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

by Vadim Birstein

  In 1944, on the eve of the Warsaw Uprising, Hitler personally appointed [Stahel] Commandant of Warsaw. He supervised the suppression of the Polish uprising and the destruction of the city.

  In August 1944, because of Romania’s departure from the war, [Stahel] was sent there to move the German troops out of Otopeni, where they were encircled.

  I ask for your instructions.

  A. Vyshinsky

  August 18, 1945

  Sent to: Beria

  To file.14

  As already mentioned, SMERSH operatives captured these prisoners in Romania and Bulgaria in September 1944 and in Berlin in May 1945. By August 1945, interrogators of the 1st Section of the 2nd GUKR Department and of the 6th GUKR Department had extracted the necessary information for the biographical sketches. Later all of them, except Fritzsche, were held in MGB investigation prisons until the end of 1951, when they were finally tried and convicted.

  There is Molotov’s note at the top of this letter: ‘A copy should be sent to C.[omrade] Beria for his opinion. August 20, 1945.’ Apparently, Beria responded quickly, because at the bottom of the first page, another handwritten note appears: ‘Letter No. 992/b was sent to C.[omrade] Molotov on August 27, 1945.’ This was a seven-page letter that included a list of seven German arrestees held in the GUPVI’s custody who may also have been considered for trial in Nuremberg. As in the SMERSH letter, a biographical sketch accompanied each name. The handwritten note on the last page indicates that the letter was prepared by Amayak Kobulov, first deputy head of the GUPVI:

  Top Secret

  Copy No. 2

  August 27, 1945

  992/b [in handwriting]

  NKID USSR [Commissariat for Foreign Affairs]

  to Comrade MOLOTOV V. M.

  In addition to the list of defendants at the court sent to you by Comrade Vyshinsky, I present a list of individuals (chosen from those held in our facilities) who, in my opinion, could be placed on the list of war criminals to be tried by the International Tribunal.

  1. Gross-Admiral RAEDER Erich, born 1876 in the town of Wandsbeck [near Hamburg], a German, son of a Gymnasium Director, has high education, not a Party member. From 1928 to 1943, [Raeder] was Commander-in-Chief of the German Navy. After the end of the war against Poland in 1939, [Raeder] received The Knight’s Cross.

  While Commander-in-Chief of the Navy of Fascist Germany, RAEDER developed, planned, and carried out a sea war against the USSR. In 1941 and 1942, [Raeder] personally inspected Soviet bases in the Baltic and Black seas, taken by Germany.

  On January 30, 1943, RAEDER resigned because of a dispute with Hitler on the requisite armament and equipment of large ships and their use in sea battle. After his resignation, Hitler promoted him to the rank of Admiral-Inspector of the German Navy.

  [ …]

  In the case of a decision to send the above-mentioned persons for trial by the Nuremberg Tribunal, it is necessary, in my opinion, to create a commission under the chairmanship of Com.[rade] Vyshinsky, which should include representatives of the Military Prosecutor’s Office, NKVD, ‘SMERSH’ NKO [Defense Commissariat], and so forth.

  The commission should examine all documents that might be used for prosecution, if necessary, should organize an additional investigation to obtain documents that could be presented in court to support the indictment.

  As a result, the commission should approve a verdict prepared by the Chief Military Prosecutor’s Office for each person.

  People’s Commissar of the Interior [NKVD] of the USSR

  (L. BERIA)15

  The other eight Germans placed on the list by Amayak Kobulov were not as important as those listed by the GUKR SMERSH. They were SA-Obergruppenführer Martin Mutschmann, former Gauleiter (Governor) of Saxony, and seven Lieutenant Generals—Friedrich Gustav Bernhardt, Hilmar Moser, Johann Georg Richert, Wilhelm Robert Oksmann, Hans Julius Traut, and Günther Walter Klammt—as well as SS-Obergruppenführer and Police General Friedrich Jeckeln. All were involved in war crimes, especially the notorious Jeckeln, who was personally responsible for ordering the deaths of over 100,000 Jews, Slavs, and Gypsies in the Baltic States during the Nazi occupation.16 Later, Bernhardt and Richert, as well as Jeckeln, were tried by Soviet military tribunals in Moscow, Minsk, and Riga respectively, in parallel with the International Nuremberg Trial. Sentenced to death, they were executed on December 30, 1945, January 30, 1946, and February 3, 1946, respectively.17 Twenty days later, in Nuremberg, Soviet Prosecutor Mark Raginsky presented excerpts from the court-martial verdict against Bernhardt as Exhibit No. USSR-90, after Bernhard had already been executed.18

