Future Hero of the Soviet Union Dmitry Karbyshev was born in 1880 in Omsk. He was of noble origin: his father worked as a military official. When the head of the family died untimely, the child was only 12 years old, and the care of him fell on the shoulders of the mother.
Childhood
The family had Tatar roots and belonged to the ethno-confessional group of Kryashens who professed Orthodoxy, despite their Turkic origin. Dmitry Karbyshev also had an older brother. In 1887, he was arrested for participating in the revolutionary movement of Kazan University students. Vladimir was arrested and the family found itself in a difficult situation.
Nevertheless, Dmitry Karbyshev was able to graduate from the Siberian Cadet Corps thanks to his talents and diligence. After this educational institution, the Nikolaev Engineering School followed. In it, the young military man also showed himself perfectly. Karbyshev was sent to the border in Manchuria, where he served as one of the chiefs in the company in charge of telegraph communications.
Service in the tsarist army
On the eve of the Russo-Japanese War junior officerreceived the military rank of lieutenant. With the outbreak of the armed conflict, Dmitry Karbyshev was sent to intelligence. He laid communications, was responsible for the condition of bridges at the front and participated in some important battles. So, he was in the middle of nowhere when the Battle of Mukden broke out.
After the end of the war, he did not live long in Vladivostok, where he continued to serve in the engineer battalion. In 1908–1911 The officer was trained at the Nikolaev Military Engineering Academy. After graduating from it, he went to Brest-Litovsk as a staff captain, where he took part in the construction of the Brest Fortress.
Since during these years Karbyshev was on the western borders of the country, he was at the front of the First World War from the very first day of its announcement. Most of the officer's service was under the command of the famous Alexei Brusilov. It was the Southwestern Front, where Russia waged war with Austria-Hungary with varying success. So, for example, Karbyshev took part in the successful capture of Przemysl, as well as in the Brusilov breakthrough. Karbyshev spent the last days of the war on the border with Romania, where he was engaged in strengthening defensive positions. In the course of several years at the front, he managed to get wounded in the leg, but still returned to duty.
Transition to the Red Army
In October 1917, a coup took place in Petrograd, after which the Bolsheviks came to power. Vladimir Lenin wanted to end the war with Germany as soon as possible in order to redirect all his forces to fight against internal enemies: the white movement. To do this, in the armymass propaganda began, agitating for Soviet power.
That's how Karbyshev ended up in the ranks of the Red Guard. In it, he was responsible for organizing defensive and engineering work. Karbyshev did especially much in the Volga region, where in 1918–1919. lay the Eastern Front. The talent and ability of the engineer helped the Red Army to gain a foothold in this region and continue its offensive towards the Urals. Karbyshev's career growth culminated in his appointment in the 5th Army of the Red Army to one of the leading posts. He ended the civil war in the Crimea, where he was responsible for engineering work in Perekop, which connects the peninsula with the mainland.
Between World Wars
In the peaceful period of the 20s and 30s, Karbyshev taught at military academies and even became a professor. Periodically, he took part in the implementation of important infrastructure defense projects. For example, we are talking about "Stalin's Lines".
With the outbreak of the Soviet-Finnish war in 1939, Karbyshev ended up at headquarters, from where he wrote recommendations on breaking through the Mannerheim defensive line. A year later, he became a lieutenant general and a doctor of military sciences.
During his publicistic activity, Karbyshev wrote about 100 works on engineering sciences. According to his textbooks and manuals, many specialists of the Red Army were trained right up to the Great Patriotic War itself. General Karbyshev devoted a lot of time to studying the issue of forcing rivers during armed conflicts. In 1940 he joined the CPSU (b).
German captivity
Fora few weeks before the start of World War II, General Karbyshev was sent to serve in the headquarters of the 3rd Army. He was in Grodno - very close to the border. It was here that the first blows of the Wehrmacht were directed when the Blitzkrieg operation began on June 22, 1941.
After a few days, Karbyshev's army and headquarters were surrounded. An attempt to escape from the boiler failed, and the general was shell-shocked in the Mogilev region, not far from the Dnieper.
After being captured, he went through many concentration camps, the last of which was Mauthausen. General Karbyshev was a well-known specialist abroad. Therefore, the Nazis from the Gestapo and the SS tried in various ways to win over to their side an already elderly officer who could pass valuable information to the German headquarters and help the Reich.
