long time - “They assigned him to patrol, and put their own man in the shelter”) we gave him the rifle of the dead man and a Parabellum pistol.
On May 6, 1942, on the road Dukhovshchina - the White detachment collided with a German tank column and was forced to retreat in battle. We were already leaving when Shmenkel ran up to the assistant detachment commander Vasiliev and said that the tanks had barrels of fuel and that we needed to shoot at them. After that, we opened fire with incendiary cartridges and burned five tanks.
Soon Fritz-Ivan became an indispensable and authoritative fighter in the detachment. The partisans fought mainly with captured weapons captured from the Germans. However, no one except Fritz-Ivan knew how to handle a machine gun, and he willingly helped the partisans master the technique. Even the detachment commander consulted with him when carrying out this or that operation.From the testimony of partisan Arkady Glazunov: “Our detachment was surrounded by the Germans, and we fought back for about two weeks. Then everyone dispersed into small groups and fought their way out of the encirclement. Shmenkel was with us and left the encirclement with one of our partisans. About a month later, our detachment gathered in the forest. Shmenkel also found us. He was severely frostbitten, but again fought against the Germans. All the partisans treated him as one of their own and respected him.
The German command found out which German soldier under the pseudonym "Ivan Ivanovich" was fighting on the side of the Soviet partisans, an announcement was distributed throughout the villages and among German soldiers“Whoever catches Shmenkel will receive a reward: for a Russian 8 hectares of land, a house, a cow, for a German soldier - 25 thousand marks and 2 months of vacation.”At the beginning of 1944, Shmenkel was captured by the Nazis and, by order of a military court, was shot in Minsk on February 22 of the same year. By decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR of October 6, 1964, for active participation in the partisan movement, exemplary performance combat missions of the command during the Great Patriotic War and the heroism and courage displayed during this time, German citizen Shmenkel Fritz Paul was posthumously awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union.
There is information about another German soldier who fought as part of the partisan raid formation "13" under the command of Sergei Grishin, operating in the territory of 19 districts of the Smolensk, Vitebsk and Mogilev regions. In March and April 1943 the south - west of Smolensk parts of the German army carried out a major operation against Grishin's detachment. The following are excerpts from the materials of two interrogations by the Germans of a girl and a defector from this partisan detachment:
Those who joined the partisans: one gypsy; one German soldier who joined the partisans after being wounded; about 200 Ukrainian deserters in German uniform, including a major whose name I don’t know, but he works at headquarters. A German soldier fights with the partisans against the Germans; speaks Russian poorly.
There is a German soldier in the group; he deserted and joined us near the village of Kolyshki. We call him Fedya, he German name I don't know. A squad of partisans ambushed a group of 10 Russian prisoners of war and two German soldiers; one soldier was killed. Ten prisoners of war are now fighting on our side. The German soldier was shot with a machine gun by Fedya, who made a request for this. He is very active and has been called a “hero”. Verbal portrait of Fedya: 19 years old, average height, thin, dark brown hair; dressed: German uniform without insignia, white fur hat with a red star?
There were 30 people in our cavalry platoon, including one German soldier named Fedya. His real name is Friedrich Rosenberg or Rosenholz. He lived near Hamburg. As far as I know, he deserted. He is respected, but the group does not trust him and constantly monitors him.
It is quite possible that we are talking about the same Fritz Schmenkel, the area of operations of the detachments approximately coincides, although in the composition of the regiment "13" detachment? Death to fascism? did not have. The name Fedya looks like Fritz, on the other hand, Fedya’s age is indicated as 19 years old, and Fritz at that time was already 27 years old, plus differences in place of birth.
The book “Notes of a Military Translator” by Vernik S.M. again tells about Belarus in 1943, where in the town of Ostryna he met an Austrian from Vienna named Kurt, who fought on the side of the partisans.
...Kurt comes from a suburb of Vienna. His father? worker. Kurt remembers 1934 well, the revolutionary battles with the Austrian fascists on the working-class outskirts of Vienna. Although he was not yet ten years old, he and his comrades brought cartridges to the workers. ...when I was drafted into the army and was supposed to be sent to the Eastern Front, during our last conversation my father said: “Kurt, you shouldn’t fight for the Nazis?”
In Belarus, the train in which Kurt and the soldiers of his regiment were traveling to the Eastern Front was raided soviet planes during which Kurt deserted. A couple of days later he was detained by partisans, after which he joined the partisan detachment and fought against German troops.THE BROTHERHOOD OF WAR
In June 1943, a soldier from a German military unit, Johann Gansovich Loida, came from Vitebsk to the partisans of the 1st Belarusian Brigade. “I came to you,” he said, “as a Czech who understands that there is no need to fight for Nazi Germany. At the same time, I would like to warn you that the Germans are deciphering your telegrams, which is sometimes associated with large losses in people and equipment. If you think that I have brought benefit to your Motherland in the fight against the Nazis, then I don’t need anything else.” Johann Gansovich, or, as he called himself, Ivan Ivanovich, conveyed to the brigade command information that was valuable not only for the partisans, but also for the Soviet Armed Forces as a whole. In particular, he reported data on the nature, number and deployment of German military units in Vitebsk, on the system and results of German radio intelligence.
Johann Loida served in a German unit that was responsible for deciphering radiograms from the Soviet Army and partisan brigades. To carry out radio reconnaissance, it had 60-70 vehicles with the identification marks “Strela”, and from May 1943 – “Elephant Head with two ears”, as a symbol of eavesdropping. Dozens of the most advanced radio receivers of that time and seven direction-finding installations located in Vitebsk, Surazh and other points in the region worked around the clock. With their help, the Nazi command managed to detect the radio stations of the 3rd and 4th Shock armies, the radios of more than ten partisan brigades and follow them constant surveillance, decipher the most important radiograms. The Czech patriot told which Soviet cipher systems are most easily decipherable and what needs to be done to reduce the effectiveness of German radio espionage.
Johann Hansovich Loida told about himself that he was born into the family of a worker who later became a communist. I studied at the institute. I was going to become a civilian specialist, to devote myself to a peaceful profession. He didn't want to fight. But despite his desire, he was drafted into the Nazi army and in 1942 sent to the Soviet-German front. In 1943, he arrived in Vitebsk in the radio intelligence unit.
From the first days of his service in the fascist army, I. G. Loyda was looking for an opportune moment to escape from the Nazi encirclement. And in Vitebsk he met Komsomol members Galina Lyatokho and her friend Valentina Kryzhevich, N.V. Kochetov and his wife Zinaida Filatovna, thus ending up in one of the underground organizations operating in the suburbs of Vitebsk - in the village of Razu Vaika. After several meetings and frank conversations, Johann Loyda began to ask Galya Latokho to help him go over to the partisans, since he did not want to fight against his own. Every day his requests became more and more persistent. Johann assured that he could not wait any longer, that we were talking about very important matters concerning the Soviet Army, that the Germans knew where the partisans were and what they were transmitting to Mainland what their strengths and needs are.
And then one day Latokho invited him to train as a partisan, although doubt still lurked somewhere in his soul. What if there is a provocation? Through her friend Jan Vilkovich and Nina, who lived on Peskovatik, Galya informed the 1st Belarusian Partisan Brigade that a German soldier of Czech nationality wanted to join them. In order to avoid any misunderstandings, it was decided to give him a route through the villages, and if he is an honest person and does not pull his tail, he will be met by the partisans.
In order to confuse the trail and hide the real reason for Loyda’s disappearance from the Nazis, the following plan was developed: to leave Loyda’s German uniform, some of his letters and photographs on the banks of the Western Dvina, and thus lead the Nazis to believe that he was swimming and drowned. And so it was done. The Germans searched for the missing person for several days, interviewed the population, including Latokho, and found scraps of letters, a torn photograph, and socks on the shore (the clothes had disappeared somewhere during this time). At this point, the search for Loyda stopped. Operation “Ivan Ivanovich” was carried out successfully.
A moving document has survived - a greeting card from Johann Loyda addressed to Galina Latocho in 1943 on the occasion of her birthday. He wrote: “My dear Galya! On your birthday I wish you full of heart all the best, a lot of happiness, health. I also wish to shake your hand next year and see a clear future before us. Yours, Ivan Ivanovich."
But 1944, as I. G. Loyd wished, was not a happy year for Galya Latokho and her underground friends. Following the denunciation of the traitor Konstantin Ananyev, she, her three sisters and Jan Vilkovich were captured by the Nazis in September 1943, subjected to severe torture, and then sent to the Auschwitz death camp. Her sister Zinaida died there. Galya participated in the camp patriotic underground. The Soviet Army liberated her from the camp.
For the heroism and courage shown in the fight against the Nazi invaders, Galina Filatovna Lyatokho (now Dvornikova) was awarded a high government award. She lives and works in the city of Vilnius.
The Nazis were afraid of the ideological influence that the Soviet people could have on the “knights of the march to the East.” It is no coincidence that in a secret instruction issued back on June 1, 1941 in Berlin under the title “Twelve Commandments for the Behavior of Germans in the East and Their Treatment of Russians,” the future occupiers were instructed: “Beware of the Russian intelligentsia, both emigrant and new, Soviet. This intelligentsia... has a special charm and art of influencing the character of a German. The Russian man has this property and even in to a greater extent Russian woman... Do not become infected with the communist spirit.”
But no, even the most strict instructions and regulations could prevent the communication of German soldiers and officers with the civilian population, with the Soviet people. In the process of this communication and under the influence of political propaganda of partisans and underground fighters, more and more military personnel appeared in the Wehrmacht army who were hostile to the Hitler regime and the war.
...The threat of children dying from starvation forced the wife of a Soviet officer, Anna Alekseevna Setkina, to go to work in a subsidiary farm of a German aviation unit. Here she had the opportunity to stealthily sometimes grab some vegetables and feed her three young children.
The German driver Erich Palenga usually came to the farm to buy food. Anna Alekseevna looked at him for a long time and carefully, and more and more often entered into conversations. Gradually they became so acquainted that they could speak completely frankly. Erich often jokingly called Setkina a partisan. At first she turned pale with fear and was silent. One day, when no one was around. Palenga said:
- Partisan is good!
- Why are you here if “partisanship is good”? - Anna Alekseevna asked him.
- If only I knew where they are! - There was sincere regret in Erich’s voice.
“Okay, I’ll try to find out,” Setkina promised, although she personally did not yet have connections with the partisans. She knew that Nadya Lebedeva (now Zhbankova) visited the partisans, and decided to consult with her on what to say to the German soldier.
A few days later, having received a positive response from Nadya, Anna Alekseevna told Erich that she had met a man who could recruit him into the partisans. Palenga was very happy and offered to escape in a truck. And so they did. On October 19, 1943, taking with him Anna Alekseevna Setkina with her children and patriots Ivan Zhbankov and Kazimir Poplavsky, Erich Palenga left Vitebsk along the old Sennen road. Outside the city they were met by a partisan guide. On the same day they arrived at the Alexey partisan brigade and were assigned to the Progress detachment.
In connection with the escape of K. Poplavsky and I. Zhbankov, the secret field police group (GFP-703) reported to the command of the 3rd Tank Army: “These two young men worked at the airfield, and they were supposed to be taken to work in Germany. They escaped from the carriages... 19.10. they escaped from Vitebsk together with the deserter Corporal Erich Palenga... They drove off in a truck. Palenga took with him Anna Setkina, six cans of gasoline, two rifles, three boxes of ammunition and took it all to the partisans.”
