At the end of 1944, Stalin showed his appreciation of the SMERSH, NKVD, and NKGB operatives who worked in Moscow by considerably improving their living conditions. On September 24, 1944 the GKO issued an order ‘On the Improvement of Food Supply of Operational Officers of the NKVD, NKGB, and SMERSH.’1 Now the food rations of 119,700 high-ranking officers, including those in SMERSH, became equal to the rations of sovpartaktiv (Soviet and Party high-level functionaries). 11,553 officers were given the same rations as those received by Central Committee members, commissars, and their deputies, which meant being able to eat in the Kremlin’s dining facilities without restriction and receiving special rations for their families. Rations were given to 27,200 officers of the second grade, and the rest, of the third grade; these were the so-called ‘liter [marked with a letter] “A” and “B” rations.’

Heads of directorates and departments (and their deputies) in commissariats were given ‘A’ food rations, while lower functionaries received the ‘B’ rations. In December 1942, the ‘A’ ration included the following for one person, per month: six kilograms of meat, approximately one kilogram of butter, 1.5 kilograms of buckwheat and pasta, seven kilograms of potatoes, and fifteen eggs.2 By comparison, at that time a worker at a military plant received 800 grams of poor-quality bread and one bowl of soup per day.

Prisoners in Moscow, 1944–45

As the Red Army advanced to the west, Moscow’s investigation prisons began to fill up with prisoners of war. Based on its operational lists prepared in Moscow, SMERSH field UKRs issued warrants for, and arrested, increasing numbers of important German, Hungarian, Romanian, and other foreign military figures and Russian émigrés and sent them to the capital. But most of the arrived prisoners belonged to the category of spetskontingent (special contingent)—that is, they were detainees held in investigation prisons without arrest warrants. Many members of the spetskontingent were not considered to have been formally arrested until 1950–52, when MGB investigators finally wrote arrest warrants before trials.

Nevertheless, all foreign prisoners were listed as POWs in Moscow investigation prisons. Lacking its own investigation prisons, GUKR SMERSH used two of the above-mentioned NKGB prisons: the Interior, or Lubyanka, located inside the NKGB/SMERSH building in the center of Moscow; and Lefortovo, a reconstructed palace built in the early 18th century in a remote district of Moscow. Prisoners who did not cooperate during interrogations, either by not giving the testimony that the SMERSH investigators wanted to hear, or by not admitting guilt, were transferred to the third investigation prison, Sukhanovka, where conditions were extremely harsh. SMERSH also had a section in the enormous Butyrka Prison belonging to the NKVD, which remained an NKVD/MVD investigation prison until 1950, when it was transferred to the MGB. Considered POWs, the SMERSH arrestees received the same food ration as those held in the NKVD POW camps. To encourage good behavior, investigators gave cooperative prisoners an officer’s ration, which was much better than a soldier’s.

Typically, Abakumov or one of his deputies would initially interrogate a newly arrived prisoner, often for several hours. Following this, a prisoner was commonly placed under the jurisdiction of Sergei Kartashov’s 2nd or Aleksandr Leonov’s 6th (Investigation) GUKR Department. In Kartashov’s department German-speaking prisoners were questioned by investigators of its 1st Section.

Investigation of German POWs

No information about the 1st Section of the 2nd GUKR Department has ever been published. I was able to establish the names of officers of this section by studying personal files of foreign prisoners at the Russian State Military (formerly Special) Archive (RGVA). As already mentioned, two files were opened for each SMERSH, NKGB, or NKVD prisoner under investigation: the Investigation File and the Prison File.

The Investigation File contained primarily transcripts (protokoly in Russian) of interrogations. When the investigation was closed, the accused had to look through this file, which was also presented at the trial after the chief USSR prosecutor or his deputy concluded that the investigation was finished. After conviction, the prisoner’s Investigation File went to the MGB/KGB (now FSB) Central Archive for storage. These files relevant to political cases are still essentially unavailable to researchers. Only the closest relatives of the rehabilitated former political convicts are allowed to read these files, and a researcher can examine an Investigation File at the FSB Central Archive only with notarized permission from direct relatives.

The Prison File contained documents about the prisoner’s arrest and his life in investigation prisons, including orders for transfers within the same prison or to other prisons. The file also included investigators’ instructions on special forms to prison personnel (a separate NKGB/MGB department not subordinate to the investigation departments) to bring the prisoner in for interrogation. The final documents in the Prison File contained the investigator’s conclusion concerning the charges to be brought against the prisoner in court and the applicable punishment (before the trial!). The investigator’s superiors and Abakumov or his deputy also signed the investigator’s conclusion.

Most GUKR SMERSH prisoners were tried by the Special Board (OSO) of the NKVD (and, from November 1946 onwards, of the MGB), or by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court. After the trial, the convicted person was transferred to NKVD jurisdiction. The Prison File now became a Personal File, containing copies of trial and sentencing documents as well as the investigator’s recommendation as to whether the convict should be sent to a punishment prison or a labor camp. The Personal File went with the convict, and documents about his prison or camp life were added. Upon a prisoner’s release the Personal File was archived. The Personal Files of foreign prisoners arrested by SMERSH, the NKGB, and NKVD ended up in the Russian State Military Archive in Moscow. If a convict died in prison, his or her Personal File went to the archive of the camp or prison’s local NKVD/MVD or MGB (in the case of special prisons) branch.

