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

by Vadim Birstein

  The heads of the FHO (Foreign Armies East) and Walli met different ends. During the July 20, 1944 attempt on Hitler’s life, General Reinhard Gehlen was sick, and his deputy, Gerhard Wessel, managed to destroy Gehlen’s correspondence with the plotters in time.14 As a result, Gehlen luckily escaped the Gestapo’s attention, but during the last months of 1944 Hitler was outraged by the pessimistic reports of Gehlen.

  At the time, Gehlen had already organized his own plot. In spring 1944, he developed a plan to save the FHO’s records for the West. By February 1945, Wessel and Hermann Baun (head of Walli I), Heinz Danko Herre and Horst Hiemenz (the former and the last head of the FHO’s Gruppe II), and Albert Schöller (deputy head of Gruppe II) participated in Gehlen’s efforts.15 In April 1945, Wessel succeeded Gehlen as FHO head, and the plotters safely hid the Walli I and FHO archives.

  The Gehlen plotters surrendered to American military intelligence (G-2, War Department).16 Gehlen’s operation was allowed to continue using the retrieved archives. Gehlen’s group, which included his immediate staff of 350 men, moved to Pullach, a suburb of Munich, and became known as the Gehlen Organization. On Gehlen’s request, thousands of Abwehr, SD and SS officers were released from internment camps in violation of the de-Nazification program and joined Gehlen’s staff, which reached nearly 3,000 men. Hans Schmalschläger, former head of Stab Walli and Walli III within it, headed the Nuremberg branch of the Gehlen Organization.17

  The Organization worked under CIA control and was its main source of information on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. In 1956, it became the main part of the newly formed Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND or Federal Intelligence Service) of West Germany. Gehlen headed the BND until 1968.

  Hermann Baun, former head of Walli I, got his own facility, and his network reached 125 agents in Western Germany.18 Over a few years Baun completed about 800 reports on the Soviet military. In 1947, he organized a successful secret transfer of the family of Gustav Hilger, former Nazi Foreign Office official and a specialist on Russian affairs who now worked for the Americans, from the Soviet Zone to West Berlin, despite the MGB’s surveillance of the family. But because Baun recruited a number of shady people and con men, he was dismissed and died in 1951. His group was included in the Gehlen Organization.

  Gehlen’s use of high-level Abwehr and SS war criminals as staff members compromised the BND. The hiring of Wilhelm Krichbaum, the former Field Police Chief, was especially devastating. He had already been a Soviet agent when, in 1951, he recruited another double agent, Heinz Felfe, the former SD officer who worked for both the British and the Soviets.19 In November 1961, Felfe was arrested on spying charges, tried, and sentenced to a 14-year imprisonment. In 1969, he was exchanged for eighteen West German and three American agents imprisoned in the USSR.20 Gehlen retired in 1968, and for the next ten years Gerhard Wessel, Gehlen’s former deputy, headed the BND.

  One Who Escaped SMERSH

  Boris Smyslowsky, a former White Army officer, was, quite possibly, the most successful—and the luckiest—Russian who served in the Abwehr. Smyslowsky created a very efficient intelligence organization made up of Russian émigrés, and he was one of the few high-ranking Russian military collaborators not caught by SMERSH.

  Smyslowsky was born in 1897 near St. Petersburg, into an officer’s family.21 After graduating from a military school in 1915, he participated in World War I and then in the Civil War, serving in the White troops under the command of General Anton Denikin. Later Smyslowsky lived in Poland and became a Polish citizen. In 1928, he moved to Germany, where he attended military courses. In 1939, after the German occupation of Poland, Smyslowsky became head of the Warsaw office of the White Russian military organization ROVS, which was called the Association of Russian Military Unions in Nazi Germany.

  At the beginning of the war with the Soviet Union, Smyslowsky joined the Abwehr under the alias ‘von Regenau.’ In July 1941, the 1st Russian Foreign Educational Battalion attached to the Army Group North was organized under his command.22 After a few months, it became the Northern Group that eventually comprised twelve Russian battalions. The new Russian recruits from White emigrants and new POW volunteers were trained in the Abwehr school in Warsaw.

  In March 1942, the Northern Group became the Sonderstab R (Special Staff Russia) with headquarters in Warsaw under the cover name of the Eastern Construction Company ‘Gilgen.’ It was attached to the Referat IX of Walli I and was supervised by Hermann Baun, head of Walli I. The Sonderstab R consisted of 20 high-ranking White Russian officers and a few hundred young men from Abwehr schools and intelligence groups. It collected intelligence mostly on partisans and the NKVD. The whole Soviet-occupied territory was divided into five (subsequently reduced to four) regions with staffs in the cities of Simferopol, Kiev, Chernigov, Minsk, and Pskov (later Vyru, in Estonia). There were also local representatives within each region. All units of the Sonderstab R’s network had cover names of building and supply organizations.

