Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, July 21, 1994 TAG: 9407210080
SECTION: NATL/INTL PAGE: A-6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Hearst Newspapers
DATELINE: PARIS LENGTH: Short
But Soviet leader Joseph Stalin never gave the orders to his hit squad.
Historian Lev Bezymenski, a specialist on World War II, says Stalin decided that once Hitler was out of the way, the United States and Britain might conclude a separate peace with the German dictator's successors, allowing them to continue fighting the Soviet Union.
Fear that the Western allies would make their own peace with Germany, excluding the Soviets, haunted Stalin up to the last days of the war, the expert adds.
Bezymenski's revelations, published in the Moscow weekly New Times, coincide with the 50th anniversary Wednesday of the unsuccessful attempt by German army officers to kill Hitler by blowing him up at his operational headquarters on the eastern front at Rastenburg, East Prussia.
The Russian historian says he discovered documents about the Soviet assassination squad, led by Igor Miklachevski, in the archives of the KGB, the former Soviet secret police, which have been selectively opened to researchers.
Georges Minc, an expert on Soviet history at France's National Research Council here, points out that Stalin often used assassination to eliminate his enemies, both inside and outside the Soviet Union.
Minc says that Stalin's plot, ``if he had gone ahead with it, would have stood a much better chance of succeeding than the bungled assassination attempt carried out by Col. Claus von Stauffenberg.''
by CNB