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Memoirs
The following report is a summary of information obtained by the U.S.
Russia Joint
Commission on POW/MIAs, and by analysts of the Defense
POW/Missing Personnel Office.
The information, referred to as the "Memoirs," was provided to the
analysts through an
interview with a source who had been living in
internal exile m the former Soviet Union.
Our analysts translated the interview with the source, and passed it to
the Russian side of
the Commission during the Commission's plenary
meeting in Moscow in late 1999 In addition, U.S. analysts
stationed full-time in Moscow are using this report to
investigate leads and examine archives m Russia which may shed some
light on the information in
the "Memoirs."
It should be noted that the information in the "Memoirs" relates to the
1940s and 1950s, and most of it is collated from second, third or
fourth hand reports.
A relatively small portion of the "Memoirs" is excerpted from the
original as the
information does not relate to the POW/MIA issue, or
the information would tend to
reveal the identify of the source.
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SUMMARY OF MEMOIRS - Part A
In the spring of 1954, a new worker, who had previously served as a radio
operator
aboard fishing vessels belonging to the Far Eastern Flotilla,
arrived at the Leningrad Gold-
prospecting Brigade in Partizanskit
(Udereslu District, Krasnoyarskii Region). He recounted
that, in
n
when he was fishing some forty miles from the Island of Okusiri in
the Sea of Japan, he "forced his way into" discussions about
a certain aircraft that had crashed Within a few minutes, a "radio
message" arrived from the base of the Trawler Fleet, stating that
all
vessels belonging to the flotilla were to commence at once a search for
the crewmembers. Immediately thereafter, an encoded message arrived
from the base's deputy political officer directing that the "enemy spy
pilots," or their corpses, if they were found, be brought at
once
"under the strictest secrecy" to the coast guard ships belonging
to the Border Patrol Just one >point was not clear From whom
was this "strictest of secrets" being kept? From the fishermen
of an
enormous flotilla scattered across the oceans and seas-who were supposed
to be the ones searching for those involved in the
crash? For days, it seemed that the entire
communications network was saturated with transmissions by crews of
the search aircraft Then, suddenly,
everything went
silent
A
week later, we radio operators were informed in the Port of Ol'ga
that an American
military spy plane had been downed over our
territorial waters by air defense (PVO) units, had
fallen into the sea
and that the entire crew had perished
Why were they so incredibly quick to
bury the Americans, who, unlike
our pilots and sailors, had top-quality personal rescue gear? .
Two
months later, the captain of the fishing vessel on which the worker
served served, returned
from Khabarovsk (He had been visiting
with his sister there ) He told the radio operator that not
all the
crew members of the "American" [aircraft) had, in fact, died "back
then" (in June) and that
ten of those people were now in
pre-trial solitary confinement in a prison in the city of
Svobodnyi, near Blagoveshchensk To keep them
away from curiosity seekers, they were
transferred there immediately
from the internal prison of the Khabarovsk MGB [i e , Ministry
of
State Security, predecessor organization of the KGB, trans
] The worker added that his captain
was unfazed by this and
that he knows the truth -- His sister was married to "just about the
most
prominent figure in the Khabarovsk Regional Committee" [of
the Communist Party, trans] In
reply to the worker's question, "What
happens now"," the captain answered.
"They will be squeezed for what is required And, of course, they will
finish them off
They'll be worked to the
bone and shipped off to
Zeya and not for the first
time
Svoboduyi is where they have their principal drowning
base In echelons, straight from the
trains, they had been
drowning people for thirty years like nothing And that's
all They
definitely will be counted in all the
docunents as having drowned See, even TASS made
the
announcement: They fell, as it were, into the sea"
The
report alarmed me a great deal
In the very beginning of 1953, a courier from the Udereiskii Regional
KGB
summoned me to the Nizhne-Angarskoe Geological
Reconnaissance Directorate in Motygino
I was informed that,
at the direction of the senior geologist, Ivanchenko, I was being
sent
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2
to handle an emergency situation at the Northern mining
enterprise On that same day, with an
escort and
two geologists, we flew off to Krasnoyarsk We were met
there by representatives of
the director of the Regional
GRU He reported that, together with other specialists, I
was to fly to
the north, where a ChP (Extraordinary Event) took
place at one of the enterprises constituting the
"integrated
system" A crust of ice within the ground had burst apart
and flooded the area of the
elevator Responding to my
retort that I lacked the proper educational background, and,
therefore,
the results of my expertise (or my suppositions) would be
considered incorrect. He waved in
front of my
face a thick folder with my "Personal File
"
the discussion, he
announced, "Around here what matters we not your
diplomas but your actions! Don't get
gloomy, young
man Go! You do your work and I'll worry about freeing
you from exile. . ."
