Specialized Teams
On 18 September 1944, a decree established a specialized task force within the 9th Chief Directorate (Главное Управление, Glavnoe Upravlenie) of the NKVD to support the work of German scientists invited to the Soviet Union. The head of the Directorate was Colonel General Avram Pavlovich Zavenyagin.
On 23 March 1945, in Stalin’s office, Lavrentij Beria suggested that specialized teams be sent to Germany to search for atomic technology and related personnel. The next day, he instructed Igor’ Vasil’evich Kurchatov, head of Laboratory No. 2, to submit requirements on the formation of the specialized search teams to be sent to Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia. That very day, Beria also signed a directive appointing his deputy, Zavenyagin, in charge of the operation to locate and deport German atomic scientists or any others who could be of use to the Soviet atomic bomb project. Operational issues for the teams were assigned to SMERSh military counterintelligence. Two members of Laboratory No. 2, Lev Andreevich Artsimovich and Yulij Borisovich Khariton, were assigned to provide scientific guidance to the operation. While the entire scientific staff at Laboratory No. 2, the only atomic laboratory at that time, numbered less than 100, close to 40 of them were sent to Germany.
Read more about this topic: Russian Alsos
Famous quotes containing the words specialized and/or teams:
“In the twentieth century, death terrifies men less than the absence of real life. All these dead, mechanized, specialized actions, stealing a little bit of life a thousand times a day until the mind and body are exhausted, until that death which is not the end of life but the final saturation with absence.”
—Raoul Vaneigem (b. 1934)
“A sturdy lad from New Hampshire or Vermont who in turn tries all the professions, who teams it, farms it, peddles, keeps a school, preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township, and so forth, in successive years, and always like a cat falls on his feet, is worth a hundred of these city dolls. He walks abreast with his days and feels no shame in not “studying a profession,” for he does not postpone his life, but lives already.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)