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

by Vadim Birstein

  SS-Hauptsturmführer (Captain) Heinz Pannwitz, who headed the Gestapo’s investigation of the Red Orchestra in France, also fell into SMERSH’s hands. After his release, the CIA interrogated Pannwitz concerning his Red Orchestra investigation and his interrogations by SMERSH, and used the resulting information in its 1979 report, The Rote Kapelle.56

  Numerous high-ranking German military generals were also taken prisoner by SMERSH.57 Among them was the ruthless Lieutenant General Reiner Stahel, who was military commandant of Warsaw during the 1944 Uprising. He was arrested by SMERSH in Romania, where Hitler had sent him in a last-ditch effort to save the German troops stationed there. Stahel died in November 1955 in a transit POW camp, on his way to Germany as part of a large repatriation of German officers. Another SMERSH prisoner was SS Major General Wilhelm Mohnke. The Americans and Canadians mounted a ten-year search for him due to his order to kill Canadian POWs during the Normandy invasion in June 1944. It was only upon Mohnke’s release in 1956 that it became known that the Soviets had him all along.58

  SMERSH operatives also arrested a group of people who witnessed the death of Hitler. In fact, there were two groups of such witnesses in Soviet captivity, and there were two completely separate investigations into the circumstances of Hitler’s demise. These were conducted independently by SMERSH under Abakumov’s personal supervision and by the Main Directorate for POWs (GUPVI), which was part of the NKVD, under the supervision of the head of the GUPVI, Amayak Kobulov.59 The NKVD and SMERSH competed to find out the truth in order to curry favor with Stalin, who was fascinated with the Führer. Stalin suspected that Hitler had somehow survived the bunker, and therefore wanted convincing proof of his death. One of the witnesses investigated by SMERSH, SS-Gruppenführer (Lieutenant General) Hans Rattenhuber, head of Hitler’s bodyguards, was, possibly, the person closest to Hitler while he was alive.

  Japanese military prisoners were investigated by SMERSH as well. They included General Otozo Yamada, commander in chief of the Kwantung Army, and the American-educated Senior Lieutenant Prince Fumitaka Konoe, who attended Princeton University before World War II. The young prince belonged to a 1,200-year-old family of Japanese rulers, and SMERSH considered him an important prisoner because he was a son and the personal secretary of Prince Fumimaro Konoe, the two-time former Japanese prime minister (1937–39 and 1940–41). In addition, Fumikata Konoe was related to Emperor Hirohito through his wife, Masako, a cousin of the emperor. Konoe, who had never been seriously ill, died suddenly in October 1956 in a transit POW camp on the way back to Japan. His death, like Raoul Wallenberg’s, remains a great mystery.

  General Yamada was more fortunate; he survived imprisonment and returned to Japan. Hiroki Nohara, deputy head of the Intelligence Department of Yamada’s army, was sentenced to death in February 1947 as a spy and executed.60 The Japanese Consul General in Harbin, Kimio Miyagawa, died in Lefortovo Prison in Moscow before he was tried, while General Shun Akifusa, head of the Japanese Military Mission in Harbin, was convicted of being a spy in December 1948 and sentenced to a 25-year imprisonment. Four months later he died in Vladimir Prison.61

  To the disappointment of the SMERSH leadership, in August 1945 the last Manchurian Emperor Pu Yi was captured by an NKVD, not a SMERSH, operational group. Although the commander in chief in the Soviet Far East, Marshal Aleksandr Vasilevsky, ordered the transfer of Pu Yi to SMERSH, NKVD Commissar Beria only allowed SMERSH officers to interrogate Pu Yi; he remained in NKVD hands.62

  Since SMERSH officers wore Red Army uniforms, people arrested by SMERSH operatives frequently did not know that they were in the hands of a separate secret service. Even Soviet POWs used to think that the NKVD or NKGB had arrested them. For instance, Lev Mishchenko, a Moscow physicist who volunteered in 1941 for the opolchenie (detachments of civilian volunteers) and was then captured by the Germans, wrote in the 2000s: ‘In June 1945, I was arrested by the counterintelligence department SMERSH of the 8th Guard Army. SMERSH… was the name of the NKGB departments within the army.’63 This misunderstanding led to confusing mistakes regarding SMERSH in the memoirs of many foreign former prisoners of SMERSH.

