SS Und Euroasia

University of Glasgow
Unternehmen Zeppelin: The Deployment of SS Saboteurs and Spies in the Soviet Union,
1942-1945
Author(s): Perry Biddiscombe
Source: Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 52, No. 6 (Sep., 2000), pp. 1115-1142
Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.
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EUROPE-ASIA STUDIES, Vol. 52, No. 6, 2000, 1115-1142 s
Unternehmen Zeppelin: The Deployment

of SS Saboteurs and Spies in the Soviet
Union, 1942-1945
PERRY BIDDISCOMBE
IT IS COMMON KNOWLEDGE that throughout the course of the fighting on the Eastern
Front from 1941 to 1945 the Germans faced a considerable threat to their military
lines of supply and to their rearward civil administration because of Soviet partisan
warfare. It is less known that the Soviet forces also faced a significant guerrilla
problem in their own hinterland, although these anti-communist partisans were less
organised and less well led than their Soviet opposite numbers. By the summer of
1944 German intelligence had identified hundreds of guerrilla groups, or at least
armed bands of draft dodgers and Red Army deserters, located in almost every part
of the Soviet Union.1
Such reports suggested that there were opportunities for contacting and coordinat-
ing these groups, as well as implying some lapses in the maintenance of security
control on the Soviet home front, factors that made launching intelligence and
sabotage operations from German-held territory seem an especially attractive option.
In fact, as early as 1942, German military intelligence, the Abwehr, had begun
recruiting Russian volunteers from prisoner-of-war camps and deploying these men in
small teams against sabotage targets behind Soviet lines, usually railways. Some of
these agents also had orders to engage in reconnaissance and establish contact with
anti-communist guerrillas.2
What is surprising is that during the same period the SS foreign intelligence
service, the Sicherheitsdienst (SD)-Ausland, also launched its own independent
attempt to exploit favourable conditions on the far side of the Eastern Front, even
despite the fact that this meant working hand-in-hand with Russian 'Untermenschen'.
Over the course of the war some of the racial paranoia characteristic of the SS began
to thaw, although the way in which Russian agents were trained and deployed
suggests that this change of heart was extremely shallow. Since German ethnology
and its Ostforschung practitioners lacked an unbiased or objective understanding of
the Soviet Union, their increasing inclusion in the project, under SD cover, allowed
the development of nothing better than a superficial liberality. This article comprises
a brief history of this unusual endeavour, codenamed Unternehmen Zeppelin.
Origins and structure
The birth of Zeppelin in 1942 seems to have arisen from a convergence of two events:
first, the organic growth and maturation of the SD Aussenorganisation, a network of
ISSN 0966-8136 print/ISSN 1465-3427 online/00/061115-28 ? 2000 University of Glasgow
1116 PERRY BIDDISCOMBE
so-called Aussenkommandos that had originally been organised for the interrogation
of Soviet prisoners-of-war; and second, a specific decision by the leaders of the SS
that an Eastern Front guerrilla and spy organisation was needed, a determination that
consolidated and gave final form to the pattern of development already underway in
the Aussenorganisation.
The Aussenkommandos had been formed after Operation Barbarossa had yielded
more than three million Soviet POWs, some of whom seemed cooperative despite
horrid treatment at the hands their captors. According to Soviet sources, those who
were not so cooperative were subjected by their interrogators to Gestapo-type
treatment in order to extract information about the Red Army and, more generally,
about the USSR.3
A few Soviet volunteers who appeared especially knowledgeable about the political
and economic life of their country were banded together to form small detachments
of interrogators, the latter usually consisting of two or three Russians plus a German
officer or NCO. Many of the Germans were Baltic Volksdeutsche familiar with the
Russian language. These mobile Aussenkommandos were allotted to frontline
Wehrmacht units, security police details or civilian government and Nazi Party
authorities, most commonly at points where a great influx of Soviet prisoners or
deserters was expected. Aussenkommandos were also responsible for gleaning from
interrogations the names and profiles of Soviet prisoners-of-war who might be
suitable for deployment as line-crossers, and some of the larger Aussenkommandos
went an extra mile and actually began to train their own recruits and infiltrate them
through enemy lines. For instance, Kommando Krim, based near Simferopol, was
already involved in such operations as early as 1942. Attention during this early phase
of action was directed mainly toward the collection of tactical information, most of
which was reported back to Berlin-based controllers in the SD-Ausland Eastern
Department (i.e. Section C).4
Even at this early date the Aussenorganisation was also developing a capacity for
mobilising Soviet POWs held in camps in Germany or far behind the front in the
occupied USSR. SD agents were already screening, interviewing and recruiting such
men, with good prospects being sent on to training camps in Kattowitz, Breslau and
Warsaw. Fully prepared agents were thereafter turned over to SD 'steering officials',
who operated near the front and dispatched the agents behind Soviet lines.5
At this stage most operations consisted of parachuting saboteurs into Soviet-held
territory. Agents were dropped in groups of five to 10 men, and some of these squads
were allowed to choose their own leaders. Each group was equipped with a portable
wireless transmitter/receiver. On landing, a static radio station was typically estab-
lished, with the operator in charge, while the other members of the team dispersed on
various assigned missions. Instructions and supplies, especially spare parts for radios,
were dropped at regular intervals. Some groups worked well, transmitting back
important information; others disappeared after their initial dispatch. A few agent
groups were used to infiltrate and weaken Soviet Partisan bands.6
Meanwhile, the leader of the SD-Ausland, Walter Schellenberg, and his boss, SS
chief Heinrich Himmler, had become interested in organising German-led partisan
bands and agent networks behind Soviet lines. There were several factors at play
behind this initiative. First, the survival of the Soviet Union beyond the end of 1941
SS SABOTEURS AND SPIES IN THE USSR 1117
had signalled a failure for German intelligence and a need to reorganise efforts in the
USSR, a task in which the SD was happily willing to challenge its rival, the Abwehr.
Himmler told Schellenberg that Hitler was disappointed with existing efforts to gather
information about Soviet Russia, and Schellenberg responded by developing the
concept of mass agent deployment, i.e. the infiltration of thousands of spies and
saboteurs behind the Eastern Front, obviously with the hope that, if even a modest
percentage completed their tasks, the impact would be decisive and Soviet security
services would find themselves swamped. Schellenberg promised that if Himmler
supported this project he would be presented with comprehensive intelligence reports
that he could be proud to show Hitler.7
Second, by 1942 the width and breadth of the Soviet Partisan movement was
becoming apparent, and while the Germans were annoyed by this development, they
were also impressed. Several of Himmler's own staff members had been killed in
guerrilla ambushes, which suggested to the SS chief that German partisan and
reconnaissance groups ought to be organised along similar lines in order to cause a
corresponding degree of grief to the Soviet leadership.8 'The Russians are a terrible
enemy', said Himmler, 'but we must fight them through guerrilla warfare ...'.9 For
a short period there was some consideration of using German poachers and smugglers
as the manpower basis for such a project-Hermann Goering later testified to this
effect at the Nuremberg Trials-but in the final analysis such 'assets' were reserved
for the infamous SS-Dirlewanger Brigade,10? and it was decided to make use of various
Soviet nationalities recruited from amongst prisoners-of-war. There was a particular
hope of organising insurgent movements in the various ethnic republics and regions
of the USSR.T"
Third, by 1942 it was becoming apparent that there were numerous anti-communist
guerrilla bands spontaneously forming in the Soviet hinterland, particularly in the
Caucasus, Kalmykia and Central Asia. Previously the Germans had supported a brief
spate of anti-Soviet partisan warfare in conjunction with the earliest phase of
Barbarossa in 1941, but it was a surprise to see trouble continuing to percolate in the
Soviet rear, particularly since the Germans had long dropped any claim to being
liberators rather than conquerors. The way in which the Germans had ruthlessly
betrayed earlier sympathisers, such as Ukrainian and Baltic nationalists, and the
barbaric fashion in which they were now conducting themselves in occupied territory
made it hard to believe that anyone on the other side might not be priming themselves
for a life-and-death struggle against the invaders, but the facts seemed to speak
otherwise. In any case, by 1942 the Abwehr had learned of rebel bands behind Soviet
lines and had begun to support some of these groups, both from the front and from
intelligence outposts in Afghanistan.12 It therefore seems likely that the SD-Ausland
thought it desirable to join the race by organising a corresponding effort and, if at all
possible, outperforming the Abwehr.
With such factors in mind, Himmler ordered Schellenberg to create an organisation
similar to the Soviet Partisan movement. Apparently, he also decided, for reasons
unknown, that the cover name should be Zeppelin, although there are several pieces
of evidence suggesting that the Zeppelin tag was already being used as early as the
spring of 1942. The key decisions taken by Himmler date to the late summer of 1942,
when the SS chief met Schellenberg at the former's field headquarters in Zhitomir. In
any case, Schellenberg decided that, since the semi-improvised Aussenorganisation

had already proved its worth, assembling more information on the Soviet Union than
any German intelligence agency had hitherto managed to gather, the Aussenkomman-
dos should be revamped and equipped with the technical means to collect every
possible scrap of information about the USSR. With Himmler's support, he beefed up
the organisation's staff by recruiting extra manpower through the personnel depart-
ment of the overall German security directorate, the Reichsicherheitshauptamt, of
which the SD-Ausland was itself a division.'3
This bureaucratic approach-creating a special sabotage organisation to suit a local
need-was conditioned by the fact that, until the end of 1942, there was no single
SD-Ausland unit or office charged with undertaking general sabotage activity. Thus
Zeppelin was not the only such special project launched: Unternehmen Otto was
formed under the purview of Section F in order to cause trouble abroad, mainly in the
Middle East, and Parsival was launched by the SD station in Paris as the organisa-
tional core for sabotage in the Maghreb. Presumably, had the idea for Zeppelin
evolved later than it did, the project would have been handled by Otto Skorzeny's
commando unit and/or its SD-Ausland control staff, Section S, which was formed in
1943. Even as it was, functions later in the war that one would have expected
Zeppelin to handle, such as liason with Ukrainian nationalist guerrillas, were covered
instead by the Skorzeny unit.
In his discussions with Himmler, Schellenberg was also adamant about providing
a proper signals network for Zeppelin, demanding 30 million marks for the establish-
ment of such a system. The result was that in September 1942 Himmler sanctioned
the creation of an elaborate radio and radio-training organisation based in the
excursion mecca of Wannsee, southwest of Berlin, and known as the Havel Institute.
Organisationally, the Havel Institute was not included as part of Zeppelin; since it was
intended to handle communications for other espionage networks as well, it was set
up as part of Section F, the SD-Ausland technical department. To head the group,
Himmler recruited a 31-year-old SS-Sturmbannfihrer and radio techician named
Peter Siepen, who had formerly been managing communications in Organisation
Todt. Siepen was replaced in December 1944 by Sturmbannfuihrer Fahross.14
The Zeppelin organisation's headquarters were also established in Wannsee and
consisted of a small oversight staff. Many of these men were young academics
recruited from the Ostforschung institutes that had first taken shape in the early 20th
century, reflecting increasing German interest in Poland and Russia, and which during
the Nazi era had become politicised and instrumentalised, coming under state or SS
control. Some of these men were eastern Volksdeutsche, with chips firmly lodged on
their shoulders. The pseudo-scientific work done by the Ostforscher had always
suffered from a bigoted, Germanocentric sense of distortion, and after the establish-
ment of the Third Reich many of these specialists had readily adopted Nazi racial
precepts as theoretical guidelines, as well as assuming the standard Nazi position that
scholarship was a form of struggle and should be coordinated with the pursuit of
German political and military interests. Even before the formation of Zeppelin some
stalwarts from the 'eastern' institutes-Kurt Luck, Gerhard Masing, Jtirgen von
Helm-had already been mobilised by the SS, playing important roles in the horrific
resettlement, deportation and genocide of peoples behind the Eastern Front.15
TABLE 1
LEADERS OF UNTERNEHMEN ZEPPELIN
Leiter SS Rank Dates
Kleinert Sturmbannfiihrer spring 1942 to summer 1942

