The encryption of a 1941 telegram about an imminent German attack has been published for the first time

The leadership of the People’s Commissariat of State Security (NKGB) of the USSR on the evening of June 21, 1941 received a telegram from the Leningrad region warning about Nazi Germany’s plans to start a war. Encrypting a document for the first time made public Presidential Library.

A photocopy of the decrypted telegram from the central archive of the FSB has been published on the library website. The sender was the head of the Department of the People’s Commissariat of State Security of the USSR for the Leningrad Region, Pavel Kuprin. He wrote to the head of the NKGB, Vsevolod Merkulov, “about the withdrawal of its specialists from Leningrad by the German company SFG by June 22 and the start of military operations in the coming days.”

“(According to) agent Chernov, on the morning of June 20, the German consulate received a telegram transmitted by the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs from the SFG company, which proposed that 8 German specialists called from Leningrad (to) Germany be sent by plane (with) such a calculation that they until the morning of June 22, they proceeded (across) the border, since (otherwise) it would be too late,” the document says.

It also follows from it that “Chernov,” during a conversation with the consulate’s Chancellor Buchholz and Consul Dienstmann, who had been called back from vacation from Germany, found out that “the situation is very tense and military action is expected (in) the next 2–4 days, with Germany taking the initiative.” . Buchholz received this information from the German Ambassador to the USSR Werner von Schulenburg, whom he met in Moscow.

The official part of the telegram clarifies that in Moscow it was received from Leningrad at 20:10 on June 21. The document was deciphered at 21:30, less than six hours before the start of the war.

Laura Keffer