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

by Vadim Birstein

  11. Leonid Rabichev, ‘Voina vse spishet,’ Znamya, no. 2 (2005) (in Russian), http://magazines.russ.ru/znamia/2005/2/ra8-pr.html, retrieved September 8, 2011.

  12. Quoted in Petrov, Pervyi predsedatel’ KGB, 44.

  13. Stavka’s directive No. 11072, dated April 20, 1945. Quoted in Mark Solonin, Net blaga na voine (Moscow: Yauza-Press, 2010), 242–3 (in Russian).

  14. Details of the Solzhenitsyn case, including a number of documents from his file, in Kirill Stolyarov, Palachi i zhertvy (Moscow: Olma-Press, 1997), 333–49 (in Russian).

  15. Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Volumes One and Two, translated from the Russian by Thomas P. Whitney (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), 164.

  16. Details in Pavel Polyan, Ne po svoei vole…Istoriya i geografiya prinuditel’nykh migratsii v SSSR (Moscow: OGI-Memorial, 2001), 191–216 (in Russian).

  17. Details in ibid., 189–90.

  18. GKO Order No. 7467-ss, dated February 3, 1945. An excerpt quoted in ibid., 211.

  19. Ibid., 213–6.

  20. A photo of Abakumov’s report to Beria, dated March 10, 1945 in SMERSH, 91.

  21. Tkachenko’s report to Beria, dated March 17, 1945. Document No. 301 in Lubyanka. Stalin i NKVD–NKGB–GUKR ‘Smersh.’ 1939–mart 1946, edited by V. N. Khaustov, V. P. Naumov, and N. S. Plotnikova, 502–4 (Moscow: Materik, 2006) (in Russian).

  22. NKVD Order No. 00453, dated May 5, 1945. Document No. 4 in Spetsial’nye lagerya NKVD/MVD, 18–19.

  23. M. I. Semiryaga, Kak my upravlyali Germaniei: politika i zhizn’ (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 1995), 161–2 (in Russian).

  24. Beria’s report No. 438/b, dated April 17, 1945. Document No. 2 in Spetsial’nye lagerya NKVD/MVD, 14–16.

  25. V. A. Kozlov, ‘Deyatel’nost’ upolnomochennykh i operativnykh grupp NKVD SSSR v Germanii v 1945–1946 gg.,’ in Spetsial’nye lagerya NKVD/MVD, 321.

  26. NKVD Order No. 00315, dated April 18, 1945. Document No. 3 in Spetsial’nye lagerya NKVD/MVD, 16–18.

  27. A. Von Plato (253–254), ‘Sovetskie spetslagerya v Germanii,’ in Spetsial’nye lagerya NKVD/MVD, 245–87.

  28. NKVD Order No. 00461, dated May 10, 1945. Document No. 5 in Spetsial’nye lagerya NKVD/MVD, 19–25.

  29. The above-cited NKVD Order No. 00315.

  30. Alfred J. Reiber, ‘Zhdanov in Finland,’ The Carl Beck Papers, no. 1107 (1995), 1–81.

  31. Edvard Hamalainen, ‘Uzniki Leino,’ Russkaya mysl’ (Paris), no. 4371, July 5, 2001 (in Russian), http://www.kolumbus.fi/edvard.hamalainen/docs/uzniki. htm, retrieved September 8, 2011. From 1948 to 1951, G. M. Savonenkov (1898–1975) was Soviet Ambassador to Finland.

  32. Major General Sergei Kozhevnikov was Abakumov’s assistant in charge of the Leningrad Front and head of the Inspection (SMERSH group) at the Allied Control Commission in Finland. N. V. Petrov, Kto rukovodil organami gosbezopasnosti 1941–1954 (Moscow: Zven’ya, 2010), 471–2 (in Russian). Possibly, Kolesnikov was Kozhevnikov’s operational name.

