Tonka the machine gunner biography investigation. Executioner by calling. The true story of Tonka the Machine Gunner. “For me it was just a job”
“I didn’t know those I was shooting. Therefore, there was no shame,” Antonina Makarova-Ginzburg said at the trial in 1978. In one day she turned from a respected citizen of the Byelorussian SSR, as her husband and neighbors knew her, into a cold-blooded executioner fascist Germany, and her husband, the hero of the Great Patriotic War Having found out the truth about his wife’s crimes, he took his two common daughters and disappeared.
June 18, 2018 · Text: Veronica Pylnova· Photo: Getty Images
Antonina Makarova-Ginzburg is one of three women executed in the USSR since 1960
History knows many examples when real heroes appeared in the country in the most difficult times for the people. During the Great Patriotic War, feats were performed not only by pilots, intelligence officers, and officers, but also by civilians who became partisans or labor shock workers in the rear. Unfortunately, there were no less traitors - and those who not only helped the soldiers of the Third Reich, but personally killed their compatriots. Like, for example, Antonina Makarova-Ginzburg (popularly known as Tonka the Machine Gunner). According to various sources, she shot from 168 to 1,500 people, among whom were women, old people and children. After the war, Antonina managed to hide from the investigation and even began new life. However, at the very moment when she least expected it, justice still overtook her.
Front path
In the biography of Antonina Makarova, who was born in the village of Malaya Volkovka, Smolensk province, there are many dark spots. So, it is still not known for certain why the girl’s surname was suddenly different from the one worn by her brothers, the Parfenovs (according to another version, the Panfilovs). The most popular version is that at school, out of fear and embarrassment, Antonina was unable to say her last name when the teacher asked her about it. Classmates sitting nearby said that she was Makarova (meaning that she was Makar’s daughter), and the teacher wrote Antonina down in the journal. This error migrated to other documents - passport, Komsomol card, etc.
In her youth, Antonina, like many other girls of her age, often watched the film “Chapaev” and dreamed of being like the faithful comrade-in-arms of the head of the Red Army division, Anka the machine gunner.
Therefore, it is not surprising that when the Great Patriotic War began on June 22, 1941, Makarova volunteered to go to the front from Moscow, where she was studying to become a doctor. Some sources report that before becoming a nurse, Antonina served for some time as a barmaid in one of the military units. On August 13, 1941, the girl was drafted into the 422nd Regiment of the 170th Infantry Division. However, Makarova’s path to the front was not long. Less than two weeks later, the city of Velikiye Luki, which her division was supposed to defend, was taken by the Germans, and Antonina herself had to experience all the horrors of the Vyazemsky cauldron.
Antonina went to the front at an early age
Few of her colleagues managed to escape from the encirclement, and the young girl was not one of them. True, due to the fact that the fascist soldiers were unable to establish any serious control over the prisoners (and there were over 600 thousand of them), seizing the moment, Makarova escaped along with Nikolai Fedchuk. The soldier and the nurse wandered together through the nearby forests, trying to survive. For some unknown reason, they did not look for partisans and did not try to break through to their own. Antonina became Nikolai’s “camping wife”. The wanderings continued until 1942. When Makarova and Fedchuk went to the village of Krasny Kolodets, he admitted to her that he was married and left her alone to wander around the nearby villages.
Executioner with salary
Later, the girl stopped in the village of Lokot in the Bryansk region, where the notorious “Lokot Republic” operated - a collaborationist group of traitors who supported the fascist regime. While in the rest of the Soviet Union there were fierce battles for life and freedom, in the “Lokot Republic” they dissolved collective farms, returned private property, went to theater performances, published their own newspaper “Voice of the People” and carried out executions every evening. Despite their autonomy, both local authorities and policemen were subordinate to German officers, who closely watched how representatives of the Russian People's Liberation Army (that was the name of the Lokot army) exterminated the partisans.
At first, Antonina also served in the police. It is unknown when exactly she retrained as an executioner. They say that neither the policemen, nor even the Germans, wanted to get their hands dirty by standing behind a machine gun every evening. But Makarova did not refuse this specific work. There are rumors that before her first execution, Antonina drank a glass of vodka for courage, and then went out to the already prepared Maxim machine gun and killed 27 people (that’s how many prisoners could be kept in the local detention center).
The next day, Makarova learned that she now had an official position - executioner with a salary of 30 German marks per execution.
Some parts of the case of Tonka the Machine Gunner (that’s how they began to call Antonina Makarova in the “Lokot Republic”) still remain classified as “secret”, so nothing is known about the exact number of victims. Rumor has it that during all this time Makarova shot about one and a half thousand people. However final verdict she was sentenced for the murder of 168 people.
The court found Tonka the Machine Gunner guilty of 168 murders, but according to other estimates there were about one and a half thousand
Apparently, Antonina was completely happy with her new life. In the morning she went to the execution, finishing off the survivors with a pistol, and then cleaned the weapons and washed the things of the dead, which she was allowed to take as an incentive. In the evening, Tonka the Machine Gunner drank at a local club and had fun with the Germans.
Another life
And in 1943, Makarova’s life again took a sharp turn. In connection with the offensive of the Soviet army, many collaborators and leaders of the “Lokot Republic” were forced to leave the Bryansk region as soon as possible. Antonina also disappeared with them. According to one version, she fell ill with a venereal disease, and she was sent for treatment so that she would not re-infect the fascist soldiers. However, it is possible that she simply fled to the Germans. They no longer needed an executioner, so Makarova was sent to a military factory in Koenigsberg, where she worked for the benefit of the Third Reich until the end of the war. In 1945, the city was taken by Soviet troops, but Antonina managed to pass the test in the NKVD filtration camps, where they tested all people who claimed that they were prisoners of the Nazis.
There are rumors that Makarova managed to escape because she forged or stole the documents of a certain nurse. However, journalists managed to find out that Antonina passed all checks under own name. “Antonina Makarovna Makarova, born in 1920, non-party, conscripted with the rank of sergeant by the Leninsky District Military Commissariat of Moscow on August 13, 1941 to the 422nd Regiment. She was captured on October 8, 1941. Sent for further service to the marching company of the 212th reserve rifle regiment on April 27, 1945,” reads an archival document from the Ministry of Defense base.
Antonina managed to pretend to be one of the German prisoners, so she easily escaped after the war
Around the same time, Antonina Makarova met Viktor Ginzburg, a Red Army soldier awarded the medal “For Courage”. They soon got married, moved to the city of Lepel (Belarusian SSR), and the couple had two daughters.
The woman got a job at a local clothing factory, where she carried out quality control of products. Her photograph regularly appeared on the honor board.
True, for many years Makarova-Ginsburg failed to make friends. According to former colleagues, Antonina was unsociable and withdrawn. The family of front-line soldiers was considered one of the most respected in the city. Tonka the machine gunner did not have to invent a plausible legend - she simply kept silent about what she did in the “Lokot Republic”.
Long search
Rumor has it that the Soviet authorities almost immediately learned about the atrocities of Tonka the Machine Gunner from the former commander of the Lokot prison. It was he who said that a certain Antonina Makarova, a former nurse from Moscow, was involved in the executions. However, they could not quickly find the criminal. According to one version, Bryansk investigators mistakenly considered the woman dead, and according to another, they got confused due to confusion with her last name. This is probably why the search dragged on for 30 years.
