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Operation Zeppelin (espionage plan)

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Operation Zeppelin (German: Unternehmen Zeppelin) was a top secret German plan to recruit Soviet prisoners of war (POWs) for espionage and sabotage operations behind the Russian front line during World War II. Active from mid-1942 to the end of the war in spring 1945, the operation initially intended to send masses of agents to Soviet Russia to collect military intelligence and to counterbalance sabotage activities carried out by the Soviet partisans. To that end, Germans recruited thousands of Soviet POWs and trained them in special camps. However, this approach had to be abandoned in favor of more targeted operations due to a lack of reliable Soviet recruits and dwindling resources, such as aircraft fuel. Operation Zeppelin was particularly important for intelligence gathering in the Eastern Front, but its more ambitious missions yielded little results. It had some success in the Caucasus where the various peoples of the Caucasus aspired to become independent from the Soviet Union, but other missions, such as sabotage of power plants near Moscow or a plot to assassinate Joseph Stalin, were abandoned or failed. A particular failure was the desertion of the Brigade SS Druzhina in August 1943.