CHAPTER 24
Hans Piekenbrock, head of Abwehr I from 1939 to March 1943, was among SMERSH’s important prisoners captured in May 1945 not far from Prague. Promoted to Major General in April 1943, he commanded the 208th Infantry Division, which participated in the Kursk Battle in Russia, the biggest tank battle and the greatest German tank failure. In March 1944, Piekenbrock became Lieutenant General, and his division fought in Ukraine, Poland, Slovakia, and Silesia. While Piekenbrock was fighting, the Abwehr ceased to exist as an independent intelligence organization.
Abwehr’s Decline
The Abwehr’s decline occurred gradually in 1943–44. In mid-March 1943, Canaris, together with Piekenbrock, Erwin Lahousen (head of Abwehr II) and Franz von Bentivegni (head of Abwehr III) visited the headquarters of Field Marshal Günther von Kluge, commander of the German Army Group Center, located near Smolensk. General Henning von Tresckow, chief of Kluge’s General Staff, and his adjutant Fabian von Schlabrendorff, were also present at the meeting. All participants came to a mutual understanding that, as von Schlabrendorff put it, ‘Only Hitler’s death will put an end to this mad slaughter of people in the concentration camps and in the armies fighting this criminal war.’1 A few days later Schlabrendorff smuggled a time bomb, disguised as bottles of cognac, onto an aircraft that carried Hitler. The bomb failed to detonate because of the extreme cold in the aircraft’s cargo space. Schlabrendorff managed to retrieve the bomb. Later, on July 20, 1944 the Gestapo arrested Schlabrendorff and he was kept in a number of concentration camps. On May 5, 1945 the Fifth U.S. Army liberated Schlabrendorff along with a group of other prisoners of the Dachau concentration camp.
In the spring of 1943, Wilhelm Keitel, commander in chief of the High Command of the Armed Forces (OKW), irritated by the Abwehr’s inefficiency, ordered the replacement of heads of the Abwehr I-III.2 Soon Piekenbrock and Lahousen were sent to the Eastern Front and did not participate in the further plots to kill Hitler. From March 1943 onwards, Colonel Georg Hansen headed Abwehr I, while Colonel Wessel Freiherr von Freytag-Loringhoven headed Abwehr II. Both Hansen and Freytag-Loringhoven were also members of the anti-Hitler plot, and in July 1944 Freytag-Loringhoven even supplied Graf Claus von Stauffenberg with explosives for killing Hitler.
In February 1944, Hitler dismissed Canaris after the Gestapo arrested two high-ranking Abwehr officers on charges of treason, and Colonel Hansen replaced him.3 In June 1944, Abwehr I and II were merged together and became the Militarisches Amt (or Mil Amt) of Walter Schellenberg’s SD. Hansen headed Mil Amt until he was arrested as a member of the July 20, 1944 plot, and Schellenberg headed both the SD and Mil Amt until the end of the war. In the Mil Amt Erwin Stolze, who was previously responsible for diversions in Soviet territory, was charged with the training of terrorists sent to the rear of the Allied troops.4
On July 22, 1944, two days after von Stauffenberg’s unsuccessful attempt on Hitler’s life, the Gestapo arrested Hansen and, on the next day, Canaris.5 Freytag-Loringhoven committed suicide on July 26, before the Gestapo could get him. Soon, on September 8, Hansen was executed in Plötenzee Prison in Berlin.
In August 1944, the Gestapo investigators found Canaris’s diary in which he had written that since 1938 he headed a resistance group within the Abwehr. The diary was given to the above-mentioned Rattenhuber, head of Hitler’s guards, who handed it over to Ernst Kaltenbrunner, head of the RSHA. Hitler read it on April 6, 1945, and on his order, the next day a special SS tribunal sentenced Canaris to death.
Two days later he was hanged slowly with a piano-wire noose in the Flossenbürg concentration camp. The SS-executioners were in a hurry to finish off Canaris: American troops were not far away from the camp. Before he left his cell, Canaris tapped out a message to an imprisoned Danish officer Hans Lunding, who was in the neighboring cell: ‘I am dying for my country. I have a clear conscience…I did no more than my patriotic duty in trying to oppose the criminal madness of Hitler, who was leading Germany to its ruin. It was in vain, as I know now that my country will go under, as I knew already in 1942.’6
After Hansen and Canaris’s arrests more reorganization of the former Abwehr followed. Abwehr III was divided among the SD, the Gestapo, and the OKW.7 The latter part, known as the Truppenabwehr, included counterintelligence in the German troops, navy, and air force, as well as in the POW camps and the German Field Police (GFP). Part of the Brandenburg-800 division (within Abwehr II) joined Otto Skorzeny’s special commandos unit SS-Jagdverband attached to the SD. The other part was included in the tank corps Grossdeutschland.
