Dmitry Ovcharenko & the Nazis

The picture below is a world war two Soviet propaganda leaflet. It shows a partisan being forced to take his hat off to a German officer, and then coming back with a sword and grenades and chopping his head off.

So what's so mind-blowing about some old Soviet propaganda?

Well, unlike most Soviet propaganda over-glorifying the common soldier with bravery like above, this actually happened: a German officer got his head chopped off by a Soviet, except instead of a sword there was an axe, and the Soviet partisan wasn't holding his grenades, he was throwing them towards 53 German soldiers and officers who surrounding him.

This man below is Dmitry Ovcharenko

Dmitry Ovcharenko was a peasant from the village of Ovcharovo in the Lugansk Region who was horrible at school, in fact, he was so bad at school he was kicked out in year 5. But to make up for his terrible reputation for not being able to cope with school life he was extremely strong, being able to carry pretty much anything.

When world war two rolled in, Ovcharenko having already done military training in 1939, was immediately put into the Red Army to fight against the German invaders. His fighting life ended as quickly as it started when he was permanently injured in combat and taken away to work as a supply carrier taking ammo and food from the safe part of the Soviet Union to the front and giving them out.

On July 13, 1941, while taking some supplies down a road, Ovcharenko was caught unaware by a German squad of 50 soldiers and three officers. At the end of a gun, he was forced to give his rifle to them and they interrogated him near his carriage with hay, food, and ammo.

Unfortunately for the German soldiers, Ovcharenko saw an axe that was in his reach and a couple of grenades hidden in a box full of hay. Within a blink of an eye, he grabbed the axe without so much as a thought and literally, sent the German officer's head flying off his shoulders.

What did his men do? Well, they just stood with their mouths open and started trying to process what the hell just happened. I mean you couldn't blame them, they just saw someone whom they respected have his head fly off with a single swing from this random Russkie who was meant to be as much trouble as a scared ant.

But unlike his blood-soaked German captors, he barely needed a second to recover from this very bizarre moment. He grabbed the grenades from the box and threw them at the German soldiers. The grenades exploded and killed 20 men while the rest realized how far down the rabbit hole this whole interrogation had gone and simply dropped their weapons and ran towards the nearby woods.

But Ovcharenko still wasn't done. Without even thinking about his supply cart, he grabbed his axe and charged towards the retreating Germans. Another German officer, who was now running, turned around to see that Ovcharenko has caught up to him raising his axe and screaming before seeing, well that was it for the second German officer because his head went flying through the air and his body falling down crashing onto the grass spilling a lot of blood on what was his uniform.

The other Germans were quite lucky not to lose their heads and went back to camp, where they reported this to their superiors.

When Ovcharenko came back to the camp, he was awarded the medal of Hero of the Soviet Union and sent to fight in a machine gun squad. Sadly, he didn’t see the final victory over the Nazis and was killed in Hungary in early 1945.

Although this story does look like something out of a cheap Michael Bay movie, there is actually a crap ton of evidence supporting this including the original documents from both sides and scientific evidence supporting these claims.

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