Thirty-seven-year-old German anti-fascist Erich Frantsevich Palenga bravely fought against the Nazis for more than six months. When in April 1944, fascist punitive forces surrounded the partisans of the Polotsk-Lepel zone in a tight ring, Erich Palenga was among those who fought to the death, who went into hand-to-hand combat with the enemy, who showed great courage in a fierce battle with the Nazi punitive forces at Lake Palik.
Many partisans of the Bogushevskaya brigade and the Alexey brigade well remember the teacher of the Skridlevskaya junior high school, the brave Komsomol intelligence officer Valentina Demyanovna Shelukho. When Nazi troops approached the area, Valentina turned to the district Komsomol committee with a request to leave her to work behind enemy lines. Having received the task, detailed instructions and appearances, the young teacher remained in the Bogushevsky party-Komsomol underground. She lived in her native village of Zastodolye. Valentina and her friends Olga Voitikhova, Olga Sidorenko, Alexander Molchanov, Maria Solovyova and Maria Kavalkina collected weapons and handed them over to the partisans and provided them with food army groups, who remained in the surrounding forests after the encirclement, distributed Sovinformburo reports and leaflets among the population.
On instructions from the Bogushevsky underground district party committee in the fall of 1941, Valentina Shelukho often went to occupied Vitebsk to establish connections with the city underground and collect intelligence data. The communist V.A. Pyatnitsky and his daughter Alla helped her in this. Later, the entire Pyatnitsky family was shot by the Nazis.
In July 1942, fulfilling the assignment of the underground district party committee and the Alexey partisan brigade, Valentina came to Vitebsk and stayed with a colleague from her pre-war work, Lydia Nikolaevna Ovsyankina (now Khodorenko). She lived in the village of Tarokombinat, next to a German military camp. It was difficult to find the best place for reconnaissance. Everything is in plain sight here, and most importantly, there are a lot of talkative Nazi soldiers. They were different: both notorious fascists and those who didn’t mind chatting about the situation at the front, about latest news. In conversations, the girls tried to find out the soldiers’ opinions about the military’s prospects and thus determined their morale and political mood.
Local teachers Maria Timofeevna Tsvetkova (now Makhonina), Klavdia Ivanovna Potapenko, Alexandra Nikolaevna Ovsyankina and a student of Vitebsk secondary school No. 17, Zina Galynya, who saved the banner of her school and handed it over to the partisan detachment, often came to Lidia Nikolaevna. This is how an underground group arose; It was headed by Valentina Shelukho.
To contact the partisans and to transfer them necessary information Valentina, Lydia Ovsyankina, Maria Tsvetkova went. Their tireless assistants were young teachers from the villages of Zastodolye and Obukhovo - Olga Sidorenko and Valentina Abozovskaya. Through them, the intelligence officers received assignments, leaflets, Sovinformburo reports, food from the partisans, and they were sent intelligence data and medicines.
In the evenings, the girls often got together at Lydia or Maria’s apartment to exchange impressions accumulated during the day, summarize the information collected, outline a plan for the next day, and agree on who would contact the brigade. The village of Tarokombinat stood apart beyond the Dvina. The people here lived friendly and selfless. The tarokombinat was a convenient place for army and partisan scouts to penetrate into the city and exit the city. Dozens of Soviet prisoners of war received help and shelter here before joining the partisans.
Parties were sometimes held in the village. But the youth did not gather to have fun. It was the only way bypass the slingshots of the occupation regime, gather together openly, get to know each other better, hear something new, meet the right person.
German soldiers often came to the parties. Many of them liked Russian and Belarusian folk songs and dances. Sometimes a German soldier will ask:
- Rus, play “Katyusha”! - And a familiar tune suddenly took off over the wary village. Guys and girls happily picked up their favorite song. At such moments, they imagined other “Katyushas”, the first salvos of which thundered near Orsha in the summer of 1941, mentally they were next to their fathers and brothers who fought against the fascist hordes on the fronts.
Valya, Lida and Maria tried not to miss the parties. Here you could hear what people were talking about, see who behaved how. It was possible to enter into a conversation with a soldier or officer of Hitler’s army, find out where and when he arrived, when and why he was going to leave.
One Sunday evening in August 1943, the girls stopped by another party. They took their place at the threshold, as usual, dodging invitations to dance under various pretexts. The evening was in full swing when two men in the uniform of German soldiers came in. They weren’t noticed here before, which means they’re newbies. They behaved quite modestly, and this immediately caught my eye. They stood behind the girls and looked at the dancers through the open door, exchanging short remarks. Their speech did not sound like German. The girls looked at each other. One of them addressed Maria in broken Russian:
- Why don't girls dance?
- Why are you? - Maria answered the question with a question.
- Not in the mood. Now is not the time to dance.
“In that case, it’s time to go home,” said Valya, feeling that there were good and necessary people in front of them.
We went out onto the street. Finding themselves alone with the girls, one of the fellow travelers, as if continuing the conversation that had begun in the house, reproached them:
- It’s not good, girls, your brothers are dying at the front, and you’re dancing here.
- What should we do? - Valya asked naively.
- We must fight!
- Where? With whom? - the girls asked.
- In a partisan detachment.
- In a partisan detachment? - Valya was surprised. -Aren't you going to fight in a partisan detachment?
- Yes, I'm going!
There was an awkward silence. "Who are they? - thought Valya. -Who is hiding under the uniform of a fascist soldier? Isn’t this a provocation?” The brigade warned that provocateurs were operating in the city, many underground fighters had failed, having gone over in her memory everything she had just heard, she discarded this thought and, waking up from a momentary stupor, calmly, as if there had been no conversation, said:
- Well, we have to go. Order is order - curfew is coming soon. - And, without stopping, the girls turned to Ovsyankina’s apartment.
The next day Valya, Lida and Maria decided not to go out anywhere and sit at home. “This is the best,” they thought. But the thought of yesterday’s meeting haunted me. With such difficulty and risk, you have to win back every person in the enemy camp, from tens and hundreds, select the one who is needed, who will not let you down, who will help in carrying out the important task of the brigade. And here they seem to be asking for it.
Something captivating and sincere was felt in these soldiers. They did not have the self-confidence and arrogant obsession characteristic of most of Hitler's soldiers and officers. Even the suddenly interrupted conversation and their hasty departure did not irritate them. Silently, frozen in place, the soldiers followed them with their gaze all the way to the apartment.
“Tomorrow I’ll go to the brigade and tell you about this meeting,” Valya told her friends. - I’ll give you some advice on what to do next. This is how either friends or provocateurs can speak directly. Try to figure it out.
So they decided. The day was drawing to a close. Together we put together a bundle of simple belongings to “exchange” in the village for food. Although Valya had a real pass, caution is always necessary. We ate jacket potatoes with salt, washed them down with cold water and began to get ready for bed.
There was a knock on the door. Lida looked out the window and, rushing to cover the unmade bed, whispered:
- Girls, yesterday's acquaintances!
“Well, let’s continue the conversation,” Valya perked up and went to open the door.
- You are welcome, gentlemen, partisans! - bowing deeply and giving way, she greeted the uninvited guests.
“Why not,” a slender, dark-haired soldier of average height answered her in tone.
- No, are you serious? That's great! Invincible German soldiers, and suddenly they wanted to join the partisans! Officers, or maybe Hitler himself offended? - Valya choked with laughter.
“Don’t laugh, girls,” he said completely seriously. - Let's get to know each other better. I am Vilim, and this is my friend Vaclav.
“Valya, Lida and Maria are teachers without students,” Shelukho introduced everyone at once. - How can we serve?
“We are not fascists or even Russians,” Vilim said, sitting down at the table. - We are Czechs, Czech Komsomol members. We don’t wear these uniforms of our own free will. They burn the body. We hate fascists. They enslaved the peoples of Europe, including our homeland - beautiful Czechoslovakia. Now the world's first socialist country is in danger. We believe that Russia will win, but we cannot stand aside. Help us contact the partisans. It's easier for you to do this. We see that you are real Soviet girls.
Vilim and Vaclav told about themselves, how they ended up in the Wehrmacht troops, about their long-conceived escape plan. But how and where? They don't know anyone here.
Parting. Valya said:
- I don’t know what to advise you. We are urban people, but the partisans, they say, are in the forests. I'll go to the village tomorrow to get food and try to ask around. Come in.
This is how Valentina Shelukho, Lydia Ovsyankina, Maria Tsvetkova, and then Klavdiya Potapenko met Czech patriots Vilim Kreuziger and Vaclav Schmock, who worked in German field aircraft repair shops at the Vitebsk airfield, and through them, the German anti-fascist Fritz Schneider.
Vilim Hubertovich Kreusiger was a member of the Communist Youth League of Czechoslovakia from 1930. He was repeatedly arrested and imprisoned for political activity, was deprived of the right to reside in his hometown of Yuzofov and its environs. During fascist occupation country actively participated in the labor movement. At the end of 1942, he was mobilized into the Wehrmacht and, as part of a light field aviation workshop, was sent to Soviet-German front as an aircraft mechanic. In the spring of 1943, he arrived at the Vitebsk airfield. From the very first day of his service in the army, Vilim did everything to ensure that the German combat aircraft that arrived at the workshop remained there as long as possible or were sent for overhaul to a military plant in Germany.
At the Vitebsk airfield, he involved his compatriot Vaclav Schmock and the German anti-fascist Fritz Schneider, who worked as an electrical equipment mechanic, in subversive work. This is how a group of saboteurs arose, operating at the airfield for four to five months in 1943. Being highly qualified specialists, Vilim, Vaclav and Fritz created hidden defects in gas tanks, instruments, power supply and alarm systems of aircraft, weakened fastening points, and destroyed hydraulic oil, of which the Germans experienced an acute shortage.
Having established contact with the group of V.D. Shelukho, the anti-fascists became even more active. They distributed leaflets received from underground women, carried out propaganda work among German soldiers, obtained medicine for the partisan hospital, accompanied girls around the city to collect intelligence data, transmitted detailed information about the airfield, gave signals to Soviet aircraft, and blew up ammunition and food warehouses.
Faced with facts of sabotage at the airfield, the Nazis cast suspicion on everyone involved in the repair of aircraft. To prevent failure, Vilim Kreusiger and Vaclav Šmok were ordered to go into the forest. On October 10, 1943, accompanied by Valentina Shelukho and Lydia Ovsyankina, they arrived at the Alexei partisan brigade. The partisans warmly greeted their Czechoslovak brothers.
Vilim Kreusiger led an international group in the brigade, consisting of Czechs, Slovaks, Yugoslavs and Germans. They bravely fought against the fascist invaders and took part in many military operations, including battles with punitive forces at Lake Nalik. Vaclav Szmok was part of a demolition group that derailed two trains with enemy manpower and equipment: on October 16, 1943 in the area of Sosnovka station and on October 18 in the area of Zamostochye station. Together with the partisans, he stormed many enemy garrisons, undermined the rails eight times railways. Only in April 1944 did he destroy from his sniper rifle 20 Nazis. Was wounded twice. Vilim Kreuziger's combat record includes 7 blown up vehicles and 2 armored vehicles. 12 destroyed bridges and up to 10 kilometers of enemy telephone lines. Here is one example of the bravery and courage of Vilim Krausiger.
