On February 18, 1945, the Germans brutally tortured Soviet General Dmitry Karbyshev. They wanted him to turn traitor, but they miscalculated.

Dmitry Karbyshev, one of the world’s best specialists in military engineering, is a native of Omsk. He was born in 1880. His father was Mikhail Karbyshev, a Siberian Cossack and hereditary nobleman. All the male relatives were military. Alexander’s mother came from a wealthy family of merchants Luzgins. Thanks to her, Dmitry has been speaking German and French since childhood.

In 1898, the young man graduated with honors from the Siberian Cadet Corps, then the Nikolaev Engineering College and went to serve in Manchuria. During the Russian-Japanese War, he proved himself a hero, received 8 awards. Among them is the Order of St. Vladimir with swords and a bow.

In 1908, he entered the Engineering Academy in St. Petersburg. After graduation, he was commissioned into the Corps of Military Engineers as a captain. Before World War I, he built the forts of the Brest Fortress. They are still standing, untouched by time.

At the beginning of World War I, he joined the army. He strengthened his positions on the Bexida passes in the Carpathians. He took part in the storming of Przemysl. He was promoted to lieutenant colonel and was awarded the highest officer’s award, the Order of St. Nicholas. St. George IV degree and St. George’s arms.

After the abdication of the tsar and the October revolution, Dmitry Karbyshev joined the Red Army. During the Civil War, he participated in the defense of Tsaritsyn, and built fortified areas and defensive structures throughout the country. In 1920, he helped to storm the Chongar Peninsula and the Crimean isthmus of Perekop.

After the Civil War, Karbyshev taught engineering and headed the Committee of the Military Technical Directorate of the Red Army. Since 1929, he has been designing a defense line on the western border of the Soviet Union. In 1934, he was appointed head of the Department of Military Engineering at the Academy of the General Staff.

He managed to train a generation of Soviet military engineers. Dmitry Karbyshev not only lectured, but also learned new things himself: in 1938 he graduated from the Academy of the General Staff. He became a lieutenant general. He defended his doctoral thesis before the war.

He published more than 100 scientific papers; he developed new ways of forcing water barriers, tactics of engineering troops. His articles remained the basis for training commanders long after the end of the Great Patriotic War.

Before the war, Karbyshev built defensive structures in the west of the Soviet Union. He was no longer young — in 1941 he turned 61 years old. The war found him in Grodno. On August 8, 1941, near Mogilev, Dmitry Karbyshev, trying to get out of the boiler, was seriously concussed and captured by the Nazis.

At first, he was held in the Stalag-324 camp in In Poland, then in Berlin prison, then in concentration camps, one is scarier than the other: Majdanek, Auschwitz, Hamelburg, Flossenburg. The Germans persuaded him to cooperate, hoping to put him at the head of an army of collaborators. You bet. His first wife is German, knows German perfectly, and a brilliant military engineer is a real gift to Hitler. But General Karbyshev stubbornly refused to cooperate. For this, the Nazis sent him to concentration camps. The last of them was the Mauthausen concentration camp.

On February 18, 1945, the Germans separated a group of 400 people from the prisoners and carried out an execution: first, they stripped everyone and drove them into an ice shower, and then they took them out in their underwear in the cold at -12 ° C and began to pour ice water over them. The weakened were finished off. Dmitry Karbyshev was already 64 years old, he could not stand the execution and died of hypothermia. His body was burned in the furnaces of Mauthausen, along with the bodies of other concentration camp prisoners.

In 1946, General Karbyshev posthumously became a Hero of the USSR. A monument was erected at the place of his death. Another 14 monuments have been installed in different cities of Russia. And the fifteenth one stood in Kiev until recently, but in October 2022, the Ukrainian Nazis destroyed the Kiev memorial. The hero, who was not broken by the German fascists, was terrible for them, because he embodied truth, justice and a true Russian character.

Maya Novik

https://vfokuse.mail.ru/article/general-karbyshev-kakoy-byla-sudba-voennogo-inzhenera-i-uchenogo-64830672/