CHAPTER 15

German Intelligence and Occupation

Unlike Abwehr, the SD was not part of the German army and its representatives followed the troops in the rear within the Einsatzgruppen, the special killing squads, and later became part of the German administration in the occupied territories. In the occupied territories the SD created its own numerous espionage and diversion schools for volunteers from Soviet POWs and the local population.

The SD and Einsatzgruppen

Within the SD, headed by Walter Schellenberg, three referats of its Abteilung (Section) VI C (espionage in the USSR and Japan) were responsible for gathering and analyzing information on the Soviet Union.¹ Dr. Heinz Gräfe, a former lawyer, headed Abteilung VI C until September 1944, when he was killed in a car accident, and Dr. Erich Hengelhaupt, former specialist in theology and a journalist, succeeded him. Both men were experts on Russia and White emigrants. After almost three million Soviet servicemen were taken prisoner during the first months of Operation Barbarossa, the SD formed its network of Aussenkommandos—mostly mobile commands that interrogated POWs captured near the front line. Many of these SD officers were Baltic Germans who knew Russian well.

The SD was deeply involved in the organization and activity of the SS Einsatzgruppen. On Hitler’s orders, the SS Einsatzgruppen were created in 1939, just before World War II, with the task of, as SS General Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski put it at the Nuremberg Trials, ‘the annihilation of the Jews, Gypsies, and political commissars’.²

In June 1941, Einsatzgruppen followed the German troops in the rear. Einsatzgruppe A was attached to Army Group North and operated in the Baltic States, while Einsatzgruppe B was attached to the Army Group Center and operated in Belorussia. The latter included a special detachment for Moscow, but Moscow was never taken. Finally, two Einsatzgruppen were attached to the Army Group South, Einsatzgruppe C that operated in the Northern and Central Ukraine, and D, which operated in Moldavia, Southern Ukraine, the Crimea, and, eventually, the Caucasus.³ Their functions partly overlapped with the Abwehr I and III squads because Einsatzgruppen also searched for the Communist Party and NKVD documents.

An Einsatzgruppe consisted of at least 600 men and had headquarters and operational smaller groups, Einsatzkommandos, of 120–170 men, of whom 10–15 were officers. Each Einsatzkommando consisted of two or three smaller units called Sonderkommandos. Einsatzgruppen included members of all SS branches. For example, Einsatzgruppe A under the command of Dr. Franz Walter Stahlecker consisted of:

	Members of	Number of men4
	Waffen SS	340
	Gestapo	89
	SD	35
	Order Police (Orpo)	133
	Criminal police (Kripo)	41

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.¹⁰From 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.

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

The scale of Russian collaboration with the Nazis was astonishing.²⁹ Approximately 10 percent of the whole population in the occupied territory supported the Germans, about 700,000 former Soviet servicemen became ‘hiwis’ (noncombatant volunteers) and 1.4 million participated in the Nazi-controlled military units. To administer this huge number of volunteers, in December 1942 Lieutenant General Heinz Hellmich was appointed ‘General for Eastern Troops’ and attached to the Second Section of the OKH General Staff’s Organizational Deparment headed by Claus von Stauffenberg, the future leader of the 20th July 1944 Plot.³⁰ In January 1944, General Ernst Köstring, former Military Attaché in Moscow (1935–41) and in March-June 1943, ‘Delegate General for Caucasus Questions’ (i.e., military governor of the occupied part of the Caucasus), replaced von Stauffenberg and his title became ‘General of Volunteer Formations’.³¹ Köstring was born in Russia, spoke perfect Russian and knew the country well.

One can understand a Soviet POW volunteering for an Abwehr or Zeppelin school—it was the only chance for survival in the inhuman conditions of the German POW camps.³² Many also saw this as an opportunity to return to Soviet territory. However, the creation of Russian troops under German control was another matter. There were the above-mentioned Special ‘Druzhina’ SD Brigade and the Vlasov Army, as well as the Russian National Liberation Army (RONA) and various Cossack formations. The RONA of 10,000 men was created in the Lokot’ Republic, a Russian-administered region in German-occupied territory. It existed from 1941 to 1943 and was supported by Günther von Kluge, Commander of the Army Group Center.³³ The main Cossack formation, the XVth SS Cossack Cavalry Corps, formed in 1943 under the command of the German General Helmuth von Pannwitz, numbered 50,000 men. On the whole, by mid-1944, the Wehrmacht had 200 battalions of troops formed of Russians, Ukrainians, Belorussians and other nationalities.

