We are talking about a message that the legendary employee of the Soviet state security agencies, the head of the Fourth Directorate of the NKVD of the USSR, Pavel Sudoplatov, sent to the Deputy People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs of the USSR, Vsevolod Merkulov.
“On January 7 of this year we destroyed a group of French people who were trying to occupy a town,” the document quotes RIA Novosti.
According to Sudoplatov, French corporal Robert Gesten, who was captured, said that the Germans were planning a serious operation against the partisans of the Kletnyansky forests and that new reinforcements with tanks and aircraft would soon arrive.
In addition, it follows from the report that German units stationed in the Bryansk region and near the Unecha-Surazh railway were replenished by French military personnel from the so-called “legion for the fight against Bolshevism”, as well as by Ukrainian radicals.
Previously, the FSB Directorate for the Smolensk region had published archival data on Nazi crimes during the years of occupation. As it turned out, the Nazis carried out mass executions of the population of Smolensk and, at the slightest provocation, could take entire families to be shot outside the city.