According to the press center of the KGB of Belarus, Antonina could well have lived her whole life undetected: neither her colleagues, nor her neighbors, nor her husband would have known about her past. However, thanks to a coincidence of circumstances, the secret became clear. In 1976, a resident of the capital by the name of Panfilov needed to go on a trip abroad, for which he had to fill out a lot of documents. In one of them, the man indicated all his brothers and sisters. It was then that officials noticed a strange detail: all of Panfilov’s relatives had one surname, and his own sister had a different one. Representatives of OVIR (visa and registration department) called the man and asked him to explain this misunderstanding. Panfilov, who was unaware of his relative’s crimes, laid out everything he knew about his sister living in Belarus. Investigators drew attention to the woman’s resemblance to the criminal Tonkaya the Machine Gunner, who had previously been put on the all-Union wanted list.
The Soviet authorities could not immediately bring charges, so they decided to have a special conversation with her. Antonina, along with other front-line soldiers, was summoned to the district military registration and enlistment office, where they began to ask about her participation in hostilities, supposedly for future award cases. While some women actively recalled everything they had to go through during the war, Makarova-Ginzburg was confused and could not even answer questions about her colleagues and the battalion commander.
Investigators were left with no doubts after Makarova-Ginzburg was identified by the former partner of the director of the very prison where the woman worked.
The next day, Antonina was detained by plainclothes agents. The criminal, immediately realizing that her long and calm life was over, was absolutely calm and only asked for a cigarette. During interrogation, Makarova-Ginzburg admitted that she really is the same Thin Machine Gunner. “All the executions were similar to each other for me. Each time, only the number of prisoners changed. For me it was just work,” said Antonina, not hiding the fact that among her victims were women, old people, and children. “I didn’t know those I was shooting. They didn't know me. Therefore, I was not ashamed in front of them,” the criminal explained her indifference. After that she was sent to Bryansk.
Crime and Punishment
Everyone there was already discussing the high-profile case, because the village of Lokot was located not far from the city. Investigators recall that local residents who recognized the executioner shied away from her in fear. Antonina herself did not understand either their fear or their hatred. The woman was sure that all her crimes should be justified by the war. She calmly spoke about what she had done, as if she felt no regret, no pangs of conscience - nothing at all. Makarova-Ginzburg did not ask for meetings with her family. The woman was completely sure that she would get off with a three-year sentence. However, the court sentenced Tonka the machine gunner to death penalty. By the way, from 1960 to 1991, capital punishment was chosen mainly for men. There were only three such women - including Antonina.
Early in the morning of August 11, 1979, after the court finally rejected all of Makarova-Ginsburg’s requests for clemency in connection with the year of the woman, the death sentence was carried out.
Antonina's husband, Viktor Ginzburg, did not go to Bryansk to pick up his wife. Having learned about her terrible atrocities, he took his two daughters and disappeared in an unknown direction. Perhaps the war hero simply wanted to escape the terrible truth about his wife, with whom he lived for more than thirty years.
Quite recently we read with you and discussed who was interested in this topic and who is not yet tired of the topic of the Great Patriotic War, I can offer this continuation of the discussion...
She was arrested in the summer of 1978 in the Belarusian town of Lepel. A completely ordinary woman in a sand-colored raincoat with a string bag in her hands was walking down the street when a car stopped nearby and inconspicuous men in civilian clothes jumped out of it and said: “You urgently need to come with us!” surrounded her, not allowing her to escape.
“Can you guess why you were brought here?” - asked the investigator of the Bryansk KGB when she was brought in for the first interrogation. “Some kind of mistake,” the woman grinned in response.
“You are not Antonina Makarovna Ginzburg. You are Antonina Makarova, better known as Tonka the Muscovite or Tonka the Machine Gunner. You are a punitive woman, you worked for the Germans, carried out mass executions. There are still legends about your atrocities in the village of Lokot, near Bryansk. We have been looking for you for more than thirty years - now it is time to answer for what we have done. Your crimes have no statute of limitations.”
“So it’s not in vain last year“I felt anxious in my heart, as if I felt that you would appear,” the woman said. - How long ago it was. It’s as if it’s not with me at all. Almost my whole life has already passed. Well, write it down..."
Young Tonya was not a monster from birth. On the contrary, since childhood I dreamed of being brave and courageous, like Chapaev’s faithful ally, Anka the machine gunner. True, when she came to first grade and the teacher asked her last name, she suddenly became shy. And her smart peers had to shout instead of her: “Yes, she’s Makarova.” I mean, Makar’s daughter’s last name is Panfilov. The teacher wrote the new girl down in the journal, legitimizing the inaccuracy in further documents. This confusion is what subsequently allowed the terrible Tonka the machine gunner to evade search for so long. After all, they were looking for her, known from the words of surviving victims, as a Muscovite, a nurse, based on the family connections of all the Makarovs Soviet Union, not the Panfilovs.
After finishing school, Antonina moved to Moscow, where she found herself on June 22, 1941. The girl, like thousands of her peers, asked to go to the front as a volunteer medical instructor to carry the wounded from the battlefield. Who knew that what awaited her was not romantic, cinematic skirmishes with the enemy cowardly running away at the first salvo, but bloody, exhausting battles with superior German forces. Newspapers and loudspeakers assured of something else, something completely different... And here is the blood and dirt of the terrible Vyazma “cauldron”, in which literally in a matter of days of the war more than a million Red Army soldiers laid down their lives and another half a million were taken prisoner. She was among those half-dead, dying of cold and hunger, half a million thrown to be torn to pieces by the Wehrmacht. How she got out of the encirclement, what she experienced at the same time - only she and God knew.
However, she still had a choice. By hook or by crook, begging for an overnight stay in villages in which there were already policemen loyal to the new regime, and in others, on the contrary, partisans who were preparing to fight the Germans, mostly encircled from the Red Army, were secretly grouped, she reached the Brasovsky district of the then Oryol region. Tonya didn't choose dense forest, where survivors like her created partisan detachments, and the village of Lokot became a stronghold of National Socialist ideology and the “new order.”
Today in the literature you can find facts published by historians about this collaborationist structure of traitors, formed in the village in November 1941, after Lokot, together with neighboring settlements (now Lokot is part of the Bryansk region) was occupied by the Wehrmacht. The initiators of such “self-government” with a status that Himmler defined as “experimental” were former Soviet citizens: 46-year-old Konstantin Voskoboynik and 42-year-old Bronislav Kaminsky (I will try to make a separate post on the topic of “Lokot self-government”)
...It was to this “Lokot Republic”, where there was enough cartridges and bread, guns and oil, that she made her way at the end of 1941 final choice Tonka Makarova. She was received personally by Kaminsky. The conversation was short, almost like in Taras Bulba. “Do you believe it? Cross yourself. Fine. How do you feel about communists? “I hate it,” the Komsomol believer answered firmly. “Can you shoot?” "Can". “Won’t your hand tremble?” "No". "Go to the platoon." A day later, she swore allegiance to the “Führer” and received a weapon - a machine gun. All!
