The future Hero of the Soviet Union Dmitry Karbyshev was born in 1880 in Omsk. He had a noble birth: his father worked as a military official. When the head of the family died prematurely, the child was only 12 years old, and the care of him fell on his mother's shoulders.
Childhood
The family had Tatar roots and belonged to the ethno-confessional group of Kryashens who profess Orthodoxy, despite their Turkic origin. Dmitry Karbyshev also had an older brother. In 1887, he was arrested for participating in the revolutionary movement of students at Kazan University. Vladimir was arrested, and the family was in a quandary.
Nevertheless, Dmitry Karbyshev was able to finish the Siberian Cadet Corps thanks to his talents and diligence. After this educational institution was followed by Nikolaev Engineering College. In it, the young military man also proved to be excellent. Karbyshev was sent to the border to Manchuria, where he served as one of the chiefs in the company responsible for telegraph communications.
Service in the tsarist army
On the eve of the Russo-Japanese War, the junior officer received the military rank of lieutenant. With the outbreak of armed conflict, Dmitry Karbyshev was sent to intelligence. He made contact, was responsible for the condition of the bridges at the front, and participated in some important battles. So, he was in the heat when the battle of Mukden broke out .
After the war, he did not live long in Vladivostok, where he continued to serve in the sapper battalion. In 1908–1911 the officer was trained at the Nikolaev military engineering academy. After graduating from it, he went to Brest-Litovsk as headquarters 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 on the front of the First World War from the very first day of its declaration. Most of the officer’s service was under the command of the famous Alexei Brusilov. It was the Southwestern Front, where Russia waged war on Austria-Hungary with varying success. So, for example, Karbyshev took part in the successful capture of Przemysl, as well as in the Brusilovsky breakthrough. The last days of the war, Karbyshev spent on the border with Romania, where he was engaged in strengthening defensive positions. During several years at the front, he managed to get a wound in the leg, but still returned to duty.
Transition to the Red Army
In October 1917, a coup occurred in Petrograd, after which the Bolsheviks came to power. Vladimir Lenin wanted to end the war with Germany as quickly as possible in order to redirect all forces to the struggle against internal enemies: the white movement. For this, mass propaganda began in the army, campaigning for Soviet power.
That is how Karbyshev was in the ranks of the Red Guard. In it, he was responsible for organizing defensive and engineering work. Especially Karbyshev did in the Volga region, where in 1918-1919. ran across the Eastern Front. The talent and abilities of the engineer helped the Red Army gain a foothold in this region and continue its offensive towards the Urals. Karbyshev's career growth culminated in the appointment of one of the leading posts in the 5th Army of the Red Army. He ended the civil war in Crimea, where he was responsible for engineering work in Perekop, connecting the peninsula with the mainland.
Between world wars
During the peaceful period of the 1920s and 1930s, 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 the "Lines of Stalin."
With the beginning of the Soviet-Finnish war in 1939, Karbyshev was in the 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 journalistic activities, Karbyshev wrote about 100 works in engineering. According to his textbooks and manuals, many specialists of the Red Army prepared right up to the Great Patriotic War. General Karbyshev devoted especially much time to studying the issue of river crossing during armed conflicts. In 1940 he joined the CPSU (b).
German captivity
A 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 attacks of the Wehrmacht were sent when the blitzkrieg operation began on June 22, 1941.
Within a few days, the army and the headquarters of Karbyshev 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.
Once in captivity, he went through many concentration camps, the last of which was Mauthausen. General Karbyshev was a well-known specialist and abroad. Therefore, the Nazis from the Gestapo and the SS tried in a variety of ways to pull an already elderly officer who could transfer valuable information to German headquarters and help the Reich.
The Nazis believed that they could easily persuade Karbyshev to cooperate with them. The officer was a native of the nobility, for many years he served in the imperial army. These features of the biography could indicate that General Karbyshev is a random person in the Bolshevik circle and would gladly make a deal with the Reich.
The 60-year-old officer was brought to explanatory bodies several times to 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 that the Nazis would be defeated. Not one of his actions spoke of the fact that the prisoner was broken or lost his spirit.
In Hammelburg
In the spring of 1942, Dmitry Mikhailovich Karbyshev was transferred to Hammelburg. It was a special concentration camp for captured officers. Here they created the most comfortable living conditions. So, the German leadership tried to win over senior officers of the enemy armies, who enjoyed great authority in their homeland. In total, 18 thousand Soviet prisoners visited Hammelburg during the war. Each of them had high military ranks. Many broke down after they left the death camps and ended up in comfortable and convenient places of detention, where they had friendly conversations. However, Dmitry Mikhailovich Karbyshev did not react at all to the psychological treatment of the enemy and continued to remain loyal to the Soviet Union.
A special man 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 the First World War 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, such proposals did not affect the officer.
