1

On April 25, 1945, six armies of the First Belorussian Front and three armies of the First Ukrainian Front launched their assault on Berlin. In the early hours of May 1, the assault flag of the 150th Idritsa Rifle Division (Order of Kutuzov, 2nd Class) was raised over the Reichstag. At 22:43 Central European Time on 8 May, the German Instrument of Surrender was signed in Berlin’s Karlshorst district. The signatories were Field Marshal Keitel, Chief of the Supreme Command of the Wehrmacht; Colonel-General Stumpff of the Luftwaffe; and Admiral von Friedeburg for the Kriegsmarine. The unconditional surrender of Germany was accepted by Marshal Zhukov and British Marshal Tedder, Deputy Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force. As witnesses, American General Spaatz and French General de Lattre de Tassigny added their signatures.

The Third Reich ceased to exist. Germany was carved into four occupation zones: the Americans took the southwest, the British the northwest, the Soviets the east. France, at the expense of Anglo-American territory, received a small zone of its own. All of Berlin, however, had fallen to the Red Army—a situation unacceptable to the Allies. During the Potsdam Conference in August 1945, British Foreign Secretary Bevin and Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov struck a deal: Allied forces would withdraw from Thuringia, and in exchange, the USSR would cede the western sectors of Berlin. When Stalin was briefed on the terms, he reacted with sharp displeasure. But Molotov persuaded him, arguing the necessity of compromise on what had become one of Potsdam’s most contentious issues—German reparations.

At the Yalta Conference in February 1945, an agreement had been reached: Germany would pay reparations totaling twenty billion U.S. dollars, half of which would go to the Soviet Union. But by Potsdam, the Western delegations had backtracked, arguing that the sum was excessive—Germany had lost vast territories, and its industry lay in ruins. After tense negotiations, U.S. Secretary of State Byrnes’ proposal was adopted: no fixed reparations total; each power would extract goods from its own occupation zone, with the USSR receiving an additional 25% of dismantled industrial equipment from the Western zones. Yet the debate didn’t end there. Stalin abruptly announced that the USSR would renounce claims to German gold and foreign investments, limiting its reparations solely to its own zone. The Allies accepted—puzzled but relieved. They didn’t know that uncontrolled shipments of German machinery and materials to the USSR were already underway. By late 1945, a strict quota had been imposed: 3.6 million tons of rail cargo and 1.2 million tons by sea.

The annexation of Thuringia to the Soviet zone accelerated this plunder. Berlin’s factories had already been stripped bare; Thuringia’s industrial base was a windfall. Of particular interest were the Ore Mountains, where Soviet geologists suspected uranium deposits—critical for Stalin’s atomic program. These considerations proved decisive.

Thus, when Major Grigori Tokayev of the Engineering Corps arrived for duty in the Soviet Military Administration in Germany in autumn 1945, Berlin had already been quartered. The American sector held Neukölln, Kreuzberg, Tempelhof, Schöneberg, Steglitz, and Zehlendorf; the British took Charlottenburg, Spandau, Tiergarten, and Wilmersdorf; the French, Wedding and Reinickendorf. The Soviet zone, the largest, encompassed Pankow, Weißensee, Prenzlauer Berg, Mitte, Friedrichshain, Lichtenberg, Köpenick, and Treptow.

The Berlin that greeted Tokayev was a vision of hell. The city lay eviscerated—buildings gutted, their innards exposed like anatomical models. The Reichstag’s skeletal dome framed the low-hanging clouds. Survivors crawled from cellars to scavenge the ruins, prying charred timbers from rubble to fuel cookfires.

“I’d seen devastation before,” Tokayev later told Major George Hopkins during interrogation. “Bombed-out blocks in Moscow, the shattered ruins of Kyiv’s Khreshchatyk. But Berlin… For days afterward, I couldn’t sleep. I felt suffocated, as though walking through a graveyard. I knew war was terrible. But there, I understood it was something else—something diabolical. I swore then to do anything in my power to prevent it from ever happening again.”

“He seemed sincere,” Hopkins noted in the margin of the transcript.

2

Gogki Tokaty Akhmaty fyrt was born in 1913 on the southern fringes of the Russian Empire, in the impoverished Ossetian village Novourukhskoye, Vladikavkaz District, Terek Oblast. His father died in 1917, and by 1920, the family had been resettled to new lands in northwestern Ossetia, near the Kabardino-Balkarian border. It was there, in the village of Stavd-Dort, that he spent his childhood. Young Gogki never set foot in a schoolhouse. From the time he could walk, he worked—herding goats, gathering firewood and dung for fuel. As he grew older, he labored alongside adults in the cornfields. There was no time for formal education, but his innate curiosity burned bright: he taught himself to read and write, devouring anything printed—books, newspapers, even pre-revolutionary magazines.