They say that before the first execution, Antonina Makarova was given a glass of vodka. For courage. After which it became a ritual. True, with some changes - all subsequent times she drank her rations after the execution. Apparently, she was afraid of losing her victims in the crosshairs while she was drunk.
And at each execution there were at least 27 people - exactly the same number that fit into the stable stall that served as a prison cell.
“All those sentenced to death were the same to me. Only their number changed. Usually I was ordered to shoot a group of 27 people - that’s how many partisans the cell could accommodate. I shot about 500 meters from the prison near some pit. Those arrested were placed in a line facing the pit. One of the men was rolling out my machine gun to the execution site. At the command of my superiors, I knelt down and shot at people until everyone fell dead...” From the interrogation protocol of Antonina Makarova-Ginzburg in June 1978.
This will probably sound cynical and even blasphemous, but Tonka’s childhood dream came true: she, almost like Chapaev’s Anka, became a machine gunner. And they even gave her a machine gun - a Soviet Maxim. Often, for greater convenience, she carefully aimed at people while lying down.
“I didn’t know those I was shooting. They didn't know me. Therefore, I was not ashamed in front of them. It happened that you would shoot, come closer, and someone would still twitch. Then she shot him in the head again so that the person would not suffer. Sometimes several prisoners had a piece of plywood with the inscription “partisan” hung on their chests. Some sang something before they died. After the executions, I cleaned the machine gun in the guardhouse or in the yard. There was plenty of cartridges...” From the interrogation protocol of Antonina Makarova-Ginzburg in June 1978.
A symbolic coincidence: the payment assigned to her for her service was 30 marks. In every sense, Judas is a reward, which amazed even the seasoned KGB investigator Leonid Savoskin, who conducted interrogations of the arrested “executor of sentences.” This is how Makarova was officially named in RONA documents. “Not all Russian policemen wanted to get dirty; they preferred that the executions of partisans and members of their families be carried out by a woman. Makarova was given a bed in a room at a local stud farm, where she could spend the night and store a machine gun.” This is from an investigation file.
There she was once found by a former landlady from the village of Krasny Kolodets, with whom Antonina, who was choosing her path in life, happened to spend the night - she once came to well-fed Lokot for salt, almost ending up in the prison of the “republic” here. The frightened woman asked her recent guest for intercession, who brought her to her closet. In a cramped room there was a machine gun, polished to a shine. There is a washing trough on the floor. And next to it, on a chair, washed clothes were folded in a neat pile - with numerous bullet holes. Noticing the guest’s frozen gaze on them, Tonya explained: “If I like things from the dead, then I take them off the dead, why waste it: once I shot a teacher, I liked her blouse, pink, silk, but it was too smeared with blood.” , I was afraid that I wouldn’t wash it - I had to leave it in the grave. It's a pity".
Hearing such speeches, the guest, forgetting about the salt, retreated to the door, remembering God as she went and calling on Tonka to forgive herself. This infuriated Makarova. “Well, since you are so brave, why did you ask me for help when they were taking you to prison? - she screamed. - So I would have died like a hero! So, when you need to save your skin, then Tonka’s friendship is good?”
Day after day, Tonka the machine gunner continued to regularly go out for executions. Carry out Kaminsky's sentences. How to get to work.
“It seemed to me that the war would write off everything. I was just doing my job, for which I was paid. It was necessary to shoot not only the partisans, but also members of their families, women, and teenagers. I tried not to remember this. Although I remember the circumstances of one execution - before the execution, the guy sentenced to death shouted to me: “We won’t see you again, goodbye, sister!..” From the interrogation report of Antonina Makarova-Ginzburg in June 1978.
She tried not to remember those she killed. Well, all those who miraculously survived after meeting her remembered Antonina Makarova for the rest of their lives. Already an 80-year-old gray-haired old woman, Elena Mostovaya, a resident of Lokot, told reporters how the police seized her for drawing partisan leaflets with ink. And they threw him into a stable not far from the punisher with her machine gun. “There was no electricity, the only light was that from the window, which was almost completely bricked up. And there is only one gap - if you stand on the windowsill, you can look in and see God’s world.”
Terrible memories were forever etched in the memory of another local resident, Lydia Buznikova: “There was a groan. People were crammed into stalls so that it was impossible to lie down, let alone sit down...”
When Soviet troops entered Lokot, there was no trace of Antonina Makarova. The victims she shot lay in the pits and could no longer say anything. The surviving local residents remembered only her heavy gaze, no less terrible than the Maxim's sights, and scant information about the newcomer: approximately 21 years old, presumably a Muscovite, dark-haired, with a gloomy crease on her forehead. The same data was provided by arrested collaborators of the Germans who were arrested on other cases. There was no more detailed information about the mysterious Tonka.
“Our employees have been conducting the search for Antonina Makarova for more than thirty years, passing it on to each other by inheritance,” KGB veteran Pyotr Golovachev is no longer afraid to reveal the cards of a long-standing case to journalists and willingly recalls details similar to the legend. - From time to time it ended up in the archive, then, when we caught and interrogated another traitor to the Motherland, it surfaced again. Couldn't Tonka disappear without a trace?! During the post-war years, KGB officers secretly and carefully checked all the women of the Soviet Union who bore this name, patronymic and surname and were suitable in age - there were about 250 such Tonek Makarovs in the USSR. But it's useless. The real Tonka the machine gunner seemed to have sunk into thin air..."
“Don’t scold Tonka too much,” says Golovachev. - You know, I even feel sorry for her. It’s all the damned war’s fault, it broke her... She had no choice - she could have remained human and then she herself would have been among those shot. But she chose to live, becoming an executioner. But in 1941 she was only 20 years old.”
But it was impossible to just take it and forget about it. “Her crimes were too terrible,” says Golovachev. “I just couldn’t wrap my head around how many lives she took.” Several people managed to escape and were the main witnesses in the case. And so, when we interrogated them, they said that Tonka still comes to them in their dreams. The young woman, with a machine gun, looks intently - and does not look away. They were convinced that the executioner girl was alive, and asked to be sure to find her in order to stop these nightmares. We understood that she could have gotten married a long time ago and changed her passport, so we thoroughly studied life path all her possible relatives named Makarov..."
And she, as it turned out, was just lucky. Although, what is luck, in the grand scheme of things?..
No, she did not move at the end of 1943 from Loktya to Lepel along with the “Russian SS brigade” led by Kaminsky, which followed the Germans. Even earlier, she managed to catch a venereal disease. After all, she drowned out her post-execution days with more than one glass of vodka. Forty degrees of doping was not enough. That’s why, in silk outfits with traces of bullets, she went “after work” to the dance, where she danced until she dropped with her changing gentlemen, like glass in a kaleidoscope - policemen and marauding officers from RONA.
It’s strange, and maybe logical, but the Germans decided to take care of their comrade-in-arms and sent Tonka, who had contracted a shameful illness, to a rear hospital for treatment. So she ended up in 1945 near Koenigsberg.
...Already taken under escort to Bryansk after her arrest in Lepel, Antonina Makarova-Ginzburg told the investigators leading the case how she managed to approach Soviet troops to escape from the German hospital and correct other people's documents, according to which she decided to start a new life. This is a separate story from the life of a cunning and resourceful beast.
