Burn After Reading

by Ladislas Farago

  The Nazis instituted a manhunt for Skalda. They arrested him on September 23, and also apprehended fifteen of his aides. Someone broke under the stress of interrogation and talked, probably in exaggerated terms, of a widespread underground movement. The weak-kneed Baron Konstantin von Neurath was replaced as Protector by the ruthless Reinhard Heydrich.

  He arrived in the Hradcin, Prague’s ancient castle on the hill, on September 27, and went to work at once, hitting right and left, very much in the dark but determined to do too much rather than too little. Premier Elias was arrested, as were three famous generals of the defunct Czechoslovak Army—Bily, Votja, and Horacek—and hundreds of others, some on actual evidence, others on the flimsiest grounds. In the next four days Heydrich had twenty-two Czech patriots executed, including Skalda and the three generals. In October, he pulled in three hundred and fourteen additional suspects, fifty-eight of whom were either shot or hanged.

  The Czechs’ answer to Heydrich’s sanguine orgy was defiance. The underground now went into action on an impressive scale. Help came also from London. Mysterious planes flew in leaders to take the places of those whom Heydrich had murdered. They also dropped supplies.

  The Heydrich terror continued. On a single day in January, 1942, twenty-three workers were shot on suspicion of sabotage. In April, there was an increase of sabotage in Bohemia and Moravia, with tragic consequences at Tetchen and Bohumin: Heydrich hanged twenty-five patriots in the former city, and had six shot in the latter.

  May came with the tidings of spring to find the underground better organized than ever, and emboldened by Heydrich’s failure to stamp out resistance despite his savage campaign. The aid received from abroad also helped tremendously. On May 5, during an RAF raid on the Skoda Works in Pilsen, an especially important group of men was dropped, with containers in which were concealed super-secret pieces of special equipment. The BBC broke in with an unusually strong attack on Heydrich, and from then on, it made the Protector the sole target of its barbs.

  The situation was getting worse by the day and Heydrich decided to start an all-out campaign this time, to liquidate the last vestiges of the underground once and for all. He had the plans drawn and then arranged for a trip to Berlin to lay them before Hitler and Himmler for their approval. He was full of excitement and talked confidently of the future, of the great plans he had for Czechoslovakia after it had regained its sense, as he put it.

  But by then, Reinhard Heydrich was himself living on borrowed time. He was to die violently before the month was out, killed by a bomb from the Resistance he could not conquer.

  If the secret war began in Czechoslovakia, Russia was not far behind.

  On July 25, 1941, the Russian campaign was just thirty-three days old; the communiqués of the German High Command were coming in batches, announcing new victories. Yet one cryptic communiqué spoke of some haphazard guerrilla activity in the combat zones, aimed mainly, and not very effectively, at the German supply lines. It was the first mention of a phantom force, which the Soviets were pitting against the invaders.

  It was a glorious summer and the Germans enjoyed the scenic beauty of the land. They were especially enchanted by the virgin forests, as a poetic German correspondent then wrote, “broad green walls into which the rugged roads seemed to penetrate vertically like bright gleaming shafts.” That same idyllic forest was soon to lose its enchantment when the Germans found it swarming with the dark soldiers of that phantom force. It “no longer inspired us with such dreams,” the correspondent wrote after a two-hour encounter with those men, “as we had had during the first stage of the journey. There it stood, silent, dark, and menacing, on either side of the road. The shadows of the night and the fogs of the marshes crept up in thin veils between tree trunks. An oppressive, nervous feeling began increasingly to possess us.”

  On September 12, a brief communiqué mentioned a German patrol “in action against bandits in no-man’s land.” On November 5, bandits were mentioned as doing demolition work after the retreat of a Red Army contingent. Nine days later, the intelligence officer of the German 11th Army was sufficiently impressed to write a memorandum about those bandits.

