Stand Hitlers „5. Kolonne“ im sowjetischen Hinterland? Zu Einsatz und Verfolgung deutscher Agenten im Ural während des Zweiten Weltkriegs

This article examines the question how Soviet secret services in the rear struggled with the severe danger of German agents during the Second World War. Focused on the Urals, the author gives several examples of incriminated persons and their „ prosecutions" including the question whether they were later rehabilitated or not. At the beginning of the war all the persons with a nationality of the adversarial states and all those who stood in any contact with them could be arrested and persecuted for espionage. Especially endangered were workers and engineers who had migrated from Germany in the 1930s. From 1942 the NKVD concentrated its force against German agents who had parachuted onto Soviet territory. In the last period of the war the anti-espionage-campaign was more and more focused on real and fictive advisers of the political system. In the whole, the suspicion and persecution of the „ Fifth cologne" of Hitler Germany in the Soviet rear was more widespread and more effective than the real danger posed by the enemy in this area of war. NKVD dossiers document the Soviet fear of espionage better than they reveal real evidence for such activity.