However, this approach had to be abandoned in favor of more targeted operations due to a lack of reliable Soviet recruits and dwindling resources, such as aircraft fuel.
Operation Zeppelin was particularly important for intelligence gathering in the Eastern Front, but its more ambitious missions yielded little results.
[2] The idea for a wider operation that would go beyond collection of military intelligence originated from "below" and was brought to the attention of Reinhard Heydrich and Heinrich Himmler.
[5] The Germans had little trouble finding recruits as starving and desperate prisoners saw Operation Zeppelin as a chance at survival.
For failing to prevent the executions, Walter Schellenberg, chief of the foreign intelligence, was sentenced to six years in prison in the post-war Ministries Trial.
[13] Zeppelin recruits, who witnessed German atrocities and heard the Untermenschen propaganda, lacked positive inspiration and that led to a high rate of failed missions and frequent defections.
[14] In January 1944, at a conference in Breslau, Schellenberg ordered that German agents needed to be attached to Russian groups for proper control and supervision.
[17] At the end of 1944 and beginning of 1945, Operation Zeppelin faced such difficulties in finding reliable Russian agents that it was decided to use Russian-speaking Volksdeutsche.
[18] From mid-1943, Operation Zeppelin also supported and maintained contact with pro-German groups that were left behind the Russian line by the advancing Red Army.
[20] Operation Zeppelin was part of the Section C at the Amt VI (foreign intelligence) of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA).
[22] It was one of the manifestations of the continued rivalry between Sicherheitsdienst (SD, the intelligence agency of the SS and the Nazi Party) and Abwehr.
[28] Hauptkommando South, due to Red Army advances, kept moving from Berdiansk to Voznesensk to Odessa to Przemyśl to Hungary where it had to be reorganized.
[28] The existence of the Hauptkommando Centre is debated between German and Russian sources; it is possible that the group recruited and trained prisoners but never fully deployed the agents.
[28] In late 1941 or early 1942, a military group, commanded by Vladimir Gil (codename Rodionov), formed in Stalag I-F in Suwałki.
[32] The defectors formed the 1st Anti-Fascist Brigade that fought the Germans and was destroyed in April 1944 during the anti-partisan Operation Frühlingsfest.
[13] Due to the insurgency in Chechnya, a particularly frequent target was North Caucasus and Transcaucasia, where over the course of the war, Zeppelin and Abwehr's Operation Schamil airdropped more than 50 diversionary groups.
Amt VI had no way of verifying received information and thus it was highly susceptible to disinformation planted by Soviet security forces.
[43] However, much of the information on Zeppelin agent activities and fate comes from Russian sources that were eager to emphasize the diligence and effectiveness of NKVD and other security agencies.
[46] Due to little success and dwindling resources, including shortages of aircraft fuel and radio units, Germans had to abandon the ideas of mass deployment of saboteurs and return to the primary goal of intelligence gathering by March 1943.
For example, a three-member team infiltrated the Soviet People's Commissariat of Transport and was able to send reports on Red Army movements.
[47] Though, as a Zeppelin officer testified after the war, the operation gathered most of its intelligence from simple interrogations of Soviet POWs.
[42] The most successful mission in Transcaucasia was Operation Mainz which involved Georgian émigrés who hoped to restore the Democratic Republic of Georgia.
[49] Mikheil Kedia [ka], chief of the Georgian desk at Zeppelin in 1942–1943,[50] approached the Germans with a plan to exploit the open border between Turkey and Soviet Russia near Batumi.
However, at the same time, it became almost impossible to maintain contact as Turkey, under increasing pressure from the Allies, broke off relations with Germany in August 1944 and Axis powers withdrew from Greece in October 1944.
[54] The plan was to drop agents in the Ural Mountains so that they would sabotage Soviet steel industry in Magnitogorsk and Chelyabinsk.
[58] An elaborate plot to assassinate Joseph Stalin in Moscow became the best known mission undertaken by Operation Zeppelin, though details of the events vary as Russian sources have altered the story several times.
Flown by a crew from the secretive Luftwaffe Kampfgeschwader 200, it was hit by Soviet anti-aircraft fire and crash-landed near Smolensk.