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

by Vadim Birstein

  Also on May 9, Gorbushin’s SMERSH operational group, which included Rzhevskaya, found and arrested Käthe Heusermann, the assistant to Dr. Blaschke, Hitler’s chief dentist.25 Heusermann’s testimony concerning dental work on Hitler and Braun was crucial in identifying the bodies. Also, with her help Hitler’s dental X-rays and a bridge prepared for Hitler were found in the bunker. On May 11, based on Heusermann’s description and on an even more detailed description from another dentist, Fritz Echtmann, Dr. Shkaravsky concluded that the burned corpse was, in fact, Hitler.26

  A week later, the Stavka in Moscow sent a high-level general to inspect the bodies and interrogate the witnesses again; his name remains unknown.27 Exhumed for the general’s viewing were the bodies of Hitler, Eva Braun, members of the Goebbels family, and General Hans Krebs, who also committed suicide in the bunker on May 1, after he unsuccessfully contacted General Vasilii Chuikov with Goebbels’s offer of surrender. The Stavka general was perhaps in contact with Abakumov because on May 22, Abakumov complained to Beria about Ivan Serov’s (NKVD Plenipotentiary at the 1st Belorussian Front) attempts to control the SMERSH investigation.28 At the same time, in Moscow’s Lubyanka Prison, Möhnke and Rattenhuber wrote detailed accounts of Hitler’s last days.

  On May 23, Beria received a report from Serov. Attached was the report of Aleksandr Vadis, head of the UKR SMERSH of the 1st Belorussian Front, in which Vadis described the interrogations of additional witnesses who positively identified Hitler’s body.29

  At the end of May 1945, the 79th Rifle Corps along with the whole 3rd Shock Army was relocated to the town of Rathenau, west of Berlin. Klimenko and his OKR SMERSH took the bodies along with them, ultimately moving them several times.

  On June 16, 1945, Beria forwarded all materials on the SMERSH investigation, collected by Serov, to Stalin and Molotov. Therefore, Stalin knew since the end of June 1945 that Hitler was dead. Mysteriously, he kept this information a secret from the Western Allies. In 1968, Colonel Gorbushin, former head of the SMERSH operational group, recalled that in early June 1945, Abakumov ordered him to Moscow. Instead of listening to Gorbushin’s report on developing investigations in Berlin, Abakumov revealed the following order from Stalin: ‘Let’s be silent. Hitler’s double might suddenly appear, and he could announce himself a Nazi leader. At that moment we will unmask him.’30 In fact, on May 4, 1945, Soviet troops had already found and filmed the body of Hitler’s double, Gustav Weler, in the bunker.

  Strangely, in 1968 Marshal Zhukov claimed that in 1945 he had no knowledge of the results of SMERSH’s investigation. When Rzhevskaya told Zhukov that Stalin knew about Hitler’s death in June 1945, Zhukov was shocked and could hardly believe that Stalin had concealed Hitler’s suicide from him.31

  Colonel Klimenko expressed skepticism about Zhukov’s statement: ‘Although the fact that Hitler’s corpse had been found was not widely announced, it was not a secret, and many people in the [79th] Corps knew about it, including [its commander] Lieutenant General S. N. Perevertkin, and Colonel I. S. Krylov, head of the Political Department. After May 13, 1945, when the autopsy report was written, the circle of persons who knew became quite wide…I personally reported on Hitler’s dishonorable death to Lieutenant General Vadis…and Lieutenant General Serov…when they visited the Chancellery. They could not conceal this information from Zhukov.’32 Klimenko may have been right because at the time Serov was very close to Zhukov.

  In July 1945, when Stalin arrived in Berlin to attend the Potsdam Conference (July 17 to August 2), he refused to see Hitler’s body. The writer Konstantin Simonov, who visited Berlin in 1945, recalled: ‘Somebody, Beria or Serov, reported to Stalin [about Hitler], and suggested bringing the corpse for [Stalin] to see or taking Stalin to look at it. Stalin said: “OK, tomorrow morning I’ll go to look at it.” Then in the morning, when it was time to go, he waved his hand and said: “No, I won’t go. Let Molotov and Beria go and look. I won’t go.”’33 However, while talking to American Secretary of State James Byrnes in Potsdam, Stalin denied that Hitler’s body had been found.34

  In February 1946, the 3rd Army moved to the city of Magdeburg, and all fourteen bodies were reburied there. But this was not the end of the story, because the NKVD/MVD conducted its own investigation, directed by Amayak Kobulov, head of the Directorate for POWs and Interned Persons. During the Battle of Berlin, NKVD operatives arrested another group of witnesses that included Hans Baur, Hitler’s personal pilot; SS-Sturmbannführer Otto Günsche, Hitler’s adjutant; and Heinz Linge, Hitler’s valet. They were held in NKVD/MVD prisons in Moscow, separately from SMERSH prisoners, and brutally interrogated.