The memoirs of Soviet POWs mention an important psychological detail of being taken prisoner: ‘In a few days all imprisoned Red Army commanders suddenly turned into strong enemies of their own country, the country where they were born, and of the government which they had sworn allegiance to… Those who continued to address “Comrade Commander” were punched in their faces or were even beaten up more seriously, and saying “Gospodin ofitser” [“Sir officer”, the address used in the Czar’s Army] became common.’³⁴ In Oflag XII-D for officers in Hammelsburg, the imprisoned Soviet major generals Fyodor Trukhin, Dmitrii Zakutnyi and Ivan Blagoveshchensky ‘cursed Stalin and the Soviet regime with the worst words and they agreed to the fact that [Mikhail] Tukhachevsky and his accomplices were innocent executed victims’.³⁵These three generals soon became among the most enthusiastic supporters of General Andrei Vlasov and his army. These examples show that many servicemen hated the Soviet regime so much that they were ready to fight against it, even on the enemy’s side. Not the least important reason for this was Stalin’s refusal to admit the existence of Soviet POWs. Soviet servicemen were supposed to commit suicide, not be taken prisoner.

The number of deserters and draft-evading individuals caught by the NKVD Rear Guard Troops was also enormous. According to Beria reports, from June 1941 till mid-1943, it reached 1,666,891 men; of these, 1,210,224 were deserters. Later, in May 1944 alone, 24,898 deserters and 26,300 draft-evading individuals were caught, 285 of whom were officers.³⁶ Of this number, 9,128 individuals were arrested and transferred for investigation to SMERSH, NKGB, and the Prosecutor’s Office. Even at the end of the war, among 27,629 Soviet servicemen captured by the Germans between December 1944 and March 1945, 1,710 men (6 percent) crossed the front line voluntarily.³⁷ If these figures are accurate, this is a very high number. Possibly, some Soviet POWs who changed lines so late in the war hoped to end up in the hands of the Allies. If so, they did not know that, according to the secret agreements in Yalta, most of them would be handed back to SMERSH and the NKVD.

In many Soviet regions, especially Ukraine, in 1941 the local population greeted the German troops as their liberators from the Soviet regime. The head of a partisan staff in Belorussia reported that the day before the Germans came ‘the unstrained anti-Soviet individuals whistled at and unequivocally threatened the evacuating Soviet and Party activists and their families, while some Soviet administrators used every reason to escape the evacuation’.³⁸ In the Stavropolsky Region, located on the border with the Northern Caucasus and occupied by the Germans in 1942, the population was convinced that German rule would be forever.⁴⁰ Soon the German atrocities against Soviet POWs, Jews, and later the whole population (with the German racial attitude toward Slavs as inferior Untermenschen) turned most of the people against the occupiers. But the Soviet regime refused to excuse either open collaborators during the two-year occupation period or the whole population living in the German-occupied territory, since everyone could be considered to have been ‘following orders of the German administration’ and, therefore, punishable as a traitor.³⁹

The population of Belorussian and West Ukrainian territories taken back by the Red Army in 1943–44 immediately experienced Stalin’s attitude toward those who were under the German occupation. All men were mobilized. A witness wrote: ‘The lack in men [in the troops] was so considerable that mobilization, in fact, turned into hunting people, like slave traders hunted Negros in Africa in the past… At dawn we encircled a village. We were ordered to shoot every person after the first notification who would try to escape from the village. A special commando group entered every house in the village, forcing all men to come out, irrespective of age and health, and to gather in the square. Then they were convoyed to special camps. There they were checked by doctors, while the politically unreliable were taken away.’⁴¹

Regular soldiers called the mobilized locals chernorubashechniki (black shirts) or sumochnye divizii (divisions with bags) because these peasants were not given uniforms and many of them had self-made bags with food.⁴² Commonly they were not provided even with rifles because they were supposed to get trophy guns after a battle. Most of these unarmed people were wiped out in the first skirmish with the Germans.

