Soy Anatolyevna Kosmodemyanskaya

Memorial stone in Dresden in front of the 46th secondary school

Soja Anatoljewna Kosmodemjanskaja ( Russian Зоя Анатольевна Космодемьянская ; born September 13, 1923 in Osino-Gai , Tambov Governorate ; † November 29, 1941 in Petrishchevo , Moscow Oblast ) was a Soviet partisan in the Second World War and a Hero of the Soviet Union . From 1942 it became a kind of icon of the Soviet resistance against the German invaders.

Use, capture and execution

Since 1938 Soja Kosmodemjanskaja belonged to the communist youth organization Komsomol . At the end of October 1941, she volunteered from a Moscow high school for service in a partisan unit.

Kosmodemjanskaya was accepted into partisan troop unit No. 9903 of the staff of the Western Front , whose main task was to carry out acts of sabotage , in particular to destroy German accommodations behind the front line.

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At the beginning of November 1941 she crossed the German lines for the first time after a brief training. Their group of eleven partisans operated successfully in the Shakhovskaya area and returned without loss. The second mission, along with two comrades, Vasily Klubkow and Boris Krainow, their commander, took them across the front line in the Naro-Fominsk area on the night of November 21 . The partisans were supposed to set fire to houses in the village of Petrishchevo near Wereja where Germans had taken up quarters. Kosmodemjanskaja was assigned the southern part of the village and, like her commander, carried out this task. Presumably it was her job to set fire to the village stables. The Germans lost 20 horses.

The Germans then organized a guard among the villagers to prevent further attacks. On the evening of November 27th, while trying to set fire to a barn, Kosmodemjanskaya was discovered by the landlord Semyon Siridov. He brought Germans over to arrest them. Klubkov, who had betrayed Kosmodemyanskaya at the time, had already been arrested. He hoped to avoid the death sentence. Klubkow was a German prisoner of war until 1945, was handed over to the Soviet Union by the Americans in July 1945 and executed that same year. Nothing is known about the fate of Krainow. Presumably he was also hanged on November 29, 1941 in Petrishchevo.

Kosmodemjanskaya was interrogated and tortured by members of the 197th Infantry Division , but gave no information, except for the code name "Tanya". With a sign around her neck that read "Arsonist" in two languages, she was taken to the village square of Petrishchevo at 10:30 on November 29, 1941 and executed.

As a deterrent, Kosmodemjanskaja's corpse was left lying around for a long time, as was often the case, and was not buried until around Christmas. Until then, by order of the Germans, her half-clothed corpse lay in the village square as a deterrent, where it was violated.

Funeral and hero worship

Kosmodemjanskaja on a postage stamp of the German Post of the GDR (1962)

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On January 22, 1942, Petrishchevo was retaken by the Red Army. A few days later, the Soviet journalist Pyotr Lidov came to the area.

He learned of Kosmodemjanskaja's execution in November through an elderly farmer from Petrishchevo. Until then, Kosmodemjanskaya was known to the residents only as "Tanya", and the journalist also spoke of "Tanya" in his first newspaper article, which he published in Pravda on January 27, 1942 . Stalin, who had read the article, made sure that the story of the unknown partisan was made public. On January 30, 1942, the body of Kosmodemjanskajas was brought to Moscow and a little later identified by her brother, who recognized her in a newspaper photo. She is buried in the Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow.

On February 16, 1942, Soja Kosmodemjanskaja was posthumously honored as a heroine of the Soviet Union. The publication of pictures in front-line magazines that were found on German soldiers and showed their execution contributed to their popularity. In addition, Lidow took pictures of the exhumed body of Kosmodemjanskajas, which gave the impression of subsequent desecration of the body, so parts of the upper body were exposed and they were placed in the snow with the rope around the neck.

souvenir

• In 1943 the Russian-Soviet sculptor Matwei Maniser created a memorial and received the Stalin Prize, First Class.
• Her monuments were erected in Saint Petersburg , Tambov , Dorochowo and Petrishchevo, and a sculpture by Soja Kosmodemjanskaja was also installed in the Partisanskaya subway station in Moscow, built in 1944 .
• In 1944 Leo Arnstam made a film ( Soja ) about her life.
• The asteroid (1793) Zoya was named after her.
• Her mother, Lyubov Timofejewna Kosmodemjanskaja , wrote the book The History of Soja and Shura in memory of her two children Soja and Shura (who also died as a soldier in the Great Patriotic War ) .
• In the GDR numerous polytechnic high schools (POS) were named after her, such as B. the 2nd POS in Templin , one POS in Rotterdam ( Thuringia ), the 46th POS in Dresden , the 15th POS in Berlin - Prenzlauer Berg , the 27th POS in Berlin-Lichtenberg , the 7th POS in Forst , the 2nd POS in Pasewalk and today's Julius-Mosen Gymnasium in Oelsnitz / Vogtl.
• The pioneer holiday camp on the Hainfeld in Stolberg (Harz) was called that.
• The 22nd Panzer Regiment of the 9th Panzer Division of the National People's Army bore her name.
• The basic organization of the pioneer organization Ernst Thälmann of the Juri-Gagarin-Oberschule with extended Russian lessons in Brandenburg an der Havel bore their name.

In 2008, Komsomolskaya Pravda published celebrity opinions on an initiative to canonize the Russian national heroine.

literature

• Lyubov Kosmodemjanskaja: Soja and Shura. 3. Edition. New Life Publishing House, Berlin 1954.
• Daniela Rathe: Soy - a "Soviet Jeanne d'Arc"? On the typology of a war heroine. In: Silke Satjukow , Rainer Gries (Ed.): Socialist heroes. A cultural history of propaganda figures in Eastern Europe and the GDR. Links, Berlin 2002, ISBN 3-86153-271-9 , pp. 45-49.

Web links

Commons : Soja Kosmodemjanskaja  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Who was Soy Kosmodemjanskaya?
• Zoya's Story (English)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Stalin's arsonist . In: Der Spiegel . No. 6 , 2000 ( online - German attack on the Soviet Union. Stalin's arsonist).
2. ↑ Kosmodemjanskaja is supposed to be the holy soy (Russian).