On January 11, 1945, the UPVI was renamed the Main Directorate, becoming the GUPVI, while Ivan Petrov was appointed its head.31 Already on February 2, Lieutenant General Mikhail Krivenko, former deputy head of the NKVD Main Directorate of the Border Guards, replaced him. His participation in the Katyn Forest massacre has already been mentioned. The 2nd (Operational) Directorate of the GUPVI staff consisted of 71 men, and the activity of its 1st Department was almost identical to that of the 1st Section of the 2nd Department of the GUKR SMERSH.
The most important war criminals and intelligence officers investigated by the Operational Directorate were kept in the NKVD/MVD investigation prisons Butyrka, Taganka, and Sretenka in Moscow. They were tried and convicted by the Military Tribunal of the Moscow Military District or the OSO (NKVD/MVD). Out of more than 400 Soviet labor camps, convicted important POWs were sent only to the camps of Vorkuta or Norilsk. Unimportant POWs were tried by POW camp tribunals and the convicts were sent to the Karlag camp (Kazakhstan) or Siblag camp (Krasnoyarsk Province in Siberia).32 From 1949 onwards, the most important convicted POWs were held in the MVD Prison in Novocherkassk.
Camp No. 27 in Krasnogorsk
The POWs in Krasnogorsk Camp No. 27 in the Moscow suburbs were the main targets of the 1st Department of the Operational Directorate. In 1943–45, the camp’s Zone No. 1 held members of the former German military elite, including Field Marshal Friedrich von Paulus, former commander of the 6th Army; Lieutenant General Arthur Schmidt, former HQ head of the same army; Lieutenant General Vincenz Müller, former commander of the German 12th Army Corps; and Hitler’s personal pilot, Lieutenant General Hans Baur.33 An Anti-Fascist School for the ‘re-education’ of POWs (‘Antifa,’ in POW jargon) and barracks for its students were located in Zone No. 2. Most of the candidates selected for this school were former German and Austrian soldiers and low-level commanders.
Also held in Camp No. 27 (Zone 1) were the relatives of German political and economic leaders, including Lieutenant Heinrich von Einsiedel, a great-grandson of Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. After his release in 1948, von Einsiedel defected to the Western Zone in Berlin. Another prisoner was Lieutenant Colonel Adolf Victor von Papen, a relative of Franz von Papen, the former German Chancellor. During World War II, Franz von Papen was German envoy to Turkey, and in 1941 he was the target of an unsuccessful assassination attempt by the NKVD/GRU team led by Sudoplatov’s deputy Naum Eitingon.34 There was also Harold Bohlen und Holbach, the youngest son of Gustav Krupp (Gustav von Bohlen), the German ‘cannon king,’ a defendant in Nuremberg who was related to the American diplomat Charles (‘Chip’) Bohlen. The latter served as a Russian interpreter for President Franklin D. Roosevelt at the Tehran and Yalta conferences and for President Harry S. Truman, at the Potsdam Conference. Later, from 1953–57, he was American Ambassador to Moscow.
In August 1944, Harold Bohlen, at the time a member of the German military mission in Bucharest, was detained by the Romanian military along with other members of the mission. However, in October Bohlen, together with another officer of the mission, Major Prince Albrecht Hohenzollern, escaped from a concentration camp. Romanian King Mihai, a nephew of Prince Albrecht, organized the escape.35 Unfortunately for him, Bohlen was caught again and ended up in Camp No. 27. Prince Albrecht managed to hide from the Soviets.
The Romanian and Hungarian generals were also held in Camp No. 27. Japanese POWs were there from August 1946 to September 1948. In 1945–47, a separate ‘cottage’ (barrack) of the camp held entire families of Polish aristocrats: Radziwills, Krasnickis, Zamoiskis, and Branickis. The NKVD operatives arrested the Radziwill family just after Prince Janusz Radziwill had spent several months under German arrest, suspected of participation in organizing the Warsaw Uprising.36
The NKVD first captured Prince Radziwill, a prominent Polish politician, in 1939, after the Soviet annexation of the Polish territory. According to Pavel Sudoplatov, in Lubyanka Prison Beria personally interrogated the prince and supposedly persuaded him to report on Hermann Goering, head of the Luftwaffe (Air Force), whom Radziwill knew well.37 The NKVD considered Radziwill to be an ‘agent of influence’ rather than an ‘operational agent’ (i.e., a spy). An ‘agent of influence’ might even not have known that he was used in Soviet interests. In 1940, Prince Radziwill was released from prison and returned to Berlin, but he did not receive any instructions from Moscow.