Dr R6der Obersturmbannfihrer summer 1942 to spring 1943
Dr Grafe Standartenfiihrer spring 1943 to summer 1943
Dr Hengelhaupt Sturmbannfiihrer summer 1943 to September 1944
Tschiersky Standartenfiihrer September 1944 to November 1944
Rapp Standartenfiihrer November 1944 to April 1945
Source: CSDIC(WEA) BAOR, 'Final Report on Dr. Gerhardt Willy Teich', FR 31,
Appendix 'B', 21 January 1946, ETO MIS-Y-Sect. CSDIC/WEA Final Interrogation
Reports 1945-1947, RG 338, NA; and HQ 7707 European Command Intelligence Center,
'CI Special Report 61', 6 March 1948, IRR File XE 003374 'Operation Zeppelin', RG 319,
NA.
One of the key Ostforscher to volunteer his services was a 32-year-old anthropol-
ogist named Gerhard Teich, who joined Zeppelin in July 1943; after a brief period in
the field near Lake Peipus he became the Zeppelin headquarters intelligence officer.
Teich's career typified that of his colleagues: he had spent most of the 1930s as a
student in universities at Leipzig, Berlin and Dorpat (Tartu), studying the geography,
sociology, history and cultural anthropology of eastern Europe. His doctoral thesis
was an ethnological survey of the Estonian peasantry. In 1939 Teich was appointed
as a deputy assistant at the Institute for Frontier and Foreign Studies, based in Berlin,
and after completing his service in the Wehrmacht he returned to the institute as a full
assistant. It was from here that Teich was recruited into the SD. Notably, once he had
his own foot in the door, he also managed to get many of his former colleagues at
the institute drafted into Section C.16
The job of the headquarters staff was originally administrative. However, in the
summer of 1944 each part of Section C, including the Zeppelin staff, was subdivided
into two bureaux: one to sift and compile information and the other to evaluate
intelligence and write appropriate reports for the Abteilung Chef. The latter function
thereafter included control of field agents, which was regarded as inseparable from the
verification of incoming information. Final reports were passed along to the boss of
Section C and thence on to the Amtschef, Schellenberg, who arranged high-level
distribution of this material.17
It should also be noted that Heinz Grafe, the chief of Zeppelin in 1943, took a
major organisational step by establishing the Zeppelin headquarters as an independent
office of Section C. Grafe argued that the administration of interrogation units and the
issuance of directives was overloading the limited machinery of Department Cl,
which had previously controlled it, although he was willing to allow other depart-
ments of Section C to continue collecting and assessing material amassed by Zeppelin
teams.18
Six SS officers ran Zeppelin during its brief span of existence. All of these officers
remained in Section C, and often in Zeppelin, even when they were not actually
leading the organisation; Kleinert and Roder, for instance, both went on to lead
Zeppelin front detachments after finishing their stints at the Wannsee headquarters.
The strongest personalities were probably Grafe, Hengelhaupt and Rapp. Grafe was
a Saxon lawyer who had been active in the Bundische Jugend and the German student
movement; after Hitler's seizure of power he had helped to reorganise the Saxon
police under Nazi control. He had learned intelligence work while posted at the SD
office in Tilsit, where he had organised espionage against the Soviet Union via
Lithuania and Latvia. Closely involved with the project to cultivate Andrei Vlasov,
Grafe went on from his post with Zeppelin to become the overall chief of Section C.
His death in a car accident in early 1944 was widely regarded as 'a severe blow' to
the SD because he could not be fully replaced.
Hengelhaupt was another Saxon, who had studied theology and journalism and in
1940 had been given the task of organising the 30 000-strong Russian emigre
community in Paris for anti-Soviet activity. One of his deputies succeeded in 1942 in
sending a small number of former tsarist officers to the Eastern Front, in defiance of
a Fiihrerbefehl to refuse the active service of Russian emigres. These volunteers
subsequently succeeded in forming some of the first Russian battalions under
Wehrmacht control. After serving as the boss of Zeppelin, Hengelhaupt went on to
run the bureau of Section C that controlled intelligence operations on the Eastern
Front.
Rapp was another case again. A duelling-scarred Swabian who had studied law,
Rapp, unlike Grafe and Hengelhaupt, was a career SD man; he had been transferred
to Section C after having commanded the Security Police in Brunswick. He was
disliked by both his superiors and subordinates and was later described by Teich as
a narrow and brutal character. After Grafe's death, Rapp was briefly considered as his
replacement as head of Section C, but his service in the trenches was already
considered so important that he could not be spared for the top job. He became the
last chief of Zeppelin in November 1944.19
Zeppelin functioned through the agency of three Hauptkommandos, one each
attached to Army Groups Nord, Mitte and Siid, but each reporting to the organis-
ation's headquarters in Wannsee. These were formed in the spring of 1943. Teich told
postwar American interrogators that in actual fact only Hauptkommandos Nord and
Slid were organised. This claim, however, was contradicted by reports given by a
number of Russians who had served in the organisation and swore that Hauptkom-
mando Mitte existed; in fact, they could even name where its interrogation centres and
training camps had been located. It is possible that Hauptkommando Mitte was active
mainly as a training organisation and failed to play a full operational role, particularly
given the hostile atmosphere to all things Nazi in Army Group Mitte, where officers
blamed Hitler's conduct of the war for the failure to take Moscow and where secret
centres of opposition were already forming. According to Teich, most of the
responsibilities of the proposed Hauptkommando Mitte were covered by Zeppelin-
Nord.
In theory, each Zeppelin Hauptkommando headquarters was divided into three
Abteilungen: one which controlled the training and operations of agents, another
which was administrative and managed supplies, and a third which evaluated and
passed on incoming information, sending it weekly by plane or courier to Wannsee.
In practice arrangements varied: in 1943-44 the headquarters of Hauptkommando Slid
consisted of an administrative and housing section, an operations section, an intelli-
gence section, a radio unit and a documents section. Hauptkommandos Nord and Slid
also controlled the Aussenkommandos, which now functioned at Army level. These
Aussenkommandos were usually bigger than their germinal predecessors, each typi-
cally comprising 15-20 Russian collaborators, as well as several German NCOs and
an officer. Smaller units called Nebenkommandos were temporarily available to help
the Aussenkommandos when the latter faced an overflow of Red Army prisoners
requiring processing and interrogation.
Each Zeppelin Hauptkommando also had its own 'military units' or 'auxiliary
battalions', which were mobilised mainly for fighting Soviet partisans. The Abwehr
had employed some of its spies and saboteurs in training in the same way in 1942,
and one of its officers recommended the practice to the controllers of Unternehmen
Zeppelin, who willingly accepted this poisoned fruit. It was believed that such
deployments not only utilised the immediate military value of Zeppelin recruits
waiting to be dropped behind Soviet lines but also served as a means of further
vetting their reliability. In addition, it was supposedly a handy means of finding a use
for men who had been drafted for agent work but were then found unsuitable.
The main 'auxiliary battalion' attached to Zeppelin-Nord was formed in March
1943 from the amalgamation of two holding outfits, one based near Pskov (the
headquarters of Hauptkommando Nord) and the other posted near Lublin. This
well-equipped unit was put under the command of Hauptsturmbannfuhrer Vladimir
Rodionov, codenamed 'Gil', a former chief of staff in the Red Army's 29th Rifle
Division who had been captured in July 1941 and was thereafter trained by the
Gestapo in Berlin. Rodionov's unit, like several Russian nationalist formations before
it, adopted the pre-revolutionary designation druzhina, a term with a distinctly
medieval tone that meant 'detachment' or 'brigade'. Its strength in 1943 has been
estimated at between 700 and 1200 men, although it fielded a considerably larger
number when deployed against Soviet guerrillas in Belorussia. Its size, no doubt, was
beefed up by the addition of local recruits.
Hauptkommando Sud had two similar companies: a 200-man unit of Caucasians
(mainly Georgians) and a 350-man unit of Central Asian Turkmen, most of whom
probably came from a group of 420 Turkmen who had been sent east from a POW
holding facility near Dresden. They had arrived at the Hauptkommando base at
Berdyansk in April 1943. The Caucasian unit was used at the front, with less than
tremendous success, while the more reliable Turkmen were used to mop up Soviet
sabotage agents in the Berdyansk area.20
This pattern of organisation was suitable for the situation on the Eastern Front in
1942, but it soon began to break down under the pressure of events. For one thing,
the Hauptkommandos worked well along a relatively static front, but they were
increasingly impaired as Soviet offensives pushed back the Wehrmacht. Hauptkom-
mando Sud, for example, bounced from Berdyansk to Voznensk to Odessa to
Przemsyl before it all but collapsed and then had to be reorganised in Hungary during
the last months of the war.21
As Zeppelin front detachments were being literally chased out of Eastern Europe
and the strains of combat began to accumulate, relations deteriorated between
Zeppelin and the various offices of German military intelligence, such as the Abwehr,
army high command intelligence (FHO) and the intelligence bureaux of the Ostfront
Army Groups. Although Zeppelin had always been consciously intended to rival these
Source: as Table I.
FIGURE 1. THE ORGANISATION OF UNTERNEHEMEN ZEPPELIN, AUTUMN 1943.
organisations, cooperation with them could prove tremendously fruitful: an outpost of