On December 1, 1944, Walli I and III were transferred to Schellenberg’s Mil Amt and became its Branch F. Later, in April 1945, escaping the advancing Soviet troops, Walli I moved to Bavaria.
As for Bentivegni, he headed Abwehr III until March 1944, when he joined the army. In August 1944, Bentivegni was promoted to Major General, and in January 1945, to Lieutenant General. On May 15, 1945 SMERSH operatives captured Bentivegni, at the time commander of the 81st Infantry Division, among numerous prisoners taken in the Courland Pocket in Latvia.8 The Army Group Courland of about 181,000 men was the last German unit that fought on Soviet territory until their surrender on May 9, 1945.
Bruno Streckenbach, Heydrich’s former deputy in the RSHA and the Einsatzgruppen supervisor, was also captured in Courland. In September 1942, he was transferred from the RSHA to the Waffen SS, and from April 1944 onwards, Streckenbach commanded the 19th SS Waffen Grenadier Division, part of the Latvian Legion. Later promoted to Waffen-SS Lieutenant General, he was captured on May 22, 1945.9
On May 31, 1945 SMERSH operatives caught Erwin Stolze in Berlin in civilian clothes.10 In 1947, he testified: ‘At the beginning of April 1945…Walter Schellenberg issued an instruction that prescribed…in case the Red Army threatens to take over Berlin, to prepare false documents in advance, to destroy operational documents, to go into hiding and wait for new instructions. I followed this order.’11 In the underground, Stolze headed a network of 800 Nazi terrorists.
In February 1946, Soviet prosecutors presented testimonies of Piekenbrock, Bentivegni, and Stolze, written during interrogations in GUKR SMERSH, at the International Nuremberg Trial.12 Lahousen, a rare survivor of the Abwehr resistance, personally testified in the courtroom against the Nazi defendants.
Piekenbrock, Bentivegni, Stolze, and Streckenbach remained in Moscow MGB investigation prisons until February 1952, when the Military Tribunal of the Moscow Military District sentenced Stolze to death, and Bentivegni and Streckenbach, to twenty-five years in labor camps.13 On March 26, 1952 Stolze was executed.
However, the Military Collegium changed Bentivegni and Streckenbach’s punishment to imprisonment, and convicted Piekenbrock to the same term. After spending three years in Vladimir Prison, in October 1955 the three were released and returned to Germany.
The heads of the FHO (Foreign Armies East) and Walli met different ends. During the July 20, 1944 attempt on Hitler’s life, General Reinhard Gehlen was sick, and his deputy, Gerhard Wessel, managed to destroy Gehlen’s correspondence with the plotters in time.14 As a result, Gehlen luckily escaped the Gestapo’s attention, but during the last months of 1944 Hitler was outraged by the pessimistic reports of Gehlen.
At the time, Gehlen had already organized his own plot. In spring 1944, he developed a plan to save the FHO’s records for the West. By February 1945, Wessel and Hermann Baun (head of Walli I), Heinz Danko Herre and Horst Hiemenz (the former and the last head of the FHO’s Gruppe II), and Albert Schöller (deputy head of Gruppe II) participated in Gehlen’s efforts.15 In April 1945, Wessel succeeded Gehlen as FHO head, and the plotters safely hid the Walli I and FHO archives.
The Gehlen plotters surrendered to American military intelligence (G-2, War Department).16 Gehlen’s operation was allowed to continue using the retrieved archives. Gehlen’s group, which included his immediate staff of 350 men, moved to Pullach, a suburb of Munich, and became known as the Gehlen Organization. On Gehlen’s request, thousands of Abwehr, SD and SS officers were released from internment camps in violation of the de-Nazification program and joined Gehlen’s staff, which reached nearly 3,000 men. Hans Schmalschläger, former head of Stab Walli and Walli III within it, headed the Nuremberg branch of the Gehlen Organization.17
The Organization worked under CIA control and was its main source of information on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. In 1956, it became the main part of the newly formed Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND or Federal Intelligence Service) of West Germany. Gehlen headed the BND until 1968.
