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Operation Zeppelin (German: Unternehmen Zeppelin) was a German intelligence operation conducted against the Soviet Union during World War II. It sought to create a fifth column by recruiting Soviet national minorities from captured prisoners of war, training and equipping them, and then infiltrating them back behind Soviet lines to foment armed resistance, collect intelligence, and conduct sabotage. Operation Zeppelin aimed to capitalize on the anti-Soviet guerrilla warfare already being waged by armed partisans in the Caucasus, Kalmykia, and Central Asia.

The operation was conducted by SD-Ausland chief Walter Schellenberg, by the direct order of Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, and commenced in 1942, continuing until 1945. Once they were dispatched into the field, many of the Zeppelin agents were captured by Soviet counterintelligence, and some even became double agents.

Ultimately, while Operation Zeppelin met with some degree of success in gathering intelligence, it failed at its primary goal in sparking anti-Soviet guerrilla resistance. However, the German efforts to spark nationalist resistance contributed to harsh Soviet reprisals and influenced the Soviet leadership's decision to deport minority nationalities to Central Asia, which led to large-scale loss of life.

Background
On June 22, 1941, Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa, opening the Eastern Front, the largest military engagement of all time. Similarly, as academic David Thomas notes, "The intelligence war in Russia 1941-1945 was waged on a scale unmatched in any other theatre of the second world war." However, pre-war German intelligence on the Soviet Union was poor, and Foreign Armies East (Fremde Heere Ost; FHO), as well as German military intelligence in general, did not perform well in the campaign's first year. The Abwehr's Stab WALLI I attempted to recruit, train, and run Soviet POWs as agents behind Soviet lines, and some of them were considered valuable assets who delivered quality intelligence. However, although the Germans did also employ signals intelligence and aerial reconnaissance, FHO intelligence from July to December 1941 was seriously inaccurate and failed to predict a number of Soviet countermoves.