confessed because he could not stand the pain of being beaten on his heels. In February 1941, the NKVD was divided in two, and Merkulov was appointed Chairman of the NKGB. On 21 July 1941, his department was merged again with the NKVD, with Merkulov was Deputy People's Commissar, under Beria. On 20 July 1943, two departments were separated again, and Merkulov was again head of the NKGB. War time In September 1939, following the pact between the USSR and Nazi Germany, Merkulov was sent to Ukraine to supervise the incorporation of territory seized from Poland. On 28 September, he reported to Beria that 1,923 people had been arrested, most of whom were accused of being Ukrainian nationalists. When almost 22,000 Polish officers were executed in the famous Katyn massacre in spring 1940, Merkulov headed the 'troika' who signed off the death sentences. Before it began, he visited the Belorussian soviet republic (Belarus) on 5 March, to check on progress in rounding up Poles trapped in the western part of the republic recently seized from Poland. In May 1941, Merkulov was in charge of the pacification of the Baltic states, which were being forcibly incorporated in the USSR. On 17 June, he sent a reporting saying that he had had 14,467 people arrested in the three republics, and another 25,711 evicted, mostly families of those arrested, evicted from their homes. It was calculated that in the short period before the German invasion, 4 per cent of Estonia's population, and 2 per cent of the populations of Latvia and Lithuania were deported. The German invasion In his role as head of foreign intelligence, Merkulov travelled with Molotov to Berlin in November 1940, to have breakfast with Hitler. He received warnings from well-placed agents that the Germans were planning to invade, but refused to believe them, telling on of his agents: "You are greatly exaggerating." On 25 May 1941, he informed Stalin that Germany had 160-200 divisions concentrated on the Soviet border, but added that war was "unlikely" because "Hitler cannot risk war with the USSR for fear of violating the unity of the Nazi Party." After the German invasion, Merkulov was in charge of purging the Red Army of officers suspected of disloyalty, including Grigory Shtern who was hit with an electric cable that ripped out his right eye, in Merkulov's office. Merkulov made the officer who struck the blow, Lev