All four years of the war, German intelligence was trustingly "feeding" on the disinformation that the Lubyanka provided to it.

In the summer of 1941, Soviet intelligence officers launched an operation that is still considered "aerobatics" of covert combat and entered the textbooks on reconnaissance craft. It lasted almost the entire war and at different stages was called differently - "Monastery", "Couriers", and then "Berezino".

Her plan was originally to bring to the German intelligence center a deliberate "misinformation" about an anti-Soviet religious-monarchist organization allegedly existing in Moscow, to force enemy intelligence officers to believe in it as a real force. And thus penetrate the intelligence network of the Nazis in the Soviet Union.

The FSB declassified the materials of the operation only after 55 years of the Victory over fascism.

The Chekists recruited a representative of a noble noble family, Boris Sadovsky, to work. With the establishment of Soviet power, he lost his fortune and, naturally, was hostile to it.

He lived in a small house in the Novodevichy Convent. Being an invalid, he almost did not leave it. In July 1941, Sadovsky wrote a poem, which soon became the property of counterintelligence, in which he addressed the Nazi occupiers as "brother liberators", called on Hitler to restore Russian autocracy.

They decided to use him as the head of the legendary Throne organization, especially since Sadovsky was really looking for an opportunity to somehow contact the Germans.

Alexander Petrovich Demyanov - "Heine" (right) during a radio communication session with a German

In order to "help" him, Alexander Demyanov, a secret employee of the Lubyanka, who had the operational pseudonym "Heine", was included in the game.

His great-grandfather Anton Golovaty was the first chieftain of the Kuban Cossacks, his father was a Cossack captain who died in the First World War. The mother came from princely family, graduated from the Bestuzhev courses at the Smolny Institute for Noble Maidens and in the pre-revolutionary years was considered one of the brightest beauties in the aristocratic circles of Petrograd.

Until 1914, Demyanov lived and was brought up abroad. He was recruited by the OGPU in 1929. Possessing noble manners and a pleasant appearance, "Heine" easily converged with film actors, writers, playwrights, poets, in whose circles he rotated with the blessing of the Chekists. Before the war, in order to suppress terrorist attacks, he specialized in developing relations between the nobles who remained in the USSR and foreign emigration. An experienced agent with such data quickly won the trust of the poet-monarchist Boris Sadovsky.

On February 17, 1942, Demyanov - "Heine" crossed the front line and surrendered to the Germans, declaring that he was a representative of the anti-Soviet underground. The intelligence officer told the Abwehr officer about the Throne organization and that it had been sent by its leaders to communicate with the German command. At first they did not believe him, they subjected him to a series of interrogations and thorough checks, including an imitation of execution, tossing a weapon from which he could shoot his tormentors and escape. However, his endurance, a clear line of conduct, the persuasiveness of the legend, backed up by real people and circumstances, finally made the German counterintelligence believe.

It also played a role that even before the war, the Moscow Abwehr station * took note of Demyanov as a possible candidate for recruitment and even gave him the nickname "Max".

* Abwehr - military intelligence and counterintelligence agency of Germany in 1919-1944, was part of the Wehrmacht High Command.

Under it, he appeared in the card file of the Moscow agents in 1941, under it, after three weeks of learning the basics of espionage, on March 15, 1942, he was parachuted into the Soviet rear. Demyanov was to settle in the Rybinsk region with the task of conducting active military-political intelligence. From the Throne organization, the Abwehr expected the activation of pacifist propaganda among the population, the deployment of sabotage and sabotage.

For two weeks there was a pause in the Lubyanka, so as not to arouse suspicion among the Abwehrs at the ease with which their new agent was legalized.

Finally "Max" relayed his first misinformation. Soon, in order to strengthen Demyanov's position in German intelligence and to supply the Germans through him with false data of strategic importance, he was appointed a communications officer under the Chief of the General Staff, Marshal Shaposhnikov.

Admiral Canaris

Admiral Canaris, the head of the Abwehr (nicknamed Janus, the “Sly Fox”) considered it his great fortune that he had acquired a “source of information” in such high areas, and could not help but boast of this success in front of his rival, the head of the VI Directorate of the RSHA, SS Brigadeführer Walter Schellenberg. In his memoirs written after the war in English captivity, he testified with envy that military intelligence had "its own man" near Marshal Shaposhnikov, from whom a lot of "valuable information" was received. In early August 1942, "Max" informed the Germans that the transmitter in the organization was becoming unusable and needed to be replaced.

Soon, two Abwehr couriers came to the secret apartment of the NKVD in Moscow, delivering 10 thousand rubles and food. They reported the location of the radio they had hidden.

The first group of German agents remained at large for ten days, so that the Chekists could check their appearances and find out if they had any connections with anyone else. Then the messengers were arrested, the walkie-talkie delivered by them was found. And the Germans "Max" radioed that the couriers had arrived, but the transmitted radio was damaged upon landing.

Two months later, two more messengers with two radio transmitters and various spy equipment appeared from behind the front line. They had the task not only to help “Max”, but also to settle in Moscow themselves, collect and transmit their intelligence information via the second radio. Both agents were recruited, and they reported to the headquarters of the "Valli" - the Abwehr center - that they had successfully arrived and started the task. From that moment on, the operation developed in two directions: on the one hand, on behalf of the monarchist organization Throne and the resident Max, on the other hand, on behalf of Abwehr agents Zyubin and Alaev, who allegedly relied on their own connections in Moscow. A new stage of the secret duel has begun - Operation Couriers.

In November 1942, in response to a request from the headquarters of "Valli" about the possibility of expanding the geography of the organization "Throne" at the expense of the cities of Yaroslavl, Murom and Ryazan and sending agents there for further work, "Max" conveyed that the city of Gorky, where a cell was created, was better suited "Throne". The Germans agreed to this, and the counterintelligence officers took care of the "meeting" of the couriers. Satisfying the requests of the Abwehrites, the Chekists sent them extensive disinformation, which was being prepared at the General Staff of the Red Army, and more and more enemy intelligence agents were called to front safe houses.

In Berlin, they were very pleased with the work of "Max" and the agents introduced with his help. On December 20, Admiral Canaris congratulated his Moscow resident on being awarded the Iron Cross of the 1st degree, and Mikhail Kalinin signed the Decree on awarding Demyanov with the Order of the Red Star. The result of the radio games "Monastery" and "Couriers" was the arrest of 23 German agents and their accomplices, who had with them more than 2 million rubles of Soviet money, several radio stations, a large number of documents, weapons, equipment.

In the summer of 1944, the operational game received a new continuation called Berezino. "Max" reported to the headquarters of "Valli" that he was "seconded" to Minsk, which had just been occupied by Soviet troops. Soon the Abwehr received a message from there that numerous groups of German soldiers and officers were making their way through the Belarusian forests to the west, who were surrounded as a result of Soviet offensive. Since the radio interception data testified to the desire of the Nazi command not only to help them break through to their own, but also to use them to disorganize the enemy rear, the Chekists decided to play on this. Soon the People's Commissar of State Security Merkulov reported to Stalin, Molotov and Beria the plan new operation. "Good" was received.

On August 18, 1944, the Moscow radio station "Throne" informed the Germans that "Max" accidentally ran into a military unit of the Wehrmacht, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Gerhard Sherhorn, who was leaving the encirclement. "Encircled" are in great need of food, weapons, ammunition. Seven days in the Lubyanka they waited for an answer: the Abwehr, apparently, made inquiries about Sherhorn and his "army". And on the eighth, a radiogram came: “Please help us contact this German unit. We intend to drop various cargoes for them and send a radio operator.”

On the night of September 15-16, 1944, three Abwehr envoys landed by parachute in the area of ​​​​Lake Pesochnoe in the Minsk region, where Sherhorn's regiment was allegedly "hiding". Soon two of them were recruited and included in the radio game.

Then the Abwehrs transferred two more officers with letters addressed to Sherhorn from the commander of the Army Group Center, Colonel-General Reinhardt, and the head of Abwehrkommando-103, Barfeld. The flow of cargo "breaking out of the encirclement" increased, with them all the new "auditors" arrived, who had the task, as they later admitted during interrogations, to find out if these were the people they pretended to be. But everything was done cleanly. So pure that in the last radiogram to Scherhorn, transmitted from the "Abwehrkommando-103" on May 5, 1945, after the surrender of Berlin, it was said:

“It is with a heavy heart that we have to stop helping you. Due to the current situation, we are also no longer able to maintain radio contact with you. Whatever the future brings us, our thoughts will always be with you.”

It was the end of the game. Soviet intelligence brilliantly outplayed the intelligence of Nazi Germany.