According to the materials in the files, when a prisoner arrived at the 2nd GUKR SMERSH Department, at first its head Kartashov or his deputy, Nikolai Burashnikov, inspected the file and, frequently, also interrogated the detainee. Kartashov was known as an extremely capable and efficient officer.3 No information is available on Burashnikov except his name surfaced in documents of the late 1930s, when he headed the 3rd Department (counterintelligence) of the NKVD’s Moscow Branch.4 After being interrogated by Kartashov or Burashnikov, the prisoner came under the jurisdiction of the 1st Section, headed by Lieutenant Colonel Yakov Sverchuk, or of other sections of the department. Sverchuk worked in the NKVD from 1938 onwards.

Kartashov, Burashnikov, and Sverchuk, and other investigators who did not know German, conducted interrogations through their young colleagues—Boris Solovov, Oleg Bubnov, Daniil Kopelyansky, Vladimir Smirnitsky, Anna Stesnova, and others. All of these young officers were professional German translators who had graduated just before World War II. Abakumov affectionately dubbed his favorite, Solovov, ‘the teacher’ because Solovov wore glasses.5 He personally recommended Solovov as a translator for the International Nuremberg Trial. SMERSH prisoners had a different opinion of Solovov. One was the former German counselor in Ploesti (Romania), Count Ruediger Adelmann, remembered him as ‘a very intelligent but mean person.’6 Frequently, Solovov’s friend Pavel Grishaev, an investigator in the 4th Department and then the 6th Department, also served as a translator at interrogations. In 1946 Grishaev, like Solovov, was sent to the International Nuremberg Trial as a translator.

Sverchuk’s staff of officers was small, only about ten people. Besides the German section, other sections dealt with Finnish, Japanese, and Russian prisoners. While formally the 2nd Department was operational, meaning that it obtained intelligence from prisoners and did not investigate criminal cases, interrogations often led to the opening of a case against a prisoner. Usually interrogations took place in the offices on the fourth and sixth floors of the main Lubyanka building, or in a separate interrogation building of Lefortovo Prison. Nikolai Mesyatsev, former investigator of the 2nd SMERSH Department, described the Lefortovo offices:

Frequently female stenographers were present during interrogations. Zinaida Kozina, Abakumov’s personal stenographer, volunteered to work with investigators. She recalled the night interrogations in Lefortovo:

The routine was the following. At 9:00 p.m. a bus was waiting at the 4th entrance [of the Lubyanka building]. It took us—me, two other women-stenographers, and investigators—to Lefortovo. There we went to offices for interrogations. At 5:00 a.m. the interrogations were over, and the bus took us to the metro station. Everybody went home… At 10:00 a.m. we were at work [in Lubyanka] again. It was necessary to immediately write down all transcripts of interrogations and to give them to the investigators.8

In some cases prisoners were also interrogated in Suhkanovo Prison. In many cases the 2nd and 4th or 6th GUKR SMERSH departments interrogated the same prisoners. Some of the German diplomats who arrived in Moscow from Bucharest in September 1944 were initially the responsibility of the 6th Department. For instance, Aleksandr Leonov, head of this department, personally interrogated Fritz Schellhorn, former German General Counselor, a week after his arrival. Then Schellhorn and other German diplomats were transferred to Kartashov’s 2nd Department and the investigation continued by Kartashov’s officers.

If a prisoner had no important intelligence information, his case was closed quickly and prepared for trial by the OSO. But the cases of important prisoners like witnesses of Hitler’s death and some German diplomats turned into long-term investigations, sometimes lasting as long as eight years.

Case Example: Major Joachim Kuhn

The case of Major Joachim Kuhn, opened by the 2nd Department in mid-1944, was typical for an investigation that continued until the 1950s. Kuhn was a member of the failed military plot to assassinate Hitler on July 20, 1944. Kuhn’s commander, Major General Henning von Tresckow, was a close associate of Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, the would-be assassin.9 Kuhn also knew von Stauffenberg well and used to visit him because Kuhn’s fiancée, Maria-Gabriele, was the daughter of von Stauffenberg’s cousin Clemens.10

Among the military plotters, Kuhn’s responsibility was to supply the conspirators with explosives and handmade bombs that he kept secretly at the HQ of the German Infantry High Command in Mauerwald (now Mamerki, Poland), not far from Hitler’s HQ ‘Wolfschanze’ (Wolf’s Lair). In March 1943, the plotters made their first assassination attempt on Hitler during his visit to the Army Group Center HQ in Smolensk, in Sovietoccupied territory. As already mentioned, following the visit, before Hitler’s plane took off, Fabian von Schlabrendroff, Tresckow’s cousin and aide-decamp, smuggled a concealed bomb onto the plane, while Erwin von Lahousen, head of Abwehr II, informed Admiral Canaris of the plan.11

The bomb did not detonate while the plane was in the air, and Kuhn and Tresckow began to plot anew. In autumn 1943, Tresckow suggested smuggling Friedrich Werner von Schulenburg through the front line in an attempt to reach Stalin for peace negotiations.12 Von Schulenburg, a former German ambassador to Moscow who knew Molotov and Stalin well, was a high-level Foreign Ministry official and a member of the Resistance. However, Field Marshal Günther von Kluge, commander in chief of the Army Group Center and a long-time member of the military opposition, did not support this plan.

