Russian journalist Pavel Tiunov published Talman’s interrogation transcripts on the local NGS news outlet, chronicling his journey from Red Army defector to SS death camp guard and active participant in mass murder.
Born in 1918 in Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk region, Talman was conscripted into an artillery unit of the Red Army at age 22 but was captured by the Germans a month later. According to his testimony, he claimed German ethnicity to gain favor and defected without resistance.
He was initially held at a POW camp in Novohrad-Volynskyi in Ukraine’s Zhytomyr region and later transferred to SS training camps in Poland, including Trawniki and Chelm. There, he was offered a role as a "guard and punisher."
Talman said he was trained “to punish and kill prisoners in ghettos, concentration and extermination camps.” He described himself as a “punisher-executioner in training.”
Talman was assigned to Belzec, one of three Nazi extermination camps in Poland that used gas chambers. He rose through the ranks and received a commendation for “exemplary service.” According to his account, he managed forced labor squads of Jewish prisoners, about 40 people each, who were made to unload train cars, separate families, search belongings and lead victims to the gas chambers.
“In the center of the camp was a pit, 6 to 8 meters deep (20 to 26 feet), where bodies were dumped,” Talman testified. He said the prisoner squads were rotated every two weeks, often being executed in groups — sometimes for no reason. He admitted to personally shooting five prisoners.
Records indicate that over 75,000 people, mostly Jews, were murdered in Belzec during Talman’s tenure. He later served at Sobibor, where he oversaw security operations. For his performance, he was granted a two-week leave to visit family in Ukraine before returning to train new guards in Lublin.
In 1943, after contracting tuberculosis, Talman was retired from service. He relocated to Austria, where he lived quietly until the area was taken by Allied forces. After the war, he was extradited to the Soviet Union as a former POW. Although initially suspected of spying for the U.S., no evidence was found and he was released.
Discharged from the military in 1946, Talman moved to Georgia, working as a barber before relocating to Novosibirsk, Siberia. In 1950, while employed as a farm laborer, he was arrested again — this time correctly identified as a Nazi executioner.
He was tried and convicted of treason and crimes against humanity. In October 1950, he was sentenced to death and executed on January 8, 1951.
“A tremendous amount of investigative work was done,” said Stanislav Lukashov, deputy head of the FSB’s Novosibirsk office, in an interview with NGS. “They questioned camp survivors: who they saw, when, under what circumstances. They reconstructed identities and movements — all without the technological tools we have today.”
Lukashov said that hundreds of criminal files detailing Soviet collaboration with the Nazis have been uncovered in the Novosibirsk region alone.