  33. Abakumov’s report to Beria, dated May 1945; a photo of the letter in SMERSH. Istoricheskie ocherki, 143.

  34. Kirill Aleksandrov, Russkie soldaty Vermakhta. Geroi ili predateli (Moscow: Yauza/Eksmo, 2005), 31 and 37 (in Russian). Aleksandrov refers to numerous documents from the Military Archive in Helsinki.

  35. Abramov, SMERSH, 219–20.

  36. Parvilahti, Beria’s Gardens, 21.

  37. Eleonora Ioffe-Kemppainen, ‘Karl Gustav Emil Mannerheim—marshal i prezident,’ Zvezda, no. 9 (1999) (in Russian), http://karelkurs.narod.ru/files/kgm. en.html, retrieved September 8, 2011.

  38. Quoted in Hamalainen, ‘Uzniki Leino.’

  39. Dmitrii Prokhorov, ‘Tragediya kronshtadtskogo “myatezhnika”,’ Sovershenno sekretno—versiya v Pitere, no. 8 (March 3, 2002) (in Russian).

  40. P. Bazanov, ‘Prokuror i ruka s ruporom,’ Rodina, no. 4 (2009) (in Russian), http://www.istrodina.com/rodina_articul.php3?id=2976&n=141, retrieved January 24, 2011.

  41. W. G. Krivitsky, In Stalin’s Secret Service (New York: Enigma Books, 2000), 209.

  42. Jussi Pekkarinen and Juha Pohjonen, Poshchady ne budet. Peredacha voennoplennykh i bezhentsev iz Finlyandii v SSSR, 1944–1981 (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2010), 39 (in Russian).

  43. Ibid., 29.

  CHAPTER 23

  Berlin and Prague Are Taken

  At the end of the war, only nine fronts with their UKRs remained in Europe (Table 22-1 lists seven of them, there were also the 2nd and 3rd Ukrainian fronts). The Red Army that was moving through Germany toward Berlin looked like anything but the disciplined troops that had crossed the Soviet border in 1944. Captain Mikhail Koryakov, who served in the troops of the 1st Ukrainian Front, recalled just after the war:

  The waves of [Marshal Konev’s] troops moving west out of the east had a colorful, exotic appearance. The grimy, bespattered tanks were covered with bright, brilliantly colored rugs on which sat dirty tankmen in uniforms soaked in machine oil. A soldier pulled a bottle out of his pocket, threw back his head and took a long swallow. Then he passed it to his neighbor and, trying to drown out the roar of motors and the screech of caterpillar tractors, in a hoarse, cracking voice began to shout the words of a song…

  The artillerymen…threatened the tankmen with their whips, and hit the horses covered with dressy horse blankets weighted down with tassels. The gun crews who jogged on the caissons had lined their seats with soft cushions embroidered with silk and made themselves comfortable. They played German mouth-organs and accordions richly inlaid with mother-of-pearl and silver.

  Amid the stream of tanks, guns, motor transports, and Army wagons there appeared every so often an old-fashioned, closed carriage with crystal lanterns or a large landau with a shiny folding top. These carriages were occupied by young officers and men in regulation Army coats with shoulder stripes and automatic rifles behind their shoulders, but who wore top hats and carried umbrellas. Some of them cracked long whips, played mouth-organs, and laughed; others sat very straight and with affected solemnity looked through lorgnettes at the troops moving down the highway…

  The Marshal established Draconian rules in an effort to restore discipline among the troops that entered Germany. The order gave a long list of officers who had been degraded and sent to disciplinary battalions. But the gory, drunken wave of debauchery rose high and swept over the dam of official orders.1

  Finally, three fronts—the 1st and 2nd Belorussian and the 1st Ukrainian—surrounded Berlin. On April 30, units of the 1st Belorussian Front took the Reichstag, the symbol of the German government. The battle for Berlin continued until May 2, 1945, but sporadic fighting with the resisting groups, mostly SS units, continued until May 11.

