Adolf to Azov

Operation Barbarossa commenced in June 1941, where the Germans invaded the Soviet Union. Many Russians who felt betrayed and mistreated by the Soviet, didn’t want to fight for the communist. This led to many disenfranchised Russian to surrender. Over the course of a year this amounted to many prisoners of war falling into the German’s hand. With this large number of prisoners, the Germans decided to try and utilize them for the purpose of intelligence gathering. This would lead to the Germans to the start of Operation Zepplin in 1942.

In the early days of Operation Zepplin. the first thing the Germans did was sort through the Soviet Prisoners and see which ones could be recruited to carry out espionage activities. The two main goals that the Germans had were to send recruits back over enemy lines to collect information on the Soviets, and to also commit acts of sabotage, like what the Communist supporter were doing behind the German lines. The Germans were very hopeful for a successful sabotage operation, with ambitious plans being formulated. Some ranged from planting explosive in near the Moscow power station to assassination attempts against Stalin.

The Germans had no problem trying to find Prisoners to recruit, especially with Prisoner who have lost loved ones due to Stalin’s purges. Many of the captured prisoners even viewed working with the Germans as something that would most likely increase their chances for survival. Even though finding volunteers were easy. Finding smart volunteers who had connections in the Soviet Union was tough. Most of the prisoners, who were not devout communists, never even had a chance to read, making the trainees illiterate.

After selection was complete, recruits were sent to a training camp that lasted anywhere from a few weeks to three months. Training varied depending on the training camp. The course included lessons in parachuting, sabotage, subversion, radio transmissions, as well as political ideology classes as well. Prisoners were still segregated. So Russian Nationalist, weren’t serving with Ukrainian Nationalist. The recruits were given German uniforms and also given living condition comparable to that of a German soldier as well. Recruits that could not past training, were sent to work in concentration camps.

After training was complete, sending the fascist agents back into the Soviet Union was another problem, since the beginning of the war there was a shortage of planes that were able to drop the newly recruited prisoners behind enemy lines. This stagnation of activities in the groups of prisoners led many of them to alcoholism, and an outbreak of venereal diseases. Many of the prisoners debated whether they made the right choice, with working for the Germans, especially when they saw what was happening to their other country men. Many of the men who were chosen, for operation Zepplin, were quick to turn themselves into the NKVD and would then work against the Germans. Even as the war drew on, and the fighting between the Germans and Soviets became more brutal, less and less, prisoners were willing to fight or even given second chances.

In June of 1942 Operation Zepplin tried to conduct its first mass deployment. Over the course of a year the operation had managed to train around two to three thousand troops, with another ten thousand to fifteen thousand in training. At this small group acting of 4 or 5 men, were air dropped behind Soviet lines to act as a reconnaissance team, while the rest group entered the Soviet occupied territory on foot. Once deployed the recruit would perform tasks such as espionage, diversion, sabotage, infiltration, dissemination of propaganda, and instigation of resistance. One of their most successful sabotage missions was in attacking the St Petersburg–Finlyandsky train station, near Leningrad.

In March1943, the goals of Operation Zepplin changed as the Germans started retreating. The new task was to leave agents behind the retreating Germans, to act as intelligence collector behind enemy lines. One of their most successful intelligences gathering operations was having three of their members infiltrate the Soviet People’s Commissariat of Transport. Their most successful partisan mission with Michael Kedia and his network of men, in Operation Mainz.

In January 1944, another new plan was launched by Operation Zepplin, to mobilize the German sleeper agents behind the Soviets lines. This proved to be rather difficult, with many of the contact agents already being in contact with the Soviet NKVD. After a month of this failure, Operation Zepplin still continued on but would only use agents from a class of people known as Volksdeutsche. These were people who were ethnically Germans but didn’t live in Germany.