Execution of war criminals in Leningrad. Public execution of fascists in Kyiv

5. Now let's look at Krasnodar. In fact, executions took place in different cities, but the documents are often not published, and videos of those events are not easy to find in a digitized version.

Eleven arrested German collaborators were accused of committing war crimes, in particular, the extermination of Soviet citizens:
1. Tishchenko Vasily Petrovich, born in 1914, native of the Krasnodar region. In August 1942, he voluntarily joined the Krasnodar occupation police, and was subsequently promoted to the position of foreman of the Sonderkommando SS-10-A for excellent service. Subsequently he became a Gestapo investigator, while simultaneously performing the duties of a secret agent. Together with German Gestapo officers, Tishchenko took part in raids, arrests, torture and executions of Soviet citizens. Gestapo investigations led by Tishchenko ended in death sentences or sentencing to concentration camps for those involved. Tishchenko also took part in the massacres of Soviet citizens in gas chambers.
2. Pushkarev Nikolai Semenovich, born in 1915, native of Dnepropetrovsk. He voluntarily joined the Krasnodar police in August 1942, then was promoted to the position of squad commander in the Sonderkommando. He took part in searches, arrests, protection, torture and executions of partisans, Soviet activists and civilians. Pushkarev also took part in the massacres of Soviet citizens in gas chambers. At the beginning of February 1943, during the retreat of German troops from Krasnodar, he participated in the bombing of the city Gestapo building in which the arrested were located, which led to the death of the latter.
3. Rechkalov Ivan Anisimovich, born in 1911, native of the Chelyabinsk region, was twice sentenced to imprisonment for theft. In August 1942, having evaded mobilization into the Red Army, Rechkalov defected to the Germans, joined the police, and a few days later was transferred to the Sonderkommando SS-10-A. Participated in identifying partisans and activists, arrests, protection and murders of Soviet citizens. Rechkalov also took part in the massacres of Soviet citizens in gas chambers.
4. Misan Grigory Nikitich, born in 1916, native of the Krasnodar region. In August 1942, he voluntarily joined the police force, and was soon transferred to the Sonderkommando. Participated in arrests, security, torture, and executions of Soviet citizens. Misan also took part in the massacres of Soviet citizens in gas chambers.
5. Kotomtsev Ivan Fedorovich, born in 1918, native of the Kirov region, was previously convicted of hooliganism. In September 1942, he voluntarily joined the police force, and in November he was transferred to the Sonderkommando. Participated in arrests, security, torture, and executions of Soviet citizens.
6. Naptsok Yunus Mitsukhovich, born in 1914, native of the Krasnodar region. He voluntarily served in the Sonderkommando, participated in arrests, security, torture, and executions of Soviet citizens.
7. Kladov Ignatiy Fedorovich, born in 1911, native of the Sverdlovsk region. He voluntarily served in the Sonderkommando, participated in arrests, security, torture, executions of Soviet citizens, and also served as a secret Gestapo agent.
8. Mikhail Pavlovich Lastovina, born in 1883, native of the Krasnodar region. In 1932, being a “kulak”, he escaped repression, came and got a job as a hospital orderly in Krasnodar. In December 1942, he assisted German troops in the massacre of sixty patients at this hospital.
9. Tuchkov Grigory Petrovich, born in 1909, native of the Krasnodar region. He voluntarily joined the police, then was transferred to the Sonderkommando. Participated in raids and arrests of anti-German Soviet citizens.
10. Pavlov Vasily Stepanovich, born in 1914, native of Tashkent. Voluntarily enlisted in the Sonderkommando. Participated in raids and arrests of anti-German Soviet citizens.
11. Paramonov Ivan Ivanovich, born in 1923, native of Rostov-on-Don. Voluntarily enlisted in the Sonderkommando. Participated in raids and arrests of anti-German Soviet citizens.
Tishchenko, Rechkalov, Lastovina and Pushkarev were charged under Art. 58-1 “a” of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR, the rest - under Art. 58-1 “b” of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR.
Based on Articles 319 and 320 of the Code of Criminal Procedure of the RSFSR, as well as guided by the decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR dated April 19, 1943, on July 17, 1943, the military tribunal sentenced Tishchenko, Rechkalov, Pushkarev, Naptsok, Misan, Kotomtsev, Kladov and Lastovina to capital punishment - death penalty by hanging. Paramonov, Tuchkov and Pavlov were sentenced to 20 years of hard labor. The verdict was met with thunderous applause from those present in the hall.
The sentence was carried out on July 18, 1943 at 13:00 on the central square of Krasnodar. About 50 thousand people were present in the square.