  The net obtained information from informers recruited among local Communist Party members, members of the Komsomol, and former Soviet functionaries. They were usually forced to work for the Sonderstab R under threat of being arrested or sent to Germany as slave laborers. Agents were sent to partisan detachments as well.

  The units sent their reports to Warsaw by couriers and collaborated with the SD and the German Field Police. It wasn’t until August 1944 that Soviet counterintelligence (NKGB) collected enough information to draw a general chart of the Sonderstab R organization.23

  In 1943, Smyslowsky’s intelligence net was renamed Sonderdivision R (Division for Special Task Russia) and became part of the Wehrmacht.24 Later, regional detachments were reorganized, and the center in Warsaw became a directorate made up of the Russian, Ukrainian, and Belorussian departments, which consisted of intelligence and partisan sections. Sonderdivision R collected information on Soviet troops and the situation in both unoccupied Soviet territory and the territory liberated by the Red Army. For the latter purpose, numerous agents were left behind the front line, and in 1943, SMERSH and NKGB discovered and arrested up to 700 such agents. On the basis of information collected by the partisan sections, the FHO published a classified book, Proceedings of the Partisan War, detailing the organization, tactics, and propaganda work of Soviet partisans.

  At the end of 1943, the Gestapo arrested Smyslowsky on charges of alleged support of the anti-Nazi Polish Home Army (Armija Krajowa) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), and the Sonderdivision R was disbanded.25 Smyslowsky ended up being acquitted and even given an award after intervention on his behalf by Admiral Canaris and Reinhard Gehlen, but the Germans lost the best intelligence net they had ever had at the Eastern Front.

  Later Smyslowsky headed the Staff for Special Tasks attached to the OKH, which continued doing intelligence work. Finally, in February 1945, his 1st Russian National Division was renamed first the Green Army for Special Tasks and then the 1st Russian National Army; in addition, he was promoted to Major General. To confuse Soviet intelligence and counterintelligence, Smyslowsky changed his name to Artur Holmston. Formally, his army was an independent ally of the Wehrmacht and maintained neutrality toward the United States and England. However, it was not a real army because it consisted of only one battalion of about 600 men. Major Yevgenii Messner, a former White officer who was appointed head of the propaganda department in Smyslowsky’s army, recalled that half of the battalion’s men were dressed in civilian clothes and only a quarter of the battalion had rifles. He added: ‘Holmston was always absent while being occupied with the intelligence work and was not involved in the organization of the corps and its HQ.’26

  By April 1945, Smyslowsky had moved his army to the Austrian town of Feldkirch, where Grand Duke Vladimir Kirillovich, head of the Imperial Family of Russia, and his court joined Smyslowsky while escaping the Red Army. On May 2–3, Smyslowsky and a group of his 494 men and women crossed the border with Liechtenstein. This group was the only Russian unit that had f
ought against the Red Army that was not handed over to SMERSH or the NKVD by the Western Allies. However, neither Liechtenstein nor Switzerland issued the Grand Duke an exit visa and he went to Spain.

  In Liechtenstein, Allen Dulles, the OSS representative in Switzerland, and other intelligence experts interviewed Smyslowsky about the Soviet Union.27 On August 16, 1945, a Soviet commission representing the Directorate of the Plenipotentiary on the Repatriation headed by General Fyodor Golikov, met with Smyslowsky and other refugees. Golikov was the former head of the GRU (military intelligence), while his repatriation directorate was, in fact, an arm of SMERSH and the NKVD. The commission tried to force the authorities to extradite Smyslowsky and 59 of his officers as war criminals, but Liechtenstein’s government refused to do so because the commission had no proof.28 It is amazing that a country with a population of 12,141 and only eleven policemen dared to stand up to the Soviets. But eventually about 200 of Smyslowsky’s men decided to go back to the Soviet Union.

  In 1947, Smyslowsky, his wife, and about 100 Russians went to Argentina. Time magazine wrote in 1953: ‘Pressed by the Kremlin, the tiny principality [Liechtenstein] ordered the general [Smyslowsky] to leave. With the help of the Russian Orthodox archbishop of Argentina, a friend of Juan Perón, he got permission to take the last of his men to Buenos Aires.’29

  In Perón’s Argentina, Smyslowsky’s experience in the Abwehr was in demand: he taught the tactics of anti-partisan war at the military academy and became Perón’s adviser on the same topic. From the mid-1960s to 1973, Smyslowsky was an adviser to the West German General Staff. During his last 13 years he lived in Liechtenstein, and he died there in 1988.