  Victory

  The Red Army paid an enormously high price for the victory. During the Berlin Operation, Marshal Georgii Zhukov, commander of the 1st Belorussian Front, continually repeated the order ‘to break through to the city’s suburbs at any price and immediately inform me [so that I can] report to Comrade Stalin and release an announcement to the press.’2 ‘At any price’ translated to 361,367 servicemen killed and wounded in Berlin from April 16 to May 8, 1945—an average of 15,712 men a day.3 Compare this to casualties during the battle for Moscow (autumn 1941–winter 1942), when losses amounted to 10,910 men a day, or during the Battle of Stalingrad (1942–43): 6,392 men a day.

  The war with Germany ended on May 8, 1945, after Major General Alfred Jodl signed the ‘Instrument of Surrender’ of the German forces in the presence of American General Walter Bedell Smith, French Major General François Sevez, and General Ivan Sousloparov, Soviet representative at the Allied Headquarters.4 Stalin was not happy that this extremely important document was signed in Rheims (France) instead of Berlin, and that the little-known Sousloparov represented the Soviet Union instead of Marshal Zhukov, the conqueror of Berlin. Stalin telephoned Zhukov to inform him that he had ordered Deputy Foreign Commissar Andrei Vyshinsky immediately to Berlin to sign th
e German surrender together with Zhukov.5

  The next day Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, Admiral Hans-Georg von Friedeburg, and General Horst Stumpff signed the Act of Military Surrender of Germany.6 British General Arthur W. Tedder and Marshal Zhukov affixed their signatures on behalf of the Allies and the Soviets, respectively. When Keitel, after signing the act, removed his monocle and tried to say something, Zhukov announced: ‘The German delegation may leave the hall.’ From that day on, the Western Allies have celebrated V-day on May 8, and the Soviets (now Russians), on May 9. Later, in Nuremberg, Jodl and Keitel were sentenced to death and hanged on October 16, 1946.

  After the signing, the Soviets threw a lavish banquet. Zhukov’s personal cook recalled that to impress the Allied military leaders, delicacies such as smoked sturgeon meat, black caviar, and special Crimean wines were brought from the Soviet Union to the ruined Berlin, and trophy German wines were also served.7 While waiting for the coming victory, on May 2 the GKO ordered the creation of a new position: Deputy Front Commander in charge of the Management of Civil Affairs.8 These deputies also had a second title, NKVD Plenipotentiary in Charge of Combating Spies, Saboteurs, and Other Enemies on German Territory. Ivan Serov (1st Belorussian), Lavrentii Tsanava (2nd Belorussian), and Pavel Meshik (1st Ukrainian) became Civil Affairs deputy commanders at the fronts that conquered Berlin. Operational groups of SMERSH, NKVD/NKGB officers, and units of NKVD troops were assigned to these three plenipotentiaries. They also had the right to organize their own prisons and concentration camps. Besides policing and repression, they were in charge of organizing local administrations in the occupied territory.

  SMERSH in Berlin

  During the Battle of Berlin all SMERSH units of the Soviet fighting troops captured and interrogated prisoners. Ivan Klimenko, head of the OKR SMERSH of the 79th Rifle Corps (3rd Shock Army, 1st Belorussian Front), later recalled that in the first days of May, SMERSH operatives captured about 800 high-ranking prisoners around the Reichstag and Hitler’s Chancellery alone.9 The most important generals and witnesses of Hitler’s suicide on April 30 were caught on May 2, including SS-Gruppenführer Johann Rattenhuber, head of Hitler’s personal RSD guards, Rear Admiral Hans Erich Voss, a representative of the German Navy at Hitler’s Headquarters, General of Artillery Helmuth Weidling, commander of the Berlin defense; and Wilhelm Möhnke, the 33-year-old Waffen-SS General whom Hitler had appointed commander of the central area of Berlin only ten days earlier.

