MOSCOW, June 1. /TASS/. Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) has published unclassified archives revealing how Soviet orphans were trained at the Abwehr’s schools of sabotage for espionage and subversive attacks against the Red Army on the home front.
"On November 15, 1941, the special department of the NKVD (the Soviet police - TASS) at the 34th Cavalry Division detained three boys aged between 8 and 10 years," the FSB said, quoting the head of the special department of the NKVD on the Southwestern Front as saying in a special report. "One of the boys said that, `in Bobruisk, the Germans gathered roughly 50 children aged from 8 to 12 years old, who never had or had lost their parents, and teach them intelligence work."
After a month of training, 10 children were transported across the Northern Donets River near the village of Kamenka in the Kharkov Region. They were given the task of "exploring the location of units of the Red Army, finding out the locations of headquarters, and detecting fire points" near the city of Izyum and in the sector controlled by the 5th Cavalry Division. Two more children were detained near the village of Drobyshevo.
On December 25, 1941, the same head of the special department, in a memo to the Deputy People's Commissar of Internal Affairs of the USSR, Viktor Abakumov, reported that "two schools of young intelligence officers, organized by German intelligence in the [Belarusian] city of Bobruisk and the village of Protopopovka in the Kharkov Region, were exposed. The schools were guised as orphanages," the FSB said, referring to unclassified documents.