On January 22, 1943, in the final stages of the Battle of Stalingrad, the sniper Maxim Pasar destroyed two German heavy machine guns 100 meters from the enemy position, but himself died of his wounds. Afterwards, his comrades applied for the posthumous title of "Hero of the Soviet Union" by virtue of his exploits in killing 237 Nazi soldiers, but the response was always in the sea, and the situation did not change until 2010.
Maxim Pasar was born in 1923 in the Nanański district of present-day Khabarovsk Territory. His father made a living as a fisherman, so he was familiar with marksmanship from an early age and knew how to shoot animals into the eyes to avoid damage to fur. While hiding and waiting for his prey, he can lie motionless for hours in any weather conditions.
After the Battle of Stalingrad broke out, Maxim's brother died honorably. In 1942, Maxim volunteered to join the army, and after short-term training at the Sniper School on the Northwest Front, he quickly grew into an excellent sniper. He saw things like daylight at night, and when he learned that an officer of the General Staff of the Inspection Force had been shot by a German sniper, he volunteered to take revenge and "shot down" the enemy from a tree with a regular Mosin-Nagant rifle – Maxim's first sniper kill.
For the next few months, Pasar used the Mosin rifle without an optical sight to kill the enemy. In May 1942 he joined the 117th Infantry Regiment of the 23rd Infantry Division to fight on the Stalingrad front, and by the end of September had killed 56 enemy, and when the command issued him a special sniper rifle, the number of enemy kills tripled. The Germans called him "the devil from the Devil's Cave" and offered him a reward of 100,000 Imperial Marks for his life.
As the division's top scorer, Pasar also undertook the heavy responsibility of training his comrades. In the autumn of 1942, Maxim and 145 "apprentices" killed more than 3,000 enemy troops.
Maxim had his own set of methods for hunting enemy officers and men, and friendly mortars and rifle fire were good helpers. Whenever the fascists were forced to shell and withdraw from the trenches, they were caught in the scope. In addition, he is also good at estimating the direction and distance of enemy fire points by observing tracer projectiles. Pasar's shooting speed was equally astonishing, with a record of 7 enemy shots in 2 minutes.
The average sniper will use a variety of tricks to detect enemy snipers, such as shaking a stick with a helmet - but this trick is ineffective against Maxim. He would use binoculars to determine whether there was a living person under his helmet, and then patiently wait for the other party to be exposed and shoot him.
Pasar's heroic deeds were widely reported in frontline newspapers, and his conversations about sniper tactics and disguise methods were frequently reported. The famous Soviet poet Yevgeny Dolmatovsky's poems praising Maxim were widely disseminated by the Red Army Newspaper, and the image of the Naysei sharpshooter immediately aroused strong repercussions among the sniper ranks.
In November 1942 Maxim Pasar was awarded the Order of the Red Banner for the first time in recognition of his success in killing 152th. In December, Maxim was injured by a bullet shock but refused admission to hospital.
In January 1943, the defense of Stalingrad was gradually coming to an end. In a battle near the village of Peshchenka, two flanking concealed fire points halted the infantry regiment's offensive, and the command ordered Pasar to clear the way. Pasar managed to approach about 100 meters from the enemy position, destroyed two German machine guns, and unfortunately died of his own wounds. Buried in the local martyrs' cemetery.
A month later, Maxim Pasar's unit applied to his superiors to posthumously award him the title of "Hero of the Soviet Union", but somehow only a second "Red Flag" medal was posthumously awarded, and the "Venus" medal was not issued. After the war, fellow villagers and comrades-in-arms complained to various departments for honor for Pasar, but they always sank into the sea.
In 2010, The President of the Russian Federation, Dmitry Medvedev, ordered that Maxim Pasar be posthumously awarded the title of "Hero of the Russian Federation". At the request of his relatives, the medal of the Russian Federation "Venus" was donated to the collection of the Museum "Nikolai Grodev" in Khabarovsk Krai. A street in Volgograd, a school in the village of Neshin in the Narneski region and a palace of culture are named after Maxim Pasar. #二战 #
