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.