  “According to available reports,” he wrote, “a well-organized, centrally-directed partisan organization is operating in the southern part of Crimea. It has at its disposal large and small bases in the Jaila mountains, which are well provided with arms, food, herds of cattle and other supplies.” Their task seemed to be, he added, the destruction of signal and traffic installations, and raids on the rear services of the German army, especially its supply columns. A few of them were spies.

  By then, several of the bandits had fallen into the hands of the enemy, and the Germans had a chance to size them up. They scandalized their captors for more reasons than one. “Already their outward appearance and their garments mark them as bandits,” wrote a Major Schaefer. “Generally speaking, they do not wear uniform with insignia of rank, but plain clothes of all sorts, or in other words, bandit’s civvies. They masquerade as innocent peasants. Some wear civilian clothes and an odd piece of uniform, so that they can swiftly change, like a chameleon, in accordance with requirements. We met bands in German uniforms, complete with insignia, and others with two uniforms, a German and a Russian, one over the other.”

  The partisans came from all walks of life. A band of three men consisted of a young Red Army straggler, a sixty-year-old engineer from Feodosia, and a Tartar. A two-man team was made up of a twenty-three-year-old Russian cobbler and a thirty-four-year-old school teacher from Kerch. By March, 1942, the front no longer was confined to those neat lines drawn on General Staff maps. It was everywhere. On March 6, even Dr. Goebbels wrote in his diary: “An SD report informed me about the situation in occupied Russia. It is, after all, more unstable than was generally assumed. The partisan danger is increasing week after week. The partisans are in control of large areas in occupied Russia and are conducting a regime of terror there.” On April 29 he added: “The danger of the partisans in the occupied areas continues to exist in unmitigated intensity. They have caused us very great difficulties during the winter, and these by no means ceased with the beginning of spring.”

  Partisan warfare was no accidental response of the Russians. As early as 1934, speaking of a possible future war against the Soviet Union, Stalin said, “It would be the most dangerous war for the bourgeoisie, because such a war will be waged not only at the fronts but also at the rear of the enemy.” And on the twelfth day of the war, Stalin issued a special order to all men, women and even children, throughout the Soviet Union, to go into action as partisans.

  “In areas occupied by the enemy,” his decree read, “guerrilla units, on foot and horseback, must be formed and diversion groups created to combat enemy troops, to foment guerrilla warfare everywhere, to blow up bridges and roads, to destroy telephone and telegraph communications, to set fire to forests, depots and trains. In occupied territories conditions must be made unbearable for the enemy and all his collaborators; they must be pursued and annihilated wherever they are, and all their measures must be brought to naught.”

  Within a week, Stalin’s general order was made specific in a directive by the Central Committee of the Communist Party (as distinct from the General Staff of the Red Army, for this was a “patriotic” matter which the Party proposed to handle). Partisan headquarters were set up in Moscow. Its chief of staff was a promising young Communist Party functionary, Ponomarenko. He was given the rank of lieutenant general, a staff, and the equipment. The rest was left to him and he made the most of it.

  According to General Sir Reginald F. S. Denning, a British expert on guerrilla warfare, Ponomarenko’s army-in-rags made a “considerable contribution to the defeat of the German armies.” After the war, Stalin went so far as to assert that had it not been for the partisans, the Soviet Union would never have succeeded in defeating the Germans.

  Ponomarenko cited examples of partisan achievements in 1945 when he prepared a report: �
��The destruction by Ukrainian guerrillas of troops guarding Sarny railway junction; the blowing up of large bridges on the rivers Ptich and Drissa; the rout by the Byelorussian guerrillas of the Germans at Slavnoye station; the rout of the garrison and the destruction of military objectives at Slutks; the blowing up by Orel troops of big Navlya and Vygonits bridges, when the whole of the German guards there were wiped out; the rout by Smolensk guerrillas of the garrison at Prigorye station and the destruction of trains in it; the operations of the Leningrad guerrillas, which ended in the killing of General von Wirtz and his bodyguard; the complete rout of four garrisons by Karelo-Finnish guerrillas on the island of Bolshoi Kremenets; the blowing up of the Savkin bridge and the extermination of the Sutok garrison by Kalinin guerrillas; the rout of an army corps headquarters at Ugodsk Zavod by Moscow guerrillas; the Sdatsk operation, which ended in the annihilation of one thousand two hundred officers and men of the Third German Jaeger Infantry Division, carried out by Crimean guerrillas.”