The following day - it was January 8th - along with two geologists
from Motygine and
another three specialist from the "26th [Post
Office] Box, (Krasnoyorsk), we flew out toward the
Island of
Dikson. (approximately 2,000 kilometers to the north of
Krasnoyarsk) Two or three
days later -- there was a blizzard and
the airports were closed -- we flew for about three hours to
the
village of Solnechnyi (?) on Bol'shevik (an island in the
Severnaya Zemlya archipelago)
There we once again "sat" because
of the weather Finally, after flying across the
Vil'kitskn
Gulf, we landed in the tundra, some 160 kilometers
from Chelyuskin Bay The site was called
"Rybak"
It was inmates who worked here at the mining enterprise since the camp was
right next to
the mine The reason for the emergency
situation -- an ignorance of elementary engineering --
could have been
clarified without having to fly out to the site Its
consequences could have been
eliminated as well by instruction from a
competent engineer What was needed were
experienced
pyrotechnic specialists and demolition experts And they
sent us a demolition-qualified inmate
tall, exhausted by hunger and the
Artic, with a very characteristic, slightly elongated artistic face
on
which the unnatural protrusion of gray eyes in sockets sunken from
emaciation revealed
someone ill with exophthalmos
goiter In an accent clearly that of an English speaker,
he also
only identified himself as a citizen of the United States of
America, Allied Officer
Dale
His
statement did not appear to make any impression on my
colleagues In fact, on the return trip,
already in
Krasnoyarsk, one of them heard me say "Tell me, please
An American! An ally
And also in the
camp" He retorted
"And they're not only in Rybak You have as many as
you
want of them in Strelka! So much for our 'so-called
allies'"
Somewhat later, after having returned to Udereya, I asked those who
had escaped from
Strelka about our "allies" Yes, they
knew about the Americans, but they had no contact with
them From the
very moment of their arrival on the territory of the Enterprise, they were
all kept
in isolation
I
was unable to converse with the American prisoner Dale
The camp guards
"monitored" me very closely Even before we entered
his area, I and all the others were warned
that it was strictly
forbidden to speak with anyone!
Six days later, we flew to Dikson Only then did I learn that we
were in a uranium mine
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3
In
Kranoyarsk I was compelled to sign a non-disclosure statement with
regard to
everything that I had seen and heard in
Rybak In Noril'sk, many years later, a
colleague who
had worked with me in Udereya at the time in
question, related that many of the Americans "who
had fallen into our
hands in 1945 from the liberated Fascist camps" were held in Rybak
and
probably perished there. "
My status as an exile did not permit me to clarify anything at all about
those Americans
who were alive from the aircraft downed in the Far
East This applied even in the case of
those
Americans who were located much closer -- in Rybak or in
Strelka But at least in the case
of
Rybak I had a chance to see one of them with my very own
eyes! I could also not but believe
those who fled from
Strelka, who trusted me with their lives, and who understood
perfectly the
price of such information
But then, in Udereya, my sad experience showed that the "flow" of
Americans from
the prisoner of war camps in Germany and in the Far
East, and now from Korea was proceeding
at a robust pace, filling in
the bottomless hell of the GULag I first met
these people in Peveka
There, in the region to which I
was sent after the hospital (as a result of an accident in
"Zemlya
Bunga") four Americans, specialists in automation
systems, were being detained They were
sent
there from the mining camps of the Northwestern Directorate of
Sevvostlag to delve into the
functionality of mobile electric
power stations that reached Chaunskaya Guba under the
Lend-
Lease program . Later, at the very beginning of
navigation in the Sea of Okhotsk, I met a still
another group
of Americans in the summer of 1948, at the Magadan transfer
point in the Bay of
Nagaev There were 14 of
