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

by Vadim Birstein

  During the night we were brought to a camp surrounded by two lines of barbed wire. Immediately…we were given the uniforms of privates without officers’ shoulder boards, as well as soldiers’ boots, and brought to barracks. Our barrack was for the Red Army commanders who had been taken prisoner or were in the detachments surrounded by the enemy. There were also barracks for privates and sergeants, and separate barracks for civilians. In the barracks, there were iron beds [not wooden bunks, as in labor camps]. We were given 350 grams of bread daily and a bowl of porridge twice a day… Daily newspapers were brought to our barrack… It was forbidden to write letters to relatives.

  No officer in the barrack talked about his past, the war or his experiences as a prisoner… The atmosphere was very tense in terms of morale, and some officers could not bear the waiting. One officer threw himself at the camp’s fence which was alive with high-voltage electricity… It was terrible torture to wait, and hope…

  After vetting, 95 per cent of officers were sent to penal battalions… Interrogations were conducted only during the night, and officers were interrogated every night. There were no beatings, but the osobisty had other methods for breaking an interrogated prisoner.

  My investigator was calm and behaved quite correctly. He never mentioned his name. He did not beat me up or threaten me while he was methodically asking questions. One night I was surprised by not being taken for an interrogation, and in the morning… I was called up to the camp’s komendatura [administration office], where they asked me if I had complaints or was beaten during interrogations… They told me that I would be released as a serviceman who had been successfully vetted and would be sent as a private to the army in the field… The osobisty advised me not to tell anybody that I had been vetted.21

  For each prisoner in these special camps, OO/SMERSH investigators opened a Fil’tratsionnoe delo or Filtration File, which contained transcripts of interrogations and other materials. As proof that the prisoner had not collaborated with the Germans, confirmation of the interrogation details was required from at least two people who were with the prisoner during his internment.

  According to the NKVD report dated October 1944, the total number of Soviet servicemen, who had been German POWs or encircled by the enemy before breaking out, vetted in filtration camps to date was 354,592. Of them, 50,441 were officers.22 The report stressed that although the camps were administered by the NKVD ‘the vetting…is conducted by counterintelligence SMERSH departments’ and 11,556 of those vetted had been arrested by OO/SMERSH departments. Among the arrested by SMERSH, 2,083 servicemen were identified as enemy intelligence and counterintelligence agents, and 1,284 were officers.

  Of those not arrested, only 60 percent of the officers were sent back to the army to continue their service. The remaining 40 percent were demoted to private and sent to penal assault battalions (shturmovye batal’ony) created in the Moscow, Volga, and Stalingrad military districts on Stalin’s order.23 Each assault battalion consisted of 929 demoted officers who were used, in Stalin’s words, for ‘the most active parts of the fronts’, such as attacks through minefields. The chance of survival in an assault battalion was almost zero. The few survivors were recommended for promotion to their previous ranks and positions.

  In addition, 30,740 servicemen were sent to the ‘labor battalions’ to work in the military industry. Although they were not formally convicted, they were treated as prisoners and forced to work in these battalions for a few months to as long as two years. By May 1945, the number of men in the filtration camps had jumped to 160,969 servicemen. They were used as forced labor workers by 23 industrial commissariats while still under investigation.

  Aleksandr Pechersky, the famous leader of the 1943 escape from the Sobibor Nazi extermination camp, was among the rare survivors of the assault battalions. 24 After his escape, Pechersky fought in a partisan detachment. Then the detachment joined the Red Army, and Pechersky was vetted and sent to the 15th Separate Assault Rifle Battalion.25 After he was wounded in battle, Pechersky was released from the assault battalion to continue his service in the regular troops.