  One of SMERSH’s last important tasks was its involvement in the International Nuremberg Trial.64 Abakumov’s investigators proposed five prisoners as possible defendants at Nuremberg. However, the Politburo chose only one of the people on SMERSH’s list: the relatively unimportant Hans Fritzsche, an official of Paul Joseph Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry, who was ultimately acquitted. It’s possible that Stalin settled on Fritzsche because he did not want his former allies to know that important generals such as Mohnke were in his hands.

  The NKVD also brought one defendant from its POW camps, Grand Admiral Erich Raeder, commander of the German Navy until 1943. He was sentenced to life in prison. The main testimony presented by Soviet prosecutors consisted of excerpts from the recorded interrogations of many SMERSH prisoners, but the prisoners themselves were not produced.

  Colonel Sergei Kartashov, head of the 2nd Department of SMERSH, which was in charge of the interrogation of important German POWs and Soviet servicemen who had been in German captivity, was the first to arrive in Nuremberg. His assignment was to do an initial evaluation of the situation. Then a special team of three SMERSH officers headed by Mikhail Likhachev, a deputy head of SMERSH Investigation Department, brought Fritzsche to Nuremberg. However, the main task of this team was to monitor the Soviet delegation—the prosecutors, judges, translators, and so forth. They were also tasked with preventing any discussion at the trial of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact or of Soviet responsibility for the massacre of 22,000 captured Polish officers executed in 1940 in the Katyn Forest and two other places.65

  After one of the Soviet military prosecutors, General Nikolai Zorya, was found dead with a gunshot wound to his head in his hotel room during the trial, it became evident that problems existed within the Soviet delegation. The official Soviet statement claimed that the death was due to ‘the incautious usage of a fire-arm by General Zorya’.66 But according to Zorya’s son, Likhachev or one of his men killed Prosecutor Zorya to prevent a discussion of the Katyn Forest massacre.

  At the same time, in early 1946, SMERSH prepared a series of trials in Moscow against a number of old White Russian generals who had been captured in Europe and Manchuria, including former Soviet General Andrei Vlasov. The most important defendants were tried in closed sessions of the Military Collegium of the Soviet Supreme Court. Only a few short sentences announcing the generals’ executions were published in the press. However, these trials took place after the end of SMERSH and will be discussed in another book.

  The formal end of SMERSH came in May 1946, when it was merged with the former NKGB, which was now renamed the MGB (State Security Ministry). Abakumov became head of the MGB, and key personnel from SMERSH headquarters in Moscow and from the front directorates took over the key positions in the MGB. As MGB minister, Abakumov supervised not only military counterintelligence but also foreign intelligence and civilian domestic counterintelligence within the USSR, which were the main functions of the former NKGB. He continued to report directly to Stalin, and the MGB became the primary tool for carrying out Stalin’s purges and repressions from 1946 until 1951, when Abakumov himself was arrested. The famous Leningrad Case and the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee Case were only two of the important prosecutions prepared by Abakumov and the MGB in the late 1940s.

  In Eastern Europe, the former SMERSH front directorates were converted into the MGB directorates of the Soviet occupation armies. Their function remained the same as during the war—finding spies and traitors within Soviet troops and purging local areas of Soviet political enemies. Hundreds of people were arrested or kidnapped and sent to the Soviet Union. Many times they were simply grabbed off the streets, and their family and friends never knew what had happened to them. Abakumov’s first deputy, Nikolai Selivanovsky, supervised the purges in Poland. One of Abakumov’s assistants, Pyotr Timofeev, controlled the situation in
Romania. The former head of one of SMERSH’s front directorates, Mikhail Belkin, oversaw events in Hungary.67 In Western Europe, SMERSH operatives worked under the cover of the staff of the Plenipotentiary on Repatriation, Colonel General Fyodor Golikov.

  Former SMERSH officers also worked in Eastern Europe as MGB advisers to the local, newly organized pro-Soviet state security services and participated in the preparation of East European show trials. Belkin and Kartashov were responsible for arrests and trials in Budapest, while Likhachev interrogated prisoners in Bulgaria, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. Since these officers reported directly to Abakumov, and Abakumov reported to Stalin, Stalin’s control over these trials was assured.