them and they had just been taken from the holds of a
ship
transporting slaves: helpless, enfeebled by a
week-and-a-half's worth of tossing on the seas,
hunger, exhaustion, and
desperation I cannot single out anyone of
them They all appeared
uniformly lifeless and
faceless But I recall how many of them there were and the
number of their brigade
"1014." I recall the name of their
brigade leader Geldol'f He, too, was
indistinguishable from the others, except, perhaps, by his
height He was tall and, for a tall
person, very
round-shouldered. It is difficult for me to remember
anyone's individual features,
anyone's eyes, because in enormous
barracks with three levels of wooden cots it was dark and
hazy, as in a
crypt What I also recall is the
physical appearance and name of the American
doctor in the group of
fourteen, a small but thick-boned fellow named Gertsige
And
this is all that I can recall about the meeting in the Bay of
Nagnev
Both
the brigade leader and the doctor knew a bit of German. They said
that they had
served with the navy somewhere out at
sea There they were seized by the
Japanese in 1943
They were detained in camps, first in the Philippines
(?), then in Manchuria, outside of Harbin,
where they
were duped by Soviet "liberators " There was very little
opportunity to communicate
with them One night they were
taken off to the depths of Kolyma, into the bottomless abyss
of
its vastness We were incomparably better off
A week later we were loaded into the hold of a
military transport
heading into the Bay of Vanin, toward construction site "501" .
.
Just to finish this point I did not have any direct contact with Americans
in Peveka I
saw them several times as they were
taken by convoy to and from the port But a doctor
from
Leningrad told me about them on numerous
occasions The doctor even provided the names
of
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4
two of them Filipp (Pill') Etth and Frederkink (or
Frederling). I might be in error here That is
all
During the
latter half of the 1960s, I once again had occasion to hear about the fate
of the
crewmembers aboard the American plane downed in the Far East in
June(?)1952 I was called
upon to fly out to
Komsomol'sk-na-Amure on a business trip with the deputy director of
my
institute.
"those" years this fellow was the director of DAL'STROL,
i e ,
from the viewpoint of the Nurenberg charge sheet, he was a war criminal of
the first order
and then, in a moment of particularly "sincere closeness," I made my
decision
He was not in the least surprised by my question He
replied at once
"Yes, at first ten people were alive. Yes, first
they were brought to Khabarovsk But, then,
of
course, they were sent off to Svobodnyi
They were to have been met
by people
from the Ministry of
Defense They were
not met, though You see, there was some screw-up
in
Moscow Well, I can tell you that they were
not met What happened to them after that, I do
not know And
I would advise you not to know as
well Let the leadership
worry itself about
it
"
Later that very same year, in Murmansk, an acquaintance who was a
friend and
erstwhile colleague of the Deputy Director "throughout the
Far East," repeated almost word-for-
word the testimony of the former
DAL'STROI director but went on to
clarify "The guys from
within
'worked over' the Americans so badly that only eight were
take
.And
those had nowhere to go after all
that. And so what? Do know
what sort of arrogance they
had? They were
Americans! You understand !!!"
"They probably drowned them," I offered as a supposition
"Well, well! And how did you find that out? He probably bared his soul to
you,
right?"
In 1973, I had my birthday celebration, to which I invited only my closest
friends The
group included the husband of my
classmate He was a general with an outstanding
service
record.
Much was said over 19 years of complete mutual trust and
affection While
accompanying the general after
an evening at our home, I decided to ask him whether he knew
anything
about "those" Americans [His reply ]
"I know only that they did not come over our way If that had been the
case, they would be alive
and healthy And, by now, they
would have been back home for a long time, across the ocean.