It is interesting that initially the Germans wanted Karbyshev to become the head of the Russian Liberation Army, which was eventually led by General Vlasov. But regular refusals from cooperation did their job: the Wehrmacht abandoned his ideas. Now in Germany they were expecting at least that the captive would agree to work in Berlin as a valuable rear specialist.
In Berlin
General Dmitry Karbyshev, whose biography consisted of constant moving, was still a tidbit 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 ignorance for three weeks.
This was done specifically to remind Karbyshev that he could become a victim of terror at any time if he did not want to cooperate with the Wehrmacht. Finally, the prisoner was sent to the investigator for the last time. The Germans asked for the help of one of their most respected specialists in military engineering. It was Heinz Rubenheimer. This pre-war expert, like Karbyshev, worked on monographs on their general profile. Dmitry Mikhailovich himself treated him with a certain reverence, as a respected specialist.
Rubenheimer made a powerful offer to his counterpart. 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 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. The officer would become a lieutenant general in the army of the German state.
Karbyshev’s feat was that he rejected all the offers of the enemy, despite several very persistent attempts. A variety of persuasion methods were used against him: intimidation, flattery, promises, etc. In the end, he was offered only theoretical work. 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 of the Third Reich system.
Despite health problems and an impressive age, General Dmitry Karbyshev again resolutely refused. After that, the German leadership waved his hand at him and wrote off him as a man fanatically devoted to the bitter cause of Bolshevism. Reich could not use such people for his own purposes.
In hard labor
From Berlin, Karbyshev was transferred to Flossenbürg, a concentration camp, where cruel orders reigned, and prisoners ruined their health without interruption in hard labor. And if such work deprived the remnants of the strength of young captives, then one can imagine how difficult it was for the elderly Karbyshev, who was already seventy.
However, during his stay in Flussenbürg, he never once complained to the camp leadership about poor conditions. Already after the war, the Soviet Union recognized the names of heroes who did not break in concentration camps. Numerous prisoners who visited him at the same work told about the courageous behavior of the general. 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 immediately imprisoned by a dozen death factories.
Every month, news from the fronts became increasingly alarming for the German leadership. After the victory at Stalingrad, the Red Army finally took the initiative in 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 cracked down on the prisoners, after which they fled inland. This practice was widespread.
Violence at Mauthausen
In 1945, Dmitry Karbyshev ended up in a concentration camp called Mauthausen. Austria, where this terrible institution was located, was hit by Soviet troops.
The SS attack aircraft were always responsible for the protection of such objects. It was they who directed the reprisals against the 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 showers, where they were under streams of ice water. The temperature difference led to the fact that many simply had a heart failure.
Prisoners who survived the first torture were given underwear and sent to the courtyard. It was frosty outside. The prisoners were shy in small groups. Soon they began to be watered from the fire hose all the same icy water. General Karbyshev, standing in the crowd, persuaded his comrades to be strong and not to show 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 at home thanks to the testimony of a Canadian major who managed to survive the fateful night of reprisals against Mauthausen prisoners.
The collected fragmentary information about the fate of the captive 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.
Subsequently, monuments in his honor were opened on the territory of the entire socialist state. The streets were also named after the general. The main monument to Karbyshev, of course, is located on the territory of Mauthausen. At the site of the concentration camp, a memorial was opened in memory of the dead and innocently tortured. It is here that the monument is located. The heroes of the Soviet Union of the Second World War deservedly have this unbending general in their ranks.
His image was especially popular in the postwar period. The fact is that it was difficult to make the country's heroes out of the many 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 really needed the image of a spotless hero who could become an example for future generations of the army.
It was such a person who turned out to be Karbyshev. His name often appeared on the pages of newspapers. Dmitry Karbyshev was popular in the literature: several works were written about him. For example, Sergey Vasiliev dedicated the poem “Dignity” to the general. Another Mauthausen prisoner, Yuri Pilyar, became the author of a fictional biography of an officer of Honor.
The Soviet government did its best to immortalize Karbyshev's feat. At the same time, the declassified documents of the NKVD indicate that the investigation of his death was carried out hastily and at the direction from above. For example, the testimony of Canadian Major St. Clair (the first witness) was inconsistent and inaccurate. He did not learn from those many details, which Karbyshev’s biography then overgrown with.
St. Clair, on whose testimony the fate of the deceased general was ascertained, himself died several years after the end of the war from ruined health. When Soviet investigators questioned him, he was already mortally ill. Nevertheless, in 1948, the writer Novogrudsky finished the official book on the biography of Karbyshev. In it, he added many facts that St. Clair never mentioned.
Without diminishing the courageous behavior of this general, the Soviet leadership tried to close its eyes 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 the Stalinist policy of oblivion of "traitors" and "enemies of the people."