Sudoplatov writes that at the beginning of 1945 he again used Prince Radziwill, who had been captured for the second time.38 Sudoplatov took the prince as a translator to a dinner with W. Averell Harriman, the American Ambassador, knowing that Radziwill and Harriman were already acquainted. During the dinner Sudoplatov, who introduced himself as ‘Pavel Matveyev,’ tried to find out what plans for post-war Europe the Americans would bring to the conference in Yalta (February 4–11, 1945). Sudoplatov lied, saying that Radziwill was living in Moscow in exile and was free to travel to Poland and London. In fact, after the meeting Radziwill joined his family incarcerated in Camp No. 27. Both Sudoplatov’s stories about Radziwill need verification.
In March 1946, British Ambassador to Moscow Archibald Clark Kerr wrote to Stalin asking him to free the Radziwill family that included two children. The release was postponed until the end of 1947, and Janusz’s wife Anna Radziwill died on February 16, 1947, before the family could leave the camp.
The Operational Directorate used Camp No. 27 (Zone 1) for two main purposes: to collect information on elite prisoners through informers, and for ideological brainwashing, preparing German collaborators for future work in the Soviet-occupied zone of Germany. As von Einsiedel wrote in his memoirs, even some German generals, including Vincenz Müller, became NKVD informers and spied on their fellow prisoners.39
Informers and collaborators were sent back to Germany early. Thus, by September 1948, General Müller had already been repatriated to East Germany, where he became a Police General.40 American military counterintelligence (CIC) twice tried to organize Müller’s defection to the West, but the general did not want to go.41 In contrast, Harold Bohlen and Adolf von Papen, who refused to collaborate with the NKVD officers, were convicted only in 1950. For the alleged spying and ‘aiding the international bourgeoisie’ they both received sentences of twenty-five years in the labor camps. They were sent to the camps near Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg) and returned to West Germany only in 1955.
In mid-1949, Camp No. 27, known as ‘operational-transitional,’ became one of seven GUPVI’s special ‘filtration’ camps for vetting the most important POWs of high officer ranks before their repatriation to Germany.42 As a result, the Operational Directorate selected forty-one generals—‘military revenge-seekers’—and opened criminal cases against them.43 For investigation they were transferred to the MVD investigation prisons in Moscow. In November 1950, Camp No. 27 was closed.
GUPVI/SMERSH Cooperation: Secret German Informers
In 1944–46, the Operational Department/Directorate frequently ‘shared’ German informers from Camp No. 27 with Kartashov’s SMERSH/MGB department in Moscow. Paul-Erchard Hille, the former Nazi journalist and member of the editorial board of Hermann Goebbels’s personal paper, Essener National Zeitung, is a good example.44 As his Personal File reveals, Hille was drafted in 1943 and served in the German infantry as a lance corporal. In January 1945, he was taken prisoner in Latvia by the troops of the 3rd Baltic Front, and then held in various POW camps until March 3, 1945 when he was moved to Moscow’s Lefortovo Prison. He must already have been a known informer; otherwise it would have been very unusual for SMERSH investigators to place an NKVD POW with SMERSH prisoners. From March 22 to April 4, Hille shared a cell with Vilmos Langfelder, Raoul Wallenberg’s assistant and driver. Langfelder and Wallenberg arrived in Moscow on February 6, 1945, and from then on, were investigated by Kartashov’s department.
After sharing a cell with Langfelder, Hille was transferred to the NKVD Butyrka Prison, where he had several cell mates. In May 1945, Yakov Schweitzer, one of the ma
in investigators of the GUPVI’s Operational Directorate, interrogated him. Interrogations continued in October of 1945 after Hille’s transfer to Camp No. 27, where Schweitzer and Nikolai Lyutyi, who supervised informers, questioned him.45 Lyutyi’s interrogation or, most probably, beseda (a confidential conversation), points directly to Hille as a cell informer.
In January 1946, Hille was again in Butyrka Prison, where he spent from the end of February to the end of April in Cell 288 with Heinz Linge, former personal valet to Hitler. During this period, the whole Operational Directorate and Amayak Kobulov himself were preoccupied with investigating the circumstances of Hitler’s death. Linge, Baur, and some other witnesses of Hitler’s suicide came under intense interrogation. As Linge recalled in 1956, ‘the subject of these interrogations was mainly the question [of ] whether Hitler was dead or alive… During these interrogations I was always maltreated [i.e., beaten].’46 NKVD investigators held each witness who was interrogated about Hitler’s death in a cell with an informer and, moreover, these cells were bugged. The documents in Hille’s file reveal that while Linge was his cell mate, Schweitzer, who was investigating Linge’s case, interrogated Hille several times. Hille told Schweitzer whatever Linge tried to conceal from the investigators.47 In May 1946, after fulfilling his role as cell spy, Hille was returned to Camp No. 27.
