In Hungary the ACC was organized in March 1945 and was formally chaired by Marshal Kliment Voroshilov. However, the marshal remained in Moscow for the most part, leaving his deputy, Lieutenant General Vladimir Sviridov, in charge of all ACC affairs.56 Mikhail Belkin, former head of the UKR of the 3rd Baltic Front, headed the Inspectorate in Budapest. Later Nikolai Velikanov, former head of the OKR SMERSH of the 52nd Army (1st Ukrainian Front), replaced Belkin. Georgii Yevdokimenko, formerly Belkin’s deputy at the 3rd Baltic Front, was deputy head of the Inspectorate in Budapest. Later, from June 1947 to March 1950, Belkin headed the UKR MGB of the TsGV, and in this capacity he supervised the organization of the show trial of the prominent Hungarian Communist politician Laszlo Rajk, in Budapest in 1949.57
In Vienna, the ACC for Austria was established later, on July 24, 1945. Before June the Soviets simply did not allow Allied military forces to enter the city. In April, the new provisional government headed by the Austrian socialist leader Karl Renner was formed under Soviet supervision. During July 1945, the Allied governments accepted the division of Vienna and the whole of Austria into four zones: Soviet, American, British and French. The central part of Vienna became an International Zone with its Allied Commandants’ Office stationed in the historical Palace of Justice. Not until October 1 did the Western Allies recognize Renner’s government.
Colonel General Zheltov, deputy Supreme Commissar of Austria, headed the Soviet part of the ACC.58 He placed his headquarters in the Hotel Imperial, while his staff lived in the requisitioned Grand Hotel. These were the most luxurious hotels in the city. Grigorii Bolotin-Balyasnyi and then Nikolai Rozanov, both continuing to be Abakumov’s assistants, headed the Inspectorate of Zheltov’s ACC group. This inspectorate mostly collected information from agents about the garrisons in the American and British zones of the city. Interestingly, in October 1945, Yurii Pokrovsky, head of the Legal Department of Zheltov’s group, was appointed deputy Soviet Chief Prosecutor in Nuremberg.
To entertain Red Army officers in Vienna, the Soviet Officers Club (Dom Ofitserov) was opened in a wing of the Schönbrunn Palace. In 1830, Emperor Franz Josef I was born in this wing and he died there in 1916. The Soviet military authorities left intact the interior decoration in the wing, and used it for big parties given to impress Western diplomats and for meetings. Ernst Kolman, a Czech mathematician who became a Soviet Communist Party functionary, recalled that at the end of 1945 he gave a lecture on the political situation in Czechoslovakia to a military audience, including SMERSH officers, in Vienna.59 The lecture took place in Franz Josef’s throne hall.
Poland
At the end of the war Poland was occupied by Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky’s 2nd Belorussian Front, which on May 29, 1945 became the Northern Group of Military Forces (Severnaya gruppa voisk or SGV).60 On June 24, Rokossovsky commanded the Victory Parade at Red Square in Moscow. Later, from 1949 to 1956, he was Polish Minister of Defense, Deputy Chairman of the Polish Council of Ministers, and a member of the Politburo of the Polish Communist Party. In June 1945, Yakov Yedunov, former head of the UKR of the 2nd Belorussian Front, became head of the Military Counterintelligence Directorate of the SGV. The SGV headquarters were in the town of Legnica (formerly German Liegnitz), an area soon called ‘Little Moscow’ by the local Poles.
Until March 1946, there were additional SMERSH and NKVD structures in Poland. Up to July 4, 1945, Abakumov’s deputy Meshik was NKVD Plenipotentiary to the 1st Ukrainian Front and deputy commander in charge of civilian administration for this front in the part of Poland occupied by the 1st Ukrainian Front’s troops. From March to August 1945, Meshik was also Adviser to the Ministry of Public Administration of the Provisional Polish Government. At the same time, in March–April 1945, Serov, NKVD Plenipotentiary to the 1st Belorussian Front, was also NKVD Adviser to the newly formed Polish Ministry of Public Security.61
On August 20, 1945, Meshik’s SMERSH career ended with his appointment as deputy head of the 1st Main Directorate subordinate to the Sovnarkom.62 This Directorate, headed by former Commissar for Munitions Boris Vannikov, was charged with building the atomic bomb.
In Poland, Nikolai Selivanovsky continued as NKVD Plenipotentiary of the 4th Ukrainian Front until July 1945, with fifteen NKVD regiments at his disposal. In addition, on April 27, he replaced Serov as NKVD Adviser to the Polish Ministry of Public Security. Selivanovsky, who was responsible for the final destruction of the Armija Krajowa, had sent Beria eighteen detailed reports about his activities up to October 1945.63 He also helped to create a Soviet-type security service in Poland.
During Selivanovsky’s presence in Poland, SMERSH and the NKVD used the infamous Auschwitz as a concentration camp for German POWs and Soviet repatriates. Nicola Sinevirsky, who in June 1945 visited the camp with a group of operatives of the 2nd Department of the UKR of the 4th Ukrainian Front, recalled:
In the ‘brick camp,’ the first gas chamber was still intact… Today the ‘brick camp’ is the home of German war prisoners. The ‘wooden camp’ [with its four gas chambers] serves as the home of Russian repatriates—about twenty thousand of them. They are tightly guarded by sentries, marching day and night around the camp. SMERSH men, commanded by about fifty officers, were also working among them around the clock. The attitude of SMERSH men, which represented the real attitude of the Soviets toward these people, became worse and more degraded every day.64
Between October 1945 and March 1946, Selivanovsky’s deputy, Semyon Davydov, signed all reports to Beria, and on March 20, 1946, Selivanovsky sent his last report from Poland. In April 1946, Selivanovsky, now back in Moscow, was reinstalled as Abakumov’s deputy, while Davydov became the MVD/MGB Adviser in Poland.65
Bulgaria and Romania
After Marshal Fyodor Tolbukhin’s 3rd Ukrainian Front was relocated from Austria to Bulgaria and Romania, it became the Southern Group of Troops (Yuzhnaya gruppa voisk or YuGV), with headquarters in Sofia.66 Tolbukhin also chaired the ACC in Bulgaria and Romania.67 Major General Aleksei Voul, former deputy head of the UKR SMERSH of the 3rd Ukrainian Front and now deputy head of the UKR SMERSH of the YuGV, also headed the Inspectorate in Sofia (Table 27-1). The Soviet staff of the ACC included four generals, a vice admiral, and 100 officers; the rest were rank-and-file staffers—a total of 270 members.68 By comparison, the British section consisted of 110 members; of these, 24 were officers, and the head of the section, Major General Walter Hayes Oxley, was the only general. The American ACC section consisted of 60 members with the only general, Major General John A. Crane, as its head. It arrived in Sofia in November 1944, and in March 1946, Major General Walter M. Robertson replaced General Crane.
In fact, Colonel General Sergei Biryuzov, commander of the 37th Army stationed in Bulgaria and Tolbukhin’s deputy chair, was in charge of the ACC work in Bulgaria. Lieutenant General Aleksandr Cherepanov, Tolbukhin’s assistant in the ACC and the Soviet military adviser to the Bulgarian Army (who later served as ACC chair from May 1947 till May 1948), wrote in his memoirs:
Biryuzov… was a decisive, tough and demanding commander, sometimes rigorous, complementing well the restrained and gentle F. I. Tolbukhin…