Military tribunal in besieged Leningrad. Executions for speculation, participation in grain theft, cannibalism, banditry. The end of the failed governor of Leningrad. Executions in territories occupied by fascist troops. The last public execution in the city: “The fulcrum has disappeared from under the feet of the condemned.”

Before approaching the events of the Great Patriotic War, let's provide a few more lines of statistics. Special services historian Vasily Berezhkov, already known to the reader, provides the following data on those executed in Leningrad up to 1945:

1939 - 72 executed,

The statistics here are eloquent. The pre-war executions, as is easy to understand, were the executions of some of Yezhov’s executioners, reprisals against enemies of the people who had not yet been killed, and a tribute to the spy mania of those years. I will cite only two names: Leningraders Konstantin Petrovich Vitko and Alexey Nikolaevich Vasiliev, both were sentenced to death for espionage and treason, the sentence was carried out on July 3 and September 23, 1939, respectively.

The war that began in 1941 could not but lead to a sharp tightening of the repressive mechanism. This is understandable: everyday life in war is always difficult, and for Leningraders they turned out to be especially difficult, because in addition to the great loss of life, hunger, cold and bombing, rampant crime was added. Food speculation, for example: in conditions of unbearable shortages, it was inevitable, and they fought against it, including by executions. One of the cases is described in a secret special message from the head of the Leningrad NKVD department, Pyotr Nikolaevich Kubatkin, dated November 7, 1941: a criminal group was formed in the system of trust canteens and restaurants in Leningrad, whose members “systematically stole large quantities of food from the warehouses and bases where they worked,” and then sold what they extracted at speculative prices. During the arrest of the leader of the group, the warehouse manager of the Caucasus restaurant, Burkalov, “the following items stolen by him were discovered: flour 250 kg, cereal 153 kg, sugar 130 kg. and other products."

Burkalov and one of his accomplices were sentenced to death. Those killed during the siege were buried in different places, including on the Levashovskaya wasteland.

Capital punishment was imposed during the blockade and “for inciting protests and participating in the theft of grain”: in January 1942 alone, seven were shot on such charges. It was not only about bandit attacks on stores, but also spontaneous riots that broke out in queues. There is a well-known incident in store No. 12 of the Leninsky District Food Store in January 1942: “About 20 citizens rushed behind the counter and began throwing bread from the shelves into the crowd,” as a result, according to NKVD estimates, about 160 kg of bread were stolen.

Food shortages led to executions even on the Road of Life: despite strict controls, some drivers managed to steal flour by pouring it out of sacks. Commissioner of the OATB echelons of the 102nd military highway N.V. Zinoviev later recalled: “If theft is discovered, then a military tribunal goes to the scene, the death penalty is imposed, and the sentence is immediately carried out. I happened to witness the execution of driver Kudryashov. The battalion lined up in a square. A closed car with a condemned man pulled up. He came out wearing felt boots, cotton pants, one shirt and no hat. Hands back, tied with a strap. About 10 shooters line up right there. The chairman of the tribunal reads the verdict. Then an order is given to the commandant, who commands the condemned: “Circle! On knees!" - and to the shooters: “Fire!” A salvo of 10 shots is heard, after which Kudryashov shudders, continues to kneel for some time, and then falls face down into the snow. The commandant comes up and shoots him in the back of the head with a revolver, after which the corpse is loaded into the back of a car and taken away somewhere.”

Among the siege crimes caused by hunger is the worst - cannibalism. In Kubatkin’s special message dated June 2, 1942, one can find summary statistics of cannibalism cases: 1,965 people were arrested, investigations into 1,913 of them were completed, 586 were sentenced to capital punishment, and 668 were sentenced to prison. The then military prosecutor of Leningrad, Anton Ivanovich Panfilenko, informed the leadership and about other details: according to his data, natives of Leningrad made up less than 15% of the cannibals, the rest were newcomers; Only 2% of those prosecuted had a previous criminal record.

