109. NKO Order No. 1-ssh, signed by Stalin and dated April 29, 1943. A photo in SMERSH, 72.
110. Romanov, Nights Are Longest There, 67.
Part VI. SMERSH in Action: 1943–44
CHAPTER 18
General Activity
Although SMERSH continued working on identifying real and imagined Soviet military traitors and deserters, as the UOO had done before, its primary focus now shifted to countering German intelligence and counterintelligence. All operational SMERSH officers in the field were provided with a long instruction entitled Organization of Search for and Liquidation of Enemy Agents.1 Since German agents generally possessed forged Soviet documents and military awards, GUKR also published secret reference booklets for verifying military documents (Materials for Identification of Forged Documents, May 1943) and awards (Materials for Identification of Forged USSR Awards and Medals, September 1943). Additionally, it became easier to identify German agents with false documents because in December 1943 a unified system of officer IDs was introduced in the Red Army.2 Now the IDs were created at special printing houses and had numbers that could be checked.
Near the front line, SMERSH initiated new tactics for capturing German agents, using operational groups of three members who constantly checked the documents of all suspicious-looking individuals.3 Two members of each group were SMERSH officers, and the third was a recruited former German agent who could identify other agents. But with the transformation of the UOO into SMERSH, Abakumov failed to take control of counterintelligence in the partisan (guerrilla) movement in the rear of the German troops.
In Partisan Detachments
With the creation of SMERSH it became unclear which organization was in charge of the Special Departments (OOs) within the partisan movement. While Panteleimon Ponomarenko, the influential first Party secretary of Belorussia, headed the partisan movement, the NKVD—under Lavrentii Beria—supervised the OOs in the partisan detachments created in 1942.4
The Soviet partisan movement had a long history. In the 1920s and 1930s, special schools attached to the OO trained terrorists and saboteurs for future war, and similar schools in the Red Army were part of the 5th Department of the General Staff.5 During the Great Terror of 1937–38, most of the sabotage specialists were arrested, convicted, and executed. They were considered unnecessary because of Stalin’s doctrine that future military actions would take place in the enemy’s territory.
On June 29, 1941, a week after the German invasion, the Council of Commissars (Sovnarkom) and the Central Committee ordered the creation of partisan detachments in the German-occupied territories.6 On July 5, the NKVD formed its own special sabotage group, which reported directly to Beria.7 Pavel Sudoplatov, who had successfully overseen the 1940 assassination of Leon Trotsky, was appointed its head. This group later became the 4th NKVD Directorate in charge of terror and sabotage in enemy-occupied territory. In April 1943, Sudoplatov’s directorate was transferred to the NKGB (State Security Commissariat), and its activities now partly overlapped those of SMERSH.
Paralleling the measures in Moscow, in 1941, local NKVD, NKGB, and Party functionaries in the German-occupied territories of Ukraine and Belorussia, as well as the OOs, political and military intelligence departments of the armies and fronts created their own partisan detachments.8 At the end of the summer of 1941, Ponomarenko sent Stalin a detailed plan for centralizing control over all partisan groups. The following December, Stalin summoned Ponomarenko to the Kremlin, where, after a two-hour discussion, he approved the establishment of the Central Headquarters of the Partisan Movement (TsShPD).9
It was not until May 30, 1942, that the State Defense Committee (GKO) ordered that the TsShPD should be attached to the Stavka—in other words, directly subordinated to Stalin, with Ponomarenko appointed as its head.10 Beria tried to oppose this decision, believing that Sudoplatov’s department in Moscow should control all partisans. In a compromise move, Vasilii Sergienko, NKVD Commissar of Ukraine and Beria’s protégé, was made Ponomarenko’s deputy, thus essentially leaving Beria in charge of the partisans.
The fighting unit of the partisan movement called otryad (a detachment) consisted of varying numbers of men. By January 1942, NKVD operational groups that had OO functions were created within all otryady.11 Official reports attest to their efficiency: for example, from 1942 to 1944, counterintelligence in the Ukrainian partisan detachments exposed and arrested 9,883 spies and traitors, of whom 1,998 were Gestapo spies.12
Not all of those arrested were real German spies. For example, there was a bizarre but widespread belief among partisan commanders and heads of the partisan OOs that many local Jews who, having escaped Nazi extermination efforts, tried to join the partisans, were Gestapo spies. On August 10, 1943, the commander of the Osipich partisan detachment reported to Moscow: ‘Recently, the Gestapo has started to use Jews as spies. The Gestapo offices in Minsk and Borisovo have established a nine-month course for the Jews. Spies have been sent to apartments in the city and to partisan detachments, and supplied with poison to kill their commanders and other partisans. Several of these spies were unmasked near Minsk.’13
Based on this belief, many Jewish escapees were arrested and executed as spies in partisan detachments.14 The truth was that the Abwehr had opened numerous schools to train local Belorussian, Ukrainian, and Russian volunteers as saboteurs, propagandists, and translators, while the Jews were hunted down by the Gestapo and SS-Einsatzgruppen, and had nothing to do with these schools.15
But anti-Semitism was not the only reason for false accusations. Another report reads: ‘In August 1943, the head of the Special Department of the Chkalov Brigade of the Baranovichi Partisan Detachment (Belorussia) personally shot to death nineteen-year-old Yelena Stankevich, a scout in this brigade’s “For the Soviet Motherland” unit, accusing her of being a Gestapo spy. In fact, she simply refused to be his lover.’16 Such executions were quite common. In the same year, Ivan Belik, head of the OO of the ‘Assault’ Partisan Brigade in Belorussia, shot a woman partisan, Verkhovod’ko, who was pregnant by Boris Lunin, commander of the brigade, on the false charge that she was a German spy.17 The real reason for her execution was that Lunin, who had a small harem in the brigade, did not want to deal with a pregnant girlfriend. In 1957 Belik and Lunin were sentenced to seven years in labor camps for this crime.
Some of the ‘spies’ captured by partisans ended up in the GUKR’s Moscow headquarters. On March 18, 1943, Henri Czaplinski (in Russian documents, Genrikh Maksimovich Chaplinsky), a 53-year-old Polish Jew and professor at the Krakow and Lvov conservatories, joined the Donukalov Partisan Brigade near Minsk.18 As an internationally known violinist, he had performed in many countries before the war, and also spoke several languages. From 1922 to 1923, he was a professor at the Hamburg Conservatory in Toronto, and from 1925 to 1927, he was first violinist with the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra.
Czaplinski told his OO interrogators that in 1940 he was arrested by the NKVD in Lvov and spent seven months in the Byelostok NKVD prison, from which he escaped during a German bombardment. On July 13, 1941, The New York Times published information about Czaplinski’s successful escape.19 After his escape, the multilingual Czaplinski worked as a translator at the headquarters of various Luftwaffe units stationed in Belorussia, which caused the OO officers of the partisan brigade to conclude that Czaplinski was an important German spy. Czaplinski was sent to Moscow, and on May 15, 1943, Ponomarenko and Lavrentii Tsanava, NKGB Commissar of Belorussia, reported to Stalin: