- A few days ago a man who could have caused my death died
of cancer at the ripe age of 86. He never faced a War Crimes Tribunal.
He should have, and in a just world he would have.
-
- His name was Lord Aldington, and only now did I learn
he was responsible for the sheer terror my decimated family of four - grandmother,
mother, younger sister and I - experienced in the brutal summer of 1945
while trapped by the Red Army in the vicinity of Berlin.
-
- We learned we were to be deported back to Russia.
-
- "Repatriation" was the euphemism. It would
have meant almost certain execution or death by starvation and cold. In
those lawless, bloody, brutal postwar years, as Germany lay in the dust
and rubble of its destroyed and burned-out cities, it happened to millions
and millions.
-
- My mother having been warned, in a desperate flight across
the Russian-British border in what we called the "Harzgebirge",
we managed to escape. I have described that flight in one of my novels
and have often told about it in keynotes and seminars in subsequent years.
-
- However, so weak was my own sense of history that as
late as 1980, I never knew that the horror we escaped had a name.
-
- It was called "Operation Keelhaul". Millions
were liquidated.
-
- Herewith, I begin a three part ZGram on "Operation
Keelhaul" and the man accused of having masterminded it. The article
below was written by one Srdja Trifkovic. (Dr. Rimland's comments are
'Zundelsite').
-
-
-
-
- LORD ALDINGTON - DEAD, BUT NO R.I.P. By Srdja Trifkovic
http://www.rockfordinstitute.org/NewsST121900.htm 12-19-00
-
- Trifkovic:
-
- Lord Aldington, 86, a former British trade minister and
Conservative Party vice chairman who filed one of Britain's most famous
libel cases against a man who labeled him a war criminal, died of cancer
Dec. 8 at his home in Kent, southern England.
-
- In 1989, Lord Aldington was awarded $2.2 million in damages
after winning a libel suit against historian Count Nikolai Tolstoy, a distant
relative of Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, who had written a pamphlet accusing
Lord Aldington of war crimes.
-
- Zundelsite:
-
- Censoring history by way of libel actions is unfortunately
the method the rich and well-connected use against their pesky critics.
-
- Trifkovic:
-
- As a British army officer in Austria at the end of World
War II, Lord Aldington -- then known by his given name, Toby Low -- oversaw
the repatriation of thousands of Cossack and Yugoslav refugees [ Ed. ...
and, of course, the ethnic Germans from the Soviet Union and the Baltic
states] . Many were subsequently killed or interned in prison camps.
-
- At the libel trial, Lord Aldington agreed that the refugees'
fate was "ghastly" but said he had not known that many faced
execution if returned to their homelands (The Washington Post, December
9, 2000).
-
- Zundelsite:
-
- To assume that a high-ranking British Army officer in
the field, whose unit daily interrogated refugees and prisoners-of-war,
all of whom had either fled from, fought against, or at one time were part
of Stalin's army, is stretching credulity a bit too far. Only a fellow
Lodge or Club member sitting as judge on a bench in London could be hypocritical
enough to seem to believe such an answer.
-
- Trifkovic:
-
- An obituary sometimes begs a thousand words - well worth
doing in this case, especially since it's been over a decade since we wrote
about Aldington, Tolstoy, and one of the greatest untold tragedies of World
War II (cf. "Writing in the Tolstoy Tradition" by Sally Wright,
Chronicles, April 1989).
-
- Zundelsite:
-
- The tragedy was not untold. There were millions of
people affected by it, and detailed accounts have long been written about
it. Only the British, and to a lesser degree, the American power elite
suppressed it, because their clique had formulated and approved these vicious
pro-Communist policies in Teheran and Yalta. They are co-guilty of what
happened. They share in the responsibility for these atrocities.
-
- Trifkovic:
-
- This is a story of heinous crimes that went unpunished
and of establishmentarian conspiracies to cover them up, of miscarriage
of justice, of one man's quixotic efforts to tell the truth and another's
quiet campaign to keep it suppressed.
