On January 11, 1945, the UPVI was renamed the Main Directorate, becoming the GUPVI, while Ivan Petrov was appointed its head.31 Already on February 2, Lieutenant General Mikhail Krivenko, former deputy head of the NKVD Main Directorate of the Border Guards, replaced him. His participation in the Katyn Forest massacre has already been mentioned. The 2nd (Operational) Directorate of the GUPVI staff consisted of 71 men, and the activity of its 1st Department was almost identical to that of the 1st Section of the 2nd Department of the GUKR SMERSH.
The most important war criminals and intelligence officers investigated by the Operational Directorate were kept in the NKVD/MVD investigation prisons Butyrka, Taganka, and Sretenka in Moscow. They were tried and convicted by the Military Tribunal of the Moscow Military District or the OSO (NKVD/MVD). Out of more than 400 Soviet labor camps, convicted important POWs were sent only to the camps of Vorkuta or Norilsk. Unimportant POWs were tried by POW camp tribunals and the convicts were sent to the Karlag camp (Kazakhstan) or Siblag camp (Krasnoyarsk Province in Siberia).32 From 1949 onwards, the most important convicted POWs were held in the MVD Prison in Novocherkassk.
Camp No. 27 in Krasnogorsk
The POWs in Krasnogorsk Camp No. 27 in the Moscow suburbs were the main targets of the 1st Department of the Operational Directorate. In 1943–45, the camp’s Zone No. 1 held members of the former German military elite, including Field Marshal Friedrich von Paulus, former commander of the 6th Army; Lieutenant General Arthur Schmidt, former HQ head of the same army; Lieutenant General Vincenz Müller, former commander of the German 12th Army Corps; and Hitler’s personal pilot, Lieutenant General Hans Baur.33 An Anti-Fascist School for the ‘re-education’ of POWs (‘Antifa,’ in POW jargon) and barracks for its students were located in Zone No. 2. Most of the candidates selected for this school were former German and Austrian soldiers and low-level commanders.
Also held in Camp No. 27 (Zone 1) were the relatives of German political and economic leaders, including Lieutenant Heinrich von Einsiedel, a great-grandson of Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. After his release in 1948, von Einsiedel defected to the Western Zone in Berlin. Another prisoner was Lieutenant Colonel Adolf Victor von Papen, a relative of Franz von Papen, the former German Chancellor. During World War II, Franz von Papen was German envoy to Turkey, and in 1941 he was the target of an unsuccessful assassination attempt by the NKVD/GRU team led by Sudoplatov’s deputy Naum Eitingon.34 There was also Harold Bohlen und Holbach, the youngest son of Gustav Krupp (Gustav von Bohlen), the German ‘cannon king,’ a defendant in Nuremberg who was related to the American diplomat Charles (‘Chip’) Bohlen. The latter served as a Russian interpreter for President Franklin D. Roosevelt at the Tehran and Yalta conferences and for President Harry S. Truman, at the Potsdam Conference. Later, from 1953–57, he was American Ambassador to Moscow.
In August 1944, Harold Bohlen, at the time a member of the German military mission in Bucharest, was detained by the Romanian military along with other members of the mission. However, in October Bohlen, together with another officer of the mission, Major Prince Albrecht Hohenzollern, escaped from a concentration camp. Romanian King Mihai, a nephew of Prince Albrecht, organized the escape.35 Unfortunately for him, Bohlen was caught again and ended up in Camp No. 27. Prince Albrecht managed to hide from the Soviets.
The Romanian and Hungarian generals were also held in Camp No. 27. Japanese POWs were there from August 1946 to September 1948. In 1945–47, a separate ‘cottage’ (barrack) of the camp held entire families of Polish aristocrats: Radziwills, Krasnickis, Zamoiskis, and Branickis. The NKVD operatives arrested the Radziwill family just after Prince Janusz Radziwill had spent several months under German arrest, suspected of participation in organizing the Warsaw Uprising.36
The NKVD first captured Prince Radziwill, a prominent Polish politician, in 1939, after the Soviet annexation of the Polish territory. According to Pavel Sudoplatov, in Lubyanka Prison Beria personally interrogated the prince and supposedly persuaded him to report on Hermann Goering, head of the Luftwaffe (Air Force), whom Radziwill knew well.37 The NKVD considered Radziwill to be an ‘agent of influence’ rather than an ‘operational agent’ (i.e., a spy). An ‘agent of influence’ might even not have known that he was used in Soviet interests. In 1940, Prince Radziwill was released from prison and returned to Berlin, but he did not receive any instructions from Moscow.
Sudoplatov writes that at the beginning of 1945 he again used Prince Radziwill, who had been captured for the second time.38 Sudoplatov took the prince as a translator to a dinner with W. Averell Harriman, the American Ambassador, knowing that Radziwill and Harriman were already acquainted. During the dinner Sudoplatov, who introduced himself as ‘Pavel Matveyev,’ tried to find out what plans for post-war Europe the Americans would bring to the conference in Yalta (February 4–11, 1945). Sudoplatov lied, saying that Radziwill was living in Moscow in exile and was free to travel to Poland and London. In fact, after the meeting Radziwill joined his family incarcerated in Camp No. 27. Both Sudoplatov’s stories about Radziwill need verification.
In March 1946, British Ambassador to Moscow Archibald Clark Kerr wrote to Stalin asking him to free the Radziwill family that included two children. The release was postponed until the end of 1947, and Janusz’s wife Anna Radziwill died on February 16, 1947, before the family could leave the camp.
The Operational Directorate used Camp No. 27 (Zone 1) for two main purposes: to collect information on elite prisoners through informers, and for ideological brainwashing, preparing German collaborators for future work in the Soviet-occupied zone of Germany. As von Einsiedel wrote in his memoirs, even some German generals, including Vincenz Müller, became NKVD informers and spied on their fellow prisoners.39
Informers and collaborators were sent back to Germany early. Thus, by September 1948, General Müller had already been repatriated to East Germany, where he became a Police General.40 American military counterintelligence (CIC) twice tried to organize Müller’s defection to the West, but the general did not want to go.41 In contrast, Harold Bohlen and Adolf von Papen, who refused to collaborate with the NKVD officers, were convicted only in 1950. For the alleged spying and ‘aiding the international bourgeoisie’ they both received sentences of twenty-five years in the labor camps. They were sent to the camps near Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg) and returned to West Germany only in 1955.
In mid-1949, Camp No. 27, known as ‘operational-transitional,’ became one of seven GUPVI’s special ‘filtration’ camps for vetting the most important POWs of high officer ranks before their repatriation to Germany.42 As a result, the Operational Directorate selected forty-one generals—‘military revenge-seekers’—and opened criminal cases against them.43 For investigation they were transferred to the MVD investigation prisons in Moscow. In November 1950, Camp No. 27 was closed.