Smersh: Stalin's Secret Weapon: Soviet Military Counterintelligence in WWII

by Vadim Birstein

  The Malenkov Commission decided that the Military Tribunal of the North Caucasian Front would try eleven defendants in an open trial, which was held in Krasnodar on July 14–17, 1943, and presided over by Judiciary Major N. Y. Mayorov, Chairman of the Military Tribunal of the North Caucasian Front.3 Eleven Soviet collaborators, charged with treason under Article 58-1a (civilians) and 58-1b (Soviet servicemen), were accused of assisting Colonel Christmann’s SK unit in the killing of 7,000 people—patients in the municipal hospital, a convalescent home, and a children’s hospital—in Krasnodar in 1942–43.4 The court appointed three counselors to defend the accused. However, Soviet legal procedures allowed the counselors to meet with their clients only in the court and they were not permitted to cross-examine eyewitnesses.

  During the trial, two defendants, N. Pushkarev and V. Tishchenko, described in detail the gas vans used by Einsatzkommando 10a for killing Jews and other victims. Until then, the existence of these vehicles was a Nazi secret. A witness named Ivan Kotov, who had been loaded into a gas van but survived, also testified:

  On 22 August [1942] I went to Municipal Hospital No. 3… As I entered the courtyard I saw a large truck with a dark-gray body. Before I had taken two steps a German officer seized me by the collar and pushed me into the vehicle. The interior of the van was crammed full of people, some of them completely naked, some of them in their underclothes. The door was closed. I noticed that the van started to move. Minutes later I began to feel sick. I was losing consciousness. I had previously taken an anti-air raid course, and I immediately understood that we were being poisoned by some kind of gas. I tore off my shirt, wet it with urine, and pressed it to my mouth and nose. My breathing became easier, but I finally lost consciousness. When I came to, I was lying in a ditch with several dozen corpses. With great effort I managed to climb out and drag myself.5

  Eight defendants were sentenced to death and publicly hanged.6 The rest were convicted to twenty years in special hard labor camps. Alexander Werth, a British journalist, referred to the trial as ‘first-rate hate propaganda’ aimed at emphasizing the suffering of the Soviet people under the German occupation.7 The German SK10a members were not caught and only a few German officers of this unit were ever put on trial. Otto Ohlendorf was the main defendant at the Nuremberg trial of Einsatzgruppen leaders (September 1947–April 1948).8 He was sentenced to death and hanged on June 7, 1951. SK commander Seetzen went into hiding near Hamburg after the war under the false name ‘Michael Gollwitzer’. After his arrest by the British authorities in September 1945, he committed suicide.

  In 1972, three former SK10a officers tried in West Germany received lenient four-year sentences for the 1941 massacre of 200 Jews in the city of Taganrog and the 1942 massacre of 214 children in the town of Yeisk. In 1973, three more officers were convicted and given from two to four and a half years for shooting hundreds of Jews and other civilians in Ukraine in 1941.

  Finally, in 1980, Kurt Christmann was tried in Munich.9 From 1946 to 1948, he was interned in the British occupation zone under the false name ‘Dr. Ronda’, after which he successfully fled to Argentina. He returned to West Germany in 1956 and was arrested by West German police in November 1979 on charges of participating in the murders of 105 persons in Krasnodar in 1942–43. On December 19, 1980, a court sentenced Christmann to ten years in prison. He died in 1987.

  The last SK10a case—of Helmut Oberlander, who had served in SK10a as an interpreter—ended in November 2009.10 In February 1942, the seventeen-year-old Oberlander, an ethnic German and Soviet citizen, was conscripted to the occupation troops. In 1954 he arrived in Canada and obtained Canadian citizenship in 1960. His citizenship was revoked in 2001 and 2007, but there was no proof that he had participated in the SK10a atrocities. In 2009 the Canadian Federal Court of Appeal reinstated Oberlander’s Canadian citizenship.

  The Kharkov Trial

  On September 2, 1943, Abakumov suggested trying several German officers taken prisoner on January 31, 1943, when the 6th German Army surrendered in Stalingrad. These officers had committed atrocities against Soviet POWs, and were the first Germans anywhere to be tried as war criminals. Abakumov wrote:

  To: Sovnarkom of the USSR, Comrade Vyshinsky

  In mid-January 1943, while tightening the encirclement of the 6th [German] Army, our troops took over a transit camp for POWs, the so-called Dulag-205, located near the village of Alekseevka not far from Stalingrad. Thousands of bodies of Red Army soldiers and commanders were found on and near the territory of the camp. All of the prisoners had died of exhaustion and cold. Also, there were a few hundred extremely exhausted former Red Army servicemen.

