The Secret War

by Max Hastings

  It is easy to imagine the tension, uncertainties and terrors of the days and nights that followed, entombed beneath a city in the hands of the enemy. The party was heavily armed, but to what purpose? Three times in early November one partisan, Leonid Cherney, risked venturing above ground by night, in an attempt to contact a woman courier. He failed, and returned to report merely that the occupiers were everywhere. On 13 November Romanian security police, who had been warned of the party far beneath their feet, sought to penetrate the catacombs. A firefight followed in the darkness, which persuaded the Romanians that it would be easier to imprison their foes by sealing the catacombs’ entrances. Thereafter, not a word was heard of Soldatenko’s party until February 1942. Their experience in the interlude was among the more dreadful of the war.

  Several partisans, succumbing to despair and hunger when their provisions ran out, demanded that the group should ascend into the city and surrender. This proposition was rejected out of hand by Soldatenko. A man named Byalik and his wife Zhenya, prominent among those clamouring for surrender and anyway vulnerable as non-Party members, were shot. During the days and weeks that followed, they were also eaten. Disputes and resentments persisted among the survivors. On 1 February 1942, four men successfully escaped through an imperfectly sealed exit, and were then rash enough to make for their own homes. Three were promptly denounced by neighbours and seized by the Romanians, while one made good his escape.

  Odessa’s occupiers now pumped gas and smoke into the catacombs to flush out the remaining partisans. This prompted a panic underground, and a new revolt in which Soldatenko and his wife Elena were shot dead. When escape proved impossible the three survivors returned to their underground lair, and subsisted for several days by eating portions of the Soldatenkos. Then, at last, all hope gone, these desperate men made their way to the surface and surrendered. A Romanian patrol ventured below and explored the partisans’ refuge. They found the bones of the Byaliks, together with the half-eaten corpses of the Soldatenkos.

  In the annals of Western Europe’s experience of the war, the massacre of the population of the village of Oradour-sur-Glane by German troops in June 1944 holds a special place, because although thousands of French Resistants and hostages were killed by the Nazis, the extinction of an entire community was a unique occurrence. In the East, however, such things were done constantly by Hitler’s forces. From the earliest days of ‘Barbarossa’ he decreed dreadful reprisals for any act of civilian Resistance. On 23 July 1941 he instructed his commanders that they should create such a reign of terror as would ‘cause the population to lose all interest in insubordination’. On 16 September his chief of staff quantified this, decreeing a tariff of fifty to a hundred executions of hostages for every German death at the hands of partisans. The policy was enthusiastically implemented by Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, who would achieve special notoriety for his blood-drenched 1944 suppression of the Warsaw Rising. Nazi repression was for some time successful: across two-thirds of occupied Soviet territory there was no significant partisan activity. Rear areas in the southern USSR, where the major German operations of 1942 took place, were notably tranquil: the steppes offered no refuges to guerrillas. Here, once again, experience in Russia mirrored that of France, where Resistance was strongest in the central and southern wildernesses, least strategically important to Hitler.

  In Belorussia, in a month following the killing of just two Germans, the 707th Infantry Division shot 10,431 people, most of them women and children. In June and July 1942, Second Panzer Army conducted two anti-partisan sweeps, codenamed ‘Birdsong’ and ‘Green Woodpecker’, against partisans in the Bryansk area. The first operation involved 5,500 German troops and ended with claims of 3,000 partisans killed, wounded or captured. Most of these were, however, merely local civilians, and Birdsong cost the Germans fifty-eight killed and 130 wounded. Green Woodpecker fared no better. There were dead Russians in plenty, to be sure, but most partisans survived. In Army Group Centre’s rear areas, covering some 90,000 square kilometres, in the first eleven months of ‘Barbarossa’ 8,000 alleged partisans were killed – a number far in excess of the total then operating in the region, and only explicable by assuming most victims to have been civilians – in exchange for 1,094 German fatalities up to 10 May 1943. In January 1943, AG Centre claimed to have killed an astounding total of 100,000 ‘bandits’. Such reports make nonsense of the Wehrmacht’s denials of complicity in Nazi war crimes.

