From the beginning of 1947 until March 1, Kuhn was in the Butyrka Prison hospital, and from March 1, 1947 to April 22, 1948, in an ‘MGB special object,’ the code name for a carefully guarded MGB dacha (country house) not far from the Malakhovka train station near Moscow.20 Abakumov ordered that Kuhn be trained for future work in the pro-Soviet East German administration, but as MGB officers soon discovered, Kuhn had other plans. Placed with Kuhn was another German POW, an informer, who reported to MGB handlers that in private conversations Kuhn criticized the Soviet regime and said that he wanted to defect to the Americans. As a result, on April 22, 1948, Kuhn was returned to Lefortovo Prison and held there for two years. Supposedly, he was subjected to torture.21
On April 5, 1950, Kuhn was transferred to Butyrka Prison. Like many other important prisoners investigated by Kartashov’s department, Kuhn was finally sentenced by the OSO (MGB) in the autumn of 1951. Convicted as a war criminal, he received a sentence of twenty-five years in a special prison for political prisoners.
From 1949 on, there were three such prisons under MGB supervision—Vladimir, Aleksandrovsk, and Verkhne-Uralsk; previously, they were under the NKVD/MVD jurisdiction. The most important convicts were held in Vladimir Prison not far from Moscow, where they could easily be additionally interrogated, if necessary. Kuhn was placed in Aleksandrovsk Prison near Irkutsk in Siberia. Another Aleksandrovsk inmate was the already mentioned Colonel Otto Armster, former head of the Abwehrstelle (Abwehr post) in Vienna, and also a member of the anti-Hitler plot, as well as a personal friend of Admiral Canaris. On June 21, 1945 he was brought to Moscow by plane and placed in Lefortovo Prison. In the spring of 1950, Armster was transferred to Butyrka. Like Kuhn, Armster was sentenced in 1951 and sent to Aleksandrovsk Prison. Apparently, by 1951, the MGB had already considered members of the anti-Nazi military plot to be unimportant, so these two were jailed far from Moscow.
For some time Kuhn was in solitary confinement, where he started calling himself ‘Major General Graf von der Pfaltz-Zweibruecken’ and hearing voices.22 A prison-hospital psychiatrist examined Kuhn and disagreed with the administration’s suspicion that he had gone insane. The doctor concluded that Kuhn ‘was fit to continue serving his sentence.’ Strangely, Kuhn was not transferred to the MVD Psychiatry Hospital in Kazan, as was done in similar cases of insanity.
In January 1956, Kuhn was released and returned to West Germany, where he lived in the town of Bad-Brukenau until his death in 1994. He had no desire to get together with those former plotting colleagues who had survived the Nazi persecution.23 When two of his prewar friends finally visited him in 1980, Kuhn called himself ‘Kronprinz Wilhelm von Hohenzollern.’ In December 1997, Kuhn was posthumously politically rehabilitated in Russia.
Investigation of POWs in the NKVD
Important German and other foreign POWs arrested by the NKVD were investigated by the Operational Department of the previously mentioned UPVI (NKVD Directorate for POWs and Interned Persons). The UPVI was created on Beria’s order issued on September 17, 1939, after Soviet troops invaded Poland.24 It had its own system of POW concentration camps, separate from that of the GULAG labor camps. Not only enemy POWs of various nationalities, but also civilians detained in the occupied territories were kept in these camps. Here is an example of such a camp:
By September 1, 1943, in the NKVD Camp No. 99 there were interned persons of various nationalities and citizenship,
| [total of] | 958 people |
| Of them, former Polish POWs | 176 |
| Children | 94 |
| According to nationalities, the contingent is represented by: | |
| Jews (men, women, and children) | 360 people |
| Poles | 181 |
| Germans | 121 |
| Spaniards | 63 |
| Hungarians | 33 |
| Romanians | 30 |
| Frenchmen, Russians, Czechs, Estonians, Danes, Finns, etc. | 170.25 |
The presence of Jewish child-prisoners is the most shocking in this document. This Camp No. 99, also known as Spaso-Zavodsky Camp, was located in Kazakhstan, near the town of Karaganda—the area where prisoners were used as enslaved coal miners.26 In 1943, captured enemy privates, not officers, were sent to this camp. Apparently, the Spaniards mentioned were soldiers of the Blue Division that fought near Leningrad in 1941–43, while the Frenchmen were soldiers drafted into the German army in Alsace-Lorraine, annexed by Nazi Germany in 1940.
Beginning in May 1943, Nikolai Ratushnyi was acting head of the UPVI. On August 3, 1943, Nikolai Mel’nikov was appointed his deputy and head of UPVI’s 2nd (Operational) Department. Mel’nikov had a long NKVD career, first in foreign intelligence and then in Sudoplatov’s 4th NKVD/NKGB Directorate (terrorist acts and diversions), where he headed the 1st Department in charge of foreign countries and POWs.
The Operational Department began investigating important POWs in 1944, but at first it was difficult to select these prisoners out of the general population of German POWs because of the increasing influx. In December 1943, there were about 100,000 POWs in the UPVI camps, while by December 1944, the number had increased to 680,921. Just after World War II, about 2,100,000 POWs (mostly former privates) were working in various branches of Soviet industry in all regions of the USSR.
In order to identify and select important prisoners, Mel’nikov created a net of informers among the POWs.27 After identifying officers, the Operational Department placed them in separate POW camps for officers. Additionally, special categories of POWs were selected for transfer to a few special UPVI camps: (a) those who had committed atrocities against Soviet citizens; (b) former active fascists and members of the intelligence, counterintelligence, and repressive organs of the enemy; and (c) those POWs who tried to escape from the UPVI camps or were planning to escape.28 On April 7, 1944, Mel’nikov committed suicide and Amayak Kobulov, former head of the NKVD rezidentura (network of spies) in Berlin in 1940–41, was appointed new head of the Operational Department.29 He was ‘a tall, fine-figured, handsome man from the Caucasus with a groomed moustache and black hair.’30 Major General Il’ya Pavlov, Kobulov’s deputy, was the only person on the UPVI staff who was transferred from SMERSH. In 1944, before coming to the UPVI, Pavlov was deputy head of the UKR SMERSH of the 2nd Belorussian Front.