The success of the operation "Berezino" was facilitated by the fact that it involved real German officers who went over to the side of the Red Army. They convincingly portrayed the surviving regiment, including recruited paratroopers and liaison officers.

From archival data: from September 1944 to May 1945, the German command made 39 sorties in our rear and dropped 22 German intelligence officers (all of them were arrested by Soviet counterintelligence officers), 13 radio stations, 255 cargo places with weapons, uniforms, food, ammunition, medicines, and 1,777,000 rubles. Germany continued to supply "its" detachment until the very end of the war.

One of the most important factors that led the Soviet people to victory in the Great Patriotic War was the prevalence of clandestine warfare. Unprecedented Courage Soviet intelligence officers, faith in the ideals of justice and love for the Motherland worked wonders. What was the system of special services of the Soviet state in the difficult years of 1941-1945?
I must say that it is quite simple and effective ...

GRU

In 1939, the intelligence department of the Workers 'and Peasants' Red Army was transformed into the Fifth Directorate of the People's Commissariat of Defense of the USSR. In 1940, it was reassigned to the General Staff and, accordingly, received the name of the Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff of the Red Army. And on February 16, 1942, the world-famous abbreviation "GRU" was born. As part of the GRU, two departments were created: the first - undercover (departments: German, European, Far East, Middle East, sabotage, operational equipment, radio intelligence), the second - information (departments: German, European, Far East, Middle East, editorial and publishing, military information , deciphering). And besides, a number of independent departments that were not part of the First and Second Directorates.

Given the fact that "he who owns the information owns the world," Joseph Stalin drew the appropriate conclusions and further raised the status of military intelligence. In October 1942, an order was issued according to which the GRU was exclusively subordinate to the People's Commissar of Defense. The functional duties of the Main Directorate included the organization of undercover and reconnaissance and sabotage work, both on the territory of other countries and in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union.

Scouts of the 27th Guards Division

A group of scouts of the divisional reconnaissance of the 27th Guards Rifle Division.
Standing from left to right: Merkulov - died due to a wound; Vasily Zakamaldin; senior lieutenant Zhuravlev - went to study; -?; Leonid Kazachenko - died due to a wound;
sitting from left to right: Alexey Solodovnikov; Vorobyov - medical officer of the company, left due to a wound; Nikolai Pluzhnikov - died in Poland while repelling an attack on the division headquarters; ? - dead ;)
The photo was taken in Poland in the summer of 1944. From the personal archive of Vladimir Fedorovich Bukhenko, who also served as a scout in this unit.

Source: personal archive of V.F. Bukhenko.

In wars and armed conflicts, military personnel internal troops not only performed special tasks, but also directly participated in hostilities. One of the heroic pages of their service and combat activities was the contribution of the NKVD troops to the Victory in the Great Patriotic War. They fought against Nazi German invaders, provided protection for the rear of the active Red Army, guarded communications and industrial facilities, escorted prisoners of war, fought against saboteurs and spies, desertion and banditry, and solved a number of other tasks, including those that were not characteristic of them.

The garrisons of the 9th and 10th divisions of the NKVD troops for the protection of railway structures, guarding transport communications on the territory of Ukraine, even surrounded, in the deep rear of the German troops, continued to defend objects for a long time to the last soldier. More than 70 percent soldiers and officers of these formations, who died in battle, remained missing. They fulfilled their military duty to the end.

Units of the 14th and 15th Red Banner motorized rifle regiments of the NKVD took part in the fighting against the German-Finnish troops in Karelia.

In the battle of the 15th Red Banner motorized rifle regiment near Lake Märet on July 25, 1941, junior lieutenant A.A. Divochkin "took command of the battery, put out the fire at the ammunition depot with danger to his life and personally fired alternately from two guns at the enemy from an open position, repelled the attack, destroyed one gun, several machine guns and up to an enemy infantry platoon."

On defense locality Hiitola showed exceptional courage, the regiment's propaganda instructor, senior political instructor N.M. Rudenko. He “personally destroyed 15 white Finns-“ cuckoos ”, being wounded, killed a German machine gunner, captured an easel machine gun and continued to smash the enemy with fire from it. Having received a second wound, he did not leave the battlefield, and at the third wound, bleeding, he lost consciousness. In the same battle ... the medical officer Kokorin appeared among the most fierce fights, assisting the wounded and personally taking part in the attacks. Being himself wounded, he made his way to the front lines to assist the senior political officer Rudenko. While fighting, the wounded Kokorin was surrounded, and the White Finnish officer tried to take him prisoner. Kokorin blew himself up and five White Finns, led by an officer, with a grenade.

By decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR of August 26, 1941, junior lieutenant Alexander Andreevich Divochkin, senior political instructor Nikolai Mikhailovich Rudenko and Red Army soldier Anatoly Alexandrovich Kokorin were awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union.

Scout Heroes

With the outbreak of World War II, the main foreign intelligence forces were sent to work against Nazi Germany. The intelligence leadership took steps to establish contact with the existing agents in the Axis countries, acquire new agents, and select operatives to be deployed behind enemy lines.

Due to the unpreparedness of foreign intelligence to work in a war, caused by mass repressions against intelligence officers, at the initial stage, contact with agents was lost. It was not possible to organize intelligence work against Germany and its satellites from the territory of neutral countries, with the exception of Switzerland, where the illegal military intelligence officer S. Rado (“Dora”) acted effectively.

In this regard, it was decided to create special reconnaissance detachments to conduct reconnaissance activities in the rear of the German troops. Active intelligence work, in particular, was conducted by the "Winners" detachment of Colonel D.N. Medvedev. It included the famous intelligence officer N.I. Kuznetsov.

After careful preparation in the 1st Directorate of the NKGB, especially in improving German language(it was planned to use it through illegal intelligence in Germany itself) N.I. Kuznetsov in 1942 was thrown behind enemy lines in the region of Rovno. With documents addressed to Paul Siebert, he was a member of various circles of the Nazi occupiers and used this circumstance to collect information of interest to Moscow.

During his stay in the rear of the Germans, N.I. Kuznetsov received and transmitted to Moscow information about the impending attempt by the German special services on the participants in the Tehran Conference, about the plans of the Wehrmacht command for Kursk Bulge, other information that was of great interest.

They destroyed the chief Nazi judge in Ukraine, Funk, the deputy Gauleiter of Ukraine, General Knut, and the vice-governor of Galicia, Bauer. With the help of other reconnaissance partisans, he kidnapped the commander of the German special forces, General Ilgen.

In 1944 he was killed by Ukrainian nationalists. For courage and heroism shown in the fight against fascist invaders, N.I. Kuznetsov was posthumously awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union.

Another reconnaissance and sabotage detachment "Fort", headed by V.A. Molodtsov, acted in Odessa and its environs. Molodtsov's scouts, based in the Odessa catacombs, obtained important information about the German and Romanian troops and the plans of the command of these countries. He was captured as a result of betrayal. He was posthumously awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union.

On the eve of the occupation of Kyiv by the Nazi troops, foreign intelligence created an illegal residency in it, headed by intelligence officer I.D. Curly. This residency managed to infiltrate the Nazi intelligence center, which was headed by a seasoned Nazi spy, Major Miller, aka Anton Milchevsky. Information was obtained about 87 Abwehr agents, as well as a number of traitors. I.D. Curly was betrayed by a Gestapo agent and executed. He was posthumously awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union.

"SMERSH"

In 1943 in People's Commissariats defense and internal affairs, as well as in the navy, SMERSH military counterintelligence units are being created, recognized by historians and experts in the field of special services, as the best counterintelligence units of the Second World War. The main task of this unit was not only to counteract the German Abwehr, but also the need to introduce Soviet counterintelligence officers into the highest echelons of power in Nazi Germany and intelligence schools, destroy sabotage groups, conduct radio games, and also in the fight against traitors to the Motherland.

It should be noted that I. Stalin himself gave the name to this special service. At first, there was a proposal to call the unit SMERNESH (that is, “death to German spies”), to which Stalin stated that Soviet territory was full of spies from other states, and it was also necessary to fight them, so it’s better to call the new body simply SMERSH. Its official name was the SMERSH counterintelligence department of the NKVD of the USSR. By the time the counterintelligence was created, the battle of Stalingrad was left behind, and the initiative in the conduct of hostilities began to gradually pass to the troops of the Union. At this time, the territories that were under occupation began to be liberated, with German captivity a large number of Soviet soldiers and officers fled. Some of them were sent by the Nazis as spies. The special departments of the Red Army and the Navy needed to be reorganized, so they were replaced by SMERSH. And although the unit lasted only three years, people talk about it to this day.

"Berezina"

“... Our radio picked up the answer. First, a tuning signal passed, then a special signal, which meant that our people got in touch without interference (not an extra precaution: the absence of a signal would mean that the radio operator was captured and forced to get in touch). And more great news: Sherhorn's detachment exists...” Otto Skorzeny. Memoirs.

On August 18, 1944, an Abwehr liaison, conspired on the territory of Belarus, radioed: a large detachment of the Wehrmacht survived in the Berezina region, miraculously escaping defeat and hiding in a swampy area. The delighted command parachuted ammunition, food and radio operators in the indicated coordinates. They immediately reported: indeed, German part, numbering up to two thousand, led by Colonel Heinrich Sherhorn, is in dire need of weapons, provisions and demolition specialists to continue the partisan struggle. In fact, it was a grandiose operation of our intelligence, code-named "Berezina", with the participation of real German officers who went over to the side of the Red Army and portrayed the surviving regiment, and paratroopers-liaisons were immediately recruited by SMERSH, included in the radio game. Germany continued air supply of "its" detachment until May 45th.

Risky game on the Bandura

According to the NKGB of the USSR, an underground organization of the Polish government in exile in London, the Delegation of Zhondu, operates on the territory of Southern Lithuania and Western Belarus, which has one of the main tasks of conducting operational intelligence in the rear of the Red Army and on front-line communications. To transmit information, the "Delagatura" has short-wave radio transmitters and complex digital ciphers.

In June 1944, near the city of Andreapol, SMERSH caught four just abandoned German saboteurs. The head and radio operator of the enemy detachment agreed to work for our intelligence and informed the Center that the penetration into enemy territory had been successful. Reinforcements and ammunition needed!

The radio game of the counterintelligence officers of the 2nd Baltic Front against Army Group North continued for several months, during which the enemy repeatedly threw weapons and new agents near Andreapol, who immediately fell into the hands of SMERSH.

Great Patriotic War became a serious test for foreign intelligence. In incredibly difficult conditions, sometimes under bombs, scouts risked their lives in order to obtain important intelligence information. Intelligence informed Stalin about the plans German command near Stalingrad, on the Kursk Bulge, about other plans of the German Wehrmacht. Thus, she contributed to the victory of our people over the most dangerous aggressor in the history of mankind.

An important place in its activities during the war years was occupied by clarifying the true plans of the USSR's allies in the anti-Hitler coalition regarding the timing of the opening of the "second front", their position at the meetings of the "Big Three".

Collection by Germany of reconnaissance against the USSR

In order to implement the strategic plans for an armed attack on neighboring countries, Hitler told his entourage about them as early as November 5, 1937 - fascist Germany, naturally, needed extensive and reliable information that would reveal all aspects of the life of future victims of aggression, and especially information on the basis of which it would be to draw a conclusion about their defense potential. By supplying government bodies and the high command of the Wehrmacht with such information, the "total espionage" services actively contributed to the preparation of the country for war. Intelligence information was obtained in different ways, using a variety of methods and means.

Second World War, unleashed Nazi Germany September 1, 1939, began with the invasion of German troops into Poland. But Hitler considered the defeat of the Soviet Union, the conquest of a new "living space" in the East up to the Urals, to the achievement of which all state bodies of the country, and primarily the Wehrmacht and intelligence, were oriented. The Soviet-German non-aggression treaty signed on August 23, 1939, as well as the Friendship and Border Treaty concluded on September 28 of the same year, were supposed to serve as camouflage. Moreover, the opportunities opened up as a result of this were used to increase activity in the intelligence work against the USSR that was carried out throughout the entire pre-war period. Hitler constantly demanded from Canaris and Heydrich new information about the measures taken by the Soviet authorities to organize a rebuff to armed aggression.

As already noted, in the first years after the establishment of the fascist dictatorship in Germany Soviet Union viewed primarily as a political opponent. Therefore, everything related to him was within the competence of the security service. But this arrangement did not last long. Soon, in accordance with the criminal plans of the Nazi elite and the German military command, all services of "total espionage" were included in secret war against the world's first country of socialism. Speaking about the direction of the espionage and sabotage activities of Nazi Germany at that time, Schellenberg wrote in his memoirs: “The decisive and decisive action of all secret services against Russia was considered the first and most important task.”

The intensity of these actions increased markedly from the autumn of 1939, especially after the victory over France, when the Abwehr and SD were able to release their significant forces occupied in this region and use them in the eastern direction. The secret services, as is clear from archival documents, were then given a specific task: to clarify and supplement the available information about the economic and political situation of the Soviet Union, to ensure the regular flow of information about its defense capability and future theaters of military operations. They were also instructed to develop a detailed plan for organizing sabotage and terrorist actions on the territory of the USSR, timed to coincide with the time of the first offensive operations of the Nazi troops. In addition, they were called upon, as has already been said in detail, to guarantee the secrecy of the invasion and to launch a wide campaign of misinformation of world public opinion. This was how the program of actions of Hitler's intelligence against the USSR was determined, in which the leading place, for obvious reasons, was given to espionage.

Archival materials and other quite reliable sources contain a lot of evidence that an intense secret war against the Soviet Union began long before June 1941.

Zally Headquarters

By the time of the attack on the USSR, the activity of the Abwehr - this leader among the Nazi secret services in the field of espionage and sabotage - had reached its climax. In June 1941, the "Zalli Headquarters" was created, designed to provide leadership in all types of espionage and sabotage directed against the Soviet Union. The Valley Headquarters directly coordinated the actions of teams and groups attached to army groups for conducting reconnaissance and sabotage operations. It was then stationed near Warsaw, in the town of Sulejuwek, and was led by an experienced intelligence officer, Schmalschleger.

Here is some evidence of how events unfolded.

One of the prominent employees of German military intelligence, Stolze, during interrogation on December 25, 1945, testified that the head of the Abwehr II, Colonel Lahousen, having informed him in April 1941 of the date of the German attack on the USSR, demanded to urgently study all the materials at the disposal of the Abwehr regarding Soviet Union. It was necessary to find out the possibility of inflicting a powerful blow on the most important Soviet military-industrial facilities in order to completely or partially disable them. At the same time, a top-secret division was created within the framework of the Abwehr II, headed by Stolze. For reasons of secrecy, it had the running name "Group A". His duties included the planning and preparation of large-scale sabotage operations. They were undertaken, as Lahousen emphasized, in the hope that they would be able to disorganize the rear of the Red Army, sow panic among the local population, and thereby facilitate the advance of the Nazi troops.

Lahousen acquainted Stolze with the order of the headquarters of the operational leadership, signed by Field Marshal Keitel, which outlined in general terms the directive of the Wehrmacht Supreme High Command to deploy sabotage activities on Soviet territory after the start of the Barbarossa plan. The Abwehr was supposed to start carrying out actions aimed at inciting national hatred between the peoples of the USSR, to which the Nazi elite attached particular importance. Guided by the directive of the supreme command, Stolze conspired with the leaders of the Ukrainian nationalists Melnik and Bendera that they would immediately begin organizing in Ukraine the actions of nationalist elements hostile to Soviet power, timing them to coincide with the moment of the invasion of the Nazi troops. At the same time, the Abwehr II began to send its agents from among the Ukrainian nationalists to the territory of Ukraine, some of whom had the task of compiling or clarifying lists of local party and Soviet assets to be destroyed. Subversive actions involving nationalists of all stripes were also carried out in other regions of the USSR.

Actions of ABWER against the USSR

Abwehr II, according to Stolze's testimony, formed and armed "special detachments" for operations (in violation of international rules of warfare) in the Soviet Baltic states, tested back in the initial period of World War II. One of these detachments, whose soldiers and officers were dressed in Soviet military uniforms, had the task of seizing the railway tunnel and bridges near Vilnius. Until May 1941, 75 Abwehr and SD intelligence groups were neutralized on the territory of Lithuania, which, as documented, launched active espionage and sabotage activities here on the eve of Nazi Germany's attack on the USSR.

How great was the attention of the high command of the Wehrmacht to the deployment of sabotage operations in the rear of the Soviet troops, shows the fact that the "special detachments" and "special teams" of the Abwehr were in all army groups and armies concentrated on the eastern borders of Germany.

According to Stolze's testimony, the Abwehr branches in Koenigsberg, Warsaw and Krakow had a directive from Canaris in connection with the preparation of an attack on the USSR to intensify espionage and sabotage activities to the maximum. The task was to provide the Supreme High Command of the Wehrmacht with detailed and most accurate data on the system of targets on the territory of the USSR, primarily on roads and railways, bridges, power plants and other objects, the destruction of which could lead to a serious disorganization of the Soviet rear and in in the end would have paralyzed his forces and broken the resistance of the Red Army. The Abwehr was supposed to stretch its tentacles to the most important communications, military-industrial facilities, as well as large administrative and political centers of the USSR - in any case, it was planned.

Summing up some of the work carried out by the Abwehr by the time the German invasion of the USSR began, Canaris wrote in a memorandum that numerous groups of agents from the indigenous population, that is, from Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Poles, Balts, Finns, etc., were sent to the headquarters of the German armies. n. Each group consisted of 25 (or more) people. These groups were led by German officers. They were supposed to penetrate into the Soviet rear to a depth of 50,300 kilometers behind the front line in order to report by radio the results of their observations, paying special attention to collecting information about Soviet reserves, the state of railways and other roads, as well as about all activities carried out by the enemy. .

In the prewar years, the German embassy in Moscow and the German consulates in Leningrad, Kharkov, Tbilisi, Kyiv, Odessa, Novosibirsk and Vladivostok served as the center for organizing espionage, the main base for the strongholds of Hitler's intelligence. In those years, a large group of career German intelligence officers, the most experienced professionals, representing all parts of the Nazi “total espionage” system, and especially the Abwehr and the SD, worked in the diplomatic field in the USSR in those years. Despite the obstacles put up by the Chekist authorities, they, shamelessly using their diplomatic immunity, developed a high activity here, striving, first of all, as archival materials of those years indicate, to test the defense power of our country.

Erich Köstring

The Abwehr residency in Moscow was headed at that time by General Erich Köstring, who until 1941 was known in German intelligence circles as "the most knowledgeable specialist on the Soviet Union." He was born and lived for some time in Moscow, so he was fluent in Russian and was familiar with the way of life in Russia. During World War I fought against tsarist army, then in the 1920s he worked in a special center for the study of the Red Army. From 1931 to 1933, in the final period of Soviet-German military cooperation, he acted as an observer from the Reichswehr in the USSR. He again ended up in Moscow in October 1935 as a military and aviation attache in Germany and stayed until 1941. He had a wide circle of acquaintances in the Soviet Union, whom he sought to use to obtain information of interest to him.

However, of the many questions that Köstring received from Germany six months after his arrival in Moscow, he was able to answer only a few. In his letter to the head of the intelligence department for the armies of the East, he explained this as follows: “The experience of several months of work here has shown that there can be no question of the possibility of obtaining military intelligence information, even remotely related to the military industry, even on the most harmless issues. . visits military units terminated. One gets the impression that the Russians are supplying all attachés with a set of false information.” The letter ended with an assurance that he nevertheless hoped that he would be able to draw up "a mosaic picture reflecting the further development and organizational structure of the Red Army."

After the German consulates were closed in 1938, the military attaches of other countries were deprived of the opportunity to attend military parades for two years, and, in addition, restrictions were placed on foreigners establishing contacts with Soviet citizens. Köstring, in his words, was forced to return to using three "meager sources of information": traveling around the territory of the USSR and traveling by car to various regions of the Moscow region, using the open Soviet press, and, finally, exchanging information with military attaches of other countries.

In one of his reports, he draws the following conclusion about the state of affairs in the Red Army: “As a result of the liquidation of the main part of the senior officers, who mastered the military art quite well in the process of ten years of practical training and theoretical training, the operational capabilities of the Red Army have decreased. The lack of military order and the lack of experienced commanders will have a negative effect for some time on the training and education of troops. The irresponsibility that is already manifesting itself in military affairs will lead to even more serious negative consequences in the future. The army is deprived of commanders of the highest qualification. Nevertheless, there are no grounds for concluding that the offensive capabilities of the mass of soldiers have declined to such an extent as not to recognize the Red Army as a very important factor in the event of a military conflict.

In a message to Berlin by Lieutenant Colonel Hans Krebs, who replaced the ill Köstring, dated April 22, 1941, it was said: “The Soviet ground forces, of course, have not yet reached the maximum number according to the combat schedule for wartime, determined by us at 200 infantry rifle divisions. This information was recently confirmed by the military attachés of Finland and Japan in a conversation with me.

A few weeks later, Köstring and Krebs made a special trip to Berlin to personally inform Hitler that there were no significant changes for the better in the Red Army.

The employees of the Abwehr and SD, who used diplomatic and other official cover in the USSR, were tasked, along with strictly oriented information, to collect information on a wide range of military-economic problems. This information had a very specific purpose - it was supposed to enable the strategic planning bodies of the Wehrmacht to get an idea of ​​​​the conditions in which the Nazi troops would have to operate on the territory of the USSR, and in particular when capturing Moscow, Leningrad, Kyiv and other large cities. The coordinates of the objects of future bombardments were clarified. Even then, a network of underground radio stations was being created to transmit the collected information, caches were set up in public and other suitable places where instructions from Nazi intelligence centers and items of sabotage equipment could be stored so that agents sent and located on the territory of the USSR could use them at the right time.

Using trade relations between Germany and the USSR for intelligence

For the purpose of espionage, cadres, secret agents and proxies of the Abwehr and the SD were systematically sent to the Soviet Union, for the penetration of which into our country the intensively developing economic, trade, economic and cultural ties between the USSR and Germany in those years were used. With their help, such important tasks were solved as collecting information about the military and economic potential of the USSR, in particular about the defense industry (capacity, zoning, bottlenecks), about the industry as a whole, its individual large centers, energy systems, communication routes, sources of industrial raw materials, etc. Representatives of business circles were especially active, who often, along with the collection of intelligence information, carried out instructions to establish communications on Soviet territory with agents whom German intelligence managed to recruit during the period of active functioning of German concerns and firms in our country.

Giving importance the use of legal opportunities in intelligence work against the USSR and in every possible way seeking to expand them, both the Abwehr and the SD, at the same time, proceeded from the fact that the information obtained in this way in the predominant part is not capable of serving as a sufficient basis for developing specific plans, making the right decisions in the military - political area. And besides, based only on such information, they believed, it is difficult to form a reliable and somewhat complete picture of tomorrow's military enemy, his forces and reserves. To fill the gap, the Abwehr and the SD, as confirmed by many documents, are making attempts to intensify work against our country by illegal means, seeking to acquire secret sources within the country or send secret agents from beyond the cordon, counting on their settling in the USSR. This, in particular, is evidenced by the following fact: the head of the Abwehr intelligence group in the United States, officer G. Rumrich, at the beginning of 1938, had instructions from his center to obtain blank forms of American passports for agents thrown into Russia.

“Can you get at least fifty of them?” Rumrich was asked in a cipher telegram from Berlin. Abwehr was ready to pay a thousand dollars for each blank American passport - they were so necessary.

Long before the start of the war against the USSR, documentary specialists from the secret services of Nazi Germany scrupulously followed all the changes in the procedure for issuing and issuing personal documents of Soviet citizens. They showed an increased interest in clarifying the system for protecting military documents from forgery, trying to establish the procedure for the use of conditional secret signs.

In addition to agents illegally sent to the Soviet Union, the Abwehr and the SD used their official employees, embedded in the commission to determine the line of the German-Soviet border and the resettlement of Germans living in the western regions of Ukraine, Belarus, as well as the Baltic states, to obtain information of interest to them. territory of Germany.

Already at the end of 1939, Hitler's intelligence began to systematically send agents to the USSR from the territory of occupied Poland to conduct military espionage. They were usually professionals. It is known, for example, that one of these agents, who underwent 15 months of training in the Berlin Abwehr school in 1938-1939, managed to illegally enter the USSR three times in 1940. Having made several long one-and-a-half to two-month trips to the regions of the Central Urals, Moscow and the North Caucasus, the agent returned safely to Germany.

Starting around April 1941, the Abwehr shifted mainly to dropping agents in groups led by experienced officers. All of them had the necessary espionage and sabotage equipment, including radio stations for receiving direct radio broadcasts from Berlin. They had to send response messages to a fictitious address in cryptography.

In the Minsk, Leningrad and Kiev directions, the depth of undercover intelligence reached 300-400 kilometers or more. Part of the agents, having reached certain points, had to settle there for some time and immediately begin to carry out the task received. Most of the agents (usually they did not have radio stations) had to return to the intelligence center no later than June 15-18, 1941, so that the information they obtained could be quickly used by the command.

What primarily interested the Abwehr and SD? The tasks for either group of agents, as a rule, differed little and boiled down to finding out the concentration of Soviet troops in the border areas, the deployment of headquarters, formations and units of the Red Army, points and areas where radio stations were located, the presence of ground and underground airfields, the number and types of aircraft based on them, the location of ammunition depots, explosives, fuel.

