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sadors: “ ere are plans [for] important talks with Moscow. [ e] Fuehrer is going to sort
out relations and raise new demands. Ambassadors must, in complete secrecy, relay this to
the governments of the nations in which they are stationed. For example, the German ambas-
sador in Budapest had to relay this piece of information, as a special secret, to the Hungarian
president. e German leaders undertook a preplanned program of disinformation toward
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their own troops, their diplomats, and their military allies. e Soviet high command was
doing the exact same thing.
Many people saw the transfer of Soviet troops to the borders. However, every person
saw only a part of what was happening. Very few individuals conceived of its true scope.
German military intelligence knew that a development of the might of the Red Army was
occurring, but it only saw the first strategic echelon, without having any idea that there was a
second one. Many Soviet marshals and generals, excluding those who were directly involved
in the planning and commanding of the troop movement, also could not conceive of its true
scope and, consequently, its meaning. Precisely for this reason, later on many of them freely
talked about this transfer of troops. eir lack of knowledge of the whole situation and the
true scale of concentration of Soviet troops is not at all coincidental; Stalin undertook draco-
nian measures to keep all this secret. Stalin’s TASS announcement was one of those measures.
e fact of the transfer itself was impossible to hide, but the most important information—
its size and its purpose—Stalin successfully hid from the entire nation, and even from future
generations.
Colonel General of the Air Force A. S. Yakovlev (at the time personal advisor to Stalin)
testifies that “at the end of May or beginning of June” a conference was held in the Kremlin
regarding questions of concealment. Troops were told that they were going to training
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camps, although the higher command understood that they were not talking of training. In
a defensive war or before its start there is no need to fool the troops—officers and soldiers are
given a clear and precise objective: here is your line, do not take a single step back! Die here,
but do not let the enemy through! If a defensive operation was being prepared, why not tell
the troops: yes, comrades, the situation is tense, anything can happen, dig foxholes and sit
in them. If troops were indeed being sent to dig foxholes, it would have made no difference
whether the objective of their move was told after arrival or upon departure. But Soviet of-
ficers were not told so upon arrival or departure. A different task was set before them, which
was concealed then and is still concealed now.
In order to understand the level of secrecy of the troop transfers, I will give one ex-
ample: a district commander and his chief of staff did not know that some other troops were
gathering on their territory. Marshal of the Soviet Union M.V. Zakharov tells us:

In the beginning of June, Colonel P. I. Rumiantsev, the chief of military communications
of the Odessa military district, came to me, at that time chief of staff in Odessa, to my
cabinet, and secretly reported that during the last few days Annushkas had been going
through the Znamenka station from the direction of Rostov and were being unloaded in
the Cherkassy region. Annushka is a term used in military communication to denote a di-
vision. Two days later, I received a cable from Cherkassy signed by the deputy commander
of the Northern Caucasus military district, M. A. Reiter, in which he asked permission
for the temporary use of several barracks of storage space in our district—to place materi-
als arriving from the Northern Caucasus into the district. Because the staff of the Odessa
military district was not informed about concentration of troops there, I contacted, using