-
- Zundelsite:
-
- Is it really "quixotic" to expose the deliberate
murder of millions? At least there is now an admission that one man -
not to mention his network of accomplices - tried to suppress this crime.
-
- Trifkovic:
-
- The story starts at Yalta in February 1945, when the
return of all Soviet citizens who found themselves in the Allied zone was
demanded by Stalin -- and was duly agreed to by Churchill and FDR. Accordingly,
hundreds of thousands of Soviet POWs liberated by the Allies were sent
back home, regardless of their wishes, and regardless of what Stalin had
in store for them.
-
- Zundelsite:
-
- What does that make Churchill and Roosevelt? Knowing
and willing accomplices who had for years been briefed about Soviet war
aims and the policies of Stalin and the behavior of his secret police and
murderous Red Army. Yet they agreed to hand these people over!
-
- Trifkovic:
-
- In addition, in May and June 1945 tens of thousands of
refugees from Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union -- unarmed civilians escaping
communism, as well as anticommunist resistance fighters and assorted collaborationists
-- were rounded up by the British in Austria, and forcibly delivered to
Stalin and Tito. Most of them were summarily executed, sometimes within
earshot of the British.
-
- Zundelsite:
-
- Within earshot not only of the British! Also the Czechs,
the Hungarians, the Yugoslavs, Tito's bunch of murderers, AND the Americans.
-
- Trifkovic:
-
- Forced repatriations were known as Operation Keelhaul
-- the "last secret" of World War II, as Alexander Solzhenitsyn
called it. Men, women, and children were forced into boxcars headed for
the Soviet zone in the east, or for Slovenia in the south.
-
- Zundelsite:
-
- Once again: It is a lie that it was a secret! It was
merely a non-event, at least to those who closed their eyes to deliberate,
pre-planned, Churchill- and-Roosevelt-approved, forced repatriation - which
only could end in the murder of millions!
-
- Trifkovic:
-
- Non-Soviet and non-Yugoslav citizens and Serbian royalists
were supposedly exempt from the deportation order, but key military officials
in the British chain of command surreptitiously included them, too. As
a result émigré Russians waving French passports and British
medals from the World War I were all rounded up and delivered to Stalin.
-
- Zundelsite:
-
- This illustrates one more time the callousness of the
British and American ruling elite. Lives meant nothing - power meant everything.
-
- Trifkovic:
-
- There was panic in the camps when the inmates realized
what was going on. The British lied to some that they were to be taken
to Italy, or some other safe haven; if the subterfuge didn't work they
used rifle butts and bayonets as prods. Some refugees committed suicide
by sawing their throats with barbed wire. Mothers threw their babies from
trains into the river. To its credit one British regiment, the London Irish,
refused: they went to war to fight German soldiers, they said, not to club
refugee women and children.
-
- Zundelsite:
-
- Where are the war criminal trials for the rest of those
field commanders who "followed orders"? Thousands of Germans
were tried, convicted, shot or hanged for "following orders".
"Obeying orders" was not allowed as an excuse by the Allied
judges in postwar trials of Germans - to this day!
-
- _____
-
- Part II of "Operation Keelhaul" - The Last
Secret (America's Shame - and Britain's!)
-
- From Dr. Ingrid Rimland <irimland@zundelsite.org Copyright
(c) 2001 - Ingrid A. Rimland
-
- "Operation Keelhaul!" To this day, it is an
unavenged post-war crime of immeasurable cruelty committed by the Allies.
This satanic scheme was meant to punish those who had joined Germany's
heroic fight against Communism or had, in a desperate scramble through
two harsh winters, tried to escape Communism's campaigns of ethnic cleansing
and genocide.
-
- I once heard an eyewitness say at one of the historical
conferences: "Like rabbits, these unlucky people were indiscriminately
caught in wide, sweeping raids across Europe after the defeat of Hitler
Germany and turned over to Stalin to perish. Men, women and children -
even babies in prams."