The Nazis believed that they could easily persuade Karbyshev to cooperate with them. The officer was from the nobility, he served in the tsarist army for many years. These features of the biography could indicate that General Karbyshev is a random person in the Bolshevik circle and will gladly make a deal with the Reich.
The
60-year-old officer was brought several times for explanatory conversations with the relevant authorities, but the old man refused to cooperate with the Germans. Each time he confidently declared that the Soviet Union would win the Great Patriotic War, and the Nazis would be defeated. None of his actions indicated that the prisoner was broken or discouraged.
In Hammelburg
In the spring of 1942 Karbyshev Dmitry Mikhailovichwas transferred to Hammelburg. It was a special concentration camp for captured officers. Here the most comfortable living conditions were created for them. Thus, the German leadership tried to win over to its side high-ranking officers of the enemy armies, who enjoyed great prestige in their homeland. In total, during the war, 18 thousand Soviet prisoners visited Hammelburg. Each of them had high military ranks. Many broke down after they left the death camps and found themselves in comfortable and convenient places of detention, where they had friendly conversations with them. However, Karbyshev Dmitry Mikhailovich did not react in any way to the psychological treatment of the enemy and continued to remain loyal to the Soviet Union.
A special person was assigned to the general - Colonel Pelit. This Wehrmacht officer once served in the army of Tsarist Russia and was fluent in Russian. In addition, he worked with Karbyshev during World War I in Brest-Litovsk.
The old comrade tried to find a variety of approaches to Karbyshev. If he refused direct cooperation with the Wehrmacht, then Pelit offered him compromise options, for example, to work as a historian and describe the military operations of the Red Army in the current war. However, even such proposals had no effect on the officer.
Interestingly, the Germans initially wanted Karbyshev to be at the head of the Russian Liberation Army, which was eventually led by General Vlasov. But regular refusals to cooperate did their job: the Wehrmacht abandoned its idea. Now in Germany they were waiting for at least the fact that the prisoner would agree to work in Berlin as a valuable logistics specialist.
In Berlin
General Dmitry Karbyshev, whose biography consisted of constant moving, was still a tasty morsel for the Reich, and the Germans did not lose hope of finding a common language with him. After the failure in Hammelburg, they transferred the old man to solitary confinement in Berlin and kept him in the dark for three weeks.
This was done on purpose to remind Karbyshev that he can become a victim of terror at any moment if he does not wish to cooperate with the Wehrmacht. Finally, the prisoner was sent to the investigator for the last time. The Germans asked for help from one of their most respected military engineers. It was Heinz Rubenheimer. This well-known expert in the pre-war period, like Karbyshev, worked on monographs on their general profile. Dmitry Mikhailovich himself treated him with well-known reverence, as a respected specialist.
Rubenheimer made his counterpart a weighty proposal. If Karbyshev agreed to cooperate, he could get his own private apartment and complete economic security thanks to the treasury of the German state. In addition, the engineer was offered free access to any libraries and archives in Germany. He could do his own theoretical research or work on experiments in the field of engineering. At the same time, Karbyshev was allowed to recruit a team of specialist assistants. An officer would become a lieutenant general in the army of the German state.
Karbyshev's feat was that he rejected all the proposals of the enemy, despite several very persistent attempts. A variety of methods of persuasion were used against him: intimidation, flattery, promises, etc. In the end, he was offered only a theoretical job. That is, Karbyshev did not even need to scold Stalin and the Soviet leadership. All that was required of him was to become an obedient cog in the Third Reich system.
Despite his he alth problems and his impressive age, General Dmitry Karbyshev this time again answered with a decisive refusal. After that, the German leadership gave up on him and wrote him off as a man fanatically devoted to the disastrous cause of Bolshevism. The Reich could not use such people for its own purposes.
At hard labor
From Berlin, Karbyshev was transferred to Flossenbürg - a concentration camp where cruel orders reigned, and prisoners ruined their he alth without interruption in hard labor. And if such labor deprived the young captives of the remnants of their strength, then one can imagine how difficult it was for the elderly Karbyshev, who was already in his seventies.