  On September 5, 1945, the Politburo approved the governmental commission on Nuremberg proposed by Beria.19 It had a long name: ‘The Commission on the Guidance of Preparation of Indictment Materials and Activity of Soviet Representatives at the International Military Tribunal (IMT) in Nuremberg.’ Two weeks later the commission was renamed the Commission on the Guidance of the Work of Soviet Representatives in the International Tribunal in Nuremberg, and in official documents it was called the Governmental Commission on the Nuremberg Trial for short.20 I will refer to it as the Vyshinsky Commission.

  Stalin suggested that Molotov supervise the commission, while Vyshinsky was appointed its chair. Its members were Vsevolod Merkulov and his deputy Bogdan Kobulov (NKGB); Abakumov (SMERSH); Konstantin Gorshenin, USSR General Prosecutor; Ivan Golyakov, Chairman of the Soviet Supreme Court; and Nikolai Rychkov, Commissar/Minister for Justice. Deputy Chief Prosecutor Grigorii Safonov and members of the Soviet Prosecution team in Nuremberg Lev Smirnov and Lev Sheinin, as well as the commission’s scientific consultant, Aron Trainin, frequently took part in the meetings that followed. Decisions of the commission were sent for approval to the Politburo.21

  The commission was in constant contact with the Soviet team in Nuremberg. In addition, Vyshinsky himself visited Nuremberg several times. The Allied delegations had no idea about Vyshinsky’s supervisory role and they could only guess why he came to the trial. Lord Shawcross, the Attorney-General of England and Wales and then the United Kingdom’s permanent delegate to the United Nations, told Arkadii Vaksberg, an investigative journalist, in 1988:

  We—I mean the British, French and Americans—simply could not figure out why he [Vyshinsky] kept coming to Nuremberg. In the end, not understanding much about the special features of the Soviet state structure, we decided that he was still the Procurator-General and this most likely explained why he was giving instructions during the trial to the prosecutors representing the Soviet side. Strictly speaking, there was nothing for him to do here in this capacity, instructions from Moscow could have been delivered another way, but, strangely enough, his visits somehow did not surprise us.22

  In the absence of Vyshinsky, Rychkov chaired meetings of the Commission in Moscow. Ivan Lavrov was the Secretary of the Commission. Colonel of Justice Dmitrii Karev, a member of the Soviet team in Nuremberg, usually recorded notes of the meetings.

  By August 29, the international list of the alleged major war criminals contained twenty-four names, starting with Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering. 23 To bring Fritzsche safely to Nuremberg was the job of SMERSH.

  The Likhachev Team

  In early September 1945, Sergei Kartashov, head of the 2nd GUKR SMERSH Department, arrived in Nuremberg.24 He informed Nikitchenko and American officials that Fritzsche and Raeder would be presented in court. Back in Moscow, on September 10, Kartashov had written a detailed report to Abakumov giving his recommendations on how SMERSH representatives should organize their control of events at the pending trial.

  A special group of investigators, culled from within GUKR SMERSH, would coordinate the preparation of materials for the trial.25 Led by the above-mentioned deputy head of the 6th Department, Mikhail Likhachev, it also included two main subordinates (mentioned in previous chapters): Pavel Grishaev of the 4th Department and Boris Solovov of the 2nd Department. They were young but experienced interrogators.

  Mi
khail Likhachev, born in 1913, joined the NKVD in 1937.26 During the war, he made his career in the Investigation Department of the UOO (by February 1942, he was already deputy head of this department) and then in the 6th Department of the GUKR SMERSH. Likhachev did not know German and spoke to the prisoners through a translator.

  Pavel Grishaev, born in 1918, joined the NKVD in 1939 as a Kremlin Guard.27 In 1942–44, he served as investigator in the OO NKVD, then UKR SMERSH of the Central/1st Belorussian Front. In December 1944, Grishaev was recalled to the GUKR SMERSH in Moscow, where he became senior investigator in the 2nd Section of the 4th Department. Nikolai Kuleshov, head of this department, was known as one of the cruelest OO investigators who interrogated the Soviet military leaders arrested in June 1941. Possibly learning by example, Grishaev also became a ruthless interrogator.