On July 21, 1944, the day after von Stauffenberg’s unsuccessful assassination attempt, Tresckow drove to the 28th Rifle Division to see Major Kuhn, who had been transferred from Tresckow’s HQ to this front division. After Tresckow told Kuhn everything he knew about Stauffenberg’s failure, he drove into the no-man’s land between the German and Soviet front lines. There Tresckow pretended to exchange fire with the enemy, and then committed suicide by blowing himself up with a grenade.13

Kuhn made a different choice—he went to the Soviets. His divisional commander, General Gustav von Ziehlberg, told Kuhn that he had an order to bring him to Berlin, where officials suspected Kuhn of having provided von Stauffenberg with explosives for the attack on Hitler.14 In fact, Stauffenberg received plastic explosives from Kuhn’s colleagues who also worked at the Mauerwald HQ. Apparently, von Ziehlberg expected Kuhn to commit suicide to escape arrest.

Instead, on July 27, 1944, Kuhn deserted to the Soviet troops. SMERSH operatives of the 2nd Belorussian Front arrested him and sent him to Moscow.15 In Germany, because of Kuhn’s desertion, von Ziehlberg was put on trial and sentenced to nine months in prison. His case was later reopened, and this time he was sentenced to death. On February 2, 1945, von Ziehlberg was executed.

In Moscow, Kuhn was jailed in Lubyanka Prison. On September 2, 1944, he wrote a lengthy testimony concerning his personal involvement in the German military opposition and conversations with von Stauffenberg and other opposition leaders, and provided a detailed description of German high-ranking opposition leaders whom he knew personally.16 Investigator Daniil Kopelyansky from Kartashov’s department translated Kuhn’s testimony into Russian.17 On September 23, Abakumov reported to Georgii Malenkov on the interrogation, enclosing a Russian translation of Kuhn’s testimony and arriving at an unfavorable conclusion: ‘Considering Kuhn’s [official] denouncement in Germany as a traitor and active participant in the plot, and his testimony that he played a very important role in the plot, it is possible that the Germans sent him [to us] with a special purpose under all these covers… I have already reported this to Comrade Stalin.’ A few days later, Kopelyansky’s translation was on Stalin’s desk and Stalin discussed the Kuhn affair with GKO members.

SMERSH investigators soon concluded that Kuhn’s testimony was truthful. From August 12, 1944, until March 1, 1947, they held Kuhn under the operational alias Joachim Malowitz, although documents issued in Kartashov’s department still listed him under his real name.18 Twice during this period, on February 17 and 28, 1945, Abakumov ordered SMERSH operatives to take Kuhn into the forest around the village of Mauerwald, in Poland, where he helped them to find a set of plotters’ documents hidden in cans and jars.19 Among the papers, there was Stauffenberg’s plan to kill Hitler in 1943 during his stay in the Wolfschanze, and draft orders to military leaders in case the assassination was successful. The Politburo rejected Abakumov’s proposal to publish these documents in the press, and the documents were declassified only in the late 1990s.

From the beginning of 1947 until March 1, Kuhn was in the Butyrka Prison hospital, and from March 1, 1947 to April 22, 1948, in an ‘MGB special object,’ the code name for a carefully guarded MGB dacha (country house) not far from the Malakhovka train station near Moscow.20 Abakumov ordered that Kuhn be trained for future work in the pro-Soviet East German administration, but as MGB officers soon discovered, Kuhn had other plans. Placed with Kuhn was another German POW, an informer, who reported to MGB handlers that in private conversations Kuhn criticized the Soviet regime and said that he wanted to defect to the Americans. As a result, on April 22, 1948, Kuhn was returned to Lefortovo Prison and held there for two years. Supposedly, he was subjected to torture.21

On April 5, 1950, Kuhn was transferred to Butyrka Prison. Like many other important prisoners investigated by Kartashov’s department, Kuhn was finally sentenced by the OSO (MGB) in the autumn of 1951. Convicted as a war criminal, he received a sentence of twenty-five years in a special prison for political prisoners.

From 1949 on, there were three such prisons under MGB supervision—Vladimir, Aleksandrovsk, and Verkhne-Uralsk; previously, they were under the NKVD/MVD jurisdiction. The most important convicts were held in Vladimir Prison not far from Moscow, where they could easily be additionally interrogated, if necessary. Kuhn was placed in Aleksandrovsk Prison near Irkutsk in Siberia. Another Aleksandrovsk inmate was the already mentioned Colonel Otto Armster, former head of the Abwehrstelle (Abwehr post) in Vienna, and also a member of the anti-Hitler plot, as well as a personal friend of Admiral Canaris. On June 21, 1945 he was brought to Moscow by plane and placed in Lefortovo Prison. In the spring of 1950, Armster was transferred to Butyrka. Like Kuhn, Armster was sentenced in 1951 and sent to Aleksandrovsk Prison. Apparently, by 1951, the MGB had already considered members of the anti-Nazi military plot to be unimportant, so these two were jailed far from Moscow.

For some time Kuhn was in solitary confinement, where he started calling himself ‘Major General Graf von der Pfaltz-Zweibruecken’ and hearing voices.22 A prison-hospital psychiatrist examined Kuhn and disagreed with the administration’s suspicion that he had gone insane. The doctor concluded that Kuhn ‘was fit to continue serving his sentence.’ Strangely, Kuhn was not transferred to the MVD Psychiatry Hospital in Kazan, as was done in similar cases of insanity.

