46. Report by Isai Babich, dated January 1, 1942. Lubyanka v dni bitvy, 302–6.
47. Sculptor N. P. Gavrilov’s visit to K. K. Rokossovsky’s troops in December of 1941. Document No. III-43 in Moskva voennaya, 1941–1945: memuary i arkhivnye dokumenty, edited by K. I. Bukov, M. M. Gorinov, and A. N. Ponomarev, 586–98 (Moscow: Mosgorarkhiv, 1995) (in Russian).
48. L. K. Brontman, ‘Dnevniki 1932–1947 gg.,’ Samizdat, 2004 (in Russian), http://militera.lib.ru/db/brontman_lk/1944.html, retrieved September 6, 2011.
Part IV. German Intelligence Services at the Eastern Front
CHAPTER 13
German Military Intelligence at the Eastern Front
By 1943, a complex German intelligence network existed at the Eastern Front and in the occupied territories. After the creation of SMERSH, Soviet counterintelligence’s main goal became finding and arresting members of German intelligence and counterintelligence. Arrest of Soviet collaborators and vetting of Soviet citizens living in areas that had been occupied by German troops was also an important part of SMERSH’s work. Since the German secret services at the Eastern Front have never been described in detail in historical sources in English, their general structure and activities are presented below.
There were two main German intelligence services, the Abwehr, military intelligence and counterintelligence, and the SD (Sicherheitsdienst) or Amt (Office) VI, the foreign intelligence within the State Security Main Office (Reichssicherheitshautamt or RSHA) of the SS (Schutzstaffel, a military organization of the Nazi Party). Abwehr can be described as the Red Army’s Intelligence Directorate merged together with the UOO, while the RSHA’s function was similar to that of the GUGB in the NKVD or the NKGB in 1941. In addition to their headquarters in Berlin, both services had branches in the field and in the occupied territory.
Abwehr, its Leaders and the RSHA
Abwehr was part of the Nazi military leadership structure. Formally, the High Command of the Armed Forces (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht or OKW) directed operations of the German Armed Forces that included the Army (Heer), Navy (Kriegsmarine), and Air Force (Luftwaffe). Abwehr was one of four OKW branches, and its full name was the Overseas Department/Office in Defense of the Armed Forces High Command (Amt Ausland/Abwehr im Oberkommando der Wehrmacht). The OKW’s Operations Branch distributed Abwehr’s intelligence information and its summaries to the intelligence evaluation sections of the army, navy, and air force. Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, Abwehr’s head, reported to the German High Command, consisting of OKW Chief Wilhelm Keitel, Operations Branch Chief Alfred Jodl, and his deputy, Walter Warlimont. Canaris was ‘a slim man of medium height… possessed of an extraordinary lively intelligence’.1 Every day the German High Command reported to Hitler about the war situation, but the most important intelligence information Canaris reported to Hitler personally.
Abwehr’s structure was established on June 1, 1938, four months before Beria reorganized the NKVD.2 Abwehr had three operational departments (Abteilungen) of five: I (intelligence), II (sabotage), and III (counterintelligence). Its headquarters in Berlin were small; in March 1943 only sixty-three officers served in Abteilung I, thirty-four in Abteilung II, and forty-three in Abteilung III.3 Therefore, Abteilung III’s HQ in Berlin was 15 times smaller than SMERSH’s HQ in Moscow (646 officers) organized the same year with a similar counterintelligence function.4
Abwehr’s Abteilung I collected intelligence on foreign armies, was in charge of identifying foreign spies in the armed forces (similar to the UOO and partly to the SMERSH mandate), disseminating disinformation among enemies, and guarding military and state secrets.5 It consisted of twelve groups, organized according to geography and economic principles. Colonel Hans Piekenbrock, ‘a Rhinelander who enjoyed life and was always ready for a joke’, headed Abteilung I from 1936 until March 1943 and was, possibly, Admiral Canaris’s best friend.6 Admiral Canaris called him ‘Pieki’, and ‘Pieki’ ‘called Canaris “Excellency”, a title to which general officers had a right under the Kaiser’. Piekenbrock was so popular among his colleagues that one of the Abwehr’s operations against Britain in 1940 was even called ‘Operation Elena’ after his wife. Piekenbrock frequently accompanied Canaris on his trips abroad, establishing contacts with foreign intelligence services and organizing and inspecting the work of Abwehr I outposts. Before the war he visited seventeen countries.
In March 1943 Piekenbrock left the Abwehr for the army, and Colonel Georg Hansen succeeded him as head of Abteilung I. He was 38, ‘blond, tall, slim, good-looking, who in contrast to the elegant Piekenbrock often buddied up to the enlisted men’.7 In May 1945, Piekenbrock was taken prisoner by SMERSH.
In the Soviet structure, military intelligence had functions similar to the main function of Abteilung I. From April 18, 1943 onwards, there were two intelligence organizations: Razvedupr or RU (an abbreviation from Razvedyvatel’noe upravlenie or Intelligence Directorate; headed by Fyodor Kuznetsov) of the Red Army’s General Staff (field intelligence) and Glavnoe razvedyvatel’noe upravlenie (Main Intelligence Directorate) or GRU (headed by Ivan Il’ichev) of the Defense Commissariat (NKO) (in charge of foreign intelligence).8 There were three operational departments within RU: the 1st, in charge of field intelligence; the 2nd, in charge of agent intelligence, and the 3rd that analyzed the incoming information. The Investigation Department, along with the 1st and 2nd departments, interrogated the German POWs.
Until the summer of 1943, Colonel Erwin von Lahousen, ‘an Austrian officer and a bitter enemy of Hitler’, headed the Abwehr’s Abteilung II in charge of sabotage.9 Before the Anschluss, the incorporation of Austria into the Third Reich in 1938, Lahousen served in the Intelligence Department of the Austrian General Staff as a specialist on Czechoslovakia. He was six foot tall, called ‘Long L’ in the Abwehr and ‘gained the complete confidence of his chief’, Canaris.10 In August 1943, von Lahousen was sent to the Eastern Front, and another of Canaris’s close associates, Baron Wessel von Freytag-Loringhoven, succeeded him.11 In 1944, Loringhoven provided the detonator charge and explosives for the assassination attempt against Hitler. On July 26, 1944 he committed suicide after being arrested by the Gestapo.
Von Lahousen’s deputy, Colonel Erwin Stolze, called ‘Saboteur No. 2’, headed Group 2A within Abteilung II, which specialized in diversions and terrorism in the Soviet Union. Until 1936, Stolze served in Abwehr I and was responsible for the intelligence collected in Eastern and Southeastern Europe.12 He supervised a number of White Russian officers, including General Yevgeny Dostovalov and Colonel Pyotr Durnovo, who conducted analysis of the Soviet press and used other Russian sources to provide Stolze with information. Stolze did not know that General Dostovalov was a double agent. From 1923 on, he worked for Soviet intelligence, and later he even moved to the Soviet Union, where he was arrested and executed in 1938.13 Therefore, most probably he provided Stolze with disinformation. Colonel Durnovo, on the contrary, became head of Abwehr’s agents in Yugoslavia in 1941. In February 1945 he and his family were killed during the infamous bombing of Dresden.14 Stolze’s close relations with the leaders of the Ukrainian emigration community were helpful in Abwehr’s preparation for Operation Barbarossa. On May 31, 1945, SMERSH arrested Stolze in Berlin.