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 Eas