In January 1956, Kuhn was released and returned to West Germany, where he lived in the town of Bad-Brukenau until his death in 1994. He had no desire to get together with those former plotting colleagues who had survived the Nazi persecution.23 When two of his prewar friends finally visited him in 1980, Kuhn called himself ‘Kronprinz Wilhelm von Hohenzollern.’ In December 1997, Kuhn was posthumously politically rehabilitated in Russia.

Investigation of POWs in the NKVD

Important German and other foreign POWs arrested by the NKVD were investigated by the Operational Department of the previously mentioned UPVI (NKVD Directorate for POWs and Interned Persons). The UPVI was created on Beria’s order issued on September 17, 1939, after Soviet troops invaded Poland.24 It had its own system of POW concentration camps, separate from that of the GULAG labor camps. Not only enemy POWs of various nationalities, but also civilians detained in the occupied territories were kept in these camps. Here is an example of such a camp:

By September 1, 1943, in the NKVD Camp No. 99 there were interned persons of various nationalities and citizenship,

     [total of] 958 people
  Of them, former Polish POWs 176
  Children 94
     
  According to nationalities, the contingent is represented by:
  Jews (men, women, and children) 360 people
  Poles 181
  Germans 121
  Spaniards 63
  Hungarians 33
  Romanians 30
  Frenchmen, Russians, Czechs, Estonians,
  Danes, Finns, etc. 170.25

The presence of Jewish child-prisoners is the most shocking in this document. This Camp No. 99, also known as Spaso-Zavodsky Camp, was located in Kazakhstan, near the town of Karaganda—the area where prisoners were used as enslaved coal miners.26 In 1943, captured enemy privates, not officers, were sent to this camp. Apparently, the Spaniards mentioned were soldiers of the Blue Division that fought near Leningrad in 1941–43, while the Frenchmen were soldiers drafted into the German army in Alsace-Lorraine, annexed by Nazi Germany in 1940.

Beginning in May 1943, Nikolai Ratushnyi was acting head of the UPVI. On August 3, 1943, Nikolai Mel’nikov was appointed his deputy and head of UPVI’s 2nd (Operational) Department. Mel’nikov had a long NKVD career, first in foreign intelligence and then in Sudoplatov’s 4th NKVD/NKGB Directorate (terrorist acts and diversions), where he headed the 1st Department in charge of foreign countries and POWs.

The Operational Department began investigating important POWs in 1944, but at first it was difficult to select these prisoners out of the general population of German POWs because of the increasing influx. In December 1943, there were about 100,000 POWs in the UPVI camps, while by December 1944, the number had increased to 680,921. Just after World War II, about 2,100,000 POWs (mostly former privates) were working in various branches of Soviet industry in all regions of the USSR.

In order to identify and select important prisoners, Mel’nikov created a net of informers among the POWs.27 After identifying officers, the Operational Department placed them in separate POW camps for officers. Additionally, special categories of POWs were selected for transfer to a few special UPVI camps: (a) those who had committed atrocities against Soviet citizens; (b) former active fascists and members of the intelligence, counterintelligence, and repressive organs of the enemy; and (c) those POWs who tried to escape from the UPVI camps or were planning to escape.28 On April 7, 1944, Mel’nikov committed suicide and Amayak Kobulov, former head of the NKVD rezidentura (network of spies) in Berlin in 1940–41, was appointed new head of the Operational Department.29 He was ‘a tall, fine-figured, handsome man from the Caucasus with a groomed moustache and black hair.’30 Major General Il’ya Pavlov, Kobulov’s deputy, was the only person on the UPVI staff who was transferred from SMERSH. In 1944, before coming to the UPVI, Pavlov was deputy head of the UKR SMERSH of the 2nd Belorussian Front.

On January 11, 1945, the UPVI was renamed the Main Directorate, becoming the GUPVI, while Ivan Petrov was appointed its head.31 Already on February 2, Lieutenant General Mikhail Krivenko, former deputy head of the NKVD Main Directorate of the Border Guards, replaced him. His participation in the Katyn Forest massacre has already been mentioned. The 2nd (Operational) Directorate of the GUPVI staff consisted of 71 men, and the activity of its 1st Department was almost identical to that of the 1st Section of the 2nd Department of the GUKR SMERSH.

The most important war criminals and intelligence officers investigated by the Operational Directorate were kept in the NKVD/MVD investigation prisons Butyrka, Taganka, and Sretenka in Moscow. They were tried and convicted by the Military Tribunal of the Moscow Military District or the OSO (NKVD/MVD). Out of more than 400 Soviet labor camps, convicted important POWs were sent only to the camps of Vorkuta or Norilsk. Unimportant POWs were tried by POW camp tribunals and the convicts were sent to the Karlag camp (Kazakhstan) or Siblag camp (Krasnoyarsk Province in Siberia).32 From 1949 onwards, the most important convicted POWs were held in the MVD Prison in Novocherkassk.

Camp No. 27 in Krasnogorsk

The POWs in Krasnogorsk Camp No. 27 in the Moscow suburbs were the main targets of the 1st Department of the Operational Directorate. In 1943–45, the camp’s Zone No. 1 held members of the former German military elite, including Field Marshal Friedrich von Paulus, former commander of the 6th Army; Lieutenant General Arthur Schmidt, former HQ head of the same army; Lieutenant General Vincenz Müller, former commander of the German 12th Army Corps; and Hitler’s personal pilot, Lieutenant General Hans Baur.33 An Anti-Fascist School for the ‘re-education’ of POWs (‘Antifa,’ in POW jargon) and barracks for its students were located in Zone No. 2. Most of the candidates selected for this school were former German and Austrian soldiers and low-level commanders.