For nine days already, the Alexei brigade had been repelling the frenzied onslaught of fascist punitive forces in the Ushachi region. The Progress detachment, in which Kreuziger was located, held the defense on the Logi-Bushenka road. On April 25, 1944, two companies of the detachment were sent to bypass the Nazis, who were threatening to break through the defenses between neighboring partisan brigades. The remaining two companies were suddenly attacked by an enemy infantry battalion. A fierce fight ensued. It seemed that the Nazis were about to crush the front lines of the partisans. At this critical moment, the slender, thin figure of Valim Kreusiger appeared on the parapet of the trench. Despising death, he raised the machine gun above his head and shouted: “Forward, comrades, for the Motherland!” Thunderous "Hurray!" shook the battlefield, and the partisans all rushed forward as one. The enemy could not stand the training and fled. The partisans killed 45 Nazis, including the battalion commander.
After uniting with units of the Soviet Army in July 1944, Czechoslovak patriots took part in the liberation of their homeland as part of General Svoboda's corps and fought at Dukla, Ratibor, Opava, and Moravska-Ostrava.
...Seeing Kreuziger and Schmok into the forest, Shelukho and Oveyankina returned to Vitebsk to send a group of German anti-fascists to the partisans. But it was already too late. The unit in which they served was unexpectedly sent to the front.
One day, Valentina Demyanovna Shelukho received the task of obtaining a plan of Vitebsk with enemy military targets marked on it. The task is not easy. To carry it out, it was necessary to penetrate, as they say, into the very lair of the invaders in the city. The Partisan intelligence officer again decided to resort to the help of anti-fascists.
In October 1942, Valentina met an employee of the Vitebsk field commandant’s office. He told her only his name - Erich. As it later turned out, Erich was a German communist, a journalist by profession, who hated fascism, but acted extremely carefully. Before he trusted Valentina, he checked her for a long time. When he was convinced that she really hated fascism and was actively fighting it, he began to help our intelligence officer. Erich gave her a special pass from the field commandant’s office, and repeatedly provided pass forms with signatures and seals for partisan liaisons.
From the Alexey brigade, Valentina brought Sovinformburo reports, newspapers, and leaflets to the city. Erich scattered and pasted them in the most dangerous places: in the commandant's office, on the doors of the headquarters of German military units, on orders and announcements of the Nazis, and put them in the official folders of German officers. He twice warned the partisans about the upcoming punitive expeditions against them. He signed his reports: “Mysterious friend.” As a representative of the field commandant's office, it was not difficult for Erich to carry out reconnaissance. He entered any military unit, presented his ID, received the necessary data and then passed it on to Sheluho. The “mysterious friend” helped our intelligence officer obtain a plan for Vitebsk and target enemy military targets there. On this occasion, in the diary of the partisan brigade “Alexei” there is the following entry: “Underground member Shelukho Valentina obtained a plan of the city of Vitebsk from the Vitebsk field commandant’s office.” Behind these meager words lies hard work that required the greatest concentration and risk, and unshakable faith in the victory of our just cause.
Unfortunately, we know very little about the “Mysterious Friend”, only his name. At one time, Erich responded to Valentina Demyanovna’s proposal to join the partisan detachment:
- The fight against fascism can be waged everywhere. The army is a more advantageous position for me. Being here, I will be of more use to you than in the partisan detachment.
This is where they parted in the fall of 1943, when Valentina received orders to leave the city.
After the war, V.D. Shelukho and her battle friends working in the field again public education. They have something to remember, something to tell our younger generation about.
In August 1966, the XVIII World Congress of the International Organization of Teachers took place in Prague. artistic disciplines. Among the Congress delegates was V.D. Shelukho. But the most joyful event for her happened after the congress. On August 14, 1966, after a twenty-year separation, Valentina Demyanovna met Vilim Kreuziger in the city of Karvina and met his family: his wife Maria, an honored school teacher in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, daughter Eva and son Petya. The meeting resulted in a real celebration of fraternal friendship. Vilim’s work comrades came to greet V. G. Kreuziger and V. D. Shelukho. Friends recalled combat episodes from the underground and partisan struggle in the Vitebsk region during the Great Patriotic War. To the accompaniment of Eva, they performed their favorite partisan songs. In the Kreusiger family, everyone loves and knows Russian well, often speaks it, and reads the works of Soviet writers.
The friendship of the Czechoslovak communist Vilim Hubertovich Kreusiger with the Vitebsk underground continues and grows stronger. In one of his letters to Vladimir Gavrilenko, he wrote: “For 20 years, I have remembered our partisan family with a feeling of love and pride. I love the Soviet people who made great sacrifices in the struggle for the freedom of the peoples of the world. I raise my children with great love for the Soviet Union and the Soviet people and remind them every day that without the help of the Soviet Union we would not be free.”Before the war, Masha Vasilyeva studied at Rylsk school No. 1 named after G.I. Shelikhova, graduated from eighth grade. Musya, as her friends and mother Elizaveta Nikolaevna called her, did not stand out among her peers in any way, except for her seriousness, prudence, and erudition. She studied well, she was especially good at German and in this subject she had only A's. Musya believed that it was impossible to know the language of Heine and Marx poorly.
She continued her studies at high school the village of Zvannoye, Glushkovsky district - her father Mikhail Georgievich was from there, he separated from Elizaveta Nikolaevna and worked in the forestry department. There, at the Zvannov school, Masha joined the Komsomol and, just before the Great Patriotic War, received a matriculation certificate.
In October 1941, the Nazis occupied the Rylsky and Glushkovsky districts. The garrison needed translators to work in the commandant's offices, and they were located not only in the city, but also in large villages. By order of the head of the commandant's office of Rylsk, courses for translators from among young girls were organized personally supervised by him. 16-year-old Masha Vasilyeva also attended these short-term courses. By this time, the headquarters of the partisan detachment named after Shchors under the command of Afanasy Yakovlevich Sinegubov, based in the Glushkovsky district, had established contact with the Komsomol member. It is not known exactly what documents Masha presented to the Germans, but Herr Commandant willingly hired a smart girl, a blond beauty with braids neatly laid around her head, dressed in a city style and wearing fashionable hats. The young age of Fraulein Masha did not arouse suspicion among the Germans that she was connected with the underground. In addition to oral translation, her duties included retyping orders and reports on a typewriter, from which the intelligence officer drew important information by copying them.
At the commandant’s office she met Lieutenant Otto Adam, the head of the armory, who was invested with special confidence by the commandant.
The quartermaster showed the girl signs of attention, sometimes walking her home in the late evenings. In conversations, Otto’s inner world was gradually revealed. A man of a peaceful profession - a furrier - hated war, but in 1939, as a result of general mobilization, he was put “under arms” against his will and sent to the front - first to Poland, and after the German attack on the USSR, he ended up in the Kursk region and served in the Rylsk garrison . Otto told Maria with pain in his voice that in Poland he witnessed how prisoners of war and the civilian population were barbarously treated in concentration camps, how people were exterminated in ovens different nationalities. And he shuddered at the cruelty of the “new order” on Russian soil, in which mass executions of people suspected of connections with partisans took place, as well as rural residents who dared not to hand over food to the German army. Many became victims of punitive repression.
Maria believed in the sincerity of the chief lieutenant’s confession and began to trust him, and after he noticed contacts from the underground group in her apartment and did not report this to his superiors, the German quartermaster endeared himself to Masha even more. At the commandant’s office, he conducted important conversations on the phone louder than usual, so that the translator in the next office could hear them. Or, seemingly absent-mindedly, he left secret documents on her table for reprinting. The Komsomol member hid this information in a “closed Mailbox“, from there they ended up at a safe house, then to a partisan detachment and to the mainland. In this way, Masha could convey to our people about the punitive operations being prepared; lists of people subject to deportation to Germany for forced labor, the names of those policemen and elders from among the Russians who especially committed atrocities, trying to curry favor with the new authorities.
Masha and Otto communicated more and more often, trusting each other. From the looks they exchanged, it was clear that their feelings were no longer constrained by official duties, but existed on their own. Could not be reflected in any documents, in any chronicle long haul their relationships. It is possible that it was like this: young people were walking along the streets of spring Rylsk. We descended from Mount Ivan Rylsky and approached the bank of the Seim, which was full of water from a strong flood. The ancient city was shrouded in a white haze of flowering gardens. And then the girl’s heart woke up. And Otto has been burning for a long time tender feelings to the Russian girl and tried to finally dispel her doubts about his attitude towards military service in the ranks of the Wehrmacht. With a warmer gaze, his eyes wide open, he admitted: “I don’t want to kill anymore, I don’t want to die. That’s why I rush to your house every evening. I’m afraid that without your faith in the justice of the fight against fascism, I will lose what appeared in me not without your participation... I will lose my conscience.”
From that moment on, Masha began to perceive the German Otto not as an enemy, but as an associate and close friend. He responded with a willingness to help the underground woman. As the head of the armory, Otto secretly gave the girl bombs and mine fuses, and helped remove weapons from the commandant’s office.
The Nazis with the swastika, firmly entrenched in Rylsk, felt like masters of life and, despite the danger from the partisans, allowed themselves all sorts of liberties. Restaurants, casinos and other entertainment establishments operated in the city. The young officer invited Fraulein Masha to the casino, ostensibly to relax and listen to a concert. By the way, it was useful to start conversations at the tables, including with Germans who held responsible positions. Intoxicated by schnapps, they chatted too much, and sometimes important information slipped through in these cheeky statements.
Apart from the underground workers, only her mother Elizaveta Nikolaevna knew about Musya’s dangerous work associated with the partisans. And people she knew and even strangers called the girl “German whore”, “shepherd” right to her face, with the addition of strong Russian obscenities. Gritting her teeth, Maria was forced to swallow undeserved insults, and mentally her soul screamed: “Believe me, people!”
Maria Vasilyeva resembles the image of another Russian underground worker, Nila Snizhko, who worked in conditions occupation regime translator at the commandant's office. The heroine of Afanasy Salynsky’s drama “The Fate of the Drummer,” just like the real girl Masha, yesterday’s schoolgirl, suffered so much torment that it’s hard to imagine, and she bravely endured it.
At the beginning of 1943, the commandant's office began to notice that information was leaking. Suspicion fell on the translator Vasilyeva. At the same time, an audit was organized at the weapons warehouse and a shortage of weapons was discovered. When the threat of exposing the underground activities of young people, in other words, the threat of a fascist noose, loomed over them, Masha and Otto secretly fled from Rylsk. On February 10, 1943, there was no trace of them from the commandant’s office. They crossed to the Glushkovsky district to join Sinegubov’s detachment.