  The investigation conducted by the Main Directorate ‘SMERSH’ revealed that the German soldiers and officers, following orders of the German high command, severely mistreated POWs—brutally exterminating them by beating and execution, creating unbearable conditions in the camp, and starving them to death. It was also established that the Germans subjected POWs to the same brutality in the camps in Darnitsa near Kiev, Dergachi near Kharkov, and in the towns of Poltava and Rossoshi.

  The following direct perpetrators of the death of Soviet people are currently under investigation in the Main Directorate ‘SMERSH’: KÖRPERT, RUDOLF, former commandant of the Dulag-205 camp, colonel of the German Army, born 1886 in the Sudetenland (Germany) to a merchant’s family. Taken prisoner on January 31, 1943, in the city of Stalingrad.

  VON KUNOWSKI, WERNER, former chief quartermaster of the 6th German Army, lieutenant colonel, born 1907 in Silesia, a noble, son of a major general of the German Army. Taken prisoner on January 31, 1943, in the city of Stalingrad.

  LANGHELD, WILHELM, former counterintelligence officer (Abwehr officer) at the Dulag-205 camp, captain of the German Army, born 1891 in the city of Frankfurt-on-Main to a family of bureaucrats, member of the Fascist Party since 1933. Taken prisoner on January 31, 1943, in the city of Stalingrad.

  MÄDER, OTTO, former adjutant to the Commandant of the Dulag-205 camp, senior lieutenant of the German Army, born 1895 in the Erfurt Region (Germany), member of the Fascist Party since 1935. Taken prisoner on January 31, 1943, in the city of Stalingrad.

  The testimonies of KUNOWSKI, LANGHELD, and MÄDER confirmed a direct order from the highest command of the German Army to exterminate Soviet POWs, both officers and privates, as ‘inferiors’…

  Thus, approximately 4,000 Soviet POWs were imprisoned in the Alekseevsk camp, although it was built to hold only 1,200 prisoners…

  As the German officers KÖRPERT, KUNOWSKI, LANGHELD, and MÄDER testified, Soviet POWs were half-starved in the Dulag-205 camp. Beginning in December 1942, the high command of the 6th German Army represented by Head of Staff, Lt. Gen. [Arthur] SCHMIDT, completely stopped food supplies to the camp…11 By the time the camp was liberated by the Red Army, approximately 5,000 men had died. The POWs, almost insane from hunger, were hunted down by dogs during the distribution of food, which was prepared from waste products…

  LANGHELD testified: ‘I usually beat the POWs with a stick 4–5 cm in diameter. This happened…also in the other POW camps…’ During the investigation…former Red Army servicemen…held in the Dulag-205 camp, were identified and interrogated…

  Thus, ALEKSEEV, A. A…testified…on August 10, 1943:

  ‘Mortality in the camp was high because…bread and water were not given at all…

  ‘Instead of water, we collected [and drank] dirty snow mixed with blood, which caused mass illness among the POWs…

  ‘We slept on the ground and it was impossible to get warm. Our warm clothes and valenki [felt boots] were taken from us, and we were given torn boots and clothes from the dead…

  ‘Many servicemen, unable to withstand the horrific conditions of the camp, went insane. About 150 men died per day, and during one day in the first days of 1943, 216 men died…The German commanders used to set dogs—Alsatians—on the POWs. The dogs knocked down the weak POWs and dragged them across the ground, while the Germans stoo
d around laughing. Public shootings of POWs were common in the camp…’

  KÖRPERT, KUNOWSKI, LANGHELD, and MÄDER admitted their guilt.

  The case is still under investigation. I have notified the government that an open trial and its detailed description in the media are necessary.

