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

by Vadim Birstein

  After Stauffenberg’s assassination attempt on Hitler [on July 20, 1944], Killinger cursed Stauffenberg at the meeting of the Legation’s staff. He called Stauffenberg ‘a pig’ and said that he would personally shoot to death any member of the Legation who was involved in Stauffenberg’s affair.

  General Spalcke had the courage to tell Killinger, in the presence of members of the Legation, that Stauffenberg is not a pig, but he is a courageous officer of the General Staff who had proven that in a battle…

  Killinger and the staff members were stunned by Spalcke’s speech, but Killinger did nothing against Spalcke because Spalcke was not involved in the assassination attempt.22

  Later in March 1945, SMERSH operatives arrested Spalcke’s wife and 13-year old son in East Prussia and took them to Moscow. Until April 1950 they were kept together in a Lefortovo Prison cell. In 1951 they were convicted as ‘socially dangerous elements’ to eight and five years of imprisonment respectively. They were released in December 1953. General Spalcke, who was imprisoned in Vladimir Prison, was released in October 1955. I am happy to report that I found General Spalcke’s son on the internet and contacted him through a German colleague of mine. Despite his terrible experience during his teenage and young adult years, he became a prominent West German diplomat.

  There was also Josias von Rantzau, an anti-Nazi (although in 1938 he joined the NSDAP) and a friend of Adam von Trott and Ulrich von Hassell, anti-Hitler resistance members in the German Foreign Ministry.23 Kurt Welkisch, press attaché of the German legation, was also sent to Moscow. He was a secret Soviet agent of the Red Orchestra network with the alias ‘ABC’.24 Welkisch’s reports to Moscow’s military intelligence HQ during 1940 and 1941 kept Soviet intelligence well informed about the staff of the German Legation in Bucharest.

  On September 7, 1944, the last transport of the detained German diplomats arrived in Moscow. It consisted of fifteen people, including Counsel Gerhard Stelzer, who replaced von Killinger for a short time as head of the legation.25 Stelzer was important for SMERSH because in the 1930s, he had served at the German Embassy in Moscow. His wife, Renata, was also arrested and arrived with him at Moscow prison.

  A similar Soviet attempt to arrest the Hungarian diplomats failed. Lieutenant General Sergei Shtemenko, head of the operational directorate of the general staff, wrote in his memoirs: ‘There was a signboard on the door of the Hungarian Embassy: “Swedish Embassy.” Later it became known that this protective sign was installed with the approval of the Swedish Ambassador.’26 However, SMERSH operatives managed to arrest Alfons Medyadohy-Schwartz, Hungarian chargé d’affaires (Appendix II, see http://www.smershbook.com).

  On August 31, a group of Romanian Communists, who had been keeping in custody the eight high Romanian officials arrested on King Mihai’s order, handed them over to the commanders of the 2nd Ukrainian Front.27 Three days later Marshal Malinovsky, commander of this front, reported to Moscow that the Romanian prisoners had been sent to Moscow via special train.

  The group included Ion Antonescu and his wife Maria; Mihai Antonescu, the Romanian foreign minister; General Kristia Pantasi, Defense Minister; General Konstantin Vasiliu, Inspector of Gendarmes; Eugen Kristesku, general director of the Special Information Service; Gheorghe Alexianu, governor of the Romanian-occupied Soviet territory; Radu Lekka, general Commissar on Jewish affairs; and some others. A special team of SMERSH operatives was in charge of guarding the prisoners and bringing them to Lubyanka.28 The prisoners were told that they were being taken to Moscow for negotiations regarding the conditions of the armistice.

  This was a lie. All these people were intensively interrogated in the 2nd, 3rd, and 6th GUKR SMERSH departments.29 Abakumov considered Kristesku’s information about British intelligence in Romania so important that he ordered Sergei Kartashov, head of the 2nd GUKR department, to prepare a special report for Stalin.30

  Apparently, it was planned to try these Romanians for the atrocities committed by the Romanian troops against Soviet civilians in 1941–43. On October 16, 1941, Romanian troops occupied the city of Odessa in Ukraine. Four days later the building that housed the Romanian military command was blown up and 60 Romanian officers and soldiers died. The explosion was caused by a radio-operated mine left by an NKVD diversion group. In retaliation, Ion Antonescu ordered the execution of 200 hostages for every dead Romanian officer, and 100 hostages for every dead soldier. About 5,000 hostages, mostly Jews, were hanged and shot in the streets of Odessa. Additionally, on October 23–25, approximately 20,000 Jewish men, women and children were burnt alive, and from 5,000 to 10,000 Jews were shot. In Transistria, the area near Odessa, about 250,000 Jews were exterminated in concentration camps during the Romanian occupation.31 But SMERSH’s plan for a trial was never implemented.