Some agents sent to the USSR were instructed by the intelligence center to refrain from specific practical actions until the start of the war. The goal is clear - the leaders of the Abwehr hoped in this way to keep their agent cells until the moment when the need for them would be especially great.

Sending German agents to the USSR in 1941

The activity of preparing agents for being sent to the Soviet Union is evidenced by such data, gleaned from the archives of the Abwehr. In mid-May 1941, about 100 people who were destined for deportation to the USSR were trained in the intelligence school of Admiral Kanris' department near Koenigsberg (in the town of Grossmichel).

Who was betting on? They are from the families of Russian emigrants who settled in Berlin after the October Revolution, the sons of former officers of the tsarist army who fought against Soviet Russia, and after the defeat, those who fled abroad, members of the nationalist organizations of Western Ukraine, the Baltic States, Poland, the Balkan countries, as a rule, who spoke Russian.

Among the means used by Hitler's intelligence in violation of the generally accepted norms of international law was also aerial espionage, which was put at the service of the latest technical achievements. In the system of the Ministry of the Air Force of Nazi Germany, there was even a special unit - a special-purpose squadron, which, together with the secret service of this department, carried out reconnaissance work against the countries of interest to the Abwehr. During the flights, all structures important for the conduct of the war were photographed: ports, bridges, airfields, military facilities, industrial enterprises, etc. Thus, the Wehrmacht military cartographic service received in advance from the Abwehr the information necessary to compile good maps. Everything related to these flights was kept in the strictest confidence, and only the direct executors and those from a very limited circle of employees of the Abwehr I air group, whose duties included processing and analyzing data obtained through aerial reconnaissance, knew about them. Aerial photography materials were presented in the form of photographs, as a rule, to Canaris himself, in rare cases - to one of his deputies, and then transferred to the destination. It is known that the command of the special squadron of the Rovel Air Force, stationed in Staaken, already in 1937 began reconnaissance of the territory of the USSR using Hein-Kel-111 disguised as transport aircraft.

Air reconnaissance of Germany before the start of the war

An idea of ​​the intensity of aerial reconnaissance is given by the following generalized data: from October 1939 to June 22, 1941, German aircraft invaded the airspace of the Soviet Union more than 500 times. Many cases are known when civil aviation aircraft flying along the Berlin-Moscow route on the basis of agreements between Aeroflot and Lufthansa often deliberately strayed off course and ended up over military installations. Two weeks before the start of the war, the Germans also flew around the areas where the Soviet troops were located. Every day they photographed the location of our divisions, corps, armies, pinpointed the location of military radio transmitters that were not camouflaged.

A few months before the attack of fascist Germany on the USSR, aerial photographs of the Soviet territory were carried out at full speed. According to information received by our intelligence through agents from the referent of the German aviation headquarters, German aircraft flew to the Soviet side from airfields in Bucharest, Koenigsberg and Kirkenes (Northern Norway) and photographed from a height of 6 thousand meters. Only for the period from April 1 to April 19, 1941, German aircraft 43 times violated state border, making reconnaissance flights over our territory to a depth of 200 kilometers.

As established by the Nuremberg trials of the main war criminals, the materials obtained with the help of aerial photographic reconnaissance, carried out in 1939, even before the start of the invasion of Nazi troops in Poland, were used as a guide in the subsequent planning of military and sabotage operations against the USSR. Reconnaissance flights, which were carried out first over the territory of Poland, then the Soviet Union (to Chernigov) and the countries of South-Eastern Europe, some time later were transferred to Leningrad, to which, as an object of air espionage, the main attention was riveted. It is known from archival documents that on February 13, 1940, Canaris' report “On new results of aerial reconnaissance against the SSSL received by the Rovel special squadron” was heard from General Jodl at the headquarters of the operational leadership of the Wehrmacht Supreme High Command. Since that time, the scale of air espionage has increased dramatically. His main task was to obtain information necessary for compiling geographical maps of the USSR. At the same time, special attention was paid to naval military bases and other strategically important objects (for example, the Shostka gunpowder plant) and, especially, oil production centers, oil refineries, and oil pipelines. Future objects for bombing were also determined.

An important channel for obtaining espionage information about the USSR and its armed forces was the regular exchange of information with the intelligence agencies of the allied countries of Nazi Germany - Japan, Italy, Finland, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria. In addition, the Abwehr maintained working contacts with the military intelligence services of the countries neighboring the Soviet Union - Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. Schellenberg even set himself the task of developing the secret services of countries friendly to Germany and rallying them into a kind of “intelligence community” that would work for one common center and supply the countries included in it with the necessary information (a goal that was generally achieved after war in NATO in the form of informal cooperation between various secret services under the auspices of the CIA).

Denmark, for example, in whose secret service Schellenberg, with the support of the leadership of the local National Socialist Party, managed to take a leading position and where there was already a good “operational reserve”, was “used as a“ base ”in intelligence work against England and Russia. According to Schellenberg, he managed to infiltrate the Soviet intelligence network. As a result, he writes, after some time a well-established connection with Russia was established, and we began to receive important information of a political nature.

The wider the preparations for the invasion of the USSR, the more vigorously Canaris tried to include his allies and satellites of Nazi Germany in intelligence activities, to put their agents into action. Through the Abwehr, the centers of Nazi military intelligence in the countries of South-Eastern Europe were ordered to intensify their work against the Soviet Union. The Abwehr has long maintained the closest contacts with the intelligence service of Horthy Hungary. According to P. Leverkün, the results of the actions of the Hungarian intelligence service in the Balkans were a valuable addition to the work of the Abwehr. An Abwehr liaison officer was constantly in Budapest, who exchanged information obtained. There was also a representative office of the SD, consisting of six people, headed by Hoettl. Their duty was to maintain contact with the Hungarian secret service and the German national minority, which served as a source of recruiting agents. The representative office had practically unlimited funds in stamps to pay for the services of agents. At first it was focused on solving political problems, but with the outbreak of war, its activities increasingly acquired a military orientation. In January 1940, Canaris set about organizing a powerful Abwehr center in Sofia in order to turn Bulgaria into one of the strongholds of his agent network. Contacts with Romanian intelligence were just as close. With the consent of the chief of Romanian intelligence, Morutsov, and with the assistance of oil firms that were dependent on German capital, Abwehr people were sent to the territory of Romania in the oil regions. The scouts acted under the guise of employees of firms - "mountain masters", and the soldiers of the sabotage regiment "Brandenburg" - local guards. Thus, the Abwehr managed to establish itself in the oil heart of Romania, and from here it began to spread its spy networks further to the east.

The Nazi services of "total espionage" in the struggle against the USSR even in the years preceding the war, had an ally in the face of the intelligence of militaristic Japan, whose ruling circles also made far-reaching plans for our country, the practical implementation of which they associated with the capture of Moscow by the Germans. And although there were never joint military plans between Germany and Japan, each of them pursued its own policy of aggression, sometimes trying to benefit at the expense of the other, nevertheless, both countries were interested in partnership and cooperation between themselves and therefore acted as a united front in the intelligence field . This, in particular, is eloquently evidenced by the activities in those years of the Japanese military attaché in Berlin, General Oshima. It is known that he coordinated the actions of the Japanese intelligence residencies in European countries, where he established fairly close ties in political and business circles and maintained contacts with the leaders of the SD and the Abwehr. Through it, a regular exchange of intelligence data about the USSR was carried out. Oshima kept his ally informed about the concrete measures of Japanese intelligence in relation to our country and, in turn, was aware of the covert operations launched against it by fascist Germany. If necessary, he provided the undercover and other operational capabilities at his disposal and, on a mutual basis, willingly supplied intelligence information. Another key figure Japanese intelligence in Europe was the Japanese envoy in Stockholm, Onodera.

In the plans of the Abwehr and the SD directed against the Soviet Union, an important place, for obvious reasons, was assigned to its neighboring states - the Baltic States, Finland, Poland.

The Nazis showed particular interest in Estonia, considering it as a purely "neutral" country, the territory of which could serve as a convenient springboard for the deployment of intelligence operations against the USSR. This was decisively facilitated by the fact that already in the second half of 1935, after a group of pro-fascist officers led by Colonel Maazing, head of the intelligence department of the General Staff, gained the upper hand at the headquarters of the Estonian army, there was a complete reorientation of the country's military command to Nazi Germany . In the spring of 1936, Maasing, and after him the chief of staff of the army, General Reek, willingly accepted the invitation of the leaders of the Wehrmacht to visit Berlin. During their time there, they struck up a business relationship with Canaris and his closest aides. An agreement was reached on mutual information on the intelligence line. The Germans undertook to equip Estonian intelligence with operational and technical means. As it turned out later, it was then that the Abwehr secured the official consent of Reek and Maazing to use the territory of Estonia to work against the USSR. At the disposal of Estonian intelligence were provided photographic equipment for the production of photographs of warships from the lighthouses of the Gulf of Finland, as well as radio interception devices, which were then installed along the entire Soviet-Estonian border. To provide technical assistance, specialists from the decryption department of the Wehrmacht high command were sent to Tallinn.

General Laidoner, commander-in-chief of the Estonian bourgeois army, assessed the results of these negotiations as follows: “We were mainly interested in information about the deployment of Soviet military forces in the region of our border and about the movements taking place there. All this information, insofar as they had it, the Germans willingly communicated to us. As for our intelligence department, it supplied the Germans with all the data we had on the Soviet rear and the internal situation in the SSSL.

General Pickenbrock, one of Canaris's closest aides, during interrogation on February 25, 1946, in particular, testified: “Estonian intelligence maintained very close ties with us. We constantly provided her with financial and technical support. Its activities were directed exclusively against the Soviet Union. The head of intelligence, Colonel Maazing, visited Berlin every year, and our representatives, as necessary, traveled to Estonia themselves. Captain Cellarius often visited there, who was entrusted with the task of monitoring the Red Banner Baltic Fleet, its position and maneuvers. An employee of Estonian intelligence, Captain Pigert, constantly cooperated with him. Before the Soviet troops entered Estonia, we left numerous agents there in advance, with whom we maintained regular contact and through which we received information of interest to us. When Soviet power arose there, our agents intensified their activities and, until the very moment of the occupation of the country, supplied us with the necessary information, thereby contributing to a significant extent to the success of the German troops. For some time, Estonia and Finland were the main sources of intelligence information about the Soviet armed forces.

In April 1939, General Reek was again invited to Germany, which was widely celebrating Hitler's birthday, whose visit, as expected in Berlin, was supposed to deepen interaction between the German and Estonian military intelligence services. With the assistance of the latter, the Abwehr managed to carry out in 1939 and 1940 the transfer of several groups of spies and saboteurs to the USSR. All this time, four radio stations were functioning along the Soviet-Estonian border, intercepting radiograms, and simultaneously monitoring the work of radio stations on the territory of the USSR was carried out from different points. The information obtained in this way was passed on to the Abwehr, from which the Estonian intelligence had no secrets, especially with regard to the Soviet Union.

The Baltic countries in intelligence against the USSR

Abwehr leaders regularly traveled to Estonia once a year to exchange information. The heads of the intelligence services of these countries, in turn, visited Berlin every year. Thus, the exchange of accumulated secret information took place every six months. In addition, special couriers were periodically sent from both sides when it was necessary to urgently deliver the necessary information to the center; sometimes military attachés at the Estonian and German embassies were authorized for this purpose. The information transmitted by Estonian intelligence mainly contained data on the state of the armed forces and the military-industrial potential of the Soviet Union.

The Abwehr archives contain materials about the stay of Canaris and Pikenbrock in Estonia in 1937, 1938 and June 1939. In all cases, these trips were caused by the need to improve the coordination of actions against the USSR and the exchange of intelligence information. Here is what General Laidoner, already mentioned above, writes: “The head of German intelligence, Kanaris, visited Estonia for the first time in 1936. After that, he visited here twice or thrice. I took it personally. Negotiations on issues of intelligence work were conducted with him by the head of the army headquarters and the head of the 2nd department. Then it was established more specifically what information was required for both countries and what we could give each other. The last time Canaris visited Estonia was in June 1939. It was mainly about intelligence activities. I spoke with Canaris at some length about our position in the event of a clash between Germany and England and between Germany and the USSR. He was interested in the question of how long it would take the Soviet Union to fully mobilize its armed forces and what was the state of its Vehicle(railway, road and road)" . On this visit, together with Canaris and Pikenbrock, there was the head of the Abwehr III department, Frans Bentivegni, whose trip was connected with checking the work of a group subordinate to him, which carried out extra-cordon counterintelligence activities in Tallinn. In order to avoid the “inept interference” of the Gestapo in the affairs of the counterintelligence of the Abwehr, at the insistence of Canaris, an agreement was reached between him and Heydrich that in all cases when the security police would carry out any activities on Estonian territory, the Abwehr must first be informed . For his part, Heydrich put forward a demand - the SD should have an independent residency in Estonia. Realizing that in the event of an open quarrel with the influential chief of the imperial security service, it would be difficult for the Abwehr to count on Hitler's support, Canaris agreed to "make room" and accepted Heydrich's demand. At the same time, they agreed that all the activities of the SD in the field of recruiting agents in Estonia and transferring them to the Soviet Union would be coordinated with the Abwehr. The Abwehr retained the right to concentrate in their hands and evaluate all intelligence information regarding the Red Army and Navy, which the Nazis received through Estonia, as, indeed, through other Baltic countries and Finland. Canaris strongly objected to the attempts of the SD employees to act together with the Estonian fascists, bypassing the Abwehr and sending unverified information to Berlin, which often came to Hitler through Himmler.

According to Laidoner's report to Estonian President Päts, the last time Canaris was in Tallinn was in the autumn of 1939 under a false name. In this regard, his meeting with Laidoner and Päts was arranged according to all the rules of conspiracy.

In the report of the Schellenberg department, preserved in the archives of the RSHA, it was reported that the operational situation for intelligence work through the SD in the pre-war period in both Estonia and Latvia was similar. At the head of the residency in each of these countries was an official employee of the SD, who was in an illegal position. All the information collected by the residency flowed to him, which he forwarded to the center by mail using cryptography, through couriers on German ships or through embassy channels. The practical activities of the SD intelligence residencies in the Baltic states were assessed positively by Berlin, especially in terms of acquiring sources of information in political circles. The SD was greatly assisted by immigrants from Germany who lived here. But, as noted in the above-mentioned report of the VI Department of the RSHA, “after the entry of the Russians, the operational capabilities of the SD underwent serious changes. The leading figures of the country left the political arena, and maintaining contact with them became more difficult. There was an urgent need to find new channels for transmitting intelligence information to the center. It became impossible to send it on ships, since the ships were carefully searched by the authorities, and the members of the crews who went ashore were constantly monitored. I also had to refuse to send information through the free port of Memel (now Klaipeda, Lithuanian SSR. - Ed.) via overland communication. It was also risky to use sympathetic ink. I had to resolutely take up the laying of new communication channels, as well as the search for fresh sources of information. The SD resident in Estonia, who spoke in official correspondence under the code number 6513, nevertheless managed to make contact with newly recruited agents and use old sources of information. Maintaining regular contact with his agents was a very dangerous business, requiring exceptional caution and dexterity. Resident 6513, however, was able to very quickly understand the situation and, despite all the difficulties, obtain the necessary information. In January 1940, he received a diplomatic passport and began working under the guise of an assistant at the German embassy in Tallinn.

As for Finland, according to the archival materials of the Wehrmacht, a “Military Organization” was actively operating on its territory, conditionally called the “Cellarius Bureau” (after its leader, the German military intelligence officer Cellarius). It was created by the Abwehr with the consent of the Finnish military authorities in mid-1939. Since 1936, Canaris and his closest assistants Pikenbrock and Bentivegni have repeatedly met in Finland and Germany with the head of Finnish intelligence, Colonel Swenson, and then with Colonel Melander, who replaced him. At these meetings, they exchanged intelligence information and worked out plans for joint action against the Soviet Union. The Cellarius Bureau constantly kept in view the Baltic Fleet, the troops of the Leningrad Military District, as well as units stationed in Estonia. His active assistants in Helsinki were Dobrovolsky, a former general of the tsarist army, and former royal officers Pushkarev, Alekseev, Sokolov, Batuev, the Baltic Germans Meisner, Mansdorf, the Estonian bourgeois nationalists Weller, Kurg, Horn, Kristjan and others. On the territory of Finland, Cellarius had a fairly wide network of agents among various segments of the country's population, recruited spies and saboteurs among the Russian White émigrés who had settled there, the nationalists who fled from Estonia, and the Baltic Germans.

Pickenbrock, during interrogation on February 25, 1946, gave detailed testimony about the activities of the Cellarius Bureau, saying that Captain First Rank Cellarius carried out intelligence work against the Soviet Union under the cover of the German embassy in Finland. “We have had close cooperation with Finnish intelligence for a long time, even before I joined the Abwehr in 1936. In order to exchange intelligence data, we systematically received information from the Finns about the deployment and strength of the Red Army.