  Abakumov.12

  Perhaps Abakumov had addressed his report to Vyshinsky, and not to Stalin, because the question of war crimes concerned an agreement with the Allies. A month later, from October 18 to November 11, 1943, a conference of Allied foreign ministers was held in Moscow, resulting in the Moscow Declaration signed by the Soviet, American, British, and Chinese leaders. Its section titled Statement on Atrocities (signed by Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin) dealt with German war criminals: ‘Those German officers and men and members of the Nazi party who have been responsible for or have taken a consenting part in the…atrocities, massacres and executions will be sent back to the countries in which their abominable deeds were done in order that they may be judged and punished according to the laws of these liberated countries and of free governments which will be erected therein.’13

  The trial of the four German officers who participated in atrocities in the Dulag-205 camp did not take place in 1943, probably because SMERSH continued interrogations of Körpert, Mäder, and four other high officials of the camp until the autumn of 1944. However, Wilhelm Langheld, also mentioned in the September 1943 report, was a defendant at a trial that came about because of a new report from Abakumov to the GKO (addressed to Stalin and Molotov) on November 18, 1943. Abakumov suggested launching a new open trial of German war criminals who had participated in the liquidation of Soviet citizens in Kharkov and Smolensk.14

  Using the April 19, 1943, secret decree of the Presidium, which provided a legal basis for the punishment of German war criminals and collaborators, Abakumov proposed trying three captured German officers, including Langheld, and one Soviet collaborator. Abakumov especially emphasized SMERSH’s possession of new proof that the occupiers had used gas vans for mass killings not only in the Krasnodar Region but also in Kharkov and Smolensk, where, in all, 160,000 inhabitants were executed.

  Abakumov proposed using eighty-nine witnesses who had testified about German atrocities, materials of the ChGK, and medical reports of exhumations by leading Soviet medical experts, including academician Nikolai Burdenko (who a few months later chaired the commission investigating the exhumed bodies of Polish officers in the Katyn Forest) and Viktor Prozorovsky, USSR chief medical expert.

  Abakumov also attached a draft decision to his report, mandating that the trial be held in Kharkov on December 10–12, 1943.15 The draft proposed that Shcherbakov, a secretary of the Central Committee and head of the GlavPURKKA; Konstantin Gorshenin, the new chief USSR prosecutor (appointed on November 13, 1943); and Abakumov should organize the trial. As events in early December 1943 demonstrate, Abakumov’s plan for the Kharkov trial was approved, but the trial proposed in Smolensk was postponed.

  The German atrocities in Kharkov began after the city’s occupation by the 6th German Army under Field Marshal Walter von Reichenau on October 24, 1941. Before capturing the city, on October 10, von Reichenau, an anti-Semite and supporter of the SS-Einsatzgruppen activity, issued his infamous order to the troops in the Eastern territories:

  The soldier in the Eastern territories is not merely a fighter according to the rules of the art of war but also a bearer of ruthless national ideology…

  Therefore the soldier must have full understanding for the necessity of a severe but just revenge on subhuman Jewry. The Army has to aim at another purpose, i.e., the annihilation of revolts in [the] hinterland which, as experience proves, have always been caused by Jews.16

  The German occupation continued until February 16, 1943, when the Soviet troops of the Voronezh Front liberated the city. But on March 15, 1943, the SS-Panzerkorps recaptured Kharkov.17 This corps included a group called Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler (commanded by SS-Gruppenführer Sepp Dietrich, one of Hitler’s closest confidants) and 3.SS-Panzer-Division Totenkopf (commanders: SS-Obergruppenführer Theodor Eicke, killed February 26, 1943, and SS-Obergruppenführer Max Simon), also mentioned as guilty parties in Abakumov’s indictment because their military actions had resulted in the massacre of retreating Soviet troops. Historian Charles Sydnor described the behavior of the Totenkopf division: ‘The Russians had abandoned most of their vehicles and equipment and were trying to escape on foot…The SSTK [Totenkopf] First Panzergrenadier Regiment…methodically cut down the panicked herds of stampeding Russians fleeing.’18

  The other SS-troops were no better. In his memoirs, Curzio Malaparte, an Italian officer, recalled his conversation with Sepp Dietrich, commander of Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler, in Berlin in 1942: ‘I told [Dietrich] about the Russian prisoners in the Smolensk camp who fed on the corpses of their comrades…Dietrich burst out laughing: “Haben sie ihnen geschmeckt?—Did they enjoy eating them?” he laughed opening his small pink-rooted fish-mouth, showing his crowded sharp fishlike teeth.’19

  The Nazi leadership considered the recapturing of Kharkov so important that Heinrich Himmler paid a visit to the city, where, on April 23, 1943, he gave a speech to the SS Panzer divisions praising their ‘dreadful and terrible reputation’.20 Finally, on August 23, 1943, the Soviet troops of the Voronezh, Southwestern, and Steppe fronts recaptured Kharkov, and SMERSH started preparing the trial.