Also held in Camp No. 27 (Zone 1) were the relatives of German political and economic leaders, including Lieutenant Heinrich von Einsiedel, a great-grandson of Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. After his release in 1948, von Einsiedel defected to the Western Zone in Berlin. Another prisoner was Lieutenant Colonel Adolf Victor von Papen, a relative of Franz von Papen, the former German Chancellor. During World War II, Franz von Papen was German envoy to Turkey, and in 1941 he was the target of an unsuccessful assassination attempt by the NKVD/GRU team led by Sudoplatov’s deputy Naum Eitingon.34 There was also Harold Bohlen und Holbach, the youngest son of Gustav Krupp (Gustav von Bohlen), the German ‘cannon king,’ a defendant in Nuremberg who was related to the American diplomat Charles (‘Chip’) Bohlen. The latter served as a Russian interpreter for President Franklin D. Roosevelt at the Tehran and Yalta conferences and for President Harry S. Truman, at the Potsdam Conference. Later, from 1953–57, he was American Ambassador to Moscow.

In August 1944, Harold Bohlen, at the time a member of the German military mission in Bucharest, was detained by the Romanian military along with other members of the mission. However, in October Bohlen, together with another officer of the mission, Major Prince Albrecht Hohenzollern, escaped from a concentration camp. Romanian King Mihai, a nephew of Prince Albrecht, organized the escape.35 Unfortunately for him, Bohlen was caught again and ended up in Camp No. 27. Prince Albrecht managed to hide from the Soviets.

The Romanian and Hungarian generals were also held in Camp No. 27. Japanese POWs were there from August 1946 to September 1948. In 1945–47, a separate ‘cottage’ (barrack) of the camp held entire families of Polish aristocrats: Radziwills, Krasnickis, Zamoiskis, and Branickis. The NKVD operatives arrested the Radziwill family just after Prince Janusz Radziwill had spent several months under German arrest, suspected of participation in organizing the Warsaw Uprising.36

The NKVD first captured Prince Radziwill, a prominent Polish politician, in 1939, after the Soviet annexation of the Polish territory. According to Pavel Sudoplatov, in Lubyanka Prison Beria personally interrogated the prince and supposedly persuaded him to report on Hermann Goering, head of the Luftwaffe (Air Force), whom Radziwill knew well.37 The NKVD considered Radziwill to be an ‘agent of influence’ rather than an ‘operational agent’ (i.e., a spy). An ‘agent of influence’ might even not have known that he was used in Soviet interests. In 1940, Prince Radziwill was released from prison and returned to Berlin, but he did not receive any instructions from Moscow.

Sudoplatov writes that at the beginning of 1945 he again used Prince Radziwill, who had been captured for the second time.38 Sudoplatov took the prince as a translator to a dinner with W. Averell Harriman, the American Ambassador, knowing that Radziwill and Harriman were already acquainted. During the dinner Sudoplatov, who introduced himself as ‘Pavel Matveyev,’ tried to find out what plans for post-war Europe the Americans would bring to the conference in Yalta (February 4–11, 1945). Sudoplatov lied, saying that Radziwill was living in Moscow in exile and was free to travel to Poland and London. In fact, after the meeting Radziwill joined his family incarcerated in Camp No. 27. Both Sudoplatov’s stories about Radziwill need verification.

In March 1946, British Ambassador to Moscow Archibald Clark Kerr wrote to Stalin asking him to free the Radziwill family that included two children. The release was postponed until the end of 1947, and Janusz’s wife Anna Radziwill died on February 16, 1947, before the family could leave the camp.

The Operational Directorate used Camp No. 27 (Zone 1) for two main purposes: to collect information on elite prisoners through informers, and for ideological brainwashing, preparing German collaborators for future work in the Soviet-occupied zone of Germany. As von Einsiedel wrote in his memoirs, even some German generals, including Vincenz Müller, became NKVD informers and spied on their fellow prisoners.39

Informers and collaborators were sent back to Germany early. Thus, by September 1948, General Müller had already been repatriated to East Germany, where he became a Police General.40 American military counterintelligence (CIC) twice tried to organize Müller’s defection to the West, but the general did not want to go.41 In contrast, Harold Bohlen and Adolf von Papen, who refused to collaborate with the NKVD officers, were convicted only in 1950. For the alleged spying and ‘aiding the international bourgeoisie’ they both received sentences of twenty-five years in the labor camps. They were sent to the camps near Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg) and returned to West Germany only in 1955.

In mid-1949, Camp No. 27, known as ‘operational-transitional,’ became one of seven GUPVI’s special ‘filtration’ camps for vetting the most important POWs of high officer ranks before their repatriation to Germany.42 As a result, the Operational Directorate selected forty-one generals—‘military revenge-seekers’—and opened criminal cases against them.43 For investigation they were transferred to the MVD investigation prisons in Moscow. In November 1950, Camp No. 27 was closed.