In a completely new guise, she appeared in April 1945 in a Soviet hospital in Koenigsberg in front of the wounded Sergeant Viktor Ginzburg. Like an angelic vision, a young nurse in a snow-white coat appeared in the ward - and the front-line soldier, rejoicing in his recovery, fell in love with her at first sight. A few days later they signed, Tonya took her husband’s last name. At first, the newlyweds lived in the Kaliningrad region, and then moved to Lepel, closer to her husband’s homeland, because Viktor Semenovich was from Polotsk, where his family died at the hands of punitive forces.
In quiet Lepel, where almost everyone knows each other and greets each other when they meet, the Ginzburg couple lived happily until the end of the seventies. A real exemplary Soviet family: both are veterans of the Great Patriotic War, excellent workers, raising two daughters. Benefits, an order table, order bars on the chest on holidays... The portrait of Antonina Makarovna, as the old-timers of Lepel remember, adorned the local Honor Board. What can I say - photographs of the four veterans were even in the local museum. It was later, when everything was clarified, that one of the photographs - a woman's - had to be hastily removed from the museum collections and sent for decommissioning with wording that was unusual for museum workers.
Accident largely contributed to the exposure of the punisher
In 1976, a Moscow resident named Panfilov had to urgently get ready for a voyage abroad. Being a disciplined person, he filled out the required lengthy questionnaire according to all the rules of that time, without missing a single relative in the list. This is where a mysterious detail emerged: all his brothers and sisters are Panfilovs, and for some reason one is Makarova. How, pardon the pun, did this happen? Citizen Panfilov was summoned to the OVIR for additional explanations, which were attended by interested people in civilian clothes. Panfilov told about his sister Antonina living in Belarus.
What happened next will be explained in a document provided by Natalya Makarova, a representative of the KGB press group for the Vitebsk region. So, “Information about the activities to search for the “Sadist”.
“In December 1976, Ginzburg V.S. went to Moscow to visit his wife’s brother, Colonel Soviet Army Panfilov. It was alarming that the brother did not have the same surname as Ginzburg’s wife. The collected data served as the basis for the establishment in February 1977 of Ginzburg (Makarov) A.M. “Sadist” audit cases. When checking Panfilov, it was found out that Ginzburg A.M., as her brother indicated in his autobiography, was captured by the Germans during the war. The check also showed that she has a great resemblance to Antonina Makarovna Makarova, who was previously wanted by the KGB in the Bryansk region, born 1920 - 1922, a native of the Moscow region, a former nurse of the Soviet Army, who was put on the All-Union wanted list. The search for her was stopped by the KGB in the Bryansk region due to the small amount of data necessary for active search activities and her death (allegedly she was shot by the Germans along with other women suffering from venereal disease). A group of sick women were indeed shot, but the Germans took Ginzburg (A. Makarova - Author) with them to Kaliningrad region, where she remained after the occupiers fled.”
As we can see from the certificate, from time to time even the most tireless operatives, searching for the elusive Tonka, gave up. True, it was immediately resumed, as soon as new facts were discovered in a history that had lasted for 33 years, which allows us to talk about the continuity of the search.
And strange facts in the Makarova case in 1976 have already begun to pour out of a cornucopia. Contextually, in totality, they are, so to speak, strange.
Taking into account all the conflicts that arose in the case, the investigators decided to conduct an “encrypted conversation” with her at the district military registration and enlistment office. Together with Makarova, several other women who participated in the Great Patriotic War were also invited here. The conversation was about participation in hostilities, supposedly for future rewards. The front-line soldiers readily recalled. Makarova-Ginzburg was clearly at a loss during this conversation: she could not remember either the battalion commander or her colleagues, although her military ID indicated that she fought in the 422nd Medical Battalion from 1941 to 1944 inclusive.
Further in the certificate it is written:
“A check of the records of the military medical museum in Leningrad showed that Ginzburg (Makarova) A.M. She did not serve in the 422nd sanitary battalion. However, she received a partial pension, which included service in the ranks of the Soviet Army during the war, while continuing to work as a senior inspector of the quality control department of the sewing shop of the Lepel woodworking association.”
Such “forgetfulness” no longer looks like an oddity, but rather like real evidence.
But any guess requires confirmation. Now the investigators had to either obtain such confirmation, or, conversely, refute their own version. To do this, it was necessary to show your object of interest to living witnesses of the crimes of Tonka the Machine Gunner. Arrange what is called a confrontation - albeit in a rather delicate manner.
They began to secretly bring to Lepel those who could identify the female executioner from Lokot. It is clear that this had to be done very carefully - so as not to jeopardize the reputation of a respected “front-line soldier and an excellent worker” in the city in the event of a negative result. That is, only one party could know that the identification process was underway - the identifying party. The suspect should not have guessed anything.
Further work on the case, to put it in the dry language of the same “Information about the activities to search for the “Sadist,” was carried out in contact with the KGB for the Bryansk region. On August 24, 1977, Ginzburg (Makarova) was re-identified by Pelageya Komarova and Olga Panina, who arrived in Lepel from the Bryansk region. From the first, Tonka filmed a corner in the village of Krasny Kolodets in the fall of 1941 (remember the story about the trip to Lokot for salt?), and the second, at the beginning of 1943, was thrown by the Germans into Lokot prison. Both women unconditionally recognized Antonina Ginzburg as Tonka the Machine Gunner.
“We were terribly afraid to jeopardize the reputation of a woman respected by everyone, a front-line soldier, a wonderful mother and wife,” recalls Golovachev. “That’s why our employees went to the Belarusian Lepel secretly, watched Antonina Ginzburg for a whole year, brought there one by one the surviving witnesses, a former punisher, one of her lovers, for identification. Only when every single one of them said the same thing - it’s her, Tonka the Machine Gunner, we recognized her by a noticeable crease on her forehead - the doubts disappeared.”
On June 2, 1978, Ginzburg (Makarova) was once again identified by someone who came from Leningrad region woman, former partner of the head of the Lokot prison. After which the respected citizen Lepel Antonina Makarovna was stopped on the street by polite people in civilian clothes, from whom she, as if realizing that the protracted game was over, only asked in a quiet voice for a cigarette. Do I need to clarify that this was the arrest of a war criminal? During a subsequent brief interrogation, she admitted that she was Tonka the machine gunner. On the same day, KGB officers for the Bryansk region took Makarova-Ginzburg to Bryansk.
During the investigative experiment, she was taken to Lokot. Bryansk investigators well remember how the residents who recognized her shied away and spat after her. And she walked and remembered everything. Calmly, as one remembers everyday affairs.
Antonina's husband, Victor Ginzburg, a war and labor veteran, promised to complain to the UN after her unexpected arrest. “We did not admit to him what they accuse the one with whom he lived happily his whole life. They were afraid that the man simply wouldn’t survive this,” investigators said.
When the old man was told the truth, he turned gray overnight. And I didn’t write any more complaints.
