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Heroes from History People Really Don’t Appreciate Enough

Khalid Elhassan November 10, 2020 32 min

William Colby - William J. Donovan — William Colby (oak leaves on cap) with OSS personnel and Norwegian Resistance members in Norway. Special Operations

6. This Hero Hacked Nazis to Death With an Ax

German forces plunging into the Soviet Union at the start of Operation Barbarossa in 1941. Encyclopedia Britannica

The summer of 1941 was a bad time for the Red Army. The recent sudden German onslaught, Operation Barbarossa, had caught the Soviets off guard and inflicted catastrophic losses upon them. As Red Army casualties mounted and reeling Soviet military personnel retreated in disarray, an unheralded soldier, Dmitry Ovcharenko, found himself among the millions caught up in the calamity.

A few weeks into the German invasion, however, Ovcharenko managed to pull off an act of sheer brutality and bloody-mindedness that set him apart and made him an early Soviet war hero. He was one of the relatively few people to have ever experienced the satisfaction of killing Nazis with an ax.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.