14. Peter Hoffmann, The History of the German Resistance 1933–1945, translated from the German by Richard Barry (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1979), 334–5.
15. Boris Chavkin and Aleksandr Kalganov, ‘Neue Quallen zur Geschichte des 20. Juli 1944 aus dem Archiv des Foederalen Sicherheitsdienstes der Russischen Foederation (FSB). “Eigenhaendige Aussagen” von Major i.G. Joachim Kuhn,’ in Forum für osteuropäische Ideen-und Zeitgeschichte, 5. Jahrgang, 2001, Heft 2, 355–402.
16. Kuhn’s statement, dated September 2, 1944. Document No. 1 in ibid., 374–98.
17. Kopelyansky’s Russian translation in Boris Khavkin, ‘Zagovor protiv Gitlera. Iz “Sobstennoruchnykh pokazanii” Kyuna,’ Rodina, no. 6 (2004) (in Russian), http://istrodina.com/rodina_articul.php3?id=1199&n=67, retrieved July 23, 2008.
18. Ibid.
19. Photos of these documents in Peter Hoffmann, ‘Oberst i. G. Hennig von Tresckow und die Staatsstreichpläne im Jahr 1943,’ Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 55, No. 2 (2007), 331–64.
20. Khavkin, ‘Zagovor protiv Gitlera.’
21. Peter Hoffmann, ‘Major Joachim Kuhn: Explosives purveyor to Stauffenberg and Stalin’s prisoner,’ German Studies Review, Vol. 28, No. 3 (October 2005), 519–46. Unfortunately, this article contains inaccurate details.
22. Kuhn’s letter dated February 15, 1952, in Chavkin und Kalganov, ‘Neue Quellen zur Geschichte,’ 369–70; Hoffmann, ‘Major Joachim Kuhn,’ 537–8.
23. Von Herwarth, Against Two Evils, 261.
24. NKVD Order No. 0308, dated September 19, 1939. Document No. 2–1 Voennoplennye v SSSR 1939–1956. Dokumenty i materialy (Moscow: Logos, 2000), edited by M. M. Zagorul’ko, 72–74 (in Russian). An overview of the UPVI/GUPVI activity is given in Stefan Karner, Im Archipel GUPVI. Kriegsgefangenschaft in der Internierung in der Sowjetunion. 1941–1956 (Wien: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1995).
25. A GUPVI’s report, RGVA, Fond I/p, Opis’ 07e, Delo 136, L. 747.
26. NKVD Order No. 00398, dated March 1, 1943. Document No. 2.12 in Voennoplennye v SSSR, 100–5.
27. NKVD Instruction No. 489, dated October 7, 1943. Document 7.3 in ibid., 729–32.
28. NKVD Order No. 00130, dated September 9, 1944. Document 7.4 in ibid., 732–5.
29. NKVD Order No. 00100, dated February 20, 1945. Document 2.23 in ibid., 122–3.
30. V. M. Berezhkov, Stranitsy diplomaticheskoi istorii (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnye otnoshenoya, 1987), 208 (in Russian).
31. NKVD Order No. 0014, dated January 11, 1945. Document 2.22 in Voennoplennye v SSSR, 120–2.
32. MVD Directive No. 219, dated August 31, 1946. Document 7.6 in ibid., 739.
33. V. A. Vsevolodov, ‘Srok khraneniya—postoyanno!’ Kratkaya istoriya lagerya voennoplennykh i internirovannykh UPVI NKVD-MVD No. 27 (1942–1950 gg.) (Moscow: LOK-motiv, 2003), 53–58 (in Russian).
34. Details in Aleksandr Kolpakidi, Likvidatory KGB. Spetsoperatsii sovetskikh spetssluzhb. 1941–2004 (Moscow: Yauza-Eksmo, 2004), 20–25 (in Russian).
