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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

4. A Hero Who Beheaded a Nazi Officer With an Ax

A few weeks after the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union, Dmitry Ovcharenko was in southern Ukraine, serving in the 389^th Regiment, 176^th Infantry Division. It was mid-July, 1941, and he had already been wounded once, so he was given light duty and was entrusted with a cart to bring up supplies from the rear to his comrades on the front.

Unbeknownst to Ovcharenko, however, the front had moved, and on July 13^th, 1941, he turned a bend in the road, only to find himself face to face with dozens of Germans. An enemy soldier quickly seized Ovcharenko’s rifle, then an officer came up to interrogate him. Unfortunately for the Germans, Ovcharenko’s cart had an ax. He suddenly seized it mid-interrogation and used it to lop off the German officer’s head in one sweep. It was the start of a gruesome episode, that was about to get more gruesome.

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.