Hauptkommando Slid, for instance, captured the secret orders of a Soviet armoured
corps, which they then traded with intelligence officers of Army Groups A and Siid
in return for information about exploitable resistance movements in Dagestan and
northern Georgia. Despite such mutually advantageous arrangements, Hauptkom-
mando Slid was subsequently ordered by the Zeppelin headquarters in Wannsee to cut
its liaison with a number of key military intelligence units.22 Relations with FHO
remained passably good, with the high command providing help in the recruitment
and placement of agents in return for intelligence, but Zeppelin was probably helped
in this case by the fact that FHO was itself locked in competition with the SD's own
archrival, the Abwehr.23
Another problem involved the decline in the number of Soviet volunteers as it
became clear after 1943 that the USSR was unlikely to be defeated, and this served
as only one of several factors that began to undercut the mass nature of the project.
Top calibre candidates had always been difficult to find, since Stalin had already
succeeded in weeding the anti-communist intelligentsia out of the Red Army, leaving
only illiterate dissidents.24 Once the allure of aligning oneself with the winning side
was gone as well, there was not much that recruiters could do to induce able
volunteers, particularly since Himmler was agonisingly slow in getting the SS to
moderate its intense principles of racial superiority and accept the 'Russian national
liberation' concept. A kind of crippling fatalism settled into the minds of some of the
more pensive recruits: even though they had made a choice to reject Stalinism, they
still thought that the Soviet regime was brutal enough and efficient enough to win the
war.25
The mass character of the movement was also threatened by some crippling
bottlenecks, which suggested that the Germans were not properly equipped to run a
project of such a scale. At one point there were 10-15000 candidates in training
camps, plus 2000 to 3000 agents ready for deployment, but the Germans lacked
enough radio sets to supply them or sufficient planes to air-drop them into their
operational zones.26 As early as December 1942 Schellenberg wrote to Himmler
complaining that five groups of Aktivisten were prepared for parachuting behind
Soviet lines but that the Luftwaffe was reluctant to provide the 20-30 aircraft needed,
pleading shortages of aviation fuel.27 Zeppelin and the Abwehr together were never
able to drop more than 1750 to 2000 saboteurs and spies into the Soviet hinterland
during the entire course of the war.28
According to Heinz Fenner, the onetime commander of Hauptkommando Siid, this
mounting backlog had disastrous consequences for Zeppelin missions. With time on
their hands, some agents awaiting deployment managed to contract venereal disease,
which in turn forced the Germans to rearrange plans and personnel commitments.
Worse yet, the extended periods before parachute drops allowed self-doubt and
trepidation to creep into the minds of the agents, which proved disastrous for morale.
Many agents spent their spare time drunk, and while in this state they jeopardised the
security of operations, divulging crucial information to Soviet spies. Fenner remem-
bered one particular case in which a Georgian detachment had to wait several weeks
for a plane, during which time they were approached by Soviet agents and almost
certainly spilled the details of their mission. One member of the team, driven to
distraction by repeated delays, proposed to a comrade that, when they were finally
deployed, they betray the group to the Soviet side.29 Agents being prepared for
individual deployment had to be isolated before their infiltration behind enemy lines
in order to minimise the chances of security leaks.30
The worst example of this destabilisation involved the druzhina unit attached to
Hauptkommando Nord and amounted to such a serious incident that it nearly
destroyed the Zeppelin programme and even threatened the slow progress that the
'Russian liberation' idea was making among people in the most senior echelons of the
Third Reich. After its formation, the druzhina unit had been deployed near Glubkoe,
in the heart of territory infested with Soviet partisans. Despite the fact that the
Germans had stuck the unit in the lion's mouth, it still came as a shock when, in
mid-August 1943, Rodionov and some of his officers switched sides. The unit had
long been penetrated by Soviet agents, who reported declining morale, and there had
already been problems with one of the companies that had been melded into the
druzhina; in November 1942 63 Russian volunteers had killed five Germans
and deserted to Soviet partisan forces near Kolitishenko. Since late July 1943 the
druzhina leadership had been in contact with Soviet intelligence. As long as these
negotiations were handled by Rodionov's counter-intelligence chief, Bogdanov, they
sputtered; Bogdanov had intimate Gestapo affiliations and was unenthusiastic about
're-defection'. However, once Rodionov himself joined the talks, the logjam was
broken. Hopelessly surrounded by partisans, Rodionov and company mutinied, killing
their SD liaison officers and fleeing into the woods along with about 2500 men.
Ninety Germans were reportedly killed. Bogdanov and the titular SS commander of
the druzhina, Count Mirsky, were kidnapped and handed over to the Soviet forces.
Only 500 Russian members of the contingent remained loyal and struggled back to
Glubkoe. This was such a high profile success for the Soviet partisans that Rodionov,
despite the fact he had earlier deserted, was accepted back into the Red Army and
awarded the Order of the Red Star by Stalin.31
Obviously this fiasco reflected poorly on the Zeppelin programme, and even more
generally on the whole strategy of arming and supporting anti-Stalinist rebels,
particularly since it created a dangerous precedent for other Russian nationalist units
in German service. According to Erickson, 'passing back to the Soviet side soon
became widespread'.32 The affair was probably a factor in the decision in late 1943
to station Osttruppen in Western Europe, mainly in order to reduce any temptation for
such forces to cross back over to the Soviet side, and it certainly increased the
hesitancy of both Himmler and Hitler to commit themselves to supporting a coherent
Russian liberation movement.
With storm clouds gathering, in early 1944 Schellenberg convened an emergency
Zeppelin conference in Breslau, the aim of which was to address outstanding
problems and save the project. In a speech to Zeppelin officials, Schellenberg
announced that the previous emphasis on mass undertakings would have to be
abandoned, and that the new policy would stress the training and deployment of fewer
but more carefully selected agents. He also suggested that Zeppelin teams would have
to be more carefully supervised, and that each group should henceforth include
Germans as well as Soviet nationals.33 A report in April 1944 suggested some
progress: the ratio of agents lost in action had dropped to one in five, down from 80%,
in 1942.34
Throughout 1944 there was further tinkering with the basic structure and purpose
of the enterprise. With the retreat from the Soviet Union and the practical collapse of
the Hauptkommandos, a more mobile system of independent detachments was
organised, now under the more direct command and control of Section C in Wannsee.
The new units were bigger than the old Aussenkommandos but not as large as the
Hauptkommandos, and they functioned at Army Group, Army and Corps level. These
detachments also worked in prisoner-of-war camps and a special team of several
Russian experts and German officers, called Meldekopf Reich, was equipped to
operate anywhere in German territory where information was needed quickly and had
a high priority. In addition, operational missions were increasingly oriented away
from sabotage and toward intelligence collection and political subterfuge, particularly
the stirring up of unrest among the mountain nations in the Caucasus.
As for the Wannsee headquarters of the organisation, it actually ceased to function

as an independent office for several months in the summer and autumn of 1944 but
regained its administrative autonomy in November and from then until the end of the
war was called bureau C/Z. This office was divided into two halves, one collecting
and compiling information, a task which included controlling agents, the other
evaluating and publishing intelligence in the form of reports.35
As the war drew to an end and Germany was threatened with dissection by
advancing Allied and Soviet armies, most of the main headquarters offices of Section
C, including Zeppelin, were evacuated to the Bavarian Alps. Rapp, however, was
recruited by Schellenberg to lead a twelve-man SD-Ausland rear detachment charged
with remaining in Berlin and protecting SD interests in the capital. Of the leading
personalities in Zeppelin, only Teich was retained by Rapp, being employed as his
personal secretary. When the Red Army pushed into Berlin's suburbs, Rapp, Teich
and their small band retreated north to Schwerin, and then on to Flensburg, all the
way remaining in contact with Schellenberg and Himmler. Sometime during this
period Rapp was given the mission of protecting the top leadership of the SD-Ausland
during the ultimate collapse of the Third Reich, not an easy assignment since nobody
in the Zeppelin headquarters had made any plans for stay-behind activity and as a
result no one had obtained false identity papers. Some desperate attempts to find
civilian papers and clothes were undertaken in early May 1945, but Rapp's real
efforts focused on whisking Schellenberg to Sweden, either by ship or by air.36 On
6 May Schellenberg flew to Malmo on a Red Cross aircraft, almost certainly with
Rapp in tow.37
Recruitment and training
Zeppelin recruitment was primarily the responsibility of the interrogators in the

