Investigation of German POWs
No information about the 1st Section of the 2nd GUKR Department has ever been published. I was able to establish the names of officers of this section by studying personal files of foreign prisoners at the Russian State Military (formerly Special) Archive (RGVA). As already mentioned, two files were opened for each SMERSH, NKGB, or NKVD prisoner under investigation: the Investigation File and the Prison File.
The Investigation File contained primarily transcripts (protokoly in Russian) of interrogations. When the investigation was closed, the accused had to look through this file, which was also presented at the trial after the chief USSR prosecutor or his deputy concluded that the investigation was finished. After conviction, the prisoner’s Investigation File went to the MGB/KGB (now FSB) Central Archive for storage. These files relevant to political cases are still essentially unavailable to researchers. Only the closest relatives of the rehabilitated former political convicts are allowed to read these files, and a researcher can examine an Investigation File at the FSB Central Archive only with notarized permission from direct relatives.
The Prison File contained documents about the prisoner’s arrest and his life in investigation prisons, including orders for transfers within the same prison or to other prisons. The file also included investigators’ instructions on special forms to prison personnel (a separate NKGB/MGB department not subordinate to the investigation departments) to bring the prisoner in for interrogation. The final documents in the Prison File contained the investigator’s conclusion concerning the charges to be brought against the prisoner in court and the applicable punishment (before the trial!). The investigator’s superiors and Abakumov or his deputy also signed the investigator’s conclusion.
Most GUKR SMERSH prisoners were tried by the Special Board (OSO) of the NKVD (and, from November 1946 onwards, of the MGB), or by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court. After the trial, the convicted person was transferred to NKVD jurisdiction. The Prison File now became a Personal File, containing copies of trial and sentencing documents as well as the investigator’s recommendation as to whether the convict should be sent to a punishment prison or a labor camp. The Personal File went with the convict, and documents about his prison or camp life were added. Upon a prisoner’s release the Personal File was archived. The Personal Files of foreign prisoners arrested by SMERSH, the NKGB, and NKVD ended up in the Russian State Military Archive in Moscow. If a convict died in prison, his or her Personal File went to the archive of the camp or prison’s local NKVD/MVD or MGB (in the case of special prisons) branch.
According to the materials in the files, when a prisoner arrived at the 2nd GUKR SMERSH Department, at first its head Kartashov or his deputy, Nikolai Burashnikov, inspected the file and, frequently, also interrogated the detainee. Kartashov was known as an extremely capable and efficient officer.3 No information is available on Burashnikov except his name surfaced in documents of the late 1930s, when he headed the 3rd Department (counterintelligence) of the NKVD’s Moscow Branch.4 After being interrogated by Kartashov or Burashnikov, the prisoner came under the jurisdiction of the 1st Section, headed by Lieutenant Colonel Yakov Sverchuk, or of other sections of the department. Sverchuk worked in the NKVD from 1938 onwards.
Kartashov, Burashnikov, and Sverchuk, and other investigators who did not know German, conducted interrogations through their young colleagues—Boris Solovov, Oleg Bubnov, Daniil Kopelyansky, Vladimir Smirnitsky, Anna Stesnova, and others. All of these young officers were professional German translators who had graduated just before World War II. Abakumov affectionately dubbed his favorite, Solovov, ‘the teacher’ because Solovov wore glasses.5 He personally recommended Solovov as a translator for the International Nuremberg Trial. SMERSH prisoners had a different opinion of Solovov. One was the former German counselor in Ploesti (Romania), Count Ruediger Adelmann, remembered him as ‘a very intelligent but mean person.’6 Frequently, Solovov’s friend Pavel Grishaev, an investigator in the 4th Department and then the 6th Department, also served as a translator at interrogations. In 1946 Grishaev, like Solovov, was sent to the International Nuremberg Trial as a translator.