35. Yevgenii Zhirnov, ‘Prints skryl svoyu nastoyashchuyu familiyu,’ Kommersant-Vlast’, no. 14 (668), April 10, 2006 (in Russian), http://www.kommersant.ru/doc.aspx?DocsID=664971, retrieved September 9, 2011.
36. Kruglov’s report to Molotov, dated March 16, 1946. GARF, Fond R-9401, Opis’ 2 (Molotov’s NKVD/MVD Special Folder), Delo 142. L. 56–58.
37. Pavel Sudoplatov and Anatoli Sudoplatov, with Jerrold L. and Leona P. Schecter, Special Tasks: The Memoirs of an Unwanted Witness—A Soviet Spymaster (New York: Little, Brown and Co., 1994), 112–5.
38. Ibid., 223–7.
39. Heinrich Graf von Einsiedel, I Joined the Russians: A Captured German Flier’s Diary of the Communist Temptation (New Haven (CT): Yale University Press, 1953), 225–7.
40. Details in Peter J. Lapp, General bei Hitler und Ulbricht. Vincenz Müller—Eine deutsche Karrier (Berlin: Christoph Links Verlag, 2003).
41. Alaric Searle, ‘“Vopo”-General Vincenz Müller and Western Intelligence, 1948–54: CIC, the Gehlen Organization and Two Cold War Covert Operations,’ Intelligence and National Security 17 (2002), no. 2, 27–50.
42. Document Nos. 7.23 and 7.25 in Voennoplennye v SSSR, 768–9, 772–3.
43. Document No. 54 in Vsevolodov, Srok khraneniya, 246–8.
44. Data from Hille’s personal file, Military Archive, Moscow; Hille’s prisoner card in Vladimir Prison; and Hille’s interview given on September 1, 1954 to the Swedish journalist, Rudolph Phillipp.
45. From February till August 1946, N. V. Liutyi-Shestakovskii (1899–?) was deputy head, and from August 1946 till February 1948, head of the 2nd Department (supervision of secret agents) of the GUPVI Operational Directorate. Voennoplennye v SSSR, 1077.
46. Joachimsthaler, The Last Days of Hitler, 254.
47. V. A. Kozlov, ‘Gde Gitler?’ Povtornoe rassledovanie NKVD–MVD SSSR obstoyatel’stva ischeznoveiya Adolfa Gitlera (1945–1949) (Moscow: Modest Kolyarov, 2003), 123 (in Russian).
48. GARF, Fond R-940, Opis’ 2 (Stalin’s Special NKVD/MVD Folder), Delo 66, L. 293–323.
49. For all these people see, for instance, von Klemperer, German Resistance Against Hitler.
50. John H. Waller, ‘The Double Life of Admiral Canaris,’ The International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence 9, no. 3 (Fall 1996), 271–89.
51. Peter Carstens, ‘Eime “zweite Entnazifizierung,”’ FAZ.net, March 18, 2010, http://www.faz.net/s/Rub594835B672714A1DB1A121534F010EE1/Do c~EA65AAB2D1C2048249EAD3E3BC2FA6BAA~ATpl~Ecommon~Scontent. html, retrieved September 9, 2011.
CHAPTER 26
War with Japan
On August 8, 1945, the Soviet Union began a war with Japan. Japan had maintained neutrality toward the Soviet Union since April 13, 1941, when Yosuke Matsuoka, the Japanese foreign minister, signed an agreement to that effect in Moscow.1 To stress the importance of the just signed Neutrality Pact, Stalin and Molotov personally went to Moscow’s Yaroslavskii Station to see off Matsuoka. Signing this pact allowed Stalin to order a month later a secret transfer of two armies from the Transbaikal and Siberian military districts to the regions near the western border for preparations for the war with Germany.2 However, the possibility of a Japanese attack against the Soviet Union existed until the first months of 1942, and by December 1941, as a result of a new draft in Siberia, thirty-nine Soviet divisions were deployed in the Transbaikal region and the Soviet Far East. But the war with Japan was inevitable, while for the Western Allies it had started on December 8, 1941.