The suspicion of collaboration continued until the end of the Soviet Union. Every Soviet citizen, even born after World War II, needed to mention in their biography form if he or she, or his or her relatives, had lived in the occupied territory during the war. If they did, this could prevent a person from being hired for a job connected with the military or secret issues, or from being allowed to travel abroad because for going abroad, each Soviet citizen needed the approval of the Communist Party and KGB officials.

Notes

1. Perry Biddiscombe, ‘Unternehmen Zeppelin: The Development of SS Saboteurs and Spies in the Soviet Union, 1942–945,’ Europe-Asia Studies, 52, No. 6 (2000), 1115–42; Michael Wildt, Generation des Unbedingten. Das Fuhrungskorps des Reichssicherheitshauptamtes (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2002), 75–81.

2. Sitting at Nuremberg, Germany, 7th January to 19th January, 1946, http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/imt/tgmwc/tgmwc-04/tgmwc-04-28-06.shtml, retrieved September 7, 2011.

3. Details in The Einsatzgruppen Reports: Selections from the Dispatches of the Nazi Death Squads’ Campaign against the Jews, July 1941–January 1943, edited by Yitzhak Arad, Shmuel Krakowski, and Shmuel Spector, v-vii (New York: Holocaust Library, 1989).

4. Telford Taylor, The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials: A Personal Memoir (New York: Knopf, 1992), 510.

5. After Reinhard Heydrich was killed by Czech partisans on May 27, 1942, Ernst Kaltenbrunner was appointed head of the RSHA in January 1943.

6. Ioffe, Abver. Politsiya bezopasnosti i SD, 56–57.

7. Details, for instance, in Rhodes, Masters of Death, 119-150.

8. Details in I. G. Starinov, Zapiski diversanta, Part IV, Chapters 6–8, http://militera.lib.ru/memo/russian/starinov_ig/31.html, retrieved September 7, 2011.

9. SD report to Berlin, dated October 1941. Document No. 6 in Chuev, Spetssluzhby, II, 42–59. Also, Alexander V. Prusin, ‘A Community of Violence: The SiPo/SD and Its Role in the Nazi Terror System in Generalbezirk Kiev,’ Holocaust and Genoicide Studies, 21, no. 1 (Spring 2007), 1–30.

10. Höhne, Canaris, 464–5.

11. Walter Schellenberg’s testimony in Nuremberg on November 13, 1945, http://www.nizkor.org/ftp.cgi/imt/nca/supp-b/ftp.py?imt/nca/supp-b//nca-sb-02-schellenberg. 02, retrieved September 7, 2011. Also, Walter Schellenberg, The Labyrinth, translated by Louis Hagen (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1956), 263–71.

12. Details in Perry Biddiscombe, ‘Unternehmen Zeppelin: The Development of SS Saboteurs and Spies in the Soviet Union, 1942–1945,’ Europe-Asia Studies, 52, no. 6 (2000), 1115–42.

13. Chuev, Spetssluzhby, II, 192–206.

14. Ibid., 205–6.

15. Kahn, Hitler’s Spies, 360.

16. Höhne and Zolling, The General Was a Spy, 42–44.

17. Details in Kirill Aleksandrov, Russkie soldaty Vermakhta. Geroi ili predateli (Moscow: Yauza-Eksmo, 2005), 203, 207–12, 253–6 (in Russian).

18. Chuev, Spetssluzhby, II, 174–6, 231-9.

19. Hitler’s decree concerning the administration of the newly-occupied Eastern territories dated July 17, 1941, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/1997-ps.asp, retrieved September 7, 2011.

20. Chuev, Spetssluzhby, I, 36–44.

21. Ibid., 45–53.

22. L. G. Ivanov, Pravda o ‘Smersh’ (Moscow: Yauza-Eksmo, 2009), 29–-30 (in Russian).

23. HSSPfs: 1) Riga (Ostland): Hans-Adolf Prützmann, Jan–Nov, 1941; Friedrich Jeckeln, Nov 1941–Jan 1945; Dr. Hermann Behrends, Jan–May 1945; 2) Mogilev, later Minsk (Russland-Mitte): Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, Jan 1941–Jan 1942; Carl Friedrich Count of Pückler-Burghauss, Jan 1942–Mar 1943; Gerrett Korsemann, Mar–Jul 1943; Curt von Gottberg, Jul 1943–Aug 1944; 3) Kiev (Russia-Süd): Friedrich Jecklen, Jun–Nov 1941; Hans-Adolf Prützmann, Nov 1941–Mar 1944; and 4) Nikolaev (Schwartz-Meer): Ludolf von Alvensleben, Oct–Dec 1943; Richard Hildebrandt, Dec 1943–Sep 1944; Arthur Phelps, Sep 1944.

