6. This Hero Hacked Nazis to Death With an Ax
The summer of 1941 was a bad time for the Red Army. The recent sudden German onslaught, Operation Barbarossa, had caught the Soviets off guard and inflicted catastrophic losses upon them. As Red Army casualties mounted and reeling Soviet military personnel retreated in disarray, an unheralded soldier, Dmitry Ovcharenko, found himself among the millions caught up in the calamity.
A few weeks into the German invasion, however, Ovcharenko managed to pull off an act of sheer brutality and bloody-mindedness that set him apart and made him an early Soviet war hero. He was one of the relatively few people to have ever experienced the satisfaction of killing Nazis with an ax.