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

by Vadim Birstein

  Soon afterwards the doors of the prison opened and arrested persons were led out in groups… Those of the prisoners who held back were beaten and kicked.25 Reinhard Retzlaff, an auxiliary officer of the 560th Group of the Secret Field Police (GFP) attached to the headquarters of the 6th German Army, also mentioned Hanebitter in his testimony about the usage of gas vans in Kharkov in March 1942.26

  This testimony revealed for the first time that the GFP, like the Einsatzgruppen, had committed atrocities. In Kharkov, Gruppe GFP 560 was active from October 1941 to August 1943. The last defendant, the Soviet collaborator Mikhail Bulanov, driver of a Gestapo truck, also testified to the killing of victims in a gas van.27 All of the defendants also admitted to personally torturing or executing arrested Soviet prisoners.

  Currently, there is no doubt that gas vans were also used by Einsatzgruppen in Poland, Belorussia, Smolensk, Riga, and elsewhere.28 However, it is puzzling that the name Kranebitter mentioned by Rietz and Retzlaff in their testimonies was written in the official records as Hanebitter. In fact, SS-Sturmbannführer Dr. Fritz Kranebitter, Doctor of Jurisprudence, was the Sipo (Secret Police) and SD commander in Kharkov from March to August 1943.29 He arrived in Kiev in February 1942, then moved to Kharkov and after that, to Dubno. In November 1943, he was appointed head of Amt IV (Gestapo intelligence and counterintelligence) within the Security Police and SD Staff in Italy and left Ukraine. He was never charged and died in Austria in 1957.

  Two of the three additional German witnesses, prisoners who were not defendants in this trial, committed just as many atrocities as those being tried. They were SS-Obersturmbannführer Georg Heinisch, former district Commissar (Gebietskommissar) of Melitopol, Ukraine, and Heinz Jantschi, a sergeant-major and Assistant Abwehr officer at the Dulag-231 transit camp for Soviet POWs. Heinisch testified about his own crimes: ‘In the period from 3rd September, 1942, till 14th September, 1943, between 3,000 and 4,000 persons were exterminated in the Melitopol region…During my work in Melitopol, there were three or four mass operations, in particular in December 1942, when 1,300 persons were arrested at once.’30 Then he added:

  [SS-Oberführer Otto] Somann [Chief of Security in the Breslau area] told me about the camp in Auschwitz in Germany where the gassing of prisoners was also carried out… Those who were to be executed first entered a place with a signboard with ‘Disinfection’ on it and they were undressed—the men separately from women and children. Then they were ordered to proceed to another place with a signboard ‘Bath’. While the people were washing themselves special valves were opened to let in the gas which caused their death. Then the dead people were burned in special furnaces in which about 200 bodies could be burned simultaneously.31

  No foreign correspondent attending the trial recognized the importance of this first public evidence of mass killings in Auschwitz. Possibly, this was because the defendants were obviously forced to give testimonies the court wanted to hear. As Arthur Koestler reported, ‘[F]or the foreign observer the Kharkov trial (which was filmed and publicly shown in London) gave the same impression of unreality as the Moscow trials, the accused reciting their parts in stilted phrases which they had obviously learned by heart, sometimes taking the wrong cue from State-Prosecutor and then coming back to the same part again’.32 On December 29, 1943, Time magazine wrote only that three German defendants and one Russian defendant were tried and executed.33

  Tellingly, this trial, like that in Krasnodar, did not mention that most of the victims killed in Kharkov were Jews, although a written report of the local commission on atrocities stated that up to 15,000 Jewish residents of Kharkov were murdered between December 1941 and January 1942.34 Interestingly, after the troops of the 1st Ukrainian Front liberated Auschwitz in January 1945, the first reports from the field stated that ‘the mass extermination of people, and in particular, the Jews brought from all over Europe, was the main purpose of the camps’.35 However, in the report to the Central Committee in Moscow, the words ‘the Jews’ had disappeared, and afterwards, the extermination of the Jews in Auschwitz was not mentioned in Soviet documents, only ‘millions of citizens from all over Europe’.

  Karl Kosch, a professional architect who served as a private in the German Army, also testified about his knowledge of gas vans in Ukraine in 1943. However, the last witness, Jantschi, talked at length mostly about the movement of Soviet POWs and arrested civilians from a camp near the city of Vyazma to a camp in the city of Smolensk, in which he took part.36 Of 15,000 people who left Vyazma, only 2,000 arrived in Smolensk—the rest died or were exterminated on the way—and of the 10,000 prisoners who were left in Vyazma, 6,000 died. Although this horrific story described the German military authorities’ general attitude toward Soviet prisoners, it had little to do with the events in Kharkov. Most probably, Jantschi’s testimony was prepared for the Smolensk trial that did not take place. Much later this testimony would have grave consequences for Jantschi.

