The Expansion of War Ë 189
Fig. 7.3.Fighters of the Caucasian special military unitSonderverband Bergmannin a military posi-
tion near Terek, Northern Caucasus, 1942.
than in organizing a German-Chechen alliance (owing in part to Germany’s refusal
to recognize autonomous insurrectionary movements). Four months later Saidurov
was arrested in Chechnia by the Soviets.⁸²Hundreds of Caucasians also formed the
so-calledSonderverband Bergmann(Special Assignment Unit Mountaineer) and were
widely deployed in the Caucasus for reconnaissance, sabotage, subversion, and actual
ghting. Some worked quite successfully. In addition, the Caucasians also joined the
Unternehmen Zeppelin, the deployment of SS saboteurs and spies in the Soviet Union
undertaken from 1942 to 1945. As Perry Biddiscombe has noted, “Of all the Zeppelin
agents dispatched behind the Soviet front, only the Moslem Caucasians seem to have
had more success in spreading propaganda and organising partisan warfare than in
simply gathering information.”⁸³All this added to Moscow’s wholesale suspicions of
the Caucasians, even though it succeeded in penetrating some of these groups.
By that time, however, the prospect of defeat was looming ever larger for Nazi
Germany, and those who fought with the Germans had to ponder their own fate af-
82 See Burds, “The Soviet War against ‘Fifth Columnists’,” 397–300.
83 Biddiscombe, “Unternehmen Zeppelin,” 1137.