  Here is an example of a typed certificate for the survivor Luka Petrusev (the formatting of the Russian original is preserved, including the typical two-line levels of signatures following the military hierarchical positions of signatories):

  Not everyone survived long enough to be vetted because many had perished earlier at the hands of the osobisty. The former secretary of a military tribunal describes a typical scenario: ‘The head of the NKVD’s OO of the corps was a tall, heavy man. He used to come to the cell that held the servicemen destined for vetting… He would pick a weak or shy serviceman and take him away. Then he would beat him up with his enormous fists until the man confessed to being a spy. After this came a painful investigation and a tribunal meeting, followed by an execution.’27

  Penal Detachments

  By June 1942, the OOs had arrested 23,000 servicemen for spying and treason as well as for ‘treacherous intentions’ since the beginning of the war.28 An OO deputy head’s report to Abakumov illustrates the scale of arrests made by the OOs at the Stalingrad Front:

  On the whole, from October 1, 1942, to February 1, 1943, according to incomplete data, special organs of the Front [the OOs] arrested 203 cowards and panic-mongers who escaped from the battlefield. Of them:

  49 men were sentenced [by military tribunals] to death, and shot in front of the troops;

  139 men were sentenced to various terms in labor camps and sent to punishment battalions and companies.

  Additionally, 120 cowards and panic-mongers were shot in front of the troops on decisions of special organs.29

  Now, in mid-1942, Stalin decided not to waste the sentenced men with mass executions, but to use most of them in penal detachments. On July 28, 1942 in his infamous Order No. 227 ‘No Step Back!’ Stalin ordered the creation of penal battalions (shtrafnye batal’ony) for officers (not to be confused with shturmovye batal’ony, where officers were sent after vetting) and penal companies (shtrafnye roty) for privates.30 Tribunals could order the suspension of any sentence, even the death penalty, and send the convicted serviceman to a penal detachment instead. Interestingly, in the order Stalin mentioned similar punishment units in the German army as his reason for creating their Russian counterparts. Information about penal detachments in the Red Army has become available only recently.

  Commanders from the brigade level up also had the right to send an officer, with no investigation or trial, to a penal battalion for one to three months. For instance, in April 1944 Georgii Zhukov, the first deputy defense Commissar, sent F. A. Yachmenov, commander of the 342nd Guard Rifle Corps, to a penal battalion for two months for not following orders and for behaving, in Zhukov’s opinion, in a cowardly fashion.31 And from August 1942, commanders at the corps and division level had the authority to send privates and junior officers to penal companies for crimes such as desertion or failure to follow orders.32 Therefore, it was easy for commanders to dispose of any serviceman they disliked. Criminals released from labor camps (750,000 in 1941 and 157,000 in 1942) were also enlisted in penal companies, although political prisoners were not released.33

  A penal battalion consisted of 800 former officers called ‘penal privates’ or ‘exchangeable fighters’, while a penal company comprised 150–200 privates. One to three penal battalions were formed at each front, and each army had between five and ten penal companies. By 1944, overall the Red Army had 15 penal battalions and 301 penal companies. The commanders and zampolity assigned to penal units were trusted, experienced officers. A representative (operupolnomochennyi) of the OO directorate of the front was also attached to each penal battalion.

  The commander of the penal battalion and his zampolit had the right to shoot a penal private instantly if he refused to follow orders. For these officers, a month of service in a penal unit was equivalent to six months in the regular troops. A radio operator attached to a penal battalion in 1944 recalled o
f the punished officers: ‘Most of them were decent men… of high performance of duty and high military morale… Foul language (maternaya bran’) was considered inappropriate among them [although it was a common language of Red Army officers]… They did not take prisoners. They also did not take German trophies… [including] bottles of schnapps and pure alcohol.’34

  Chances of survival in a penal unit, as in an assault battalion, were very slim, because these troops were used for forced reconnaissance or attacks through minefields. ‘Shtrafbat [penal battalions] and death were synonymous’, according to one military tribunal member.35 In 1944, monthly losses in the regular military troops totaled 3,685 men, while in the penal units, the figure was 10,506.336 At least 1.5 million servicemen served in the penal units from 1942 to 1945. It is unknown how many survived. If a serviceman completed his term or was wounded in battle, he was promoted to his former rank and sent back to a regular unit, and he had his military awards returned to him.

  German POWs

  During the first year of war with Germany, Soviet troops took very few German prisoners. By 1942, only 9,174 captured German and Romanian soldiers were being held in NKVD POW camps.37 According to OO reports to Abakumov, some German soldiers surrendered voluntarily.

