Killing Hitler (24 page)

When Stalin pulled out of his crisis of confidence, he threw himself into a flurry of activity. He began with a radio address to the Soviet people, the first time he had been heard from since the German invasion, now almost two weeks old. He opened in uncharacteristic style, addressing his listeners as “Comrades, citizens, brothers and sisters…my friends,” before launching into a tirade on the perfidy of “Fascist Germany” and the grim sacrifices required to secure a Soviet victory. His delivery was slow and quiet, almost monotone, with the thick drawl of his Georgian accent. Every inch of soil and every drop of blood must be fought for, he said. All Soviet production was to be placed on a war footing, every enterprise was to intensify its production. No quarter would be given to deserters, panic-mongers, spies, and diversionists. Where the Red Army was forced to retreat, it would leave nothing of use in its wake; anything that could not be evacuated was to be destroyed. This was not an ordinary war between two armies, he warned; “it was a war of the entire Soviet people against the German-Fascist troops.”
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Every means was to be utilized, every advantage exploited to drive the invader from the motherland. If the assassination of Hitler was not already on the agenda, it very soon would be.

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In fact, assassination, alongside judicial murder and kidnapping, was already an integral part of the Soviet political landscape. Stalin himself had a brutally simple attitude toward human life. As one recent biographer has observed, he talked about the lives of men as one would old clothes: “some we keep, some we throw away.”
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Thus, for all its “scientific” guiding principles, his regime demonstrated a remarkable degree of casual brutality. In the Ukraine in the early 1930s, some five million or so peasants were starved to death in the course of a forced collectivization campaign. Soon after, the first of the great purges began, devouring numerous prominent politicians and senior military personnel on the basis of personal grudges, rumors, and forced confessions.

The network that was developed to deal with such supposed miscreants was a simple expansion of the existing system of punitive camps, or gulag, dotted around the more inhospitable parts of the Soviet Union. From the bleak Arctic coast to the forests of the Far East, new camps mushroomed and the older ones were packed to bursting point with a total of some 1.8 million unfortunates.
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Their names—Vorkuta, Solovetsky, Kolyma—are largely unknown in the West, yet they deserve the same shudder of recognition as Auschwitz, Dachau, and Belsen. Labor and punishment were their primary functions, though with primitive conditions, lack of food and medical care, death was ever-present and, indeed, was viewed by the authorities as a happy by-product.

Many never reached the gulag at all. In the generalized slaughter that followed the purges, those slated for death were often dealt with in the local NKVD (secret police) headquarters or merely spirited away. Across the road from the notorious Lubyanka prison in Moscow, for example, there was even a specially constructed abattoir for the execution of prisoners, with a sloping concrete floor, hoses to wash away the blood, and a wooden wall to absorb stray bullets.
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The victims were transferred into steel coffins and taken for cremation. Their ashes would be dumped in a mass grave.

The executioners, and their political masters, went about their task with alacrity and a nefarious attention to detail. Killings were organized by quota, and many enthusiastic and ambitious
paladins sought to exceed their prescribed limit. A young Nikita Khrushchev, for instance, ordered the murder of 55,741 individuals in Moscow—5,741 over quota. Sixty-eight thousand more were arrested in Leningrad.
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Every city and town of the Soviet Union was affected. Almost every family would have told a similar tale: the dreaded knock at the door, arrest, torture, confession, and execution. The majority of cases crossed Stalin’s own desk. On one day, for example, he is reported to have personally signed 3,167 death warrants.
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On another occasion, he signed an order authorizing 48,000 executions.
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Stalin possessed the power of life and death over every Soviet citizen, and it was a power that he did not shrink from using.