Save two cartridges for yourself
The Shchors detachment operated from October 1941 and was part of the 2nd Kursk Partisan Brigade. In the zone of his influence were the Glushkovsky, Rylsky, Krupetsky districts, part of the Sumy region and even the Oryol region. The people's avengers blew up bridges and derailed locomotive trains; During surprise raids on commandant's offices, Germans and policemen were killed. The partisans fought in the front line, because in March 1943 the Rylsky and Glushkovsky regions were still under the thumb of the Nazis, who, as revenge for their defeat in Stalingrad, began to prepare for the summer offensive and the largest operation near Kursk.By this time, the Shchors detachment numbered 250 “bayonets”. The entry of M. Vasilyeva and Otto Adam into it caused gossip among the partisans; they were very wary of Otto, because he was German and probably loved the Vaterland - his homeland. But as they got to know the stranger, they felt “our guy” in him. Like his new comrades, he ate simple food, smoked a hand-rolled cigarette made from evil shag, wore a padded jacket and a hat with earflaps with floppy “ears.” I began to speak a little Russian, fortunately the “teacher” was always nearby. The main thing that endeared him to Otto was that he carried out all the tasks accurately. One of them was not at all ordinary. Adam's group included Masha and fighter Vladimir Golovanov. They performed entire staged performances. Otto, dressed in the uniform of a Hauptmann (captain), wearing kid gloves and a monocle, sat like an important gentleman in a carriage drawn by a bay, frisky stallion. The arrogant Fraulein Masha sat nearby as a translator, and the role of the driver was played by Golovanov, also dressed in a German uniform. In case of shelling, a weapon was hidden in the stroller, covered with straw.
The trio rolled up to railway stations, and Otto, under the guise of checking in German, negotiated with the station management, talked down to him, found out train schedules and their routes. Once, at one station, he scolded his “subordinates” for poor work so much that they were speechless, and then, in front of their eyes, he ordered to drive away three trains in which they were transporting cattle, bags of cement and parcels from Germany.
The detachment's signalmen transmitted the received intelligence data to the headquarters of the Red Army formations. Successfully carried out raids into the very lair of the enemy at the risk of life finally dispelled suspicions towards Otto.
In 1961, former detachment commander A.Ya. Sinegubov wrote his own memoirs, which are in the collections of the Rylsk Local History Museum. This letter also contains the following lines: “In many villages of the Glushkovsky, Rylsky, Krupetsky districts, where the detachment visited, the population knew that a German was fighting among our fighters. That’s what they called him: Otto – a German partisan. And Adam justified Masha’s guarantee of devotion to our common cause. Otto and Masha really performed miracles. They carried out complex and difficult reconnaissance missions. Together with the detachment they took part in many battles against German occupiers and gained the respect of all the fighters.
I remember that in one battle in March 1943 in the State Forest near the village of Neonilovki, the Nazis threw a regiment of soldiers at us, and there were only 250 of us. The battle was very difficult: we had to fight off attack after attack, and we were running out of ammunition. The situation has become threatening. And then Masha, a brave girl, crawled to the dead Germans and brought a machine gun and cartridges. From this machine gun, Otto began to scribble at the Germans. Ammunition was taken from the dead. The enemies lost about five hundred people and were forced to retreat, and we went to other forests.”
The joint activities of the anti-fascist and the Russian intelligence officer contributed to their rapprochement. They no longer hid their feelings. In the detachment they were called the bride and groom, and their comrades tried to leave them alone as soon as the opportunity presented itself. Young people dreamed of getting married, talked about their future - after the war, the end of which was already looming, they wanted to go to Moscow to study. Otto had aspirations to become a bridge builder, and Masha decided to become a teacher. They did not know what fate awaited them soon.
On March 20, 1943, Otto, Masha and Golovanov set off again, as it turned out, on their last reconnaissance mission. When four days later they were returning to the detachment, they ran into an ambush in the Khodeykovsky forest, not far from the Seim River. They were betrayed by the traitor, the headman of the village of Khodeikovo Bondarenko. The partisans began to fight off the Germans and withstood several attacks. During the shootout, Golovanov was seriously wounded.
During the sudden respite, Otto began to think feverishly. This situation was imagined by the writer Vasily Alekhin in the trilogy novel “Flashes over the Diet” (in the third part “Bullet for Two”): “The girl who is next to him is not a simple guiding thread from the past to the present. A thread reached out to the future. And I believed in happiness... Doesn’t this girl deserve happiness? Isn’t this what you came into life for? She came into my life, into my heart. Otto looked at Masha for a long time, so dear, so close. Who is she to me? Friend? But friends only remember, and I am ready to give her my allegiance. Loyalty is forever. Oh, how absurd it is to die when happiness smiles on you, when you have just begun to free yourself from fear for your own life.”
The shooting resumed. The enemies were getting closer and closer. They wanted to take the partisans alive. There was nowhere to wait for help, and cartridges were running out. The scouts kept two of them for themselves. Otto felt the end was near and made a very difficult decision for himself. He shuddered, imagining that his beloved would be tortured by the Gestapo, and then hanged or shot.
There were only a few seconds left. Otto took the Walter out of his holster. Masha understood his intention, but did not move away when Otto pulled her towards him, putting his arm around her shoulders. Masha pressed her cheek to his cheek, her temple to the temple of her loved one. Two shots rang out. First, Otto shot Masha, and then committed suicide.
Vladimir Gubanov learned about the death of his comrades, regaining consciousness in a village hut, from a woman who picked up the guy and nursed him. And they told her on “people's radio” about the sad fate of Otto and Masha.
The heroes were buried right in the forest by a fisherman, and not in a coffin (there was no time to knock down boards), but in a sheet. A few days later Elizaveta Nikolaevna arrived here. They gave her a shovel, and the woman dug up the grave. The bodies of Masha and Otto were no longer recognizable. She recognized her daughter only by her blond braids, cut them off as a keepsake, and planted a linden tree on the grave itself.
The grave was essentially abandoned until, in 1945, the ashes of the lovers were transferred to a mass grave in the village of Zvannoye. And in 1965, on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the Great Victory - to a mass grave in the village of Glushkovo.
The best award is people's memory
For their heroism, neither Masha nor Otto received any state award, and the best reward for patriots is people's memory. After the end of the war, local historians and museum workers were the first to find out about this couple. In Glushkovsky local history and Rylsky local history museums I got acquainted with interest with the exhibitions dedicated to M. Vasilyeva and O. Adam, with documents. In Rylsk there are written eyewitness accounts of those terrible events. I was interested in objects that belonged to Masha Vasilyeva: a checkered notebook on geometry, where text material accompanying the geometric figures was neatly written in her hand; a small picture she embroidered on linen fabric; school and family photographs of Masha, as well as a photograph of her with braids, taken when she was about 16. Everything really touches the soul.
This story, unusual for wartime, reached journalists, local writers, and professional writers in different ways. The pioneer of this exciting topic should be considered the Kursk playwright Oleg Viktorov, a participant in the Great Patriotic War, whom I met shortly before his death in 2006. And he told me what was the impetus for turning to material with a dramatic ending. In 1959, Oleg Sergeevich, a lawyer by training and then working in the regional prosecutor’s office, as part of a group of prosecutors, investigated the atrocities of the former head of the village of Khodeikovo Bondarenko in the Glushkovsky district. The fascist henchman hid from just retribution for 15 years. At the trial, facts of his participation in the executions of Soviet people and abuse of fellow villagers were presented. It was he who told about the deaths of Masha and Otto.
The love story of a Russian girl intelligence officer and German officer-anti-fascists haunted Viktorov as an aspiring playwright. For a whole year he worked on the drama, which resulted in the play “It Was Near Kursk” (“Otto Adam”), which was staged under different titles in the Kursk, Belgorod and Sumy drama theaters, and the play “It Was Near Kursk” by the amateur theater of the Kursk Rubber Plant technical products were filmed in 1961 by a regional television studio. At the same time, the artists played in a real situation in the Glushkovsky district, near the village of Zvannoye. The magazine Ogonyok wrote about this play and its real characters (No. 20, May 1961). The article was republished by the German newspaper “Wochen Post”, and Otto Adam’s relatives learned about his fate, which was unknown to them. Needless to say, what Frau Line Adam, who learned that her own son had found his last refuge in a foreign land, experienced at this news. She really wanted to come to the USSR to visit her son’s burial place, but because of the Iron Curtain, she was denied a visa. But Uncle Otto, Fritz Bayer and his wife Elisabeth, managed to make such a trip. Even before the war, Fritz joined the German Communist Party, and after the war he was the director of the Leipzig Higher Party School, moreover, for his active anti-fascist activities he was awarded the Lenin Jubilee Medal, and such a person could not be denied a visa to travel to the USSR. The married couple arrived in Glushkovo in May 1970, when the 25th anniversary of the Great Victory was celebrated.
Honored teacher of the Russian Federation Nina Mitrofanovna Bondarenko told me about the details of the private visit:
– Guests from the GDR took part in the celebrations in the Frunze Park and laid a wreath from their family on the mass grave and touched memorial plaque, as if they wanted to warm a cold stone with their warmth.
From Fritz we learned about Otto. He was a calm, gentle man; He did not participate in any rallies or putschs, was not interested in politics and did not consider himself an anti-fascist, unlike his father. When Otto fought in Poland, his father and his brother Fritz ended up in a concentration camp for their political activities. Fritz managed to free himself, but Otto’s father could not stand the torture and died. His uncle told his nephew the sad news when he came home for a visit. The death of his father and the atrocities he saw in Poland turned his psychology upside down, and he became a convinced anti-fascist. Having learned about Otto’s defection to the Red side, some of his compatriots called him a traitor. But there were other Germans, this is evidenced, in particular, by the following fact: in Treptower Park, in the cemetery where the dead lie soviet soldiers, there is a monument: a thin young girl with long braids put her head on the shoulder of a German officer, and the inscription on the bronze plaque is written in German “To the bright love of Masha Vasilyeva and Otto Adam (1941-1943).”
...The German guests and I went to the place where Masha and Otto died and bowed to the holy land. We also visited Zvannoye, at the mass grave where the remains of the heroes were originally transferred. This place is also memorable to me because in May 1945 I was accepted as a pioneer here.
Afterword
In the Frunze Park in the village of Glushkovo there is a monument to the Glushkovo residents who died in the fight against Nazi Germany. He towers over mass grave. On the marble plaque, in addition to other names, the following names are indicated: Vasilyeva M.M. - partisan (1925-1943), and below - Otto Adam (German) - partisan (1913-1943). Their names are also listed in the 11th volume of the regional Book of Memory.On weekdays, the park is quiet, only birdsong can be heard. The leaves of the linden and maple trees are rustling, the chestnut trees have thrown out their “white candles” - they seem to be saluting the patriots.
... Two hearts fell asleep forever, united into one. A little-known poet, describing a similar story, exclaimed:
And he closed his eyes. And the blood ran red,
A red ribbon snakes around the neck.
Two lives fall, merging,
Two lives and one love.
Despite the dramatic ending, the life of the Russian girl and the German guy has become a symbol of nobility, courage, self-sacrifice and everything that elevates a person. For how many years have people lived a story similar to a legend.
Original taken from steissd Did the Germans have partisans?
They were not mentioned in Soviet sources. At least for the general public, and not for professional historians. They even recognized the existence of the post-war resistance of Bandera, the Forest Brothers in the Baltics and the Polish AK members, but not a word about the Germans. And it seemed like they weren’t there. And they were. Naturally, Nazi. True, most of them were Octobrists with ears.
In May 1945, Nazi Germany signed the Act of Unconditional Surrender. The Second World War ended, but the troops of the countries of the anti-Hitler coalition still suffered losses (and not for a year or two, but right up to the end of the 60s). Members of the underground Werewolf organization continued fighting.