GUPVI/SMERSH Cooperation: Secret German Informers

In 1944–46, the Operational Department/Directorate frequently ‘shared’ German informers from Camp No. 27 with Kartashov’s SMERSH/MGB department in Moscow. Paul-Erchard Hille, the former Nazi journalist and member of the editorial board of Hermann Goebbels’s personal paper, Essener National Zeitung, is a good example.44 As his Personal File reveals, Hille was drafted in 1943 and served in the German infantry as a lance corporal. In January 1945, he was taken prisoner in Latvia by the troops of the 3rd Baltic Front, and then held in various POW camps until March 3, 1945 when he was moved to Moscow’s Lefortovo Prison. He must already have been a known informer; otherwise it would have been very unusual for SMERSH investigators to place an NKVD POW with SMERSH prisoners. From March 22 to April 4, Hille shared a cell with Vilmos Langfelder, Raoul Wallenberg’s assistant and driver. Langfelder and Wallenberg arrived in Moscow on February 6, 1945, and from then on, were investigated by Kartashov’s department.

After sharing a cell with Langfelder, Hille was transferred to the NKVD Butyrka Prison, where he had several cell mates. In May 1945, Yakov Schweitzer, one of the main investigators of the GUPVI’s Operational Directorate, interrogated him. Interrogations continued in October of 1945 after Hille’s transfer to Camp No. 27, where Schweitzer and Nikolai Lyutyi, who supervised informers, questioned him.45 Lyutyi’s interrogation or, most probably, beseda (a confidential conversation), points directly to Hille as a cell informer.

In January 1946, Hille was again in Butyrka Prison, where he spent from the end of February to the end of April in Cell 288 with Heinz Linge, former personal valet to Hitler. During this period, the whole Operational Directorate and Amayak Kobulov himself were preoccupied with investigating the circumstances of Hitler’s death. Linge, Baur, and some other witnesses of Hitler’s suicide came under intense interrogation. As Linge recalled in 1956, ‘the subject of these interrogations was mainly the question [of ] whether Hitler was dead or alive… During these interrogations I was always maltreated [i.e., beaten].’46 NKVD investigators held each witness who was interrogated about Hitler’s death in a cell with an informer and, moreover, these cells were bugged. The documents in Hille’s file reveal that while Linge was his cell mate, Schweitzer, who was investigating Linge’s case, interrogated Hille several times. Hille told Schweitzer whatever Linge tried to conceal from the investigators.47 In May 1946, after fulfilling his role as cell spy, Hille was returned to Camp No. 27.

On October 10, 1947, Nikolai Selivanovsky (MGB deputy minister) ordered Kartashov to request Hille’s transfer from Camp No. 27 to his MGB department. For an unknown reason, Amayak Kobulov did not sign the document transferring Hille to Lubyanka until January 30, 1948. In April 1951, the already mentioned officer Boris Solovov finished his interrogations of Hille. On April 14, 1951, the OSO (MGB) sentenced Hille to twenty-five years in prison for spying, and he was sent to Vladimir Prison. In July 1953, not long after Stalin’s death in March that year, Hille was released, and by December 1953 he was among the first POWs repatriated to East Germany.

An Anti-Hitler Plotter in GUPVI’s Hands

The GUPVI and GUKR SMERSH did not generally share information they received from prisoners during investigations. The two organizations sent separate reports to Stalin, Molotov, and other Politburo members, and only the GKO and Politburo members had full information on POWs. Abakumov and Kobulov conducted two separate investigations concerning the circumstances of Hitler’s suicide and presented the Politburo with two lists of potential defendants for trial at Nuremberg. The case of Colonel Hans (Johannes) Crome, former HQ head of the 4th Army Corps, was one of those rare instances in which the NKVD shared information directly with the GRU, NKGB, and SMERSH. On September 19, 1944, Beria signed the following letter:

In other words, the GUPVI had a higher-level German military plotter than the SMERSH’s prisoner Major Kuhn, about whom Abakumov reported to Stalin four days later. A 28-page Russian translation of Crome’s testimony dated September 2, 1944 was attached to Beria’s letter.

Crome claimed that the military anti-Hitler organization created in 1941 consisted of a central, leading group in Berlin, with branches in the High Command of the Armed Forces (OKW), the Army High Command (OKH), the armies at the Eastern Front, and the occupational troops in France. The central group included Colonel General Ludwig Beck, Field Marshal Erwin von Witzleben, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, Infantry Generals Alexander Falkenhausen and Friedrich Olbricht, and Major General Hans Oster (Canaris’s deputy), along with four civilians: Professor Jens Jessen; Ambassador to Rome Ulrich von Hassell (incorrectly spelled ‘Gasselt’ throughout the document); Oberbürgermeister Carl Goerdeler; and Prussian Staatsminister Johannes Popitz. While these names are now well known, in 1944 the Soviet leaders and heads of security services were possibly hearing about them and about the widespread German military Resistance for the first time.49 The organization’s goal was to arrest Hitler and other Nazi leaders and to try them in court. If Hitler’s arrest was impossible, the plotters were prepared to assassinate him. Crome mentioned Kuhn’s superior General Tresckow as the lead plotter at the Eastern Front.

Two points in Crome’s testimony are most interesting. First, he claimed that Admiral Canaris was one of the leaders of the plot and that the plotters’ meetings took place at his apartment in Berlin, which corresponds with some other data about Canaris.50 Second, according to Crome, the plotters planned coups twice, in December 1941 and autumn 1942 (in fact, it turned out to be more than twice). The first attempt was cancelled, and the second was postponed. In February 1942, RSHA head Reinhard Heydrich made a sudden visit to Paris, after which came the dismissal and discharge from the army of one of the key plotters, Field Marshal von Witzleben (commander of the German Occupational Troops in France), followed by the SD’s intensified oversight of Witzleben’s staff officers. Obviously, Heydrich had information about the plotters’ plans. Crome did not know what happened later because of his transfer to the Stalingrad Front and subsequent capture in February 1943. Unfortunately, no information is available about the reaction of the recipient of Beria’s cover letter and Crome’s testimony.