I
know that Zhukov was aware of the extraordinary event
(ChP) that occurred in the summer of
1952. I know
that Zbukov immediately contacted Stalin directly with a
request that be involve
himself in the fate of the American pilots, who
as he understood, were lusted from the very
beginning as having
perished But neither Stalin nor his underlings responded to
the disgraced
marshal. Lastly, I know that, as soon as he became
deputy minister of defense in 1953, the
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5
marshal directed a search for people and documents. But Beria's
archives, as it were, had neither
those people nor the documents about
them Probably, 'nothing was there any
longer.' "
In the 1980s, I once again was in the Far East, to which I was
inextricably drawn by
the undisclosed secret regarding the loss of the
American aircraft My companion on these trips was
a new
acquaintance I became acquainted with him and convinced him to transfer
over to my
institute, into the scientific field, I must say, all for
the same reason his many years of
involvement in the
geographical area of constant interest to me Before we met, he
was for many
years a supervisory official in two agencies in the
capital and directed energy-related and
hydromechanical construction in
the Far East And, as an advisor to the minister, he had to
have
been closely acquainted with those who could have and
rr ive
known the truth about the
Extraordinary Event (ChP) of
thirty years before Two years of persistent searching by him,
who
unquestionably was himself intrigued by the idea of revealing the
crime, shed no new light on the
course of events of the summer of 1952
or related details But he did learn the names of
two
crewmembers of that aircraft, BUSH and MOORE, who will
forever remain in the soil of the
Khabarovsk
Region And however blasphemous this thought may
appear to the uninitiated, let
people take my
word By their horrible fate they were spared the
vastness of the GULag's
underworld a prison isolation cell with the
proud name "Svobodnyi," which is in close
proximity to
Blagoveshchensk! And many others
[signed]
August 1983
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SUMMARY OF MEMOIRS - Part B
In the fall of 1951, a group of American - POWs (?) from Korea (7) arrived
at the
Kirovskij mining camp, Uderejskij administrative
district, Krasnoyarsk region
However, in the beginning of 1952,
they disappeared without trace In any case,
during
the liquidation of the prison camp during the winter of 1951 and
into 1952, none of them
were among the frost bitten prisoners, who were
marched in column to Motygmo (in the
south part of the region)
and offered medical assistance
A worker
from Kirovskij, a deportee, witnessed how "late at night, on
Russian
Christmas, a group of approximately 20 persons, maybe slightly
more, were led from
the camp along the Venisminovkij road [note
the road connecting the town of Kirovsk and
Venisminevskij] "
The
deportee's daughter and her friend, a Cossack, witnessed that during the
last
days of December 1951 "more than 20 prisoners, wearing bare
threads and half frozen,
were moved along the road to
Veniaminovkij "
The
daughter of the manager of Veniaminovkij, stated that "on Christmas
we
were given a present; frost bitten prisoners being led and driven
like cattle by the NKVD
They did not speak Russian They
only said "American, American" and "eat, eat"
They
wanted food Then, in the morning, around 6o'clock, they were
marched away to
somewhere further However, further lies only a
wasteland, mountainous, desolate and
uninhabited, the
taiga a dead-end
A driver
and hunter from village of Chinuel, observed from his car,
prisoners of
some sort that were speaking, but not in Russian, coming
at him and being marched
passed his car along the road The
guards were trying to prevent the prisoners
from
talking This was early in the morning, on
Christmas He could not understand why
prisoners were being marched on a
holiday(?) Why to the north? There is nothing
there, there is no work
for them to do
That evening, when he returned to his home in Chinuel, the column
was passing
the mouth of the Ishimbi
River
it seemed, towards him, to Chinuel itself
The next day, around
7am he was going back to Kirovsk when he again encountered
the
same column of prisoners, having t h i n n e d o
u
t
It was approaching the
town of Kameaka, nearing the
river.
Yet
another witness He worked as a dredge operator at the Kirovskij
mine
In February 1952, while hunting in the lower reaches of
the Parenda, where it empties into
the Kwnenka river, he happened upon
small clearing already slightly covered with snow
For some reason it
had been covered over with beams of logs The dogs immediately
were
aroused. They dragged out some type of boot - worn out at the heel ,
slippers and
even a shoe, resembling American shoes by the - copper
nails Forcing him to put on his
glasses, in disbelief
as to what they had in their teeth
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He had heard
rumors and became quite nervous. Especially disturbing to him was
the
behavior of his dogs They were nervous, whimpering, scratching at the snow
and
barking in a manner unlike any that they had before on the hunt. He
tried to dig up the
ground - covered in a half meter of
snow Suddenly, the snow was up to his waist
But
beneath, the ground was already frozen although, clearly the ground
had been turned-up
and filled back in It was obvious that someone had
been buried here and the dogs began
to back up and howl like near a
corpse...