Who and how got into the German partisan movement? Were these people fanatics, besotted with twelve years of Nazi propaganda, or unwitting participants who failed to choose a peaceful life? These and other questions are answered by the historian, author of the book “Werewolf. Fragments of the brown empire" Andrey Vasilchenko.
The article is based on material from the program “The Price of Victory” of the radio station “Echo of Moscow”. The broadcast was conducted by Vitaly Dymarsky and Dmitry Zakharov. You can read and listen to the original interview in full at this link.
Until the fall of 1944, talking about the need to create some kind of base in order to defend against the troops that entered Germany was considered defeatism, almost a criminal offense. At best, all operations were viewed as minor sabotage attacks. When, by the end of 1944, it became clear that the entry of Allied troops into German territory was just a matter of time, chaotic attempts began to create some kind of sabotage army. As a result, the main task was entrusted to Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler. He decided to entrust this task to police units, namely the Prützmann Bureau. During his time as SS Obergruppenführer Hans-Adolf Prützmann distinguished himself with similar bloody actions in occupied Ukraine. They believed that he understood the partisans better than others, since he fought with them himself.
At this time, saboteur No. 1 Otto Skorzeny developed a feeling of jealousy, and he did everything possible to sabotage the organization of the Werewolf movement, believing that at some point he himself would lead the sabotage army. All this discord led to the fact that the German partisan movement was not ready to meet the enemy: tactics were not developed, personnel were not trained, bases were created hastily.
But nevertheless, after May 1945, the “werewolves” continued to carry out their operations. What is this? Some kind of “wild army”, “wild army”? Several factors come together here. First of all, it's a reaction. local population, especially the national outskirts, which have wandered from country to country for centuries. These are Silesia, Sudetenland, Alsace, Lorraine. That is, when new authorities appeared, there was what is called a “wild eviction” of the Germans. That is, the Soviet authorities tried to create a certain barrier, the French did the same, and this caused discontent among the local population, who, naturally, willy-nilly tried to somehow resist, including by armed means.
The second component is the remains of Wehrmacht units. This was especially pronounced on the Western Front. The fact is that the Allies tried to capture as much territory as possible. As a result, they resorted to tactics that were very detrimental to them - they tried to repeat the blitzkrieg, tank wedges, but they did not have the required number of motorized infantry. As a result, huge gaps arose between tanks and infantry, almost tens of kilometers long. And in these gaps, the remnants of the parts felt quite calmly, at ease. Some wrote that at that moment the Wehrmacht on the Western Front generally turned into a bunch of small partisan detachments. What can we talk about if Wenck’s army calmly walked along the western rear. This is not a battalion, not a company - this is an entire tank army. As a result of this, the so-called “Kleinkrieg”, that is, a small guerrilla war, was also considered by the allies and our Soviet units to be part of the Wehrmacht.
Reichsjugendführer Arthur Axmann (left) and Hitler Youth graduates
And there was also a plan by Arthur Axman, the head of the Hitler Youth, which involved mobilizing young people to create a whole network of partisan detachments and sabotage groups. By the way, Axmann is the only one of all the Nazi bosses who, already in 1944, not only thought about the occupation of Germany, but began to actively prepare for it. Moreover, he even tried to get funding.
The fact is that the “werewolves” from youth environment, from the “Hitler Youth” (the militia included not only teenagers, there were also quite mature functionaries), received hefty funding amounting to millions of Reichsmarks, and after the establishment of the occupation power they had to create their own own business— transport companies, which would allow them to operate mobile. That is, in fact, a widely ramified underground organization was created, which had its own funding, and not some kind of conditional one, but quite large. And the failure of this organization was due to the fact that the economic wing, which at a certain point had become quite well established, began to fear the paramilitary wing of the youth “werewolves”, which, naturally, jeopardized their well-being. They did not at all want to end their days in prison or against the wall.
Concerning quantitative composition"Werewolf", then install exact number Militia is quite difficult. At least these are not dozens of people, we are talking about several thousand. The predominant effect is still Western and southern territory Germany. The bulk of the “werewolves” were concentrated in the Alps. The fact is that a plan was hatched to create an Alpine citadel, which the Allies (the Alps went mainly to the Americans) would take quite a long time. That is, in the end, the Alps served as the starting point for the creation, relatively speaking, of the Fourth Reich.
On the Eastern Front (meaning the territory of Germany), the “werewolves” acted in small groups of 10–15 people. Basically, these were sporadic, frivolous detachments that were quickly identified and cleared out. Here we cannot discount the experience of the NKVD, and, of course, the fact that we still had a continuous front, and not some wedges, like our Western allies.
Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler (left) and Obergruppenführer Hans-Adolf Prützmann. Ukraine, 1942
The Werwolf's first sortie took place in September 1944 against advancing Red Army units. In fact, it was a classic sabotage activity, no different from previous sabotage groups, except that it was already carried out within the framework of the Werewolf. As a result, two bridges were blown up. However, this group was quickly identified and eliminated. In this situation, the Soviet army had no sentimentality, however, neither did the Western allies.
By the way, the topic of the relationship between the local population and the occupation authorities, which, wittingly or unwittingly, is connected with the theme of “werewolves”, is also very interesting. We have already said that the national outskirts of Germany were swarming with detachments for a long time (let’s call them “werewolves”), but for the most part this was caused by tough politics. And the most paradoxical thing is that the Soviet occupation policy was not the most ruthless. If you look at what the Americans or the French did, the actions of the Red Army and the Soviet occupation authorities were not so terrible. By the way, this is due to the fact that in the Soviet zone of occupation the problem of “werewolves” was dealt with quite quickly, with the exception of a few cases, which, in particular, are associated with the Sudetenland and Silesia. The fact is that there was a massive eviction and deportation of Germans, and some of them raided back. The motivations were very different: personal revenge, the need to take property, and so on.
If we talk about the French, they generally find themselves in a very difficult situation. The fact is that France was one of the few victorious countries that, before that, still lost the war to Germany. Therefore, as a result, the French occupation authorities openly took revenge on the Germans, despite the fact that they did not know such atrocities as were, for example, in Belarus and Ukraine. Nobody hid this revenge and cruel actions. There were official hostages, which, by the way, did not exist in the Soviet occupation zone. And these actions caused discontent among the local population, which sooner or later led to the emergence of independent detachments that were automatically enrolled in the Werewolf.
As for East Prussia, there were no such large sabotage actions as in the western region of Germany. This is due to some effective civil policy measures. What was the difference between Western and Soviet troops when they entered German territory? In the official setting, albeit not always shared. Soviet troops liberated the German people from fascism, and the Western allies liberated the Germans. And in the second case, no distinction was made between social democrats, anti-fascists, or simply the civilian population who sympathized with the Nazis. You can give an example that may seem creepy today. In the summer of 1945 in Cologne, the Anglo-Americans quite harshly, even brutally, dispersed an anti-fascist demonstration of prisoners concentration camps. “They were simply afraid of any crowd of people,” many will think. The Allies were generally afraid of any activity from the Germans. A German is an enemy in any capacity, even if he is a communist or a social democrat.
And from this point of view, the Soviet occupation administration collaborated much more actively with the Germans. Both the creation of the GDR in 1949 and the actual transfer of power to the Germans in 1947, naturally under patronage, were simply unthinkable phenomena in the American and French occupation zone.
Commandant of Berlin Nikolai Berzarin talks with the Trümmerfrau, 1945
Since we have touched on the post-war page of history, we note that if at first the main activity of the “werewolves” was military confrontation, that is, in an attempt to stop the advancing Red Army, as well as the armies of the Allies (by the way, it is quite naive to believe that such small detachments could to do this), then somewhere in 1945-1946 these were small attacks, mainly boiling down to blowing up bridges, cutting communication lines, and killing individual policemen. There are interesting statistics that show that in 1946 - 1947 percentage Polish and Czech policemen suffered more at the hands of the “werewolves” than Soviet soldiers standing alone.
If we talk about some major actions at the end of the war and the post-war period, we should recall the murder of the burgomaster of Aachen, Franz Oppenhof, who was appointed to this post by the Americans. The whole paradox was that Oppenhoff insisted on actively involving Germans in the administration, even though they were members of the Nazi Party.
According to American and British sources, the murder of General Berzarin, the commandant of Berlin, is also nothing more than an action of the “Werewolf”; we have a car accident. Neither the first nor the second versions are excluded, but we still note that the ruins of Berlin, which it was in the summer of 1945, were simply created for sabotage attacks.
We have already said that “Werewolf” was directed not only against the Allied and Soviet troops, but also against the Germans themselves. One of the functions of the organization was to intimidate the local population. Here you can give a lot of examples of how alarmists and defeatists were dealt with in territory still controlled by the Nazis. There was one paradoxical case when in one small town the local burgomaster tried to hide from the advancing Soviet units and was caught by the “werewolves”, the very ones whom he himself recruited into the team, following orders from above.
As far as we know, during the creation of Werewolf, teenagers were actively armed with faust cartridges. There are records and evidence that young partisans caused quite a lot of headaches for our tank crews, and not only ours. Catch the “werewolf” soldier - he immediately had a dilemma: how to perceive him - as a child or still as a Nazi collaborator? Naturally, there were reprisals against such attackers (not only on our part, but also on the part of the allies), and attempts to break the stereotypes of young people regarding the new authorities, especially when it became clear that all this was not a chaotic movement, but that there were certain people behind it strength.
After the war, until about the end of 1946, the Werewolves operated in central Germany. On the outskirts, their forays continued for another year, until the end of 1947. And the longest where they existed was South Tyrol, a German-speaking territory that was transferred to Italy. Here the “werewolves” fought until the end of the 60s.
Few people know, but Soviet historiography sinned by significantly underestimating the degree of resistance on the part of the German population. But still, we should pay tribute to those who worked with the Soviet occupation administration. These people did not rely solely on violence; there were still some measures of social influence. In particular, working with German anti-fascists. With the exception of the British, the Americans, Canadians, and French were afraid to do this, suspecting that among the anti-fascists there were secret Werwolf agents who were trying to get into the new administration in order to use their position to continue sabotage and terror. By the way, there were examples of this. A certain “werewolf” Yarchuk, a Polish Volksdeutsche, was identified, who, due to his very loyal attitude, they even tried to appoint as burgomaster of a small city. But then it turned out that he, it turns out, was specially sent by the “Werewolf”. That is, the Western allies had a rather cautious attitude towards anti-fascists, because they saw German partisans in any attempt at social and political activity.
I remember a note that urged not to enter into relationships with German girls. This was motivated by the fact that women would deliberately infect American soldiers with syphilis in order to help the activities of the Werewolf, an organization in which her brother, her son, and so on are members. That is, the Americans and the British took this threat quite seriously. Why? Because they couldn’t oppose anything to her. They had no practice in waging guerrilla warfare or countering it. The French had some experience, but, again, this experience was associated with the urban environment, not with ruins. The French resistance operated under completely different conditions.
Adolf Hitler greets young men from the Hitler Youth. Berlin, 1945
As for the basic tactics of the “werewolves,” it was terribly primitive: the partisans dug into a bunker (whether it was a forest guardhouse, a cave, or some other shelter), let the advanced units of the “enemy” troops forward and then struck in the rear. Naturally, under these conditions they were quickly identified and eliminated.