  Boris Solovov, even younger, was born in 1921. In 1941, at the beginning of the war, he joined the NKVD. In 1943–46, he was an authorized officer (operupolnomochennyi) in the 1st Section of Kartashov’s 2nd Department of the GUKR SMERSH. Both Grishaev and Solovov spoke fluent German.

  In Nuremberg, the group became known as the Likhachev team. The other investigators of the 1st Section of Kartashov’s department, especially those with a good knowledge of German, were also involved in the work of this team in Moscow—Captain Daniil Kopelyansky, Lieutenants Gushchin and Oleg Bubnov, Junior Lieutenant Soloviev (not to be confused with Solovov), Authorized Officer Anna Stesnova, and a translator, Maria Potapova, prepared documents for the trial.28

  On October 12, 1945, Bogdan Kobulov, Vasilii Chernyshev (NKVD Deputy Head), and Abakumov signed a joint letter addressed to Beria requesting his order to transport Fritzsche and Raeder from Moscow to Nuremberg. Three days later the Likhachev team brought Fritzsche to Berlin.29 Several cadets from the Military Counterintelligence School under Senior Lieutenant Gennadii Samoilov served as guards. The group also included a counterintelligence officer, Fyodor Denisov, and four female translators: Yelena Aleksandrova-Dmitrieva, Valentina Valitskaya, Olga Svidovskaya-Tabachnikova, and Elizaveta Shcheveleva-Stenina.30 These translators later assisted Soviet prosecutors and judges.

  Before Raeder was taken to Berlin, he and his wife were held at one of the special NKVD mansions near Moscow. When the NKVD officers arrived to take him to the trial, they told him he would be back in a few days. Colonel Pavel Tupikov, head of the NKVD Counterintelligence Department Smersh, along with Turaev, a military translator, escorted Raeder separately from Fritzsche.31 After Tupikov left Nuremberg in January 1946, Grishaev continued to interrogate Raeder.

  The two defendants and the Soviet security officers who held them lived in a mansion near Potsdam under the guard of military cadets who arrived with Likhachev. On October 18, 1945, Grishaev and Solovov presented the two defendants with the indictment signed by the Chief of Counsel of the International Military Tribunal. In response, Fritzsche immediately wrote the following:

  I, Hans Fritzsche, have received today, October 18, 1945, at 19:50 Berlin time, the Indictment of the Chief of Counsel of the International Military Tribunal, a statement regarding my right to defense, a list of German lawyers, and the Rules of the International Military Tribunal in the German language. The above documents have been handed to me by Red Army Officer Grishajeff, acting on orders of the International Military Tribunal, who advised me in German on the contents of the documents and on my right to defense.32

  Later, before the trial, Fritzsche expressed his opinion of the indictment: ‘It is the most terrible indictment of all time. Only one thing is more terrible: the indictment the German people will make for the abuse of their idealism.’33

  Admiral Raeder, who, like Fritzsche, mentioned Grishaev in his statement about the indictment, later recalled in his memoirs: ‘This was the first time I had heard of war crimes.’34 After receiving the indictment, he asked for the notes he had left in Moscow. After a few days he received the notes and the text of the deposition he was supposed to sign. Raeder described the situation: ‘When I examined the notes and deposition, however, I refused to sign such a statement since it was [a] fabricated jumble of excerpts from my notes, taken out of context, erroneously translated, and generally misleading.’

  Raeder continued: ‘A few days later Fritzsche and I were taken by automobile from Berlin to Nuremberg… Like the other defendants who had preceded us or who came after us, we were incarcerated in individual cells of the Nuremberg Criminal Prison, under glaring electric lights.’35

  For the next five months, the Likhachev team became a SMERSH watchdog that controlled the Soviet delegation. Officially Grishaev and Solovov were assigned as investigators for the Chief Prosecutor of the USSR, General Rudenko. In fact, they intervened in the work of prosecutors. On November 16, 1945, at a meeting of the Vyshinsky Commission, Kobulov announced: ‘Our people, who are in Nuremberg at the moment, report to us…[that] Goering, Jodl, Keitel, and the others behave provocatively during interrogations, and that their answers frequently contain anti-Soviet declarations, while our investigator C.[omrade] [Georgii] Aleksandrov [head of the Soviet group of interrogators] responds to them weakly.’36