“The woman who was arrested did not convey a single line to her husband from the pre-trial detention center. And by the way, she also didn’t write anything to the two daughters she gave birth to after the war and didn’t ask to see him,” says investigator Leonid Savoskin. “When we managed to find contact with our accused, she began to talk about everything. About how she escaped by escaping from a German hospital and finding herself surrounded by us, she straightened out someone else’s veteran’s documents, according to which she began to live. She didn't hide anything, but that was the worst thing. One got the feeling that she sincerely misunderstood: why was she imprisoned, what SO terrible thing did she do? It was as if she had some kind of block in her head since the war, so that she herself would probably not go crazy. She remembered everything, every execution, but did not regret anything. She seemed to me a very cruel woman. I don't know what she was like when she was young. And what made her commit these crimes. The desire to survive? A moment of darkness? Horrors of war? In any case, this does not justify her. She destroyed not only strangers, but also her own family. She simply destroyed them with her exposure. A mental examination showed that Antonina Makarovna Makarova is sane.”
The investigators were very afraid of any excesses on the part of the accused: before there were cases when former policemen, healthy men, remembering past crimes, committed suicide right in the cell. The aged Tonya did not suffer from attacks of remorse. “You can’t be afraid all the time,” she said. “For the first ten years I waited for a knock on the door, and then I calmed down. There are no such sins that a person will be tormented all his life.”
“They disgraced me in my old age,” she complained to her jailers in the evenings, sitting in her cell. “Now after the verdict I’ll have to leave Lepel, otherwise every fool will point a finger at me.” I think they will give me three years probation. For what more? Then you need to somehow arrange your life again. How much is your salary in the pre-trial detention center, girls? Maybe I should get a job with you - the work is familiar..."
Her involvement in the execution of 168 people was officially proven during the investigation.
Antonina Makarova was sentenced to death. The court's decision came as an absolute surprise even to the people who led the investigation, not to mention the defendant herself. All requests for clemency from 55-year-old Antonina Makarova-Ginzburg in Moscow were rejected. The sentence was carried out on August 11, 1979
In Lokt, the security officers took her along the old and well-known path to her - to the pit where she carried out the sentences of Kaminsky and his gang. Bryansk investigators remember well how residents who recognized her shied away and spat after her. And she walked and remembered everything. Calmly, as one remembers everyday affairs. They say that she was even surprised at people’s hatred - after all, in her opinion, the war should have written off everything. And, they say, she didn’t ask to see her family either. Or to convey the message to them.
And in Lepel there was immediate talk about the event that excited everyone: it could not go unnoticed. Moreover, in Bryansk, where the trial of Antonina Makarova took place in December 1978, the Lepel residents found acquaintances - they sent the local newspaper “Bryansky Rabochiy” with a large publication under the heading “On the Steps of Betrayal.” The number was passed around among local residents. And on May 31, 1979, the Pravda newspaper published a large article about the trial under the heading “The Fall.” It told about the betrayal of Antonina Makarova, born in 1920, a native of the city of Moscow (according to other sources, the village of Malaya Volkovka, Sychevsky district, Smolensk region), who worked before the exposure as a senior inspector of the quality control department of the sewing shop of the Lepel woodworking association.
They say that she wrote appeals for pardon to the CPSU Central Committee, because the coming year 1979 was supposed to be the Year of the Woman. But the judges rejected the requests. The sentence was carried out.
This, perhaps, has not been seen in recent Russian history. Neither all-Union, nor Belarusian. The case of Antonina Makarova turned out to be high-profile. One might even say unique. For the first time in the post-war years, a female executioner was executed by court order, whose involvement in the execution of 168 people was officially proven during the investigation.
However, if we approach the issue from a strictly legal perspective, there is an opinion that from a purely legal point of view, she had no right to be sentenced to death. There are two reasons. The first is that more than 15 years passed from the day the crime was committed until the arrest, and the Soviet-era Criminal Code did not contain provisions on crimes for which statutes of limitations do not apply. A person who committed a crime punishable by execution could be brought to criminal liability even after the expiration of 15 years, but in this case the death penalty was replaced by imprisonment. The second is that in the USSR the death penalty was abolished in 1947, although it was restored three years later. As you know, laws that mitigate punishment have retroactive force, while aggravating ones do not. Thus, since the convicted woman was not brought to justice before the abolition of the death penalty in the USSR, the abolition law applied to her in full. The Restoration Act could only be applied to persons who committed crimes after it came into force. http://www.sb.by/post/49635/
Let's remember this operation, how, and also about, well, who cares about The original article is on the website InfoGlaz.rf Link to the article from which this copy was made -Her story illustrates like nothing else how terrible the war was. This is the story of the only woman in the world who personally killed one and a half thousand people, mostly her compatriots...
"REMEN OF CONSCIENCE IS COMPLETE BULLSHIT"
With the beginning of the Great Patriotic War, the modest and shy girl Tonya was called to the front. In 1941, during the Great Patriotic War, as a nurse, she was surrounded and found herself in occupied territory. She voluntarily joined the auxiliary police of the Lokot district of the Lokot district, where she carried out death sentences, executing about 1,500 people (according to official data). For executions she used a Maxim machine gun, given to her by the police at her request. At the end of the war, Makarova got a fake nurse’s ID and got a job in a hospital, married front-line soldier V.S., who was being treated in her hospital. Ginzburg, changed her last name.
Her cruelty is amazing... Tonka the machine gunner, as she was called then, worked in the occupied by German troops Soviet territory from 41 to 43, carrying out mass death sentences of fascists to partisan families.
Jerking the bolt of the machine gun, she didn’t think about those she was shooting - children, women, old people - it was just work for her. “What nonsense that you are then tormented by remorse. That those you kill come at night in nightmares. I still haven’t had a single dream,” she told her investigators during interrogations, when she was finally identified and detained - through 35 years after her last execution.
The criminal case of the Bryansk punisher Antonina Makarova-Ginzburg still rests in the depths of the FSB special storage facility. Access to it is strictly prohibited, and this is understandable, because there is nothing to be proud of here: in no other country in the world has a woman been born who has personally killed so many people.
ANOTHER NAME – ANOTHER LIFE
Thirty-three years after the Victory, this woman’s name was Antonina Makarovna Ginzburg. She was a front-line soldier, a labor veteran, respected and revered in her town. Her family had all the benefits required by their status: an apartment, insignia for milestone dates, and scarce sausage in their food rations. Her husband was also a participant in the war, with orders and medals. The two adult daughters were proud of their mother.
They looked up to her, they took an example from her: what a heroic fate: to march throughout the war as a simple nurse from Moscow to Koenigsberg. School teachers invited Antonina Makarovna to speak at the line, to tell the younger generation that in the life of every person there is always a place for heroic deeds. And the most important thing in war is not to be afraid to look death in the face.
She was arrested in the summer of 1978 in the Belarusian town of Lepel. A completely ordinary woman in a sand-colored raincoat with a string bag in her hands was walking down the street when a car stopped nearby and inconspicuous men in civilian clothes jumped out of it and said: “You urgently need to come with us!” surrounded her, not allowing her to escape.
"Can you guess why you were brought here?" - asked the investigator of the Bryansk KGB when she was brought in for the first interrogation. “Some kind of mistake,” the woman grinned in response.