One of these cases was reflected in the blockade diary of Lyubov Vasilievna Shaporina, entry dated February 10, 1942: “A certain Karamysheva lived in apartment 98 of our building with her daughter Valya, 12 years old, and her teenage son, an artisan. The neighbor says: “I was sick, my sister had a day off, and I persuaded her to stay with me. Suddenly I hear the Karamyshevs screaming. Well, I say, Valka is being whipped. No, they shout: “Save, save.” The sister rushed to the Karamyshevs’ door, knocked, but they didn’t open it, but the cry of “save me” grew louder. Then other neighbors ran out, everyone knocked on the door, demanding to open it. The door opened, a girl covered in blood ran out of it, followed by Karamysheva, her hands also covered in blood, and Valka was playing the guitar and singing at the top of her lungs. He says: an ax fell from the stove onto a girl. The management director told the information that became clear during the interrogation. Karamysheva met a girl at the church who was asking for alms. She invited her to her place, promised to feed her and give her ten. At home they assigned roles. Valya sang to drown out the screams, the son covered the girl’s mouth. At first Karamysheva thought of stunning the girl with a log, then hit her on the head with an ax. But the girl was saved by a thick down hat. They wanted to kill and eat. Karamysheva and her son were shot. My daughter was placed in a special school.”

Another case is in Kubatkin’s message dated May 2, 1942, which talks about a female gang captured at the Razliv station: “The gang members visited bread and grocery stores, targeted the victim and lured her to G.’s apartment, allegedly to exchange things for food .

During a conversation in G.’s apartment, gang member V. committed murder with an ax blow to the back of the head. The corpses of the murdered gang members were dismembered and eaten. Clothes, money and food cards were shared among themselves.

During January-March, gang members killed 13 people. In addition, 2 corpses were stolen from the cemetery and used for food.”

All six members of the gang were sentenced to death by a military tribunal. During the blockade, such a fate awaited all those cannibals who killed and then consumed the meat of their victims as food: their crimes were classified as banditry. Those who consumed the meat of corpses were, for the most part, sentenced to prison, although capital punishment sometimes awaited them (as, for example, the milling machine operator of the Bolshevik plant K., who in December 1941 cut off the legs “from unburied corpses at the Serafimovskoye cemetery for the purpose of consumption"). Let us also pay attention to the difference between the total number of people in Kubatkin’s statistics and the number of those convicted: the rest, apparently, did not live to see the verdict.

Unfortunately, cases of cannibalism continued in the blockaded city even after Kubatkin compiled his terrifying statistics. There were also new executions. Unemployed K, 59 years old, was executed because on July 1, 1942, “having lured a five-year-old boy I. to her apartment, killed him and consumed the corpse as food.” Around the same time, assistant driver of the Finnish Line of the Oktyabrskaya Railway A., 36 years old, killed his neighbor, an employee of the technical school of the City Cleaning Trust, dismembered the body “and prepared parts of it for consumption.” He was detained on the street by a policeman with a bag containing the severed head of a neighbor. According to the verdict of the military tribunal, he was shot.

The famine in besieged Leningrad also contributed to ordinary banditry: “Individual criminal elements, in order to take possession of ration cards and food products, committed bandit murders of citizens.” This also posed a problem for the city. And it is no coincidence that on November 25, 1942, the military council of the Leningrad Front, headed by Leonid Aleksandrovich Govorov, adopted resolution No. 001359 “On measures to combat banditry in Leningrad,” which stated harshly and succinctly: “Cases of banditry are to be considered within 24 hours, bandits are to be sentenced to death and publish several verdicts in the press.”

They were also sentenced to death for less serious crimes. Evidence of this is not difficult to find in the besieged issues of the Leningradskaya Pravda newspaper. At the beginning of November 1941, for example, citizen I. Ronis, the head of a gang that systematically stole food and manufactured goods cards from citizens, was sentenced to capital punishment by a military tribunal. In April 1942, citizen A.F. was shot. Bakanov, who, “entering the apartment of citizen S., stole her things,” and also with an accomplice “robbed two citizens, using their bread cards.” Reports about such trials and executed sentences were published regularly in the first months of the blockade under the constant heading “In the military tribunal.” Although the executions themselves were not public, the edifying element in these executions was still the most important.

All these crimes are purely criminal, but there were also instances of political crimes during the blockade. Siege historian Nikita Lomagin writes that “on average, during the war months of 1941, 10–15 people were shot per day in the city for anti-Soviet activities,” but notes that “the number of people convicted of robbery, banditry and murder was three times higher , rather than “political”..."

