Operation Osoaviakhim (Russian: Операция «Осоавиахим», romanized: Operatsiya "Osoaviakhim") was a secret Soviet operation in which more than 2,500 German scientists, engineers and technicians, who worked in several areas from companies and institutions relevant to military and economic policy in the Soviet occupation zone of Germany (SBZ) and Berlin, as well as around 4,000 more family members, totalling more than 6,000 people, were taken from former Nazi Germany to the Soviet Union. It took place in the early morning hours of October 22, 1946 when MVD (previously NKVD) and Soviet Army units under the direction of the Soviet Military Administration in Germany (SMAD), headed by Ivan Serov, rounded up German scientists and transported them by rail to the USSR.
Much related equipment was also moved, the aim being to literally transplant research and production research centers such as the V-2 rocket center of Mittelwerk, from Germany to the Soviet Union, and collect as much material as possible from test centers such as the Luftwaffe's central military aviation test center at Erprobungstelle Rechlin, taken by the Red Army on 2 May 1945.
The codename Osoaviakhim is the acronym of the then large Soviet organization OSOAVIAKhIM ('Society for the Assistance of Defense, Aircraft and Chemical Construction'), which recruited civilian specialists for the Red Army during World War II (and later reconstituted as DOSAAF) which was mistakenly used as "Aktion Ossawakim" for the first time on October 23, 1946, by the broadcaster Deutsche Nachrichtenagentur (DENA) of the US occupying power and adapted by the Central Intelligence Group (CIG), a predecessor of the CIA, as Operation Ossavakim. Another predecessor organization of the CIA, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) used the term Operation Ossavakim for the first time on January 13, 1947. The usage of the codename was not identified in Soviet archives.
The Osoaviakhim campaign served to secure the transfer of know-how and is described in Russia as "Foreign Specialists in the USSR" (Иностранные специалисты в СССР). In some cases, the families of those affected and their furniture were also relocated. In most cases the years in the Soviet Union passed without employment contracts and legitimization through personal documents.
Although much larger in scale, it had some parallels with earlier Allied operations such as the Alsos Mission, Operation Paperclip and Russian Alsos, which forcibly moved military specialists between German occupation zones or abducted them to the United Kingdom, United States and the Soviet Union, respectively.
At the end of World War II, the Soviet Union had been devastated by Nazi Germany, with 27 million people killed, 1,700 cities destroyed and agricultural production reduced to famine proportions. At the Yalta Conference, Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Joseph Stalin agreed that war reparations were payable by Nazi Germany in the form of equipment, goods and German labour, with Roosevelt and Stalin agreeing to an amount of $20 billion, with 50% ($10 billion) going to the Soviet Union. The Soviets, United States and to a lesser extent Britain and France all seized "intellectual" reparations from Germany. The dismantling of German industry also ensured the complete disarmanent of its war potential, as agreed at the Potsdam Conference.
A race between the Allies developed to acquire as many scientists and engineers as possible, particularly nuclear physicists needed for the development of nuclear weapons, followed by rocket technology, such as the V2 missile ('Retaliation Weapon 2') and the Messerschmitt Me 163 Komet. Expertise in gyroscopic instrumentation for inertial guidance and modern advances in airplane construction, such as turbojet-engines or swept wings were also sought. Other fields of special interest were, including but not limited to, miscellaneous electronic devices, color film products, chemical weapons and optics. Hiring or abduction of these skilled workers was one of the objectives of the so-called 'Trophy commissions'.
Immediately following the German Instrument of Surrender, skilled workers, documents, laboratories and material were shipped abroad in the western zones of occupation. Among these, the "abduction of German nuclear physicists to Farm Hall" as a part of Operation Epsilon became particularly well known. The Soviet atomic bomb project secured a group of nearly 100 German specialists as Russian Alsos, including Gustav Hertz, Nikolaus Riehl, Peter Adolf Thiessen, and Manfred von Ardenne, and brought them to the Soviet Union "not entirely voluntarily, but without physical pressure".
In the Soviet occupation zone of Germany, the Soviet Union initially set up a large number of design offices, e.g. the Institut Nordhausen in the vicinity of Bleicherode and the Institut Berlin for the reconstruction of German guided missiles. By May 1946 the Soviets founded the Zentralwerke to include both institutes as well as manufacturing and test sites from the earlier Mittelwerk underground factory in the Nordhausen, Thuringia area with more than 6,000 German employees. It was directed by Helmut Gröttrup who had profound knowledge of the V2 intricacies from his work for the V2 development in the Peenemünde Army Research Center.
The operation formally known as Operation Osoaviakhim was decreed on 13 May 1946 under resolution No. 1017–419 by the Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union with the objective to accomplish "Transfer of the construction bureaus as well as 2,000 German specialists til end of 1946".
The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs commissioned Ivan Serov, Head of the Soviet Military Administration in Germany with the secret preparations. The Soviet Union wanted to ensure full access to German technologies both through the transfer of expert knowledge and the dismantling of the production facilities and their reconstruction in the Soviet Union. In addition, according to the Potsdam Agreement of August 2, 1945, developing and manufacturing weapons in Germany was banned. With the decree of the Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union No. 1539-686 of July 9, 1946, Stalin laid October 22, 1946 as the start of the dismantling operations.
Operation Ossawakim was unprecedented in its dimensions: in a concerted, secret operation on October 22, 1946, employees of facilities within the entire Soviet zone of occupation were drafted within half a day and 92 freight trains were made available for transport. In detail, for example,
it was presented as follows: Days beforehand, Kurt Magnus noticed unusual bustle of the Soviet military and the arrival of freight trains at the station in Bleicherode. A specialist from Dessau managed to escape hours beforehand. He could not manage to warn his colleagues by telephone; as the telephone network had been shut down. Public transport in Dessau had been suspended as well. A designer at Zeiss suffered a fatal heart attack when he was informed that he would be transported away.
Between midnight and 3am, when everybody was asleep. They knew exactly where I lived, first of all: a few days before I was captured, a fellow came. They had a key – they had everything to the apartment, to the door. There was one interpreter who told me [in German]: "Get up! You are being mobilized to work in Russia", and there were about half a dozen soldiers with machine guns, who surrounded me. When I wanted to get to the toilet, they checked it out first to make sure there was no escape hatch. It was a very tight operation. They did that with every family. Many families came, while I was alone.
In the first mention of Operation Ossawakim, a number of companies and facilities were named which were confirmed and supplemented in the follow-up secret orders which are mentioned below. However, so far, the known documents do not entirely match with reality.
The remainder of this article differentiates between:
Facilities of the engine and aviation industry
Optical technologies and glass industry (Jena)