Even the Soviet élite was not immune from the whirlwind of bloodletting. Early victims included Stalin’s former comrades Zinoviev and Kamenev, and the hero of the civil war, Marshal Tukhachevsky. Of the 139 members of the Soviet Central Committee in 1934, more than 100 had been arrested by 1938; most of them were shot.
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Later, the onetime head of the NKVD, Nikolai Yezhov, fell victim to his own murderous machinery. Yezhov, who had reached the pinnacle of power as a member of the Kremlin inner circle and died with Stalin’s name on his lips, was disposed of in a common grave. Some cases highlight not only the Stalinist contempt for human life but also its all-pervading perversity. The wife of Stalin’s secretary, Bronka Poskrebysheva, for example, was arrested by the NKVD in 1939 after spurning the advances of its priapic and sadistic leader, Lavrenti Beria. She was held for two years before being executed in the autumn of 1941. Her husband, meanwhile, made numerous pleas for clemency on her behalf, only to be comforted by Stalin with the words “Don’t worry, we’ll find you another wife.”
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He never remarried, yet remained in his post until 1952.

Foreign citizens were also caught up in the maelstrom. In 1939, a large number of Poles were deported to the USSR from the area of eastern Poland annexed by Stalin. This included a sizeable contingent of Polish soldiers and around twenty thousand former Polish officers. While the civilians and ordinary soldiers fed the gulag, the debate raged within the Kremlin as to what
should be done with the Polish officers—most of whom were doubly if not trebly damned as aristocrats, intellectuals, and landowners. The solution finally arrived at was as simple as it was brutal. In April 1940, Stalin’s favorite executioner, Blokhin, was dispatched to Byelorussia, where the officers were being held. There, in a soundproofed room, he donned a leather butcher’s apron and proceeded to execute 250 Poles every night for the following month.
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Of the final death toll of around twenty-eight thousand, Blokhin supplied at least seven thousand corpses.

Ultimately, the number of those who fell victim to the executioner’s bullet is unknown, and perhaps unknowable. The total number of victims of the Great Terror is still disputed, though some reliable authorities on the issue estimate that a total of around twenty million individuals were imprisoned, of whom some seven million perished.
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There should be no dispute, however, about the sanctity of human life in the Soviet Union. In the drive toward the communist ideal, human beings were simply expendable. As Stalin’s maxim ran: “Death is the solution to all problems—no man, no problem.”

This attitude extended to the NKVD’s foreign operations, where enemies, real or imagined, were assured of a grisly end. Just as the purges and the Great Terror were rooting out “Trot-skyists” and “deviationists” at home, so the NKVD foreign section carried that same fight beyond the Soviet frontier. Their primary targets were the “Whites” (the anti-Soviet Russian exile community) and the followers of the communist heretic Leon Trotsky. And while the majority of their activities consisted simply of observation, infiltration, and intelligence gathering, a small unit, the Administration for Special Tasks, was established in Paris to handle “wet affairs”—the messy business of kidnapping and assassination.
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The Special Tasks section soon grew to become one of the largest divisions of the Soviet foreign intelligence service, boasting some 212 operatives across Europe by 1938. Its agents were trained as linguists, socialites, spies, and saboteurs. Many learned their trade at an NKVD facility outside Moscow, where they were made accustomed to life in luxurious “capitalist” surroundings.
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Thus prepared, they were sent to infiltrate “enemy” organizations, businesses, and even households, where they would observe and report. On a signal from “Center,” infiltration agents could then become assassins, or a specialist “mobile group” could be brought in, thus leaving the infiltration agents in situ, undercover. Their most notable victims included the discredited head of NKVD foreign intelligence, Abram Slutsky, the exiled former White general Yevgeni Miller, and the defectors Ignace Poretsky and Walter Krivitsky. Their methods varied with time and opportunity, though they did specialize in the use of poisons.
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In most cases, they worked with such skill that there was little evidence that any crime had been committed. Miller, for instance, was kidnapped on a Paris street and secretly shipped to Moscow for interrogation before being murdered. Slutsky was poisoned with cyanide, though the death was made to look like a heart attack.
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And Krivitsky’s murder in a Washington hotel room was faked as a suicide.
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Only rarely did the slick killing operation falter. One such example was that of Poretsky, an NKVD agent in Paris who had chosen to side with Trotsky. After failing to be lured to his death by an “old friend” bearing a box of chocolates laced with strychnine, Poretsky was simply machine-gunned in a Lausanne side road. Even then, he evidently did not go quietly. When his body was found, he was discovered to be clutching a clump of his assassin’s hair.
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The most famous victim of the NKVD’s assassins, however, was Trotsky himself, the hero of the Russian revolution and civil war who had fallen foul of Stalin in the late 1920s. Living in exile in France and later Mexico, Trotsky headed a small movement of followers, propagating his heretical brand of communism. Though he exerted negligible influence politically and ideologically, he became an obsession for Stalin. Inevitably, his small network was infiltrated by NKVD agents, who succeeded in murdering his son during an apparently routine appendectomy and beheading his Paris secretary. One of those agents, the Spaniard Ramón Mercader, had been trained in Moscow. In Mexico, living under the pseudonym of Frank Jacson, he posed as the lover of Trotsky’s courier, and soon became a frequent visitor to Trotsky’s
fortified villa outside Mexico City. He worked patiently to gain his target’s trust, bringing gifts, playing with the grandchildren, and earnestly discussing politics.

