In 1941–43, several Brandenburger groups were dropped near Murmansk, a city on the Barents Sea, with orders to destroy the railway from Murmansk to Leningrad.49 Murmansk had a big port, where in 1941–42 British and American ships brought American supplies sent to the Soviet Union as part of the American lend-lease. Also, this railway was important for moving Soviet troops in the North and supplying the encircled Leningrad. In 1942–43, numerous Brandenburger sabotage groups were dropped into Southern Russia.
Some of the Brandenburg detachments were hard to control.50 On June 30, 1941, the Gruppe Nachtigall, part of the Brandenburg corps formed of western Ukrainian émigrés, entered the city of Lvov, followed by an SS-Einsatzgruppe. Just before the Soviet troops left the city, the NKVD killed in local prisons at least 3,000 Ukrainians—followers of the nationalist leader Stefan Bandera.51 The Jews were blamed for these atrocities because they allegedly supported the Soviet invasion in 1939. Using this rumor as an excuse, the Einsatzgruppe, along with the newly formed local Ukrainian police and, apparently, some of the Nachtigall members, slaughtered between 2,000 and 4,000 Jews and Poles.
Bandera, supported by the Nachtigall, proclaimed an independent ‘Ukrainian State’ in Lvov and formed a government under his deputy, Yaroslav Stetsko. In Berlin Alfred Rosenberg, Minister for Eastern Territories, was outraged since his plans for the area did not include any state independent from Germany. By July 12, the Gestapo arrested Bandera and Stetsko and they spent most of the rest of the war in Sachsenhausen-Zellenbau concentration camp. On Canaris’s order, the Nachtigall was transferred from Ukraine to Germany. Later the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), organized by Ukrainian nationalists in the area of Lvov, became one of the main targets of the NKVD, SMERSH, and the NKGB. The UPA fought against the Germans, the Soviets, and the Polish underground Armija Krajowa (Home Army).52
In the autumn of 1941, Walli II formed an additional battalion, Bergman (later Corps Alpinist), for actions in the Caucasus.53 It consisted of 1,500 volunteers, mostly Soviet POWs of various Caucasian ethnic groups. In 1942 and 1943, this battalion fought in the Caucasus, then in the Crimea, and from April 1944, in Romania and Greece. The Abwehr also used two special groups, Tamara 1 and 2, formed of Georgian emigrants, attached to the Army Group South, for diversion and intelligence collection.
The FHO Takes Over
The RSHA was not the only threat to Abwehr’s activity. In December 1941, after the German troops stopped near Moscow, Hitler decided to make decisions in Russia by himself and became Supreme Commander of the Army High Command (Oberkommando des Heeres or OKH). De facto the OKH was responsible for military actions at the Eastern Front, and the OKW, at the Western Front in Europe. With this change, Abwehr remained in the OKW, but the cooperation of Stab Walli with the OKH increased.
The OKH had its own military intelligence department, the FHO (Foreign Armies East), responsible for military affairs in Eastern Europe.54 It analyzed information received from the Abwehr and other sources and made estimations and predictions. From mid-1942 on, the FHO was directly subordinated to the Chief of the General Staff and to the OKH Operations Department. Colonel Reinhard Gehlen, head of the FHO from April 1942 onwards, was a forty-year-old ‘thin man of medium height with dark thinning hair’.55 General Franz Halder, Chief of the General Staff from 1938 until September 1942, highly praised Gehlen: ‘[He] combines extraordinary ability and knowledge with unusual assiduity and a soldier’s ardour. He is born a leader.’56
Gehlen introduced a new three-part structure for the FHO’s Russian department.57 Gruppe (Section) I, headed by Captain Gerhard Wessel, produced a daily enemy situation report, situation maps, and statistics, including numbers of Soviet prisoners.
Gruppe II, under Major Heinz Danko Herre and then Major Horst Hiemenz (Herre eventually became head of the training section of the Vlasov Army consisting of former Red Army servicemen), reported on the economic and military potential of the Soviet Union and evaluated the strategy and operational intentions of the Stavka. It assessed the statements of Soviet POWs, evaluated captured documents and Soviet press items, and maintained the main index of Soviet formations and Soviet high-level personnel.
Gruppe III was responsible for translating captured documents, press articles, radio broadcasts, and propaganda materials. Colonel Alexis Baron von Rönne, fluent in Russian, an FHO liaison with the Abwehr, SD, OKH, and OKW—and later a member of the anti-Hitler plot—headed this section until March 1943, when he was appointed head of the Fremde Heere West, an equivalent of the FHO at the Western Front. Captain Egon Peterson succeeded him. At a special interrogation center subordinated to Gruppe III and commanded by the former Soviet Major Vasilii Sakharov, selected Soviet POWs were interrogated in detail.
Two signals intelligence offices shared information on reconnaissance with the FHO, Fremde Luftwaffe Ost, German Air Force intelligence, and Leitstelle für Nachrichetenaufklärung Ost, the OKH signals intelligence organization. The Germans broke a number of Red Army, Soviet Air Force, and NKVD ciphers, and the FHO received a lot of information obtained through radio reconnaissance.
In mid-1942, Walli’s sections I and III were placed under the operational control of the FHO.58 To make the contact more efficient, Walli I moved closer to the location of the FHO. From June 1941 until July 1942, German General Staff and Gehlen’s office were in Mauerwald (now Mamerki), while Walli I was stationed nearby. Mauerwald was not far from ‘Wolfschanze’ (Wolf’s Lair), Hitler’s headquarters near Rastenburg, a small town in East Prussia (now Ketrzyn, Poland).
From mid-July to October 1942, when Hitler used his other headquarters ‘Wehrwolf’ (should be ‘Werewolf’ in English, but Hitler ordered that it be spelled ‘Wehr’ as the word ‘defense’ in German) near Vinnitsa in the occupied Ukraine, the OKH and Walli I were stationed in Vinnitsa itself. In November 1942, Hitler went back to the Wolfschanze, and the OKH, to Mauerwald, while Walli I moved to Neuhof (now Timofeevka), again not far from Mauerwald. They stayed there until November 1944. In 1943, Hitler stayed in ‘Wehrwolf’ twice, in February–March and August–September.
From July 1942 onwards, the FHO was responsible for evaluating information from Walli’s sections I and III and for providing an independent estimate of the enemy situation. However, Major Hiemenz, head of FHO Group II, was skeptical regarding the information he received from Walli on Russia: ‘All we got from Canaris was rubbish.’59
Notes
1. Karl Heinz Abshagen, Canaris, translated by Alan Houghton Brodrick (London: Hutchinson, 1956), 23.
2. David Kahn, Hitler’s Spies: German Military Intelligence in World War II (New York: Collier Books, 1978), 233.
3. Ibid., 238.
4. SMERSH. Istoricheskie ocherki i dokumenty, edited by V. S. Khristoforov, et al. (Moscow: Glavnoe arkhivnoe upravlenie, 2003), 75 (in Russian).
5. Details in Julius Madder, Hitlers Spionagegenerale sagen aus (Berlin: Verlag der Nation, 1978), 429–48.
6. Abshagen, Canaris, 85; Ladislav Farago, Burn After Reading: The Espionage History of World War II (New York: Pinnacle Books, 1972), 28; Kahn, Hitler’s Spies, 236–7.