As follows from Pickenbrock's testimony, he first visited Helsinki with Canaris and Major Stolz, head of the Abwehr department I of the Ost ground forces headquarters, in June 1937. Together with representatives of Finnish intelligence, they compared and exchanged intelligence information about the Soviet Union. At the same time, a questionnaire was handed over to the Finns, which they were to be guided in the future when collecting intelligence information. The Abwehr was primarily interested in the deployment of Red Army units, military industry facilities, especially in the Leningrad region. During this visit, they had business meetings and conversations with the German ambassador to Finland, von Blucher, and the military attaché, Major General Rossing. In June 1938, Canaris and Pickenbrock again visited Finland. On this visit, they were received by the Finnish Minister of War, who expressed satisfaction with the way Canaris's cooperation with the head of Finnish intelligence, Colonel Swenson, was developing. The third time they were in Finland was in June 1939. The head of Finnish intelligence at that time was Melander. The negotiations proceeded within the same framework as the previous ones. Informed in advance by the leaders of the Abwehr about the upcoming attack on the Soviet Union, Finnish military intelligence in early June 1941 put at their disposal the information it had in relation to the Soviet Union. At the same time, with the knowledge of the local authorities, the Abwehr began to carry out Operation Erna, which involved the transfer of Estonian counter-revolutionaries from Finland to the Baltic region as spies, radio agents and saboteurs.

The last time Canaris and Pickenbrock visited Finland was in the winter of 1941/42. Together with them was the chief of counterintelligence (Abwehr III) Bentivegni, who traveled to inspect and provide practical assistance to the "military organization", as well as to resolve issues of cooperation between this organization and Finnish intelligence. Together with Melander, they determined the boundaries of Cellarius' activities: he received the right to independently recruit agents on Finnish territory and transfer them across the front line. After the negotiations, Canaris and Pikenbrock, accompanied by Melander, went to the city of Mikkeli, to the headquarters of Marshal Mannerheim, who expressed a desire to personally meet with the chief of the German Abwehr. They were joined by the head of the German military mission in Finland, General Erfurt.

Cooperation with the intelligence services of the allied and occupied countries in the fight against the USSR undoubtedly brought certain results, but the Nazis expected more from him.

The results of the activities of German intelligence on the eve of the Great Patriotic War

“On the eve of the war, the Abwehr,” writes O. Reile, “was unable to cover the Soviet Union with a well-functioning intelligence network from well-located secret strongholds in other countries - Turkey, Afghanistan, Japan or Finland.” Established in peacetime strongholds in neutral countries - "military organizations" were either disguised as economic firms or included in German missions abroad. When the war began, Germany was cut off from many sources of information, and the importance of "military organizations" greatly increased. Until the middle of 1941, the Abwehr carried out systematic work on the border with the USSR in order to create its own strongholds and plant agents. Along the German-Soviet border, a wide network of technical reconnaissance equipment was deployed, with the help of which interception of radio communications was carried out.

In connection with Hitler's installation on the all-out deployment of the activities of all German secret services against the Soviet Union, the question of coordination became acute, especially after an agreement was concluded between the RSHA and the General Staff of the German Ground Forces to assign to each army special detachments of the SD, called "Einsatzgruppen" and "Einsatzkommando".

In the first half of June 1941, Heydrich and Canaris convened a meeting of Abwehr officers and commanders of police and SD units (Einsatzgruppen and Einsatzkommando). In addition to separate special reports, reports were made at it that covered in general terms the operational plans for the upcoming invasion of the USSR. The ground forces were represented at this meeting by the quartermaster general, who, regarding the technical side of cooperation between the secret services, relied on a draft order worked out in agreement with the chief of the SD. Canaris and Heydrich, in their speeches, touched upon the issues of interaction, "feeling of the elbow" between parts of the security police, the SD and the Abwehr. A few days after this meeting, both of them were received by the Reichsführer SS Himmler to discuss their proposed plan of action to counter Soviet intelligence.

Evidence of the scope that the activities of the "total espionage" services against the USSR on the eve of the war can serve as such generalizing data: only in 1940 and the first quarter of 1941 in the western regions of our country were discovered 66 residencies of Nazi intelligence and neutralized more than 1300 of its agents .

As a result of the activation of the “total espionage” services, the volume of information they collected about the Soviet Union, which required analysis and appropriate processing, constantly increased, and intelligence, as the Nazis wanted, became more and more comprehensive. There was a need to involve relevant research organizations in the process of studying and evaluating intelligence materials. One of these institutes, widely used by intelligence, located in Wanjie, was the largest collection of various Soviet literature, including reference . The special value of this unique collection was that it contained an extensive selection of specialized literature on all branches of science and economics, published in the original language. The staff, which included well-known scientists from various universities, including immigrants from Russia, was headed by one professor-Sovietologist, Georgian by origin. The impersonal secret information obtained by intelligence was transferred to the Institute, which he had to subject to careful study and generalization using the available reference literature, and return to Schellenberg's apparatus with his own expert assessment and comments.

Another research organization that also worked closely with intelligence was the Institute of Geopolitics. He carefully analyzed the collected information and, together with the Abwehr and the Department of Economics and Armaments of the Headquarters of the Wehrmacht High Command, compiled various reviews and reference materials. The nature of his interests can be judged at least from such documents prepared by him before the attack on the Soviet Union: “Military-geographical data on the European part of Russia”, “Geographical and ethnographic information about Belarus”, “Industry of Soviet Russia”, “Railway transport of the SSSL, " Baltic countries(with city plans).

In the Reich, in total, there were about 400 research organizations dealing with socio-political, economic, scientific, technical, geographical and other problems of foreign states; all of them, as a rule, were staffed by highly qualified specialists who knew all aspects of the relevant problems, and were subsidized by the state according to a free budget. There was a procedure according to which all requests from Hitler - when he, for example, demanded information on any particular issue - were sent to several different organizations for execution. However, the reports and certificates prepared by them often did not satisfy the Fuhrer due to their academic nature. In response to the task received, the institutions issued "a set of general provisions, perhaps correct, but untimely and not clear enough."

In order to eliminate fragmentation and inconsistency in the work of research organizations, to increase their competence, and most importantly, their return, and also to ensure proper control over the quality of their conclusions and expert assessments based on intelligence materials, Schellenberg would later come to the conclusion that it was necessary to create an autonomous groups of specialists with higher education. Based on the materials placed at their disposal, in particular on the Soviet Union, and with the involvement of relevant research organizations, this group will organize the study of complex problems and, on this basis, develop in-depth recommendations and forecasts for the political and military leadership of the country.

The "Department of Foreign Armies of the East" of the General Staff of the Ground Forces was engaged in similar work. He concentrated materials coming from all intelligence and other sources and periodically compiled "reviews" for the highest military authorities, in which special attention was paid to the strength of the Red Army, the morale of the troops, the level of command personnel, the nature of combat training, etc.

Such is the place of the Nazi secret services in general in military machine Nazi Germany and the scope of their participation in the preparation of aggression against the USSR, in intelligence support for future offensive operations.

Encyclopedia of delusions. Third Reich Likhacheva Larisa Borisovna

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Vladimir Vysotsky

There is an opinion that in Nazi Germany they prepared perhaps the most invulnerable spies in the world. Say, with the notorious German pedantry, they could take care of all, even the seemingly most insignificant little things. After all, according to the old spy saying, it is on them that the best agents always “burn”.

In reality, the situation on the invisible German-Allied front developed somewhat differently. Sometimes the Nazi "knights of the cloak and dagger" were ruined by their scrupulousness. A similar story in the book "Spy Hunter" is given by the famous English counterintelligence officer, Colonel O. Pinto. At the beginning of World War II, British counterintelligence had a lot of work: refugees from European countries conquered by the Reich flocked to the country in an endless stream. It is clear that under their view of the land of foggy Albion, German agents and collaborators recruited in the occupied territories strove to penetrate. O. Pinto had a chance to deal with one such Belgian collaborator - Alfons Timmermans. By itself, Timmermans aroused no suspicions: the former sailor of the merchant fleet, in order to find himself in safe England, went through a lot of difficulties and dangers. In his simple belongings, too, there was nothing from the espionage arsenal. However, the attention of Colonel O. Pinto was attracted by 3 completely harmless, at first glance, things. However, we will give the floor to the counterintelligence officer himself: “The one who instructed him before the trip to England took into account every little thing and thereby betrayed the newcomer to the British counterintelligence. He supplied Timmermans with three things necessary for "invisible" writing: pyramidon powder, which dissolves in a mixture of water and alcohol, orange sticks - a writing medium - and cotton wool for wrapping the tips of the sticks, in order to avoid treacherous scratches on paper. The trouble with Timmermans was that he could buy all these things at any pharmacy in England and no one would ever ask him why he was doing it. Now, because his mentor was too scrupulous person. he had to answer some questions for me ... Timmermans - the victim of German scrupulousness - was hanged in Vandeworth prison ... "

Very often, German pedantry turned out to be fatal for agents who had to work under the guise of US Army soldiers. Perfectly owning the "great and mighty" English language, fascist intelligence officers turned out to be completely unprepared for American slang. So, quite a few carefully conspiratorial and legendary spies came across that at army gas stations, instead of the typical jargon "ges", they used the literary name of gasoline - "petrol". Naturally, no one expected to hear such a clever word from a simple American soldier.