Aussenkommandos, on whose heads fell most of the work undertaken in these outfits.
Potential agents selected by interrogation teams were sent to special training camps,
the largest of which was near Sandberg, where they were schooled in the arts of
sabotage, propaganda and radio transmission, along with enduring some half-hearted
attempts at ideological indoctrination. Some Zeppelin radio operators were trained at
the Havel Institute's four schools (Lehnitz, Harzburg, Pansdorf and Wannsee), and it
is likely that agents were also prepared for action at SD espionage facilities in
Belgrade and the Hague. They were clothed in German uniforms and were fed and
lodged in a manner comparable to regular German soldiers. Some recruits were given
guided tours of Germany in order to impress them with the level of German living
standards. In general, there was no system or set of principles governing the training,
and as a result there was heavy emphasis on military discipline in some camps and
almost none in others.
In late 1944 and early 1945 the main training facilities were evacuated to the
Marienbad region of Bohemia, a complicated operation carried out under the
command of a former Gestapo agent, Sturmbannfihrer Lumm. The main result was
that when the war ended many of the Zeppelin organisation's personnel and trainees
fell into the hands of the Czechs and the Americans rather than the Soviet forces.
Most Zeppelin recruits were obviously Russians, Ukrainians, Belorussians, Cau-
casians, Cossacks and Turkmen, although a number of Poles and Serbs were also
mobilised. To reduce tension in the training camps, care was taken to segregate the
cadets according to their different political and ideological convictions, i.e. Ukrainian
nationalists had to be kept separate from Vlasovite Great Russian nationalists, who in
turn had to be isolated from the various breeds of Caucasian and Central Asian
nationalists. White Russian emigres also had to be carefully segregated.38
The nature and depth of Zeppelin training says volumes about the character of the
organisation, particularly the fact that the training emphasis was on producing
quantity rather than quality. Both German and Soviet sources agree that until 1944 the
preparation of agents was not very thorough; basic sabotage courses lasted only two
to three weeks, although espionage courses could take as long as three months.39 The
mass infiltration concept promoted by Schellenberg was the reconnaissance equivalent
of a wave attack, and suggests that the lives of the agents were not thought to have
much value. Perhaps this notion fitted the standard German stereotype of the Russian
way of doing things, i.e., throwing masses of flesh and bone at military and economic
problems, particularly since it was known that the Soviet Union was dispatching great
numbers of ill-trained and poorly armed agents behind German lines, many of them
acting under compulsion.40 At the very least, such tactics seemed to the Germans to
legitimise their own procedures.
Security arrangements for Zeppelin also suggest that life was considered cheap. A
horrible fate awaited Soviet POWs who were recruited for the organisation but were
re-evaluated halfway through training as being either unreliable or physically in-
capable. About 200 of these unfortunates were sent to Auschwitz, where they were
systematically murdered.4' Another device to protect secrecy involved Schellenberg
ordering the execution of a number of agents who had successfully returned from
missions, particularly if they were regarded as having no further operational worth.42
The SD also faced difficulties in offering any ideological or spiritual meat to
sustain their recruits. SS trainers were first willing to make ideological concessions to
Central Asian, Caucasian and Transcaucasian cadets, since they came from areas over
which the Germans did not envision exercising much direct control in the future
(unlike Russia proper and the Ukraine). Even by late 1943 or early 1944 the various
'national committees'-emigrd governments in the bud organised by the Germans-
were developing inflammatory nationalist propaganda used in training Zeppelin
recruits from the southern fringes of the Soviet Union.
Material for Central Asian Turkmen, for instance, was drafted by the 'National
Turkmenistan Unity Committee', which had been formed under the tutelage of the
Ostministerium in 1942. Some elements in the SD resented the Unity Committee
because it was a conservative agency not oriented toward armed action,43 but it did
develop a propaganda line with some appeal. True to the promise of its name, the
Unity Committee argued that the Soviet Union had fostered the development of
various Turkish dialects in Central Asia in order to erode a common language that
was allegedly capable of uniting all Turks of the region; the Soviet authorities had
thereby succeeded in dividing and ruling what was actually a single Turkmen nation.
To represent Germany's supposed rejection of this vile tactic, pro-German literature
was drafted in the literary language common to the region, at least until it dawned on
SD controllers that the Turkmen were already so accustomed to their sub-languages
that they were not able to read the propaganda. This material was also printed in Latin
script rather than the russifying Cyrillic that had been introduced into the trainees'
homelands. The Unity Committee's arguments on these grounds produced something
of a nationalistic resonance, unlike Islamic religious appeals, which generally fell flat.
The young Turkmen captured by the Germans came from a society that was already
largely secularised; of the 350 men in the 'auxiliary battalion' attached to Hauptkom-
mando Slid, only 25 observed the teachings and daily rituals of Islam.44
Dealing with Russians proved much more difficult, particularly since Himmler
failed to come to an understanding with Vlasov until the war was almost over.
Although Zeppelin quickly began to make use of personnel associated with the
Vlasovite 'Russian Liberation Committee',45 not everyone in the Zeppelin set-up was
keen to be included on the roster of Vlasov's 'army'; fears on that score were
reportedly part of the reason the SS-druzhina revolted in the summer of 1943.46 On
the other hand, the general propaganda and political lines advanced by Vlasov were
attractive to many Russians in German service, and SS resistance to them was the
source of a broad malaise. In 1944 Himmler finally gave a formal nod to the 'Russian
liberation' concept, appointing a German-Bait named Radetzki as the liaison between
Zeppelin and the Vlasov committee,47 and allowing Schellenberg and the bosses of
Zeppelin to negotiate an agreement with Vlasov. The Russian nationalists were also
allowed to organise their own intelligence service in Soviet territory as long as they
shared its yield with Zeppelin, a wise move since this independent network was
manned by the type of idealists whose energies had long gone to waste in Zeppelin.
Schellenberg admits in his memoirs, however, that this accommodation was too late
in coming, and that Himmler's distrust had prevented fruitful collaboration at a point
when more could have been accomplished.48 Moreover, even as the clock ticked
toward 12, nationalists in Zeppelin who were caught trying to use the organisation for
purely patriotic purposes were still being dropped from service and arrested.49 Such
procedures hardly acted as an inspiration for anti-Stalin activists.
All this is a problem if one recalls Hegel's axiom that people fight for ideas much
more readily than for material interests. Unfortunately for the Germans, it was often
the latter that inspired Russian prisoners to volunteer for Zeppelin service. In some
cases conditions in POW march columns or camps were so desperate that helping the
Germans seemed to many captives the only real means of keeping themselves alive.
Korovin and Shibalin claim that the Germans actually had recruiting stations
organised in concentration camps such as Buchenwald, Auschwitz and Sachsen-
hausen50-locations in which Russian inmates were faced with the option of selling
their souls to the devil to pay for a measure of deliverance. The Germans also
suspected that some volunteers were attracted by the money that was typically
provided to agents whom the Germans were about to commit.51 Solzhenitsyn, while
he was a prisoner in the Soviet labour camp system, met some of the poor wretches
who had offered themselves either to Unternehmen Zeppelin or to the Abwehr and
who then surrendered or were caught behind Soviet lines. Solzhenitsyn's impression
was that many of these men had regarded their actions as the best means of getting
out of a POW camp and back to the Soviet Union, perhaps once again to fight in the
Red Army.52 Other recruits were motivated by the desire for revenge, particularly
members of groups that had been affected by the 1930s purges in an especially
adverse way, such as former kulaks, ex-businessmen and Red Army officers.53 Some
agents were coerced, a situation which suggests grounds for doubt about the likely
behaviour of such operatives once behind Soviet lines, although Schellenberg and his
associates were willing to accept more than the usual proportion of failed missions.54
The lack of positive inspiration among agents was manifesting itself in a number
of ways by 1943. As noted above, the 'auxiliary battalions' sometimes proved
unreliable; Rodionov had confided in discussions with Schellenberg, held long before
he deserted, that he was profoundly unhappy with the treatment of civilians and
POWs in German-occupied Russia, and that he resented German propaganda about
Slavic 'Untermenschen'.55 Worse still, agents deployed along Soviet supply routes
were often knocking on the doors of the Russian authorities as soon as they were
parachuted into the Soviet rear. Not only did such cases represent a waste of resources
and time for the Germans, but they also created chances for the NKVD to infiltrate
Zeppelin or to use agents who had surrendered in 'playback' operations (of which
more will be said below). Two saboteurs sent out by Zeppelin-Nord, for instance,
quickly surrendered to the Soviet forces after they had crossed the Russian lines, and
such was their lack of faith in the German cause that they then agreed to serve as
double agents. Returning to the German front, they functioned under secret Soviet
control for more than two years and caused the capture of a dozen more Zeppelin
spies.56
As a result of such miscues, the Germans were eventually forced to abandon the
notion of 'mass agentry', and as they became more selective about picking volunteers
they were drawn to choosing people who, for one reason or another, had put
themselves beyond the pale. In other words, they wanted recruits who had committed
some offence, such as desertion, that was unforgivable in Soviet eyes and presumably
prevented the volunteers from ever cutting a deal to return to Soviet service. If a
candidate lacked such a stain on his record, Zeppelin officers obligingly provided it
by forcing him to participate in brutalities against Soviet civilians as part of his
antipartisan duty. These proceedings were photographed and filed away as part of an
elaborate and highly-organised form of blackmail.57 Zeppelin officers also began to
recruit more agents from amongst Russians just captured at the front, presumably
because these men, not having yet been subjected to horrendous abuse, were relatively
free to either offer or refuse their services, unlike the desperados already held for long
months and years in German camps.58
Missions
Much of the published information on Zeppelin operations comes from Soviet

sources. Naturally, these tended to emphasise the vigilance of Soviet security organs
and their supposedly deft ability at penetrating the Zeppelin enterprise. Soviet sources
liked to point out, for example, that it was their outstanding counter-intelligence work
that forced the Germans eventually to stop sending masses of half-trained agents
behind the Eastern Front.59 While such claims are exaggerated, they bear a certain
measure of truth. After the end of World War II some German intelligence officers-
die hards like Otto Skorzeny-were loath to admit that their operations on the Eastern
Front had ever been seriously compromised. Others, however, in moments of
frankness, conceded that the NKVD and Smersh had enjoyed great success: Werner
Ohletz told the Americans in 1948 that German mobilisation and training programmes
for Russian agents had been so heavily infiltrated by Soviet agents that most parties
engaged in missions behind Soviet lines had been quickly wiped out.60
Perhaps the most illustrative case in point, and certainly the one most cited by
Soviet sources, was the story of an elite agent named Politov, a James Bond-type
adventurer primed for great things by the Zeppelin leadership. Although Soviet
sources typically portrayed Politov as having had a shady background, he had risen
to become a company commander in the Red Army before deserting to the Germans
in May 1942. Grafe was impressed by Politov, particularly by his claim of acquain-
tanceship with several junior officers working in the Soviet high command (Stavka),
and it was decided to air-drop Politov into the Moscow region so that he could
ascertain the transport routes used by high command officers and then ambush Stavka
vehicles at his discretion. Grafe assigned the training of Politov to Sturmbannfiihrer
Kraus, the chief of Hauptkommando Nord, and over the autumn, winter and spring of
1943-44 Kraus spent the hefty sum of four million marks running Politov through
extensive programmes of instruction. Moreover, since it was eventually decided that
Politov should pose as a badly wounded but highly decorated Red Army major, in
early 1944 he underwent plastic surgery in order to simulate injuries. Like 007,
Politov was provided with special equipment, including a noiseless, armour piercing
weapon called a Panzerknacke, which could be fired from the sleeve of a coat, a
special radio-controlled magnetic mine, and an experimental, high altitude
monoplane, the Arado 332, that at Politov's request was equipped with a hatch
allowing Politov and a collaborator to drive a motorcycle directly from the fuselage
as soon as the plane landed. As a morale booster, Politov was also introduced to Otto
Skorzeny, who was fresh from his exploits rescuing Mussolini at Gran Sasso.
Meanwhile, Soviet counter-intelligence had begun picking up bits and pieces of
information suggesting that something was afoot at Haupkommando Nord. On the
basis of this information, the NKVD sent a detachment to kidnap the deputy chief of
the Zeppelin training school at Pskov, Oberscharfiihrer Lashkov-Guryanov, who was
successfully snatched, along with some sensitive documents, on New Year's Eve
1943. Trying to maintain secrecy in the wake of this mess, Kraus transferred the
entire operation to Riga, but the Soviet side got another break when the tailor assigned
to prepare Politov's uniforms-in particular, a coat designed to accommodate the
Panzerknacke-happened to be a Soviet agent. The NKVD then put Politov under
watch and by June 1944 had discovered both the rough outline of his mission and the
location of his intended point of arrival near Moscow. During the same period they
also learned that a special German team was scouting for a secondary landing field
near Smolensk, and when this team radioed the coordinates for this site back to Berlin
they were intercepted.
As a result, when Politov was deployed in September 1944, along with his wife,
who was also an agent, they failed to make much progress. Soviet forces surrounded
the primary landing zone near Moscow, intending to seize their prey as soon as they
hit the ground, but a last-minute hitch occurred when Politov's Arado was hit by
Russian flak soon after take-off from Riga, and the plane was forced to ditch at the
secondary site near Smolensk, which the Soviet forces had left unattended. Once the
NKVD had made some calls to the anti-aircraft command and deduced what had
happened, they flooded the Smolensk area with personnel, organising roadblocks and
search patrols. The badly damaged Arado was captured at the landing site, along with
its crew, and Politov and his wife were picked up soon afterwards, thanks to an
observant sentry who stopped the couple's motorcycle at a checkpoint and noticed
that the riders looked suspiciously dry on a rainy night, even though they claimed to
have been driving for hours.61
NKVD personnel subsequently used Politov's radio transmitter to launch a 'play-
back' operation and pretend that all was going well. 'Playback' manoeuvres are a
common theme in the Soviet literature on Zeppelin, and such tactics were especially
effective when the Soviet forces were able to 'turn' members of an initial Zeppelin
unit sent to penetrate an area and then lure in more and more SD personnel and
supplies. This happened in the Kalmyk ASSR, where a group of agents was dropped
by the Germans near Yashkul in the autumn of 1943. The unit's radio operator, one
Martynyk, was eventually caught and converted by the NKVD and Smersh. Zeppelin
controllers subsequently failed to recognise that Martynyk's transmissions were
fraudulent, and they continued to send agents and weapons into the region. One of
these later operatives, Abwehr Captain von Miiller, was also 'turned' by the Soviet
side and thereafter contributed to the deception.62 Similar manoeuvres were conducted
along the Baltic coast and in the Bryansk area, where in June 1944 34 Zeppelin agents
were captured. Near Vologda a five-man team deployed in October 1943 in order to
scout local landing sites and interfere with rail traffic was overrun soon after being
dropped; their short-wave radio transmitter was thereafter used to supply phony
intelligence about the type of Red Army units and equipment being shipped over
northern railway lines.63 Over the course of the entire war, Soviet security services
claim to have 'turned' nearly 13% of the Zeppelin and Abwehr radio agents they
apprehended-more than eighty of 631 prisoners-and that as a direct result they
captured 400 additional enemy spies and saboteurs.64
Not all Zeppelin operations were subverted: near the headquarters of Zeppelin-Sad
in Berdyansk SD officers scored a valuable achievement simply by bribing Ukrainian
fishermen on the Sea of Azov with liquor and tobacco. These anti-communist
fishermen reported that a large Soviet intelligence unit had moved into quarters at
Eisk, on the eastern shore of the sea. Troops from this unit, whom the fishermen had
recognised as former members of the regional NKVD, had also approached the
fishermen looking for details on German and Romanian units stationed around
Berdyansk. After checking this information against corroborating sources, Zeppelin
officers warned local Wehrmacht commanders that the Soviet forces were preparing
a major step-up in espionage and sabotage operations around the Sea of Azov.
Despite the fact that the local garrison commander in Berdyansk had little use for
Hauptkommando Slid, Ukrainian police and other resources were mobilised to meet
this onslaught. In one subsequent 10-day period the Soviet forces parachuted seven
five-man groups into local forests, but 28 of these agents were captured by German
forces (including squads from the Zeppelin 'auxiliary battalions').65
Organising offensive operations was harder than conducting defence, although
Zeppelin had some measure of success in the Caucasus and Transcaucasus, where
they managed to cultivate some anti-Soviet resistance groups. Zeppelin officers had
good relations with the various Caucasian 'national committees', which were usually
eager to organise rebellions in their mountainous homelands and to get someone-