Hermann Baun, former head of Walli I, got his own facility, and his network reached 125 agents in Western Germany.18 Over a few years Baun completed about 800 reports on the Soviet military. In 1947, he organized a successful secret transfer of the family of Gustav Hilger, former Nazi Foreign Office official and a specialist on Russian affairs who now worked for the Americans, from the Soviet Zone to West Berlin, despite the MGB’s surveillance of the family. But because Baun recruited a number of shady people and con men, he was dismissed and died in 1951. His group was included in the Gehlen Organization.
Gehlen’s use of high-level Abwehr and SS war criminals as staff members compromised the BND. The hiring of Wilhelm Krichbaum, the former Field Police Chief, was especially devastating. He had already been a Soviet agent when, in 1951, he recruited another double agent, Heinz Felfe, the former SD officer who worked for both the British and the Soviets.19 In November 1961, Felfe was arrested on spying charges, tried, and sentenced to a 14-year imprisonment. In 1969, he was exchanged for eighteen West German and three American agents imprisoned in the USSR.20 Gehlen retired in 1968, and for the next ten years Gerhard Wessel, Gehlen’s former deputy, headed the BND.
One Who Escaped SMERSH
Boris Smyslowsky, a former White Army officer, was, quite possibly, the most successful—and the luckiest—Russian who served in the Abwehr. Smyslowsky created a very efficient intelligence organization made up of Russian émigrés, and he was one of the few high-ranking Russian military collaborators not caught by SMERSH.
Smyslowsky was born in 1897 near St. Petersburg, into an officer’s family.21 After graduating from a military school in 1915, he participated in World War I and then in the Civil War, serving in the White troops under the command of General Anton Denikin. Later Smyslowsky lived in Poland and became a Polish citizen. In 1928, he moved to Germany, where he attended military courses. In 1939, after the German occupation of Poland, Smyslowsky became head of the Warsaw office of the White Russian military organization ROVS, which was called the Association of Russian Military Unions in Nazi Germany.
At the beginning of the war with the Soviet Union, Smyslowsky joined the Abwehr under the alias ‘von Regenau.’ In July 1941, the 1st Russian Foreign Educational Battalion attached to the Army Group North was organized under his command.22 After a few months, it became the Northern Group that eventually comprised twelve Russian battalions. The new Russian recruits from White emigrants and new POW volunteers were trained in the Abwehr school in Warsaw.
In March 1942, the Northern Group became the Sonderstab R (Special Staff Russia) with headquarters in Warsaw under the cover name of the Eastern Construction Company ‘Gilgen.’ It was attached to the Referat IX of Walli I and was supervised by Hermann Baun, head of Walli I. The Sonderstab R consisted of 20 high-ranking White Russian officers and a few hundred young men from Abwehr schools and intelligence groups. It collected intelligence mostly on partisans and the NKVD. The whole Soviet-occupied territory was divided into five (subsequently reduced to four) regions with staffs in the cities of Simferopol, Kiev, Chernigov, Minsk, and Pskov (later Vyru, in Estonia). There were also local representatives within each region. All units of the Sonderstab R’s network had cover names of building and supply organizations.
The net obtained information from informers recruited among local Communist Party members, members of the Komsomol, and former Soviet functionaries. They were usually forced to work for the Sonderstab R under threat of being arrested or sent to Germany as slave laborers. Agents were sent to partisan detachments as well.
The units sent their reports to Warsaw by couriers and collaborated with the SD and the German Field Police. It wasn’t until August 1944 that Soviet counterintelligence (NKGB) collected enough information to draw a general chart of the Sonderstab R organization.23
In 1943, Smyslowsky’s intelligence net was renamed Sonderdivision R (Division for Special Task Russia) and became part of the Wehrmacht.24 Later, regional detachments were reorganized, and the center in Warsaw became a directorate made up of the Russian, Ukrainian, and Belorussian departments, which consisted of intelligence and partisan sections. Sonderdivision R collected information on Soviet troops and the situation in both unoccupied Soviet territory and the territory liberated by the Red Army. For the latter purpose, numerous agents were left behind the front line, and in 1943, SMERSH and NKGB discovered and arrested up to 700 such agents. On the basis of information collected by the partisan sections, the FHO published a classified book, Proceedings of the Partisan War, detailing the organization, tactics, and propaganda work of Soviet partisans.