  According to Ponomarenko, in just two years of partisan warfare behind the lines, his guerrillas killed thirty generals, three hundred thousand German soldiers and hundreds of Soviet collaborators. A chambermaid blew up Friedrich Kube, the German governor general of Byelo-Russia; another woman partisan killed Fabian Akinchitz, chief of the German secret service in Minsk; and still another killed Friedrich Vench, commandant of the town of Baranovichi.

  During the same period (between 1941 and 1943), Ponomarenko’s ragamuffins derailed three thousand trains, blew up three thousand two hundred and sixty-three bridges, destroyed one thousand one hundred and ninety-one tanks and four hundred seventy-six planes. Germany had a total of six million six hundred thousand dead from all causes on all fronts. Of these, Ponomarenko claimed his partisans had killed more than a million officers and men. At the peak of their activities, in 1944 in the Crimea, partisans mounted a thousand raids on roads and railways in the German rear within a period of only seven hours. “And these raids,” Field Marshall von Manstein added, “happened every single day.”

  Like any other army, this guerrilla force had an insatiable appetite for information. It was supplied by thousands of spies. Vladimir Morosov was a small cog in this service. His importance lay in the fact that he was typical, the average Soviet spy of World War II. He was thirty-three years old when the Germans came, an accountant by profession, who went to the commandant of the Red Army garrison in his town and volunteered. They sent him to a school in Krasnodar, in the Caucasus, to learn the ropes, and he was graduated with twenty-eight other students in his class after only twenty days. His was one of the extended courses. In the pressure of those days, some spies were sent into the field with as little as a three-day education.

  On February 18, 1942, he was taken to Kerch and delivered to the partisans with whom he was to work. Hardly was he settled when he was ordered to go behind the German lines and find out the number of Germans in the Islam-Terek area and the location of a certain ammunition and fuel dump at Itchky. The partisans smuggled him across the Sivash and then, on his own, he made his way to the German rear.

  The average spy met an average end. His name and mission are today known because the Germans caught him and shot him, leaving a brief memento of his memory in a two-page document. Thousands like Morosov lost their lives in missions like this; but thousands managed to go and return, bringing back the vital intelligence they were supposed to procure.

  Fully half of the partisan spies were women, some pretty girls who performed in the world’s oldest profession, both catering to the German soldiers and coaxing information from them; others, elderly matrons doing various manual jobs. They came in all forms and shapes, and in all age groups.

  On February 14, 1942, at Kush, a young man was seen slipping a scrap of paper to an older man on a street corner. A member of the German Field Secret Police happened to be passing by and stopped to inquire. When the Russians tried to run away, the German shot them both. Papers found on the man showed he was a fifty-four-year-old Russian railroad worker who served as a courier for the Kush partisans. The young man was a spy whose information the courier came to collect. He turned out to be a girl. She was fourteen years old.

  In the spy business, youth was regarded as an advantage. One of Ponomarenko’s directives required that “children must play an important part as scouts and secret agents.” An intelligence officer who believed in the directive was Lieutenant Ivan Brusenko, billeted in the house of a certain Derechenko in Poltava. The lieutenant became very friendly with the family, especially with Pavel, Comrade Derechenko’s twelve-year-old son. Brusenko’s room became an improvised spy school where he taught the boy the tricks of the trade.

  Brusenko thought up a plausible cover for Pavel. The boy was to go to Lichovka, on the right bank of the Dnieper, pretending to be a war orphan, begging for something to eat and engage German soldiers in purposeful conversations. He was to return to a rendezvous on the left bank of the river every two to four days to deliver his intelligence and to receive new instructions.

  Brusenko impressed on the boy that he was not to make any notes, but had to keep everything he found out in his mind. Furthermore, he was to operate as a lone wolf, taking care of his own needs and maintaining his own lines of communications. It was quite a job for a child, but Pavel was up to it.