  The majority of the important SMERSH prisoners captured during and just after the war were kept and interrogated in Moscow investigation prisons until 1948, when they were sentenced. The rest remained in these prisons until 1950–52, when they were finally tried. Many of them, including former foreign diplomats, were accused of spying; the bizarre paragraph 4 of Article 58, ‘assistance to the world bourgeoisie’, was also frequently used. The luckiest spies and traitors were tried between May 26, 1947 and January 12, 1950, during a period when the death sentence was replaced by 25-year imprisonment in labor camps. There was a practical, not a humane, reason behind this abolition: with the loss of many millions of men during the war, Stalin needed unpaid workers to help restore industry.

  In February–March 1948, special labor camps (at first six, later four more) with especially harsh conditions of life and work were created for ‘especially dangerous prisoners’, i.e. prisoners sentenced under Article 58.68 The political prisoners were separated from criminals and moved to these special camps, while the most important political prisoners, especially with 25-year terms, were put in three special prisons—Vladimir, Verkhne-Uralsk and Aleksandrovsk. New convicts convicted under Article 58 were assigned to these special labor camps and prisons exclusively. As in the Nazi concentration camps, prisoners in special camps had numbers attached to their clothes.69 Therefore, most of the important SMERSH prisoners ended up in this special penal system. In January 1953, there were 221,727 political prisoners in special camps, and 1,313 prisoners in special prisons.70

  Although SMERSH existed for only three years, from 1943 to 1946, the two years prior to its formal organization (when Abakumov was chief of its direct predecessor, the UOO), and the five years after its demise (when Abakumov was head of the MGB), must be considered as part of its history. There is a continuous thread, during those ten years, of Abakumov’s special relationship with Stalin.

  Until now, there has been a lack of understanding, in the historical literature, of the part played by Abakumov. Abakumov’s role as head of the UOO, SMERSH, and then the MGB was shrouded in secrecy. He was not a member of the Communist Party or Soviet government leadership, and portraits of him were not publicly displayed anywhere in the Soviet Union. Until recently, even the Russian State Archive of Film and Photo Documents, which keeps all documentary films and numerous photos of the Soviet period, did not have Abakumov’s picture. There are perhaps only seven or eight photographs of him in existence, and I know of only one occasion, in March 1946, when the newspaper Pravda published a photograph of him—sitting next to Marshal Georgii Zhukov, the conqueror of Berlin. Even in the Soviet Union, very few people knew that the MGB, the most feared security service, was headed by Abakumov and not by Beria.71

  In contrast, two books have been published in English about Lavrentii Beria, who was quite famous during his time in Moscow.72 Every Soviet citizen was familiar with Beria’s appearance because photographs of him were frequently published in newspapers. Also, his portraits, along with those of the other Politburo members, were posted on buildings in every city and town during official Soviet holidays—the 1st of May (International Labor Day) and the 7th of November (Bolshevik Revolution Day). Yet the period during which Beria was head of all the security services only lasted for five years, from 1938 until 1943. After the creation of SMERSH, Beria had to compete with Abakumov for influence.

  From 1943 on, as NKVD Commissar, Beria was formally in charge of managing the NKVD labor camps and prisons, but through his close associate, Vsevolod Merkulov, Beria also effectively controlled the NKGB, which was responsible for foreign intelligence and internal counterintelligence. However, after 1943 he was never again, during Stalin’s life, the all-powerful security chief he had once been.

  On December 29, 1945, Beria, who was still a deputy chairman of the Council of Commissars, was appointed head of the Soviet Atomic Project, while Sergei Kruglov, his devoted and rather colorless deputy, became the head of the MVD (Internal Affairs Ministry, the successor to the NKVD). Therefore, contrary to what is generally believed, from the beginning of 1946 until Stalin’s death on March 5, 1953, Beria did not head any of the Soviet secret services. As a member of the Politburo, each of which was assigned a group of ministries to supervise, for the next year Beria oversaw the work of the MGB and MVD, as well as that of ten other ministries, although this supervision was primarily administrative. In February 1947 even this supervisory role was taken away. In July 1947 Abakumov refused to follow Beria’s orders regarding the construction of facilities by the MGB for the atomic project.73

  By September 1947 it was clear that Beria had lost all control over the state security services. Abakumov, on the contrary, continued to amass power, managing to get several MVD directorates incorporated into his MGB. In terms of his control over state security, Abakumov was far more powerful from 1946 to 1951 than Beria had been from 1938 to 1943.

