Therefore, every Pole who opposed the Sovietization of Poland was arrested. In addition, all Slavs of non-Polish origin were forced to move to the Soviet Union.
Abakumov and Tsanava continued:
The operation to capture [the enemies] is scheduled for November 6 of this year. Until then, we are working to establish who should be arrested…
Up to November 1 [1944], the operational ‘SMERSH’ groups had arrested… 499 persons, of whom 82 were sent under guard to the territory of the Soviet Union [possibly, to GUKR SMERSH in Moscow]. We are preparing to send the remaining 417 persons to the NKVD Ostashkov Camp.
An additional 1,080 men were disarmed and transferred to the reserve of the Polish Army…
We are using the Bialystok City Prison to hold the arrestees until they are transported under guard to the Soviet Union.119
This was the same Ostashkov Camp in which the captured Polish officers were held in 1939–40 before they were massacred.
On November 8, 1944, Abakumov and Tsanava sent another cable to Beria:
On November 8 [1944], 1,200 active members of the Armija Krajowa and other underground organizations were arrested. Of them, 1,030 persons were sent to the NKVD Ostashkov Camp by special train No. 84176…
On the night of November 6/7 of the current year, the documents of people living in the city of Bialystok were checked, resulting in the arrest of 41 members of the ‘AK’ and other criminal elements.
The operation to capture members of the ‘Armija Krajowa’ and agents of German military intelligence continues.
On November 11, we are planning to send a second train to the Ostashkov Camp.120
The first train, carrying 1,030 prisoners identified as ‘interned persons,’ left Bialystok on November 7, 1944, and arrived in Ostashkov on November 19.121 Amazingly, 15 prisoners managed to escape on the way to Ostashkov.
The last cable to Beria from Abakumov and Tsanava in Bialystok said:
On November 12 [1944], we sent a second train No. 84180 with 1,014 arrested active members of the ‘Armija Krajowa’… to the Ostashkov Camp. A total of 2,044 persons were arrested and sent out…
On November 10, the Chief Plenipotentiary for resettlement informed [us] that he had listed 33,702 families to be resettled… 196 families have already been sent to the BSSR [Belorussia]…
A total of 341 persons are working on the resettlement…
We consider it expedient to leave small [NKVD] operational groups subordinate to Colonel [Vladimir] KAZAKEVICH, deputy head of the Directorate ‘SMERSH’ of the 2nd Belorussian Front, who is in charge of the operational work in Bialystok and Bialystok Voevodstvo…
We consider it expedient to return and to continue conducting our usual duties.
We ask for your instructions.122
The second train, carrying 1,014 Poles, left Bialystok on November 12, 1944,123 and arrived eight days later in Ostashkov. Later, on April 14, 1945, 1,516 Poles were transferred to other POW camps, while the rest were sent back to Poland in 1946 and 1947.124
Beria considered the operation complete. On November 14, 1944, in a cover letter accompanying copies of Abakumov and Tsanava’s last report, he wrote to Stalin, Molotov, and Malenkov: ‘During the operation, 2,044 active members of the Armija Krajowa and other underground organizations were arrested. The work preparing the resettlement of the Belorussians and Ukrainians to the Soviet Union has been improved… I think Comrades ABAKUMOV and TSANAVA should be allowed to leave.’125
The permission was granted and Abakumov returned to Moscow, while Tsanava went to Belorussia. Two months later Tsanava was back at the 2nd Belorussian Front as NKVD Plenipotentiary. Now the SMERSH Directorate of this front was under his, and not Abakumov’s, control.
Notes
1. Stalin’s Order No. 70, dated May 1, 1944, page 187 in I. V. Stalin, Sochineniya, T. 15 (Moscow: Pisatel’, 1997), 185–8 (in Russian).
2. Nicola Sinevirsky, SMERSH (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1950), 62–63.
3. Wilhelm Hoettl, The Secret Front: The Story of Nazi Political Espionage (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1954), 182. On Ion Antonescu (1882–1946), see Dennis Deletant, Hitler’s Forgotten Ally: Ion Antonescu and His Regime, Romania 1940–1944 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).
4. Details in transcripts of Stahel’s interrogations in GUKR SMERSH on April 28 and August 25, 1945. Document Nos. 79 and 80 in Generaly i ofitsery Vermakhta rasskazyvayut… Dokumenty iz sledstvennykh del nenetskikh voennoplennykh. 1944–1951, edited by V. G. Makarov and V. S. Khristoforov (Moscow: Demokratiya, 2009), 387–402 (in Russian).
5. Hoettl, The Secret Front, 188; Michael Bloch, Ribbentrop (London: Bantam Press, 1992), 411.
6. Quoted in ‘German Diplomats in Bucharest after 23 August, 1944,’ Radio Romania International, July 8, 2009, http://www.rri.ro/arh-art.shtml?lang=1&sec=9&art=22271, retrieved September 8, 2011.
7. ‘Turkey: Advance Man’s Retreat,’ Time, October 13, 1941.
8. Elizabeth W. Hazard, Cold War Crubicle: United States Foreign Policy and the Conflict in Romania. 1943–1953 (Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 1996), 40–81.
9. Later Frank Wisner became CIA station chief in London, chief of the CIA’s Office of Policy Coordination, and the CIA’s deputy director of plans. In 1965, he suffered a nervous breakdown and committed suicide.
10. Hazard, Cold War Crubicle, 44–45.
11. Shlomo Aronson, Hitler, the Allies, and the Jews (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 162–6.
12. The Secret War Report of the OSS, edited by Anthony Cave Brown, 286 (New York: Berkley Publishing Corporation, 1976).
13. Hazard, Cold War Crubicle, 60.
14. An interview with Lawrence Houston, cited in ibid., 196, and a speech by Allen Dulles on May 4, 1959, quoted in Richard Harris Smith, The OSS: The Secret History of America’s First Central Intelligence Agency (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1972), 118.
15. On SOE operations in Romania see Alan Ogden, Through Hitler’s Back Door: SOE Operations in Hungary, Slovakia, Romania and Bulgaria 1939–1945 (Barnsley, South Yorkshire: Pen & Sword Military, 2010), 197–263.
16. Bradley F. Smith, Sharing Secrets with Stalin: How the Allies Traded Intelligence, 1941–1945 (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1996), 20–26; Martin Kitchen, ‘SOE’s Man in Moscow,’ Intelligence and National Security 12, No. 3 (July 1997), 95–109.
17. Smith, Sharing Secrets with Stalin, 254.
18. Quoted (page 395) in B. D. Yurinov, “Ternistyi put’ sotrudnichestva,” in Ocherki istorii rossiiskoi vneshnei razvedki. T. 4. 1941–1945 gody (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniya, 1999), 385–98 (in Russian).
19. Testimony of Max Braun on September 10, 1947. Page 324 in Document No. 43 in Generaly i ofitsery Vermakhta, 217–20.
20. The Romanians handed over several members of the mission, including Colonel Hans Schwickert, to the NKVD—not SMERSH—operatives. Yevgenii Zhirnov, ‘Prints skryl svoyu nastoyashchiuiu familiyu,’ Kommersant-Vlast’, no. 14 (668), April 10, 2006 (in Russian), http://www.kommersant.ru/doc.aspx?DocsID=664971, retrieved September 8, 2011.