At the end of 1943, the Gestapo arrested Smyslowsky on charges of alleged support of the anti-Nazi Polish Home Army (Armija Krajowa) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), and the Sonderdivision R was disbanded.25 Smyslowsky ended up being acquitted and even given an award after intervention on his behalf by Admiral Canaris and Reinhard Gehlen, but the Germans lost the best intelligence net they had ever had at the Eastern Front.
Later Smyslowsky headed the Staff for Special Tasks attached to the OKH, which continued doing intelligence work. Finally, in February 1945, his 1st Russian National Division was renamed first the Green Army for Special Tasks and then the 1st Russian National Army; in addition, he was promoted to Major General. To confuse Soviet intelligence and counterintelligence, Smyslowsky changed his name to Artur Holmston. Formally, his army was an independent ally of the Wehrmacht and maintained neutrality toward the United States and England. However, it was not a real army because it consisted of only one battalion of about 600 men. Major Yevgenii Messner, a former White officer who was appointed head of the propaganda department in Smyslowsky’s army, recalled that half of the battalion’s men were dressed in civilian clothes and only a quarter of the battalion had rifles. He added: ‘Holmston was always absent while being occupied with the intelligence work and was not involved in the organization of the corps and its HQ.’26
By April 1945, Smyslowsky had moved his army to the Austrian town of Feldkirch, where Grand Duke Vladimir Kirillovich, head of the Imperial Family of Russia, and his court joined Smyslowsky while escaping the Red Army. On May 2–3, Smyslowsky and a group of his 494 men and women crossed the border with Liechtenstein. This group was the only Russian unit that had fought against the Red Army that was not handed over to SMERSH or the NKVD by the Western Allies. However, neither Liechtenstein nor Switzerland issued the Grand Duke an exit visa and he went to Spain.
In Liechtenstein, Allen Dulles, the OSS representative in Switzerland, and other intelligence experts interviewed Smyslowsky about the Soviet Union.27 On August 16, 1945, a Soviet commission representing the Directorate of the Plenipotentiary on the Repatriation headed by General Fyodor Golikov, met with Smyslowsky and other refugees. Golikov was the former head of the GRU (military intelligence), while his repatriation directorate was, in fact, an arm of SMERSH and the NKVD. The commission tried to force the authorities to extradite Smyslowsky and 59 of his officers as war criminals, but Liechtenstein’s government refused to do so because the commission had no proof.28 It is amazing that a country with a population of 12,141 and only eleven policemen dared to stand up to the Soviets. But eventually about 200 of Smyslowsky’s men decided to go back to the Soviet Union.
In 1947, Smyslowsky, his wife, and about 100 Russians went to Argentina. Time magazine wrote in 1953: ‘Pressed by the Kremlin, the tiny principality [Liechtenstein] ordered the general [Smyslowsky] to leave. With the help of the Russian Orthodox archbishop of Argentina, a friend of Juan Perón, he got permission to take the last of his men to Buenos Aires.’29
In Perón’s Argentina, Smyslowsky’s experience in the Abwehr was in demand: he taught the tactics of anti-partisan war at the military academy and became Perón’s adviser on the same topic. From the mid-1960s to 1973, Smyslowsky was an adviser to the West German General Staff. During his last 13 years he lived in Liechtenstein, and he died there in 1988.
Smyslowsky always remained a Russian ultra-nationalist. In 1946, he addressed a group of young émigrés: ‘You are glorious descendants of those who have been building for thousands of years the greatest Empire in the world. You are descendants not of the European, but of our own, pure Russian culture with its geniuses of state organization, unconditional loyalty, and military valor.’30 Although these bizarre notions about Russia’s exceptional role in history became popular again in the Russian society of the 2000s, Smyslowsky’s prediction of the end of Soviet Communism was naive. In 1953, he told Time: ‘The world should know that foreign armies will never conquer Russia. Only a nationalist army of Russians, fighting Communism but not Russia, can ever hope to succeed.’
There is a small ‘Russian Monument’ in Liechtenstein commemorating the asylum given to Smyslowsky’s army. In 1993, the French film director Robert Enrico released the movie Vent d’est (East Wind) about Smyslowsky and his men’s escape to Liechtenstein. The British actor Malcolm McDowell played Smyslowsky in the movie.
