A FEAT OF HEROISM BY A SOVIET INTELLIGENCE OFFICER

By Lyubov Tsarevskaya 

True, it is troops that win battles, but the outcome of every battle is largely pre-determined by the performance of intelligence services involved. None of the major battles in the war between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany was fought without obtaining and analyzing secret intelligence about enemy plans first. It is Soviet Intelligence Service officers that collected the required secret information in the enemy rear at the risk of losing their lives. Because a failure meant not only death, but one through most brutal torture in a torture-chamber. Nikolai Kuznetsov, a legendary Soviet intelligence officer, was certainly one of the more prominent officers of the Soviet Intelligence Service. 

He was born into the family of a peasant, in the Ural Mountains region, in 1911. His linguistic endowments and a prodigious memory helped him master German, and he even submitted a research in German to get his university diploma in engineering. Nikolai Kuznetsov knew German history inside out, and he also learnt a lot about German customs and traditions from German engineers who worked together with him at a factory in the Urals. Small wonder then that when Nazi Germany attacked the USSR in June 1941, Kuznetsov was told to join a special-purpose unit to be trained for intelligence gathering in the enemy rear. 

In summer 1942 he was taken to a guerrilla unit that was operating in the vicinity of the city Rovno, in the occupied Western Ukraine. Rovno was important because Germans had declared it the capital of the occupied Ukraine, and Hitler’s Governor-General in Ukraine, Erich Koch had his official residence set up in Rovno. The city was a place where numerous intelligence operations against Soviet troops were planned, where information about the Anti-Hitler Coalition was channeled to, and where reports were deciphered. So it was into that hornets’ nest that the Soviet Intelligence Service officer Nikolai Kuznetsov was supposed to be infiltrated as a German Oberleutenant, or First Lieutenant, Paul Siebert. 

One day a young, good-looking and neatly-dressed officer was walking down a Rovno street, saluting officers who were higher in rank and responding offhandedly to saluting soldiers. Now and again he would stop to look at a shop- or café-window, or to read a poster or a playbill. There was absolutely nothing about him that would cause suspicion. He got so much used to his role of a German officer that Paul Siebert had become his alter ego. Yet he was always on his guard, since he knew only too well that the German security services, - the Gestapo and counterintelligence, - were filled with experienced professionals. 

Throughout the almost 18 months that Kuznetsov had been in the enemy rear, he was permanently at risk of being exposed. He managed to gather intelligence of particular importance, one that revealed the German Command’s strategic and tactical plans. Kuznetsov masterminded a plan to kill Hitler’s Governor-General of the Ukraine Erich Koch during an audience with him, but failed to carry it out because Koch was heavily guarded. But the visit was not useless altogether, since during the audience Kuznetsov learnt from Koch about German preparations for a major offensive near Kursk in summer 1943. This is the way the former Soviet intelligence officer Alexander Lukin describes the episode in his documentary novel about Nikolai Kuznetsov (Lukin got almost all the material from Kuznetsov himself). 

“Where were you wounded, Siebert?” – came a sudden question from Erich Koch.

“In a place near Kursk, Herr Reichskommissar. Until I make a recovery, I am temporarily compelled to form part of a rear service. But I am impatient about going back to the front.” 

“Oh, you will soon get the pleasure of avenging your injury,” Koch said. “The Fuehrer, will soon uncork a surprise on the Bolsheviks in just the area you were wounded in. 

Kuznetsov barely managed to restrain himself from jumping to his feet. At first he thought he might have misunderstood Koch. But then he realized that the Reichskommissar of the Ukraine and the Gauleiter, or political chief, of East Prussia Erich Koch had, in a casual conversation with some Oberleutenant, blurted out secret plans for an important Nazi military operation. Koch could hardly expect his remarks to be carefully reported that very night to the command of our unit,” Alexlander Lukin writes in his book, “and later to our command in Moscow.”    

So it was back in spring 1943 that the Red Army Command was informed of the German High Command’s plans to launch an offensive operation, codenamed the “Operation Citadel”, near the city Kursk. The Soviet Command concentrated its forces in the area and inflicted a crushing defeat on the Nazi troops in what came to be known later as the Battle of Kursk.

In 1944, when the Soviet troops were driving Germans westwards to the borders of the USSR, Nikolai Kuznetsov moved to the city of Lvov, in Western Ukraine, where he killed two high-ranking Nazi officials in what proved to be acts of retaliation of unparalleled daring. Germans responded with immediate police round-ups, and Kuznetsov decided to leave the city for his guerrilla unit. But while en route, his car was stopped by military police. Following a skirmish Kuznetsov and his men forced their way into the nearby forest. But Germans took up the chase. When the Soviet intelligence officers were ambushed in one of the villages, they decided not to surrender and used an antitank grenade to blow up themselves and the Germans around them. Nikolai Kuznetsov became a war hero when, naturally, still alive. Unfortunately, the title of Hero of the Soviet Union was conferred on him when he was already dead.