Smersh exploited for the same purpose former Nazis, insignificant functionaries of Hitler’s NSDAP. Many of them were people, who, according to Soviet law, ought to have been in prisons and concentration camps… It’s true that in this kind of case we really needed to have hostages who could be used as leverage for blackmail. An individual’s wife, children or elderly parents, if they lived in the Soviet Occupation Zone, could be used for this purpose. The local Smersh bodies in the place where these relatives lived kept them under permanent secret surveillance to prevent them escaping to the west.86
Prostitutes were also a tool of SMERSH surveillance: ‘Among the Austrian agents whom Smersh recruited, the procurers of girls for allied military personnel worked with particular success… We had in Vienna a number of “meeting houses” or brothels, which Smersh financed for the same purpose.’87 SMERSH/MGB used these methods in all occupied countries.
In the Soviet occupational zones, the Russian Federation Criminal Code with its notorious Article 58 was introduced. Under various paragraphs of this article, not only Soviet citizens but also local citizens arrested by SMERSH were charged, mostly as spies (Article 58-6).88 Besides investigating the arrestees locally, the UKRs sent many of those suspected of espionage to Moscow.
The fate of Gotthold Starke, a German journalist and diplomat arrested by the operatives of the UKR SMERSH of GSOVG in the town of Mulhausen in July 1945, is a good example (Appendix II, see http://www.smershbook.com). Apparently, his main ‘crime’ was being an attaché at the German Embassy in Moscow just before the outbreak of war. During the war, Starke served in the Press and Communication Department of the German Foreign Office, and he was chief editor of the newspaper Deutsche Rundschau in Polen published by the German occupation authorities in Poland. Starke was kept in Moscow investigation prisons until October 7, 1947, when the OSO sentenced him to a 10-year imprisonment for his ‘assistance to the world bourgeoisie’ (Article 58-4) and spy activity (Article 58-6/1).89 Even the length of the term shows that the case was falsified: at the time, most spies were sentenced either to no less than 15 years of imprisonment, or to death. Starke’s Finnish cell mate in Vladimir Prison, Unto Parvilahti, later recalled:
Gotthold Starke was a finely cultured man, a humanist and journalist by vocation… Starke had got terribly thin; he often had severe heart attacks; he breathed with only one lung, but it would have been hard to find a better cell-mate. If the rest of the world’s diplomats were equipped with the same tact as Gotthold Starke, the world would be a more peaceful place.90
Starke was released in July 1955, after serving the term.
The other arrestee, Christian Ludwig of Mecklenburg, was ‘guilty’ of being a duke. His father, Friedrich Francis IV, was the reigning grand duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, but he abdicated after World War I. Christian Ludwig was his father’s successor as Grand Duke due to the marriage of his elder brother Friedrich to a non-noble woman. UKR SMERSH of GSOVG arrested Duke Christian Ludwig in October 1945 at his Ludwigslust Castle. A year before that, in 1944, he was discharged from the German Army, ostensibly for being a member of a former ruling house; most probably, the real reason was that he was close to the military plotters against Hitler.
On his prisoner card in Vladimir Prison, the duke’s employment status is given as ‘manager of an estate.’ Obviously, he personally committed no crime because later he was charged with ‘the preparation and conducting of aggressive war against the Soviet Union’—a ‘crime’ of which any officer of the German Army could have been accused.91 Duke Christian Ludwig was kept in Moscow investigation prisons until October 1951, when the OSO sentenced him to a 25-year imprisonment. Like Starke, the duke was sent to Vladimir Prison. The card has a handwritten note: ‘He is socially dangerous due to his past.’ The duke was released in June 1953.
Those arrestees who were investigated locally were tried by military tribunals of the occupation troops. The above-mentioned Nagy-Talavera described a court session of the military tribunal of the TsGV in Baden that tried him:
The trial was a farce…
The table was covered with a red cloth and on the wall were pictures of Kalinin, Stalin, and Lenin and some slogans about Soviet justice. Two guards with machine pistols were standing in the room at all times…
[The] box where the prisoners had to be was in fact the most horrible [of all]. There were things written on it in four languages—in German ‘Gott hilft mir’ and ‘Gott ste, mir bei,’ because they were giving death sentences here also, and in Romanian and Hungarian, ‘Goodbye, my mother, forever,’ etc…
They sentenced me to 25 years of slave labor… Helping the Americans was the main charge. I was sentenced on Paragraph 58, Article 6 [espionage].92
Political convicts, including Nagy-Talavera, were transported to the Soviet Union to serve their terms. However, the OSO in Moscow made decisions on the most important cases in absentia, while prisoners were still kept in Baden or Germany. Many prisoners sentenced to death were also transported to Moscow for execution.93
Additionally, SMERSH operatives in all occupied countries were involved in vetting Soviet citizens brought by in the Nazis as slave laborers (ostarbeiters) during the war, as well as POWs. One hundred vetting camps for returning POWs and civilians, each holding 10,000 people, were created in the rear zones of the 1st and 2nd Belorussian fronts, and the 1st–4th Ukrainian fronts.94 Vetting was performed by Vetting and Screening Commissions (PFK) that included both SMERSH officers from the staff of UKRs and officers sent from Moscow HQ.95 SMERSH officers checked POWs, while civilians were checked by joint NKVD, NKGB and SMERSH commissions.
In Austria, the filtration camp near the town of Wiener-Neustadt, 50 kilometers from Vienna, was the biggest. Anatoly Gulin, a former Red Army sergeant who was captured by the Germans but subsequently escaped and spent the last months of the war in an Italian partisan group, recalled entering this camp with other Soviet repatriates transported from Italy:
The camp… occupied a gigantic area surrounded by a barbed-wire fence with watchtowers at the corners, manned by guards. Inside the barbed wire were the partially bombed-out buildings of a town with an aerodrome. After our companies walked into this territory, the Red Army camp administrators… insulted us with language so foul that we had almost forgotten the meaning of the words [while in captivity]. The commandant of the camp… was literally seething with hatred… It looked like if he could, he would have killed all of us…
We were put in a semi-destroyed building…
The camp was guarded by soldiers recruited in Central Asia, and they were no better than the Germans. They thought we were criminals… They used to shoot at our windows without any reason, and they wounded some of us.96
Gulin also briefly described the vetting procedure:
One day the osobisty [SMERSH officers] came to the camp, and the intense work started: one repatriate after another was called in, and some persons even twice. Finally, it was my turn. A young lieutenant interrogated me. He pretended to be important and tried to look older than he was.
After I answered his last question, he gave me permission to leave, but suddenly he stopped me at the door. He was interested in my watch and simply demanded that I give it to him. I was filled with indignation and abruptly refused. The lieutenant responded with foul language and said that if I had been clever enough to cooperate, I would have been at home in a couple of months, but now I would work for the Motherland for a few years…