  Smyslowsky always remained a Russian ultra-nationalist. In 1946, he addressed a group of young émigrés: ‘You are glorious descendants of those who have been building for thousands of years the greatest Empire in the world. You are descendants not of the European, but of our own, pure Russian culture with its geniuses of state organization, unconditional loyalty, and military valor.’30 Although these bizarre notions about Russia’s exceptional role in history became popular again in the Russian society of the 2000s, Smyslowsky’s prediction of the end of Soviet Communism was naive. In 1953, he told Time: ‘The world should know that foreign armies will never conquer Russia. Only a nationalist army of Russians, fighting Communism but not Russia, can ever hope to succeed.’

  There is a small ‘Russian Monument’ in Liechtenstein commemorating the asylum given to Smyslowsky’s army. In 1993, the French film director Robert Enrico released the movie Vent d’est (East Wind) about Smyslowsky and his men’s escape to Liechtenstein. The British actor Malcolm McDowell played Smyslowsky in the movie.

  Notes

  1. André Brissaud, Canaris (Garden City, NY: Grosset & Dunlap, 1974), 297.

  2. Heinz Hohne, Canaris, translated from the German by J. Maxwell Brownjohn (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., Inc., 1970), 528–30.

  3. David Kahn, Hitler’s Spies: German Military Intelligence in World War II (New York: Collier Books, 1978), 268–71.

  4. Stolze’s statement during an interrogation in the MGB, dated July 14, 1947, quoted in Julius Madder, Hitlers Spionagegenerale sagen aus (Berlin: Verlag der Nation, 1977), 419, 441–8.

  5. Hohne, Canaris, 555–99; Michael Mueller, Canaris: The Life and Death of Hitler’s Spymaster, translated by Geoffrey Brooks (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2007), 251–8.

  6. Quoted in André Brissaud, Canaris, translated and edited by Ian Colvin (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973), 331.

  7. S. G. Chuev, Spetssluzhby tret’ego reikha (St. Petersburg: Neva, 2003), Kniga I, 21–22 (in Russian).

  8. Bentivegni’s personal card in the Vladimir Prison Archive.

  9. Streckenbach’s prisoner card in the Vladimir Prison Archive.

  10. Julius Madder, Hitlers Spionagegenerale (Berlin: Verlag der Nation, 1979), 131–3.

  11. Quoted in Aleksandr Beznasyuk and Vyacheslav Zvyagintsev, Tribunal. Arbat, 37 (dela i lyudi) (Moscow: Terra, 2006), 111–2 (in Russian).

  12. Madder, Hitlers Spionagegenerale, 419, 441–8. Also, sitting at Nuremberg, Fifty-Sixth Day: Monday, 11th February, 1946, http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/imt/tgmwc/tgmwc-06/tgmwc-06-56-12.html, retrieved September 9, 2011.

  13. Prisoner cards of Piekenbrock, Bentivegni and Streckenbach in the Vladimir Prison archive.

  14. The Service: The Memoirs of General Reinhard Gehlen, translated by David Irving (New York: World Publishing, 1972), 98.

  15. Details in James H. Critchfield, Partners at the Creation: The Men Behind Postwar Germany’s Defense and Intelligence Establishments (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2003), 28–32.

  16. Documents in The CIA and Nazi War Criminals, edited by Tamara Feinstein, February 4, 2005, http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB146/index.htm, retrieved September 9, 2011.

  17. Linda Hunt, Secret Agenda: The United States Government, Nazi Scientists, and Project Paperclip, 1945 to 1990 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), 205.

  18. Critchfield, Partners at the Creation, 33, 116–8.

  19. Paul B. Brown, ‘Analysis of the Name File of Wilhelm Krichbaum,’ http://www.archives.gov/iwg/declassified-records/rg-263-cia-records/rg-263-krichbaum. html; Norman J. W. Goda, ‘CIA Files Relating to Heinz Felfe, SS Officer and KGB Spy,’ http://www.fas.org/sgp/eprint/goda.pdf, both retrieved on September 9, 2011.

  20. Dmitrii Ivanov, ‘Veteran razvedki Vitalii Korotkov: “Kurta” obmenyali na tselyi avtobus zapadnykh shpionov,’ Izvesiya, December 20, 2007 (in Russian).

