Nicholas Poppe

Nicholas Poppe (Russian: Николай Николаевич Поппе, romanized: Nikolay Nikolayevich Poppe; 8 August 1897 – 8 June 1991) was a Russian linguist and Nazi collaborator. He is also known as Nikolaus Poppe, with his first name in its German form. He is often cited as N.N. Poppe in academic publications.

Poppe was a leading specialist in the Mongolic languages and the hypothetical (and controversial) Altaic language family to which the Mongolic, Turkic, and Tungusic languages are supposed to belong. Poppe was open-minded toward the inclusion of Korean in Altaic, but regarded the evidence for the inclusion of Korean as weaker than that for the inclusion of Mongolic, Turkic, and Tungusic.

Poppe was born on 8 August [O.S. 27 July] 1897 in Yantai, Shandong, China. Poppe's father was stationed in China as a consular officer in the Russian diplomatic service.

Poppe's boyhood and youth were marked by wars: the Boxer Rebellion, the Russo-Japanese War, the First World War, and the Russian Civil War, which was followed by the establishment of the Soviet regime. Later, he experienced Stalin's Great Purge and the Second World War.

Poppe graduated from the Mongolian Department of the Faculty of Social Sciences of Petrograd University in 1921 where his main mentor was B. Ya. Vladimirtsov. He began teaching at the Institute for Modern Oriental Languages before he had completed his studies in 1920 at the age of 23. Three years later, in 1923, he began teaching at the University of Petrograd. In 1931, he was appointed head of the Department of Mongolian Studies in the Institute of Oriental Studies at the Soviet Academy of Sciences. In 1933, at the age of 36, he was elected as the youngest associate member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences.

During World War II, Poppe left Leningrad in 1941 while it was under threat of capture by the German military, and found work at a teaching institute in Mikoyan-Shakhar. However, he defected to the Nazis when they arrived there in August 1942. Poppe "actively collaborated in the creation of the quisling government in the Karachai minority region", which quickly rounded-up and killed the region's Jews. Poppe himself says he acted as a translator and helped the German military identify mountain passes through which to advance further into the country. After the war, Poppe condemned the actions of the SS in the Karachai region and claims he helped spare the Tats, a religiously Jewish but ethnically Iranian group of mountain people.

When the German troops retreated Poppe went with them, and in 1943 was given a job at the SS Wannsee Institut "as one of its most important intelligence experts on the USSR." The Nazi collaborators at Wannsee "prepared reliable studies for the SS and the German high command describing the location of promising targets inside the Soviet Union, including concentrations of Jews and other minority groups." Historian Christopher Simpson writes that "the Wannsee collaborators did not sign orders for executions; they just told the killers where to find their prey."

After the war ended, Poppe lived undetected in the British occupation zone in Germany until summer 1946, when the Soviet Union demanded the British hand him over under the terms of the Yalta protocol, describing Poppe as "an active agent of the Gestapo". Poppe was interrogated by British intelligence officers as part of Operation Applepie, while Foreign Office officials claimed to the Soviets that they could not find him, despite conceding in private that they were "sheltering a traitor to the Soviet Union and a war criminal." Concerned that Poppe would disclose British and American recruitment of Nazis to the Soviets, the British asked the US military to "lose" Poppe in the United States: