186 Ë War and Dénouement
groups of Georgian émigrés headed by David Erkomaishvili crossed the Georgian bor-
der, reached Batumi, contacted underground groups, and returned with much polit-
ical, economic, and military information, which was then handed to the Germans.
The operation was repeated in May and June 1944.⁶⁷At the time, “a steady stream of
weapons, sabotage material and propaganda” was being smuggled in the other direc-
tion to sympathizers in Georgia.⁶⁸
With or without direct contact with their lands, the Caucasian émigré groups re-
sponded positively to the new situation of Germany’s war against the Soviet Union.
In October 1941, for example, General Giorgi Kvinitadze, who belonged to Bammat’s
Caucasus group, turned directly to Hitler, hoping that Germany would liberate Geor-
gia. Said Shamil had similarly turned to Germany even earlier, in August 1941.⁶⁹Soon
afterward, the former Georgian envoy to Germany, Vladimir (Lado) Akhmeteli, who
had abandoned the Social Democratic camp for the Caucasus group in the mid-1930s,
oered to the German Foreign Ministry a plan for a Great Caucasian Federation. Two
months later he proposed to Hitler creating a Georgian Legion out of thirty thousand to
fty thousand Soviet Georgian prisoners of war, which his friend General Kvinitadze
could command. (There were numerous cases of Soviet Georgian soldiers surrender-
ing voluntarily to the German side.)⁷⁰Akhmeteli suggested to the Germans that the
Caucasus could live, for the time being, under a German protectorate, although, as
far as Georgia was concerned, an independent monarchy would be installed in due
course.⁷¹
Visions of a free Caucasus, however, were never supported by Nazi ideology.
Some Germans, such as Friedrich Werner von der Schulenburg, the last German
ambassador to the Soviet Union before the war and previously chief of the German
mission in the Caucasus at the time Georgia declared its independence in May 1918,
were supporters of Caucasian national sentiments. Schulenberg went so far as to
unite the Georgian political groups, who chose the Georgian prince Irakli Bagra-
tioni of Mukhrani (in exile in France, Italy, and then in Spain) as a candidate for
the throne. In April 1942, Schulenberg also invited a number of Caucasian émigré
leaders to a conference in Berlin. This so-called Adlon meeting (after the name of the
luxury hotel in Berlin where it took place) was attended by members of the former
Caucasus group and other rightist parties, as well as some former Promethean group
leaders: Haidar Bammat, Alikhan Kantemir, Vassan-Giray Dzhabagi, Spiridon Kedia,
67 See von zur Mühlen,Zwischen Hakenkreuz und Sowjetstern, 174–175.
68 See Perry Biddiscombe, “Unternehmen Zeppelin: The Deployment of SS Saboteurs and Spies in
the Soviet Union, 1942–1945.”Europe-Asia Studies52, no. 6 (2000), 1132–33. The author states that the
Soviet claim that Soviet agents had penetrated these groups and crippled the Georgian underground
is unconvincing.
69 See von zur Mühlen,Zwischen Hakenkreuz und Sowjetstern, 105, 121.
70 See Mamoulia,Gruzinskii legion, 61–62, 323.
71 Von zur Mühlen,Zwischen Hakenkreuz und Sowjetstern, 105–106.