Sverchuk’s staff of officers was small, only about ten people. Besides the German section, other sections dealt with Finnish, Japanese, and Russian prisoners. While formally the 2nd Department was operational, meaning that it obtained intelligence from prisoners and did not investigate criminal cases, interrogations often led to the opening of a case against a prisoner. Usually interrogations took place in the offices on the fourth and sixth floors of the main Lubyanka building, or in a separate interrogation building of Lefortovo Prison. Nikolai Mesyatsev, former investigator of the 2nd SMERSH Department, described the Lefortovo offices:
The two-story investigation building in Lefortovo Prison was big. Only a few investigators worked on the first floor, and the rest worked in the offices on the second floor, arranged along a long corridor… Every investigator usually worked in the same office. There were a stool and a small table for a prisoner under investigation located in front of the investigator’s desk in the office. There was also a sofa covered with leather in front of a window where the investigator could rest between interrogations or even sleep at night.7
Frequently female stenographers were present during interrogations. Zinaida Kozina, Abakumov’s personal stenographer, volunteered to work with investigators. She recalled the night interrogations in Lefortovo:
The routine was the following. At 9:00 p.m. a bus was waiting at the 4th entrance [of the Lubyanka building]. It took us—me, two other women-stenographers, and investigators—to Lefortovo. There we went to offices for interrogations. At 5:00 a.m. the interrogations were over, and the bus took us to the metro station. Everybody went home… At 10:00 a.m. we were at work [in Lubyanka] again. It was necessary to immediately write down all transcripts of interrogations and to give them to the investigators.8
In some cases prisoners were also interrogated in Suhkanovo Prison. In many cases the 2nd and 4th or 6th GUKR SMERSH departments interrogated the same prisoners. Some of the German diplomats who arrived in Moscow from Bucharest in September 1944 were initially the responsibility of the 6th Department. For instance, Aleksandr Leonov, head of this department, personally interrogated Fritz Schellhorn, former German General Counselor, a week after his arrival. Then Schellhorn and other German diplomats were transferred to Kartashov’s 2nd Department and the investigation continued by Kartashov’s officers.
If a prisoner had no important intelligence information, his case was closed quickly and prepared for trial by the OSO. But the cases of important prisoners like witnesses of Hitler’s death and some German diplomats turned into long-term investigations, sometimes lasting as long as eight years.
Case Example: Major Joachim Kuhn
The case of Major Joachim Kuhn, opened by the 2nd Department in mid-1944, was typical for an investigation that continued until the 1950s. Kuhn was a member of the failed military plot to assassinate Hitler on July 20, 1944. Kuhn’s commander, Major General Henning von Tresckow, was a close associate of Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, the would-be assassin.9 Kuhn also knew von Stauffenberg well and used to visit him because Kuhn’s fiancée, Maria-Gabriele, was the daughter of von Stauffenberg’s cousin Clemens.10
Among the military plotters, Kuhn’s responsibility was to supply the conspirators with explosives and handmade bombs that he kept secretly at the HQ of the German Infantry High Command in Mauerwald (now Mamerki, Poland), not far from Hitler’s HQ ‘Wolfschanze’ (Wolf’s Lair). In March 1943, the plotters made their first assassination attempt on Hitler during his visit to the Army Group Center HQ in Smolensk, in Sovietoccupied territory. As already mentioned, following the visit, before Hitler’s plane took off, Fabian von Schlabrendroff, Tresckow’s cousin and aide-decamp, smuggled a concealed bomb onto the plane, while Erwin von Lahousen, head of Abwehr II, informed Admiral Canaris of the plan.11
The bomb did not detonate wh
ile the plane was in the air, and Kuhn and Tresckow began to plot anew. In autumn 1943, Tresckow suggested smuggling Friedrich Werner von Schulenburg through the front line in an attempt to reach Stalin for peace negotiations.12 Von Schulenburg, a former German ambassador to Moscow who knew Molotov and Stalin well, was a high-level Foreign Ministry official and a member of the Resistance. However, Field Marshal Günther von Kluge, commander in chief of the Army Group Center and a long-time member of the military opposition, did not support this plan.
On July 21, 1944, the day after von Stauffenberg’s unsuccessful assassination attempt, Tresckow drove to the 28th Rifle Division to see Major Kuhn, who had been transferred from Tresckow’s HQ to this front division. After Tresckow told Kuhn everything he knew about Stauffenberg’s failure, he drove into the no-man’s land between the German and Soviet front lines. There Tresckow pretended to exchange fire with the enemy, and then committed suicide by blowing himself up with a grenade.13
Kuhn made a different choice—he went to the Soviets. His divisional commander, General Gustav von Ziehlberg, told Kuhn that he had an order to bring him to Berlin, where officials suspected Kuhn of having provided von Stauffenberg with explosives for the attack on Hitler.14 In fact, Stauffenberg received plastic explosives from Kuhn’s colleagues who also worked at the Mauerwald HQ. Apparently, von Ziehlberg expected Kuhn to commit suicide to escape arrest.
