Opperation Zeppelin unsuccessfully tried to form an auxiliary military unit, the Russian SS troops. In June 1942, the 1st Russian National SS Detachment or Druzhina No. 1 was organized under the command of the former Soviet Lieutenant Colonel Vladimir Gil (pseudonym ‘I. G. Rodionov’).17 ‘Druzhina’ is an old word for a military unit of a Middle Ages Russian prince. By March 1943, Druzhina No. 1 became the Special ‘Druzhina’ SD Brigade that included three rifle battalions and other detachments. The brigade’s officers were former Red Army commanders or White Russian officers, and the former Soviet Major General Pavel Bogdanov headed the counterintelligence department. However, the brigade’s staff was formed of SS officers and SS-Obersturmbannführer Appel supervised the brigade. On August 16, 1943, while stationed in Belorussia, part of the brigade turned against the Germans and about 2,200 members changed sides. It became the 1st Anti-Fascist Partisan Brigade under Gil-Rodionov’s command, but on May 14, 1944 Gil was killed in battle.
Jointly with Alfred Rosenberg’s Ministry for Eastern Territories, Zeppelin organized the so-called national committees in exile. According to the Nazi plan, the committees represented future governments of independent states that would be formed after the German victory. There were Georgian, Armenian, Azeri, Turkistan, North Caucasian, Volga Tatar, and Kalmyk committees.18 For these committees, Rosenberg’s ministry opened seven of its own schools in Germany and Poland for training agent-propagandists selected from among POWs and workers brought to Germany from the occupied territories. Finally, the Russian Committee headed by General Andrei Vlasov, which later became the Russian Liberation Army (ROA), was formed in 1942 in Berlin. This was a joint effort of the OKW Propaganda Department, Abwehr, and the RSHA.
In the Occupied Territories
The Germans divided the occupied Soviet territories into two zones, A and B. Zone A included a territory of 800–1,000 kilometers in the rear of the fighting troops and was administered by military commandants. Territories far from the front (Zone B) were managed by Reichskommissars appointed by the Ministry for Eastern Territories established in July 1941.19 Before the war, Hitler planned to organize four Reichskommissariaten in Russia, but only two were established, Reichskommissariat Ostland (Baltic States and Belorussia, Reichskommissar Hinrich Lohse) and Reichskommissariat Ukraine (Ukraine and the neighboring territories, Reichskommissar Erich Koch). Both Abwehr and SS organized local centers within the German civilian administration of Reichskommissars.
In July 1941, Abwehr established its center, Abwehrstelle (or Ast) Ostland, in Riga.20 It consisted of three departments (intelligence, sabotage, and counterintelligence) and coordinated intelligence and counterintelligence work in the occupied Baltic States and part of Belorussia. Branches (Abwehrnebenstellen or Ansts) were also organized in Tallinn, Kaunas, and Minsk and smaller units in other Baltic towns, as well as mobile detachments in Belorussia. Ast officers could make arrests and carry out investigations. In 1942, Ast Ostland opened two schools for training its own agents. In 1944, the SMERSH Directorate of the 2nd Baltic Front captured lists of the Ast Ostland agents who were sent to the rear of the Red Army.
To combat NKVD agents and partisans in Ukraine, in August 1941 Abwehr III formed a counterintelligence center Ast Ukraine in Rovno (later it moved to Poltava), headed by Colonel Naumann.21 It consisted of five referats:
III F: combating Soviet intelligence agents
III C: combating the Soviet underground and partisans
III L: counterintelligence in the air force
III Kgf: counterintelligence among POWs
III M: counterintelligence in the Navy in the city of Nikolaev (a port on the Black Sea).
Ast Ukraine had branches (Ansts) in Kiev, Nikolaev, and Vinnitsa as well as smaller units under the cover of military staffs. Many of these units were headed by White Russian émigrés. The work of Ast Ukraine was based on information from local secret agents.
At the beginning of 1943, the Abwehr had 130 intelligence and sabotage centers in the occupied territory. It opened 60 schools in Minsk, Vitebsk, Smolensk, Orel, Poltava, the Crimea, and so forth. According to SMERSH information, the schools trained four categories of agents:
1. Agent-spies, whose task was to gather information about the Red Army and send it back to German intelligence centers;
2. Agent-saboteurs, whose task was to blow up military and industrial facilities;
3. Agent-terrorists, whose task was to assassinate Red Army commanders and government functionaries;
4. Agent-propagandists, whose task was to disseminate false rumors about the Red Army and its inevitable defeat.22
After training, the agents were sent into Soviet-controlled territory.
In Zone B, the SS established a chain administered by five SS and Police Leaders (Höhere SS und Polizeiführer or HSSPf).23 Himmler personally appointed HSSPfs and they reported to him. Higher SS and Police Leaders (Höchste SS und Polizeiführers or HöSSPfs) headed regional SS centers and reported to the HSSPfs.24 An SS und Polizeiführer (SSPf) commanded a local headquarters staff that represented the Orpo, Gestapo, SD and Waffen SS and was usually formed of Einsatzgruppen personnel who had operated in the region. Additional police forces were recruited from among the locals.
From mid-1943 onwards, finding and arresting members of all the above-mentioned German organizations was the main goal of SMERSH. In addition, SMERSH took on the enormous task of arresting and vetting Soviet collaborators and many Soviet citizens who had the misfortune to have lived in German-occupied territories.
Soviet Collaborators
The relationship between the local population and the German invaders during the occupation was not black and white, but much more complicated. The brief German occupation of Kaluga, a town located 190 kilometers to the southwest of Moscow, was a good example. German troops occupied Kaluga on October 13, 1941, during their fast advance toward Moscow. By November 8, the Germans had organized a Jewish ghetto, ordered the Jews to put on yellow stars, shot some of them, and hanged several partisans.
At the same time, the Germans opened Orthodox churches—an important anti-Soviet propaganda gesture. Most churches had been closed since the 1920s because in the Soviet Union the Church was viewed as a potential ideological rival of Communism. In 1941, Metropolitan Sergei Voskresensky, who lived in Riga, even created the ‘Russian Orthodox Mission in the Liberated [i.e. German-occupied] Regions of Russia’, with Pskov as the Church administration center.25 Nikolai Gavrilov, a sculptor drafted by the Red Army to draw illustrations of war scenes, recalled: ‘[In Kaluga] fifty-two official marriages of Germans with our girls were registered in the churches… During the retreat, the Germans took these women with them and later killed them.’26 After the Soviet 50th Army took back Kaluga, OO operatives hunted down collaborators—administrators appointed by the occupants, the editor and staff of a Russian newspaper that was published in Kaluga during the two-month occupation, and so forth.
Three days before Kaluga was liberated, the GKO ordered the arrest of the family members of all traitors and German collaborators sentenced by the OSO.27 In June 1942, a new GKO order defined the family members of the servicemen and civilians who had been sentenced to death for treason, worked for the Germans during the occupation or escaped with the retreating Germans: the father, mother, husband, wife, sons, daughters, brothers and sisters ‘if they lived together with the traitor or were at his expense at the time when the crime was committed’.28