Overview

The heroic fate of Mikhail Devyataev, fighter pilot, Hero of the Soviet Union, honorary citizen of the city of Kazan and the Republic of Mordovia is not a myth, although it looks like a Hollywood blockbuster in tortuous and thrilling scenario. He passed through four death camps and on 8 February 1945 he escaped from the Usedom Island concentration camp aboard a Heinkel 111 bomber with 9 Soviet suicide bombers. Usedom Island was home to the highly secret German missile center in Peenemünde, where the world's only V-2 ballistic rocket was tested, the weapon of revenge, as Hitler called them. Historians have described as miraculous the fact that the Heinkel 111, which Mikhail Devyataev assimilated the controls practically in the air, could not be shot down by the German fighters sent in alarm.