What political crimes are we talking about? A report on the activities of the Leningrad police, compiled in the fall of 1943, states directly: “In the first period of the war, there were manifestations of anti-Soviet pro-fascist agitation, the dissemination of false rumors, leaflets, etc.<…>Decisive, severe measures were taken against the defendants in these cases, which yielded positive results in terms of reducing this type of crime.”

And again, Leningradskaya Pravda gives us examples. On July 3, 1941, for example, she notified readers that the military tribunal of the NKVD troops of the Leningrad District had examined the case against V.I. Koltsov for distributing anti-Soviet leaflets “fabricated by the Finnish White Guard” among visitors to cafe-buffets, and sentenced him to death. On September 30, 1941, the newspaper reported about “the case of Smetanin Yu.K., Sergeeva E.V., and Surin V.M. on charges of counter-revolutionary agitation”: the accused not only spread “false rumors aimed at weakening the power of the Red Army,” but also kept fascist leaflets they had collected. The ending is clear: “Fascist agents Smetanin, Sergeeva and Surin were sentenced to capital punishment - execution. The sentence has been carried out."

The severity of blockade justice was sometimes aggravated by the excessive zeal of the NKVD. The case of a group of Leningrad scientists convicted of anti-Soviet sentiments and the creation of a counter-revolutionary organization called the “Committee of Public Salvation” affected dozens of people, and five were shot by a military tribunal in the summer of 1942: the outstanding optical scientist, corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Sciences, Vladimir Sergeevich Ignatovsky, his wife, professors Nikolai Artamonovich Artemyev and S.M. Chanyshev, senior engineer of the Institute of Precision Mechanics Konstantin Alekseevich Lyubov. After the war, in 1957, the special inspection of the KGB personnel department was forced to state: “No objective data about the existence of a counter-revolutionary organization among scientists, except for the testimony of the arrested themselves, obtained as a result of physical and moral pressure on them, was obtained during the investigation.” . And a year later, the Party Control Committee admitted something else: in the Leningrad NKVD department, “the criminal practice of interrogating prisoners after they were sentenced to heavy duty was widespread. During these interrogations, by means of promises to save the lives of those sentenced to death, incriminating evidence against other persons, which the investigation needed, was extorted.”

A clear confirmation that pre-mortem interrogations - such as once in the Kovalevsky forest - were at that time a permanent working tool of the Cheka / NKVD.

Another example, a later one, reminds us that defectors and saboteurs also appeared in besieged Leningrad - as a rule, from among the captured Soviet citizens. They usually tried to find shelter with relatives, and if they failed, severe punishment awaited everyone. On June 16, 1942, the military tribunal of the Baltic Fleet sentenced to death and confiscation of property three relatives of the deserter and saboteur Emelyanov - his wife, evacuation hospital employee Nadezhda Afanasyevna Emelyanova, brother-in-law Vasily Afanasyevich Voitko-Vasiliev and mother-in-law Alexandra Ignatievna Voitko-Vasilieva, as well as the wife of another saboteur Kulikov, postman of the 28th post office Maria Petrovna Kulikova. All of them admitted to assisting dangerous relatives, as well as receiving money from the enemy. From Emelyanova’s testimony: “In total, I received 7,000 rubles; I committed treason not for political reasons and not because I was hostile to Soviet power, but solely due to moral depression due to the death of my father and hunger.”

Finally, two more high-profile cases - geography teacher Alexei Ivanovich Vinokurov and senior auditor-inspector of the Leningrad city department of public education Alexei Mikhailovich Kruglov. The first not only “systematically carried out counter-revolutionary anti-Soviet agitation among school employees, students and those around him,” but also kept a diary filled with very risky statements. Here is just one quote: “Everyone lives in hopes of a speedy deliverance and each believes in it in his own way. The population endures unheard of hardships, many die, but, oddly enough, there are still many people in the city who believe in the victory of the adventurers.”

The sentence given to the geography teacher on March 16, 1943 by the military tribunal of the USSR NKVD troops of the Leningrad District and the rear guards of the Leningrad Front was still the same - execution; it was carried out on March 19.

Vinokurov’s siege diary, it should be added, was published in the 21st century.