In 1955, Crome was repatriated to West Germany, where he continued his service and became Brigadegeneral of the Bundeswehr. He retired in 1961 and died in 1997. As for Field Marshal Witzleben, the Gestapo arrested him on July 21, 1944. On August 7–8, 1944 he was tried along with seven other military plotters. Witzleben was condemned to death and executed.

Interestingly, from 1963 to 1965 Crome’s son Hans-Henning headed Department 85 in the BND, the West German intelligence service. This department was in charge of investigating former war criminals among the BND staff. Crome Jr. collected materials on 146 staff members, 71 of whom—former RSHA officers—resigned because their crimes had been proven. In 2010 he told an interviewer: ‘My work in Department 85 is the only issue that haunts my nightmares after 40 years of my service.’51 He was referring to the crimes committed by those staffers who had resigned. Later Crome made a successful intelligence career while being stationed in New York, Madrid, and Bern.

In May 1945, after the war in Europe, Moscow investigation prisons of both GUKR SMERSH and GUPVI’s Operational Directorate were full of prisoners under investigation, and it took years to close cases and try all prisoners. But the influx of new prisoners from Europe was still coming, and in August, after the war with Japan, it increased enormously.

Notes

1. GKO Order No. 6594, dated September 24, 1944. Quoted in Viktor Cherepanov, Vlast’ i voina. Stalinskii mekhanizm gosudarstvennogo upravleniya v Velikoi Otechestvennoi voine (Moscow: Izvestia, 2006), 329 (in Russian).

2. Ibid., 435.

3. SMERSH. Istoricheskie ocherki i dokumenty, edited by V. S. Khristoforov et al., 214–5 (Moscow: Glavnoe arkhivnoe upravlenie, 2003) (in Russian).

4. Document 6 (Indictment of the Austrian composer, Hans Hauska) in ‘Vernite mne svobodu!’ Deyateli literatury i iskusstva Rossii i Germanii—zhertvy stalinskogo terrora, edited by V. F. Kolyazin and V. A. Goncharov, 118–9 (Moscow: Medium, 1997) (in Russian).

5. Vladimir Abarinov, ‘A report of Doctor Smoltsov,’ Novoe vremya, No. 1 (1993), 40–41 (in Russian).

6. A notarized testimony of Count Adelmann about Raoul Wallenberg given to the Swedish authorities on February 6, 1956 (in German) (RWDD, RA UD, Stockholm).

7. Nikolai Mesyatsev, Gorizonty i labirinty moei zhizni (Moscow: Vagrius, 2005), 141 (in Russian).

8. Page 123 in Dmitrii Dontsov, ‘Stenografistka generala Abakumova,’ in Voennaya kontrrazvedka of ‘Smersha’ do kontrterroristicheskikh operatsii (Moscow: Kuchkovo pole, 2010), 112–31 (in Russian).

9. Roger Moorhouse, Killing Hitler: The Plots, the Assassins, and the Dictator Who Cheated Death (New York: Bantam Books, 2006), 236–41.

10. Peter Hoffmann, Stauffenberg: A Family History, 1905–1944 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 181.

11. Michael Mueller, Canaris: The Life and Death of Hitler’s Spymaster, translated by Geoffrey Brooks (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2007), 224–5.

12. Klemens von Klemperer, German Resistance Against Hitler: The Search for Allies Abroad, 1938–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 374–5.

13. Fabian von Schlabrendorff, The Secret War Against Hitler, translated by Hilda Simon (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1966), 295.

14. Peter Hoffmann, The History of the German Resistance 1933–1945, translated from the German by Richard Barry (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1979), 334–5.

15. Boris Chavkin and Aleksandr Kalganov, ‘Neue Quallen zur Geschichte des 20. Juli 1944 aus dem Archiv des Foederalen Sicherheitsdienstes der Russischen Foederation (FSB). “Eigenhaendige Aussagen” von Major i.G. Joachim Kuhn,’ in Forum für osteuropäische Ideen-und Zeitgeschichte, 5. Jahrgang, 2001, Heft 2, 355–402.

16. Kuhn’s statement, dated September 2, 1944. Document No. 1 in ibid., 374–98.

17. Kopelyansky’s Russian translation in Boris Khavkin, ‘Zagovor protiv Gitlera. Iz “Sobstennoruchnykh pokazanii” Kyuna,’ Rodina, no. 6 (2004) (in Russian), http://istrodina.com/rodina_articul.php3?id=1199&n=67, retrieved July 23, 2008.

18. Ibid.

19. Photos of these documents in Peter Hoffmann, ‘Oberst i. G. Hennig von Tresckow und die Staatsstreichpläne im Jahr 1943,’ Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 55, No. 2 (2007), 331–64.

20. Khavkin, ‘Zagovor protiv Gitlera.’

21. Peter Hoffmann, ‘Major Joachim Kuhn: Explosives purveyor to Stauffenberg and Stalin’s prisoner,’ German Studies Review, Vol. 28, No. 3 (October 2005), 519–46. Unfortunately, this article contains inaccurate details.

