- It wasn't just Ike and the Germans, Jeff. British
Gen. Alexander, a fervent Christian, refused to obey Churchill's
direct orders to hand over anti-Communist Russian prisoners of war to
Stalin after the war. Since he was too widely admired and respected to
fire, Churchill moved him 'up and out' to be Governor-General of
Canada, then proceeded to get his purposes accomplished. British
troops were ordered to hunt down and shoot Russian prisoners who tried
to escape their fate. Some British troops, weeping, refused to fire on
the hapless Russians and were then threatened by their officers with
drawn pistols and made to do so. All were then read the Official
Secrets Act and compelled to keep their silence. To this day, the vast
majority of the British public know nothing of this war crime -
directly ordered by Churchill.
-
- And those handed over to the NKVD? As they crossed
the bridge which was the handover point, multitudes of Russians threw
themselves off it too their deaths on the rocks below as soon as they
saw the black-uniformed troops waiting for them on the far side. The
others all perished as slave labour.
-
- A Footnote To Yalta
By Jeremy Murray-Brown
-
- In the National Archives in Washington there exists
a short clip of film which would appear to be the only one of its kind
ever made. It is the unedited footage taken by an American army camera
unit at a prisoner of war camp in southern Germany in February 1946. A
card, headed "Return of Russian Prisoners to Russia," identifies the
subject matter of the film and the location where it was taken.
-
- For many years this unique piece of film was not
available for public inspection. What it recorded was a small part of
a vast operation that was one of the most sensitive of the Second
World War, the handing over to Stalin of large numbers of Russians who
in varying circumstances found themselves under German control by the
war's end. Some of these Russians had been organized into military
units to fight alongside German forces against the Red Army; in
addition to them were well-known Cossack regiments who had left their
homeland in the period 1917 - 1921 after the defeat of the White
Russian armies by the Bolsheviks. In all, several hundred thousand
Russians - a staggering number - took up arms against the Soviet Union
in the years following the German invasion in June 1941.
-
- The fate of these Russians was one of the best kept
secrets of the war. As many as could surrendered to American and
British forces, trusting that they would eventually be able to settle
somewhere outside the Soviet Union. But in February 1945, at the Yalta
conference, Roosevelt and Churchill agreed to Stalin's demand that
they be handed over to him. The anti-Soviet Russians in the hands of
the western allies would therefore be betrayed. To carry out the
repatriation order, American and British servicemen often had to
resort to deception and brute force. No one doubted what was in store
for the Russians once they were in Soviet hands. Many were executed on
the spot.
-
- In some instances, Allied guards responsible for
turning over their prisoners could see their bodies hanging in the
forests where the exchange took place. Some were transferred on the
same boat that had brought the British delegation to Yalta a few
months previously. They were shot behind warehouses on the quay side
with low flying Soviet planes circling overhead to help drown the
noise of the rifle fire. Many returned prisoners were tortured before
being shot. The remainder disappeared into prison camps for long
sentences, receiving the worst treatment of all the Gulag's inmates.
Needless to say all were immediately stripped of the new winter
clothing and personal equipment that had been generously issued to
them by the British in response to the cynical demands of Soviet
liasion officers. American and British officers were the appalled
eyewitnesses to many desperate acts of suicide by Russian men and
women who preferred their own death and that of their wives and
children to falling into the hands of the Cheka/NKVD/GPU/KGB.
-
-
- The Cossack General, Pyotr Krasnov, had fought
against the Bolsheviks back in 1918 and hoped that the British would
sympathize with his situation, remembering their own intervention at
that time on the side of the White Russians. Churchill, British
Secretary for War in 1919, had then been the most ardent supporter of
their cause; while the Allied Commander-in-Chief in Italy, Field
Marshal Alexander, still wore a Russian Imperial order awarded to him
for his services against the Bolsheviks in Courland. Krasnov in turn
had then been decorated with the British Military Cross. He like other
White Russians had never been a Soviet citizen. But his appeals were
unavailing. Under the Yalta agreement, he, too was sent back to the
Soviet Union to certain death. He was for Stalin a prize captive.
Another bonus came Stalin's way when zealous administrators for good
measure threw in individuals and groups from the Baltic republics and
Yugoslavia who found themselves on the wrong side when hostilities
ended and whose repatriation had never been part of the Yalta
negotiations.
-
- Of all this, the public in the democracies knew
nothing. For three decades the subject remained a closely guarded
secret. Western eyewitnesses were obliged by official policy to keep
silent. A few journalists knew that some handing over was taking
place, but not its scale. But Alexander Solzhenitsyn had met some of
the surviving Russians in Soviet prison camps and learned about their
history. His account of their fate and that of their leader, General
Vlasov, which appeared in the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago,
published in 1973 - itself a sensation - was the first the general
public in the west heard of the subject and the phenomenon, as
Solzhenitsyn put it, of so many young Russians joining in a war
against their own Fatherland. "Perhaps there is something to ponder
here," he wrote.
-
- When Western archives were at last available to
historians, two remarkable books quickly appeared: The Last Secret,
1974, by Nicholas Bethel, and Victims of Yalta, 1977, by Nikolai
Tolstoy, both shocking in their detailed accounts of what had
happened. The BBC joined in with a television documentary by a
Hungarian film maker, Robert Vas, based on interviews with servicemen
and civilians who had been involved in the tragedy or knew about it.
Some of them confessed to still feeling traumatized by what they had
been ordered to do. Solzhenitsyn had written harshly about the moral
weakness of Western leaders in kowtowing to Stalin, about the
duplicity and short-sightedness of their repatriation policy; and
though others defended the decisions taken as a necessity of war,
pointed questions continued to be raised over the reputation of
prominent individuals who once had a hand in determining the policy.
In 1989, a bitter libel action was fought in British courts between a
senior establishment figure and his detractors who accused him of
being one of the military officers responsible for repatriating
Cossack and Yugoslav prisoners knowing what their fate would be.
Tolstoy, the author of Victims of Yalta, was one of his accusers,
arguing that senior British officers were in this matter just as
guilty as German officers executed for war crimes.
- The film in the National Archives is thus a unique
visual document, an extraordinary witness to a dark episode in this
century's history. To historians of documentary films it offers an
absorbing text on the elusive correspondence between visual records
and historical reality, between pictorial and literary descriptions of
events, a subject that requires increasing attention in our
image-conscious age. For me the discovery of this film clip came at
the same time as I learned with a shock that none of the students I
was lecturing to, and who were about to graduate from a leading mass
communications institute, was aware of "the Gulag", or indeed had
heard of the term. How can one explain the significance of visual
records if there is no historical imagination to give them
meaning?
-
- Read the rest of this Holocaust:
- http://www.bu.edu/jeremymb/papers/paper-y1.htm
-
- © 2000 College Of Communication, Boston
University
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