Preparations
On May 21, 1943, the GKO ordered the secret construction of a railroad from Komsomolsk on the Amur River to the Soviet Harbor in the Far Eastern Pacific.3 This railroad was crucial for the future movement of troops and military hardware to the Sea of Japan. With labor camp prisoners doing the construction work, completion was planned for August 1, 1945.
On November 1, 1943, after a dinner in the Kremlin, Stalin confidentially informed U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull that he planned to enter the war with Japan after the German defeat. Hull immediately cabled the news to President Franklin D. Roosevelt.4
In July 1944, after the Western Allies opened the Second Front in Europe, Stalin informed Marshal Aleksandr Vasilevsky, head of the General Staff, that he would be commander in chief of the war with Japan.5 The GUKR SMERSH started preparing an operational list containing the names of Japanese intelligence members and leaders of the Russian émigré community in Manchuria, which it completed on September 15, 1944.6 On February 11, 1945, the last day of the Yalta Conference, Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill signed a secret protocol, stating that after the war with Japan, the Soviet Union would acquire all of Sakhalin Island, the Kuril Islands, and a zone in Korea.7
On April 5, 1945, Molotov denounced the 1941 agreement in a diplomatic note to the Japanese ambassador to Moscow, Naotake Sato. The Soviet troops were already on the move to the Russian Far East. On June 28, 1945, Stalin issued an order: ‘All preparations are to be carried out in the greate
st secrecy. Army commanders are to be given their orders in person, orally and without any written directives.’8 Marshal Vasilevsky was appointed commander in chief in the Far East under the alias ‘Vasiliev’ (previously he was ‘Vladimirov,’ Table 21-1), and other commanders were also given aliases.9 All preparations were to be completed by August 1, 1945.
On May 15, 1945, Abakumov appointed his deputy, Isai Babich, and Aleksandr Misyurev, an assistant, as coordinators of SMERSH units of the Far Eastern Group of Soviet Troops.10 They were transferred there with a staff of 150 experienced SMERSH officers. Experienced UKR SMERSH heads were put in charge of the Far Eastern fronts:
Front SMERSH Head
Far Eastern Group of Troops I. Ya. Babich, Deputy Head, GUKR SMERSH
Primorsk Group of Troops D. I. Mel’nikov, Head, Karelian Front UKR SMERSH
Transbaikal Front A. A. Vadis, Head, 1st Belorussian Front UKR SMERSH
Far Eastern Front I. T. Saloimsky, Transbaikal Front UKR SMERSH
Later, in August 1945 the Primorsk (or Maritime) Group of Troops and Far Eastern Front became the 1st Far Eastern Front and 2nd Far Eastern Front respectively when Stalin launched his war against Japan. At the same time, GUKR SMERSH in Moscow was not idle. On June 9, 1945, it updated its operational list of Japanese intelligence members and Russian émigrés in Manchuria targeted for arrest.11
On July 11, 1945, Ambassador Naotake Sato tried to persuade Molotov to establish long-term friendly relations with Japan. At the time, three groups of Soviet troops totaling about 1.5 million men had already been deployed at the Manchurian border. The Japanese Kwantung Army, stationed in Manchuria since 1931, was the first to meet the Soviet offensive. In 1945, this army consisted of 713,000 men, of whom, according to the Japanese sources, about half were poorly trained teenaged recruits and old men, since the elite troops had long ago been sent to fight the Americans and British.12 The Japanese troops had almost no fuel and as a result, during the ensuing battle with the Soviets not a single plane out of a fleet of 900 was able to take off, and all 600 Japanese tanks were seized by the Soviets before they were even used.