The case of Alexei Mikhailovich Kruglov became even more noticeable. He was arrested on January 26, 1943, shortly after he told his friends: “If you see a car or carriage with a swastika driving along Nevsky, then know that I am riding in them. Feel free to take off your hat and come over.” During the investigation, it turned out that Kruglov was in contact with representatives of German intelligence and even agreed to take the post of governor of the city after the occupation of Leningrad. On April 8, 1943, a military tribunal sentenced the failed governor to capital punishment with confiscation of property; on April 14, the sentence was carried out.

A special place in the life of justice in the blockaded city was occupied by purely military crimes committed by career soldiers and officers of the Leningrad Front. One of the eloquent examples is the sentence passed on December 2, 1941 by the front military tribunal to the former commander and commissar of the 80th Infantry Division, Ivan Mikhailovich Frolov and Konstantin Dmitrievich Ivanov. Both of them, having received a verbal order from the commander to break through the enemy blockade in their sector, “had a defeatist attitude towards the implementation of the combat order of the Front Command, showed cowardice and criminal inaction, and Frolov told two representatives of the front 3 hours before the start of the operation that he did not believe in successful outcome of the operation."

The tribunal’s verdict stated: “Frolov and Ivanov violated the military oath, dishonored the high rank of a soldier of the Red Army and, with their cowardly defeatist actions, caused serious damage to the troops of the Leningrad Front.” Both of them were stripped of their military ranks and shot.

And some more statistics: according to a memo from the special department of the NKVD of the Leningrad Front, addressed to Headquarters representative Kliment Voroshilov, from May to December 1942 alone, almost four thousand soldiers and officers were arrested for espionage, sabotage, treasonable intentions, defeatist agitation, desertion and self-mutilation; Of these, 1,538 people were sentenced to capital punishment.

...The time has come to move on to the most difficult chapter of military history, one of the most dramatic parts of this already difficult book - to the executions in the lands occupied by the Nazis. The central part of Leningrad, as everyone knows, was able to be defended from the enemy at the cost of enormous efforts and losses, but the suburbs - including Tsarskoe Selo, Peterhof, Krasnoe Selo, then belonging to the Leningrad region, but now included within the city limits - found themselves under the Germans . It was a truly tragic period in the history of these suburbs. It is no coincidence that the poetess Vera Inber wrote in her poem “Pulkovo Meridian,” created in 1941–1943:

We will take revenge for everything: for our city,

The great creation of Petrovo,

For residents left homeless,

For the Hermitage, dead as a tomb,

For the gallows in the park over the water,

Where did young Pushkin become a poet...

Although Vera Mikhailovna was not entirely accurate - apparently, the Nazis did not erect gallows in Tsarskoye Selo parks, but they often shot there. Pushkin resident Pavel Bazilevich, who found the occupation as an 11-year-old child and lived with his mother in the left half-circle of the Catherine Palace, recalled: “For water, I went to the park to the spring of the monument, Girl with a Jug,” the only place with clean drinking water. I walked through Triangular Square, My Own Garden and further down. Every morning I saw a terrible picture. A German came out of the palace and led a man in front of him. Often these were women with children. The fascist led them to a crater near the Evening Hall and shot them in the back or the back of the head with a pistol, and then pushed them into the pit. This is how the Germans dealt with the Jews. They didn't pay attention to me. I remember this: a German executioner, always dressed in a black sweater with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows.”

Not only Jews were shot. Acts on the atrocities of the Nazi invaders, drawn up in 1944–1945 by special commissions after the liberation of the Leningrad suburbs from occupation, recorded: people were executed in Pushkin, Pavlovsk, Peterhof, and Krasnoe Selo. In Pavlovsk, for example, as the local commission was able to establish, the occupation authorities shot over 227 residents and hanged six.

Mass executions took place on the territory of Pavlovsky Park, in the area of ​​mass graves, but not only there; When the Nazis retreated, ordinary Pavlovsk trees were used to deal with local residents - and Anna Ivanovna Zelenova, director of the Pavlovsk palace and park, noted in February 1944 that “even now the tree branches are broken and the ropes are dangling.”

It was not possible to collect clear statistics for the city of Pushkin; The number of those executed was estimated by the 1945 commission at 250–300 people; modern historians of the Holocaust believe that up to 800 Jews alone were exterminated. They were shot on the Rose Field, in the Lyceum Garden, in Aleksandrovsky and Babolovsky parks. Witness Ksenia Dmitrievna Bolshakova told how already on September 20, three days after their invasion of Pushkin, the Germans exterminated an entire group of Jews in the square in front of the Catherine Palace: “...Then they opened fire from machine guns. This is how these children were shot. The corpses of the executed fifteen adults and 23 children lay on the square for about 12 days, and then 2 German officers came to my room, one of them spoke Russian well, who suggested that I remove the stinking corpses from the palace square. I and several citizens from among the residents of the city of Pushkin buried corpses in craters on the palace square, and some of the corpses, about 5 pieces, were buried in the Own garden opposite the room of Alexander II, in Catherine Park. Buried in a trench."