Like all his peers, he came of age under Soviet rule. The promise of a radiant future, one that would replace their hardscrabble existence, resonated deeply with him. He joined the Komsomol early and became a member of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) in 1928. By then, he’d already mastered the Fordson—one of the first tractors in the North Caucasus, and the only one in the region—learning to repair it himself. His sharp mind and imposing stature caught the attention of local officials, who secured him a spot at the workers’ faculty (rabfak) of the Leningrad Mining Institute in 1928. He excelled, particularly in mathematics, earning a transfer to Moscow’s prestigious Bauman Higher Technical School. After graduation, he enlisted in the Red Army and was assigned to the Zhukovsky Air Force Academy. Within a year, he was leading one of the academy’s laboratories. By 1941, he had passed PhD defence and become dean of the aeronautical engineering faculty.

Yet he never returned home. The Ossetia of his memories—its mountains, forests, and icy rivers—remained etched in his mind. In 1989, at 76, the now-renowned Professor Tokaty was nominated for a British knighthood in recognition of his scientific contributions. But the honorific “Sir” would never precede his name. To accept, he would have had to swear an oath of allegiance to Her Majesty the Queen—a step he refused. “I, Gogki Tokaty, an Ossetian, was included in that list,” he later explained. “But it required a declaration of loyalty to the English Crown. A foreigner cannot become a ‘Sir’ without this oath. I declined. Why? I am not English—I am Ossetian. Though I am endlessly grateful to this country for the honor, I am a son of the Caucasus. It is there I first drew breath. No title or award could ever make me less Ossetian.”

By 1941, Grigori Tokayev—as he was now known—had firmly established himself in Moscow. He married Aza Baeva, a Vladikavkaz native studying at the Mendeleev Chemical-Technological Institute, and they were allotted a room in a sparsely populated communal apartment on Furmanny Lane. Their daughter, Bella, was born in 1938. Life was full: exhilarating work at the Zhukovsky Academy’s aerodynamics lab, a happy young family, a promising academic career ahead.

All of it ended on June 22, 1941.

3

From the interrogation transcript of Lieutenant Colonel Tokayev by Major Hopkins, December 14, 1947:

“Go on, Grigori. What happened to you after the war began?”

“First, explain the two-week gap in our sessions. Don’t tell me you were occupied with other matters. You have only one case now. Me.”

“You provided extensive details about your work at the Air Force Academy and the research conducted there. I couldn’t verify their accuracy. Your statements were sent to our military specialists. I only received their assessment today.”

“And?”

“No evidence of disinformation was found in your account.”

“Does that convince you of my sincerity?” “Not entirely. Everything you described was already known to our experts. Don’t ask how. London watches Soviet military developments very closely. The only novelty was your claim about aviation rocket-engine research. Our experts doubt the Russians have made significant progress there.”

“What would dispel their doubts? A squadron of Soviet jet bombers over London?”

“Your view of the political situation is overly grim.”

“It’s realistic. You still don’t grasp why I defected, George. Let me clarify. First, a question: Does your intelligence know which Red Army units are stationed in Germany?”

“I assume so.”

“Write this down. Under Marshal Sokolovsky’s command: the 3rd Shock Army (Magdeburg), 8th Guards Army (Weimar), 2nd and 1st Guards Mechanized Armies (Dresden), and the 16th Air Army (Wünsdorf)—nine fighter divisions, three ground-attack, six bomber, one night-bomber, over 2,000 aircraft total. Support troops: four artillery divisions, two tank brigades, five anti-aircraft divisions. Add the forces in Austria and Poland. Does this mean nothing to you?”

“Are you suggesting Stalin might attempt to seize all of Europe?”

“You think he wouldn’t?”

“In 1945, Churchill believed it possible. The Allies couldn’t have stopped the Red Army then. That’s why Wehrmacht units surrendering to us were held in camps along the demarcation line—kept in uniform, drilling, weapons stored nearby. They’d have absorbed the first Soviet strike. Later, when Churchill decided Stalin wouldn’t attack, the prisoners were moved inland for denazification.”

“What changed his mind?”

“The American atomic bomb.”

“Churchill was hasty. A bomb won’t deter Stalin. He knows the U.S. won’t risk using it in Central Europe—this isn’t Japan. Nothing would stop Soviet tanks. They could reach the Channel in 48 hours. They’re only waiting for the order.”

“Why do you believe such an order might come?”

“I know the state of those forces. They’re at full readiness. Meanwhile, the U.S. and Britain are demobilizing. This imbalance is dangerous. Insist your superiors heed this, George.”

“I will. Now, let’s resume.”

“Ask your questions…”