anyone-on the German side to help them in achieving this goal.66 'Even though there
are many partisans in the Caucasus', noted the Kabardinian Committee, 'their work
is not effective for lack of proper leadership'. This committee was on record in 1943
beseeching the German high command 'to give the peoples of the North Caucasus the
chance to wage a partisan war in the mountains of our homeland ... Our people are
the irreconcilable enemies of the Bolsheviks and will prove that on any front'.67
The first major German effort to seize this opportunity was the brainchild of a
Chechen refugee named Hamdi Mansura, who won the backing of the Abwehr in
1941, although the Zeppelin in embryo Aussenorganisation also managed to join in
on the project. The basic plan was to recruit and train 150 North Caucasian
nationalists and deploy them with the intent of touching off a pro-German uprising in
the Caucasus. The unit was codenamed Sonderkommando Schamyl, in memory of the
19th century Imam who had led Dagestani and Chechen mountaineers against the
Russians. Mansura claimed that Soviet sovereignty in the mountains was weakening,
and that the Caucasians were ready to revolt.
Three Schamyl detachments were parachuted into the Caucasus in September 1942.
The first unit, comprising 30 well-armed men and led by Feldwebel Moritz, was
dropped into the Maikop region with orders to blow up bridges and railways but to
prevent the Soviet sabotage of oil production facilities if it looked likely that
Wehrmacht forces might be able to reach the area as part of the annual German
summer offensive. Most members of this group survived and reported to German
headquarters once the Wehrmacht had arrived in the region.
The second detachment, Gruppe Ost, was not so fortunate. It also comprised 30
men, 10 of them Germans led by an Oberleutnant Lange. This unit, clad in Soviet
uniforms, was dropped about 25 miles south of Grozny, and it had orders to establish
contact with the local population and organise a rebellion. Unfortunately for the
Germans, the group was sighted by Soviet security forces during its air-drop, and it
encountered enemy fire even before its members hit the ground. Only two-thirds of
the unit escaped from the drop zone to flee into the surrounding hills. After this
inauspicious start the commandos managed to establish radio contact with German
lines, but they found it tremendously difficult to achieve contact with the Chechen
population, who treated them like pariahs. They eventually discovered, quite by
accident, that the Chechens thought that they were actually a band of NKVD agents
provocateur, sent into the area in order to draw out and incriminate disloyal elements.
This trick had already been tried by the Soviet authorities in the Volga German ASSR
in 1941, and news of it had apparently travelled south and reached the Caucasus. Only
when the parachutists produced a silk swastika flag could they establish their bona
fides and get some help.
Meanwhile, a third Schamyl team of a dozen men had been dropped into the
eastern Caucasus in order to ascertain the whereabouts of Gruppe Ost, which, as far
as its Abwehr and SD controllers were concerned, had gone missing. These two units
increasingly attracted the hostile attention of large Soviet security formations sent to
hunt them down, and whereas the Wehrmacht never delivered relief by managing to
reach and occupy the region, only a handful of the parachutists ever regained German
lines. A fourth Schamyl platoon of forty Dagestanis was never deployed as a unit,
although many of its members were later attached to reconnaissance squads sent into
the Soviet rear for various minor endeavours. Sonderkommando Schamyl failed to
incite a large-scale uprising, but it did draw Soviet manpower and equipment into the
mountains at a time when those resources could probably have been more profitably
employed elsewhere.68
The most successful mission in the Transcaucasus was a Georgian operation
codenamed Aktion Mainz. In general, Georgians were favoured collaborators for the
SD because many emigre leaders had moved from Paris to Berlin after 1940 and they
were especially willing to cooperate with German plans for 'liberating' their home-
land. In addition, there were several areas in Georgia, particularly in the northern part
of the republic, where the local population was strongly anti-Soviet, and which
seemed to offer especially good reception zones for Zeppelin paratroopers.69
Mainz was arranged through liaison men attached to the 'Georgian National
Committee', particularly Michael Kedia, a prominent cheese-maker and one of the
chief emigre leaders who had offered his services to the Germans after the fall of
Paris. Kedia managed to convince SD officers of the profound unhappiness of the
nationalities living in the Transcaucasus, and he developed an idea about how to
exploit this discontent by exploiting the open Soviet-Turkish border near Batumi,
where Soviet Georgians and Turks conducted a flourishing trade in foodstuffs and
other commodities. Upon Kedia's urging, Alexander Menagarishvili, the leader of the
Georgian exile community in Turkey, agreed to organise the infiltration of two squads
of Georgians at the Batumi frontier crossing. Once inside Georgia, these groups
camped in the woods near Batumi, where the leader of one of the units had contacts
among the local populace. Both teams established links with the anti-Soviet under-
ground in Georgia and sent back huge volumes of political, economic and military
intelligence to Menagarishvili and Kedia, who in turn passed on information to the
SD. Going the other way, a steady stream of weapons, sabotage material and
propaganda was also smuggled to sympathers in Georgia. All of this was undertaken
with the connivance of the Turkish intelligence service, which received a limited flow
of information in return for its cooperation. Schellenberg visited Turkey in June 1943
and established a regular channel of contact between the SD and the Turks, although
the Turks were already coming under Soviet pressure to break up Zeppelin support
networks operating on Turkish soil. The Turks were also concerned that the 'Georgian
National Committee' planned to expand a future independent Georgian state at
Turkey's expense.
On the whole, the Mainz enterprise unfolded so well that Zeppelin organisers
decided in the spring of 1944 to launch a second operation called Mainz II, which
involved parachuting five teams of well-armed spies and saboteurs into Georgia.
Three of these units reported back by radio, one delivering reports as late as April
1945. Mainz and Mainz II were thrown into flux, however, by Turkey's breach of
relations with Germany in 1944, which undercut German intelligence operations.
Moreover, communications between Germany and Turkey became unreliable after
Tito's successes in Yugoslavia in the spring of 1944, and they were cut almost
entirely after the German evacuation of Greece. The Germans compensated by
convincing Russian deserters and defectors in the Balkans to cross the Turkish
frontier and have themselves interned. These deserters were instructed subsequently
to escape from Turkey to the Soviet Union, find the Mainz and Mainz II contact-
groups, collect their information and smuggle the material back to Germany via the
Balkans.70 The information gathered by such means appears to have been genuine-
not the pap dished out through Soviet 'playback' operations-and there are therefore
no grounds for the Soviet claim that NKVD penetration operations had totally
crippled the Georgian underground aligned with Zeppelin.
Planting groups more deeply in the interior of the USSR was no easy task. Zeppelin
was able to land operatives as far east as the Urals, the Kazan area and the Volga
delta,71 and in August 1943 a group was even dropped in Central Asia, where it
attempted to turn Kazakh public opinion in a separatist direction, preaching the merits
of a future German protectorate.72 Several agents managed to get in touch with people
of influence in Samarkand and Tashkent. One agent rode a Soviet troop train all the
way to Vladivostok, where he observed troop movements and sent back valuable
information by radio.73 However, long-range aircraft were in short supply, and
operations so far afield were hard to control and evaluate. Hauptkommando Siid, for
example, parachuted several groups of agents to a point 30 miles outside Gur'ev,
whence they had orders to travel even further east, to the oil district of Emba, in order
to cut a pipeline running from this area to the Caspian Sea. It was extremely difficult,
however, for Zeppelin controllers in Berdyansk to determine exactly what happened
to these groups, or whether they were still acting independently. They all managed to
maintain wireless contact, but they could report only propaganda successes; the
pipeline they were sent to destroy remained intact, and the information they radioed
back was of limited value.74
Another example of such problems was Unternehmen Ulm, an attempt to interfere
with Soviet tank production in the Ural industrial conurbations of Chelyabinsk,
Sverdlovsk and Zlatoust. A Zeppelin platoon was assembled and charged with this
operation, but it was never carried out because of lack of aircraft and the ongoing
difficulties caused by the retreat of the front, which continually drew Zeppelin
saboteurs further and further away from their targets. Bomber and V-1 attacks
planned by Zeppelin specialists were also aborted for the same reasons. A few men
were deployed on Ulm reconnaissance missions and, according to David Kahn, one
eight-man unit was deployed on a sabotage-espionage undertaking in June 1944,
although the project ended badly: one agent was killed on landing, two others, the
leader and radio operator, committed suicide, another was murdered by his comrades
and yet another died of exhaustion. Of the remaining three, one was captured and the
other two deserted, apparently submerging themselves amongst the local population.75
Research capabilities
Apart from conducting operations behind Soviet lines, Unternehmen Zeppelin also
contributed to the Nazi war effort by organising technical and research facilities for
the use of Russian POWs collaborating with the Germans. Among the great masses
of Soviet prisoners were many engineers, university professors, inventors and scien-
tists, even members of the Leningrad Academy of Sciences and other similar
institutes. In late 1943 Zeppelin officers organised Sonderlager T, a camp at
Breslau-Oswitz for Russian engineers, scientists and technicians willing to carry out
research under German control. Special facilities were provided, and apparently some
important work was done on remote control technology, high frequency transmissions
and other advanced research problems. According to Schellenberg, Russian
researchers generated some worthwhile ideas which had an impact on German arms
production. This project was similar in many regards to the way the Soviet Union
later made use of captured German scientists and technical experts, except that the
flow of technology transfer was in the opposite direction. Sonderlager T also served
as an advanced interrogation and training centre, and experts worked on planning the
Zeppelin organisation's most elaborate sabotage missions, such as Unternehmen Ulm,
which was dependent on exact knowledge of tank production facilities and power
plants in the Urals. Needless to say, such projects reflected the influence of the
Ostforscher within the Zeppelin command structure.
As far as Zeppelin personnel were concerned, the work of Sonderlager T yielded
such good results that in early 1944 it was decided to widen the scope of the project
to include economic and statistical questions connected with the USSR. Sonderlager
T was absorbed into a broader undertaking called Sonderlager L, and the camp was
shifted from Breslau-Oswitz to Blamau-on-Ybbs in eastern Austria. This decision to
move was not only motivated by the deteriorating military situation on the Russian
Front but was also intended to keep the Sonderlager in close contact with two parallel
organisations, the Informationsstelle fiir Wirtschaft und Technik der Sowjetunion
(IWTS) and the Wannsee Institute, both part of the Forschungsdienst Ost, the Eastern
Front arm of a research department of SD-Ausland formed in 1943. Such measures
should also be understood as part of a greater trend in 1943 to bring many of the
Ostforschung institutes under close SD oversight and to further coordinate their
activities. At the same time the activities of the Ostforscher were shifted away from
furnishing the ethnographic information behind deportation and mass killing opera-
tions, instead focusing upon the provision of intelligence for Zeppelin and other SD
espionage projects. When the Zeppelin headquarters needed information on specific
matters-for instance, on the treatment of guerrillas during World War I-it was to
this network of institutes and study groups that they turned.
The IWTS was an 80-person institute headed by Hauptsturmfuhrer Lieben of the
Forschungsdienst Ost; it specialised in studies of the Soviet industrial economy. It
was designed, from its point of origin, to complement the Zeppelin Sonderlager. The
new Sonderlager base at Blamau was close to the impressive reference library of the
IWTS, which consisted of 20 000 volumes looted from the Kiev Polytechnic,
probably by SS-Sonderkommando Ktinsberg, a unit formed partly of mobilised
Ostforscher who specialised in plundering intellectual resources in Kiev and other
locales behind the front of Army Group Siid. The books and documents from Kiev
were moved to eastern Austria in eight railway boxcars, whereafter they were stored
at the Schwedenschanze Inn at Oswitz and became a primary resource for the
specialists of Sonderlager L.
The Wannsee Institute antedated both the Zeppelin Sonderlager and the IWTS,
although its mandate was much the same; originally a private foundation, it was
annexed to the SD in 1936 by Reinhard Heydrich in order to give the security service
a means of studying political, economic and administrative questions connected with
the Soviet Union. Most of the institute's personnel were selected by its first chief, the
Georgian emigre Michael Achmeteli, who had once served as the ambassador to
Berlin from the short-lived Georgian Republic, and who had spent much of the 1930s
cosying up to Heydrich. The deputy head, Sturmbannfiihrer Augsburg, was the
brother of the first commander of Sonderlager T, which made for a comfortable fit
once the Sonderlager was established. In 1943, when the institute was reorganised so
that it could provide greater support for intelligence activities, Achmeteli was
replaced by Hans Koch, an Austrian university professor who had served as the head
of the institute before it had been taken over by the SD. The institute was also
evacuated from Berlin to Schloss Plankenwarth, not far from Blamau, mainly in order
to protect its valuable records and books from bombing. Once safely ensconced in its
new facilities, members of the Wannsee Institute met regularly in St. Lambrecht with
specialists from Sonderlager L and the IWTS. In fact, the Wannsee Institute worked
so closely with Zeppelin that the two organisations were often confused, particularly
after the latter's headquarters detachment outside Berlin moved into the offices
vacated by the Wannsee Institute after it had moved south.
The arrangement at Blamau proved an environment which nurtured some valuable
work, particularly since Sonderlager L volunteers laboured under conditions incom-
parably better than those endured by eastern workers anywhere else in the Third
Reich. They produced strategic intelligence in the broadest sense of the term,
developing statistics, maps and charts illustrating the progress of Soviet tank pro-
duction, the Russian system of communications, likely areas of future economic
expansion, and other topics of importance. So valuable were these studies that when
the Soviet forces advanced into eastern Austria in the spring of 1945 photostat copies
were made and hidden in local caves, probably with the hope that they could soon be
handed over to other powers interested in crusading against the Soviet Union, namely
the Americans and the British.76
Zeppelin and the Western powers
Exactly how the Western Allies reacted to Unternehmen Zeppelin is a matter of some
interest. The Americans who overran the organisation's main complex of training
camps in western Czechoslovakia originally treated Zeppelin troops as a possible
threat. This conclusion seemed justified by the fact that Zeppelin cadets and training
personnel, unlike the members of the organisation's headquarters, had made some
preparations for underground activity: they had solicited phony identification papers
from local Nazi authorities and had buried stores of sabotage equipment in the
Marienbad area. Agents of the Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) detachment investi-
gating the Zeppelin camps discovered three dead caretakers at a former Zeppelin
school near Abaschin-killed possibly to keep their mouths shut-and they also
turned up evidence that five Russian women trained at a school in Kynsvart were
being prepared for deployment in France, since they were French-speaking. This
suggested that at least a few Zeppelin agents might be operating behind Allied lines
in Western Europe. Overall, however, there did not seem much reason for concern,
particularly since officers of the 516th CIC detachment were not impressed by the
physical or mental calibre of the 'activists' whom they interrogated. They regarded
the 40 female agents located at Kynsvart as 'uneducated labourers from Russian
lagers' and concluded that they had 'failed to apply themselves seriously to training
for espionage'.7
Despite this negative assessment, the Americans and British continued to interro-
gate personnel who had been involved in Zeppelin and to keep tabs on the
organisation's former personnel, many of whom had escaped into the American zone
of Germany. By 1946 the proverbial worm had turned. In March CIC theatre
headquarters began seeking information about the intelligence services maintained by
East European anti-communist groups in the US zone, and within a month they were
interviewing officers of these organisations in order to collect intelligence about
events east of the Elbe. By October of the same year CIC Region VI (Bamberg) had
dropped all sense of subtlety, soliciting interrogation reports on Zeppelin with an eye
toward gaining information about the Soviet intelligence service. They added that
'[Zeppelin] personalities who have had CI experiences against the Russians are also
of interest'.78
After the Western Allies handed back a measure of responsibility for intelligence
to the German-staffed Organization Gehlen the personnel of this enterprise, many of
them former officers in FHO, re-established contacts with their old SD confreres and
tried to revive Zeppelin. Apparently, some groups inside the Soviet Union had been
instructed at the end of the war to postpone work and cut radio communications with
Germany, but otherwise to maintain contact among members and to lie dormant,
awaiting further instructions. Efforts in the late 1940s and early 1950s to establish
contact with some of these units, such as the Mainz detachments in Georgia, all
fizzled out.79 Presumably the agents had long since buried their radio sets and arms
and had either quietly resumed leading ordinary lives or had been caught by the
Soviet security services and banished to the Gulag Archipelago.
Conclusions
What impact did Zeppelin have? Certainly it helped to elicit savage reprisals,
especially the large-scale deportation of peoples from the southern USSR who had
appeared open to aiding German efforts to foster guerrilla warfare and mass
espionage.80 In Stalin's Soviet Union even pinprick attacks were sufficient to provoke
this type of wholly unproportional response. Solzhenitsyn speculates that this was
probably all the German high command ever expected of the project-that it increase
internal chaos behind enemy lines8--but there is no real evidence to support the
contention that the Germans were ever quite this crafty or far-sighted. Schellenberg
does suggest, however, that the Germans knew about whole Soviet divisions and
Partisan units being diverted in order to track down Zeppelin teams.82
The project also showed the racial paranoias of the SS diminishing somewhat, but
only in their most extreme form. Unternehmen Zeppelin itself operated like a colonial
bureaucracy, with members of the various Soviet nationalities uniformly forced into
subaltern positions. Moreover, as noted above, the well-being and lives of the
organisation's agents did not seem to be regarded as particularly precious assets.
Whatever official changes in policy occurred, haughty SS officers and Ostforscher
continued to treat Zeppelin personnel-particularly Asians-as racial inferiors, with
obvious consequences on morale.83 Poor relations between Zeppelin troops and

