Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

DESPITE INDIVIDUAL ACTS of heroism, the NKVD and NKGB (as its security and intelligence components were renamed in 1943) deserve to be remembered less for their bravery during the Second World War than for their brutality. After the forcible incorporation into the Soviet Union of eastern Poland in September 1939, followed by the Baltic states and Moldavia in the summer of 1940, the NKVD quickly moved in to liquidate “class enemies” and cow the populations into submission. 67On June 25, 1941, three days after the beginning of Hitler’s invasion, the NKVD was ordered to secure the rear of the Red Army by arresting deserters and enemy agents, protecting communications and liquidating isolated pockets of German troops. In August 1941 Soviet parachutists disguised as Germans landed among the villages of the Volga German Autonomous Region and asked to be hidden until the arrival of the Wehrmacht. When they were given shelter, the whole village was exterminated by the NKVD. All other Volga Germans, however loyal, were deported by the NKVD to Siberia and northern Kazakhstan, with enormous loss of life. 68

When the Red Army took the offensive in 1943, the NKVD followed in its wake to mop up resistance and subversion. Beria reported proudly to Stalin at the end of the year:

In 1943, the troops of the NKVD, who are responsible for security in the rear of the Active Red Army, in the process of cleaning up the territory liberated from the enemy, arrested 931,549 people for investigation. Of these, 582,515 were servicemen and 394,034 were civilians.

Of those arrested, 80,296 were “unmasked,” in many cases wrongly, as spies, traitors, deserters, bandits and “criminal elements.”

Stalin used the NKVD to punish and deport entire nations within the Soviet Union whom he accused of treachery: among them Chechens, Ingushi, Balkars, Karachai, Crimean Tartars, Kalmyks and Meskhetian Turks. In response to Stalin’s instructions to reward “those who have carried out the deportation order in an exemplary manner,” Beria replied:

In accordance with your instructions, I submit a draft decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR on decorations and medals for the most outstanding participants in the operation involving the deportation of the Chechens and Ingushes. 19,000 members of the NKVD, NKGB and Smersh took part, plus up to 100,000 officers of the NKVD forces…

As on this occasion, many of the NKVD and NKGB personnel decorated during the war received their medals not for valor against the enemy but for crimes against humanity. 69

THE WARTIME RECORD of Soviet intelligence on the eastern front was patchy. Up to the end of 1942 the main espionage system providing intelligence from Nazi Germany and occupied Europe was a loosely coordinated GRU illegal network linked to the NKVD Harnack and Schulze-Boysen groups, codenamed the Rote Kappelle (“Red Orchestra”) by the Abwehr. The “musicians” were the radio operators who sent coded messages to Moscow; the “conductor” was the Polish Jew Leopold Trepper, alias Jean Gilbert, known within the network as le grand chef. The Rote Kappelle had 117 agents: 48 in Germany, 35 in France, 17 in Belgium and 17 in Switzerland. 70The network was gradually wound up during the later months of 1942 as German radio direction-finding tracked down the “musicians.” Trepper himself was captured as he sat in a dentist’s chair in occupied Paris on December 5. According to the Abwehr officer who arrested him, “For a second he was disturbed; then he said in perfect German, ‘You did a fine job.’” Only Rado’s GRU illegal residency in Switzerland, known as the Rote Drei after its three main radio transmitters, which was out of reach of German intelligence, continued work for another year until it was shut down by the Swiss. 71

Though both Trepper and Rado were sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment in Moscow after the war, it was later alleged by Soviet historians that intelligence from the Rote Kappelle had been of enormous assistance to the Red Army. In reality, intelligence did not begin to have a significant influence on Soviet military operations until after Trepper was arrested and most of his network wound up. Military intelligence failed to detect the sudden German turn south which captured Kiev in September 1941, and was taken aback by the intensity of the October assault on Moscow. The loss of Kharkov in May 1942 was due partly to the fact that the Stavka (a wartime combination of GHQ and high command) was expecting another attack on the capital. The Wehrmacht’s move south in the summer again took the Stavka by surprise. Throughout the German advance to Stalingrad and the Caucasus, Soviet forces were constantly confused about where the next blow would fall. When the Red Army encircled Axis forces at Stalingrad in November 1942, it believed it had trapped 85,000 to 90,000 troops; in reality it had surrounded three times as many. 72

The NKVD’s main role at Stalingrad was less in providing good intelligence than in enforcing a ferocious discipline within the Red Army. About 13,500 Soviet soldiers were executed for “defeatism” and other breaches of military discipline in the course of the battle, usually by a squad from the NKVD Special Detachment. Before execution, most were ordered to strip so that their uniform and boots could be reused. The NKVD postal censorship seized on any unorthodox or politically incorrect comment in soldiers’ letters to their families as evidence of treachery. A lieutenant who wrote “German aircraft are very good… Our anti-aircraft people shoot down only very few of them” was, inevitably, condemned as a traitor. In the 62nd Army alone, in the first half of October 1942, the NKVD claimed that “military secrets were divulged in 12,747 letters.” 73The great victory at Stalingrad, sealed by the surrender of the German Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus, twenty-two generals and 91,000 troops early in 1943, was achieved in spite of, rather than because of, the contribution of the NKVD.

Stalingrad was followed by a major improvement in the quality of Soviet military intelligence on the eastern front, made possible in part by massive supplies of radio equipment from the Americans and the British. 74At the end of 1942 the Stavka established special-purpose radio battalions, each equipped with eighteen to twenty radio-intercept receivers and four direction-finding sets. The result, according to a Soviet historian given access to the battalions’ records, was “a qualitative jump in the development of radio-electronic combat in the Soviet army.” Though Soviet cryptanalysts lacked the state-of-the-art technology which enabled Bletchley Park to decrypt high-grade Enigma and Geheimschreiber messages, they made major advances during 1943—reluctantly assisted by German cipher personnel captured at Stalingrad—in direction-finding, traffic analysis and the breaking of lower-grade hand ciphers. In 1942-3 they also had the benefit of Luftwaffe Enigma decrypts supplied by an agent inside Bletchley Park.

All these improvements were evident during the battle of Kursk in the summer of 1943 when the Red Army defeated the last great German offensive on the eastern front. Intelligence reports captured by the Wehrmacht from the Red Army during the battle revealed that Soviet SIGINT had located the positions and headquarters of the 6th, 7th and 11th Panzer Divisions, II and XIII Panzer Corps, and Second Army HQ. Aerial reconnaissance before and during Kursk was also on a larger scale and more successful than ever before. 75

Victory at Kursk opened the way to an almost continuous advance by the Red Army on the eastern front which was to end with Marshal Zhukov accepting the surrender of Berlin in May 1945. With a four-to-one superiority in men over the Wehrmacht, large amounts of military equipment from its Western allies and growing dominance in the air, the Red Army, though suffering enormous losses, proved unstoppable. In the course of its advance, the Red Army sometimes captured lists of the daily settings for periods of up to a month of the Wehrmacht’s Enigma machines, as well as some of the machines and their operators. During the final stages of the war these captures sometimes enabled Soviet cryptanalysts to decrypt spasmodically a still unknown number of Enigma messages. 76