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. Privalov was a cultured man, although taciturn and hampered by his lack of German which was the lingua franca among the different nationalities in the camp. Although he was the ranking officer, it was Bessonov who was dominant among the Soviet prisoners: his burly physique and over-bearing manner allowed him to maintain his fearsome NKVD status, notwithstanding the changed circumstances. The other Russians present were Lieutenant Colonel Victor Brodnikov, who is believed to have worked for the Germans under Bessonov,13 and Lieutenant Nikolay Russchenko, a former reserve office who was captured during fighting near Leningrad. He claimed to have escaped and led a Russian partisan group in actions behind German lines. When recaptured, he was tortured, but kept denying any involvement with the resistance.14 Acting as orderly to the officers was a Soviet soldier, Fyoder Ceredilin, who had spent time in a Soviet gulag before the war.
In uncomfortably close proximity to the Russians were two young Polish RAF officers, Jan Izycki and Stanislaw Jensen. They were flying a Wellington Bomber when it was shot down over France a year previously. Jensen, the pilot, managed to crash land the plane in a field and they both managed to drag themselves clear of the burning wreck. Izycki, the navigator, suffered serious burns to his face which his full beard now only partly obscured. His hands were also badly burned. When captured, they sought medical attention, but Izycki’s wounds didn’t save him from a severe beating.15 The Poles tended to keep to themselves in the Sonderlager. They both shared the Polish national prejudice against Russians and tried as far as possible to avoid contact with their Soviet neighbours.
A group of Italians had also entered the special compound in late 1943. They had been stationed in the Italian embassy in Berlin when the post-Mussolini Italian government changed sides and they, like hundreds of thousands of Italian servicemen, were imprisoned. The officers among them were soon transferred out of Sachsenhausen, leaving behind two orderlies, Amechi and Burtoli, who assumed the roles of cook and servant for the growing number of British officers in the compound.
At some point, Cushing and Walsh approached Peter Churchill again in conspiratorial fashion. They had come to tell him that they had an informer in their midst. They were referring to Lance-Bombardier John Spence, their fellow Irish POW who had taken Murphy’s place within their section of the hut. If, as Cushing and Walsh suspected, Spence was, for whatever reason, currying favour with the Camp Commandant by informing on others, there was a risk that they would be tarnished with the same brush, hence their interest in isolating him and distancing themselves from him. The crimes and betrayals attributed to Spence were numerous. For one, it appears he had volunteered to work on a German Radio Service (Irland Redaktion) that directed propaganda broadcasts to Ireland.
Early in the war, the Germans established propaganda radio stations directed at different countries. The Irish service, which transmitted for only a few hours weekly, directly after Lord