  On December 18, 1943, the chair of the tribunal read the verdict, which had been approved in Moscow. The four defendants were sentenced to death by hanging. The verdict specifically mentioned the military and police involved:

  Violent atrocities against Soviet civilians were carried out on the territory of the city and region of Kharkov by officers and soldiers of:

  The SS Adolf Hitler Division, commanded by Obergruppenführer of S. S. Troops Dietrich, the Death’s Head Division, under the command of Gruppenführer of SS Troops Simon.

  By the German punitive organs.

  The Kharkov SD Sonderkommando, commanded by Sturmbannführer Hanebitter.

  By the Kharkov group of the German Secret Field Police, commanded by Police Commissar Karchan.37

  A witness to the execution on the next day later recalled:

  Plenty of people gathered at the Blagoveshchensk Market Square. There were four gallows…The convicts were standing in the body of a truck located under the gallows, with its sides pulled down. The Germans were smoking, while the Russian convict, dressed in a black robe, was standing apart from them…

  Several [Soviet] soldiers came up [to the convicts] and tied their hands. The Russian dropped on his knees in front of the Red Army soldiers, but they also tied his hands. Then a noose was placed around the neck of each convict. The truck started to move slowly. I looked at the last German. He moved his legs, and then he hung in the air and jerked. I closed my eyes. When I opened them, he was still jerking. I looked at the crowd. When [the German] hung in the air, a long sound ‘Ah-h-h-h’ was heard from it [the crowd]. Many took steps backward, and some turned around and ran away.38

  Apparently, public hanging was so unpopular that in May 1944 it was replaced by nonpublic shooting.39 However, the public execution of war criminals by hanging was restored after the war.

  After the defense counselors were back to Moscow, Beria called them to his Lubyanka office and yelled at the aged Nikolai Kommodov, who had just defended Langheld and Rietz: ‘At the trial you acted not as a defense lawyer, but as a prosecutor. This was written in every foreign newspaper!’40 This was a lie. Most probably, Beria followed Stalin’s lead knowing that Stalin had not forgotten Kommodov’s defense of Dr. Dmitrii Pletnev, a personal enemy of Stalin’s, who was falsely accused of poisoning the writer Maxim Gorky at the Bukharin Trial in 1938.41 Kommodov was so frightened by Beria’s reprimand that he died of a heart attack a few days later.

  The legal outcome of the trial was summarized by one of the leading Soviet jurists Aron Trainin in his book The Criminal Responsibility of the Hitlerites published in 1944.42 Trainin wrote that ‘the Hitlerites’ should be tried for launching a war of aggression which was a fundamental ‘crime against peace’. This and other principles discussed in the book became a basis of statements by Soviet prosecutors at the International Nuremberg Trial.

  Soviet filmmakers made a propaganda film named Sud idet! (The Court Is In Session!) about the Kharkov Trial, and it was shown throughout the country. The American Office of Strategic Services (OS
S) made a shortened version of this film. In July 1944 Life magazine published a few stills from this documentary.43 In June 1945, an American movie ‘We Accuse’, compiled from the Soviet, British, and German newsreels and focused on the Kharkov Trial, was shown in a number of New York movie theaters, except those owned by the members of the Hays Office, Hollywood’s censorship bureau.44 The office demanded extensive cuts, in particular, of the footage of atrocities. However, soon the U.S. Army Signal Corps released even more horrifying footage of the liberated death camps in Europe.

  Later Atrocity Trials

  Sepp Dietrich and Max Simon, whom Abakumov connected with atrocities in 1943, were captured and tried by the Allies. On July 16, 1945, the U.S. Military Tribunal at Dachau (Case No. 5–24) sentenced Dietrich to life in prison, commuted to twenty-five years, for the execution of American POWs by his troops in 1944 (the Malmedi massacre). After serving ten years, Dietrich was released. On May 14, 1957, the German court sentenced him to twenty-nine months for his part in the Night of the Long Knives in 1934. In 1966, Dietrich died aged seventy-three of a heart attack.

