Leaders of the Einsatzgruppen, usually highly educated men, received orders from Reinhard Heydrich, head of the RSHA, or from Bruno Streckenbach, Heydrich’s deputy and head of the RSHA Personnel Department.5 Streckenbach had personal experience of heading the Ensatzgruppe I in Poland in the autumn of 1939. After this, in 1939–40, as head of the Gestapo and SD in Krakow, he supervised the arrests and persecution of Polish professors as part of the so-called AB Aktion. Like the Katyn Forest massacre in the Soviet Union in April 1940, this German action aimed to destroy the Polish elite and intelligentsia.
During the first months of the war with the Soviet Union, Einsatzgruppen executed Jews, political commissars, and other high-ranking officers selected from Soviet POWs. In many places Einsatzgruppen were extremely efficient. For instance, the city of Brest was taken over on June 22, 1941, at 9:00 a.m., and by 2:00 p.m. the arrests of the Communist Party and Soviet officials, as well as the Jews, began according to the lists of names prepared by German agents before the war.6
Einsatzgruppen committed outrageous atrocities in the occupied territories.7 For example, Einsatzgruppe C (commanded by Dr. Otto Rasch) carried out the well-known massacre of Jews in Kiev’s suburb Babi Yar. Kiev was taken by German troops on September 19, 1941. Despite a chaotic Red Army retreat, before leaving big cities like Kiev and Kharkov, the NKVD operatives and engineering troops usually put remote-controlled mines in important buildings.8 These mines were blown up by radio signals after the cities were occupied by the Nazis. Many civilians were killed in the central part of Kiev by such explosions, which went on for more than a week, and fires destroyed what was left of the buildings. The Germans and local Ukrainians blamed the Jews for the explosions. As SS representatives reported to Berlin, in retaliation 33,771 Jews were rounded up and killed on September 29 and 30, 1941, by Sonderkommando 4a of Einsatzgruppe C, two squads of the Order Police known as Orpo, and the local collaborators, the Ukrainian militia (police).9 In fact, the SS decided to exterminate the Jewish population of Kiev on September 16, before the fall of the city and the explosions. By December 1941, the four Einsatzgruppen that followed the German troops had exterminated about 300,000 Jews in the newly-occupied territories.
Einsatzgruppen cooperated with the Abwehr III field groups in vetting Soviet POWs. Abwehr III officers made lists of the Jews, Gypsies, and commissars identified among the POWs. Einsatzgruppen or the GFP used these lists for carrying out executions.10 From July 1941 onwards, the Gestapo and SD operatives were also responsible for screening POWs and carried out executions of the selected POWs. The Orpo had its own Police Battalions that conducted executions and actions against partisans, and its members also participated in Einsatzgruppen.
Operation Zeppelin
In the spring of 1942, Walter Schellenberg, head of the Amt VI, developed the plan for Operation Zeppelin. In 1945, he testified in Nuremberg:
The purpose of… [Zeppelin] was to choose from a selection of Russian prisoners intelligent and suitable men to be deployed on the eastern front behind the Russian lines… The POWs thus selected were turned over to Commandos in the rear, who trained the prisoners… in assignments of the secret messenger service and in wireless communications. In order to furnish these prisoners with a motive for work, they were treated extremely well. They were shown the best possible kind of Germany.11
The SD Referat VI C/Z was responsible for the whole operation.12 Its staff was located in the Wansee Villa widely known due to the 1942 conference The Final Solution of the Jewish Question that took place there. In November 1944, Schellenberg also moved with his staff to this villa after the Prinz-Albrecht-Palais at Wilhelmstrasse 102, the SS headquarters in Berlin, was bombed out.
At first SS-Sturmbannführer Walter Kurreck headed Referat VI C/Z. After he left Berlin in July 1942 to participate in the Einsatzgruppe D in Southern Russia, SS-Obersturmbannführer Rudolf Oebsger-Röder succeeded him. In the field, special Aussenkommandos of up to 50 men attached to Einsatzgruppen selected Soviet POWs who agreed to work for the SD. Radio contact with the field groups was conducted by ‘the Havel Institute’, a powerful SD radio station (Referat VI F) installed in Wansee near the villa. The Havel Institute also taught radio operators for Operation Zeppelin.
In February 1943, Oebsger-Röder also left Berlin to command the Einsatzkommando Cluj in Hungary, and SS-Standartenführer Heinz Gräfe became head of the Referat VI C/Z. Two main field Hauptkommandos, Russland-Mitte (consisting of four Aussenkommandos, operational area from the Northern Ukraine to the White Sea) and Russland-Süd (from seven to ten Aussenkommandos, operational area from the Northern Ukraine to the Black Sea; later divided into ‘Russland-Nord’ and ‘Ukraine-Süd’) were organized. In the summer of the same year, Dr. Erich Hengelhaupt replaced Gräfe. A year later he divided each part of Operation Zeppelin, including the headquarters staff, into two bureaus: one for compiling information, and another for evaluating the collected information and writing reports to the Referat’s chief and Schellenberg. In the main headquarters, the second bureau was also in control of field agents.
The headquarters of each Hauptkommando were in charge of controlling agent operations and training, and preliminary evaluation of incoming information. Compilations of information were sent to Wansee by plane or courier. After Hengelhaupt was promoted to Abteilung VI C head, SS-Standartenführer Walter H. Rapp, a career SD-man, headed Referat VI C/Z from November 1944 to April 1945.
At the beginning of the operation, three secret training schools for Zeppelin agents were organized in the concentration camps Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, and Auschwitz.13 Later, there were five Zeppelin companies, four of which were formed of volunteers from a particular ethnic group: Georgians, Armenians, Azeri, and other Caucasian people. People from Central Asia were trained in a camp near Warsaw. Russian agents for parachuting near Moscow, Leningrad, and the industrial region in the Ural Mountains were taught at the Hauptlager Jablon school near the city of Lublin in Poland.
A separate group of approximately 200 experts on the Soviet economy was selected from among the POWs and kept in Special Lager L.14 These experts analyzed intelligence information on the Soviet economy obtained from Soviet sources and the press, as well as from POWs, and prepared maps and charts of Soviet industrial regions and particular objects.
During the first year, about 3,000 agents graduated from the Zeppelin schools.15 After the German defeat at Stalingrad in February 1943, the number of POW volunteers for schools dropped significantly.
The FHO provided Zeppelin’s agents with specific information for each operation on Soviet territory.16 Most of these operations failed because agents were captured or killed, or immediately surrendered to the NKVD or SMERSH. Despite this, from 1942 to 1943, the German army had from 500 to 800 agents behind Soviet lines at any time.