The Soviet border guards were captured semi clothed as they stumbled half-awake out of their barracks. The German Army Propagandakompanien (PR) photographers caught the dazed look on their shocked faces as they stood with hands raised in the watery spring dawn.
They were the victims of Stalin’s willful determination not to believe the evidence of his intelligence services and the warnings from Britain that an attack was impending. Prime Minister Winston Churchill contacted Sir Stafford Cripps, the British Ambassador in Moscow, in mid April with a message for Stalin:
“Following from me to M. Stalin, provided it can be personally delivered by you: “I have sure information from a trusted agent that when the Germans thought they had got Yugoslavia in the net – that is to say, after March 20 – they began to move three out of the five Panzer divisions from Rumania to southern Poland. The moment they heard of the Serbian revolution this movement was countermanded. Your Excellency will readily appreciate the significance of these facts.”
Churchill was careful to conceal that this “sure information from a trusted agent” came from ULTRA signals intercepts. It was top grade intelligence.
In the months preceding the attack Stalin and Lavrenti Beria, his sinister chief of the NKVD secret police, had received numerous indicators that an attack was in the offing. However his deep suspicion of the West led him to believe that these might be part of a plan to entrap the USSR in a war with Germany, a country with which he had signed the Russo-German Pact on August 23, 1939.
In Germany and Western Europe the Rote Kapelle – Red Orchestra (the code name given by the Abwehr) – the German counter espionage organisation to the largest Soviet spy ring and resistance organisation, had been providing information to the USSR from 1938. However, in the spirit of the Russo-German Pact, Stalin had stood it down in 1939. It was reactivated following the German invasion of the USSR in 1941 and by 1942 had some 100 radio transmitters forwarding information to the USSR.
The driving force behind the Rote Kapelle was Leopold Trepper, a Polish Jew who based himself in Belgium and made contact with dissident Germans. The most important of these were Harro Schulze-Boysen, grandson of Admiral von Tirpitz, and Arvid Harnack, nephew of a celebrated theologian, whose wife Mildred was American.
In the Far East a brilliant but eccentric Communist agent Richard Sorge had from February 1941 been warning the Russians that the attack was in the offing.
Among the other indicators of an impending attack on the ground was the Otto-Programme or Otto Programme, “Otto” standing for Ost or East. It was the code name for the development between October 1,1940 and May 10, 1941 of road and rail links through Eastern Europe to the borders of the USSR in preparation for Unternehmen Barbarossa. In 1941 the German troop strengths began to change on the Soviet German border. In early March 1941 there were 34 divisions, by April 23 this figure had risen to 59 and finally by June 5 there were 100 divisions in the East.
On June 21 a young German Communist named Korpik slipped away from his unit’s concentration area in Poland and crossed the border into the USSR in order to warn them of the impending attack. Writing of the incident after the war, Nikita Kruschev, the then leader of the USSR, reported that on Stalin’s orders Korpik was shot as an agent provocateur.
