As the Red Army approached the outskirts of Berlin, local Soviet spies on the ground reported on the surprising number of individuals springing forward to proclaim their membership in the Communist Party. The author of a 30 April 1945 Top Secret report, recently declassified by the Russian SVR, clearly had no wool pulled over his eyes. Admitting that there very well could be some party members worthy of appointments in a new post-war government, most of those making the claims were doing whatever they could to secure a relatively safe and swift departure from the beleaguered city.
The following is a translation of this Top Secret report. Neither the intended recipient nor the agent/author are provided.
TOP SECRET
CODED TELEGRAM No. 5743
From BERLIN
Received 1 May 1945 at 00.35 Decoded 1 May 1945 at 11.00
With the arrival of our troops, a substantial number of individuals have begun to appear almost everywhere in the Berlin region, declaring themselves as Communist Party members, and who intend to create Party organizations and aspire to administrative positions in the cities and towns. These “Communists” are recruiting new members, rapidly becoming overrun by all sorts of vagabonds and opportunists.
As, for example, in the town of Woltersdorf, near Berlin, where “Communists” – with no prior permission – took over control of the village and began recruiting the population to join the “kompartiya,” handing out certificates (with a hammer and sickle printed on them) on belonging to the “kompartiya” to all types of shady characters. These vagabonds came together to organize a May Day commemoration and conduct a mass organized gathering of “party members”.
The most active “communist” was the Ukrainian Mihail Korotash, who has lived in Germany since 1921, who let it slip that he is a member of the OUN [Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists].
In the city of Köpenick (50,000 inhabitants), in one day, 34 “Communists” approached the mayor, in groups and individually, all with the same intentions as in the above case.
In the city of Freidrichshagen (18,000 inhabitants), the burgomaster was a certain Hermann Schwartz (birth year 1886), a typesetter who asserted that he’s been a member of the Communist Party since 1919, and during that whole time he was the political leader of the city-level organization and personally knew [Wilhelm] Pieck and [Wilhelm] Florin. He is clustering old party members around himself: Kristina Schmidt, Kurt Magdeburg, Erich Lerche, and others.
If there are individuals among these people who previously belonged to the party, and more or less behaved under the Hitler regime, then most of them are still ne’er-do-wells, urgently trying to change their stripes.
Berlin’s civilian population has opportunities to leave the city unimpeded, and there is accurate information that the “party members” are officers and soldiers who have dressed in civilian clothes and using this ploy are leaving from our troops encircling the city.
Entire cities and villages east of Berlin remain absolutely intact, and it is assumed that the Nazis on the run will flock to them.
For the time being, there are no SMERSH elements in this locations, and the mayors are, to a significant degree, extremely weak and inexperienced sucklings.
I report this because it may be of some interest to comrade Dimitrov.
30 April 1945
Translating History 