On October 10, 1947, Nikolai Selivanovsky (MGB deputy minister) ordered Kartashov to request Hille’s transfer from Camp No. 27 to his MGB department. For an unknown reason, Amayak Kobulov did not sign the document transferring Hille to Lubyanka until January 30, 1948. In April 1951, the already mentioned officer Boris Solovov finished his interrogations of Hille. On April 14, 1951, the OSO (MGB) sentenced Hille to twenty-five years in prison for spying, and he was sent to Vladimir Prison. In July 1953, not long after Stalin’s death in March that year, Hille was released, and by December 1953 he was among the first POWs repatriated to East Germany.
An Anti-Hitler Plotter in GUPVI’s Hands
The GUPVI and GUKR SMERSH did not generally share information they received from prisoners during investigations. The two organizations sent separate reports to Stalin, Molotov, and other Politburo members, and only the GKO and Politburo members had full information on POWs. Abakumov and Kobulov conducted two separate investigations concerning the circumstances of Hitler’s suicide and presented the Politburo with two lists of potential defendants for trial at Nuremberg. The case of Colonel Hans (Johannes) Crome, former HQ head of the 4th Army Corps, was one of those rare instances in which the NKVD shared information directly with the GRU, NKGB, and SMERSH. On September 19, 1944, Beria signed the following letter:
September 19, 1944
No. 997/b
To: State Committee of Defense,
Comrade STALIN I.V.
SNK [Sovnarkom], Comrade MOLOTOV
CC VKP(b), Comrade MALENKOV
Razvedupr RA, Comrade IL’ICHEV
NKGB USSR, Com.[rade] MERKULOV
GUKR ‘SMERSH’ NKO, Com.[rade] ABAKUMOV
Attached to this letter is the testimony of German POW, Colonel CROME.
Hans CROME, from the family of a Lutheran priest, a professional officer of the Reichswehr, graduate of the German Academy of the General Staff, was taken prisoner near Stalingrad in January 1943, when he was in charge of the headquarters of the 4th Army Corps.
In connection with the information published in the press about the assassination attempt on Hitler, CROME reported that he was a member of an organization of military plotters created in Germany in 1941.
In his testimony CROME reported data of interest on the circumstances of organization of the plotters’ group, on its members and their ideas, and on the group’s goals and activity.
PEOPLE’S COMMISSAR of INTERNAL AFFAIRS of the SOVIET UNION
(L. BERIA)
This is correct [a signature of a secretary]
Typed in 7 copies
[in handwriting:]
Sent to Com.[rades] Molotov, Malenkov, Il’ichev on September 22, 1944
Sent to Com.[rades] Merkulov and Abakumov on September 23, 1944.48
In other words, the GUPVI had a higher-level German military plotter than the SMERSH’s prisoner Major Kuhn, about whom Abakumov reported to Stalin four days later. A 28-page Russian translation of Crome’s testimony dated September 2, 1944 was attached to Beria’s letter.
Crome claimed that the military anti-Hitler organization created in 1941 consisted of a central, leading group in Berlin, with branches in the High Command of the Armed Forces (OKW), the Army High Command (OKH), the armies at the Eastern Front, and the occupational troops in France. The central group included Colonel General Ludwig Beck, Field Marshal Erwin von Witzleben, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, Infantry Generals Alexander Falkenhausen and Friedrich Olbricht, and Major General Hans Oster (Canaris’s deputy), along with four civilians: Professor Jens Jessen; Ambassador to Rome Ulrich von Hassell (incorrectly spelled ‘Gasselt’ throughout the document); Oberbürgermeister Carl Goerdeler; and Prussian Staatsminister Johannes Popitz. While these names are now well known, in 1944 the Soviet leaders and heads of security services were possibly hearing about them and about the widespread German military Resistance for the first time.49 The organization’s goal was to arrest Hitler and other Nazi leaders and to try them in court. If Hitler’s arrest was impossible, the plotters were prepared to assassinate him. Crome mentioned Kuhn’s superior General Tresckow as the lead plotter at the Eastern Front.