  In May 1946, while searching the bunker area in Berlin, a team of MVD investigators found two cranium fragments, one with a clearly visible bullet hole.35 The investigators decided that the fragments were from Hitler’s skull. Noted medical expert Pyotr Semenovsky studied the fragments and concluded that the shot was upward to the mouth or temple. In other words, it looked as if Hitler shot himself. The MVD team also found bloodstains on the sofa where Hitler was sitting during the suicide. Since 1946, the skull fragments and small pieces of bloodstained fabric and wood have been kept in secret archives along with the file on the NKVD/MVD investigation.

  However, the results of a DNA study conducted in 2009 did not support the MVD’s conclusion about the fragment with a bullet hole.36 Most probably, this fragment belonged to the skull of a woman and, therefore, could not have been a fragment of Hitler’s cranium. However, male DNA was identified in bloodstains on the sofa. Although this DNA study needs confirmation, it leaves open the question of whether Hitler only took poison or shot himself as well (or was shot by Linge).

  Finally, from August 1948 to September 1949, Otto Günsche and Heinz Linge were held at the secret MVD Special Object no. 5, an MVD safe house in Moscow.37 Colonel Fyodor Parparov, an intelligence officer, was in charge of overseeing them. In 1944, Parparov was awarded the Order of Patriotic War of the 1st Class for his propaganda work with captured Field Marshal Friedrich von Paulus.38 Now, with the assistance of a group of MVD officers, Parparov translated into Russian what Günsche and Linge had written about Hitler and his death. Finally, Parparov heavily edited and altered the text in conformance with Soviet propaganda style. In December 1949, the manuscript was published as a single-copy book called Unknown Hitler, and was sent to Stalin as a gift for his seventieth birthday.

  The manuscript was discussed again later, in 1959, at the Central Committee, but it was not until 2005 that two German historians published a German translation of it under the title Das Buch Hitler.39 Writing the manuscript did not help Günsche and Linge, who, in 1950, were sentenced like the other witnesses to twenty-five years in labor camps, and released and returned to Germany only in 1955.

  The story of Hitler’s body ended only in March–April 1970, when on the order of KGB Chairman Yurii Andropov, the remains of Hitler, Braun, and members of the Goebbels family were exhumed again.40 The Central Committee approved this operation under the code name Arkhiv (Archive), and Lieutenant General Vitalii Fedorchuk, head of the 3rd KGB Directorate, a successor of SMERSH, was in charge. According to the documents, the remains were burned to ashes and thrown into the river Ehle near Biederitz in Sachsen-Anhalt.

  In 2005, Major General Vladimir Shirokov, one of the few participants in the Archive operation, briefly described it in an interview. Shirokov’s superior, Nikolai Kovalenko, head of the 3rd Section of the KGB Special Department of the 3rd Shock Army (located in Magdeburg), was in command of the operation. Shirokov recalled:

  There were remains of ten individuals (four adults and six children). By the way, the information that [Hitler’s] jaws are kept in an archive, is not true because they were taken only for a while for an expert evaluation… We put the bones in a new box… In the morning, we brought it to a particular place near Magdeburg, poured napalm on it, burned it and dispersed the ashes. Nikolai Grigorievich [Kovalenko] told us: ‘Lads, we need to mention the place where we’
ve dispersed the ashes. But who knows what can happen, let’s write down another place.’41

  If this is true and all the bones of the adults, including both jaws, were in place, Shirokov and Kovalenko did not destroy the bones of Hitler, Eva Braun, and Magda Goebbels, but of somebody else. Also, it would be very unusual for a KGB officer like Kovalenko to misinform KGB leaders regarding the location where the ashes were thrown away. Therefore, there are still unanswered questions about what became of Hitler’s remains.

