What Stalin Knew (37 page)

incidents on October 22 and 23 and asking the German government to take

appropriate steps to ensure no further violations of Soviet space by Ger-

man aircraft. There is no indication that the Germans paid the least bit of

attention.15

An NKVD report sent to the leadership on March 20, 1941, noted that

‘‘for the period October 16, 1940 to March 1, 1941, thirty-seven German

aircraft violated Soviet airspace. In that same period six Soviet aircraft

inadvertently violated German airspace.’’ No explanation was given for the

Soviet actions. ‘‘The flights of German aircraft are in most cases carried

out over the construction of fortified areas, obviously for intelligence pur-

poses. These aircraft fly over USSR territory up to distances of three to six

kilometers on the average, but in some cases as far as eighty kilometers. . . .

Whenever these violations occur, the border troops protest them. German

authorities do not deny that violations have taken place but claim they

arise from the fact that there are many military flying schools near the

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border and student pilots easily become disoriented.’’ The report closed

with this sentence: ‘‘Despite these explanations by German representa-

tives, violations of Soviet airspace continue.’’16

Whoever drafted that NKVD report was right on the money. Confirma-

tion that these were intelligence flights came from Harro Schulze-Boysen

(code name Starshina), who passed the information to Arvid Harnack

(code name Korsikanets) in January 1941. This arrangement continued

until the end of March, when Korsikanets’s case officer, deputy resident

Aleksandr M. Korotkov, began to handle Starshina directly. In judging

Starshina’s reporting, one must remember that Korsikanets, Korotkov,

and the officers in the NKGB Foreign Intelligence Directorate in Moscow

were unfamiliar with German air force terminology or operations. Often

the right questions were not put to Starshina or the information he pro-

vided was incorrectly interpreted when it was disseminated to the leader-

ship in Moscow. Nevertheless, his reporting on the Luftwaffe’s photo re-

connaissance program, when considered in the light of Germany’s

continuing violations of Soviet airspace, should have convinced the leader-

ship that more was involved than navigational errors by student pilots.17

Starshina’s first report described a large-scale effort to photograph the

entire border area of the western USSR, including Leningrad and Kron-

stadt, using improved cameras. The results would be used to produce accu-

rate maps of the USSR and to further operational planning. The squadron

performing the photo reconnaissance was known as Revelstaffel, after its

commander, Revel. Its main base was at Oranienburg, where it was carried

on the books as a squadron engaged in experiments in high-altitude flight.

It flew its reconnaissance missions from bases at Bucharest, Königsberg,

and Kirkenes in northern Norway. The photography was carried out at an

altitude of 6,000 meters and the films were of excellent quality. Starshina

also reported that, according to the German military attaché in Stockholm,

in mid-April the Soviet government had protested to the Finns that the

Germans were overflying Finland to reach Soviet airspace. The Finns ad-

vised the Germans of the Soviet protest and asked if German aircraft could

bypass Finnish territory. At the same time, the Finns promised the Ger-

mans that if their aircraft passed over Finnish territory flying from Kirk-

enes in Norway, the Finns would not fire on them. The Finns’ positive

attitude was the result, Starshina believed, of the close cooperation be-

tween the German and Finnish general staffs in drawing up plans for

operations against the USSR.18

According to postwar German sources, high-altitude reconnaissance

‘‘WE DO NOT FIRE ON GERMAN AIRCRAFT’’

169

over the USSR was ordered by Hitler in October 1940 and carried out by

Lieutenant Colonel Theodor Rowehl’s unit beginning in February 1941.

(Starshina’s ‘‘Revel’’ was a Russian transliteration of the German ‘‘Ro-

wehl’’). One group operated from East Prussia and covered Belorussia,

using HE-111 aircraft. The second covered the Baltic States with DO-215-

B2 aircraft made by Dornier. The third, operating from Bucharest with

HE-111 and DO-215-B2 aircraft, covered areas north of the Black Sea.

From Cracow and Bucharest, a ‘ ‘special squadron of the Research Center

for High-Altitude Flying’ covered the area between Minsk and Kiev. They

employed special Junkers models, the JU-88B and JU-86P—magnificent

machines capable of reaching 11,000 and 15,000 meters respectively. . . .

These aircraft were equipped with pressurized cabins, with engines spe-

cially tuned for high-altitude flying, with special photographic equipment,

and a wide angle of vision. . . . The plan worked smoothly. The Russians

noticed nothing.’’ These German descriptions of the program confirm Star-

shina’s reporting and provide greater technical detail. They are wrong,

however, with regard to the start of the overflights and in the belief that the

‘‘Russians noticed nothing.’’ They certainly did notice, but given Stalin’s

refusal to respond to these provocations, nothing was done about them.19

As of early January 1941, Starshina reported, Göring ordered the ‘‘Rus-

sian Department transferred from the Air Ministry to the so-called active

element of the air staff, which works on plans for military operations.’’ By

early April, plans were developing for a bombing campaign as part of the

invasion: ‘‘Air attacks will focus on important military and economic ob-

jectives; however, because the Soviet Union is such a vast territory, in its

operational plans the Luftwaffe will concentrate on key rail junctions in

the central USSR where north-south and east-west lines intersect. Other

early targets of German bombing will be electric power stations, particu-

larly in the Don Basin. Targets in Moscow will include engine building and

ball bearing plants, along with enterprises of the aviation industry.’’