Pavel Bazilevich also recalled something else: “The German commandant’s office was then located in the pharmacy building opposite the Avangard cinema.” Here, on electric lighting poles, the Nazis hanged those they considered guilty of something. There they hanged my comrade Vanya Yaritsa along with his father.” Another resident of Pushkin, Nina Zenkovich, echoes him: “The Germans used the lamp posts on Komsomolskaya, Vasenko streets and near the Lyceum as gallows, and in the park opposite the Avangard cinema, where the chapel now stands, there was a gallows on which people were hanged with signs on the chest “I am a partisan” or “I am a marauder”..."

Gallows, as another witness, Anna Mikhailovna Alexandrova, told the 1945 commission, stood throughout Pushkin during the occupation: “There were a lot of gallows with hanged people throughout the city: on the street. Komsomolskaya, opposite st. Comintern and at the Alexander Palace, - with the inscriptions: “For communication with the partisans”, “Jew (Jews)”. The same witness Averina, who added one more address to the mournful topography: “When I went to buy potatoes in early October 1941, I saw hanged people on Oktyabrsky Boulevard.”

In general, almost all of Pushkin was then lined with gallows, and the bodies of the hanged were not allowed to be removed for weeks. A clear confirmation of the kind of “Ordnung” the fascist war machine brought to Russian soil.

This is evidenced by a fragment of the memoirs of Svetlana Belyaeva, the daughter of the outstanding science fiction writer Alexander Belyaev, who was then forced to stay in Pushkin for health reasons: “I almost didn’t go out into the street, I watched life through a peephole melted in the frosty glass. Through it I could see a boarded-up “sweet” stall, trees covered in frost, and a post with a “transition” arrow... One day, after breathing through the peephole, I clung to the window, and my heart sank - instead of the “transition” arrow, a man with a plywood sheet was hanging on the crossbar on the chest. There was a small crowd standing near the pillar. While hanging, the Germans drove all passers-by to the scene of the incident for warning. Numb with horror, I looked out the window, unable to take my eyes off the hanged man, and loudly chattered my teeth.

Neither mother nor grandmother were at home at that moment. When my mother returned, I rushed to her, trying to tell her about what I had seen, but I just burst into tears. Having calmed down, I told my mother about the hanged man. After listening to me, my mother, in an unnaturally calm voice, answered me that she had seen it too.

Why him, why? - I asked, tugging at my mother’s sleeve. Half turning away, my mother said to the side:

It is written on the board that he is a bad judge and a friend of the Jews.

The hanged man was not removed for almost a whole week, and he hung, dusted with snow, swaying in the strong wind. After it was removed, the pole was empty for several days, then they hanged a woman on it, calling her a burglar. There were people who knew her who said that the woman, like us, moved from a broken house to another apartment, and went to her place to get things.”

Why were the occupiers executed? Jews - for nationality, communists - for belonging to the party, the rest, as the reader has already understood, for various things - for connections with partisans and Red Army soldiers, for opposing the occupying power and violating the norms and rules established by it, sometimes for criminal offenses: in Pushkin at the time The occupation was hungry and cold, people got their food as best they could.

And Olga Fedorovna Berggolts, who found herself in Pushkin literally a day after his release, recalled another crime for which local residents were threatened with execution: “On the gate leading to the courtyard of the Catherine Palace, there is a stenciled inscription on plywood in German and Russian: “Stop.” . Restricted area. For being in the zone - execution. Commandant of the city of Pushkin."

And at the gates of Alexander Park there are two plywood boards, also in Russian and German. On one there is an inscription: “Entrance into the park is strictly prohibited. For violation - execution." On another: “Civilians, even accompanied by German soldiers, are not allowed to enter.” (I give the inscription with all the spelling features.) We removed these boards and took them with us. Then we entered our park, for entering which only yesterday a Russian person was threatened with execution...”