  Back in 1945, SMERSH had many other problems besides finding Hitler’s body, including discipline in the Soviet troops. On May 11, 1945, Meshik, deputy commander of the 1st Ukrainian Front in charge of the management of civil affairs, reported to the Soviet high command in Berlin: ‘Despite Comrade Stalin’s [April 20, 1945] order about the necessity of having a more lenient attitude toward the Germans, unfortunately, robberies of the local population and rapes of German women continue.’42

  Capturing Andrei Vlasov

  Unexpectedly, after the fall of Berlin, fighting with the Germans continued in Prague. On May 5, the Czech resistance broadcast a call to the Czech nation to rise up against the Germans. The next day, the radio also appealed to the American troops that were not far from Prague. The Czechs did not know that the Americans and Soviets had agreed upon a line of demarcation according to which Prague was in the Soviet zone.

  On May 7, Waffen SS and SS Panzer troops stationed outside the city launched several severe attacks on the insurgents. Within a few hours the situation had become grave for the resistance. Suddenly, the uprising gained support from the 1st Division of Andrei Vlasov’s Russian Liberation Army (ROA) under the command of Major General Sergei Bunyachenko.43 A. I. Romanov, a member of the UKR SMERSH of the 1st Ukrainian Front, recalled:

  Vlasov’s men took Prague by storm, took many German prisoners, SS troops in particular, and raised two flags on the town hall roof; the Czech national flag and the blue and white flag of St. Andrew, the flag of Free Russia. Vlasov was well aware that he and his men could not remain in Prague. Our [Soviet] tanks were already within a day’s journey of the city. Behind the tanks came the Smersh operational groups of the First, Second, and Fourth Ukrainian Fronts.44

  On May 7, Field Marshal Ferdinand Schörner, appointed commander in chief of the German Army by Hitler on April 27, shortly before his suicide, ordered his troops to retreat to the west and deserted the army. He tried to escape to Bavaria by plane, but the plane crashed in Austria. In Prague, the SS troops continued to fight.

  On May 11, troops of the three Ukrainian fronts completed the Prague Offensive. A week later Schörner was captured by the Americans, and on May 26, they handed him over to SMERSH.45 Schörner was sent to Moscow and became one of GUKR SMERSH’s important prisoners, along with Fritzsche, Voss, and Stahel, who were interrogated as possible defendants in Nuremberg.

  SMERSH operatives of the three Ukrainian fronts immediately began making arrests in the city. Nicola Sinevirsky recalled the night before the SMERSH Operational Group of the 4th Ukrainian Front moved into the city: ‘The SMERSH men were preparing themselves for a big purge… Prague was…the headquarters for Russian émigrés, Ukrainian separatists, and Czech politicians of all shades and descriptions… SMERSH agents had begun to show a far greater interest in Czechs and the anti-Communist element in Russian émigré circles, than in the Germans.’46

  Sinevirsky was right. Between the two world wars, Prague became a capital of Russian and Ukrainian émigré culture.47 In 1925, the number of emigrants from Russia was more than 25,000, 9,000 of whom were Ukrainians. Russian periodicals, literary magazines, and numerous books were published. There were Russian departments in Charles University, the Pedagogical Institute, the Institute of Agricultural Cooperation, the Institute of Commercial Knowledge, and there were also the Russian Public University, Archaeological Institute, the Russian Archive, the Museum of Russian Emigration, a gymnasium, and a seminary. These institutions were funded by the ‘Russian Action’ program of the Czechoslovak president, Tomas Masaryk, and his administration. Masaryk naively believed that the Bolshevik regime would not last long, and that after the fall of the Soviet Union the Russians from Prague would create an administration in the new democratic Russia. In 2003, the Czech government proclaimed May 11, 1945, as ‘the day of the destruction of Russian intellectuals’ in Prague.

  Some SMERSH arrestees in Prague were immediately interrogated. Sinevirsky gave examples when he translated an interrogation that started during the day and continued through the night:

  Vlasta sat silent, motionless, quiet.

  ‘Speak! You whore!’ The Captain [Stepanov] moved toward her and caressed her hair…

  Vlasta wept silently.

  ‘Look here,’ Stepanov continued, ‘you are a beauty and there is nobility in your whole being. But if you are not going to answer my questions, I will simply beat all the teeth out of your goddamned mouth.’

