Aleksandr Yefimovich Shults

In December 1945, an NKVD interpreter named Aleksandr Yefimovich Shults escaped to the American occupation zone of Germany. He was a Jew born in 1922 in the town of Cherkassy, Ukraine, and was living there when German troops occupied the area in late 1941. He was taken to a POW camp in Germany, where he remained until Soviet forces arrived in spring 1945.

He was hired as an interpreter for the SMERSH section of the Eleventh Tank Division in Germany in April 1945. The KGB “Wanted List” described him as a “freelance” interpreter, so it is unclear whether was ever a staff NKVD employee. In December Shults escaped to the American zone and was living in West Germany under the assumed name Schaeffer in 1949. By 1961 he had emigrated to Toronto, Canada. A military tribunal sentenced him to execution in absentia in 1961. The KGB possessed a photograph of him dated 1966, possibly obtained by intercepting letters he sent to his relatives in the Soviet Union.

[i] 1969 “KGB Wanted List,” p. 439.