German officials helped provoke the SS-druzhina uprising in 1943.84
Despite evidence of myriad problems, Unternehmen Zeppelin seems to have borne
some value as an intelligence instrument, particularly during 1943-44, when the
organisation was most completely developed and its network was especially far-flung
and active. One veteran of the organisation later recalled that it was regarded as 'the
most important intelligence operation on the Eastern Front'.85 Although it was
penetrated and partially subverted by Soviet agents, Zeppelin still managed to develop
a comprehensive picture of conditions inside the Soviet Union, at least until the
middle of 1944.86 A few Zeppelin teams were inserted at key points inside the USSR,
apparently undetected by the Soviet authorities. In Moscow, for instance, a three-man
detachment infiltrated the Ministry of Transport and photographed reports on Red
Army movements; another group in the Zhiguli mountains maintained a watch over
goings-on in the Soviet rail hub of Kuibyshev, a key Volga port and manufacturing
centre.87 According to Schellenberg, a lone agent, disguised as an escaped POW who
had returned to Soviet lines, succeeded in penetrating the staff of Marshal
Rokossovsky and in sending back information.88 Kahn reports that the Havel Institute,
the reception point for many Zeppelin radio messages, picked up 4000 to 7000 words
a day in communications, far more than the amount received by parallel Abwehr
stations.89 An SS officer who visited Sturmbannfiihrer Siepen's office in October
1944 later recalled seeing a wall chart mapping the location of fifteen Zeppelin
stations that were still functioning behind Soviet lines: one was in Moscow, two in
the Astrakhan area and several in the Caucasus.90
One can only imagine what might have been accomplished had Zeppelin tried to
work with the Wehrmacht intelligence organs rather than against them, or had the
resources poured into Zeppelin simply been redirected toward the Abwehr, which,
after all, was doing many of the things Zeppelin attempted to do in Russia before the
SD project ever got off the ground. Heinz Fenner later reported that the competition
and constant bickering between Zeppelin and its rivals was one of the reasons the
organisation never fulfilled its potential.91
Two other riders must also be attached to this assessment. First, the organisation
actually functioned quite differently from the guerrilla rallying point envisioned by
Himmler and Schellenberg in 1942. In fact, it had relatively little success in
accomplishing its original raison d'etre, the coordination of anti-Soviet resistance
groups and the fomenting of large-scale unrest, although some Zeppelin controllers
continued to organise operations along these lines long after they should have been
disabused of any such notions. Of all the Zeppelin agents dispatched behind the
Soviet front, only the Moslem Caucasians seem to have had more success in
spreading propaganda and organising partisan warfare than in simply gathering
information. Officers of Zeppelin-Nord also gave a good account of themselves in
forming and training large-scale Baltic resistance groups, particularly in Latvia,92 but
this was essentially a defensive operation launched in anticipation of Soviet advances
into the Baltic region.
Zeppelin actually operated more effectively as a sort of Ostforschung institute
specialising in general observations about the political and economic situation in the
USSR, an expansive mandate that fitted comfortably into Schellenberg's holistic
conception of intelligence work. In other words, Sonderlager L appears to have been