On the morning of 20 August 1940, he arrived with an article that he had written, which Trotsky had agreed to read. He was also carrying a dagger, a revolver, and an ice pick. While Trotsky sat in his study reading the article, Mercader smashed the ice pick into the back of his skull. As he later told the police:

[He] screamed in such a way that I will never forget it as long as I live. His scream was
Aaaaa…
very long, infinitely long and it still seems to me as if that scream were piercing my brain. I saw Trotsky get up like a madman. He threw himself at me and bit my hand.
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After a short struggle, Mercader was arrested. Trotsky, meanwhile, died of his injuries the following day. In many ways, the assassination was a far from perfect “wet” operation. The target’s body had not been disposed of, and the scene had not been made to look like a suicide or a medical emergency. Worst of all, the assassin had been caught and had confessed to his crime. Nonetheless, when he was finally released from prison in Mexico in 1960, Mercader traveled to Moscow and was awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union.
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Trotsky’s assassination was certainly a botched job, but Stalin had at least succeeded in eliminating his rival and had demonstrated that his agents were capable of liquidating high-level, well-protected targets outside the Soviet Union. After the removal of Trotsky, of course, the next perceived threat to Stalin came from European fascism, which had evolved in many ways in opposition to Bolshevism. Thus, while Hitler’s government was clamping down on the activities of domestic communists, so Stalin’s agents were also beginning to target the Nazi élite.

As early as 1934, the then head of Special Tasks, Yakov Serebryanski, had received an instruction to assassinate the German
Reichspräsident
, Hermann Göring, during a visit to France. A sniper was recruited and infiltrated into Le Bourget airport to
the east of Paris, where the target was expected to land. But when the visit was canceled, the assassin was told to stand down.
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Hitler, too, was beginning to attract the close attentions of Stalin’s NKVD. By the summer of 1939, Alexander Foote, a British-born NKVD operative, had been based in Munich for some months.
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A tall, bluff Yorkshireman and veteran of the Spanish civil war, Foote was being groomed by the Soviets as an infiltration agent. Posted to Munich to learn German and watch political developments, he became a regular visitor to a small restaurant in the city, the Osteria Bavaria, which, it turned out, was also one of Hitler’s favorite haunts. As Foote later reminisced:

Looking one day for a cheap place to lunch, I found by accident the Osteria Bavaria, and, having settled down to the good 1s.6d. set lunch, I noticed a flurry at the door and Hitler strode in accompanied by his adjutant Brueckner, his photographer and toady Hoffmann, and two A.D.C.s.
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