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Moscow—Poznan—Berlin
part, I got the study with a sofa made up with crisp, clean sheets. In the study, a
portrait of Hitler still hung on the wall, and on the desk was a photograph of an
officer of undeterminable rank with his wife clinging to him.
Before going to bed, wanting to jot down my first impressions, I sat at the writing
desk and pulled open the top drawer. Good grief! The former proprietor of
the study had left his Iron Cross (German medal for meritorious combat service)
and Walther pistol with a full ammunition clip in the drawer.With these spoils in
hand, I immediately paid a visit to my comrades, who were wallowing in their
snow-white feather beds. For them it was quite unusual to use feather beds instead
of ordinary blankets.
“Give the pistol to our general,” advised Smirnov, “and hand over the medal
to Smersh.” 5
In the morning, the general briefed us about the plan of action. Our first task was
to perform a thorough inspection of “DVL,” the German Luftwaffe research center
in Adlershof. 6 But Adlershof had not yet been taken. In the meantime we had to find
maps, and we conversed with the army group’s intelligence representatives.
The general was pleased with my gift.The Walther pistol was much lighter than
our TT. The Smersh representative showed no enthusiasm when he took the
German medal.“We have quite enough of these,” he commented.
The army group’s intelligence service officers did not brief us so much as try to
understand what we were interested in and what they needed to look for. They
were competent combat officers, but clearly were not in the habit of dealing with
scientific-technical intelligence matters.We were one of the first official echelons
within the military for scientific-technical intelligence, which previously had been
completely uncoordinated within the combat armies. Subsequently, many detachments
of civilian specialists were sent to the occupied zones of Germany and called
“trade union” or “civilian” officers.
The Smersh military intelligence representative posed the following question to
us at a meeting: “The Germans have issued leaflets that say that we will not take
Berlin, and that we will receive such a blow that there won’t be any bones to
gather. The Führer has a secret weapon in store so that the Red Army will be
completely annihilated on German soil.What could that weapon be?”
Indeed, what could it be? If it were the V-2, then no matter how many of them
Hitler had “in store,” this weapon would not bother the Red Army.This much was
clear to us. Chemical weapons? using them in any form on German soil would
now be more dangerous to the Germans than to us.
We decided that this was pure propaganda.And it turned out we were right. In
the United States, Germany, and the USSR, a new, top-secret weapon really was
5. The organization SMERSH—Smert Shpionam (Death to Spies)—was the armed forces counter-intelligence
agency whose primary task from 1943 to 1946 was to uncover spies and saboteurs in the military, screen
all liberated Soviet POWs, and protect military factories
6. DVL—Deutsche Versuchsanstalt für Luftfahrt (German Aviation Research Institute).
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