  A few weeks later, Pavel vanished from home and made his way alone to a prearranged spot on the river where one of Brusenko’s assistants was awaiting him. It was a cold night and the barefoot boy, appropriately dressed for the mission, was shivering, as the Red Army sergeant ferried him across the river in a small boat.

  Next morning he approached his first German soldier, asked for some bread, and found that the soldier talked freely to the timid questions he posed, camouflaged as the innocent curiosity of an urchin, and so did others. Two nights later Pavel made his way back to the river. Lieutenant Brusenko was waiting for him. He was well satisfied with the information Pavel brought back and ordered the boy to return at once.

  Returning from this mission, Pavel ran into a German patrol whose leader refused to accept the little beggar at face value. He took the boy back to Lichovka and handed him over to the Secret Field Police. Under the strain of the interrogation, the lad started to contradict himself. He was turned over to the tough guy of the unit, and, within an hour, Pavel talked. His adventures were over.

  I reconstructed Pavel Derechenko’s story from a report of Group 626 of the Secret Field Police. It was a relatively short report, written in awkward official German. It concluded with the three words :

  “Derechenko was shot.”

  There was hardly a teen-ager in the Soviet Union who kept aloof from the war. The official account of the partisans abounds with their stories and shows that they distinguished themselves in all phases of the guerrilla war.

  “A group of children,” the account related, “under the leadership of two twelve-year-old boys, recently carried a charge of dynamite to a bridge and placed it in position, taking advantage of the dark night and of a dozing sentry. They then lit the fuse and made off into the woods. The bridge was blown to atoms.”

  While this immense partisan effort was run almost exclusively from inside Russia, the underground armies elsewhere in Europe had outside assistance, from the British S.O.E., the American O.S.S. and the various governments-in-exile in London. The agents of the S.O.E. came from many countries and all walks of life. A man named Chastellaine had been a director of an oil company in Rumania, but during the war he plotted the sabotage of some of his own old firm’s installations. Denis J. Rake was a famous circus artist who lived in Belgium and became one of the British heroes of the Belgian underground. Yeo-Thomas—the famous White Rabbit—was manager of a celebrated Parisian fashion house and became a leader of the Maquis. Odette Sansom was the pretty French wife of an Englishman and the mother of three beautiful daughters, but she became one of the most effective spies of all, and survived to receive the coveted George Cross, the
only one among the ladies of the underground to do so.

  Among the shadowy figures of S.O.E. was a little, raven-haired French woman remembered only by her wartime nickname, La Souris, The Mouse. There was nothing really mousy about her except the recognition signal she used on her missions. It was a delicate scratching on a window pane, like the sound of a mouse. She furnished Britain with the first information about the absolute weapon with which the Germans hoped to win the war, the famous guided missile called V-l.

  In order to describe the manner in which these agents worked, I will tell a composite story woven around La Souris.

  The Mouse was a school teacher in Paris and a native of Normandy. When the Germans reached the capital in June, 1940, she returned to her relatives in Lyons-la-Forêt, to sit out the occupation. She could not endure the idleness, however, and she inquired for someone who would take her to England. One night a delivery truck drove up to the farmhouse where she was staying and a man came in, asking for her. She asked no questions, but took her old-fashioned, school-marmish hat and her coat, and followed the man to the truck. He instructed her to climb in and lie down behind some sacks of potatoes. He drove her to a hut near an open field where three men squatted, talking in low tones. She sat down and kept quiet.

  Half an hour later she heard a buzzing sound in the air. The three men ran out to the field, lighted torches and attached them to sticks which formed the shape of an L. A small aircraft landed and taxied to the shorter branch of the L. It was a black-painted plane without any insignia on it, one of the little Lysanders of the S.O.E.’s air ferry service.

  She climbed in. One of the men followed her into the plane. It taxied and took off, circled the field once, and, when she looked down, she saw only darkness beneath. The torches were gone.