the most successful aspect of the project. Both Teich and Fenner pointed out that
although Zeppelin included military data as part of this broad sweep, the organis-
ation's real achievement was the collection of information about the potentialities of
Soviet industrial, coal and petroleum production, the Soviet food supply, and the
existence of anti-Soviet opposition. As a result, the organisation did not always have
the capacity to arrive at accurate appreciations of specific Soviet military intentions.
Secondly, Teich also observed that most of what Zeppelin officers learned about
the Soviet Union came from the simple interrogation of POWs rather than through
any more dramatic means, such as the deployment of parachute agents and line-
crossers.93 Zeppelin specialists also drew much valuable information from published
Soviet sources.94 While this may seem surprising, it is a conclusion that fits the
general pattern for intelligence agencies operating in all sorts of environments and
under all sorts of circumstances. The answers to key questions are often available,
without acts of derring-do, for those with eyes to see and ears to listen.
University of Victoria
Politische Information-Forschungsdienst Ost, 'Antibolschewistische Widerstandsbewegungen

und Banden in der Sowjetunion', 15 August 1944, Records of OKH, microcopy no. T-78, reel 493,
frames 6480051-6480067, US National Archives, College Park, Maryland (NA).
2 Heinz Hohne & Hermann Zolling, The General Was a Spy (New York, 1972), p. 19. For initial
Abwehr recruiting missions and deployments see Amt Ausland/Abwehr, Abw. II/JON to WPr, 26
October 1942 (frame 856); and 'Erfolgsmeldungen-S-Ferneinsatz des Abw. Kdos. 202 vom 1.4 bis
31.10.42' (frames 767-769), both in Records of OKW, reel 1499, microcopy no. T-77, NA.
3 F. Sergeev, 'Natsistskaya Razvedka Protiv SSSR: "Delo" Tukhachevskogo, Operatsiya
"Tseppelin" ', Novaya i noveishaya istoriya, 1989, 1, p. 129.
4 CSDIC(WEA) BAOR, 'Final Report on Dr. Gerhard Willy Teich', FR no. 31, Appendix 'B',
21 January 1946, ETO MIS-Y-Sect. CSDIC/WEA Final Interrogation Reports 1945-1947, Record
Group (hereafter RG) 338, NA; and CSDIC, 'First Detailed Interrogation Report on SS Sturmbann-
fuehrer Dr. Krallert Wilfried', Entry 119A, RG 226, NA.
5 307th CIC Det., HQ 7th Army, 'Ruhl Felix, Leiter of Gestapo Stelle Augsberg from 1 Sept till
March 1945', IRR File XE 031994, 'Siegrune and Other Secret Orders', RG 319, NA; and HQ 7707
European Command Intelligence Center, 'CI Special Report 61', 6 March 1948, IRR File XE 003374,
'Operation Zeppelin', RG 319, NA.
6 Walter Schellenberg, Memoiren (Cologne, 1956), p. 241; CSDIC, 'First Detailed Interrogation
Report on SS Sturmbannfuehrer Dr. Krallert Wilfried', Entry 119A, RG 226, NA; 307th CIC det, HQ
7th Army, 'Ruhl, Felix, Leiter of Gestapo Stelle Augsberg from 1 Sept till March 1945', 8 June 1945,
IRR File XE 031994, 'Siegrune and Other Secret Orders', RG 319, NA; and HQ 7707 European
Command Headquarters Center, 'CI Special Report 61', 6 March 1948, IRR File XE 003374,
'Operation Zeppelin', RG 319, NA.
7 Schellenberg, pp. 239-240; Sergeev, pp. 128-129; and David Kahn, Hitler's Spies (New York,
1978), p. 360.
8 'Final Report on the Case of Walter Friedrich Schellenberg', p. 32, in Covert Warfare (New
York, 1989), vol. xiii.
9 Schellenberg, p. 240.
10 The Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal (Nuremberg,
1947), vol. ix, pp. 563-564. For the history of the Dirlewanger unit see Gerald Reitlinger, The SS:
Alibi of a Nation, 1922-1945 (London, 1981), pp. 171-174; and Hellmuth Auerbach, 'Die Einheit
Dirlewanger', Vierteljahrshefte fur Zeitgeschichte, 10, 3, 1962, pp. 250-263. Himmler himself later
referred to Dirlewanger's following as 'the guerrilla companies of the SS', and Dirlewanger himself,
near the end of the war, noted that his troops 'were specially suited for fighting in wooded country'.
1 V. V. Korovin & V. I. Shibalin, 'Gitlerovskii Abver terpit porazhenie', Novaya i noveishaya
istoriya, 1968, 5, p. 100.
2 Patrik von zur Miihlen, Zwischen Hakenkreuz und Sowjetstern: Der Nationalismus der
sowjetischen Orientvilker im Zweiten Weltkrieg (Dusseldorf, 1971), pp. 204-206, 208-209, 214-215;
Joachim Hoffmann, Deutsche und Kalmyken 1942-1945 (Freiburg, 1974), pp. 91-92, 95-96; and
John Armstrong (ed.), Soviet Partisans in World War II (Madison, 1964), p. 582.
13 Schellenberg, pp. 240-241; 'Final Report on the Case of Walter Friedrich Schellenberg', p.
32; CSDIC(WEA) BAOR, 'Final Report on Dr. Gerhard Willy Teich', FR no. 31, Appendix 'B', 21
January 1946, ETO MIS-Y-Sect. CSDIC/WEA Final Interrogation Reports 1945-1947, RG 338, NA;
Office of the US Chief Counsel, Evidence Division, Interrogation Branch, 'Summary no. 827-Emil
Haussmann', Imperial War Museum, London; Sergeev, p. 129; and Kahn, p. 295.
14 Schellenberg, pp. 222, 240; CI War Room, London, 'Situation Report No. 11-Amt VI of the
RSHA, Gruppe VI F', IRR File XE 125551 'Subversive Organization of Amt VI F RSHA', RG 319,
NA.
15 For the nature of the Ostforschung institutes see Michael Burleigh, Germany Turns East: A
Study of Ostforschung in the Third Reich (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 8-9, 11, 36, 215, 236.
16 CSDIC(WEA) BAOR, 'Final Report on Dr. Gerhard Willy Teich', FR 31, ETO MIS-Y-Sect.
CSDIC/WEA Final Interrogation Reports 1945-1947, RG 338, NA.
17 CSDIC (WEA) BAOR, 'Final Report on Dr. Gerhard Willy Teich', FR 31, 21 January 1946,
Appendix 'A', ETO MIS-Y Sect/WEA Final Interrogation Reports 1945-1947, RG 338, NA.
18 CSDIC(WEA) BAOR, 'Final Report on Dr. Gerhardt Willy Teich', FR no. 31, Appendix 'B',
21 January 1946, ETO MIS-Y-Sect. CSDIC/WEA Final Interrogation Reports 1945-1947, RG 338,
NA; and 'Extract from Introduction-General Survey of Security Situation', Entry 119A, RG 226,
NA.
Appendix 'A'; CSDIC (WEA) BAOR, 'Final Report on SS Stubaf. Alarich Brohs @Richter
@Bruno', FR 10, 19 December 1945, both in ETO MIS-Y Sect. CSDIC/WEA Final Interrogation
Records 1945-1947, RG 338, NA; SSU/AMZON Report no. H-52, 'Russian Emigration and its
Cooperation with the Germans against the Soviets', 28 June 1946, IRR File ZF 015110 'Vlassow
Group', RG 319, NA; 'Katenbrunner Interrogation No. 5', 24 May 1945; and SHAEF CI War Room,
London 'HSSuPF's and IdS', 15 June 1945, both in Entry 119A, RG 226, NA.
20 Schellenberg, p. 241; HQ 7707 European Command Intelligence Center, 'CI Special Report
61', 6 March 1948, IRR File XE 003374 'Operation Zeppelin', RG 319, NA; 'Copy (Extracts):
Sicherheitsdienst', April 1943, Entry 119A, RG 226, NA; and John Erickson, The Road to Berlin
(Boulder, 1983), p. 95.
NA; and HQ 7707 European Command Intelligence Center, 'CI Special Report 61', 6 March 1948,
IRR File XE 003374 'Operation Zeppelin', RG 319, NA.
22 HQ 7707 European Command Intelligence Center, 'CI Special Report 61', 6 March 1948, IRR
File XE 003374 'Operation Zeppelin', RG 319, NA.
23 H6hne & Zolling, pp. 39-40.
25 Schellenberg, pp. 243-244.
26 Ibid., p. 243; and Kahn, p. 360.
27 Schellenberg to Himmler, 11 December 1942, Document NG-4719, in Trials of War Crimi-
nals before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals (Washington, 1952), vol. xiii, pp. 570, 578.
28 Pravda, 2 September 1988; and Julius Mader, Hitlers Spionagegenerale sagen aus (Berlin,
1970), p. 280.
31 Ibid., pp. 244-245; Sven Steenberg, Vlasov (New York, 1970), pp. 105-110; Armstrong, p.
236; Erickson, p. 96; Gerald Reitlinger, The House Built on Sand: The Conflicts of German Policy
in Russia, 1939-1945 (London, 1960), p. 325; Matthew Cooper, The Phantom War: The German
Struggle against Soviet Partisans, 1941-1944 (London, 1979), pp. 122-123; and Timothy Patrick
Mulligan, The Politics of Illusion and Empire: German Occupation Policy in the Soviet Union.
1942-1943 (New York, 1988), pp. 156-157.
32 Erickson, p. 96.
33 'Final Report on the Case of Walter Friedrich Schellenberg', pp. 61-62.
34 CSDIC, 'First Detailed Interrogation Report on Sturmbannfuehrer Dr. Krallert Wilfried',
Entry 119A, RG 226, NA.
3 CSDIC(WEA) BAOR, 'Final Report on Dr. Gerhardt Willy Teich', FR no. 31, Appendices
'A' and 'B', 21 January 1946, ETO MIS-Y-Sect. CSDIC/WEA Final Interrogation Reports 1945-
1947, RG 338, NA; and CSDIC, 'First Detailed Interrogation Report on SS Sturmbannfuehrer Dr.
Krallert Wilfried', Entry 119A, RG 226, NA.
36 CSDIC (WEA) BAOR, 'Final Report on Dr. Gerhard Willy Teich, FR 31, 21 January 1946,
Appendix 'A'; CSDIC (WEA) BAOR, 'Final Report on Hptm. Heinrich Otto Karl Soujon', FR 53,
9 March 1946, both in ETO MIS-Y Sect. CSDIC/WEA Final Interrogation Reports 1945-1947, RG
338, NA; and 'Ziedler Interrogation Report', Entry 119A, RG 226, NA.
38 CSDIC(WEA) BAOR, 'Final Report on Dr. Gerhard Willy Teich', FR no. 31, Appendix 'B',
21 January 1946, ETO MIS-Y-Sect. CSDIC/WEA 'Final Interrogation Reports 1945-1947, RG 338,
NA; HQ 7707 European Command Intelligence Center, 'CI Special Report 61', 6 March 1948, IRR
File XE 003374 'Operation Zeppelin', RG 319, NA; 'Extract from Introduction-General Survey of
Security Situation', Entry 119A, RG 226, NA; Schellenberg, pp. 241-242; History of the Counter
Intelligence Corps (Baltimore, 1959), vol. xxvi, p. 76, NA; Korovin & Shibalin, p. 101; and Pavel
Drska, Ceskoslovenskd Armada v Ndrodn? a Demokraticke Revoluci 1945-1948 (Prague, 1979), p.
63.
NA; 'Extract from Introduction-General Survey of Security Situation', Entry 119A, RG 226, NA;
Sergeev, p. 130; and Istoriya Velikoi Otechestvennoi Voiny Sovetskogo Soyuza 1941-1945 (Moscow,
1965), vol. vi, p. 136.
41 Trials of the War Criminals before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals, vol. xiii, pp. 551-596.
42 Kahn, p. 360.
43 Signature illegible to Stdf. Brandt, 15 June 1944, NS 19/3573, Bundesarchiv, Koblenz (BA).
44 HQ 7707 European Command Intelligence Center, 'CI Special Report 61,' 6 March 1948, IRR
45 Korovin & Shibalin, p. 100
46 Cooper, p. 123.
47 CSDIC(WEA) BAOR, 'Final Report on Dr. Gerhard Willy Teich', FR 31, Appendix 'A', ETO
MIS-Y-Sect. CSDIC/WEA Final Interrogation Reports 1945-1947, RG 338, NA. In December 1944
Radetzki was replaced as liaison by an SD officer named Schror.
49 Igor Jung, a White Russian refugee who was in command of a Zeppelin training camp near
Braunau, Austria, was arrested after he failed to send men forward to Zeppelin but was discovered
instead 'secretly using them for his own purposes'. Jung was a member of the Russian National
Union, and after his release from confinement in 1945 he joined the Vlasov movement. 7th Army
Interrogation Center, 'Preliminary Interrogation Report-Source: Jung, Igor, White Russian Peace
Emissary', 12 July 1945, IRR File XE 003374 'Operation Zeppelin', RG 319, NA.
50 Korovin & Shibalin, p. 101.
52 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956 (New York, 1973), vol. i, pp.
246-247.
53 H. W. Posdnjakoff, 'German Counter-Intelligence in Occupied Soviet Union', pp. 95-98, in
World War II German Military Studies (New York, 1979), vol. xix.
54 Schellenberg, p. 241; and Sergeev, p. 129.
56 Sotsialisticheskaya industriya, 9 October 1970.
57 Kahn, pp. 273-274.
59 Istoriya Velikoi Otechestvennoi Voiny Sovetskogo Soyuza 1941-1945, vol. vi, p. 136.
60 Werner Ewald Ohletz, 'Special Intelligence Report-Russian Emigrds', 1 November 1948,
OMGUS ODI General Correspondence, 19 (Russia, General), RG 260, NA.
61 Krasnaya zvezda, 26-30 December 1965; and A. Bel'ev, B. Syromyatnikov & V. Ugrinovich,
'Proval Aktsii "Tseppelina"', in S. N. Lyalin (ed.), Front bez linii Fronta (Moscow, 1970), pp.
356-375. For brief descriptions of this affair see Robert Stephen, 'Smersh: Soviet Military Counter-
Intelligence during the Second World War', Journal of Contemporary History, 22, 4, 1987, pp.
605-606; and Kahn, p. 360. For the penetration of German installations at Pskov see Moskovskaya
Pravda, 30 July, 1 August and 4 August 1971.
62 Moskovskaya Pravda, 13-14 November 1971.