However, throughout his stay in Flussenbürg, he never once complained to the camp management about the poor conditions of detention. After the war, the Soviet Union recognized the names of the heroes who did not break down in the concentration camps. The courageous behavior of the general was told by numerous prisoners who had been with him at the same work. Dmitry Karbyshev, whose feat was accomplished every day, became an example to follow. He inspired optimism in the doomed prisoners.
Due to his leadership qualities, the general was transferred from one camp to another, so that he would not disturb the minds of other captives. So he traveled all over Germany, being imprisoned in dozens of "death factories" at once.
Every month the news from the fronts became more and more disturbing for the German leadership. After the victory at Stalingrad, the Red Army finally took the initiative into its own hands and launched a retaliatory offensive in the western direction. When the front approached the borders of pre-war Germany, an urgent evacuation of concentration camps began. The staff brutally de alt with the prisoners, after which they fled inland. This practice was ubiquitous.
Massacre at Mauthausen
In 1945, Dmitry Karbyshev ended up in a concentration camp called Mauthausen. Austria, where this terrible institution was located, was under attack by Soviet troops.
SS stormtroopers have always been responsible for guarding such objects. It was they who led the massacre of prisoners. On the night of February 18, 1945, they gathered about a thousand prisoners, among whom was Karbyshev. The prisoners were stripped and sent to the showers, where they were under the streams of icy water. The temperature difference led to the fact that many simply failed heart.
The prisoners who survived the first session of torture were given underwear and sent to the courtyard. It was freezing weather outside. The prisoners were shy in small groups. Soon they were being poured with the same ice-cold water from a fire hose. General Karbyshev, who was standing in the crowd, persuaded his comradesstand firm and show no cowardice. Some tried to escape from the ice jets directed at them. They were seized, beaten with batons and returned to their place. In the end, almost everyone died, including Dmitry Karbyshev. He was 64 years old.
Soviet investigation
The last minutes of Karbyshev's life became known in his homeland thanks to the testimony of a Canadian major who managed to survive the fateful night of the massacre of Mauthausen prisoners.
The collected fragmentary information about the fate of the captured general spoke of his exceptional masculinity and devotion to his duty. In August 1946, he posthumously received the country's highest award - the title of Hero of the Soviet Union.
In the future, monuments in his honor were opened on the territory of the entire socialist state. Streets were also named after the general. The main monument to Karbyshev, of course, is located on the territory of Mauthausen. A memorial to the dead and innocently tortured was opened on the site of the concentration camp. This is where the monument is located. Heroes of the Soviet Union of the Great Patriotic War deservedly have this inflexible general in their ranks.
His image was especially popular in the post-war period. The fact is that it was difficult to make the heroes of the country out of the numerous generals who ended up in concentration camps. Many of them were forcibly deported back to their homes, and a dozen were also repressed. Someone was hanged in the Vlasov case, others ended up in the Gulag on charges of cowardice. Stalin himself was in great need of the image of a pure hero,which could become an example for future generations of the army.
Karbyshev turned out to be just such a person. His name often flashed on the pages of newspapers. Dmitry Karbyshev was popular in literature: several works were written about him. For example, Sergei Vasiliev dedicated the poem "Dignity" to the general. Another prisoner of Mauthausen, Yuri Pilyar, became the author of an artistic biography of the officer "Honor".
The Soviet authorities did their best to immortalize the feat of Karbyshev. At the same time, declassified documents of the NKVD indicate that the investigation into his death was carried out hastily and on orders from above. For example, the testimony of Canadian Major St. Clair (the first witness) was inconsistent and inaccurate. They did not learn from him those numerous details that Karbyshev's biography later acquired.
St. Clair, on whose testimony the fate of the deceased general was clarified, he himself died a few years after the end of the war from ruined he alth. When the Soviet investigators questioned him, he was already terminally ill. Nevertheless, in 1948, the writer Novogrudsky completed an official book dedicated to the biography of Karbyshev. In it, he added many facts that St. Clair never mentioned.
Without belittling the courageous behavior of this general, the Soviet leadership tried to turn a blind eye to the fate of other high-ranking officers of their army, who were tortured and died in the dungeons of the Gestapo. Almost all of them became victims of Stalin's policy of forgetting "traitors" and "enemies of the people".