But the possible troubles of the German spies did not end there. As it turned out, the Yankee soldiers even military ranks renamed it differently. The sabotage group, supervised by the most venerable German spy - Otto Skorzeny, was convinced of this on their own sad experience. Subordinates of the Scarred Man arrived on captured American self-propelled guns at the location of the 7th Armored Division near the Belgian city of Potto. The commander of a group of spies bravely jumped out of the car and introduced himself, according to the charter, introducing himself as a company commander. It could not have occurred to him that in the US Army such a name for a military rank has long become an anachronism, and various slang abbreviations are used instead. The Yankee soldiers immediately recognized the forgery and shot their pseudo-colleagues on the spot, led by their "company" ...

It was even more difficult for pedantic German agents to work in the USSR. Let's take an example. Nazi Germany was preparing a group of spies to be sent to Soviet territory. All scouts were thoroughly trained and were fluent in Russian. Moreover, they were even introduced to the peculiarities of the Soviet mentality and the mysterious Russian soul. However, the mission of these almost ideal agents failed miserably at the first check of documents. The treacherous trifle, "with the head" betraying the fighters of the invisible front, turned out to be ... passports! No, the “red-skinned passports” themselves, made by the best German counterfeiters, did not differ in any way from the real ones and were even worn and battered accordingly. The only thing in which the "pro-fascist" documents differed from their original Soviet counterparts was the metal staples with which they were sewn together. The diligent and punctual Germans made fake “ksivs” in good conscience, as for themselves. Therefore, the pages of the passport were fastened with staples made of high-quality stainless wire, while in the Soviet Union they could not even conceive of such a wasteful and inappropriate use of stainless steel - the most common iron was used for the main document of every citizen of the USSR. Naturally, over the long years of operation, such a wire oxidized, leaving characteristic red marks on the pages of the passport. It is not surprising that the valiant SMERSH became very interested, finding among the usual "rusty" passports little books with clean, shiny stainless steel clips. According to unverified data, only at the beginning of the war, Soviet counterintelligence managed to identify and neutralize more than 150 such spies - "staplers". Truly, there are no trifles in intelligence. Even if it is intelligence of the Third Reich.

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Is it possible? Well, why not, on the other hand? The image of Stirlitz, although literary, has prototypes in reality. Who among those interested in that era has not heard of the “red chapel” - the Soviet intelligence network in the highest structures of the Third Reich? And if so, then why not be similar to the Nazi agents in the USSR?
The fact that during the war there were no high-profile revelations of enemy spies does not mean that they did not exist. They really couldn't be found. Well, even if someone had been discovered, they would hardly have made a big deal out of this. Before the war, when there was no real danger, espionage cases were fabricated from scratch to settle scores with objectionable people. But when a disaster struck that was not expected, then any exposure of enemy agents, especially high-ranking ones, could lead to panic in the population and the army. How is it so, in the General Staff or somewhere else at the top - treason? Therefore, after the execution of the command of the Western Front and the 4th Army in the first month of the war, Stalin no longer resorted to such repressions, and this case was not particularly advertised.
But this is a theory. Is there any reason to believe that Nazi intelligence agents really had access to Soviet strategic secrets during the Great Patriotic War?

Agent network "Max"

Yes, there are such reasons. At the very end of the war, the head of the Abwehr department "Foreign armies - East", General Reinhard Gehlen, surrendered to the Americans. Subsequently, he headed the intelligence of Germany. In the 1970s, some documents from his archive were made public in the West.
The English historian David Ken spoke about Fritz Kauders, who coordinated the Max network of agents in the USSR, created by the Abwehr at the end of 1939. The famous general of state security Pavel Sudoplatov also mentions this network. Who was a part of it is unknown to this day. After the war, when the chief of Kauders changed owners, the Max agents began to work for US intelligence.
It is better known about the former employee of the Secretariat of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, Minishkiy (sometimes called Mishinsky). It is mentioned in several books of Western historians.

Someone Minishky

In October 1941, Minishkiy served as a political worker in the troops of the Soviet Western Front. There he was captured by the Germans (or defected) and immediately agreed to work for them, indicating that he had access to valuable information. In June 1942, the Germans smuggled him across the front lines, staging his escape from captivity. At the very first Soviet headquarters, he was greeted almost like a hero, after which Minishkiy established contact with the Abwehr agents previously sent here and began to transmit important information to Germany.
The most important is his report on the military conference in Moscow on July 13, 1942, which discussed the strategy of the Soviet troops in the summer campaign. The meeting was attended by the military attaches of the United States, Britain and China. It was stated there that the Red Army was going to retreat to the Volga and the Caucasus, to defend Stalingrad, Novorossiysk and the passes of the Greater Caucasus at any cost, and to organize offensive operations in the regions of Kalinin, Orel and Voronezh. Based on this report, Gehlen prepared a report to the Chief of the German General Staff, General Halder, who then noted the accuracy of the information received.
There are several absurdities in this story. All those who escaped from German captivity were under suspicion and subjected to a lengthy check by the SMERSH authorities. Especially the political workers. If the political worker was not shot by the Germans in captivity, this automatically made him a spy in the eyes of the inspectors. Further, Marshal Shaposhnikov, mentioned in the report, who allegedly attended that meeting, at that time was no longer the chief of the Soviet General Staff.
Further information about Minishki says that in October 1942 the Germans organized his return crossing through the front line. Until the end of the war, he was engaged in the analysis of information in the department of General Gehlen. After the war, he taught at a German intelligence school, and in the 1960s he moved to the United States and received American citizenship.

Unknown agent in the General Staff

At least twice the Abwehr received reports from an unknown agent in the General Staff of the USSR about Soviet military plans. On November 4, 1942, the agent reported that by November 15, the Soviet command planned to launch a series of offensive operations. Further, the areas of offensives were named, which almost exactly coincided with those where the Red Army launched offensives in the winter of 1942/43. The agent made a mistake only in the exact place of strikes near Stalingrad. According to historian Boris Sokolov, this can be explained not by Soviet disinformation, but by the fact that at that moment the final plan for the operation near Stalingrad had not yet been determined. The original date of the offensive was really planned for November 12 or 13, but then was postponed until November 19-20.
In the spring of 1944, the Abwehr received a new report from this agent. According to him, the Soviet General Staff considered two options for action in the summer of 1944. According to one of them, Soviet troops plan to deliver the main blows in the Baltic and Volhynia. In other words, the main goal is German troops group "Center" in Belarus. Again, it is likely that both of these options have been discussed. But in the end, Stalin chose the second one - to strike the main blow in Belarus. Hitler decided that it was more likely that his opponent would choose the first option. Be that as it may, the agent's report that the Red Army would launch an offensive only after the successful landing of the allies in Normandy turned out to be accurate.

Who is under suspicion?

According to the same Sokolov, a secret agent should be sought among those Soviet military men who fled to the West in the late 1940s while working in the Soviet Military Administration in Germany (SVAG). In the early 1950s in Germany, under the pseudonym "Dmitry Kalinov", a book by an allegedly Soviet colonel entitled "Soviet marshals have the floor" was published, based, as stated in the preface, on documents from the Soviet General Staff. However, it has now been clarified that the true authors of the book were Grigory Besedovsky, a Soviet diplomat, an émigré defector who fled the USSR back in 1929, and Kirill Pomerantsev, a poet and journalist, the son of a white émigré.
In October 1947, Lieutenant Colonel Grigory Tokaev (Tokaty), an Ossetian who was collecting information about the Nazi missile program in the SVAG, learned about his recall to Moscow and the impending arrest by the SMERSH authorities. Tokayev moved to West Berlin and asked for political asylum. Later he worked in various high-tech projects in the West, in particular - in the NASA Apollo program.
During the war years, Tokayev taught at the Zhukovsky Air Force Academy, worked on Soviet secret projects. Nothing says anything about his knowledge of the military plans of the General Staff. It is possible that the real agent of the Abwehr continued after 1945 to work in the Soviet General Staff for new, overseas masters.