by Aleksandr Tikhonov
These October days mark the 80th anniversary of the Zaporozhye front-line offensive operation, carried out from October 10 to 14, 1943. Then, unable to contain the advance of our troops, the German command gave the order to blow up the Dnieper Hydroelectric Station. After the war, Soviet state security agencies identified the participants in the destruction of this hydroelectric power station from among the Wehrmacht military personnel. Today’s material about those events is based on their testimony, which can be found in full on the official website of the FSB of Russia in the “Archival materials” section of the “History” section.
In the post-war period, Soviet state security agencies actively worked to search for participants in mass atrocities and destruction committed by Nazi troops on the temporarily occupied territory of the Soviet Union. One of these crimes was the blowing up of the Dnieper Hydroelectric Power Station (unable to restrain the advance of the Red Army during the Zaporozhye operation, the German command gave the order to blow up the hydroelectric dam).
Among the German war criminals - and their search was carried out in camps for German prisoners of war, located not only on the territory of the USSR, but also in European countries liberated by units of the Red Army - direct participants in the blowing up of the Dnieper Hydroelectric Dam in October 1943, committed by military personnel 520, were identified. 1st engineer regiment of the Wehrmacht. This is what two of them said when testifying.
The interrogation of the former driver of the battalion of the 520th Engineer Regiment, Chief Corporal Kurt Hans Stofen, was carried out on October 11, 1947 in Stalino (now Donetsk).
From the testimony of the prisoner of war, it follows that all the troubles for him began with his arrival on the Soviet-German, or, as the Germans called it, the eastern front. Until October 1941, he served as a driver of a passenger car in Berlin and, as a courier for the High Command, sometimes saw another corporal - Hitler, and every day - Field Marshal Walter von Brauchitsch (who would die in a British prisoner of war hospital in 1948) and Reichsmarshal Hermann Goering (commits suicide in his cell a few hours before his execution by hanging according to the verdict of the Nuremberg Tribunal in 1946). That is, for the time being everything was going great for Corporal Stofen.
And in March 1942, he was first sent to the Soviet-German front as a rifleman near Kharkov. Eight days later, with severely frostbitten feet, he was taken to a hospital in Silesia.
When Steffen recovered, he was returned to the front, near Rostov. However, in the fall, near Tuapse, he fell ill again, this time with paratyphoid fever, and he was taken to Germany for treatment.
The third deployment to the eastern front after recovery was his last. In July 1944, near Minsk, he was captured.
The twists and turns in the fate of the German soldier who came to us with the war are very significant. This is an edification to all those who plan to conquer Russia by force of arms - sadness and captivity await them if the outcome is successful.
However, in this case, we are not interested in the entire generally ordinary biography of Corporal Stofen, but in its fragment associated with the bombing of the Dnieper Hydroelectric Power Station during the retreat of the Wehrmacht under the pressure of the Red Army in 1944.
The chief corporal’s testimony during interrogation in Stalino recorded the following:
“...at 4 o’clock on September 30, 1943, we arrived at the Dneprostroy airfield. At the airfield, the commander of the sapper battalion, Major Senftendberg, lined us up in a semicircle and announced to us the purpose and task of the special mission to Dneprostroy. We were told that by October 14, 1943, we would mine the Dnieper Hydroelectric Dam and prepare it for explosion.”
At the Dneprostroy station there were already five wagons with explosives, and Stofen, having received a truck at the request of the local military unit in the garage, began transporting explosives (boxes with 250 two-hundred-gram bombs in each) to the hydroelectric dam, making six to eight trips daily. In addition to his car, eight more trucks were involved. They also carried aerial bombs from a nearby airfield, which, together with explosives, were placed in the Dnieper Hydroelectric Station tunnel. “At the power station there were five sites of hidden mining with good camouflage and four sites of camouflaged mining on the dam itself,” testified prisoner of war Stofen.
By the evening of October 14, the Nazis completed work on mining the hydroelectric power station. The first explosions occurred at 20.02...
Answering a question about the purpose of mining and blowing up the Dnieper Hydroelectric Station, the corporal said that “the explosion was intended to destroy and destroy the Dnieper Hydroelectric Station. Leave the desert on the retreat route, that’s what we did.”
Another participant in the explosion of the Dnieper hydroelectric dam, captain of the German army Michael Leonhard Haller, during interrogation on September 26, 1949 in the Ministry of Internal Affairs camp No. 414 (Czechoslovakia), gave detailed testimony about the preparation of the hydroelectric power station for the explosion, including the mass of explosives and aerial bombs used - from 100-150 tons.
“On October 14 or 15, 1943, an order was received from the regimental headquarters commander Pohlman with the following content: “The prepared objects should be blown up immediately upon receipt of the appointed time of day,” he said. “At 20 o’clock in the evening, all the prepared objects were blown up, including mine...”
That is, the pedantic Germans divided the Dnieper Hydroelectric Station into sections, each of which was mined and then undermined by a separate team led by an officer. But in general, as mentioned above, they left behind a desert.
...Retreating, they strive to leave a desert behind them, destroying schools, hospitals, theaters, libraries, residential buildings, and the current followers of Nazism in Ukraine. However, this will not save them from defeat. And they will have to give evidence on this matter, and then answer for what they have done.