24. The Russland Ostland in Riga had branches in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Belorussia; the Russland Mitte in Minsk had branches in four Belorussian and south Russian cities, and the Russland Süd in Kiev had branches in 16 Ukrainian cities, the Caucasus and the Crimea. Details in Chuev, Spetssluzhby, II, 59–82, and Kovalev, Natsistskaya okkupatsiya, 115–38.

25. A total of 168 Russian Orthodox and two Catholic churches were opened at the German-occupied territory of the Leningrad Region; before the war, there were only five Russian Orthodox churches in that area. In N. Lomakin, Neizvestnaya blokada (St. Petersburg: Neva, 2004), 493 (in Russian).

26. Document No. III-43, in Moskva voennaya, 1941–1945: memuary i arkhivnye dokumenty, edited by K. I. Bukov, M. M. Gorinov, and A. N. Ponomarev, 591 (Moscow: Mosgorarkhiv, 1995) (in Russian).

27. GKO Decision No.1074-ss, dated December 27, 1941. Document No. 207, in Lubyanka. Stalin i NKVD, 324.

28. GKO Decree No. 1926-ss, dated June 24, 1942. Document No. 224 in ibid., 350–1.

29. Details, for instance, in B. N. Kovalev, Natsistckaya okkupatsiya i kollaboratsionism v Rossii. 1941–1944 (Moscow: Tranzitkniga, 2004) (in Russian); Aleksandrov, Russkie soldaty Vermakhta.

30. Details in Wilfried Strik–Strikfeld, Against Stalin and Hitler: Memoirs of the Russian Liberation Movement 1941-1945, translated from the German by David Footman (New York: The John Day Co., 1973), 118–20.

31. Ibid., 181–6.

32. See, for instance, Christian Streit, Keine Kameraden: Die Wehrmacht und die sowjetischen Kriegsgefangnen 1941–1945 (Bonn: Dietz, 1997).

33. On the Lokot’ Republic, see B. V. Sokolov, Okkupatsiya. Pravda i mify (Moscow: AST-Press Kniga, 2002), 654–71 (in Russian).

34. P. N. Paliy-Vashchenko, V nemetskom plenu. Iz zhizni voennoplennogo (Paris: YMCA-Press, 1987), 78 (in Russian).

35. K. M. Aleksandrov, Ofitserskii korpus armii general-leitenanta A. A. Vlasova, 1944–1945 (St Petersburg, 2001), 31 (in Russian).

36. Beria’s report, dated July 27, 1944. Document No. 271 in Lubyanka. Stalin i NKVD, 442.

37. Figures from the German documents cited in N. M. Ramanichev, ‘Vlasov i drugie,’ Istoriya, no. 34 (2001), http://his.1september.ru/articlef.php?ID=200103403, retrieved September 7, 2011.

38. Materialy po istorii Russkogo Osvoboditel’nogo Dvizheniya (1941–1945 gg.). Vyp. 2 (Moscow: Arkhiv ROA, 1998), 169 (in Russian).

39. Lev Razgon, Nepridumannoe. Biograficheskaya proza (Moscow: Zakharov. 2007), 477–8 (in Russian).

40. Bochkov’s Order No. 46-ss, dated May 15, 1942.

41. P. G. Grigorenko, V podpol’e mozhno vstretit’ tol’ko krys… (New York: Detinets, 1981), Chapter 23 (in Russian), http://militera.lib.ru/memo/russian/grigorenko/33.html, retrieved September 7, 2011..

42. S. S. Zamyatin, ‘Vremennye boitsy’ (in Russian), http://www.proza.ru/texts/2008/05/10/375.html, retrieved September 7, 2011.