Two points in Crome’s testimony are most interesting. First, he claimed that Admiral Canaris was one of the leaders of the plot and that the plotters’ meetings took place at his apartment in Berlin, which corresponds with some other data about Canaris.50 Second, according to Crome, the plotters planned coups twice, in December 1941 and autumn 1942 (in fact, it turned out to be more than twice). The first attempt was cancelled, and the second was postponed. In February 1942, RSHA head Reinhard Heydrich made a sudden visit to Paris, after which came the dismissal and discharge from the army of one of the key plotters, Field Marshal von Witzleben (commander of the German Occupational Troops in France), followed by the SD’s intensified oversight of Witzleben’s staff officers. Obviously, Heydrich had information about the plotters’ plans. Crome did not know what happened later because of his transfer to the Stalingrad Front and subsequent capture in February 1943. Unfortunately, no information is available about the reaction of the recipient of Beria’s cover letter and Crome’s testimony.
In 1955, Crome was repatriated to West Germany, where he continued his service and became Brigadegeneral of the Bundeswehr. He retired in 1961 and died in 1997. As for Field Marshal Witzleben, the Gestapo arrested him on July 21, 1944. On August 7–8, 1944 he was tried along with seven other military plotters. Witzleben was condemned to death and executed.
Interestingly, from 1963 to 1965 Crome’s son Hans-Henning headed Department 85 in the BND, the West German intelligence service. This department was in charge of investigating former war criminals among the BND staff. Crome Jr. collected materials on 146 staff members, 71 of whom—former RSHA officers—resigned because their crimes had been proven. In 2010 he told an interviewer: ‘My work in Department 85 is the only issue that haunts my nightmares after 40 years of my service.’51 He was referring to the crimes committed by those staffers who had resigned. Later Crome made a successful intelligence career while being stationed in New York, Madrid, and Bern.
In May 1945, after the war in Europe, Moscow investigation prisons of both GUKR SMERSH and GUPVI’s Operational Directorate were full of prisoners under investigation, and it took years to close cases and try all prisoners. But the influx of new prisoners from Europe was still coming, and in August, after the war with Japan, it increased enormously.
Notes
1. GKO Order No. 6594, dated September 24, 1944. Quoted in Viktor Cherepanov, Vlast’ i voina. Stalinskii mekhanizm gosudarstvennogo upravleniya v Velikoi Otechestvennoi voine (Moscow: Izvestia, 2006), 329 (in Russian).<
br />
2. Ibid., 435.
3. SMERSH. Istoricheskie ocherki i dokumenty, edited by V. S. Khristoforov et al., 214–5 (Moscow: Glavnoe arkhivnoe upravlenie, 2003) (in Russian).
4. Document 6 (Indictment of the Austrian composer, Hans Hauska) in ‘Vernite mne svobodu!’ Deyateli literatury i iskusstva Rossii i Germanii—zhertvy stalinskogo terrora, edited by V. F. Kolyazin and V. A. Goncharov, 118–9 (Moscow: Medium, 1997) (in Russian).
5. Vladimir Abarinov, ‘A report of Doctor Smoltsov,’ Novoe vremya, No. 1 (1993), 40–41 (in Russian).
6. A notarized testimony of Count Adelmann about Raoul Wallenberg given to the Swedish authorities on February 6, 1956 (in German) (RWDD, RA UD, Stockholm).
7. Nikolai Mesyatsev, Gorizonty i labirinty moei zhizni (Moscow: Vagrius, 2005), 141 (in Russian).
8. Page 123 in Dmitrii Dontsov, ‘Stenografistka generala Abakumova,’ in Voennaya kontrrazvedka of ‘Smersha’ do kontrterroristicheskikh operatsii (Moscow: Kuchkovo pole, 2010), 112–31 (in Russian).
9. Roger Moorhouse, Killing Hitler: The Plots, the Assassins, and the Dictator Who Cheated Death (New York: Bantam Books, 2006), 236–41.
10. Peter Hoffmann, Stauffenberg: A Family History, 1905–1944 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 181.
11. Michael Mueller, Canaris: The Life and Death of Hitler’s Spymaster, translated by Geoffrey Brooks (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2007), 224–5.
12. Klemens von Klemperer, German Resistance Against Hitler: The Search for Allies Abroad, 1938–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 374–5.
13. Fabian von Schlabrendorff, The Secret War Against Hitler, translated by Hilda Simon (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1966), 295.
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