  In 1947, Abakumov’s MGB lost responsibility for foreign intelligence (its 1st Main Directorate) when Stalin merged it, along with military intelligence (GRU or the Main Intelligence Directorate) and diplomatic and Party intelligence services, into a new organization called the Committee on Information. Undaunted, in October 1949, Abakumov established a new 1st Directorate, charged with counterintelligence on foreigners and on Soviet personnel abroad. It was headed by Colonel Georgii Utekhin, who had headed departments in SMERSH headquarters that were in charge of capturing enemy agents in the Red Army rear and sending SMERSH agents to the German intelligence schools.

  As he had done to so many people before, Stalin decided to purge Abakumov, and on July 12, 1951, he was arrested. Many high-ranking SMERSH officers, including Selivanovsky, Likhachev, Belkin, and Utekhin, were also detained. By the beginning of 1953 Stalin pretended that he had nothing to do with the appointment of Abakumov as MGB minister. Stalin told those investigating Abakumov’s case that in 1946 Beria had insisted on Abakumov’s appointment and that was why he ‘did not like Beria and did not trust him’.74 Apparently, Stalin was preparing to use the Abakumov case as a tool against Beria.

  Nikita Khrushchev, who emerged as the Soviet leader soon after Stalin’s death in March 1953, played a big part in concealing Abakumov’s real role. During the de-Stalinization campaign that started with Khrushchev’s secret speech at the Twentieth Soviet Communist Party Congress in 1956 and continued at the Twenty-second Congress in 1961, as well as in a series of speeches at other Party meetings, Khrushchev repeatedly mentioned Abakumov as ‘an accomplice’ of Beria. Apparently, Khrushchev wanted to make Beria the primary villain of the Stalin period in order to expedite Beria’s speedy trial and execution at the end of 1953. By the way, the text of Khrushchev’s speech of 1956, published in many languages that same year, appeared in press in the Soviet Union only in 1989.

  After Stalin’s death on March 5, 1953, Beria was appointed first deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers and Minister of Interior Affairs (MVD). This was a new MVD that included both previous ministries, the MGB and the MVD. In other words, Beria restored the monolithic NKVD structure that had been in effect from 1941–43. However, the new MVD was much bigger than the NKVD of 1941–43, and Beria acquired enormous power.

  To counter this threat, Georgii Malenkov, Vyacheslav Molotov and Khrushchev united, and on June 26, 1953, with th
e help of Georgii Zhukov, first deputy Defense Minister, Beria was arrested as an alleged spy and enemy of the people. On December 23, 1953, the Special Session of the USSR Supreme Court sentenced Beria to death and he was executed. Beria’s longtime colleagues—Vsevolod Merkulov, Vladimir Dekanozov, Bogdan Kobulov, and Sergei Goglidze, whom he brought from the Caucasus in 1938, as well as Pavel Meshik and Lev Vlodzimersky, who became his trusted men in Moscow—were also convicted and shot.

  The investigation of Abakumov continued for a year after Beria’s execution. When Roman Rudenko, the newly appointed Soviet chief prosecutor, was interrogating Abakumov in 1953–54, he tried in vain to connect Abakumov with Beria. Abakumov firmly stated: ‘I’ve never visited Beria’s apartment or his dacha. We had a strictly official, working relationship, and nothing else.’75

  Abakumov and his devoted men—Aleksandr Leonov, former head of the SMERSH Investigation Department, and two of his deputies, Likhachev and Vladimir Komarov, as well as Ivan Chernov, former head of SMERSH’s Secretariat, and his deputy Yakov Broverman—were tried by a special session of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court in Leningrad from 12–19 December, 1954.76 As ‘a member of Beria’s gang’, Abakumov was accused of treason against the Motherland, terrorism, counter revolutionary acts, and so forth. None of these accusations made any sense. Abakumov pleaded not guilty, stating that ‘Stalin gave instructions, and I only followed them’.77 This was true. As Chernov recalled, during the announcement of the death verdict ‘not a muscle moved in Abakumov’s face, as if the announcement did not concern him’.78 Abakumov, Leonov, Likhachev, and Komarov were executed on December 19, 1954, immediately after the trial. Chernov and Broverman were sentenced to imprisonment in labor camps, for 15 and 25 years respectively.