1943 brought a real turning point in the war between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. The Red Army pushed parts of the Wehrmacht to the west, and the outcome of the battles was largely determined by the tank power. In this situation, the authorities of the Third Reich decided to organize large-scale sabotage against the tank industry of the USSR. Its center was in the Urals, and it was there that the Nazis planned to strike as part of Operation Ulm.
Preparing for surgery
The plan for Operation Ulm matured in the bowels of the SS. The head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, was inspired by the brilliant operation to free the ousted Italian duce Benito Mussolini, which was carried out by SS Obersturmbannfuehrer Otto Skorzeny, considered the most professional saboteur of the Third Reich. Therefore, it was Skorzeny who was instructed to prepare for the operation in the deep Soviet rear.
Otto Skorzeny, 35, is a civil engineer by profession, during his student years he was known as an avid fighter and duelist, and then as a convinced Nazi, a SA militant. When the Second World War began, Skorzeny tried to enroll in the Luftwaffe, but Otto was not accepted into the aviation because of his 30 years of age and high growth (196 cm). Then he joined the SS and in four years made a dizzying career there. In December 1939, Skorzeny was enlisted as a sapper in the reserve battalion of the SS Adolf Hitler, then he was transferred to the SS Das Reich division, where he served as a driver.
In March 1941, Skorzeny received the first officer rank of SS Untersturmführer (corresponding to a lieutenant in the Wehrmacht). After the invasion of the territory of the Soviet Union, Skorzeny fought as part of a division, but not for long - already in December 1941 he fell ill with an inflammation of the gallbladder and was sent to Vienna for treatment.
In April 1943, Skorzeny, who by that time held the title of SS Hauptsturmführer (captain), was transferred to a special purpose unit intended for reconnaissance and sabotage operations behind enemy lines. After the successful operation to free Mussolini, the credibility of Skorzeny on the part of both Himmler and Adolf Hitler personally increased immensely. Therefore, he was assigned to lead the training of saboteurs for Operation Ulm.
The group "Ulm" selected 70 people from among young Russian emigrants and former prisoners of war of the Red Army. Primary attention was paid to the children of White emigrants, as they were considered the most reliable and ideologically motivated. But saboteurs were also recruited from the Red Army prisoners of war, especially from those who were from the Urals and knew the Ural landscape well.
In September 1943, the recruits began training. Skorzeny himself supervised the training, by this time he was responsible for reconnaissance and sabotage training in the VI Directorate of the RSHA (Main Directorate of Imperial Security in Germany). The Ulm group was tasked with destroying key facilities in the metallurgical industry in Magnitogorsk, power plants that supplied enterprises with electricity, and tank factories in the Urals.
In November 1943, the most capable cadets, and there were thirty of them, were transported to the Pskov region of the USSR, occupied by the Nazis, to the village of Pechki, where they began to be trained in practice to blow up railway tracks, destroy power lines, and work with new explosive devices. They trained future saboteurs and jump with a parachute, taught them how to survive in a deep forest, skiing. Only on February 8, 1944, the cadets were sent to the Riga region, from where they were supposed to be delivered by air to the place of dumping in the Soviet rear.
Tarasov group
At about midnight on February 18, 1944, the Junkers-52 three-engine aircraft, which had additional fuel tanks, took off from a military airfield in Riga operated by the Luftwaffe and headed east. On board the plane was the northern group of paratroopers, commanded by Haupscharführer Igor Tarasov - only seven saboteurs.
Igor Tarasov, a White émigré, was an officer in the Russian Imperial Navy. In 1920 he left Russia, settled in Belgrade and taught navigation science before the war. Tarasov hated Soviet power, therefore, when the Nazis offered him cooperation, he did not think much. Moreover, he spent his childhood on the Chusovaya River and knew its surroundings well.
Apart from Tarasov, the white emigrants were the group's radio operator Yuri Markov, the spare radio operator Anatoly Kineev, Nikolai Stakhov. The latter served with Baron Peter Wrangel in the rank of second lieutenant, and then also settled in Yugoslavia. In addition to the former whites, the Tarasov group included prisoners of war of the Red Army, who went over to the side of the Nazis.
Nikolai Grishchenko served as the commander of the artillery battery of the 8th rifle regiment of the Red Army with the rank of senior lieutenant. He was captured and soon agreed to cooperate with the Nazis. Two other saboteurs, Pyotr Andreev and Khalin Gareev, were also former Red Army soldiers.
On the night of February 18, 1944, after six to seven hours of flight, the Tarasovites were dropped over a dense forest in the Urals. They were to begin to operate to the east of the city of Kizela, Sverdlovsk region. From the plateau it was possible to go to the Gornozavodskaya railway, which connected Perm with Nizhny Tagil and Sverdlovsk, and to the Tagilo-Kushvinsky industrial hub itself.
Following Tarasov's group, about two days later, the southern group under the leadership of the SS Haupscharführer, 40-year-old White émigré Boris Khodolei, was to be thrown into the Urals. The saboteurs in the form of junior commanders of the Red Army were supposed to land about 200-400 km south of Sverdlovsk and begin to carry out tasks to destroy the defense plants of the Chelyabinsk region.
Khodolei's group was supposed to fly to the Urals immediately after the center received a radiogram from Tarasov's group. But that did not happen. The saboteurs were already preparing to take off when their commander, Khodolei, announced that an order had come to stop the operation.