There were almost no executions in Peterhof - and only because the Germans quickly organized the evacuation of local residents to Ropsha, but there they began in full swing. Witness Pulkina, interviewed by the commission in 1944, recalled the following episode: “They held a meeting at which they asked to hand over communists and Jews. There were no Jews; one communist, Ropshinsky, was present, but he was not extradited, and the next day he was hanged anyway. He hung for a very long time, he was photographed, and then many soldiers had cards, who showed them off, boasting. I saw other hanged cards even earlier; many soldiers also had them. Showing the cards, they watched the face to see if there was any sympathy or compassion.”

Gallows, gallows... One can imagine the impression all these reprisals made on the residents of the Leningrad suburbs, for whom public execution was a distant relic of tsarism. The occupiers sowed fear, but hatred towards them was even stronger.

This hatred found vent in the last public execution in the entire history of the city. Almost eight months have passed since the day of the Great Victory - and at 11 o’clock in the morning on January 5, 1946, on the Vyborg side of Leningrad near the Gigant cinema: “The sentence was carried out on the Nazi villains... sentenced by the Military Tribunal of the Leningrad Military District for committing mass executions, atrocities and violence against the civilian Soviet population, burning and looting of cities and villages, deportation of Soviet citizens into German slavery - death by hanging" (from LenTASS report).

Eight people then ended up on the gallows: the former military commandant of Pskov, Major General Heinrich Remlinger, and those who served in special forces, Captain Karl Hermann Strüfing, Lieutenant Eduard Sonnenfeld, Chief Sergeants Ernst Böhm and Fritz Engel, Chief Corporal Erwin Skotki, privates Gerhard Janicke and Erwin Ernst Herer. Each of them accounted for more than a dozen ruined lives, which they themselves admitted to during the trial, which took place in the Vyborg Palace of Culture. We were talking about war crimes committed mainly in the current Pskov region.

The Military Tribunal of the Leningrad Military District has been in session since December 28, 1945; on the evening of January 4, 1946, the verdict was pronounced, and the execution took place the next morning. According to LenTASS, “numerous workers present in the square greeted the execution of the sentence with unanimous approval.” In Leningradskaya Pravda, the newspaper’s war correspondent Mark Lanskoy succinctly reported on what happened: “Eight war criminals hung from a strong crossbar in Leningrad yesterday. In the last minutes, they again met the hating eyes of the people. They again heard whistles and curses, escorting them to a shameful death.

The cars started moving... The last point of support left from under the feet of the convicts. The sentence was carried out."

Leningrad writer Pavel Luknitsky also witnessed the execution and left a detailed description of it, which the reader will find at the end of this book. Let us quote here a short passage about the key moment of the execution: “The condemned do not move. They all froze, the last two or three minutes of life remained for them.

“Comrade Commandant, I order the sentence to be carried out!” - the prosecutor commands loudly and clearly.

The commandant, in a sheepskin coat, with his hand on his earflap hat, turns sharply from the jeep to the gallows, the general jumps off the car and steps back. "Willis" was about to reverse, drop the chair, stop, and remain in place until the end of the execution.

The commandant makes a sign with his hand, says something, the fifth soldier on each vehicle begins to throw a noose around the neck of the condemned.

I am omitting here the naturalistic details of the moment of execution - the reader does not need them. I will give just one single point. When the trucks started moving very slowly at once, and when the ground began to disappear from under the feet of the convicts, each of them was involuntarily forced to take several small steps, Sonenfeld, unlike the others, took a decisive step forward in order to quickly jump off the wooden platform of the body himself. so that the noose would jerk him more sharply. His eyes at that moment were decisive and stubborn... Sonnenfeld died first. All convicts accepted death silently and without any gestures.”

On the same day, Luknitsky wrote down, summing up his own feelings: “Probably, if I had seen a public execution before the war, such an execution would have made a terrible impression on me. But, obviously, like for everyone who spent the entire war in Leningrad and at the front, nothing can be too strong an impression. I didn’t think that in general everything would turn out to be so relatively unimpressive for me. And I didn’t see any people in the square who were affected in any way, other than some excitement, by the impressions of this spectacle. Probably, everyone who survived the war and hated the vile enemy felt the justice of the verdict and felt a sense of satisfaction, knowing what kind of bestial creatures were those who were hanged today for all their countless atrocities.”

The fairness of the verdict is, of course, the exact words and today they do not raise the slightest doubt.

That was, let’s put the point one more time, the last public death penalty in the history of the city.