Sverchuk’s staff of officers was small, only about ten people. Besides the German section, other sections dealt with Finnish, Japanese, and Russian prisoners. While formally the 2nd Department was operational, meaning that it obtained intelligence from prisoners and did not investigate criminal cases, interrogations often led to the opening of a case against a prisoner. Usually interrogations took place in the offices on the fourth and sixth floors of the main Lubyanka building, or in a separate interrogation building of Lefortovo Prison. Nikolai Mesyatsev, former investigator of the 2nd SMERSH Department, described the Lefortovo offices:
The two-story investigation building in Lefortovo Prison was big. Only a few investigators worked on the first floor, and the rest worked in the offices on the second floor, arranged along a long corridor… Every investigator usually worked in the same office. There were a stool and a small table for a prisoner under investigation located in front of the investigator’s desk in the office. There was also a sofa covered with leather in front of a window where the investigator could rest between interrogations or even sleep at night.7
Frequently female stenographers were present during interrogations. Zinaida Kozina, Abakumov’s personal stenographer, volunteered to work with investigators. She recalled the night interrogations in Lefortovo:
The routine was the following. At 9:00 p.m. a bus was waiting at the 4th entrance [of the Lubyanka building]. It took us—me, two other women-stenographers, and investigators—to Lefortovo. There we went to offices for interrogations. At 5:00 a.m. the interrogations were over, and the bus took us to the metro station. Everybody went home… At 10:00 a.m. we were at work [in Lubyanka] again. It was necessary to immediately write down all transcripts of interrogations and to give them to the investigators.8
In some cases prisoners were also interrogated in Suhkanovo Prison. In many cases the 2nd and 4th or 6th GUKR SMERSH departments interrogated the same prisoners. Some of the German diplomats who arrived in Moscow from Bucharest in September 1944 were initially the responsibility of the 6th Department. For instance, Aleksandr Leonov, head of this department, personally interrogated Fritz Schellhorn, former German General Counselor, a week after his arrival. Then Schellhorn and other German diplomats were transferred to Kartashov’s 2nd Department and the investigation continued by Kartashov’s officers.
If a prisoner had no important intelligence information, his case was closed quickly and prepared for trial by the OSO. But the cases of important prisoners like witnesses of Hitler’s death and some German diplomats turned into long-term investigations, sometimes lasting as long as eight years.
Case Example: Major Joachim Kuhn
The case of Major Joachim Kuhn, opened by the 2nd Department in mid-1944, was typical for an investigation that continued until the 1950s. Kuhn was a member of the failed military plot to assassinate Hitler on July 20, 1944. Kuhn’s commander, Major General Henning von Tresckow, was a close associate of Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, the would-be assassin.9 Kuhn also knew von Stauffenberg well and used to visit him because Kuhn’s fiancée, Maria-Gabriele, was the daughter of von Stauffenberg’s cousin Clemens.10
Among the military plotters, Kuhn’s responsibility was to supply the conspirators with explosives and handmade bombs that he kept secretly at the HQ of the German Infantry High Command in Mauerwald (now Mamerki, Poland), not far from Hitler’s HQ ‘Wolfschanze’ (Wolf’s Lair). In March 1943, the plotters made their first assassination attempt on Hitler during his visit to the Army Group Center HQ in Smolensk, in Sovietoccupied territory. As already mentioned, following the visit, before Hitler’s plane took off, Fabian von Schlabrendroff, Tresckow’s cousin and aide-decamp, smuggled a concealed bomb onto the plane, while Erwin von Lahousen, head of Abwehr II, informed Admiral Canaris of the plan.11
The bomb did not detonate while the plane was in the air, and Kuhn and Tresckow began to plot anew. In autumn 1943, Tresckow suggested smuggling Friedrich Werner von Schulenburg through the front line in an attempt to reach Stalin for peace negotiations.12 Von Schulenburg, a former German ambassador to Moscow who knew Molotov and Stalin well, was a high-level Foreign Ministry official and a member of the Resistance. However, Field Marshal Günther von Kluge, commander in chief of the Army Group Center and a long-time member of the military opposition, did not support this plan.
On July 21, 1944, the day after von Stauffenberg’s unsuccessful assassination attempt, Tresckow drove to the 28th Rifle Division to see Major Kuhn, who had been transferred from Tresckow’s HQ to this front division. After Tresckow told Kuhn everything he knew about Stauffenberg’s failure, he drove into the no-man’s land between the German and Soviet front lines. There Tresckow pretended to exchange fire with the enemy, and then committed suicide by blowing himself up with a grenade.13
Kuhn made a different choice—he went to the Soviets. His divisional commander, General Gustav von Ziehlberg, told Kuhn that he had an order to bring him to Berlin, where officials suspected Kuhn of having provided von Stauffenberg with explosives for the attack on Hitler.14 In fact, Stauffenberg received plastic explosives from Kuhn’s colleagues who also worked at the Mauerwald HQ. Apparently, von Ziehlberg expected Kuhn to commit suicide to escape arrest.
Instead, on July 27, 1944, Kuhn deserted to the Soviet troops. SMERSH operatives of the 2nd Belorussian Front arrested him and sent him to Moscow.15 In Germany, because of Kuhn’s desertion, von Ziehlberg was put on trial and sentenced to nine months in prison. His case was later reopened, and this time he was sentenced to death. On February 2, 1945, von Ziehlberg was executed.
In Moscow, Kuhn was jailed in Lubyanka Prison. On September 2, 1944, he wrote a lengthy testimony concerning his personal involvement in the German military opposition and conversations with von Stauffenberg and other opposition leaders, and provided a detailed description of German high-ranking opposition leaders whom he knew personally.16 Investigator Daniil Kopelyansky from Kartashov’s department translated Kuhn’s testimony into Russian.17 On September 23, Abakumov reported to Georgii Malenkov on the interrogation, enclosing a Russian translation of Kuhn’s testimony and arriving at an unfavorable conclusion: ‘Considering Kuhn’s [official] denouncement in Germany as a traitor and active participant in the plot, and his testimony that he played a very important role in the plot, it is possible that the Germans sent him [to us] with a special purpose under all these covers… I have already reported this to Comrade Stalin.’ A few days later, Kopelyansky’s translation was on Stalin’s desk and Stalin discussed the Kuhn affair with GKO members.
SMERSH investigators soon concluded that Kuhn’s testimony was truthful. From August 12, 1944, until March 1, 1947, they held Kuhn under the operational alias Joachim Malowitz, although documents issued in Kartashov’s department still listed him under his real name.18 Twice during this period, on February 17 and 28, 1945, Abakumov ordered SMERSH operatives to take Kuhn into the forest around the village of Mauerwald, in Poland, where he helped them to find a set of plotters’ documents hidden in cans and jars.19 Among the papers, there was Stauffenberg’s plan to kill Hitler in 1943 during his stay in the Wolfschanze, and draft orders to military leaders in case the assassination was successful. The Politburo rejected Abakumov’s proposal to publish these documents in the press, and the documents were declassified only in the late 1990s.