64 Pravda, 2 September 1988.
66 Von zur Miihlen, pp. 91, 198-200; and Korovin & Shibalin, p. 101.
67 'Protokoll uber den Beschluss des Kabardinischen Nationalausschusses', 6 September 1943,
R6/145, BA.
68 CI War Room, London, 'Liquidation Report no. 111--FAK 20 1', Entry 119A, RG 226, NA;
Herbert Kriegsheim, Getarnt, Getiiuscht, und doch Getreu: Die geheimnisvollen "Brandenburger"
(Berlin, 1958), pp. 90-91, 95-98, 101-103, 109-114, 128-133; Mader, pp. 191-193, 375-376; von
zur Mtuhlen, pp. 173-174; and A. I. Kosikov, 'Diversanty "Tret'ego Reikha" ', Novaya i noveishaya
istoriya, 1986, 2, p. 129. In the summer of 1941 the Soviet forces, using planes with German
markings, had dropped a team of airborne provocateurs in German uniforms into the Volga German
Republic in order to test the reactions of Soviet Germans. After some of the latter expressed a desire
to participate in an 'anti-Bolshevik rebellion' nearly the entire population was herded aboard railway
boxcars and sent eastwards. FHO lib, 'Auszug aus SS-Jagdverb.', 5 January 1945, 3 April 1945,
RH2/2337, Bundesmilitararchiv, Freiburg.
70 CSDIC(WEA) BAOR, 'Final Report on Dr. Gerhardt Willy Teich', FR no. 31, Appendix 'D',
NA; 'Extract from V. E. Fortnightly Report No. 29 (endg. 31/12/43) (Addendum)', Entry 119A, RG
226, NA; and von zur Mtihlen, pp. 174-176. For relations between the SD and the Turks see
Schellenberg, pp. 306-307; and Study of German Intelligence Activities in the Near East and Related
areas Prior to and During World War II, pp. 171, 175, IRR File ZA 022138 'German Intelligence
Activities in the Near East and Related Areas', RG 319, NA.
71 CSDIC, 'First Detailed Interrogation Report on SS Sturmbannfuehrer Dr. Krallert Wilfried',
Entry 119A, RG 226, NA.
73 Schellenberg, pp. 246-247.
Appendix 'C', ETO MIS-Y Sect. CSDIC/WEA Final Interrogation Reports 1945-1947, RG 338, NA;
Sergeev, p. 130; Schellenberg, pp. 245-246; and Kahn, pp. 360-361.
76 CSDIC(WEA) BAOR, 'Final Report on Dr. Gerhardt Willy Teich', FR 31, Appendices 'B',
'C' and 'E', 21 January 1946, ETO MIS-Y-Sect. CSDIC/WEA Final Interrogation Reports 1945-
1947, RG 338, NA; CSDIC, 'First Detailed Interrogation Report on SS Sturmbannfuehrer Dr. Krallert
Wilfried', Entry 119A, RG 226, NA; Hehn to Teich, 30 June 1944, R58/125, BA; and Schellenberg,
p. 245. For the Forschungsdienst Ost and the Wannsee Institute see also Schellenberg, pp. 221, 244;
CI War Room, London, 'Liquidation Report no. 12-Amt VI of the RSHA Gruppe VI G', 21 October
1945, Entry 119A, RG 226, NA; and CSDIC (WEA) BAOR, 'Final Report on SS Ostubaf Gustav
Adolf Nosske', FR 72, 11 May 1946, ETO MIS-Y Sect. CSDIC/WEA Final Interrogation Reports
1945-1947, RG 338, NA. For overall context and information on Sonlderkommando Kiinsberg see
Burleigh, pp. 231-232, 238, 244-246.
7 'Extract from Introduction-General Survey of Security Situation', Entry 119A, RG 226, NA;
516th CIC Detachment, 'Killing of Informants', 27 June 1945, IRR File XE 003374 'Operation
Zeppelin', RG 319, NA; and History of the Counter Intelligence Corps, vol. xxvi, p. 76, NA.
Representatives of seven 'national governments' met a US officer in April 1945 but were dismayed
to find that a war against the USSR was not uppermost in the minds of the Americans, at least at the
time, and that their real worth lay in their knowledge about the SD, which the Americans were
seeking to destroy. Joseph E. Persico, Piercing the Reich (New York, 1979), pp. 267-268.
78 HQ CIC USFET to Chiefs, CIC, All Regions, 13 March 1946; HQ CIC USFET Region VI
(Bamberg) to Commanding Officer, 970th CIC Detachment USFET, 6 September 1946, both in IRR
File XE 003374 'Operation Zeppelin', RG 319, NA; and Lt Oswald to the ACoS G-2, US Third
Army, 25 April 1945, IRR File ZF 015110 'Vlassow Group', RG 319, NA.
79 H6hne & Zolling, pp. 161-163.
80 For a general discussion of this issue see Aleksandr Nekrich, The Punished Peoples (New
York, 1978).
81 Solzhenitsyn, vol. i, p. 247.
84Cooper, pp. 122-123.
NA.
87 Hohne & Zolling, p. 40.
89 Kahn, p. 295.
90 CSDIC, 'First Detailed Interrogation Report on SS Sturmbannfuehrer Dr. Krallert Wilfried',
Entry 119A, RG 226, NA. This same officer also reported, however, that all Zeppelin stations behind
Soviet lines had ceased transmitting by the end of 1944.
92 V. A. Matrosov (ed.), Pogranichnye voiska SSSR v Velikoi Otechestvennoi Voine 1942-1945
(Moscow, 1976), pp. 612-614.
File XE 003374 'Operation Zeppelin', RG 319, NA; and CSDIC(WEA) BAOR, 'Final Report on Dr.
Gerhardt Willy Teich', FR 31, Appendix 'B', 21 January 1946, ETO MIS-Y-Sect. CSDIC/WEA Final
Interrogation Reports 1945-1947, RG 338, NA.
94 Sergeev, 'Natsistskaya Razvedka Protiv SSSR', p. 130.

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University of Glasgow

Unternehmen Zeppelin: The Deployment

Origins and structure

ISSN 0966-8136 print/ISSN 1465-3427 online/00/061115-28 ? 2000 University of Glasgow

any case, Schellenberg decided that, since the semi-improvised Aussenorganisation

Leiter SS Rank Dates

Kleinert Sturmbannfiihrer spring 1942 to summer 1942

FIGURE 1. THE ORGANISATION OF UNTERNEHEMEN ZEPPELIN, AUTUMN 1943.

organisations, cooperation with them could prove tremendously fruitful: an outpost of

As for the Wannsee headquarters of the organisation, it actually ceased to function

Recruitment and training

Zeppelin recruitment was primarily the responsibility of the interrogators in the

Much of the published information on Zeppelin operations comes from Soviet

eager to organise rebellions in their mountainous homelands and to get someone-

Zeppelin and the Western powers

obvious consequences on morale.83 Poor relations between Zeppelin troops and

conception of intelligence work. In other words, Sonderlager L appears to have been

Politische Information-Forschungsdienst Ost, 'Antibolschewistische Widerstandsbewegungen

62 Moskovskaya Pravda, 13-14 November 1971.

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