He
stopped tempting fate, - left The hunt was over
A week later, he
met with his friend, who worked for the militia. His friend
recommended
he keep quiet for God's sake...
In July
1952, my friend and I, based on this information, tried to locate
that
clearing However, the swamp had flooded over.
In the
fall, we again began to search But, we had been
"sold-out" We were
questioned by the police and held
for ten days in detention
In the
1960s, I again tried to locate this burial site However,
the taiga had
completely grown over it I was assisted by very kind
people. Again, someone did not
like my search
Just like the incident of the shooting of the Americans in Bodajbo,
in
Moscow, again to the, prosecutor's office, USSR (local Government
District Attorney's
office) the official car arrived . .
Then, in August 1964, I officially requested from Krasnoyarsk . .
"as to the fate of
American prisoners of war at the Krovskij mining
camp " But of course I did not receive
a reply So, I then submitted a
letter to the USSR prosecutor's office itself However,
the
reply was not from Pushkinskij, but from Kuovskij - from the
military prosecutor's
office In the reply, on a carbon
copy, it stated "...regarding the fates of citizens of the
USA, held at
the Kirovskij Springtime camp, the
Prosecutor of the Krasnoyarsk region
has
no information "
The Prosecutor, USSR, through the military forced the regional
Krasnoyarsk, to
reply That reply stated there
were such persons, however, we do not know where they
were taken.
A list was compiled by a woman containing 22 names of citizens of the
USA
imprisoned in the Kirovskij camp during the winter of 1951 to
1952. When this person
arrived at Kirovskij, she worked as
a sanitation worker Part of her duties included
cleaning
toilets at the camp She put the list together over a months
time It is not
complete, since she was not able to ask
anyone for help
During ten years of repression even she herself had forgotten about
this Because
she is alone, in an exile brought about
from working in the zone of the camp
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By
1951, this once slim figured, fan-haired, gray-eyed beauty had turned into
an
old woman But, to this "old woman" I devoted to
my investigative work She was able
to recall and
"Shed light on everything" She was able to record only 22
names
of Americans, as she was being carefully watched She
was not even able to get their first
names One day, she
managed to sneak a pencil in, broke it into pieces and handed them
out
to the Americans so they could record their names and addresses on pieces
of
newspaper Several days later, she smuggled them out,
covered in filth, in a canvas bag
She cleaned them, dried them, placed
them in a empty fruit jar, and buried them
During Christmas of that year, when the Americans were being marched to
north
toward Veniaminovkij, she disappeared without a trace, just like
the Americans And I
remain, still hopeful of
finding this glass jar
[script]
2 Sep
1979
Moscow
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|
[handwritten) No dates'
|
1 Al'bertson, Sam [Albertson, Sam]
2 Foster [Foster]
3
Xetch [Hatch]
4 Lion, Dtopdzh [Leon, George]
5 Sikssmit [ ?
Smith]
6 Ambroze [Ambiose]
7 Miller [Miller]
8 Devis [Davis]
9
Summerbi [Summerby]
10 Budher Allan [Butcher, Allan]
11 Dzhonson,
Xubert [Johnson, Hubert]
12 Veksiei [Vexler or Veksler]
13 Kuk,
Irving [Cook, Irving]
14 Morin [Morin]
15 Larsen [Larsen]
16
Boyar [Boyar or Boyer] |
17. Fisher [Fisher]
18. Gel'fand [Galvan, Halvan]
19.