  Max Simon was captured by British troops and sentenced to death in 1947 for his complicity in the September 1944 massacre of civilians in Italy. The sentence was commuted and he was released in 1954. In October 1955, a German court tried him again. Twice acquitted, Simon died on February 1, 1961, before the start of a third trial.

  Georg Heinisch, who was a witness at the Kharkov Trial, was among those convicted and sentenced to death at the Kiev trial (December 1945– January 1946).45 He confessed to his participation in the extermination of 3,000 Jewish children in October 1942. By chance, while working with archival documents, I discovered the fate of the two other Kharkov witnesses, Jantschi and Kosch.

  The materials in Jantschi’s Personal File clearly reveal that on August 9, 1943, he voluntarily crossed the front line near the town of Sumy.46 This explains his detailed testimony to GUKR investigators concerning Dulag-231 and the horrible treatment of Soviet POWs, which he repeated in Kharkov. However, he also described his personal discovery of six Jews among the Soviet POWs in the Vyazma Camp and seventeen Jews among prisoners in the Miller Camp, all of whom he handed over to the SD command for execution. Additionally, in September 1941, Jantschi was involved in sending Soviet POWs to Germany for slave labor.

  On August 7, 1944, both Jantschi and Karl Kosch, the third witness at the Kharkov Trial, were transferred from a prison in Moscow to the special POW Camp No. 27 in the Moscow suburbs. However, on November 13, 1946, both were returned to Lefortovo Prison in Moscow, where Sergei Kartashov’s (now the 4th MGB) department started a new investigation. For at least two years the prisoners were kept together and interrogated from time to time. On May 5, 1948, Jantschi made an unsuccessful suicide attempt.

  Extensive interrogations (fifty-two instances) of Jantschi began in December 1949 and continued through July 1951. Finally, on January 12, 1952, the Military Tribunal of the Moscow District sentenced him to twenty-five years in prison as a German spy (Article 58-6) and a war criminal (April 19, 1943, Decree). Interestingly, no documents in his Personal File mention the Kharkov Trial, although the verdict repeated his testimony in Kharkov almost word for word. On January 15, 1952, the same military tribunal sentenced Kosch as a German spy to twenty-five years in prison, with no credit for the time of the Kharkov trial.

  On February 16, 1952, the Supreme Court denied Jantschi’s appeal, in which he pleaded guilty but asked the court to consider the circumstances under which he committed the crimes. The next day he again attempted suicide by hitting his head against a wall. On March 30, 1952, Jantschi was brought to Vladimir Prison, where he was kept in solitary confinement for some time. Kosch arrived in Vladimir later, on May 16, 1952. Like many other German prisoners in Vladimir, Jantschi and Kosch were released in October 1955.

  It remains a mystery why SMERSH/MGB considered these two German prisoners so important that they were held without trial until 1952. Only a few high-level German generals and foreign diplomats were treated similarly. Possibly, Jantschi and Kosch were used as cell spies against their own fellow German prisoners. In any case, it is clear that, at least in 1952, military counterintelligence wanted, for unknown reason, to conceal their involvement in the Kharkov Trial.

  On January 22, 1944, Abakumov sent the GKO a new report addressed to Stalin, Molotov, and Beria.47 The GUKR proposed a new trial in Smolensk for thirteen defendants arrested by SMERSH. The investigation revealed the extermination of 135,000 civilians in the Smolensk region during the German occupation, and also stated that the German authorities had used children for slave labor and forced teenage girls into prostitution. In addition, German intelligence used teenagers as spies in the Red Army’s rear. However, the trial was postponed because from January 16 to 23, 1944, academician Nikolai Burdenko’s commission was working in the Katyn Forest, examining bodies of dead Polish officers and trying to prove that the Germans, and not the NKVD, had shot the victims—a question that was raised at the Nuremberg trial as well.48

  The only cases proposed for open trials were those that would create public sympathy for the suffering of the Soviet people. Very few knew about the routine military tribunal trials. For instance, in September 1944, Lieutenant General Mikhail Belkin, head of the SMERSH Directorate of the 3rd Baltic Front, completed the investigation of Rudolf Körpert and Otto Mäder (mentioned in Abakumov’s September 1943 letter to Vyshinsky), and four other high-level officers of the Dulag-205 administration.49 They were accused of ‘mass extermination of Soviet citizens’ and ‘having implemented the policy of German fascism concerning the extermination of the Soviet population’. On October 10, 1944, not in a public trial, as Abakumov suggested, but in a closed military tribunal, all six were sentenced to death by shooting. It remains unclear if and when Werner von Kunowski, the last general on Abakumov’s September 1943 list, was executed.