  One manifestation of escalating partisan activity was reported by Maj. Gen. Nagel, inspector-general of operations for Economic Staff East, the institution responsible for plundering the occupied regions of food and livestock. During the summer of 1942 he told Berlin that it had become too dangerous to send parties into forests in Army Group Centre’s sector to cut timber for railway sleepers. Moreover, local German commanders were unwilling to continue wholesale seizures of livestock, for fear of increasing partisan support in local communities. Millions who had initially acquiesced in German occupation, then become cowed by repression, had now begun to believe that only Soviet victory might deliver them from starvation and destitution. Sixteenth Army HQ reported that between May and July 1942, thirty attacks had been made on bridges and eighty-four on railways in its area, involving destruction of twenty locomotives and 130 wagons. In Army Group Centre’s sector, between June and December 1942 there were 1,183 attacks on railways, an average of six a day.

  The existence of the partisan bands was brutish in the extreme. Like the French maquis, they practised banditry to support their own existences with at least as much zeal as they fought the Germans. One day in September 1942, a group of starving men crawled into a potato field, and began frantically scrabbling in the earth. One of them, named Kovpak, heard a noise behind him and turned to see a woman gazing contemptuously down at them. She said, ‘My God! My God! Here you are, big healthy guys – and reduced to stealing potatoes from us!’ Many men froze, starved, were shot in clashes with rival bands or faced summary execution for some alleged breach of discipline. ‘We shot Kozhedub for firing his gun twice while he was drunk, causing panic in the camp,’ wrote a partisan named Popudrenko in February 1942. ‘This was a good decision. In the evening we had an amateur concert, sang to an accordion, danced, and told funny stories … Comrade Balabai [killed] one bastard, a forester who was working for the Germans.’ The story was the same everywhere. ‘In the morning I received a report that a former [Soviet] prisoner of war who served in the 2nd Company had deserted,’ scrawled a partisan group leader named Balitsky on 3 August 1943. ‘He was captured in the village of Lipno … Having little to discuss with this spy, I merely pulled out my Mauser and ended this nobody’s existence with a single shot.’

  A large proportion of the Soviet fighters were mere fugitives, more than a few of them Jews seeking a refuge from Nazi persecution, rather than Soviet patriots committed to armed struggle against the Axis. Around half of all partisans were local peasants, forced into service at gunpoint. Every band lived in dread of betrayal, and collaborators revealed their locations to the enemy as often as happened to the maquisards of France. Casualties were appalling: when the Germans located and surrounded a partisan sanctuary, it was not unusual for every man in a group to perish. But when Moscow’s will was served, it was the partisans who did the attacking. Popudrenko recorded on 27 February 1942: ‘We learned last night that grain was being assembled for the Germans in Klyusy. We sent thirty men who brought back more than 100 poods, the rest was distributed among collective farmers.’ A fortnight later: ‘We attacked a Hungarian battalion stationed in Ivanovka village … First Company attacked frontally, Second held the flank, Third and Fourth gave fire support. Results of the battle: killed 92 Hungarians among them 4 officers, 64 policemen. Captured one heavy machine-gun and 2 light, 15,000 cartridges, an anti-aircraft gun, 103 blankets, seven rifles, one transmitter etc. We have lost ten men killed and seven wounded.’ It is reasonable to guess that many of the Hungarian dead were shot after being
taken prisoner, the custom on both sides of partisan war.

  On 18 August 1942 Hitler issued a new Directive, No. 46, giving ‘Guidelines for an intensified fight against the plague of banditry in the East’. For the first time, this proposed carrots as well as sticks in the management of the occupied territories: collaborationist communities would receive enhanced rations, and be excused from forced labour. In reality, however, this belated concession was seldom observed. And only two months later Hitler issued a new order, stating that the Eastern partisan war must now be recognised as ‘a struggle for the total extirpation of one side or the other’. A subsequent general order of 11 November 1942 stated that ‘captured bandits, unless exceptionally … enlisted in our fight against the bands, are to be hanged or shot’. Germany’s modern Potsdam historians have written: ‘The occupying power was neither willing to create the political framework for pacification nor able to enforce such a condition by military might.’