  21. Kirill Aleksandrov, Russkie soldaty Vermakhta. Geroi ili predateli (Moscow: Yauza-EKSMO, 2005), 195–9 (in Russian).

  22. Chuev, Spetssluzhby, I, 254–73.

  23. Photo on page 121 in SMERSH. Istoricheskie ocherki.

  24. Chuev, Spetssluzhby, I, 263–4.

  25. Aleksandrov, Russkie soldaty, 236–9.

  26. Quoted in ibid., 237.

  27. N. Tolstoi, Zhertvy Yalty (Paris: YMCA-Press, 1988), 435 (in Russian).

  28. Yefim Barban, ‘Russkii soyuznik nemtsev,’ Ogonyok, no. 21, May 19–25, 2009 (in Russian).

  29. ‘Argentina: Last of the Wehrmacht,’ Time, April 13, 1953.

  30. General Holmston-Smyslowsky, ‘Lichnye vospominaniya o generale Vlasove,’ Suvorovets, nos. 30–38, August–October 1949, http://m.shkuro.webnode.com/products/gjen-kholmston-smyslovskij-lichnyje-vospominanija-o-gjenjeraljevlasovje-/, retrieved September 9, 2011.

  Part VIII. The End of WWII

  CHAPTER 25

  Investigations in Moscow

  At the end of 1944, Stalin showed his appreciation of the SMERSH, NKVD, and NKGB operatives who worked in Moscow by considerably improving their living conditions. On September 24, 1944 the GKO issued an order ‘On the Improvement of Food Supply of Operational Officers of the NKVD, NKGB, and SMERSH.’1 Now the food rations of 119,700 high-ranking officers, including those in SMERSH, became equal to the rations of sovpartaktiv (Soviet and Party high-level functionaries). 11,553 officers were given the same rations as those received by Central Committee members, commissars, and their deputies, which meant being able to eat in the Kremlin’s dining facilities without restriction and receiving special rations for their families. Rations were given to 27,200 officers of the second grade, and the rest, of the third grade; these were the so-called ‘liter [marked with a letter] “A” and “B” rations.’

  Heads of directorates and departments (and their deputies) in commissariats were given ‘A’ food rations, while lower functionaries received the ‘B’ rations. In December 1942, the ‘A’ ration included the following for one person, per month: six kilograms of meat, approximately one kilogram of butter, 1.5 kilograms of buckwheat and pasta, seven kilograms of potatoes, and fifteen eggs.2 By comparison, at that time a worker at a military plant received 800 grams of poor-quality bread and one bowl of soup per day.

  Prisoners in Moscow, 1944–45

  As the Red Army advanced to the west, Moscow’s inves
tigation prisons began to fill up with prisoners of war. Based on its operational lists prepared in Moscow, SMERSH field UKRs issued warrants for, and arrested, increasing numbers of important German, Hungarian, Romanian, and other foreign military figures and Russian émigrés and sent them to the capital. But most of the arrived prisoners belonged to the category of spetskontingent (special contingent)—that is, they were detainees held in investigation prisons without arrest warrants. Many members of the spetskontingent were not considered to have been formally arrested until 1950–52, when MGB investigators finally wrote arrest warrants before trials.

  Nevertheless, all foreign prisoners were listed as POWs in Moscow investigation prisons. Lacking its own investigation prisons, GUKR SMERSH used two of the above-mentioned NKGB prisons: the Interior, or Lubyanka, located inside the NKGB/SMERSH building in the center of Moscow; and Lefortovo, a reconstructed palace built in the early 18th century in a remote district of Moscow. Prisoners who did not cooperate during interrogations, either by not giving the testimony that the SMERSH investigators wanted to hear, or by not admitting guilt, were transferred to the third investigation prison, Sukhanovka, where conditions were extremely harsh. SMERSH also had a section in the enormous Butyrka Prison belonging to the NKVD, which remained an NKVD/MVD investigation prison until 1950, when it was transferred to the MGB. Considered POWs, the SMERSH arrestees received the same food ration as those held in the NKVD POW camps. To encourage good behavior, investigators gave cooperative prisoners an officer’s ration, which was much better than a soldier’s.

  Typically, Abakumov or one of his deputies would initially interrogate a newly arrived prisoner, often for several hours. Following this, a prisoner was commonly placed under the jurisdiction of Sergei Kartashov’s 2nd or Aleksandr Leonov’s 6th (Investigation) GUKR Department. In Kartashov’s department German-speaking prisoners were questioned by investigators of its 1st Section.