I will return to this front again if you deem it necessary.
I await your orders.
Suicides became common among the arrested East Prussians. On March 11, 1945, Beria forwarded Stalin and Molotov a report from Prussia:
The women arrestees talking among themselves say that they have been collected for sterilization… Many Germans say that all German women left in the rear of the Red Army in East Prussia were raped by servicemen of the Red Army… Previously, a considerable part of the German population had not believed Nazi propaganda about the brutal treatment of the German population by the Red Army, but because of the atrocities committed by some Red Army soldiers, part of the population has committed suicide… Suicides of Germans, especially women, are becoming more and more frequent.21
On May 5, 1945, Beria ordered a team of three generals to replace Abakumov in East Prussia.22 It included Colonel General Arkadii Apollonov, head of the NKVD Main Directorate of Interior Troops and deputy NKVD Commissar, Lieutenant General Ivan Gorbatyuk, head of the Main Directorate of the NKVD rear guard troops, and Lieutenant General Fyodor Tutushkin, head of the SMERSH Directorate of the Moscow Military District. Zelenin was ordered to send 400 SMERSH operatives from his SMERSH Directorate to assist the team. Apollonov and his team were charged with the final cleansing of East Prussia, to eliminate the remaining ‘spies, terrorists, and saboteurs acting in the Red Army’s rear.’ It is likely that the replacement of Abakumov as a Plenipotentiary by Beria’s deputy Apollonov meant that Beria wanted to keep this newly conquered country under his control.
As for Abakumov, in March 1945 he went to Moscow and did not participate in the conquest of Berlin. Probably, this was one of the main reasons for Abakumov’s hatred of Ivan Serov—Beria’s man and Plenipotentiary to the 1st Belorussian Front under Marshal Zhukov’s command, that eventually conquered Berlin. It is likely that this was also a reason why after the war Abakumov enthusiastically organized a campaign against Zhukov.
Within the territory occupied by the 1st Belorussian Front, 202 operational SMERSH groups were subordinate to Plenipotentiary Serov, who on February 18, 1945, ordered that every German on Polish territory be found.23 Using local Poles and Russians as informers to report on the Germans resulted in the arrests of 4,813 suspects, of whom 2,792 were investigated and found to be Germans.
Finally, on April 16, 1945, the mass arrests and deportations of the German population stopped. The next day Beria personally reported to Stalin on the results of the joint work of the NKVD–NKGB–SMERSH operational groups under the plenipotentiaries. A total of 215,540 individuals were arrested, of whom 138,200 were Germans (8,370 intelligence officers, terrorists, etc.), 38,660 were Poles, and the rest were Soviet citizens (of these, 17,495 were considered traitors). Five thousand arrestees died ‘in the course of operations and on the way to the [concentration] camps.’24
Two days later Beria sent new instructions to the plenipotentiaries of the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Belorussian, and the 1st and 4th Ukrainian fronts.25 All captured servicemen of the German Army; members of the Volkssturm, SS, and SA; and staff members of German prisons, concentration camps, and so forth, were to be sent to the new concentration camps set up for this contingent, while former members of the Russian Liberation Army were detained in the vetting camps.26 By September 1945, nine new camps had opened for the arrestees in Germany. Three were old Nazi concentration camps—Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, and Jamlitz.27 Additionally, Beria ordered the setting up of camps for those interned in Poland (1st Belorussian and 4th Ukrainian fronts) and Germany (2nd and 3rd Belorussian and 1st Ukrainian fronts).28
Beria also tried to establish NKVD control over prisoners who potentially had intelligence information and were important to SMERSH: ‘Arrestees who may be interesting in operational terms can be transported only with NKVD approval.’29 But Abakumov’s men did not follow this order. All important people arrested by SMERSH operatives continued to be sent to Moscow upon the approval of Abakumov or his deputy.
Officers of SMERSH, NKVD, and NKGB received awards for their work on the plenipotentiary staff. Three plenipotentiaries, Abakumov, Serov, and Tsanava, were awarded the Order of Kutuzov of the 1st Class, one of the highest Soviet military awards.
For unknown reasons, Beria did not send plenipotentiaries to the 2nd and 3rd Ukrainian fronts (Table 22-1). Possibly, he had decided that the countries liberated by these fronts were less important than Germany and Poland. The UKRs of these fronts continued to report directly to the GUKR. On April 4, 1945, the troops of the 2nd Ukrainian Front took Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia, and on March 31, 1945, troops of both fronts took Vienna. After the war, Vienna became the location of the UKR of the Central Group of Soviet troops in Europe that controlled the Soviet occupational zone in Austria, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia.
Operation in Helsinki
In the meantime, one of the oddest SMERSH operations was taking place in formally independent Finland. From June 26, 1941 onwards, Finland was at war with the Soviet Union. On September 4, 1944, an armistice ended the conflict, and on September 19, 1944, a Finnish delegation signed a temporary peace agreement in Moscow.
Politburo member Andrei Zhdanov was sent to Helsinki to head the Soviet part of the Allied Control Commission (ACC) in Finland.30 Although officially the ACC consisted of 150 Soviet and 60 British staffers, in fact Zhdanov’s staff reached 1,000 men and he used this enormous Soviet presence in Helsinki to intervene in Finnish internal affairs. On September 27, 1944, Finland declared war against Germany. A few days before the end of this war, on April 27, 1945, a group of SMERSH operatives transported twenty Finnish and former Russian citizens from Helsinki to Lubyanka Prison in Moscow.
On the evening of April 20, 1945, Yrjö Leino, the newly appointed Finnish Home Secretary, was called to Hotel Torni in Helsinki, where Zhdanov’s office was located. Zhdanov’s deputy, Lieutenant General Grigorii Savonenkov, handed Leino a letter, signed by Zhdanov, containing a demand to arrest twenty-two persons and hand them over to SMERSH representatives.31 These twenty-two individuals were allegedly ‘guilty of war crimes, espionage for Germany, and terrorist acts against the Soviet Union.’ Leino, a devoted Communist and son-in-law of Otto Kuusinen, a leader of the Finnish Communists and member of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party, followed Moscow’s order without consulting the Finnish government. Abakumov’s report to Beria makes it clear that the Soviet Union operated with impunity in the supposedly sovereign state of Finland:
I am reporting that, following the instruction of Comrade STALIN, a special group of the Main Directorate ‘SMERSH’ under the Soviet Control Commission in Finland, through the Finnish police arrested 20 White Guardists and agents of German and Finnish intelligence services, who have been conducting hostile activity against the Soviet Union.
The arrests of these persons, according to the plan approved by the Stavka, were made as follows:
The Head of the Operational Group of SMERSH in Finland, Major General KOLESNIKOV [possibly, Kozhevnikov],32 reported to Comrade ZHDANOV the evidence against those targeted for arrest. On behalf of the Soviet government, he made a statement to the Finnish government demanding that they be arrested and handed over to us.
After this the Finnish police, under the control of our [military] counterintelligence, arrested these persons and handed them over to us.