So we did not find out the reason for such an unexpected ending of our adventure, did not learn anything about the fate of the Tarasov group. Most likely, her failure became a saving straw for us, - recalled then the former SS Oberscharfuehrer P. P. Sokolov.
Failure to land saboteurs
For the Soviet counterintelligence, Operation Ulm ceased to be secret after January 1, 1944, right in the village of Pechki, partisans of the 1st Leningrad Partisan Brigade kidnapped the deputy head of the Zeppelin sabotage school. The captured documentation allowed the Soviet counterintelligence to neutralize dozens of German intelligence officers and saboteurs operating on the territory of the USSR. Information was received about the planned sabotage against the defense industry of the Urals.
Directorate of the NKGB with its No. 21890 dated October 13, 1943 guided you that the German intelligence in Berlin is preparing the sabotage group "Ulm" to be sent to our rear. The group consists of prisoners of war, electrical engineers and electricians who were born or know Sverdlovsk, Nizhny Tagil, Kushva, Chelyabinsk, Zlatoust, Magnitogorsk and Omsk well.
This message was received on February 28 by the head of the Nizhne-Tagil department of the NKGB, Colonel A. F. Senenkov.
The NKGB Directorate for the Sverdlovsk Region sent a task force to the site of the alleged disembarkation of the saboteurs, which organized an observation post. At the Kizelovskaya GRES, security was increased, and in the areas of bridges across the rivers, hidden ambushes of Soviet security officers were also located. However, the saboteurs have sunk into oblivion. They did not get in touch with their own center either.
As it turned out later, the German pilots lost their course and threw out a group of saboteurs under the command of Tarasov 300 km from their destination - in the Yurlinsky district of the Molotov region (as the Perm region was then called). The dusk landing immediately led to casualties among the saboteurs. The radio operator Yuri Markov landed unsuccessfully, cut his side with a bit and tightly tightened his parachute lines. Khalin Gareev received a strong blow upon landing, could not move and shot himself, as the rules prescribed.
The commander of the group, Igor Tarasov, received a severe bruise upon landing and froze his legs. He decided to warm himself with alcohol, but feeling powerless, he decided to poison himself with poison, which was with him as with the group commander.
However, the poison after an alcohol dose did not work on Tarasov, and then the SS Hauptscharführer shot himself. Subsequently, the counterintelligence officers who studied his remains found a note:
Let communism perish. I ask you not to blame anyone for my death.
Anatoly Kineev, upon landing, lost one felt boot and froze his leg. Only Grishchenko, Andreev and Stakhov landed more or less successfully. They tried to leave Kineev, but then he developed gangrene, and one of the saboteurs was forced to shoot his comrade. The radio that remained after Kineev's death was inoperative. Stakhov, Andreev and Grishchenko set up a camp in the wilderness and now fought only for their own survival.
The saboteurs ran out of food supplies by June 1944. Then they decided to go out of the forest to the people. Stakhov, Andreev and Grishchenko went in the south-west direction, finding themselves on the territory of the Biserovsky district of the Kirov region. Local residents were hostile to suspicious men, they refused to sell food, although the saboteurs offered good money for them.
How did the fate of the saboteurs who survived
Having lost all hope of surviving in the forests, remaining at large, the trinity of the surviving saboteurs came to the village policeman and revealed all their cards. The summoned counterintelligence officers detained German saboteurs. They were taken to Kirov and then to Sverdlovsk. The investigation into the case of the Tarasov group went on until the end of 1944. All those under investigation admitted their guilt, showed the caches of weapons and explosives. White emigrant Nikolai Stakhov received 15 years in prison and was transferred to Ivdellag, where he spent nine years and died in May 1955.
Peter Andreev, who was serving a sentence in the Bogoslovlag, and then received a link in the Magadan region instead of a camp, received ten years of imprisonment. Nikolai Grishchenko received 8 years in prison and in 1955, after being released from the camp, returned to his family. Such was the inglorious life path of these people, who, by the will of fate, found themselves involved in the millstones of history and ruthlessly ground by them.
Years passed, and SS Obersturmbannfuehrer Otto Skorzeny assessed Operation Ulm as a failure in advance, doomed to failure in any case. According to Skorzeny, the saboteurs had no real possibility of destroying Soviet facilities in the Urals. Himself Hitler's saboteur number one, by the way, managed to avoid persecution after Germany's defeat in World War II and worked for Western intelligence services. He even carried out the missions of the Israeli intelligence service "Mossad". Skorzeny lived to be 67 and died in Madrid in 1975, 30 years after the war.
Memories of the planned sabotage operation in the Urals were left by Pavel Petrovich Sokolov (1921-1999). The son of a colonel of the Russian Imperial Army, who was living in Bulgaria at the beginning of the war, Sokolov, on the instructions of the Bulgarian communists, entered the service of the Nazis, hoping to go over to the side of the Soviet Union after being thrown into the Soviet rear.
In the "Ulm" group, Sokolov had the title of oberscharfuehrer (sergeant major) of the SS and was included in the group of Boris Khodolei. But then the people of Khodolya did not fly to the Urals. In September 1944, Sokolov was captured after landing in the Vologda region. He served a ten-year term in a Soviet camp, received USSR citizenship, graduated from the Irkutsk Institute of Foreign Languages and worked at a school for about 25 years.