Notes
1. André Brissaud, Canaris (Garden City, NY: Grosset & Dunlap, 1974), 297.
2. Heinz Hohne, Canaris, translated from the German by J. Maxwell Brownjohn (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., Inc., 1970), 528–30.
3. David Kahn, Hitler’s Spies: German Military Intelligence in World War II (New York: Collier Books, 1978), 268–71.
4. Stolze’s statement during an interrogation in the MGB, dated July 14, 1947, quoted in Julius Madder, Hitlers Spionagegenerale sagen aus (Berlin: Verlag der Nation, 1977), 419, 441–8.
5. Hohne, Canaris, 555–99; Michael Mueller, Canaris: The Life and Death of Hitler’s Spymaster, translated by Geoffrey Brooks (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2007), 251–8.
6. Quoted in André Brissaud, Canaris, translated and edited by Ian Colvin (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973), 331.
7. S. G. Chuev, Spetssluzhby tret’ego reikha (St. Petersburg: Neva, 2003), Kniga I, 21–22 (in Russian).
8. Bentivegni’s personal card in the Vladimir Prison Archive.
9. Streckenbach’s prisoner card in the Vladimir Prison Archive.
10. Julius Madder, Hitlers Spionagegenerale (Berlin: Verlag der Nation, 1979), 131–3.
11. Quoted in Aleksandr Beznasyuk and Vyacheslav Zvyagintsev, Tribunal. Arbat, 37 (dela i lyudi) (Moscow: Terra, 2006), 111–2 (in Russian).
12. Madder, Hitlers Spionagegenerale, 419, 441–8. Also, sitting at Nuremberg, Fifty-Sixth Day: Monday, 11th February, 1946, http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/imt/tgmwc/tgmwc-06/tgmwc-06-56-12.html, retrieved September 9, 2011.
13. Prisoner cards of Piekenbrock, Bentivegni and Streckenbach in the Vladimir Prison archive.
14. The Service: The Memoirs of General Reinhard Gehlen, translated by David Irving (New York: World Publishing, 1972), 98.
15. Details in James H. Critchfield, Partners at the Creation: The Men Behind Postwar Germany’s Defense and Intelligence Establishments (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2003), 28–32.
16. Documents in The CIA and Nazi War Criminals, edited by Tamara Feinstein, February 4, 2005, http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB146/index.htm, retrieved September 9, 2011.
17. Linda Hunt, Secret Agenda: The United States Government, Nazi Scientists, and Project Paperclip, 1945 to 1990 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), 205.
18. Critchfield, Partners at the Creation, 33, 116–8.
19. Paul B. Brown, ‘Analysis of the Name File of Wilhelm Krichbaum,’ http://www.archives.gov/iwg/declassified-records/rg-263-cia-records/rg-263-krichbaum. html; Norman J. W. Goda, ‘CIA Files Relating to Heinz Felfe, SS Officer and KGB Spy,’ http://www.fas.org/sgp/eprint/goda.pdf, both retrieved on September 9, 2011.
20. Dmitrii Ivanov, ‘Veteran razvedki Vitalii Korotkov: “Kurta” obmenyali na tselyi avtobus zapadnykh shpionov,’ Izvesiya, December 20, 2007 (in Russian).
21. Kirill Aleksandrov, Russkie soldaty Vermakhta. Geroi ili predateli (Moscow: Yauza-EKSMO, 2005), 195–9 (in Russian).
22. Chuev, Spetssluzhby, I, 254–73.
23. Photo on page 121 in SMERSH. Istoricheskie ocherki.
24. Chuev, Spetssluzhby, I, 263–4.
25. Aleksandrov, Russkie soldaty, 236–9.
26. Quoted in ibid., 237.
27. N. Tolstoi, Zhertvy Yalty (Paris: YMCA-Press, 1988), 435 (in Russian).
28. Yefim Barban, ‘Russkii soyuznik nemtsev,’ Ogonyok, no. 21, May 19–25, 2009 (in Russian).
29. ‘Argentina: Last of the Wehrmacht,’ Time, April 13, 1953.
30. General Holmston-Smyslowsky, ‘Lichnye vospominaniya o generale Vlasove,’ Suvorovets, nos. 30–38, August–October 1949, http://m.shkuro.webnode.com/products/gjen-kholmston-smyslovskij-lichnyje-vospominanija-o-gjenjeraljevlasovje-/, retrieved September 9, 2011.