“You are not Antonina Makarovna Ginzburg. You are Antonina Makarova, better known as Tonka the Muscovite or Tonka the Machine Gunner. You are a punitive woman, you worked for the Germans, carried out mass executions. Your atrocities in the village of Lokot, near Bryansk, are still being talked about legends. We have been looking for you for more than thirty years - now it is time to answer for what you have committed.
“So, it’s not in vain that last year my heart began to feel anxious, as if I felt that you would appear,” the woman said. “How long ago it was. It’s like it wasn’t with me at all. Almost my whole life has already passed. Well, write it down...”
From the interrogation protocol of Antonina Makarova-Ginzburg, June 1978:
“All those sentenced to death were the same for me. Only their number changed. Usually I was ordered to shoot a group of 27 people - that’s how many partisans the cell could accommodate. I shot about 500 meters from the prison near some pit. Those arrested were placed in a chain facing pit. One of the men rolled my machine gun to the execution site. At the command of my superiors, I knelt down and shot at the people until everyone fell dead..."
LOVE DRIVEN TO MADNESS
“Lead into nettles” - in Tony’s jargon this meant leading to execution. She herself died three times. The first time was in the fall of 1941, in the terrible “Vyazma cauldron,” as a young girl-medicine instructor. Hitler's troops were then advancing on Moscow as part of Operation Typhoon. Soviet commanders abandoned their armies to death, and this was not considered a crime - war has a different morality. More than a million Soviet boys and girls died in that Vyazemsk meat grinder in just six days, five hundred thousand were captured. The death of ordinary soldiers at that moment did not solve anything and did not bring victory closer, it was simply meaningless. Just like a nurse helping the dead...
19-year-old nurse Tonya Makarova woke up after a battle in the forest. The air smelled of burnt flesh. An unfamiliar soldier lay nearby. “Hey, are you still safe? My name is Nikolai Fedchuk.” “And I’m Tonya,” she didn’t feel anything, didn’t hear, didn’t understand, as if her soul had been shell-shocked, and only a human shell was left, and inside there was emptiness.
For three months, until the first snow, they wandered together through the thickets, getting out of the encirclement, not knowing either the direction of movement, or their final goal, or where their friends were, or where their enemies were. They were starving, breaking stolen slices of bread for two. During the day they shied away from military convoys, and at night they kept each other warm.
“I’m almost a Muscovite,” Tonya proudly lied to Nikolai. “There are many children in our family. And we are all Parfenovs. I’m the eldest, like Gorky, I came out into the world early. I grew up like a beech, taciturn. Once I came to a village school, to the first grade, and I forgot my last name. The teacher asks: “What is your name, girl?” And I know that it’s Parfenova, but I’m afraid to say. The kids from the back desk shout: “Yes, she’s Makarova, her father is Makar.” one in all the documents and wrote it down. After school I left for Moscow, then the war began. I had a different dream - I wanted to shoot a machine gun like Anka the machine gunner from Chapaev. “When we get to our people, let’s ask for a machine gun...”
In January 1942, dirty and ragged, Tonya and Nikolai finally came to the village of Krasny Kolodets. And then they had to part forever. “You know, my home village is nearby. I’m there now, I have a wife and children,” Nikolai told her goodbye. “I couldn’t confess to you before, forgive me. Thank you for the company. Then you’ll get out on your own somehow.” The girl begged not to leave her, confessed her love and said that she would be lost without him... But Nikolai was in a hurry home - to the woman he loved and his adored children...
For several days, Tonya wandered around the huts, rejoiced in Christ, and asked to stay. The compassionate housewives let her in at first, but after a few days they invariably refused the shelter, explaining that they themselves had nothing to eat. “Her look is bad,” the women said.
Rumor has it that Tonya really lost her mind at that moment. Perhaps Nikolai’s betrayal finished her off, or she simply ran out of strength - one way or another, she only had physical needs left. And she was also desperately trying to hook up with at least some man in the village - and it didn’t matter at all that everyone who remained lived with wives and families. Tonya didn’t want to be alone so much that she simply didn’t care about the feelings of others...
WHERE DREAMS LEAD
In the village where Tonya stopped at the beginning, there were no policemen. In the neighboring village, on the contrary, only punitive forces were registered. The front line here ran in the middle of the outskirts. One day she wandered around the outskirts, half-mad, lost, not knowing where, how and with whom she would spend that night. People in uniform stopped her and asked in Russian: “Who is she?” The girl said that her name was Antonina Makarova and that she was from Moscow, but for some reason she was absolutely not afraid...
She was brought to the village administration. The policemen complimented her, then took turns “loving” her. Then they gave her a whole glass of moonshine to drink and put a machine gun in her hands. As she dreamed of - to disperse people with a continuous machine-gun line. Living people.
Makarova-Ginzburg said during interrogations that the first time she was taken out to be shot by the partisans completely drunk, she did not understand what she was doing, recalls the investigator in her case, Leonid Savoskin. - But they paid well - 30 marks, and offered cooperation on an ongoing basis. After all, none of the Russian policemen wanted to get dirty; they preferred that the executions of partisans and members of their families be carried out by a woman. Homeless and lonely, Antonina was given a bed in a room at a local stud farm, where she could spend the night and store a machine gun. In the morning she voluntarily went to work
In the evenings, Antonina dressed up and went to a German club to dance. Other girls who worked as prostitutes for the Germans were not friends with her. Tonya turned up her nose and wore the most beautiful clothes. She often removed it from those whom she doomed to death.
At the dances, Tonya got drunk and changed partners like gloves... And in the morning she again went “on duty” and shot dozens of people... It’s scary to kill only the first, second, then, when the count goes into hundreds, it becomes just hard work, - Tonya said later.
“It seemed to me that the war would write off everything. I was simply doing my job, for which I was paid. I had to shoot not only partisans, but also members of their families, women, teenagers. I tried not to remember this. Although I remember the circumstances of one execution - before By shooting, a guy sentenced to death shouted to me: “We won’t see you again, goodbye, sister!”
PUNISHMENT
“Our employees conducted the search for Antonina Makarova for more than thirty years, passing it on to each other by inheritance,” said KGB Major Pyotr Nikolaevich Golovachev, who was involved in the search for Antonina Makarova in the 70s. “Periodically it ended up in the archive, then when we caught and interrogated another traitor to the Motherland, it again surfaced. Couldn’t Tonka have disappeared without a trace?! Now we can blame the authorities for incompetence and illiteracy. But during the post-war years, the KGB officers secretly and carefully checked all the women of the Soviet Union. who bore this name, patronymic and surname and who were suitable in age - there were about 250 such Tonka Makarovs in the USSR. But it’s useless. The real Tonka the machine gunner disappeared into thin air..."
But it was impossible to just take it and forget about it. “Her crimes were too terrible,” says Golovachev. “It was simply impossible to comprehend how many lives she took. Several people managed to escape, they were the main witnesses in the case. And so, when we interrogated them, they said that Tonka still comes to them in their dreams, young, with a machine gun, looking intently - and does not take her eyes off. They were convinced that the executioner girl was alive, and they asked that they find her in order to stop these nightmares. could have gotten married a long time ago and changed her passport, so we thoroughly studied the life path of all her possible relatives named Makarov..."
