Dmitry Mikhailovich Karbyshev

Lieutenant General of Engineer Troops, Doctor of Military Sciences, posthumous Hero of the Soviet Union (16 August 1946). Born on 26 October 1880 in Omsk. He graduated from the Siberian Cadet Corps and the Nikolaev Engineering School, served in the Russo-Japanese War and then in the First World War, building fortifications and taking part in the siege of Przemyśl and the Brusilov offensive. He joined the Red Army in 1918. By 1941 he was the country's leading authority on fortification: his work on fortified districts, field positions and the engineering support of operations was the textbook for several intakes of officers. He was in his sixty-first year when the war began. In August 1941, near Mogilev, he was severely concussed and taken prisoner. Over three and a half years he passed through a succession of camps: Zamość, Hammelburg, Flossenbürg, Majdanek, Auschwitz, Sachsenhausen and Mauthausen. The German command repeatedly offered him collaboration — a post in the Wehrmacht engineering service, his own laboratory, working conditions. He refused every time. To the enemy his value lay precisely in his expertise, which is what made the refusal a choice against a concrete and available alternative rather than a symbolic gesture. He was killed on the night of 18 February 1945 at Mauthausen, when prisoners were driven out into the frost and hosed with water. The circumstances became known from surviving prisoners after the camp was liberated.