  The Germans ultimately deployed a quarter of a million men for anti-partisan operations and rear-area security in the East, which represented a real achievement for Stalin, Moscow Centre and Pavel Sudoplatov, who provided the NKVD agents and wireless-operators who served with the partisans. Most of the German troops engaged in security duties were men unfit for front-line service, but they had to be armed and fed, and thus became a significant drain on Hitler’s war effort. During 1943 the partisans’ field strength increased from 130,000 to a quarter of a million. On 28 July Allen Dulles in Bern signalled Washington, reporting his Berlin sources saying that partisans were now making a major impact behind the Eastern Front, seriously disrupting the Wehrmacht’s lines of communication. German sigint officers considered the radio discipline of the partisans better than that of Soviet regular units, probably because every group knew that its survival depended on outwitting German locators. In the autumn of 1943 a monthly average of 2,000 telephone poles and three hundred cables were cut by guerrillas behind Army Group Centre’s front alone. Its headquarters introduced a special ‘partisan warning’ radio channel, broadcasting to all units.

  Wehrmacht ‘special intelligence groups’ handled security and interrogation in the German rear areas, among the ugliest aspects of the anti-partisan war. A British file on some of the personalities involved, mostly based on Ultra material, included such figures as Vladimir Bedrov: ‘Formerly employed by the NKVD in Leningrad. Deserted to the Germans. Employed as an interpreter and translator. Extremely brutal towards prisoners. Deserted in February 1944 and arrested in Estonia. Sent to a concentration camp in Eastern Germany for people who know too much.’ Another man, Sergeant Bohme, came from Riga, had lived in Vienna, spoke fluent Russian and English, ‘ran an agent network recruited from Russia PW and three or four women’. Field Police Inspector Karl Brenker was described in his British dossier as ‘guilty of every conceivable crime against the Russian population. A veritable beast. Carried out executions himself. Particularly brutal towards women. Decorated with the golden anti-partisan badge.’

  The NKVD’s Fourth Directorate was responsible for directing what became known as ‘the Railway War’ because of its emphasis on hitting German communications. ‘An enemy train was blown up at 1 a.m.,’ a partisan leader named Balitsky wrote in his diary for 25 August 1943. ‘It consisted of thirty-eight wagons and was heading towards the front. We took part of its load and burned the rest. [Most of] the train’s escort were killed and five captured, after putting up heavy resistance in which fifteen partisans were wounded.’ The attack on German Eastern Front communications during the Russians’ huge summer 1944 ‘Bagration’ offensive made more impact on the main battlefront than did that of the Resistance in France in support of D-Day. The Soviets at last had the resources to orchestrate major operations behind the lines as well as against the German armies. They deployed ‘strategic intelligence sections’, eight to twelve strong, operating ten to sixty miles beyond the front, and were also able to sustain reasonably regular airdrops to hundreds of partisan groups. No reliable balance sheet is possible, though it seems reasonable to assume that – as in every other aspect of the war in the East – the partisan campaign cost the Russians far more people than the Germans. But in the last two years of the war they made a difference. In the words of a German general, partisans became ‘formidable, well-trained units … a plague with which all rear-area headquarters, supply, transportation and signal units had to contend every day’.

  Between 1941 and 1945, Sudoplatov claimed in his memoirs that the NKVD dispatched a total of 212 teams to lead guerrilla groups, and 7,316 agents and wireless-operators to work behind enemy lines. Its sabotage schools trained a thousand men for the Red Army, and another 3,500 for its own operations. He suggested that 2,222 ‘operational combat groups’ served behind the front in the course of the war. The Soviet official history professed that partisans were responsible for killing 137,000 Germans – which must be an absurdly exaggerated figure – including 2,045 alleged collaborators and eighty-seven senior Nazi officials explicitly targeted for assassination. The Soviet Union after the war produced a roll of honour of heroes of partisan operations, led by such names as Kuznetsov, Medvedev, Prokupuk, Vaopshashov, Karasyov, Mirkovsky. Kuznetsov – even less appropriately codenamed than most wartime agents as ‘Fluff’ – was an NKVD man of striking blond good looks. Born in 1911, before the war he had served the Lubyanka by sharing with foreign diplomats several Bolshoi ballet stars as lovers. He had grown up in German-speaking Siberia, and thus was able to pass himself off as a Wehrmacht officer, ‘Oberleutnant Paul Zibert’, operating behind enemy lines. In this role he assassinated several prominent Germans. He was named a Hero of the Soviet Union after being killed by Ukrainian nationalists while trying to cross back to the Red Army’s lines in 1944.