  Rattenhuber and Möhnke participated in one of Hitler’s last bizarre actions. On April 28, Hitler appointed a military tribunal, with Möhnke presiding and Rattenhuber as a member; two other members, generals Hans Krebs and Wilhelm Burgdorf, committed suicide four days later. The tribunal court-martialed Eva Braun’s brother, and, therefore, Hitler’s brother-in-law, Waffen-SS General Hermann Fegelein (a man close to Heinrich Himmler), as a deserter.10 However, Hitler ordered Rattenhuber’s RSD guards to execute Fegelein on the next day, after it became known that Himmler was trying to negotiate surrender to the Allies through the diplomat and head of the Swedish Red Cross, Count Folke Bernadotte. According to Traudl Junge, one of Hitler’s surviving secretaries, Hitler suspected Himmler of planning to poison him, and Fegelein was allegedly part of the conspiracy. As she recalled, Fegelein ‘had been shot like a dog in the park of the Foreign Office.’11

  Escapees from Hitler’s bunker in the Chancellery fled in three groups after Hitler’s death.12 Yelena Rzhevskaya, a translator of Klimenko’s SMERSH group, recalled: ‘The group that included…Rattenhuber and Hitler’s driver [Erich] Kempke, was getting through under the cover of a tank. But a grenade thrown from a window hit the tank at the left side…“I was wounded,” wrote Rattenhuber [later in his testimony], “and was taken prisoner by the Russians.”’13 Möhnke and Vice-Admiral Voss were captured in another group. SMERSH operatives additionally arrested Major Ernst Keitel, Field Marshal Keitel’s son, and Hans Fritzsche, head of the Radio Department in the Propaganda Ministry and future defendant in Nuremberg.

  On the same day, Colonel Klimenko and his men found the burned bodies of Paul Joseph Goebbels and his wife Magda in the garden of Hitler’s Chancellery, and the bodies of their six children, poisoned by their mother, inside the bunker.14 More exactly, a small competing SMERSH searching group of the 5th Shock Army commanded by Major Zybin found Goebbels’s body first. As Zybin’s superior, Leonid Ivanov, recalled later, ‘Zybin was a short guy, but he stood up in front of the colonel [Miroshnichenko, Klimenko’s superior] and, with his chest sticking out, pronounced: “This is my trophy, I won’t give it to you!” The colonel swung his arm and struck the major [Zybin]. This is how the 3rd Army got Goebbels’s corpse.’15

  Voss, Karl Schneider, a member of Hitler’s military guards, and some others identified the bodies, while Hitler’s personal doctor Werner Haase testified about Hitler’s suicide. Major Boris Bystrov, a member of Klimenko’s SMERSH group, told Rzhevskaya about the identification of the dead Goebbels children by Voss:

  Bystrov asked Voss: ‘Did you know these children?’

  Voss nodded positively and, exhausted, after asking permission, slipped into a chair.

  ‘I saw them only yesterday. This is Heidi,’ he pointed to the youngest girl.

  Before he moved into this room, he had identified [the bodies of ] Goebbels and his wife…

  Voss was shaken; he was sitting with stooped shoulders…

  Suddenly he…jumped up and ran away. Bystrov rushed after him along a corridor of the dark dungeon…When he overtook Voss, [Bystrov] understood that it was Voss’s gesture of desperation, without any intention or desire to escape.16

  Voss even tried to commit suicide by cutting his veins with a small knife, but Klimenko’s men interrupted his attempt.

  The next day, Major General Aleksei Sidnev, deputy head of the UKR SMERSH of the 1st Belorussian Front, sent two reports to Abakumov and Beria. The first mentioned the finding and identification of the bodies of the members of the Goebbels family, and the second described testimony by Dr. Haase. Haase stated that, on April 30, he had seen Hitler for the last time, but he knew that after the meeting Hitler had poisoned himself and his body had been burned.