  [ …]

  Without a word of warning, the Captain slugged her. His fist smacked into the girl’s teeth. She reeled, but did not fall. He hit her a second time. This time she fell to the floor…The Captain kicked the prostrate girl in the face. His heavy boots left an angry mark and the blood began to flow from the cuts they left. He began trampling on her breasts in a mad dance. Blood streaked the girl’s face and ran down the front of her dress…

  It was three o’clock the next morning before Captain Stepanov completed his preliminary questioning of Vlasta.48

  Many arrestees were sent to Moscow, and their fates are not well known. Sergei Maslov, a leader of the emigrant Labor Agrarian Party, and Alfred Bem, a historian of Russian literature, were famous within the Russian community. SMERSH operatives arrested Maslov after he had just been released from a German concentration camp. According to rumors, the operatives executed him soon after his arrest. Bem was brought to Moscow and sentenced; he later died in a Soviet labor camp.

  On June 9, SMERSH operatives arrested Prince Pyotr Dolgorukov.49 He and his twin brother, Pavel, were among the founders of the liberal Constitutional Democratic (Cadet) Party in Czarist Russia. After the Bolshevik revolution, Pavel became one of the organizers of the White movement. In exile, Pavel Dolgorukov continued his political activity. In 1926, after illegally crossing the Soviet border with Romania, he was arrested, charged with plotting the assassination of Pyotr Voikov in Warsaw (see Abakumov’s above-mentioned accusation of Kutepov Jr.), and executed in June 1927.

  On account of his brother, Pyotr Dolgorukov’s fate was sealed. He was accused as follows: ‘In November 1920, he organized anti-Soviet and counterrevolutionary formations in Czechoslovakia, and from 1939 on, chaired the “Union of Russian Emigrant Organizations in Czechoslovakia.”’50 The OSO of the NKVD sentenced Dolgorukov to five years in prison. In September 1946, he arrived in Vladimir Prison.51 Three years later the OSO of the MGB extended his term, and on November 10, 1951, the 86-year-old prince died in the Vladimir Prison hospital.

  Sergei Postnikov, founder of the Russian Archive in Prague, was also arrested in May 1945. The Gestapo had arrested him previously in 1941, but released him in 1943. SMERSH was interested in Postnikov because Soviet security services were extremely anxious to get access to the Russian Archive. It contained information about the majority of the Russian emigrants in Europe. After the war the Czechoslovak government decided to give the archive to the Soviet Academy of Sciences.52 However, it was taken by the NKVD, and in December 1945, a train consisting of nine cars loaded with 650 boxes of documents and guarded by NKVD troops arrived in Moscow. The documents were immediately classified and the NKVD used them to compose a list of 18,000 names of wanted emigrants in Europe. On June 6, 1946, a new wave of arrests of Russians named on the list began in Prague.

  The OSO sentenced Postnikov to five years in the labor camps. After his term he was exiled to the city of Nikopol in Southern Russia. Luckily, he survived, and returned to Prague in 1955.

  Additionally, in May 1945, SMERSH oper
atives of the 1st Ukrainian Front arrested about 1,000 Ukrainian emigrants. They were brought to Kiev, where their cases were investigated by the Ukrainian NKGB. Tried by the Military Tribunal of the NKVD troops of the Kiev Military District, most of the arrestees were sentenced to terms of ten to twenty-five years in labor camps.

  Thousands of ROA privates and officers became SMERSH’s main target in Czechoslovakia. As Romanov wrote, on May 7, 1945, ‘not far from Pibran, the Czechs [Czech partisans] seized General Vlasov’s assistant, his chief of staff General [Fyodor] Trukhin, and handed him over to a Smersh operational group. The Czechs hanged Trukhin’s deputy, Colonel [Vladimir] Boyarsky, on the spot.’53 Later, American officials handed more of Vlasov’s soldiers over to SMERSH.

  On May 12, Vlasov was caught near Prague in the American zone. Major Gen. Yevgenii Fominykh, Commander of the 25th Tank Corps, and Colonel Zubkov, his head of staff, reported to the Military Council of the 1st Ukrainian Front:

  Intelligence reconnaissance…showed that Vlasov’s 1st Division under the command of former General Buyanichenko [incorrect spelling of Bunyachenko], Vlasov, and his staff were there…

  Captain [Mikhail] Yakushev [commander of a battalion in the 162nd Tank Brigade] drove to the head of the column [of the 1st ROA Division] and stopped his car across the road…

  After approaching Vlasov’s car, Com.[rade] Yakushev found Vlasov hiding under a blanket and shielded by a translator and a woman.