- 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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