  Even less was known about the routine military trials in the field. For example, in December 1944, the military tribunal of the 1st Baltic Front tried nine members of a Lithuanian paramilitary group captured by SMERSH. From 1941 to August 1944, that group had arrested Soviet servicemen and parachutists and handed them over to the Germans. They also fought against the advancing Red Army.50 The group’s leader was sentenced to death and shot, and the others were sentenced to ten years in labor camps. It is not surprising that the Soviets wanted to prevent the world from knowing about those who viewed the German invasion as an opportunity to free themselves from the Soviet regime.

  Open public trials continued after the war, but now Beria was put in charge of organizing them. On November 2, 1945, he ordered that a special commission consisting of Merkulov (NKGB), Abakumov, and Sergei Kruglov (NKVD) be set up to evaluate the cases of 105 important war criminals being held in POW camps and prisons.51 Three days later, the commission forwarded to Molotov a list of 85 potential defendants for future open trials in Leningrad, Smolensk, Velikie Luki, Kiev, Nikolaev, Minsk, Riga, and Bryansk. Defendants were selected and grouped according to their activities and region. The Politburo approved the plan for future trials and ordered that a commission headed by Vyshinsky, and including Abakumov and Kruglov, be responsible for organizing the trials.52

  The trials took place from December 1945 to February 1946, at the same time as the Nuremberg trials.53 Surprisingly, the extermination of Jews was discussed at these trials, making it hard to believe that less than two years later Stalin unleashed his own anti-Semitic campaign against the ‘cosmopolitans’ and the American ‘fifth column’, the code words for identifying Soviet Jews as enemies of the state and supposedly potential American spies. At the trials, all 85 German defendants, including 18 generals, were sentenced either to death by hanging (66 defendants) or twelve to twenty years in the labor camps.

  Oddly, during the first trial (December 28, 1945–January 4, 1946) of eleven Germans accused of atrocities committed in the Leningrad region and the cities of Novgorod and Pskov in 1941–42,
a prosecutor asked the defendant Arno Diere (in the Russian records, Duere) about the Katyn massacre.54 Diere claimed that he had helped to bury the bodies of Polish officers supposedly shot there by the Nazis. However, it became clear that he was lying. Diere stated that the Katyn Forest was in Poland and not in Russia and that the trench used for the burial was 15–20 and not 1.5–2.0 meters deep, and so on. In fact, Diere had participated in mass killings of Soviet civilians, and by cooperating with the Soviet investigators and lying he had saved his own life.

  On January 5, 1946, Major General Heinrich Remlinger—the former military commandant of Pskov, who admitted his guilt but insisted that he had followed orders—and seven other convicts were hanged in Leningrad.55 Diere was sentenced to fifteen years of hard labor in camps. He survived and in 1954, he admitted that he had lied about his involvement in the Katyn Forest massacre.

  On September 10, 1947, the Politburo approved nine more open trials of 137 Germans.56 Stalin personally controlled the decisions of the military tribunals that followed and approved on the phone death sentences for the German generals. Additionally, in October–November 1947, 761 prisoners were sentenced as war criminals in closed sessions of military tribunals.57

  Notes

  1. Lawrence D. Stokes, ‘From Law Student to Einsatzgruppe Commander: The Career of a Gestapo Officer,’ Canadian Journal of History 37, no. 1 (April 2002), 41–73. Details about the activity of Einsatzgruppe D in Andrej Angrick, Besatzungspolitik und Massenmord. Die Einsatzgruppe D in der südlichen Sowjetunion 1941–1943 (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition 2003).

  2. SMERSH. Istoricheskie ocherki, 315. The ChGK was created on November 2, 1942 and consisted of Shvernik (Chairman); Andrei Zhdanov, a Politburo member; Academicians Nikolai Burdenko, Boris Vedeneev, Trofim Lysenko, Yevgenii Tarle, and Ivan Trainin; the writer Aleksei Tolstoi; a female pilot, Valentina Grizodubova; and the clergyman Metropolitan Nikolai of Kiev. The ChGK played mostly the propaganda role and concealed the anti-Jewish Nazi racial policy and falsely ascribed the Katyn massacre to the Nazis. Marina Sorokina, ‘People and Procedures: Towards a History of the Investigation of Nazi Crimes in the USSR,’ Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 6, no. 4 (Fall 2005), 797–831.