But the “werewolves” were supplied with weapons centrally. The only thing that the German authorities managed to do was create huge secret warehouses, which were revealed almost until the mid-50s. At the last moment, when the Nazis already realized that everything would soon collapse, they stockpiled so many supplies that they could supply more than one army. Therefore, in May 1945, the “werewolves” had toxic substances, several types of explosives, and special cylinders for poisoning water sources. And there was simply no need to talk about machine guns, grenades, small arms.
Well, and finally, a few words about the fate of the Werewolf. Most of the saboteurs were caught, and since they did not fall under the Geneva Convention and were not prisoners of war, they were shot on the spot. And only in special cases, as already mentioned, with teenagers, did they still try to carry out some kind of work.
They were not mentioned in Soviet sources. At least for the general public, and not for professional historians. They even recognized the existence of the post-war resistance of Bandera, the forest brothers in the Baltic states and the Polish AK members, but not a word about the Germans. And it seemed like they weren’t there. And they were. Naturally, Nazi. True, most of them were Octobrists with ears.
In May 1945, Nazi Germany signed the Act of Unconditional Surrender. The Second World War ended, but the troops of the countries of the anti-Hitler coalition still suffered losses (and not for a year or two, but right up to the end of the 60s). Members of the underground Werewolf organization continued fighting.
Who and how got into the German partisan movement? Were these people fanatics, besotted with twelve years of Nazi propaganda, or unwitting participants who failed to choose a peaceful life? These and other questions are answered by the historian, author of the book “Werewolf. Fragments of the brown empire" Andrey Vasilchenko.
The article is based on material from the program “The Price of Victory” of the radio station “Echo of Moscow”. The broadcast was conducted by Vitaly Dymarsky and Dmitry Zakharov. You can read and listen to the original interview in full at this link.
Until the fall of 1944, talking about the need to create some kind of base in order to defend against the troops that entered Germany was considered defeatism, almost a criminal offense. At best, all operations were viewed as minor sabotage attacks. When, by the end of 1944, it became clear that the entry of Allied troops into German territory was just a matter of time, chaotic attempts began to create some kind of sabotage army. As a result, the main task was entrusted to Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler. He decided to entrust this task to police units, namely the Prützmann Bureau. During his time as SS Obergruppenführer Hans-Adolf Prützmann distinguished himself with similar bloody actions in occupied Ukraine. They believed that he understood the partisans better than others, since he fought with them himself.
At this time, saboteur No. 1 Otto Skorzeny developed a feeling of jealousy, and he did everything possible to sabotage the organization of the Werewolf movement, believing that at some point he himself would lead the sabotage army. All this discord led to the fact that the German partisan movement was not ready to meet the enemy: tactics were not developed, personnel were not trained, bases were created hastily.
But nevertheless, after May 1945, the “werewolves” continued to carry out their operations. What is this? Some kind of “wild army”, “wild army”? Several factors come together here. Firstly, this is the reaction of the local population, especially the national outskirts, which for centuries have walked from country to country. These are Silesia, Sudetenland, Alsace, Lorraine. That is, when new authorities appeared, there was what is called a “wild eviction” of the Germans. That is, the Soviet authorities tried to create a certain barrier, the French did the same, and this caused discontent among the local population, who, naturally, willy-nilly tried to somehow resist, including by armed means.
The second component is the remains of Wehrmacht units. This was especially pronounced on the Western Front. The fact is that the Allies tried to capture as much territory as possible. As a result, they resorted to tactics that were very detrimental to them - they tried to repeat the blitzkrieg, tank wedges, but they did not have the required number of motorized infantry. As a result, huge gaps arose between tanks and infantry, almost tens of kilometers long. And in these gaps, the remnants of the parts felt quite calmly, at ease. Some wrote that at that moment the Wehrmacht on the Western Front generally turned into a bunch of small partisan detachments. What can we talk about if Wenck’s army calmly walked along the western rear. This is not a battalion, not a company - this is an entire tank army. As a result of this, the so-called “Kleinkrieg”, that is, a small guerrilla war, was also considered by the allies and our Soviet units to be part of the Wehrmacht.
Reichsjugendführer Arthur Axmann (left) and Hitler Youth graduates
And there was also a plan by Arthur Axman, the head of the Hitler Youth, which involved mobilizing young people to create a whole network of partisan detachments and sabotage groups. By the way, Axmann is the only one of all the Nazi bosses who, already in 1944, not only thought about the occupation of Germany, but began to actively prepare for it. Moreover, he even tried to get funding.
The fact is that the “werewolves” from the youth environment, from the “Hitler Youth” (the militia included not only teenagers, there were also quite mature functionaries), received a fair amount of funding, amounting to millions of Reichsmarks, and after the establishment of occupation power they had to create their own business transport companies, which would allow them to operate mobile. That is, in fact, a widely ramified underground organization was created, which had its own funding, and not some kind of conditional one, but quite large. And the failure of this organization was due to the fact that the economic wing, which at a certain point had become quite well established, began to fear the paramilitary wing of the youth “werewolves”, which, naturally, jeopardized their well-being. They did not at all want to end their days in prison or against the wall.
As for the quantitative composition of the Werewolf, it is quite difficult to establish the exact number of the militia. At least these are not dozens of people, we are talking about several thousand. The predominant effect is still the western and southern territories of Germany. The bulk of the “werewolves” were concentrated in the Alps. The fact is that a plan was hatched to create an Alpine citadel, which the Allies (the Alps went mainly to the Americans) would take quite a long time. That is, in the end, the Alps served as the starting point for the creation, relatively speaking, of the Fourth Reich.
On the Eastern Front (meaning the territory of Germany), the “werewolves” acted in small groups of 10 - 15 people. Basically, these were sporadic, frivolous detachments that were quickly identified and cleared out. Here we cannot discount the experience of the NKVD, and, of course, the fact that we still had a continuous front, and not some wedges, like our Western allies.
Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler (left) and Obergruppenführer Hans-Adolf Prützmann. Ukraine, 1942
The Werwolf's first sortie took place in September 1944 against advancing Red Army units. In fact, it was a classic sabotage activity, no different from previous sabotage groups, except that it was already carried out within the framework of the Werewolf. As a result, two bridges were blown up. However, this group was quickly identified and eliminated. In this situation, the Soviet army had no sentimentality, however, neither did the Western allies.
By the way, the topic of the relationship between the local population and the occupation authorities, which, wittingly or unwittingly, is connected with the theme of “werewolves”, is also very interesting. We have already said that the national outskirts of Germany were swarming with detachments for a long time (let’s call them “werewolves”), but for the most part this was caused by tough politics. And the most paradoxical thing is that the Soviet occupation policy was not the most ruthless. If you look at what the Americans or the French did, the actions of the Red Army and the Soviet occupation authorities were not so terrible. By the way, this is due to the fact that in the Soviet zone of occupation the problem of “werewolves” was dealt with quite quickly, with the exception of a few cases, which, in particular, are associated with the Sudetenland and Silesia. The fact is that there was a massive eviction and deportation of Germans, and some of them raided back. The motivations were very different: personal revenge, the need to take property, and so on.
If we talk about the French, they generally find themselves in a very difficult situation. The fact is that France was one of the few victorious countries that, before that, still lost the war to Germany. Therefore, as a result, the French occupation authorities openly took revenge on the Germans, despite the fact that they did not know such atrocities as were, for example, in Belarus and Ukraine. Nobody hid this revenge and cruel actions. There were official hostages, which, by the way, did not exist in the Soviet occupation zone. And these actions caused discontent among the local population, which sooner or later led to the emergence of independent detachments that were automatically enrolled in the Werewolf.
As for East Prussia, there were no such large sabotage actions as in the western region of Germany. This is due to some effective civil policy measures. What was the difference between Western and Soviet troops when they entered German territory? In the official setting, albeit not always shared. Soviet troops liberated the German people from fascism, the Western allies - from the Germans. And in the second case, no distinction was made between social democrats, anti-fascists, or simply the civilian population who sympathized with the Nazis. You can give an example that may seem creepy today. In the summer of 1945 in Cologne, the Anglo-Americans quite harshly, even brutally, dispersed an anti-fascist demonstration of concentration camp prisoners. “They were simply afraid of any crowd of people,” many will think. The Allies were generally afraid of any activity from the Germans. A German is an enemy in any capacity, even if he is a communist or a social democrat.
And from this point of view, the Soviet occupation administration collaborated much more actively with the Germans. Both the creation of the GDR in 1949 and the actual transfer of power to the Germans in 1947, naturally under the patronage, in the American and French zone of occupation were simply unthinkable phenomena.
Commandant of Berlin Nikolai Berzarin talks with the Trümmerfrau, 1945
Since we have touched on the post-war page of history, we note that if at first the main activity of the “werewolves” was military confrontation, that is, in an attempt to stop the advancing Red Army, as well as the armies of the Allies (by the way, it is quite naive to believe that such small detachments could to do this), then somewhere in 1945 - 1946 these were small attacks, mainly boiling down to blowing up bridges, cutting communication lines, and killing individual policemen. There are interesting statistics that show that in 1946 - 1947, in percentage terms, Polish and Czech policemen suffered more at the hands of “werewolves” than Soviet soldiers standing alone.
If we talk about some major actions at the end of the war and the post-war period, we should recall the murder of the burgomaster of Aachen, Franz Oppenhof, who was appointed to this post by the Americans. The whole paradox was that Oppenhoff insisted on actively involving Germans in the administration, even though they were members of the Nazi Party.
According to American and British sources, the murder of General Berzarin, the commandant of Berlin, is also nothing more than an action of the “Werewolf”; we have a car accident. Neither the first nor the second versions are excluded, but we still note that the ruins of Berlin, which it was in the summer of 1945, were simply created for sabotage attacks.
We have already said that “Werewolf” was directed not only against the Allied and Soviet troops, but also against the Germans themselves. One of the functions of the organization was to intimidate the local population. Here you can give a lot of examples of how alarmists and defeatists were dealt with in territory still controlled by the Nazis. There was one paradoxical case when in one small town the local burgomaster tried to hide from the advancing Soviet units and was caught by the “werewolves”, the very ones whom he himself recruited into the team, following orders from above.
As far as we know, during the creation of Werewolf, teenagers were actively armed with faust cartridges. There are records and evidence that young partisans caused quite a lot of headaches for our tank crews, and not only ours. Catch the “werewolf” soldier - he immediately had a dilemma: how to perceive him - as a child or still as a Nazi collaborator? Naturally, there were reprisals against such attackers (not only on our part, but also on the part of the allies), and attempts to break the stereotypes of young people regarding the new authorities, especially when it became clear that all this was not a chaotic movement, but that there were certain people behind it strength.
After the war, until about the end of 1946, the Werewolves operated in central Germany. On the outskirts, their forays continued for another year, until the end of 1947. And the longest where they existed was South Tyrol - a German-speaking territory that went to Italy. Here the “werewolves” fought until the end of the 60s.