  Most German and other foreign prisoners, as well as wounded enemy soldiers, were simply shot on sight or killed after being tortured.38 Stalin himself issued a direct instruction to General Georgii Zhukov: ‘You should not believe in prisoners of war. You should interrogate a prisoner under torture and then shoot him to death.’39

  After interrogating prisoners, the OO would send only a few of them to the NKVD camps for POWs in the rear. Most were shot. Here is a report on the interrogation of a captured German pilot who refused to answer the questions of the OO officer (the formatting of the Russian original, which has the typical structure found in NKVD/SMERSH documents, is retained):

  ‘I approve’

  December 18, 1942

  Deputy Head of the NKVD OO of the Western Front,

  Major of State Sec.[urity]

  /Shilin/

  DECISION

  Army in the field, December 18, [1942]. I, deputy head of the 6th Section of the NKVD OO of the Western Front, Captain of State Sec.[urity] Gordon, after having examined the materials of the case of a POW of the German Army, a fighter pilot, Lieutenant Justel Martin, b. 1922 in the town of Osterade (East Prussia),

  FOUND OUT [that]

  Justel was a member of the Hitler youth organization, volunteered for the German Army in 1939, and actively participated in the actions of the German occupation in France and other countries. For this, he was awarded an Iron Cross of the 2nd Class. He did not give testimony on the military equipment of the German Army, saying that he knew nothing about it. On the basis of the above, I

  DECIDED [that]

  Justel Martin SHOULD BE SHOT as an uncompromising enemy of the USSR.

  Deputy head of the 6th Section of the OO NKVD,

  Captain of State Sec.[urity] [signature] /Gordon/

  ‘I agree’:

  Head of the 6th Section of the OO NKVD of the W[estern] F[ront],

  Captain of State Sec.[urity] [signature] /Zaitsev/

  December 18, 1942.40

  The second document, handwritten, reported on the execution of the pilot:

  Army in the field, December 19, 1942

  We, the undersigned Jr. Lieutenant of State Sec.[urity] Ostreiko and Jr. Lieutenant of State Sec.[urity] Samusev, wrote this document to give notice that today, at 2:00 a.m., we executed the decision of the NKVD OO of the W/f [Western Front] regarding the POW Justel Martin.

  We sign after the execution,

  [signatures] Samusev, Ostreiko.41

  Of course, not all POWs refused to answer the counterintelligence officers. 42 If a German prisoner gave important information during his first interrogation, he might be sent to Moscow for further questioning by the head of the 4th Department of the UOO, frequently with colleagues from other departments.

  The policy of taking as few enemy POWs as possible continued until the end of World War II. In 1944, 2nd Ukrainian Front commander Marshal Ivan Konev described to Yugoslavian Communist Milovan Djilas the Soviet victory at Korsun’-Shevchenkovsky in January 1944. Djilas recalls:

  Not without exultation, [Konev] sketched a picture of Germany’s final catastrophe: refusing to surrender, some eighty, if not even one hundred, thousand Germans were forced into a narrow space, then tanks shattered their heavy equipment and machine-gun nests, while the Cossack cavalry finally finished them off. ‘We let the Cossacks cut up as long as they wished. They even hacked off the hands of those who raised them to surrender!’ the Marshal recounted with a smile.43

  However, by 1943 the Soviets had begun to capture significant numbers of POWs. On January 30, 1943, the commander in chief of the German troops that encircled Stalingrad, Field Marshal Friedrich von Paulus, surrendered his army.44 Of approximately 100,000 German servicemen and 19,000 ‘hiwis’ (Soviet POW volunteers used as noncombatants) who became prisoners, only 5,000 Germans—mostly officers, who were treated better than privates—survived the Soviet camps.45 From Stalingrad onwards, a huge flow of German, Italian, Spanish, and Hungarian POWs began to populate POW camps inside Russia. Some of the captured intelligence officers ended up in Lubyanka Prison in the hands of the UOO.