On July 25, 1945, Beria reported to Stalin, who was attending the Potsdam Conference in Berlin, that the construction of the railroad to the Soviet Harbor was complete.13 The next day Harry S. Truman, Churchill, and Chinese President Chiang Kai-shek signed the Potsdam Declaration stating that if Japan did not surrender, it would be destroyed. The Japanese government did not respond.
On the morning of August 6, Truman ordered the first atomic bomb to be dropped on the city of Hiroshima. Two days later, at 5:00 p.m., Molotov officially informed Ambassador Sato that the Soviet Union would begin the war the next day. In fact, Soviet troops had already begun the offensive under the code name Operation August Storm.14 On August 9, the Americans dropped the second atomic bomb on the city of Nagasaki.
The next day the Japanese government informed the Allies that it wished to capitulate.15 On August 15, Japanese radio transmitted Emperor Hirohito’s speech of surrender to the nation, in which he agreed to all the demands of the Potsdam Declaration. In response, U.S. commander in chief General Douglas MacArthur issued Order No. 1, stopping the advance of American troops into Japan.
But peace was not what Stalin wanted. Soviet troops had occupied only a third of the Japanese territory Stalin had agreed upon with the Allies, and on August 17, 1945, he ordered Marshal Vasilevsky to continue the offensive.16 The next day, troops began landing on South Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands. The island of Hokkaido was not occupied only because the unexpectedly fierce Japanese defense of Sakhalin Island slowed the advancing Soviet troops.
New SMERSH Tactics
In Manchuria and other parts of China, SMERSH used new tactics. Groups of SMERSH operatives were parachuted in to Changchun, Mukden, Port Arthur (now Lüshun), and Dairen (Dalnii in Russian). These groups consisted mostly of SMERSH officers, followed by a landing force and additional forces bearing a flag of truce. In Changchun, on August 19 a group of SMERSH operatives and truce forces compelled General Otozo Yamada to order the surrender of his Kwantung Army.17 During this short campaign in Manchuria, Babich and Misyurev personally led two raids conducted by a group of SMERSH operatives. On September 21, 1945, Aleksandr Vadis reported to Babich:
From August 9 to September 18, there were 35 operational-search [SMERSH] groups in Manchuria. They conducted operations along with storm troopers, taking over cities, especially those in which, according to our intelligence information, there were [enemy] intelligence and counterintelligence organs.
In total, 2,249 people were arrested by September 18, 1945. Among them:
1. Official members of the YaVM [Japanese Military Missions] 317
2. YaVM agents 349
3. Official members of the Japanese gendarmerie 569
4. RFS [Russian Fascist Union] leaders and active members 305
5. BREM [Bureau of Russian Emigrants] leaders and active members 75
6. [Former] Red Army Intelligence men recruited by Japanese intelligence 10
7. Traitors to the Motherland 162.18
Officially, the number of Japanese intelligence agents captured by SMERSH operatives in the Far East and Manchuria reached 50,000, which is hard to believe.19
As usual, leaders of Russian émigré organizations were special targets of SMERSH operational groups. After the Civil War in Russia, many White Russian troops as well as members of the Maritime Provisional Government (May 1921–November 1922 in Vladivostok) crossed the border with China and settled there on territories later occupied by Japan. Furthermore, from 1929 to 1931, many Russian peasants crossed the Chinese border to escape enforced collectivization. In 1921–45, Grigorii Semenov was the key leader (Ataman) of all Cossacks living in nineteen large settlements in China, in charge of the 20,000-strong Cossack Union. The goal of this extremely anti-Soviet group was ‘to free Russia from the power of the Comintern and to restore law and order.’20 In August 1945, Ataman Semenov, two of his sons, and his uncle, White Lieutenant General D. F. Semenov, were captured by a SMERSH operational group parachuted into Dairen. Abakumov informed Beria:
On August 25 of the current year [1945] the operational group of the UKR SMERSH of the Transbaikal Front captured in the suburbs of the town of Dairen the leader of the White Russian Cossack Troops, head of the White Russian Guards, who had been hiding in Japan, Lieutenant General SEMENOV, G. M., born in 1890 in the village of Durulguev in the former Transbaikal Region, a Russian, who served in the Czar’s Army as a Colonel of Cossack Troops.
