Lev Mikhailovich Kolosov

Lev Mikhailovich Kolosov was born in 1924 in Leningrad. Before the war he worked as a construction project manager. In December 1941, he was dispatched behind German lines as a member of an intelligence team of the Leningrad Front. He would have been seventeen years old. He was soon arrested by German forces and by July 1943, he was a member of an SD company. In March 1944, he was listed as a member of a Jagdkommand, a German anti-partisan unit under the “Zepellin” program, through which the German army identified and recruited Russian POWs. Kolosov operated in the Polotsk area of Belarus until he was wounded and hospitalized in April 1944. He was subsequently sent to German for intelligence training as a radio operator and later a clerk. He held a junior enlisted rank in the German army and was awarded German medals. He fell into U.S. custody at the end of the war.[i]