Dachau to Dolomites. Tom Wall
a tall person with unruly red hair approached and saluted. ‘Sergeant Cushing at your service, Sorr [sic] and welcome to Sonderlager ‘A’.’1
Cushing introduced Churchill to his roommate Andy Walsh and to the two other Irish prisoners in an adjoining room, Patrick O’Brien and John Spence. Cushing asked if Churchill would like tea or a cigarette, to which the bemused officer quipped ‘both’. Within minutes, he sat on his allotted bunk, a teacup in hand, enjoying the first cigarette he had smoked for quite some time. The Irishmen were anxious to please. Churchill was the first British officer they had encountered since Friesack. How would they explain their presence here, and more particularly in Friesack? Would they be regarded as traitors? Since Stalingrad and the Allied invasion of southern Italy, it had become evident that the tide of war had turned in favour of the Allies and, with the prospect of victory, the thoughts of the former Friesack men would have begun to focus on their post-war reputations. The reaction of these officers to their tale of officer-sanctioned feigned collaboration would be important. It could make the difference between joyous liberation and court martial at war’s end.
First impressions were important and, as the Captain was made comfortable, Cushing and Walsh told him about their time in Friesack. Churchill was given to understand that it was their commanding officer, John McGrath, who suggested they enrol for training with the Germans in order to double-cross them. This of course was misleading, for, as we have learned, Cushing had already volunteered before McGrath’s arrival in that camp, but a little muddling of the timescales would help to deflect suspicion. No matter, Churchill was charmed by the two Irishmen. Following months of solitary confinement, he delighted in their brogue-infused storytelling. He believed them, although his confidence in them was not to be shared by later British arrivals.
A number of the recently arrived Russian prisoners were now sharing a hut with the Irish quartet. They had been placed there following the death of Stalin’s son and Kokorin’s departure. The group included generals who had apparently turned traitor and allied themselves with the Nazis. In the rapid encircling movements that characterised the 1941 German invasion, almost 900,000 Soviet troops were taken prisoner. (In total, 5.7 million were captured by the Germans or their allies during the war, more than half of whom died in captivity.2) Nazi racial theory, and the excuse that the Soviet Union had not ratified the Geneva Convention, contributed to mass murder, cruel exploitation and the fatal neglect of Russian prisoners. Nevertheless, the Nazis were always on the lookout for prestigious prisoners, including high-ranking officers, who might prove to be useful to them. Subsequently, when the German military began to experience serious manpower losses themselves, consideration was given to the recruitment of Russian prisoners into the German war machine. The most significant collaborator was Andrei Vlasov, a decorated Red Army General, who was allowed to establish a ‘Russian Liberation Army’, recruited from Russian prisoners of war. Another important General to agree to work with the Germans was Ivan Bessonov, who now shared accommodation with the Irish group in Sachsenhausen.
Bessonov, a stocky, crude, arrogant, but clever man from the Urals, had been a senior NKVD general. (The NKVD was the Soviet Secret Police, later rebranded as the KGB.) When captured in July 1941 he faced summary execution as Hitler had ordered that all captured political commissars be shot. To save himself, he immediately adopted an anti-Stalinist stance and volunteered to work for the Nazis. The tactic worked and he became an important Nazi collaborator. He had inside knowledge of Stalin’s military and security apparatus and he was more than willing to share all he knew with the Nazis. He also had first-hand knowledge of the terror wrought by the arrests and executions in Russia in the years preceding the war: first-hand because he, as a NKVD general, would have been an agent of that terror. He would also have feared becoming a victim, for the secret police themselves were not immune from being purged. Thousands of NKVD personnel were arrested in the late 1930s after the arrest and execution of two secret police chiefs in 1936 and 1939. The wily Bessonov escaped these purges, just as he managed to escape execution after his capture by the Germans.