  On April 9, 1946, Ion and Mihai Antonescu and Generals Pantasi and Vasiliu were handed over to the Romanian secret police to stand trial in Bucharest.32 Later Alexianu was also transferred to Romania. These five were sentenced to death along with another eighteen defendants, and they were all accused of betraying the Romanian people on behalf of Nazi Germany, supporting the German invasion of the Soviet Union, murdering political opponents and civilians, and other crimes. Ion and Mihai Antonescu, Vasiliu, and Alexianu were executed on June 1, 1946; for the others, the death sentence was commuted to imprisonment. In December 2006, the Bucharest Court of Appeals overturned Ion Antonescu’s conviction for certain crimes.33 It decreed that the war against the USSR to free Bessarabia (Moldavia) and northern Bukovina (taken by the Soviets in 1939) was legitimate.

  In the meantime, SMERSH operatives continued to arrest high-ranking Romanian and German intelligence officers and numerous Russian émigrés. On November 22, 1944, Abakumov reported to Beria on SMERSH activities in Romania:

  On the whole, by November 15 [1944], 794 enemy intelligence and counterintelligence officers were arrested, including:

  Officers of Romanian and German intelligence 47

  Rezidents of Romanian and German intelligence 12

  Agents of German intelligence 180

  Agents of Romanian intelligence and counterintelligence 546

  Agents of Hungarian intelligence 9

  Among the arrestees are: BATESATU, Head of the Romanian intelligence center ‘N’ of the 2nd Section of the Romanian General Staff; SERBANESCU, Deputy Head of the Intelligence Center No. 2 of the ‘special information service’ of Romania; a German, STELLER, rezident [head of a spy network] of German intelligence; ZARANU, rezident of the German intelligence organ ‘Abwehrstelle-Vienna’, and others.

  The investigation has found that German and Romanian intelligence services actively used White Guardists and members of various anti-Soviet émigré organizations for espionage against the Red Army.

  ‘SMERSH’ organs have arrested 99 members of such organizations, who have admitted that they spied for the Germans and Romanians.

  For instance, the following active White Guardists were arrested in the city of Bucharest: POROKHOVSKY, I. Ye., General Secretary of the Main Ukrainian Military Organization in Europe; KRENKE, V. V., Doctor of Economics; DELVIG, S. N., Lieutenant General of the Czar’s Army.34 They confessed to their contacts with the enemy intelligence services…

  I have already reported on all of this to Comrade STALIN.35

  The last phrase was a reminder to Beria that although Abakumov was obliged to report to Beria, he, in fact, reported directly to Stalin.

  Interestingly, on September 26, 1944 Stalin had already signed a cable to the commanders of both the 2nd and 3rd Ukrainian fronts: ‘The Stavka… prohibits the making of arrests in Bulgaria and Romania… From now on, nobody should be arrested without the permission of the Stavka.’36 Therefore, it is possible that Stalin personally approved most of the above-mentioned arrests.

  A few months later, an arrested Finn, Unto Parvilahti, met Romanian intelligence officer Theodor Batesatu, who was mentioned by Abakumov, in Lefortovo Prison. Parvilahti wrote in his memoirs: ‘A black patch co
vered his [Batesatu’s] right eye-socket; the eye was missing and he told me that he himself had shot it away when trying to blow his brains out on capture…“Now they’re going to do the firing,” he said with grim humor.’37

  Soviet military leaders also urged the arrest of the Romanian king and his court, but Stalin decided to use Romanian Communists to get rid of the king later. General Shtemenko recalled:

  In late August and the beginning of September 1944…while reporting to the Stavka on the military situation, many times A. I. Antonov [first deputy head of the General Staff] and I…suggested taking decisive measures against [i.e., arresting] the king’s court. As usual, the Supreme Commander [Stalin] listened to us attentively, lit his pipe unhurriedly, smoothed out his smoky moustache with the pipe’s mouthpiece, and said approximately the following: ‘The foreign king is not our concern. Our tolerance toward him will be advantageous for our relationships with the Allies. The Romanian people…will make their own decision regarding the real meaning of the monarchy. And it’s reasonable to think that the Romanian Communists… will help their people to understand the situation.’38