Few people know, but Soviet historiography sinned by significantly underestimating the degree of resistance on the part of the German population. But still, we should pay tribute to those who worked with the Soviet occupation administration. These people did not rely solely on violence; there were still some measures of social influence. In particular, working with German anti-fascists. With the exception of the British, the Americans, Canadians, and French were afraid to do this, suspecting that among the anti-fascists there were secret Werwolf agents who were trying to get into the new administration in order to use their position to continue sabotage and terror. By the way, there were examples of this. A certain “werewolf” Yarchuk, a Polish Volksdeutsche, was identified, who, due to his very loyal attitude, they even tried to appoint as burgomaster of a small city. But then it turned out that he, it turns out, was specially sent by the “Werewolf”. That is, the Western allies had a rather cautious attitude towards anti-fascists, because they saw German partisans in any attempt at social and political activity.
I remember a note that urged not to enter into relationships with German girls. This was motivated by the fact that women would deliberately infect American soldiers with syphilis in order to help the activities of the Werewolf, an organization in which her brother, her son, and so on are members. That is, the Americans and the British took this threat quite seriously. Why? Because they couldn’t oppose anything to her. They had no practice in waging guerrilla warfare or countering it. The French had some experience, but, again, this experience was associated with the urban environment, not with ruins. The French resistance operated under completely different conditions.
Adolf Hitler greets young men from the Hitler Youth. Berlin, 1945
As for the basic tactics of the “werewolves,” it was terribly primitive: the partisans dug into a bunker (whether it was a forest guardhouse, a cave, or some other shelter), let the advanced units of the “enemy” troops forward and then struck in the rear. Naturally, under these conditions they were quickly identified and eliminated.
But the “werewolves” were supplied with weapons centrally. The only thing that the German authorities managed to do was create huge secret warehouses, which were revealed almost until the mid-50s. At the last moment, when the Nazis already realized that everything would soon collapse, they stockpiled so many supplies that they could supply more than one army. Therefore, in May 1945, the “werewolves” had toxic substances, several types of explosives, and special cylinders for poisoning water sources. And there was simply no need to talk about machine guns, grenades, small arms.
Well, and finally, a few words about the fate of the Werewolf. Most of the saboteurs were caught, and since they did not fall under the Geneva Convention and were not prisoners of war, they were shot on the spot. And only in special cases, as already mentioned, with teenagers, did they still try to carry out some kind of work.
How the Germans fought the partisans
It was easier for the Germans to fight the partisans if they united into large groups. For this purpose, German special forces even distributed fake leaflets on behalf of the Soviet command. Corresponding refutations appeared in the partisan press. Thus, the Selyanskaya Gazeta newsletter on May 7, 1943 warned:
“Recently, the Nazis cooked up a leaflet and scattered it in some areas of Ukraine and Belarus. In this leaflet, supposedly on behalf of the Soviet military authorities, the partisans are asked to stop acting alone and in small detachments, unite into large detachments and carry out the order to act jointly with regular units of the Red Army. This order, says Hitler's fake, will follow as soon as the harvest is in the barns and the rivers and lakes are covered with ice again.
The purpose of this provocation is obvious. The Germans are trying to delay the actions of the partisans on the eve of the decisive spring-summer battles. The Nazis want the partisans to stop fighting and take a wait-and-see attitude.”
During the first two years of the war, the Germans and police, as a rule, shot captured partisans on the spot after a short interrogation. Only on October 5, 1943, a special order “Treatment of Captured Bandits” was issued, according to which captured partisans and defectors should henceforth be considered not only as a source of intelligence information and manpower for Germany, but also as a possible replenishment of the increasingly thinning collaborationist formations. In July 1943, the Western headquarters of the partisan movement was forced to admit that the lives of the partisans captured during combat operations were preserved, and more or less tolerable living conditions were created:
“The command of the fascist army provides the families of partisans with horses for cultivating their estates. At the same time, these partisan families are given the responsibility to ensure that their father, son or brother, etc. return to the house, leave the partisan detachment...
This tactic of the Nazi invaders has some influence on the fragile partisans. There are isolated cases of partisans going over to the enemy’s side.”
“Instead of the usual executions on the spot, they (the Nazis. - B. C.) a partisan who is captured or goes over to their side is enlisted as a police officer, given rations for a family, even given a cow for 2-3 families. Those newly captured or transferred are placed separately. They are not even allowed to communicate with the policemen who went over to serve the Nazis in the winter. From such they create separate groups and are sent to catch small groups of partisans.
The Nazis specifically send partisan wives into the forests so that they can persuade their husbands and bring them to the Germans, promising them good rations. This fascist propaganda and the method of their struggle had some influence on the morally unstable cowards, who, due to isolation from the command of the detachments, weak educational work, being in small groups and alone, went over to the side of the enemy.
For the month of May from the detachments of Gukov and Kukharenko, which until the end of the month were in the triangle (Vitebsk - Nevel - Polotsk. - B.S.) and were subjected to continuous raids by fascists and police, up to 60 people went over to the side of the enemy, mostly former Zelenists (“greens” or “wild partisans” who had not previously obeyed Moscow. - B.S.) and deserters from the Red Army...
In the description of the German actions, which was given by the command of the Okhotin brigade, one can feel respect for the formidable enemy that was the Wehrmacht:
“German tactics in a surprise attack on partisans always boiled down to one thing: shelling with all types of available weapons, followed by an attack. But the enemy never used relentless pursuit tactics. Having achieved success from the first attack, he stopped there. This was one of the weaknesses of German tactics.
When defending in cases of partisan attack, the enemy turned around quickly and, turning around, taking a battle formation, fought very stubbornly, always almost to the point of complete exhaustion of his forces (loss of people and expenditure of ammunition). This was one of the enemy’s strengths, but it led him to heavy losses in people.
There was not a single case where the enemy did not accept the battle imposed on him. Even when he ran into a partisan ambush, he never fled in panic, but, retreating in battle, took his dead, wounded and weapons. In such cases, the enemy did not take losses into account, but did not abandon his dead and wounded.
The weakness of German tactics was that the Krauts were afraid of the forest. They set up ambushes on partisans only in populated areas. There was not a single case of the Germans ambushing partisans in the forest.
The strength of German tactics was defensive tactics. Wherever the Germans went, and if they had to stop even for a short time, they always dug in, which the partisans never did to themselves.”
The enemy began to use partisan methods of fighting (hidden concentration of forces in the forest at night in order to attack the partisans by surprise at dawn, ambushes, mining of partisan roads, etc.) only recently.
In addition, since August 1943, continuous bombing of the partisan zone by aircraft began. “There is almost not a single village left in the Ushachi and Lepel regions occupied by partisans that has not been raided by fascist vultures. German uchlegs (student pilots) also practiced in this field. B. WITH.)".
Indeed, according to German sources, for the last year and a half of the war, the Luftwaffe used the Eastern Front as a kind of training ground for flight school graduates. Freshly trained pilots had to get comfortable in the air and gain experience in fighting a weaker enemy in the form of the Soviet Air Force, before entering into mortal combat with a much more formidable enemy - the Anglo-American “flying fortresses”. The partisan zones provided an ideal target for training. The partisans, of course, had neither fighters nor anti-aircraft guns, and it was possible to shoot down a plane with a rifle or machine gun only at a very low altitude. Young German pilots were hardly worried about the fact that their bombs fell primarily on the heads of peaceful inhabitants of villages and towns, who, by the will of fate, found themselves on the territory of the partisan region. However, the pilots of the “flying fortresses” also did not think about life and death German burghers, dropping bomb loads on German cities...
In the struggle in the occupied territory, all sides widely used traditional methods of guerrilla warfare, including masquerading as the enemy. Thus, on June 16, 1944, the order for the 889th German security battalion noted: “Recently, the partisans have been trying to capture more prisoners (a few days remained before the start of the general Soviet offensive in Belarus - Operation Bagration. - B.S.). WITH For this purpose, they drive trucks in German uniforms along the main highways and, picking up German soldiers who ask for a ride, deliver them to their camp. A similar incident took place on June 2, 1944 on the Bobruisk - Starye Dorogi highway. All soldiers are advised of the dangers of driving unfamiliar vehicles. Drivers are prohibited from taking unknown soldiers with them.”
The Germans also resorted to masquerade, in particular, they created false partisan detachments of policemen or Vlasovites dressed in Red Army uniforms or civilian dress. They came into contact with small groups or individual partisans, encouraged them to join the detachment, and then, waiting for the right moment, destroyed or captured them. The Germans even introduced special distinctive headdresses for their partisans. Such false detachments often robbed the population in order to then blame the real partisans. However, the latter also sometimes thoroughly robbed the population, dressed in German or police uniforms.
But it happened that false partisan detachments turned into real ones. This happened, for example, with a detachment of 96 people led by ROA officers Captain Tsimailo and Senior Lieutenant Golokoz. The latter, instead of fighting the partisans, established contact with Zakharov’s brigade operating in the Vitebsk region and revealed the truth to him. As a result, on July 17, 1943, 55 false partisans led by Golokoz joined the real ones, having previously killed the Germans who were with them - two radio operators and a captain. The remnants of the detachment, together with Tsimailo, managed to escape.
Sometimes false underground centers were created, with the help of which the secret field police caught real underground workers. According to this scheme, a “military council” operated in Minsk, consisting of German agents- former commanders of the Red Army Rogov and Belov (he was eventually killed by partisans) and the former secretary of the Zaslavl district party committee Kovalev, who “part-time” was also a member of the real Minsk underground committee. At first, the “military council” was a real underground organization, headed by commanders and commissars of the Red Army, who, unfortunately, were not familiar with the rules of secrecy. The organization had grown too much; almost half of Minsk knew about its activities. It got to the point that sentries were openly posted at the house where the headquarters of the “military council” was located, who checked the documents of ordinary underground fighters who came there. Very quickly the Minsk GUF found out about the organization. The leaders of the “military council” were arrested and bought their lives at the cost of betrayal. Now under the control of the Gestapo, they sent underground members supposedly to a partisan detachment; on the way, the police stopped the trucks, and their passengers ended up in a concentration camp. As a result, hundreds of underground fighters were arrested and shot and several partisan detachments were defeated.
Sometimes pseudo-partisan detachments were created by local residents themselves - after their liberation by the Red Army. The goal here was one and rather mundane - to receive an indulgence for being under occupation, and at the same time “legally” profit from the goods of former German collaborators. The history of one such detachment, discovered by the Special Department of the 2nd Guards Cavalry Corps in the Konyshevsky district of the Kursk region, was told by the head of the Special Department Central Front L.F. Tsanava in a letter to Ponomarenko dated March 13, 1943: “The organizer and “commander” of this false partisan detachment was the teacher of the village of Bolshoye Gorodkovo, Konyshevsky district, Ryzhkov Vasily Ivanovich, born in 1915, native and resident of B. Gorodkovo, non-party, with a high school education. education, former junior commander of the 38th separate battery of the headquarters of the 21st Army, who voluntarily surrendered to the Germans in October 1941. The “commissar” of this detachment was a resident of the village of Maloye Gorodkovo, Summin Tikhon Grigorievich, a former soldier of the Red Army, who returned to the village after it was occupied by the Germans. Ryzhkov V.I. March 2nd Special Correspondent (Special Department of the Corps. - B.S.) arrested. Summin T.G. disappeared and is currently wanted.