Even judged against the standards of the NKVD, Bessonov was an obnoxious individual. He is believed to have been instrumental in having his Red Army commanding officer arrested in order to take over his command.3 Later, while working for the Germans, he was implicated in the execution of a fellow Russian POW who tried to escape.4 Although he refused to become involved with General Vlasov’s ‘Russian Liberation Army’, this was because he believed he should have been put in charge of it.5 The role he was assigned by the Germans was to recruit Soviet POWs into anti-Communist partisan units that would be trained to operate behind Soviet lines. For a time, the Germans appeared to have considered him as a potential Russian Quisling, appointing him head of ‘The Political Centre for the Struggle against Bolshevism’.6 In this role he was fond of imagining himself as the ruler of a new Russia, but he ran afoul of his German bosses when, according to himself, he was overheard declaring ‘as if I’d give the Ukraine to these bastards’.7 Despite this, he may have continued to advise the SS on their anti-partisan tactics while in Sachsenhausen.
Bessonov, learning of Churchill’s presence and believing that he was a cousin of the British Prime Minister, used Cushing and Walsh as emissaries in a bizarre scheme that he wanted put to the Englishman. As conveyed by the Irishmen, he suggested that Captain Churchill allow himself to be parachuted back to England in order to try to convince his ‘cousin’ Winston to allow British paratroopers to accompany Bessonov’s renegade recruits in a parachute drop near one of the large Soviet gulags. The idea was that they would release the prisoners and recruit the fittest into an anti-Stalinist force that could eventually overthrow the Stalinist regime. Self-survival was almost certainly Bessonov’s primary motivation for suggesting this absurd plan: liberation by the Red Army would lead to his certain execution, so his only hope was that the Western Allies might change sides also. Peter Churchill listened to this proposal with mounting incredulity before declining the offer.8
One could be forgiven for seeing Bessonov’s intrigues as nothing more than the delusional ravings of a renegade officer. His proposal had no chance of being put into practice, but it was not entirely implausible. There were close to three million prisoners in Soviet Gulags at the outbreak of the war and Bessonov knew the location of many of these forced labour camps. Before his fall from favour, a dozen of his men, wearing NKVD uniforms, had been parachuted into the Komi region of Siberia, but they were quickly captured and executed.9 It’s doubtful that he would have had the proposal put to Peter Churchill without some level of encouragement from the SS, on whom the plan would depend. Of course, it was delusional to think that when victory seemed assured the British, and more especially the Americans, would ever consider allying themselves with Germany against the Soviet Union. But it was a delusion shared by many in the Nazi leadership, not least by Himmler, virtually to the war’s end.10 It is largely for this reason that some of the characters depicted in this book became hostages; to be used as leverage in negotiations with this in mind. Peter Churchill, as we will see, was not the last of the British Officers to be presented with an offer of a flight out of Germany in an attempt to achieve a cessation of hostilities on the Western front.
Bessonov had another reason for attempting to involve Churchill in this scheme. It provided him with the chance of reviving his standing with the Nazi authorities. But why did Cushing and Walsh agree to get involved? It seems from Peter Churchill’s account that they were disappointed with his rejection of the proposal.11 As noted in the previous chapter, Cushing, was anti-Communist, but it’s likely his motivation had more to do with his own self-survival. He might have been considering a contingency plan, in the event that their story about pretend collaboration wasn’t believed. An alliance between Germany and Britain, were it ever to come about, would remove any prospect of them being accused of collaboration, for then the Germans would no longer be the enemy. Certainly, it is not beyond the ingenuity of Cushing to have considered the fail-safe benefits of such an unlikely eventuality.
Major General Pyotr Privalov, another of the Russians present, was very different to Bessonov. A refined and decorated officer, commander of the 15th Rifle Corps of the Red Army, he had been seriously wounded before being captured in December 1942 when his car was ambushed in Eastern Ukraine.12 Under interrogation, he indicated a willingness to work for the Germans, although in his case this seems to have been nothing more than a stratagem for escape. Following one unsuccessful escape attempt, he was transferred to Sachsenhausen.