‘I approve’
December 18, 1942
Deputy Head of the NKVD OO of the Western Front,
Major of State Sec.[urity]
/Shilin/
Army in the field, December 18, [1942]. I, deputy head of the 6th Section of the NKVD OO of the Western Front, Captain of State Sec.[urity] Gordon, after having examined the materials of the case of a POW of the German Army, a fighter pilot, Lieutenant Justel Martin, b. 1922 in the town of Osterade (East Prussia),
Justel was a member of the Hitler youth organization, volunteered for the German Army in 1939, and actively participated in the actions of the German occupation in France and other countries. For this, he was awarded an Iron Cross of the 2nd Class. He did not give testimony on the military equipment of the German Army, saying that he knew nothing about it. On the basis of the above, I
Justel Martin SHOULD BE SHOT as an uncompromising enemy of the USSR.
Deputy head of the 6th Section of the OO NKVD,
Captain of State Sec.[urity] [signature] /Gordon/
‘I agree’:
Head of the 6th Section of the OO NKVD of the W[estern] F[ront],
Captain of State Sec.[urity] [signature] /Zaitsev/
December 18, 1942.40
The second document, handwritten, reported on the execution of the pilot:
Army in the field, December 19, 1942
We, the undersigned Jr. Lieutenant of State Sec.[urity] Ostreiko and Jr. Lieutenant of State Sec.[urity] Samusev, wrote this document to give notice that today, at 2:00 a.m., we executed the decision of the NKVD OO of the W/f [Western Front] regarding the POW Justel Martin.
Of course, not all POWs refused to answer the counterintelligence officers.42 If a German prisoner gave important information during his first interrogation, he might be sent to Moscow for further questioning by the head of the 4th Department of the UOO, frequently with colleagues from other departments.
The policy of taking as few enemy POWs as possible continued until the end of World War II. In 1944, 2nd Ukrainian Front commander Marshal Ivan Konev described to Yugoslavian Communist Milovan Djilas the Soviet victory at Korsun’-Shevchenkovsky in January 1944. Djilas recalls:
Not without exultation, [Konev] sketched a picture of Germany’s final catastrophe: refusing to surrender, some eighty, if not even one hundred, thousand Germans were forced into a narrow space, then tanks shattered their heavy equipment and machine-gun nests, while the Cossack cavalry finally finished them off. ‘We let the Cossacks cut up as long as they wished. They even hacked off the hands of those who raised them to surrender!’ the Marshal recounted with a smile.43
However, by 1943 the Soviets had begun to capture significant numbers of POWs. On January 30, 1943, the commander in chief of the German troops that encircled Stalingrad, Field Marshal Friedrich von Paulus, surrendered his army.44 Of approximately 100,000 German servicemen and 19,000 ‘hiwis’ (Soviet POW volunteers used as noncombatants) who became prisoners, only 5,000 Germans—mostly officers, who were treated better than privates—survived the Soviet camps.45 From Stalingrad onwards, a huge flow of German, Italian, Spanish, and Hungarian POWs began to populate POW camps inside Russia. Some of the captured intelligence officers ended up in Lubyanka Prison in the hands of the UOO.
In general, Soviet propaganda depicted the Germans as subhuman beings. Here is an example of a ‘politically correct’ excerpt from a letter written by Private Il’ichev to his relatives, which was included in an official OO report (in translating the letter, I have tried to capture the flavor of the Russian text): ‘I was a live witness to the surrender of the Fascist scum on a mass scale not far from the town of Kalinin. I wish you could see the miserable and terrifying shape of these dogs in human appearance… The day is coming when our army will beat up this scum on its own territory. Then no one will have mercy, even toward a three-month-old child. I will personally tear to pieces a degenerate [child] of these dogs.’46
The attitude of civilians toward the Germans was similar. Nikolai Gavrilov, a Muscovite who visited the city of Kaluga (only 100 miles from Moscow) just after it was liberated from the German troops on December 30, 1941, witnessed the following scene: ‘I saw children sliding down a hill… After I approached them, I realized that they were using [as a sled] the frozen body of a Fritz [a generic name for a German soldier in Russia during World War II]. His boots had been removed and his feet were cut off. Water was poured over the body, and it was covered with dung. The nose was destroyed… The kids pulled the body uphill using a rope with a hook. The ‘burden’ was very heavy, and they worked hard.’47
With the continuation of the war, the morale of the German POWs was changing. Lazar Brontman, a front journalist, wrote in his diary in March 1944: ‘Major Shemyakin, former professor of psychology at Moscow University… introduced an interesting taxonomy: a) the Germans taken prisoner in 1941–42 were proud and arrogant; they began talking only after being punched in the ear; b) a German lance corporal captured in 1943, during the Stalingrad battle… typically not only ordered POWs to line up, but also squatted down beside the line, to check and realign; c) the Germans taken in 1943–44 were completely apathetic and indifferent.’48
In the meantime, in the summer of 1942, the German Army Group South followed Hitler’s order ‘to secure the Caucasian oilfields’ and moved to the Northern Caucasus. Although on August 21 the German soldiers raised a Nazi flag on Mount Elbrus, the highest peak in Europe, the Red Army quickly pushed the Germans from that area.
By February 1943, after the surrender of Paulus’s Sixth Army in Stalingrad, the Soviet troops began to regain what they had lost during the previous two years of war. For almost two years a huge territory of Ukraine, Belorussia and a part of Russia had been controlled by the German occupation military and civilian administration, in which German security services played an important role. Additionally, in this territory various German security services opened numerous spy schools that recruited volunteers from the Soviet POWs and local population. At this turning point it became clear that military counterintelligence needed to focus its attention on the real German intelligence and counterintelligence services, and not on the alleged spies within the Red Army. In the meantime, the structure and activity of the German intelligence and counterintelligence services was very complex.
Notes
1. Stalin’s instruction to commanders of the Leningrad Front, dated November 13, 1941. Quoted in V. D. Danilin, ‘Stalinskaya strategiya nachala voiny,’ Otechestveyyaya istoriya 3 (1995).
2. Stavka’s Order No. 0428, dated November 17, 1941, in Russkii arkhiv. Velikaya Otechestvennaya. Prikazy, 13 (2-2), 119–20.
3. Directive of the Military Council of the Western Front, dated November 9, in Skrytaya pravda voiny: 1941 god. Neizvestnye documenty, edited by P. N. Knyshevsky et al., 210 (Moscow: Russkaya kniga, 1992) (in Russian).
4. Photo of this order in B. M. Bim-Bad, Stalin: issledovanie zhiznennogo stilia (Moscow: URAO, 2002), between pages 128 and 129. Another copy is kept in the U.S. Library of Congress, Manuscript Division, ‘Volkogonov Collection,’ Reel 4.