  On December 3, 1943, the 6th (Investigation) Department of GUKR wrote a draft indictment of four captured German officers and two Russian collaborators being kept in Moscow Lubyanka Prison.21 From December 5 to 15, Abakumov remained in constant contact with Stalin and other Party leaders, coordinating all details of the future show trial. During the trial he reported to the leadership every day, and, until the end of the trial, the trial documents were routinely altered according to instructions from Moscow.

  The trial took place in Kharkov from December 15 to 18, 1943, and was the first trial of German servicemen for war crimes. The Military Tribunal of the 4th Ukrainian Front, presided over by Major General of Justice A. N. Myasnikov, tried four defendants—three Germans and one Russian (for some unknown reason, only three Germans and one Soviet defendant were present at the trial), and accused six high-ranking German military, intelligence, and military police officers of war crimes. As in Krasnodar, the court appointed three defense counselors from Moscow. Renowned Soviet writers and journalists, including Aleksei Tolstoi, Konstantin Simonov, and Ilya Ehrenburg, were present, along with foreign journalists, and the trial was filmed.22

  The indictment prepared by GUKR pronounced:

  Investigation has established that the atrocities, violence, and plunder in the town and Region of Kharkov were committed by officers and men of the German Army and in particular by: SS Division ‘Adolf Hitler’, commanded by Obergruppenfuehrer of SS troops Dietrich; SS Division ‘Totenkopf’, commanded by Gruppenfuehrer of SS troops Simon; the German Punitive Organs: the Kharkov SD Sonderkommando led by its commander, Sturmbannfuehrer Hanebitter; the group of German Secret police in the town of Kharkov, headed by Polizei Kommissar Karchan and his deputy—Police Secretary Wulf; the 560th group of Secret Field Police attached to the staff of the 6th German Army—Polizei Kommissar Mehritz; the defendants in the present case: Reinhard Retzlaff [Retzlaw in the Russian documents], official of the 560th Group of the German Secret Field Police; Wilhelm Langheld, Captain of German Military Counter Espionage Service; Hans Rietz [Ritz in the Russian documents], Assistant Commander of the SS Company SD Sonderkommando; Mikhail Bulanov, chauffeur of the Kharkov SD Sonderkommando.

  The preliminary examination has established the system followed:

  Asphyxiation with carbon monoxide in specially equipped automobile ‘murder vans’ of many thousands of Soviet people;

  Brutal massacres of peaceful Soviet citizens and destruction of towns and villages of temporary occupied territory;

  Mass extermination of old people, women, and small child
ren;

  Shooting, burning, and brutal treatment of Soviet wounded and prisoners of war.

  All this constitutes a flagrant violation of the rules for the conduct of war established by international conventions, and of all generally accepted legal standards.23

  The prosecutor’s interrogation of the defendants Langheld, Retzlaff, Rietz, and Bulanov in the court went smoothly. Basically, they repeated what had already been included in the detailed part of the indictment. Apparently, this was a typical well-rehearsed show trial, albeit, for once, presenting accurate accusations. Evidently, the defendants learned their roles well while they were held in the Lubyanka. One of the Russian courtroom translators, Anna Stesnova, was even an officer of the 1st Section of the 2nd GUKR Department. The prosecution’s questions focused mainly on the killing of Soviet citizens in gas vans and by shooting. On December 16, Langheld testified that in May 1942 he had witnessed how German soldiers forced prisoners to enter a gas van:

  Among the people being loaded into [the] gas van were old men, children, old and young women. These people would not go into the machine of their own accord and had therefore to be driven into the gas van by SS men with kicks and blows of the butt ends of automatic rifles…

  I heard from Captain Beukow that the same kind of gas vans were used in… Kharkov, Poltava, Kiev.24

  Hans Rietz, a former lawyer and then Assistant SS Company Commander within Sonderkommando 4a, gave similar testimony:

  On 31st May, 1943 I arrived in Kharkov and reported to the Chief of the Kharkov Sonderkommando, Hanebitter… The next day…Lt. Jacobi… showed me the vehicle standing in the yard. It was an ordinary closed army transport lorry, only with an airtight body.

  Lt. Jacobi opened the doors of the machine and let me look in. Inside the machine was lined with sheet iron, in the floor was a grating through which the exhaust gases of the motor entered, poisoning people inside the van.