Instead, on July 27, 1944, Kuhn deserted to the Soviet troops. SMERSH operatives of the 2nd Belorussian Front arrested him and sent him to Moscow.15 In Germany, because of Kuhn’s desertion, von Ziehlberg was put on trial and sentenced to nine months in prison. His case was later reopened, and this time he was sentenced to death. On February 2, 1945, von Ziehlberg was executed.
In Moscow, Kuhn was jailed in Lubyanka Prison. On September 2, 1944, he wrote a lengthy testimony concerning his personal involvement in the German military opposition and conversations with von Stauffenberg and other opposition leaders, and provided a detailed description of German high-ranking opposition leaders whom he knew personally.16 Investigator Daniil Kopelyansky from Kartashov’s department translated Kuhn’s testimony into Russian.17 On September 23, Abakumov reported to Georgii Malenkov on the interrogation, enclosing a Russian translation of Kuhn’s testimony and arriving at an unfavorable conclusion: ‘Considering Kuhn’s [official] denouncement in Germany as a traitor and active participant in the plot, and his testimony that he played a very important role in the plot, it is possible that the Germans sent him [to us] with a special purpose under all these covers… I have already reported this to Comrade Stalin.’ A few days later, Kopelyansky’s translation was on Stalin’s desk and Stalin discussed the Kuhn affair with GKO members.
SMERSH investigators soon concluded that Kuhn’s testimony was truthful. From August 12, 1944, until March 1, 1947, they held Kuhn under the operational alias Joachim Malowitz, although documents issued in Kartashov’s department still listed him under his real name.18 Twice during this period, on February 17 and 28, 1945, Abakumov ordered SMERSH operatives to take Kuhn into the forest around the village of Mauerwald, in Poland, where he helped them to find a set of plotters’ documents hidden in cans and jars.19 Among the papers, there was Stauffenberg’s plan to kill Hitler in 1943 during his stay in the Wolfschanze, and draft orders to military leaders in case the assassination was successful. The Politburo rejected Abakumov’s proposal to publish these documents in the press, and the documents were declassified only in the late 1990s.
From the beginning of 1947 until March 1, Kuhn was in the Butyrka Prison hospital, and from March 1, 1947 to April 22, 1948, in an ‘MGB special object,’ the code name for a carefully guarded MGB dacha (country house) not far from the Malakhovka train station near Moscow.20 Abakumov ordered that Kuhn be trained for future work in the pro-Soviet East German administration, but as MGB officers soon discovered, Kuhn had other plans. Placed with Kuhn was another German POW, an informer, who reported to MGB handlers that in private conversations Kuhn criticized the Soviet regime and said that he wanted to defect to the Americans. As a result, on April 22, 1948, Kuhn was returned to Lefortovo Prison and held there for two years. Supposedly, he was subjected to torture.21
On April 5, 1950, Kuhn was transferred to Butyrka Prison. Like many other important prisoners investigated by Kartashov’s department, Kuhn was finally sentenced by the OSO (MGB) in the autumn of 1951. Convicted as a war criminal, he received a sentence of twenty-five years in a special prison for political prisoners.
From 1949 on, there were three such prisons under MGB supervision—Vladimir, Aleksandrovsk, and Verkhne-Uralsk; previously, they were under the NKVD/MVD jurisdiction. The most important convicts were held in Vladimir Prison not far from Moscow, where they could easily be additionally interrogated, if necessary. Kuhn was placed in Aleksandrovsk Prison near Irkutsk in Siberia. Another Aleksandrovsk inmate was the already mentioned Colonel Otto Armster, former head of the Abwehrstelle (Abwehr post) in Vienna, and also a member of the anti-Hitler plot, as well as a personal friend of Admiral Canaris. On June 21, 1945 he was brought to Moscow by plane and placed in Lefortovo Prison. In the spring of 1950, Armster was transferred to Butyrka. Like Kuhn, Armster was sentenced in 1951 and sent to Aleksandrovsk Prison. Apparently, by 1951, the MGB had already considered members of the anti-Nazi military plot to be unimportant, so these two were jailed far from Moscow.