  In general, Soviet propaganda depicted the Germans as subhuman beings. Here is an example of a ‘politically correct’ excerpt from a letter written by Private Il’ichev to his relatives, which was included in an official OO report (in translating the letter, I have tried to capture the flavor of the Russian text): ‘I was a live witness to the surrender of the Fascist scum on a mass scale not far from the town of Kalinin. I wish you could see the miserable and terrifying shape of these dogs in human appearance… The day is coming when our army will beat up this scum on its own territory. Then no one will have mercy, even toward a three-month-old child. I will personally tear to pieces a degenerate [child] of these dogs.’46

  The attitude of civilians toward the Germans was similar. Nikolai Gavrilov, a Muscovite who visited the city of Kaluga (only 100 miles from Moscow) just after it was liberated from the German troops on December 30, 1941, witnessed the following scene: ‘I saw children sliding down a hill… After I approached them, I realized that they were using [as a sled] the frozen body of a Fritz [a generic name for a German soldier in Russia during World War II]. His boots had been removed and his feet were cut off. Water was poured over the body, and it was covered with dung. The nose was destroyed… The kids pulled the body uphill using a rope with a hook. The ‘burden’ was very heavy, and they worked hard.’47

  With the continuation of the war, the morale of the German POWs was changing. Lazar Brontman, a front journalist, wrote in his diary in March 1944: ‘Major Shemyakin, former professor of psychology at Moscow University… introduced an interesting taxonomy: a) the Germans taken prisoner in 1941–42 were proud and arrogant; they began talking only after being punched in the ear; b) a German lance corporal captured in 1943, during the Stalingrad battle… typically not only ordered POWs to line up, but also squatted down beside the line, to check and realign; c) the Germans taken in 1943–44 were completely apathetic and indifferent.’48

  In the meantime, in the summer of 1942, the German Army Group South followed Hitler’s order ‘to secure the Caucasian oilfields’ and moved to the Northern Caucasus. Although on August 21 the German soldiers raised a Nazi flag on Mount Elbrus, the highest peak in Europe, the Red Army quickly pushed the Germans from that area.

  By February 1943, after the surrender of Paulus’s Sixth Army in Stalingrad, the Soviet troops began to regain what they had lost during the previous two years of war. For almost two years a huge territory of Ukraine, Belorussia and a part of Russia had been controlled by the German occupation military and civilian administration, in which German security services played an important role. Additionally, in this territory various German s
ecurity services opened numerous spy schools that recruited volunteers from the Soviet POWs and local population. At this turning point it became clear that military counterintelligence needed to focus its attention on the real German intelligence and counterintelligence services, and not on the alleged spies within the Red Army. In the meantime, the structure and activity of the German intelligence and counterintelligence services was very complex.

  Notes

  1. Stalin’s instruction to commanders of the Leningrad Front, dated November 13, 1941. Quoted in V. D. Danilin, ‘Stalinskaya strategiya nachala voiny,’ Otechestveyyaya istoriya 3 (1995).

  2. Stavka’s Order No. 0428, dated November 17, 1941, in Russkii arkhiv. Velikaya Otechestvennaya. Prikazy, 13 (2-2), 119–20.

  3. Directive of the Military Council of the Western Front, dated November 9, in Skrytaya pravda voiny: 1941 god. Neizvestnye documenty, edited by P. N. Knyshevsky et al., 210 (Moscow: Russkaya kniga, 1992) (in Russian).

  4. Photo of this order in B. M. Bim-Bad, Stalin: issledovanie zhiznennogo stilia (Moscow: URAO, 2002), between pages 128 and 129. Another copy is kept in the U.S. Library of Congress, Manuscript Division, ‘Volkogonov Collection,’ Reel 4.

  5. Quoted in B. V. Sokolov, Front za liniei fronta. Partizanskaya voina 1939–1945 gg. (Moscow: Veche, 2008), 175 (in Russian).

  6. Boris Sokolov, ‘43 milliona,’ Novaya gazeta, no. 65, June 22, 2009 (in Russian), http://www.novayagazeta.ru/data/2009/065/22.html, retrieved September 6, 2011.

  7. OO Instruction No. 1244/6, Southwestern Front, dated December 4, 1941. S. G. Chuev, Spetssluzhby III Reikha. Kniga 1 (St. Petersburg: Neva, 2003), 348–51 (in Russian).