Perhaps SMERSH’s most infamous arrest was that of the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who saved many thousands of Jews in Budapest at the end of World War II by providing them with fake documents, establishing safe houses, pulling people off trains bound for extermination camps, and so forth.53 Named a Righteous Gentile by the Israeli government for his heroic actions, the truth of what happened to Wallenberg after his arrest by SMERSH is one of the deepest mysteries of World War II. It seems likely that he died in the Soviet investigation prison Lubyanka in 1947.54 An even deeper mystery is why he was never repatriated to Sweden, despite the fact that he was a member of the powerful Wallenberg family and worked for the family corporation. The Wallenbergs, whose wholly family-owned interests during World War II amounted to perhaps half the gross national product of Sweden, had also been involved in mutually beneficial financial dealings with the Soviet Union since the 1920s.
High-level Abwehr and SD (the foreign branch of the Nazi State Security) officers also became prisoners of SMERSH. Among them were Lieutenant General Hans Piekenbrock, head of Abwehr Abteilung (Department) I (foreign intelligence) from 1937 to 1943; Colonel Erwin Stolze, deputy head of Abwehr Department II (sabotage and subversion) from 1937 to 1944, who was known as Saboteur No. 2; and Lieutenant General Franz-Eccard von Bentivegni, head of Abwehr Department III (counterintelligence) from 1943 to 1944.55
SMERSH also arrested and interrogated SS-Oberführer (Major General) Friedrich Panzinger, former head of the Gestapo’s Department A, which specialized in combating Communism and other opposition in Nazi Germany. He was well-known as the head of the Gestapo commissions that investigated both the famous Soviet spy network the Red Orchestra in 1942, and the anti-Hitler plotters in 1944. Between these two investigations, from September 1943 to May 1944, Panzinger headed the Gestapo branch in Riga, the capital of Latvia, and simultaneously commanded Einsatzgruppe A, a Latvia-based SS killing squad. After his release from Soviet imprisonment in October 1955, Major General Panzinger committed suicide while awaiting arrest in West Germany.
SS-Hauptsturmführer (Captain) Heinz Pannwitz, who headed the Gestapo’s investigation of the Red Orchestra in France, also fell into SMERSH’s hands. After his release, the CIA interrogated Pannwitz concerning his Red Orchestra investigation and his interrogations by SMERSH, and used the resulting information in its 1979 report, The Rote Kapelle.56
Numerous high-ranking German military generals were also taken prisoner by SMERSH.57 Among them was the ruthless Lieutenant General Reiner Stahel, who was military commandant of Warsaw during the 1944 Uprising. He was arrested by SMERSH in Romania, where Hitler had sent him in a last-ditch effort to save the German troops stationed there. Stahel died in November 1955 in a transit POW camp, on his way to Germany as part of a large repatriation of German officers. Another SMERSH prisoner was SS Major General Wilhelm Mohnke. The Americans and Canadians mounted a ten-year search for him due to his order to kill Canadian POWs during the Normandy invasion in June 1944. It was only upon Mohnke’s release in 1956 that it became known that the Soviets had him all along.58
SMERSH operatives also arrested a group of people who witnessed the death of Hitler. In fact, there were two groups of such witnesses in Soviet captivity, and there were two completely separate investigations into the circumstances of Hitler’s demise. These were conducted independently by SMERSH under Abakumov’s personal supervision and by the Main Directorate for POWs (GUPVI), which was part of the NKVD, under the supervision of the head of the GUPVI, Amayak Kobulov.59 The NKVD and SMERSH competed to find out the truth in order to curry favor with Stalin, who was fascinated with the Führer. Stalin suspected that Hitler had somehow survived the bunker, and therefore wanted convincing proof of his death. One of the witnesses investigated by SMERSH, SS-Gruppenführer (Lieutenant General) Hans Rattenhuber, head of Hitler’s bodyguards, was, possibly, the person closest to Hitler while he was alive.
Japanese military prisoners were investigated by SMERSH as well. They included General Otozo Yamada, commander in chief of the Kwantung Army, and the American-educated Senior Lieutenant Prince Fumitaka Konoe, who attended Princeton University before World War II. The young prince belonged to a 1,200-year-old family of Japanese rulers, and SMERSH considered him an important prisoner because he was a son and the personal secretary of Prince Fumimaro Konoe, the two-time former Japanese prime minister (1937–39 and 1940–41). In addition, Fumikata Konoe was related to Emperor Hirohito through his wife, Masako, a cousin of the emperor. Konoe, who had never been seriously ill, died suddenly in October 1956 in a transit POW camp on the way back to Japan. His death, like Raoul Wallenberg’s, remains a great mystery.
General Yamada was more fortunate; he survived imprisonment and returned to Japan. Hiroki Nohara, deputy head of the Intelligence Department of Yamada’s army, was sentenced to death in February 1947 as a spy and executed.60 The Japanese Consul General in Harbin, Kimio Miyagawa, died in Lefortovo Prison in Moscow before he was tried, while General Shun Akifusa, head of the Japanese Military Mission in Harbin, was convicted of being a spy in December 1948 and sentenced to a 25-year imprisonment. Four months later he died in Vladimir Prison.61
To the disappointment of the SMERSH leadership, in August 1945 the last Manchurian Emperor Pu Yi was captured by an NKVD, not a SMERSH, operational group. Although the commander in chief in the Soviet Far East, Marshal Aleksandr Vasilevsky, ordered the transfer of Pu Yi to SMERSH, NKVD Commissar Beria only allowed SMERSH officers to interrogate Pu Yi; he remained in NKVD hands.62
Since SMERSH officers wore Red Army uniforms, people arrested by SMERSH operatives frequently did not know that they were in the hands of a separate secret service. Even Soviet POWs used to think that the NKVD or NKGB had arrested them. For instance, Lev Mishchenko, a Moscow physicist who volunteered in 1941 for the opolchenie (detachments of civilian volunteers) and was then captured by the Germans, wrote in the 2000s: ‘In June 1945, I was arrested by the counterintelligence department SMERSH of the 8th Guard Army. SMERSH… was the name of the NKGB departments within the army.’63 This misunderstanding led to confusing mistakes regarding SMERSH in the memoirs of many foreign former prisoners of SMERSH.
One of SMERSH’s last important tasks was its involvement in the International Nuremberg Trial.64 Abakumov’s investigators proposed five prisoners as possible defendants at Nuremberg. However, the Politburo chose only one of the people on SMERSH’s list: the relatively unimportant Hans Fritzsche, an official of Paul Joseph Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry, who was ultimately acquitted. It’s possible that Stalin settled on Fritzsche because he did not want his former allies to know that important generals such as Mohnke were in his hands.
The NKVD also brought one defendant from its POW camps, Grand Admiral Erich Raeder, commander of the German Navy until 1943. He was sentenced to life in prison. The main testimony presented by Soviet prosecutors consisted of excerpts from the recorded interrogations of many SMERSH prisoners, but the prisoners themselves were not produced.
Colonel Sergei Kartashov, head of the 2nd Department of SMERSH, which was in charge of the interrogation of important German POWs and Soviet servicemen who had been in German captivity, was the first to arrive in Nuremberg. His assignment was to do an initial evaluation of the situation. Then a special team of three SMERSH officers headed by Mikhail Likhachev, a deputy head of SMERSH Investigation Department, brought Fritzsche to Nuremberg. However, the main task of this team was to monitor the Soviet delegation—the prosecutors, judges, translators, and so forth. They were also tasked with preventing any discussion at the trial of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact or of Soviet responsibility for the massacre of 22,000 captured Polish officers executed in 1940 in the Katyn Forest and two other places.65