  Possibly, both Abakumov and Beria reported the news to Stalin. SMERSH and the NKVD began competing to find out what, in fact, had happened to Hitler. Unfortunately, most of the sources published in English failed to identify two separate investigations by the two Soviet security services.17 Here I will mention only some of SMERSH’s efforts.

  SMERSH operational groups began an intensive search for Hitler’s body and for additional witnesses who could identify the corpse. On May 4, the captured SS-guard Harry Mengershausen provided the first detailed information that the bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun had been burned in the garden of the Chancellery.18 The next day the badly burned bodies of a man and a woman were found by accident in a bomb crater in the Chancellery’s garden. Nobody could identify them, and Klimenko ordered that they be buried again. Later he realized that the bodies could have belonged to Hitler and Eva Braun. Since now the 5th Army, and not Klimenko’s 3rd Shock Army, controlled the territory of the Chancellery, Klimenko and his men stole the bodies from the site and kept them.

  On May 5, Weidling gave a detailed testimony stating that ‘Hitler and his wife committed suicide by taking poison, after which Hitler also shot himself.’19 Three days later Rattenhuber said that Hitler did not shoot himself, but ordered his valet, Heinz Linge, to shoot him.

  On May 8, a special medical commission of the 1st Belorussian Front headed by Lieutenant Colonel Faust Shkaravsky, chief medical forensic expert of this front, conducted an autopsy of Hitler and Braun’s presumed bodies. As Rzhevskaya writes, ‘it was really incredible that Doctor Faust [Shkaravsky’s first name] directed an autopsy of Adolf Hitler!’20 The commission concluded that death was caused by cyanide poisoning, and not shooting. However, the commission also noted that part of Hitler’s skull was missing.

  Colonel Vasilii Gorbu
shin, head of a SMERSH operational group, called up Rzhevskaya:

  He handed me over a box and said that it contained Hitler’s teeth and that I was responsible for its safety…

  It was…a dark-red box with a soft lining inside made of satin…

  It was a great obligation for me to have that box in my hands all the time, and I turned cold every time I thought that I might have left it somewhere…

  For me…the deaths of the leaders of the [Third Reich] and the surrounding circumstances had become something ordinary.

  And not only for me. When I came to the headquarters, my friend Raya, a telegraph operator, tried on Eva Braun’s evening dress. Senior Lieutenant Kurashov, who was in love with her, brought her this dress from the dungeon of the Reich’s Chancellery. It was long, almost down to the floor, with a deep décolleté on the front, but Raya didn’t like it. And she was not interested in it as in a historical souvenir.21

  Later the lower jaws of Hitler and Eva Braun, and both jaws of Magda Goebbels, were sent to the 2nd MGB Main Directorate (internal counterintelligence) in Moscow and have been kept in the MGB/KGB/FSB archive since then.22

  In the early 2000s, the German forensic scientist Mark Benecke examined Hitler’s and Braun’s jaws in the FSB archive.23 The fragments were still kept in the same perfume or cigar boxes that Rzhevskaya put them in, back in 1945. Benecke wrote: ‘The teeth are stored inside of large overseas travel suitcases, packed together with Hitler’s uniform and the original files of the death investigation. The reports of Hitler’s dentist, [Hugo] Blaschke (who had formerly studied in the U.S.), and other witnesses clearly show that the teeth in that little cigar box must indeed be the Führer’s.’

  In the meantime, on May 9, 1945, the Soviet Victory Day, most SMERSH arrestees and high-level generals were flown to Moscow. However, some witnesses of Hitler’s death, and Fritzsche, remained in prison in Berlin and were further interrogated. Later all of them were also transported to Moscow. The witnesses were held in investigation prisons until 1951–52, when they were finally sentenced to long prison terms, and the most important of them were sent to Vladimir Prison.24 Dr. Haase died under investigation in 1946, and Weidling died in Vladimir Prison on November 17, 1955, just before repatriation to Germany. That same year, the survivors were released and returned to Germany.