22. Kuhn’s letter dated February 15, 1952, in Chavkin und Kalganov, ‘Neue Quellen zur Geschichte,’ 369–70; Hoffmann, ‘Major Joachim Kuhn,’ 537–8.

23. Von Herwarth, Against Two Evils, 261.

24. NKVD Order No. 0308, dated September 19, 1939. Document No. 2–1 Voennoplennye v SSSR 1939–1956. Dokumenty i materialy (Moscow: Logos, 2000), edited by M. M. Zagorul’ko, 72–74 (in Russian). An overview of the UPVI/GUPVI activity is given in Stefan Karner, Im Archipel GUPVI. Kriegsgefangenschaft in der Internierung in der Sowjetunion. 1941–1956 (Wien: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1995).

25. A GUPVI’s report, RGVA, Fond I/p, Opis’ 07e, Delo 136, L. 747.

26. NKVD Order No. 00398, dated March 1, 1943. Document No. 2.12 in Voennoplennye v SSSR, 100–5.

27. NKVD Instruction No. 489, dated October 7, 1943. Document 7.3 in ibid., 729–32.

28. NKVD Order No. 00130, dated September 9, 1944. Document 7.4 in ibid., 732–5.

29. NKVD Order No. 00100, dated February 20, 1945. Document 2.23 in ibid., 122–3.

30. V. M. Berezhkov, Stranitsy diplomaticheskoi istorii (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnye otnoshenoya, 1987), 208 (in Russian).

31. NKVD Order No. 0014, dated January 11, 1945. Document 2.22 in Voennoplennye v SSSR, 120–2.

32. MVD Directive No. 219, dated August 31, 1946. Document 7.6 in ibid., 739.

33. V. A. Vsevolodov, ‘Srok khraneniya—postoyanno!’ Kratkaya istoriya lagerya voennoplennykh i internirovannykh UPVI NKVD-MVD No. 27 (1942–1950 gg.) (Moscow: LOK-motiv, 2003), 53–58 (in Russian).

34. Details in Aleksandr Kolpakidi, Likvidatory KGB. Spetsoperatsii sovetskikh spetssluzhb. 1941–2004 (Moscow: Yauza-Eksmo, 2004), 20–25 (in Russian).

35. Yevgenii Zhirnov, ‘Prints skryl svoyu nastoyashchuyu familiyu,’ Kommersant-Vlast’, no. 14 (668), April 10, 2006 (in Russian), http://www.kommersant.ru/doc.aspx?DocsID=664971, retrieved September 9, 2011.

36. Kruglov’s report to Molotov, dated March 16, 1946. GARF, Fond R-9401, Opis’ 2 (Molotov’s NKVD/MVD Special Folder), Delo 142. L. 56–58.

37. Pavel Sudoplatov and Anatoli Sudoplatov, with Jerrold L. and Leona P. Schecter, Special Tasks: The Memoirs of an Unwanted Witness—A Soviet Spymaster (New York: Little, Brown and Co., 1994), 112–5.

38. Ibid., 223–7.

39. Heinrich Graf von Einsiedel, I Joined the Russians: A Captured German Flier’s Diary of the Communist Temptation (New Haven (CT): Yale University Press, 1953), 225–7.

40. Details in Peter J. Lapp, General bei Hitler und Ulbricht. Vincenz Müller—Eine deutsche Karrier (Berlin: Christoph Links Verlag, 2003).

41. Alaric Searle, ‘“Vopo”-General Vincenz Müller and Western Intelligence, 1948–54: CIC, the Gehlen Organization and Two Cold War Covert Operations,’ Intelligence and National Security 17 (2002), no. 2, 27–50.

42. Document Nos. 7.23 and 7.25 in Voennoplennye v SSSR, 768–9, 772–3.

43. Document No. 54 in Vsevolodov, Srok khraneniya, 246–8.

44. Data from Hille’s personal file, Military Archive, Moscow; Hille’s prisoner card in Vladimir Prison; and Hille’s interview given on September 1, 1954 to the Swedish journalist, Rudolph Phillipp.

45. From February till August 1946, N. V. Liutyi-Shestakovskii (1899–?) was deputy head, and from August 1946 till February 1948, head of the 2nd Department (supervision of secret agents) of the GUPVI Operational Directorate. Voennoplennye v SSSR, 1077.

46. Joachimsthaler, The Last Days of Hitler, 254.

47. V. A. Kozlov, ‘Gde Gitler?’ Povtornoe rassledovanie NKVD–MVD SSSR obstoyatel’stva ischeznoveiya Adolfa Gitlera (1945–1949) (Moscow: Modest Kolyarov, 2003), 123 (in Russian).

48. GARF, Fond R-940, Opis’ 2 (Stalin’s Special NKVD/MVD Folder), Delo 66, L. 293–323.

49. For all these people see, for instance, von Klemperer, German Resistance Against Hitler.

50. John H. Waller, ‘The Double Life of Admiral Canaris,’ The International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence 9, no. 3 (Fall 1996), 271–89.

51. Peter Carstens, ‘Eime “zweite Entnazifizierung,”’ FAZ.net, March 18, 2010, http://www.faz.net/s/Rub594835B672714A1DB1A121534F010EE1/Do c~EA65AAB2D1C2048249EAD3E3BC2FA6BAA~ATpl~Ecommon~Scontent. html, retrieved September 9, 2011.