During the arrest, documents were taken from SEMENOV that proved his anti-Soviet activity.
SEMENOV is en route to the Main SMERSH Directorate.21
A month later, Abakumov reported to Beria on the arrests of leaders of the Russian Fascist Party (RFP), which was very active in Harbin in Manchuria. In the 1920s, Harbin was a Russian-émigré cultural and political center, similar to Prague and Paris.22 The first Russian fascist organizations appeared in Manchuria in 1925, inspired by the example of Benito Mussolini. In May 1931, the first congress of Russian fascists formed the RFP, electing the charismatic Konstantin Rodzaevsky its general secretary.23 Born in 1907 in Blagoveshchensk on the Russian left bank of the Amur River, in 1925, Rodzaevsky fled to Harbin, where he entered the Law Institute. In 1928, his father, a lawyer, and a younger brother joined him in Harbin, while the OGPU arrested Rodzaevsky’s mother and two sisters who had stayed behind in Blagoveshchensk.
Rodzaevsky wrote the RFP program. The party’s goal was ‘to overthrow the Jewish Communist dictatorship in Russia and to create a new National-Labor Great Russia [like National Socialist Germany], Russia for the Russians.’24 According to Rodzaevsky, Russia would achieve the highest level of prosperity and social justice, and the greatest Eurasian Empire would be created after Finland, Poland, and the neighboring Baltic countries joined Russia in that union. Rodzaevsky called Stalin ‘a concubine of the American capitalists and the Jews,’ and the OGPU, ‘a Zionist n
et.’
Rodzaevsky was obsessed with the worldwide ‘Jewish-Masonic plot,’ which he imagined and described in Russian in a brochure, Judas’ End, and a book, Contemporary Judaisation of the World or the Jewish Question in the 20th Century. The latter was republished in 2001 by the current Russian nationalists.25 In 1934, Russian fascists formed an international organization, the Russian Far East Moscow, with its central office in Harbin and branches in twenty-six countries. But because of Rodzaevsky’s extreme anti-Semitism, the leader of the American-Russian fascists, Anastase Vonsiatsky, soon broke with the RFP.26
The creation of the RFP coincided with the Japanese occupation of Manchuria and the creation of a puppet state, Manchukuo. The Japanese established a Bureau on the Affairs of Russian Emigrants in Manchuria (BREM) to manage the huge Russian population in Harbin.27 A Russian needed BREM’s (i.e., Japanese) approval to be hired, to open a business, and even to visit relatives in another city. The staff of BREM consisted of Cossacks and monarchist émigrés. In 1943, Major General Lev Vlasievsky became head of BREM, while Mikhail Matkovsky, the son of another White General, Aleksei Matkovsky, was his assistant. In fact, Mikhail Matkovsky was a Soviet intelligence agent, and through him, the Soviets learned a lot about the Russian community in Harbin.28 Despite his service, SMERSH arrested Matkovsky and later he was sentenced to a ten-year imprisonment in labor camps.
Between 4,000 and 20,000 Russians joined the RFP in Manchuria, while the total Russian population in Harbin was about 80,000.29 In 1939, the RFP changed its name to the Russian Fascist Union or RFS. The RFS widely used terror against members of the Russian émigré community and soon became part of the Japanese-Manchurian mafia. In October 1941, Japanese security arrested Richard Sorge, head of the Soviet spy ring in Tokyo, and then started vetting the Russian population in China.30 The Japanese detained and intensely interrogated Rodzaevsky and two other RFS leaders for a month. In 1943, the Japanese administration banned the RFS.
Smersh: Stalin's Secret Weapon: Soviet Military Counterintelligence in WWII Page 59