Natazon, Filipp [Natazon, Philipp]
20. Gershfel'd [Gershfield or
Hershfield]
21 Sich, Garri [Seech, Gary or Harry]
22 Kajzer [Kaiser]
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[handwritten notation on bottom right)
POWs of North
Korea
Through Khabarovsk
In the villages of Kirovskij-
Udereiskij
region
Kransoyarsk kraj [administrative district],
|
| May 1954 map |
| Trans Siberian Rail map |
SUMMARY OF MEMOIRS - Part C
TESTIMONY
At the end of June -
beginning of July 194 1, during the massive repression
against
prisoners by the NKVD (town of Kuybishev), many
foreigners were executed In July
1943, there was
another wave of and executions, except now it was against
foreign
specialists (a list of l38 names,who were executed in
l941) I found myself in the town
of Kuybishev,
and I found out the reason for the executions
Counterintelligence "SMERSH" (headed by
Abakymov), during this period
"cleansed" the areas of any
unnecessary specialists - Americans and Swedes, that were
utilized from
1936 for the construction of underground industrial complex by
the
Shiguiev Mountains (on the right bank of the Volga River,
opposite the town of
Kuybishey)
All of them were recruited by Soviet
representatives in Germany and Great Britain,
and according to the
official paperwork worked in "Third World countries"
Once the
contract was formed, their fates were sealed
The head of "recruitment" of foreign
specialists was Leonid
Skoblinskiy, who until 1929 was the head of the political
section
of the VChK-OGPY predecessor to the NKVD) In the 1930s, he was
the secretary of
the Party Bureau of the Soviet Bank in Paris And,
during 1941 - 1943, under the cover
of [WWII], SMERSH "finished" its
dealings with the Americans and Swedes. They
were killed in
the transportation tunnels that were labeled "Liter Zero One "
[After the
executions) they were taken out of the tunnels and buried
near cemeteries of the German
POW camps The actual
cemetery was located of the south border of the "industrial
zone" of
the Separate Labor Point No 5 in Kpaishe (in the area of the
Kuybishev
railroad)
From May 1941 till November 1943, I was a
prisoner and worked in the complex
"Liter Zero
One." I knew very well what was happening during that
tune. A witness to
all the crimes was my
foreman Somehow he escaped the liquidation Another
witness
who informed us of everything that went on in these tunnels I
had a list of the executed
Americans and Swedes, that was prepared by
my comrades [who were killed] But in
November 1943,
this list was lost possibly, the area where the Americans and
Swedes
were buried is still open (i.e free from
construction) This area was "free' in 1957, when
I visited
it in search of witnesses
[signature]
16 November 1961
|
| Memoir Part C Graphic |
| Russian book cover (translated Railroads of the
USSR) |
| rail map |
|
Actually most of the lists on prisoners were
lost in November 1943, when we had to
off load members from the "Baku
Stage", and I had to destroy the lists However, I
was
able to save the list containing foreigners, by writing it on the
inside of my jacket, and
later turned this list into the contents of my
second letter
The head of the medical examiner's
office of the labor camp also gave me the first
and last names of the
executed foreigners (including Americans) Her
department made
up the forms on all foreign prisoners, who were
executed without a trial These forms
listed
fiction "history of illness" and made up the causes of death (according to
the
GULAG statistics, these documents were coded by the number "08".
[signed]
22 December 1994
|
SUMMARY OF MEMOIRS - PART D
In
November - December 1945 from the occupied Manchuria (by the
Soviet
Army) a MVD convoy took out six groups of prisoners containing
American POWs that
were held in Japanese prison camps in 1943 - 1945
The itinerary for the convoys were
"Dunfanhoon -- Chita -- Luan Ude"
and Chan -Chun - Chita -- Ulan Ude" It was known
to
the convoy that these six groups of prisoners were going to a special
GULAG to work
on the railroad between Ulan Ude and Ulan Bator.
Actually, all the Americans from the
convoy, once it reached Ulan Ude,
were transferred to winter camps in Bodaibo (North
Siberia). They were
all executed there
At the end
of 1940s - begginning of 1950s, when the interior forces
were
demilitarized, some of them stated that Americans were executed in
the Bodaibo prison,
a place that "traditionally" hosted executions from
the 1930s of middle-class Kozaks
from Zabaikal and Don (Andnus Krulikas
and Vasilty Komov) (There were a total of
200
individuals who were executed) |