The investigation into the Ryzhkov case and the detachment’s activities established the following. By units of the Red Army, B. Gorodkovo and M. Gorodkovo were liberated from the Germans on February 8, 1943; Ryzhkov and Summin organized the false partisan detachment on February 12, 1943. This detachment, under the guise of fighting German accomplices, carried out raids and searches in adjacent settlements, seized property and livestock from some former elders and police officers. Part of what was taken was distributed to passing military units, and part was appropriated.
Hiding behind the name of the commander of the partisan detachment, Ryzhkov contacted the advancing units, misleading them with the fictitious actions of the “partisan detachment.”
11/20/43 Ryzhkov and Summin gathered members of the detachment and, threatening with weapons, offered to go to the regional center - Konyshevka, with the aim of allegedly organizing Soviet power there and heading the body of Soviet power in the region... There are signals about the existence of several more similar detachments " .
I don’t know if the security officers managed to find Summin and what the further fate Ryzhkov - execution, penal battalion or Gulag.
Often the Germans defeated the partisans using their own methods of fighting. Thus, the commander of the Osipovichi partisan unit, which included several partisan brigades, Hero of the Soviet Union, Major General Nikolai Filippovich Korolev, testified in the final report: “In Bobruisk, Mogilev, Minsk and other cities, “volunteer” battalions “Berezina”, “Dnepr” began to form, "Pripyat" and others, which were intended to fight partisans. To replenish these battalions and to train command personnel, the “Eastern Reserve Regiment” was created in Bobruisk.
It must be said that some of these “volunteers,” who completely sold out to the Germans, actively fought against the partisans. Using guerrilla tactics, they penetrated forest areas in small groups and organized ambushes on partisan roads. So, in March 1943, one of the battalions organized an ambush at the site of partisan camps in the Zolotkovo forest, which was attacked by the headquarters group of the partisan brigade “For the Motherland.” During the battle, the commander of this brigade, Major Alexey Kandievich Flegontov, died (I note that Flegontov was not a simple major, but a state security major, which was equivalent to the army general rank. - B. WITH.)…
Subsequently, with the liberation by the Soviet Army of a significant part of the Soviet territory occupied by the enemy, police and renegade garrisons were transferred to our area from the areas liberated by the Soviet Army. In October 1943, a regiment under the command of the former Dorogobuzh landowner and White emigrant Bishler arrived in the village of Vyazye (was it not this Bishler who wrote the text of the leaflet about partisan cannibalism, which will be discussed below? - B. WITH). This regiment then took an active part in blocking the partisans of the Pukhovichi, Cherven and Osipovichi regions at the end of May 1944.”
Korolev also wrote about the “treasonous battalion” of Major Buglai, which arrived in the Osipovichi region to fight the partisans and “settled in villages located in, close proximity to the partisan zone. Its personnel were well trained in methods of fighting partisans and skillfully took advantage of the tactical mistakes of individual detachments. He waged an active struggle through ambushes in forests, on partisan roads and at river crossings, and through surprise attacks on partisan outposts in villages...”
The paradox was that as the Red Army successfully advanced to the west, the position of the partisans did not improve, but, on the contrary, worsened. The partisan regions now fell into the operational zone, and later into the front line of the Wehrmacht. The partisans increasingly had to engage in battle with regular army units, which were superior to them in both weapons and combat training. Collaborationist formations that fled from areas liberated by Soviet troops moved to ever-shrinking occupied territories. In these formations there were now people who, as a rule, vehemently hated the communists, did not count on mercy for the Red Army soldiers and partisans, and had extensive experience in fighting the latter. At the same time, many other collaborators, hoping to earn forgiveness, joined the partisans in hundreds and thousands. It is no coincidence that at the time of joining the Soviet troops in the partisan brigades of Belarus, from a third to a quarter of the fighters were former police officers, Vlasovites and Wehrmacht “volunteers”. However, in practice, the sharp increase in numbers did not strengthen, but weakened partisan detachments and formations. After all, they were no longer supplied with ammunition, and the expanded detachments became, as mentioned, less maneuverable and more vulnerable to attacks from the air and on the ground.
Another circumstance complicated the situation. As stated in the report Central headquarters partisan movement (end of 1942), “using the remnants of anti-Soviet formations and individuals whose interests were infringed by Soviet power, German command trying to impose a Civil War on us, forming from garbage human society combat military units..." Indeed, in the occupied territories in 1941–1944 there was a real civil war, complicated by acute interethnic conflicts. Russians killed Russians, Ukrainians killed Ukrainians, Belarusians killed Belarusians. Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians fought with Russians and Belarusians, Belarusians, Ukrainians and Russians - with Poles, Chechens and Ingush, Karachais and Balkars, Crimean Tatars and Kalmyks - with Russians, etc. The Germans were, in principle, happy with this situation, because it allowed them to spend fewer of its own troops and police to fight various partisans.
How many people in total participated in the Soviet partisan movement? After the war, the figure often appeared in the works of historians was more than a million people. However, familiarity with wartime documents makes it necessary to reduce it by at least half.
Ponomarenko and his staff kept statistics, but the data received was not always accurate. The commanders of partisan brigades and formations sometimes had no information about the number of individual detachments, and sometimes, we repeat, they deliberately inflated it, hoping to get more weapons and ammunition. True, very soon they realized that supplies from the center were limited by such objective factors as weather, the availability of landing sites that were convenient and inaccessible to enemy fire, as well as the number of transport aircraft. Therefore, they often began to underestimate the number of detachments in order to accordingly underestimate the losses incurred and more freely report on the successes achieved.
In 1944, after the liberation of the republic, the Belarusian headquarters of the partisan movement compiled a final report, according to which there were a total of 373,942 people in the ranks of the partisans here. Of these, 282,458 people were in combat formations (brigades and individual partisan detachments), and
79,984 people were used as scouts, messengers, or were employed in guarding partisan zones. In addition, about 12 thousand people were members of the underground anti-fascist committees, especially in the western regions of the republic. In total, there were more than 70 thousand people in the underground in Belarus, as it turned out after the war, of which over 30 thousand were considered liaisons and intelligence agents for the partisans.
In Ukraine, the scope of the partisan movement was much smaller. Although after the war Khrushchev claimed that by the beginning of 1944 there were more than 220 thousand Soviet partisans operating here, this figure looks completely fantastic. Indeed, by that time the entire Left Bank of the Dnieper, where the most numerous partisan units. And on March 5, 1943, Ponomarenko, in a report to Stalin, estimated the total number of 74 partisan detachments in Ukraine at 12,631 people. Almost all of these units belonged to large connections Kovpak, Fedorov, Naumov and others. In addition, as the head of the Central Headquarters of the partisan movement pointed out, on the Right Bank and in the not yet liberated regions of Left Bank Ukraine there were partisan reserves and detachments with which contact had been lost, with a total number of over 50 thousand people. During subsequent raids, the formations of Kovpak, Saburov and others increased two to three times due to local reinforcements, but in any case, the number of Soviet partisans on the Right Bank was three to four times lower than the figure mentioned by Khrushchev. As noted in the certificate prepared on February 15, 1976 by the Institute of Party History under the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine, there. unlike other republics and regions, there were no registration cards at all, either for 220 thousand or for any smaller number partisan
The relatively weak development of the pro-Soviet partisan movement in Ukraine compared to Belarus and the occupied regions of the RSFSR is explained by a number of factors. Historically, Ukrainian lands have always been richer than Belarusian ones, which means the population is more prosperous. For this reason, it suffered more severely during the revolution, and later from collectivization and the famine it caused. The famine in Ukraine turned out to be worse than in Belarus, also because agriculture was more thoroughly undermined by the creation of collective farms. But by the beginning of World War II it had partially recovered and, thanks to better climatic conditions, still surpassed Belarusian agriculture in productivity. During the war, the latter had to supply Army Group Center, the largest of all German army groups in the East. That's why food supplies for the occupiers here they caused especially strong discontent. In addition, the natural conditions of Belarus, covered with forests and swamps, were ideal for guerrilla warfare.
Thanks to this, much more encircled Red Army soldiers settled in the Belarusian forests than in the Ukrainian steppes, which also created a mass base for the pro-Soviet partisan movement.
It should also be taken into account that Western Ukraine The most influential among local residents was the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. Nationalist organizations in Belarus have never been so popular, although here, as in Ukraine, intense confrontation with Polish population. If in Galicia and Volyn the Ukrainians relied on the OUN and UPA in this confrontation, then in Belarus Orthodox Belarusians (unlike Catholic Belarusians) saw the Soviet partisans as their comrades in the fight against the Poles.
In other occupied Soviet republics, the scope of the partisan movement was even smaller than in Ukraine. By April 1, 1943, throughout the territory occupied by the Germans, there were 110,889 partisans, located mainly in Belarus, Ukraine, Crimea, as well as in the Smolensk and Oryol regions. At that time, there were three sabotage groups of 46 people operating in Estonia, 13 groups with a total of 200 people in Latvia, and 29 groups with 199 people in Lithuania. Population Baltic states the overwhelming majority did not have any sympathy for the Soviet system and looked at the German occupation as a lesser evil. And in Moldova, out of 2892 partisans, there were only seven ethnic Moldovans, and the bulk were Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians. The song about “a dark-skinned Moldavian woman gathering a Moldavian partisan detachment” is nothing more than a poetic fantasy. The Moldovans clearly preferred to return to Romania after a year of Soviet domination.
The total number of participants in the Soviet partisan movement, if we assume that on other lands there were approximately the same number of partisans as in Belarus, can be estimated at approximately half a million people (only in combat units).
I note that there were much more collaborators among prisoners of war and residents of the occupied territories than partisans and underground fighters. According to various estimates, from one to one and a half million former Soviet citizens served in the Wehrmacht alone, in the military and police formations of the SS and SD. In addition, several hundred thousand people each belonged to the local auxiliary police and peasant self-defense units, on the one hand, and served as elders, burgomasters and members of local councils, as well as doctors and teachers in schools and hospitals opened by the Germans, on the other hand. True, it is difficult to say to what extent those who had to work in occupation institutions in order not to die of hunger can be considered collaborators.
Now about irreversible losses. By January 1, 1944, they amounted to individual republics and regions (without Ukraine and Moldova): Karelo-Finnish SSR - 752 killed and 548 missing, and a total of 1300 (of this number, only 1086 had the names and addresses of relatives known); Leningrad region- 2954.1372.4326 (1439); Estonia - 19, 8, 27; Latvia –56, 50.106 (12); Lithuania - 101.4.115 (14); Kalinin region - 742,141, 883 (681); Belarus - 7814, 513, 8327 (389); Smolensk region- 2618, 1822, 4400 (2646); Oryol region - 3677, 3361, 7038 (1497); Krasnodar region - 1077, 335, 1412 (538); Crimean ASSR - 1076, 526, 1602 (176); total - 20,886, 8680, 29,566 (8487). These figures are certainly incomplete, but they fairly well illustrate the comparative intensity of partisan combat activity in different regions.
To this we must add that in the seven months remaining until the end of the partisan movement, the Soviet partisans suffered greatest victims caused by large-scale measures taken against them punitive operations with the participation of army units. In Belarus alone, the partisans then lost 30,181 people killed, missing and captured, that is, almost four times more than in the previous two and a half years of war. The total irretrievable losses of Soviet partisans until the end of the war can be estimated at at least 100 thousand people.
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