  From Stalin’s perspective, the most important achievement of Russia’s guerrillas was to sustain a semblance of Soviet authority in regions far behind the front, and to create a propaganda legend of national unity against the invader. In reality, the occupied areas of the Soviet Union spawned as many different responses to Hitler – a similar quotient of Resisters, a matching proportion of collaborators – as did Western Europe. The consequence was that Moscow exacted a terrible retribution from those who, following the German retreat, were deemed to have done less than their duty to the Motherland. In 1943 Beria reported that the NKVD had arrested and detained for interrogation 931,549 suspects in territories liberated by the Red Army. Of these, he said, 80,296 had been ‘unmasked as spies, traitors, deserters, bandits and criminal elements’.

  Many partisan groups killed more Russian people than Germans, with the deliberate purpose of making them more fearful of the wrath of Stalin than that of Hitler. A February 1942 report by the commander of the Kopenkin group, operating in Poltava oblast, merits quotation at length, not because it is unusual, but because there are many others like it in declassified archives, marked ‘TOP SECRET’:

  I discovered by interviewing local [Party] activists in Ostanovki that three villagers, including the collective farm foreman, were loyal towards the Germans and betrayed our people. These three persons were arrested and taken to the forest 3–4 km from Postanovki where we shot them. At dawn on 30 October 1941, the detachment reached Khoroshki settlement, and spent the daylight hours in a school. New members of the detachment took the oath. We restocked with supplies from the collective farm’s reserves, and one cart was taken to carry the machine-guns. I learned from local activists that the Germans had appointed the former local schoolteacher starosta [village head] in Khoroshki. We took him with us when leaving the village and shot him after driving for 3 km … In Cherevki we arrested the newly appointed starosta and another man sympathetic to the Germans. We shot both.

  In Bolshaya Obukhovka … we arrested and shot two starostas, five persons recruited by the German intelligence, seventeen people associated with the church, and three deserters. All five persons recruited by Gestapo were 14–19 years old. According to the commander of the
Mirgorod partisan detachment comrade Andreev, six locals from Obukhovka were supporting the Germans. I sent a group to arrest these six persons, who were afterwards shot.

  According to the information of comrades Ivashchenko and Andreev, a family with four sons living in Bolshaya Obukhovka were producing and distributing a religious leaflet [which stated]: ‘Everyone who finds this should write ten more and give them to people. Pray for the Germans, our liberators. God has saved us from Jews and communists.’ A group of six partisans were sent to [the village] led by comrade Tereshchenko. They came to the [evangelists’] house and asked them to open the door, but the occupants did not obey, instead barring the doors and windows with wooden beams. After waiting for two hours, Tereshchenko asked for permission to break down the door … In the morning, the father and four sons were taken and shot in the forest. I have established by questioning the locals that three [Red] Army men have been living in Bolshaya Obukhovka for over a month. I arrested them with help from local partisans. Questioning them revealed that they had got married and had no intention of returning to the front. I shot these three men as deserters and traitors to their motherland.

  According to the information from comrades Ivashchenko, Andreev and local activists in the village Panasovka, a former kulak was appointed the starosta there. I sent a group to shoot him and his family, as we knew that his wife, daughter and mother were active in spreading unpatriotic rumours, such as that the Soviet regime is gone forever, and that German authority is the only authentic one … Their property was confiscated for partisan use. According to information received from local people in Olefirovka, the collective farm’s agronomist, who had been appointed village chief, refused to issue grain, saying that the Soviet regime was no more, and the Germans needed it. I sent comrade Kaminyar to shoot [the man and his wife] and distribute around sixty tons of grain among the collective farmers.