68. A. I. Cherepanov, Pole ratnoe moe (Moscow: Voenizdat, 1984), 272–3 (in Russian).
69. Cherepanov, ibid., 271–2.
70. Roy M. Melbourne, Conflict and Crisis: A Foreign Service Story (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1997), 96.
71. Donovan’s final report on activities of the OSS units in Romania and Bulgaria, dated November18, 1944. Documents 93–94 in The OSS–NKVD Relationship, 1943–1945 (Covert Warfare series, Volume 8) (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1989). Biryuzov is mentioned as ‘Berezov’ in Document 72 in ibid.
72. Yelena Valeva, ‘Politicheskie protsessy v Bolgarii, 1944–1948 gg.,’ ‘Karta,’ no. 36-37 (2003), 48-59 (in Russian), http://www.hro.org/node/10845, retrieved September 8, 2011.
73. Biryuzov’s letter to Kimon Georgiev, dated November 28, 1944, in Cherepanov, Pole ratnoe moe, 272.
74. Memoirs by Vladimir Skorodumov, ‘Rusaika,’ Neva, no. 10 (2006) (in Russian), http://magazines.russ.ru/neva/2006/10/sk15-pr.html, retrieved September 9, 2011.
75. GKO Decision No. 7161-ss, dated December 16, 1944. Details in V. B. Konasov and A. V. Tereshchuk, ‘“Budut nemedlenno predany sudu Voennogo Tribunala…” Iz istorii internirovaniya grazhdanskogo naseleniya Avstrii, Bolgarii, Vengrii, Germanii, Rumynii, Chekhslovakii i Yugoslavii v 1944–1945 gg,’ Russkoe proshloe, no. 5 (1994), 318–37 (in Russian).
76. Elizabeth W. Hazard, Cold War Crubicle: United States Foreign Policy and the Conflict in Romania. 1943–1953 (Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 1996), 64–72.
77. Interview with Mrs. Polly Wisner Fritchey in Burton Hersh, The Old Boys: The American Elite and the Origins of the CIA (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1992), 208.
78. Robert Bishop and E. S. Crayfield, Russia Astride the Balkans (New York: Robert McBride, 1948), 123.
79. Polyan, Ne po svoei vole, 210.
80. Hersh, The Old Boys, 208.
81. Hazard, Cold War Crubicle, 96–98. In October 1946, Mannicatide, who had joined the OSS staff, and his family were smuggled out of Romania under General Schuyler’s supervision, and they ended up in the United States.
82. B. D. Yurinov, ‘Vzaimodeistvie razvedok SSSR i SshA v gody voiny,’ Ocherki istorii rossiiskoi vneshnei razvedki. T. 4. 1941–1945 gody (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniya, 1999), 399–415 (in Russian).
83. Nikita Petrov, ‘Die militärische Spionageabwehr in Österreich und die Todesstrafe. Struktur, Funktionen, Praxis,’ in Stalins letzte Opfer: Verschleppte und erschossenen Österreicher in Moscau 1950–1953, edited by Stefan Karner and Barbara Stelzl-Marx, 79–96 (Wien: Böhlau Verlag, 2009).
84. Romanov, Nights Are Longest There, 158.
85. Report No. 3067 by Lieutenant Colonel Bogdanov, head of the Inspectorate in Austria, to deputy MGB Minister Selivanovsky, dated September 9, 1947. Document No. 104 in Die Rote Armee in Osterreich: Sovjetische Besatzung 1945-1955. Dokumente, edited by Stefan Karner, Barbara Stelzl-Marx, and Alexander O. Tschubarian, 478–84 (Münich: Oldenbourg Verlag, 2005).
86. Romanov, Nights Are Longest There, 158–9.
87. Ibid., 160.
88. Pages 31–34 in N. Petrov and Ya. Foitsik, ‘Vvedenie. Apparat upolnomochennogo NKVD-MGB SSSR v Germanii, politichesrie repressii i formirovanie nemetskikh organov bezopasnosti v GDR 1945–1953 gg.,’ in Apparat NKVD-NKGB v Germanii, 1945–1953, edited by N. Petrov and Ya. Foitsik, 5–53 (Moscow: Demokratiya, 2009) (in Russian).
89. Gotthold Starke’s prisoner card in the Vladimir Prison Archive.
90. Unto Parvilahti, Beria’s Garden: Ten Years’ Captivity in Russia and Siberia, translated from the Finnish by Alan Blair (London: Hutchinson and Company, 1959), 141. Starke briefly described his imprisonment in Gotthold Starke, ‘Archbishop Reins in the Prison of Vladimir,’ Modern Age, no. 2 (Spring 1958), 182-5.
91. According to Duke Christian Ludwig’s prisoner card in Vladimir Prison, he was tried under the Control Council Law No. 10 (Punishment of Persons Guilty of War Crimes, Crimes Against Peace and Against Humanity adopted at the Nuremberg Trials), Article 2-1a (crimes against peace).
92. Nagy-Talavera, Recollections, 8.
93. List of the Austrians executed in 1945–47, in Stalins letzte Opfer, 631–2.
94. Stavka’s Directive No. 11086, dated May 11, 1945. Document No. 266 in Russkii Arkhiv. Velikaya Otechestvennaya, 15 (4–5), 418–9.
95. Romanov, Nights Are Longest There, 172.
96. Anatoly Gulin, ‘I ne komissar, i ne evrei… Moya nevolya,’ Novyi Mir, no. 7 (2003) (in Russian), http://magazines.russ.ru/novyi_mi/2005/7/gu4.html, retrieved September 9, 2011.
97. Romanov, Nights Are Longest There, 173–4.
98. Mark W. Clark, Calculated Risk (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950), 476–7.
99. Romanov, Nights Are Longest There, 159.
100. V. N. Nikolsky, GRU v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny (Moscow: Yauza-Eksmo, 2005) (in Russian), http://militera.lib.ru/h/nikolsky_va01/index.html, retrieved September 9, 2011.
101. V. P. Babich, Velikaya Otechestvennaya voina: Vospominaniya V. P. Babicha, Chapter 1. Dlinnyi put’ domoi (in Russian), http://vsbabich.narod.ru/dolgoe1.htm, retrieved September 9, 2011.
CHAPTER 28
The SMERSH Team in Nuremberg
Perhaps controlling the work of the Soviet delegation at the International Trial in Nuremberg was one of the main achievements of Abakumov’s SMERSH. The role of this SMERSH team in the trial remained unknown to the Western delegations.
The London Agreement
On June 21, 1945, a series of meetings among the American, British, French, and Soviet delegations had begun at Church House, Westminster (London) to develop a protocol for the upcoming international trial of German war criminals in Nuremberg.1 Major General of Justice Iona Nikitchenko headed the Soviet delegation at these meetings. Apparently, his Western colleagues were unaware that General Nikitchenko was no less guilty of crimes against humanity than were the future German defendants. In the 1930s, as a member of the Military Collegium, he had signed thousands of death sentences of alleged enemies of the people and received the highest Soviet awards for preparing show trials.2 In 1937, in a single telephone conversation, Nikitchenko agreed to sentence 102 defendants to death without even seeing their case files.3 A witness testified in 1940: ‘At the session of the Military Collegium an arrestee claimed he had denied his previous testimonies because he had been beaten [by investigators]. Chairman Nikitchenko told him: “Do you want us to beat you a little bit more?”’4