For some time Kuhn was in solitary confinement, where he started calling himself ‘Major General Graf von der Pfaltz-Zweibruecken’ and hearing voices.22 A prison-hospital psychiatrist examined Kuhn and disagreed with the administration’s suspicion that he had gone insane. The doctor concluded that Kuhn ‘was fit to continue serving his sentence.’ Strangely, Kuhn was not transferred to the MVD Psychiatry Hospital in Kazan, as was done in similar cases of insanity.
In January 1956, Kuhn was released and returned to West Germany, where he lived in the town of Bad-Brukenau until his death in 1994. He had no desire to get together with those former plotting colleagues who had survived the Nazi persecution.23 When two of his prewar friends finally visited him in 1980, Kuhn called himself ‘Kronprinz Wilhelm von Hohenzollern.’ In December 1997, Kuhn was posthumously politically rehabilitated in Russia.
Investigation of POWs in the NKVD
Important German and other foreign POWs arrested by the NKVD were investigated by the Operational Department of the previously mentioned UPVI (NKVD Directorate for POWs and Interned Persons). The UPVI was created on Beria’s order issued on September 17, 1939, after Soviet troops invaded Poland.24 It had its own system of POW concentration camps, separate from that of the GULAG labor camps. Not only enemy POWs of various nationalities, but also civilians detained in the occupied territories were kept in these camps. Here is an example of such a camp:
By September 1, 1943, in the NKVD Camp No. 99 there were interned persons of various nationalities and citizenship,
[total of] 958 people
Of them, former Polish POWs 176
Children 94
According to nationalities, the contingent is represented by:
Jews (men, women, and children) 360 people
Poles 181
Germans 121
Spaniards 63
Hungarians 33
Romanians 30
Frenchmen, Russians, Czechs, Estonians,
Danes, Finns, etc. 170.25
The presence of Jewish child-prisoners is the most shocking in this document. This Camp No. 99, also known as Spaso-Zavodsky Camp, was located in Kazakhstan, near the town of Karaganda—the area where prisoners were used as enslaved coal miners.26 In 1943, captured enemy privates, not officers, were sent to this camp. Apparently, the Spaniards mentioned were soldiers of the Blue Division that fought near Leningrad in 1941–43, while the Frenchmen were soldiers drafted into the German army in Alsace-Lorraine, annexed by Nazi Germany in 1940.
Beginning in May 1943, Nikolai Ratushnyi was acting head of the UPVI. On August 3, 1943, Nikolai Mel’ni
kov was appointed his deputy and head of UPVI’s 2nd (Operational) Department. Mel’nikov had a long NKVD career, first in foreign intelligence and then in Sudoplatov’s 4th NKVD/NKGB Directorate (terrorist acts and diversions), where he headed the 1st Department in charge of foreign countries and POWs.
The Operational Department began investigating important POWs in 1944, but at first it was difficult to select these prisoners out of the general population of German POWs because of the increasing influx. In December 1943, there were about 100,000 POWs in the UPVI camps, while by December 1944, the number had increased to 680,921. Just after World War II, about 2,100,000 POWs (mostly former privates) were working in various branches of Soviet industry in all regions of the USSR.
In order to identify and select important prisoners, Mel’nikov created a net of informers among the POWs.27 After identifying officers, the Operational Department placed them in separate POW camps for officers. Additionally, special categories of POWs were selected for transfer to a few special UPVI camps: (a) those who had committed atrocities against Soviet citizens; (b) former active fascists and members of the intelligence, counterintelligence, and repressive organs of the enemy; and (c) those POWs who tried to escape from the UPVI camps or were planning to escape.28 On April 7, 1944, Mel’nikov committed suicide and Amayak Kobulov, former head of the NKVD rezidentura (network of spies) in Berlin in 1940–41, was appointed new head of the Operational Department.29 He was ‘a tall, fine-figured, handsome man from the Caucasus with a groomed moustache and black hair.’30 Major General Il’ya Pavlov, Kobulov’s deputy, was the only person on the UPVI staff who was transferred from SMERSH. In 1944, before coming to the UPVI, Pavlov was deputy head of the UKR SMERSH of the 2nd Belorussian Front.
Smersh: Stalin's Secret Weapon: Soviet Military Counterintelligence in WWII Page 57