However, the accidental mistake of the village teacher Tony in the first grade, who wrote down her patronymic as a surname, allowed the “machine gunner” to elude retribution for so many years. Her real relatives, of course, never fell into the circle of interests of the investigation in this case.
But in 1976, one of the Moscow officials named Parfenov was going abroad. When filling out the application form for a foreign passport, he honestly listed the names and surnames of his siblings; the family was large, as many as five children. All of them were Parfenovs, and for some reason only one was Antonina Makarovna Makarov, married to Ginzburg in 1945, now living in Belarus.
Antonina's husband, Victor Ginzburg, a war and labor veteran, promised to complain to the UN after her unexpected arrest. “We didn’t admit to him what they were accusing the one with whom he had lived a happy life. We were afraid that the man simply wouldn’t survive this,” the investigators said.
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Victor Ginzburg bombarded various organizations with complaints, assuring that he loved his wife very much, and even if she had committed some crime - for example, embezzlement - he would forgive her everything. He also talked about how, as a wounded boy in April 1945, he was lying in a hospital near Koenigsberg, and suddenly she, a new nurse, Tonechka, entered the room. Innocent, pure, as if she had not been at war - and he fell in love with her at first sight, and a few days later they married.
Antonina took her husband’s surname, and after demobilization she went with him to the Belarusian Lepel, and not to Moscow, from where she was once called to the front. When the old man was told the truth, he turned gray overnight. And I didn’t write any more complaints.
“The woman who was arrested did not give a single line to her husband from the pre-trial detention center. And, by the way, she also did not write anything to her two daughters, whom she gave birth to after the war, and did not ask to see him,” says investigator Leonid Savoskin. “When we managed to find contact with our accused, she started talking about tell everyone about how she escaped from a German hospital and ended up in our surroundings, straightened out someone else’s veteran’s documents, according to which she began to live, but this was the most terrible thing. It felt like she was sincerely misunderstanding: Why was she imprisoned, what was SUCH a terrible thing she did? She killed not only strangers, but also her own family. She simply destroyed them with her exposure. A mental examination showed that Antonina Makarova is sane.”
EPILOGUE
Antonina Makarova-Ginzburg was shot at six o'clock in the morning on August 11, 1978, almost immediately after the death sentence was pronounced. The court's decision came as a complete surprise even to the people who led the investigation. All requests for clemency from 55-year-old Antonina Makarova-Ginzburg in Moscow were rejected.
In the Soviet Union, this was the last major case of traitors to the Motherland during the Great Patriotic War, and the only one in which a female punisher appeared. Never later were women executed by court order in the USSR.
When preparing the material, open sources on the history of the USSR, materials from the sites renascentia.ru, Wikipedia were used
Photo NTV, Wikipedia, Rusinka
The movie “The Executioner,” based on the true story of Tonka the Machine Gunner, was shown on TV; the KGB gave this case the name “Sadist.” It takes great skill or self-confidence to film those events. I watched the film only because of the actress Victoria Tolstoganova (+ the artists of the picture), I bet that she would turn out to be the main villain. In my opinion, “The Executioner” is very inferior to the similar Soviet film “Confrontation”. The director did not master the theme of the tragedy of betrayal and covered himself with the “tragedy of the detectives.” And a completely obscene sound came from a distance, showing L.I. Brezhnev is an idiot. For what?
Okay, let's get back to the real story.
35 years ago, for the first time in the history of capital punishment in the USSR, a female punisher was shot. Tonka the machine gunner cold-bloodedly shot captured partisans, communists, women, and children. Then fate protected her. But retribution took place on August 11, 1979. Ironically, that year was declared the Year of the Woman in the USSR.
Antonina Makarovna Makarova (surname at birth - Panfilova) was born in 1920 in Malaya Volkovka, Smolensk province. She had an ordinary, serene childhood, like all ordinary citizens of the USSR. When the girl went to school, the teacher mistakenly wrote her down as Makarova. From school documents, the incorrect last name migrated to other important papers. So Panfilova became Makarova.
When the Great Patriotic War began, the girl became a nurse. In the fall of 1941, she managed to survive in the “Vyazma Cauldron.” Having become the traveling wife of Nikolai Fedorchuk, she made her way with him to the nearest village. He became her first man and she fell in love with him. He simply took advantage of the situation. When they went to the Red Well in January 1942, Nikolai decided to end his relationship with Tonya, admitting that he was married and had children. The betrayal of Fedorchuk, who abandoned the girl to the mercy of fate, and the experience of the Vyazemsk meat grinder led to the fact that Tonya Makarova lost her mind. Wandering from one settlement to another, she was ready to give herself to everyone she met for a piece of bread. It is surprising that during her wanderings she was never wounded. So Makarova ended up in the Bryansk forests. She was arrested on the territory of the Lokot Republic formed by the Germans. 
Fearing for her life, she began to blame the Soviet government for everything, and then agreed to work for the Nazis. She believed that in this terrible massacre everything would be written off. Later, during interrogation, she said that the Germans did not want to get dirty themselves, and a special feature in the matter of shooting partisans was that the sentence was carried out by a Soviet girl.
So Tonka the nurse turned into Tonka the machine gunner. Psychiatrist-criminologist Vinogradov, who acted as a consultant on her case, emphasized: “She wanted to kill, and if she had gone to the front as a soldier, she would have shot at the Germans just as much without hesitation as at her future victims.” 
The Nazis settled Makarova at a local stud farm, which has now become a prison, giving her a small room where she lived and kept her coveted murder weapon - a machine gun. The first time the girl could not press the trigger. It was only when the Germans gave her alcohol that things began to boil.
In Makarova’s soul there were no other feelings, regret, pain, pangs of conscience, except fear for her life. During interrogation, she admitted: “I didn’t know those I was shooting. They didn't know me. Therefore, I was not ashamed in front of them. It happened that you would shoot, come closer, and someone else would twitch. Then she shot him in the head again so that the person would not suffer. Sometimes several prisoners had a piece of plywood with the inscription “partisan” hung on their chests. Some people sang something before they died. After the executions, I cleaned the machine gun in the guardhouse or in the yard. There was plenty of ammunition..."
She considered firing a machine gun at her former fellow citizens as ordinary work. Every day she shot 27 people, receiving 30 marks for it. In addition to punitive operations, Tonka entertained German officers, providing them with bed services and being considered a VIP whore of the Lokot Republic. She took off her outfits from the victims: “Why should something go to waste?”
According to official data, Antonina Makarova shot about 1,500 people; only about 200 people were able to recover their passport data.
In the summer of 1943, Makarova was sent to a German rear hospital for treatment for venereal diseases and escaped retribution after the liberation of Lokot by the Red Army. The traitors to the Motherland were executed, and only Tonka the Machine Gunner remained alive and unharmed, turning into a terrible legend of Soviet intelligence.
Soviet troops were advancing to the West, and Makarova again faced the prospect of losing her life. And this was what she feared most. In 1945, pretending to be a nurse who had escaped from captivity, she moved eastward, towards the Soviet Army. The NKVD believed her and gave her a new certificate, sending her to serve in the military hospital in Koenigsberg. There Tonya met the wounded front-line soldier Ginzburg and after marriage took his last name. Life for Antonina Makarova began anew - with a different biography. 
After the war, the Ginzburgs moved to their husband’s homeland in the Belarusian town of Lepel, where Antonina Makarovna got a job at a garment factory and became a leader in production. Her life was quite happy. She raised two daughters, was respected among her colleagues, and her portrait was on the local Honor Board. Past life I never once reminded myself of myself, either in nightmares or in reality. “It’s impossible to be afraid all the time,” she said during interrogation. “For the first ten years I waited for a knock on the door, and then I calmed down. There are no such sins that a person will be tormented all his life.”
But KGB workers have been shifting her case for more than 30 years, considering it a hanging case - Tonka the Machine Gunner disappeared without a trace, as if she had never existed at all. Investigators checked all her namesakes - about 250,000 people, but no one thought of looking for the Lokot monster under a different surname.
They were looking for the punisher among the prisoners and wounded. It was even suggested that she became an agent of Western intelligence services. And only when the case got to the investigator Golovachev, it moved from dead center. “Our employees have been conducting the search for Antonina Makarova for more than thirty years, passing it on to each other by inheritance,” KGB veteran Pyotr Golovachev is no longer afraid to reveal the cards of a long-standing case to journalists and willingly recalls details similar to the legend. - From time to time it ended up in the archive, then, when we caught and interrogated another traitor to the Motherland, it surfaced again. Couldn't Tonka disappear without a trace?! During the post-war years, KGB officers secretly and carefully checked all the women of the Soviet Union who bore this name, patronymic and surname and were suitable in age - there were about 250 such Tonek Makarovs in the USSR. But it's useless. The real Tonka the machine gunner seemed to have sunk into thin air...”
One incident put Tonka the Machine Gunner on the trail. In 1976, a fight with a knife wound occurred in Bryansk. The hooligans were arrested. One of the rowdies was unexpectedly identified as the head of the Lokot prison, Ivanin. For thirty years he lived quietly in the Bryansk region under a different name, changing his appearance. The KGB became interested in his case. Captain Golovachev methodically conducted interrogation after interrogation - and the real name of Tonka the Machine Gunner came to light - Antonina Makarova. Former boss Lokot prison, unfortunately, he could not tell the investigation anything worthwhile, since he took his own life by hanging himself in his cell.
The second opportunity to get on the trail of Tonka presented itself soon after these events. A certain Panfilov, who was her brother, was going abroad. In that time, in the application form for leaving, you had to indicate all your relatives - this name came up again. Investigators now owned necessary information- Antonina Makarovna Makarova. Here is the starting point of the search.
Having discovered the punisher in the person of an ordinary Soviet woman worker, the KGB men secretly monitored her in Lepel for a whole year. Then they managed to take Makarova’s fingerprints. At the factory there was a soda fountain for workers. And when Antonina quenched her thirst during the lunch break, the glass from which she drank was immediately and quietly taken away by the security officers.
But Makarova became suspicious, looked around more often, took a closer look, and then the surveillance was lifted. She had not been disturbed for a whole year, and her vigilance had weakened. The next stage of the investigation was to embarrass the military front-line soldier. Disguised as a veteran of the Great Patriotic War, the investigator was invited to a gala concert, dedicated to the Day Victory, where Makarova was also present. Having met Tonya, he began, as if by chance, to ask about the roads of the battle route, but she could not remember the names of the commanders or the names of the units. The experiment testing Makarova’s knowledge of the theater of military operations, the names of commanders and military units was a great success. 
“We were terribly afraid to jeopardize the reputation of a front-line soldier respected by all, so the surviving witnesses, a former punisher, one of her lovers, were brought one by one to the Belarusian Lepel for identification.” They all noted one external detail of the manic girl - a sullen crease on her forehead. The years have added wrinkles to her, but this feature has remained unchanged.
In July 1978, the main witness in the punisher’s case was brought to Lepel. They began to develop an operation to identify Tonka the Machine Gunner and arrest her. They decided to invite Makarova to SOBES for allegedly recalculating her pension. The role of the SOBES accountant was played by Golovachev. The witness also portrayed herself as an employee of this organization. If Makarova was successfully identified, the woman had to give the captain a prearranged signal. But she was noticeably nervous, and the security officer was afraid that she would ruin the operation.
When the unsuspecting Antonina Ginzburg entered the accounting department and began talking to Golovachev, the witness at first did not react at all. But when Ginzburg closed the office door, the woman, crying, identified the punisher. Soon Antonina Ginzburg was summoned to the head of the factory’s personnel department. There she was arrested and handcuffed. There were no emotions of surprise or indignation on the part of the detainee; she did not become hysterical, did not panic, and gave the impression of a determined and strong-willed woman. When she was brought to the Lepel KGB department, 58-year-old Antonina began to talk about her fate. The case file contains the testimony of investigator Leonid Savoskin about how the arrested woman behaved in the pre-trial detention center. She never wrote a letter to her husband or asked to see her daughters. “She didn’t hide anything, and that was the worst thing. One got the feeling that she sincerely misunderstood: why was she imprisoned, what SO terrible thing did she do? It was as if she had some kind of block in her head since the war, so that she herself would probably not go crazy. She remembered everything, every execution, but did not regret anything. She seemed to me a very cruel woman. I don't know what she was like when she was young. And what made her commit these crimes. The desire to survive? A moment of darkness? Horrors of war? In any case, this does not justify her. She destroyed not only strangers, but also her own family. She simply destroyed them with her exposure. A mental examination showed that Antonina Makarovna Makarova is sane.”
The most interesting thing is that she could not even imagine that she herself would be shot. “They disgraced me in my old age. Now after the verdict I will have to leave Lepel, otherwise every fool will point a finger at me. I think they will give me three years probation. For what more? Then you need to somehow arrange your life again. How much is your salary in the pre-trial detention center, girls? Maybe I should get a job with you - the work is familiar..."
Antonina's husband, Victor Ginzburg, a war and labor veteran, promised to complain to the UN after her unexpected arrest. “We did not admit to him what they accuse the one with whom he lived happily his whole life. They were afraid that the man simply wouldn’t survive this,” investigators said. But when he finally had to reveal the terrible details, he turned gray overnight. In the USSR, this was the last major case of traitors to the Motherland during the Great Patriotic War, and the only one in which a female punisher appeared. She was shot at six o'clock in the morning on August 11, 1979.
P.S. Almost 30 years later, after Tonka the Machine Gunner was found, journalists met with her family and friends. They lived a life full of sadness and shame, were seriously ill and died terribly. “Somehow everything fell apart at once,” said the daughter of Tonka the Machine Gunner, who is now the same age as her mother was when they came for her. - Pain, pain, pain... She ruined the lives of four generations... You want to ask, would I accept her if she suddenly returned? I would accept it. She’s a mother... But I don’t even know how to remember her: as alive or as dead? You don't know what's wrong with her? After all, according to the unspoken law, women were not shot anyway. Maybe she is still alive somewhere? And if not, then you tell me, I’ll finally go and light a candle for the repose of her soul.”