On March 28 and April 21, 1941, the Foreign Affairs Commissariat

protested German overflights in notes to the German Foreign Office. The

April 21 protest noted eighty violations and described an April 15 incident

at Rovno in which a German plane was forced to land by Soviet fighters.

On it ‘‘were found a camera, some rolls of exposed film, and a torn to-

pographical map . . . of the USSR, all of which gives evidence of the crew’s

purpose.’’

The April 21 note also reminded the German Foreign Office of ‘‘the

statement that was made on March 28, 1940, by the assistant military

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attaché of the embassy of the USSR in Berlin to Reich Marshal Göring.

According to this statement, the People’s Commissar for Defense of the

USSR made an exception to the usual very strict measures for the protec-

tion of the Soviet border and gave the border troops the order not to fire on

German planes flying over Soviet territory
so long as such flights did not

occur frequently.
’ I emphasize this last phrase to highlight the pathetic

nature of the Soviet response to these constant German provocations. As

for Starshina, he reported on May 9 that ‘‘despite the Soviet diplomatic

note [probably the April 21 note], photo reconnaissance flights are con-

tinuing. The only concession made by the Luftwaffe has been to raise the

altitude for photography to 11,000 meters and order the aircrews to take

greater care.’’ The photo reconnaissance flights continued, however, and

increased in intensity up to June 22. No one in the Soviet leadership, the

military, or the security services could ignore these flights, yet no refer-

ences to them or to their implications appeared in any of the periodic

special reports by Golikov. When Stalin later cursed Starshina for his

June 17 report, part of his anger may well have arisen from the agent’s

continual reminders of the real purpose of the German overflights.20

Between April 19 and June 19, 1941, there were 180 violations of So-

viet airspace compared with 80 between March 27 and April 18. Violations

occurred nearly every day in June, each one marked by a memorandum

report to the leadership from the NKVD deputy for troops, Ivan I. Maslen-

nikov. In addition, he forwarded summaries of border troop reports on the

movements of German troops ever closer to the border. Even Beria joined

in with a June 12 memorandum to Stalin and Molotov. After enumerating

the increasing number of violations, he commented: ‘ Violations of the

border by German aircraft are not accidental, as can be shown by the

direction and depth of these flights over our territory. In many cases Ger-

man aircraft fly over our territory for distances of up to 100 kilometers or

more, particularly in the direction of areas where defense construction is

under way or over the locations of large Red Army garrisons.’’ Beria con-

cluded this section of his memorandum with an account of the incident at

Rovno. The report was sent to the attention of Stalin and Molotov.

As the tempo of airspace violations increased, there were indications

that Soviet fighter pilots were growing tougher. On June 19 three German

aircraft were forced to land by Red Army fighters although no shots were

fired. On June 20 a German bomber was intercepted near Brest-Litovsk by

a Soviet fighter and signaled to follow it. When the bomber ignored the

signals, the interceptor fired a warning burst from his machine gun. The

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171

German returned the fire and managed to make it back across the border.

The Soviet pilot was not hit and returned to his base.21 Senior Red Army

commanders of covering forces along the border voiced concern about

these intrusions over Soviet defensive positions. The commander of the

Twelfth Army in the Kiev Special Military District sent a written request

for instructions ‘‘on when it was permitted to open fire with antiaircraft

weapons on German aircraft.’’ Maksim A. Purkayev, chief of staff of the

district responded: ‘ You may open fire if (1) special directives to that effect

have been given by the Military Council; (2) mobilization has been de-

clared; (3) the plan for a covering force has been put into effect, so long as

there are no special prohibitions; (4) it is known to the Military Council of

the Twelfth Army that we do not direct fire from antiaircraft artillery on

German aircraft in peacetime.’’22

Although it has become clear with the declassification of documents

from the prewar period that it was Stalin who insisted on the orders not

to fire on German aircraft, some retired officers cited other reasons for

the failure to halt German aerial reconnaissance. For example, Marshal

Matvei V. Zakharov, in 1941 chief of staff of the Odessa Military District,

claimed that the aircraft could not be intercepted because Soviet intercep-

tors could not follow them across the frontier and the Red Army did not

have sufficient antiaircraft artillery to shoot them down. Moreover, the

VNOS posts were ineffective in warning air defense of the approach of

hostile aircraft. Nowhere in his treatment of German violations of Soviet

airspace does Zakharov admit that it was orders from the top that made it

possible for the Luftwaffe to operate with impunity over the USSR.23

As the invasion grew nearer, the intensity of German air activity in-

creased. There were eleven cases on June 19 and thirty-six on June 20. On

the twentieth, the violations included five from Finland; although the na-

tionality of the aircraft was not given in the NKVD reporting, all the planes

entered Soviet airspace from Finland and returned to Finland after com-

pleting their missions. One violation took place from Romania. Among

those incidents attributed to German aircraft, one involved thirteen Ger-

man bombers that entered Soviet airspace at a height of only 300 meters,

went a distance of 4.5 kilometers, then returned to German territory after

spending only four minutes over the USSR. Pilots and bombardiers cannot

do better than to have a very safe but quick look at the targets they are

getting ready to bomb. Three airspace violations were reported on June 21,

the day before the invasion, each of them involving two engine bombers

that entered the USSR at low altitudes. After traveling distances of from six

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to ten kilometers, they returned to German territory, very probably having

reconnoitered their specific targets. That these flights were not accidental

can be seen in the June 21, 1941, message to Moscow of the chief of staff of