  In the meantime, on July 6, 1945, Stalin gave the king the highest Soviet military award, the Order of Victory, made of platinum, gold, silver, rubies, and diamonds. The other recipients of this order were fifteen of the highest military leaders of the war; Stalin and Marshals Georgii Zhukov and Aleksandr Vasilevsky received it twice.39 Among the five foreign recipients, including the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, King Mihai was the only civilian.40

  Apparently, while awarding Mihai supposedly for ordering the arrest of Ion Antonescu and his accomplices, Stalin tried to gloss over the fact that on February 27, 1945, Stalin’s watchdog Andrei Vyshinsky, Soviet Deputy Commissar for Foreign Affairs, whom Stalin sent to Bucharest, forced Mihai I to appoint the new government headed by the pro-Soviet Petru Groza as prime minister.

  In December 1947, Stalin’s secret plan to get rid of Mihai I was implemented. Backed by orders from Moscow, Groza and Gheorghiu-Dej, general secretary of the Romanian Communist Party, forced the king to abdicate. In 2007, King Mihai I recalled: ‘It was blackmail… They said, “If you don’t sign this immediately we are obliged”—why obliged I don’t know—to kill more than 1,000 students that they had in prison.’41 Outside the palace the king could see soldiers and artillery facing the compound. A few days later he left the country. Only in 1992, after the fall of the Communist regime, did the king visit Romania again.

  Bulgaria

  On September 7, 1944, the Red Army invaded Bulgaria from Romania. Bulgaria had joined the Axis in 1941, when the Bulgarian King (Tsar) Boris III declared war against England and the United States, but not against the Soviet Union.42 His father, Ferdinand I, was the founder of the royal dynasty of Bulgaria and a relative of Queen Victoria, as well as of the French, Belgian, Portuguese, and Mexican royal families. Additionally, Boris III was married to Giovanna di Savoia, daughter of Victor Emmanuel III of Italy. During World War II, German Minister Adolf Heinz Beckerle constantly tried to intervene in Bulgaria’s internal affairs.43 Tsar Boris was extremely embarrassed by Beckerle’s efforts, especially because Beckerle was not a professional diplomat, but a policeman.

  On August 15, 1943, during the ongoing collapse of Italy (on July 10 the Western Allies landed in Sicily, and the armistice was signed on September 3), Tsar Boris visited Hitler and refused to change Bulgaria’s neutrality toward Russia. Apparently, this was too much for Hitler. Shortly after his return from Berlin Boris III died mysteriously—most probably, poisoned by the Germans. Boris’s son, Simeon II, was only six years old, and his uncle Prince Kyril of Bulgaria, Prime Minister Professor Bogdan Filov, and Lieutenant General Nikola Mihov of the Bulgarian army were appointed regents, while Dobri Bozhilov succeeded Filov as prime minister. All these people were pro-German.

  On September 2, 1944, the Soviet Union declared war against Bulgaria and after five and a half hours the Bulgarians called for an armistice. By September 9, the Fatherland Front—a coalition of the Communist Party, the left wing of the Agrarian Union, and a few pro-Soviet politicians who had returned from exile in the Soviet Union—had taken power.44 Bulgaria became the first Communist-controlled country outside the Soviet Union, and the Bulgarian population in Sofia enthusiastically welcomed Soviet troops.

  The new Bulgarian authorities immediately ordered the arrests of the young tsar’s regents, former ministers of all cabinets from January 1941 to September 1944, and all members of the parliament during that period.45 In two days, 160 former politicians on this list were arrested, and their properties were confiscated. Later many of them were executed without trial.46

  On September 11, Georgi Dimitrov, the famous Bulgarian Communist, ordered from Moscow the creation of ‘people’s courts’ for trying these and other ‘traitors’. At the time Dimitrov headed the Department of International Information of the Central Committee, the Comintern’s successor. Apparently, Stalin wanted to deal with the most important of the arrested former Bulgarian leaders himself because Prince Kyril, former prime ministers Bozhilov and Petru Gabrovski, two other ministers, and three members of parliament were handed over to the UKR SMERSH operatives of the 3rd Ukrainian Front and were brought to Moscow Lubyanka Prison. In Sofia, Soviet military intelligence also seized the Bulgarian state archive and sent it to Moscow, where most of its documents are still kept at the Military (former Special) Archive.

