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Rubbing It In: History’s Greatest Flexes and Ownages

Khalid Elhassan June 3, 2025 17 min

3. Chopping Up Nazis With an Ax

Nazis advance into the USSR in the summer of 1941. Radio Free Europe

In the summer of 1941, shortly after the Nazis invaded the USSR, Dmitry Ovcharenko, of the Red Army’s 389^th Regiment, 176^th Infantry Division, was in southern Ukraine. Recovering from recent injuries, Ovcharenko was on light duty, given a cart to transport supplies from the rear to the front. However, the front moved while Ovcharenko was on a supply run, and he was unaware of that when on July 13^th, 1941, he turned a bend in the road and ran into dozens of Germans.

One of them quickly seized Ovcharenko’s rifle, then an officer came up to interrogate him. Unbeknownst to the Nazis, their captive’s cart had an ax. Ovcharenko suddenly grabbed it, and beheaded the German officer with a single strike. While shocked Nazis attempted to process what they had just seen, Ovcharenko dove into the cart, grabbed hand grenades, and began to throw them at his captors.

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.