  Three days later Vyshinsky rebutted: ‘Neither the defendants nor witnesses attacked the USSR or me personally during interrogations… The described incident took place on October 18 [1945] in my presence during the interrogation of the defendant [Hans] Frank [former Governor-General in Poland] by the American Lieutenant Colonel Hinkel. After the interrogation, Frank, in fact, called Hinkel ‘a pig’… In my opinion, this report [from Nuremberg] misinformed the government.’37

  Colonel Thomas S. Hinkel of the Judge Advocate-General’s office was one of four American lawyers who interrogated defendants before the trial. During the interrogation that Vyshinsky mentioned, the defendant Frank tried to persuade Hinkel that he was innocent of the charges: ‘I want to point out that I am a believing Christian.’38 But Hinkel did not buy Frank’s sudden transformation and Frank was outraged.

  Defendant Hans Fritzsche

  Although Fritzsche did not belong to the highest Nazi elite, he was the highest-ranking bureaucrat captured by the Soviets. Born in 1900 in Bochum, he studied history, languages, and philosophy.39 In 1923, he joined the nationalistic party Deutschnationale Volkspartei, and in 1933, the Nazi Party. From 1932, Fritzsche headed the Wireless News Service, incorporated in 1933 into Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry. In 1938, Fritzsche was appointed deputy head, and then head of the German Press Division. After this he headed the Radio Division of the Propaganda Ministry.

  SMERSH operatives arrested Fritzsche in Berlin on May 2, 1945. That day he came to General Vasilii Chuikov’s headquarters, where he proposed a radio broadcast calling upon the German troops to give up all resistance. He was allowed to do so. ‘And then,’ as Fritzsche wrote later, ‘the first of many interrogations that took place in Berlin, in Lubyanka Prison in Moscow, and in Nuremberg began.’40 The next day he was taken to Hitler’s Chancellery, where he saw about fifteen burned corpses, and on May 4, he was brought in to identify the corpse of his boss, Goebbels.

  Until July 29, 1945, Fritzsche was held along with the dental technician Fritz Echtmann (who identified Hitler’s dentures) in Friedrichshagen Prison in Berlin.41 Finally, on July 29, 1945, Fritzsche and a group of other prisoners, including Vice Admiral Hans Voss, were flown to Moscow.

  In Nuremberg, Fritzsche confronted Likhachev in the presence of members of the Western prosecution teams, telling of his treatment at Likhachev’s hands in Moscow during the investigation:

  ‘You know that in Moscow, you submitted me to twenty-two depositions against my present fellow-prisoners at a time when I knew nothing of an impending trial and you know that I declined to put my signature to those statements—statements which I never made. You know, too, that after three days and three nights I signed [the] twenty-third deposition, one against myself and you will remember that I did so only after some twenty alterations had been made on so-called points of honor. Curiously en
ough, these alterations are now missing. In addition, you know that I made the following declaration:

  “I declare that no question was put to me and no answer given by me in the form in which it is set down here. I confirm the incorrectness of the wording of this deposition throughout its length. I sign solely in order that the three-man tribunal, which twice a month pronounces sentence without examining the accused…may write ‘Sentence of Death’ under my name by way of discharge…”

  In the present circumstances, Colonel [Likhachev], I can only reaffirm the declaration which I made to you then.’

  Both Li[kh]achev’s hands were now fidgeting. Courteously he pressed Russian cigarettes upon everyone else present: he did not offer me any.42

  The hearing of Fritzsche’s personal responsibility for ‘Crimes against Peace, War Crimes, and Crimes against Humanity’ began at the morning session on January 23, 1946. A member of the American Prosecution team, Captain Drexel Sprecher, ended his presentation with the following conclusion:

  Without the propaganda apparatus of the Nazi State it is clear that the world, including Germany, would not have suffered the catastrophe of these years; and it is because of Fritzsche’s able role on behalf of the Nazi conspirators and their deceitful and barbarous practices in connection with the conspiracy that he is called to account before this International Tribunal.43

  Soon after that, on February 21, 1946, Fritzsche had a breakdown after watching a Soviet documentary on the destruction of Soviet cities and cultural monuments. Fritzsche explained to the American psychiatrist Dr. G. M. Gilbert, who visited Fritzsche in his cell: ‘I have had the feeling—of getting buried in a growing pile of filth—piling up week after week—up to my neck in it—and now—I am choking in it.’44