  After a three-month investigation by SMERSH (the details of the interrogations are unknown), Moscow decided that Prince Kyril and other Bulgarian arrestees should be tried in Sofia and not in Moscow, and they were transported back to Bulgaria.47 On February 1, 1945, the Bulgarian People’s Court sentenced the three regents, 22 former ministers, 87 members of parliament, and 47 generals and colonels to death as war criminals who had involved Bulgaria in World War II on the German side, and they were executed.48

  In September 1946, Simeon II, his sister Maria Louise and their mother Queen Giovanna were sent into exile. Tsar Simeon II, who had never abdicated, returned to Bulgaria in 1996, and served as prime minister from 2001 to 2006.

  In the meantime, SMERSH operatives hunted Axis diplomats in Bulgaria. Later, in prison, the Italian diplomat Giovanni Ronchi claimed that while immunity for foreigners was one condition of Germany’s capitulation in Sofia, the Soviets immediately violated this agreement.49 In accordance with the agreement, members of the Italian and German legations were put on a special train that went from Sofia to Turkey.50 The evacuation was organized by a Swedish diplomat, chargé d’affaires Erland Uddgren, and two representatives of the Swedish Red Cross were on board the train, which was flying the Swedish flag. For some time, the train stayed on the Romanian border with Turkey, while the diplomats waited for Turkish visas.

  In Moscow, Stalin ordered the train to be found and the diplomats arrested.51 An operational group of the NKVD rear guard troops of the 3rd Ukrainian Front located the train and took a number of diplomats, including 32 Germans and a few Italians, into custody. SMERSH operatives of the 3rd Ukrainian Front sent a group of important German and Italian diplomats, including Ronchi, to Moscow (Appendix II, see http://www.smershbook.com), but nothing was ever heard of the rest of the people on the train. However, the two Swedish representatives returned to Sofia. SMERSH operatives also arrested members of the Hungarian Legation in Sofia and sent them to Moscow (Appendix II, see http://www.smershbook.com).

  In an operation similar to that which had taken place in Bucharest, in early September a six-man OSS team arrived in Sofia.52 It organized the evacuation of 335 airmen, mostly Americans, by train to Turkey. This train had better success than the one with German and Italian diplomats on board, and on September 10, it reached Istanbul. On September 26, the American and British intelligence missions left Sofia after Soviet military authorities threatened to arrest them.

  SMERSH unleashed mass arrests of Russi
an émigrés. The Soviets were well informed about White Guard military organizations in Bulgaria. Nikolai Abramov, a son of General Fyodor Abramov, the Russian All-Military Union (ROVS, a Russian émigré military organization) leader in Bulgaria, for many years was an OGPU/NKVD agent. From 1931 to 1937, he sent detailed reports to Moscow about the ROVS’ activity in Bulgaria.53

  In Sofia, SMERSH operatives arrested two former commanders of the White armies, Lieutenant General Nikolai Bredov and Colonel V. P. Kon’kov.54 The latter was also a commander of the Russian Corps that fought alongside the Germans. Another arrested officer, B. P. Aleksandrov, for years headed special courses at a school in Bulgaria that trained White Russian terrorists who were then sent to the Soviet Union.55 This and similar schools in Prague and Paris maintained contact with the intelligence services in many countries. Aleksandrov was in touch with Finnish intelligence, and SMERSH investigators accused him of having been a Finnish spy. Several arrested émigrés were shot—for instance, Dmitrii Zavzhalov, editor of the newspaper Za Rossiyu [For Russia].56 But most of them were sent to Moscow, and their fate is unknown. As for Kon’kov, he survived a long-term sentence in the labor camps, and returned to Bulgaria after Stalin’s death.

  Slovakia

  Simultaneously with the events in Romania and Bulgaria, on August 29, 1944, Slovak Defense Minister Ferdinand Čatloš (pronounced Chatlosh) announced on the radio that German troops had occupied Slovakia, and the Slovak National Uprising under the command of General Jan Golian, and then General Rudolf Viest, began.57 Besides the Slovak troops (about 60,000 men), partisan detachments under the leadership of Soviet commanders were parachuted to Slovakia via an airlift called the ‘Main Land—Uprising Slovakia’. About 1,500 Soviet military planes carried Czechoslovak paratroopers, military equipment and supplies from Soviet territory to the insurgent area.58 Partisan detachments also included the escaped French and Ukrainian POWs, as well as groups of British SOE and American OSS operatives.59 From September 7, 1944 to February 18, 1945 a Soviet military mission headed by Major Ivan Skripka and a small British–American military mission headed by the British Major John Segmer and American Captain James Holt Green operated at the HQ of the insurgents.