-
-
- Operation Keelhaul - Part II By Srdja Trifkovic.
-
- Trifkovic:
-
- In late June 1945 the original policy of screening the
would-be deportees was reinstated, but it was too late: most of them were
already dead, or in the depths of the Gulag. The tragedy would have remained
little known outside obscure émigré circles were it not for
British historian Count Nikolai Tolstoy, who has dedicated his life to
exposing the truth and identifying those responsible.
-
- Zundelsite:
-
- To reinstate the screening policy after the date of the
first massive Keelhaul operation was only the beginning of the white-wash
and attempted cover-up - much like the "Establishing of a Royal Commission"
or the "Simpson van Rhoden Commission" into the torture methods
by US (largely Jewish) interrogators in the Malmedy and other post-war
crimes trials.
-
- These commissions were set up to control the facts allowed
to reach a suspicious public. (Many people today remember the Warren Commission
into the assassination of JFK, based on the selfsame principles...) In
the West, the arrest, detention and deliberate deportation of millions
to Soviet Russia is virtually unknown.
-
- Trifkovic:
-
- This great-grand-nephew of Russia's famous novelist [Tolstoy]--
and heir to the senior line of the family -- has written three books on
forced repatriations, each more revealing than the previous one, as more
suppressed information came to light.
-
- Zundelsite:
-
- Maybe now that Aldington and his ilk are dying off, we
might be able to get to the bottom of the British and Allied Power elites'
cold-hearted extermination plans for Europe's elite who had temporarily
freed themselves from the clutches of the banksters in the West and the
Communists in the East during the Third Reich reign. Much Revisionist
work to be done!
-
- Trifkovic:
-
- In 1977 his "Victims of Yalta" was published,
followed by "Stalin's Secret War" in 1981, and then his most
controversial book, "The Minister and the Massacres" (1986).
-
- In his books Tolstoy argued that refugees not covered
by the Yalta agreement -- émigré Russians and royalist Yugoslavs
-- were forcibly repatriated because Harold Macmillan, "minister resident"
in the Mediterranean and later prime minister, wanted to advance his political
career by appeasing Stalin. He persuaded a British general whose 5th Army
Corps occupied southern and eastern Austria to ignore a Foreign Office
telegram ordering that "any person who is not (repeat not) a Soviet
citizen under British law must not (repeat not) be sent back to the Soviet
Union unless he expressly desires."
-
- Zundelsite:
-
- Harold Macmillan! That sad-faced, sad-sack excuse of
a British upper crust politician who later on was the undertaker in charge
of the burial of the British Empire - the man who canceled England's missile
strike force and who abandoned the White colonists of British-African dependencies
to their fate by his "wind of change" betrayal policies!
-
- Trifkovic:
-
- Enter Lord Aldington, then a politically well-connected
30-year-old brigadier called Toby Low, who was the Fifth Corps chief of
staff. He was also an aspiring Tory politician, hopeful of being nominated
as a candidate at the forthcoming general election in Britain. Low had
no qualms about acting upon Macmillan's suggestions.
-
- Zundelsite:
-
- No qualms? He admitted that the effect of his orders
would be "ghastly". It must be recalled that his orders were
given after the war was lost, the shooting had stopped, the German Wehrmacht
was defeated and had surrendered. There was no military justification
for his actions - even of "military necessity"!
-
- Trifkovic:
-
- On May 21, 1945 he issued an order to 5th Corps officers
as to how to define Soviet citizenship: "Individual cases will NOT
be considered unless particularly pressed . . . In all cases of doubt,
the individual will be treated as a SOVIET NATIONAL."
-
- The émigrés' fate was thus sealed. Tolstoy
named Aldington in his last book as the chief executor of the policy of
forced repatriation on the ground, the man who went way beyond the call
of duty in carrying out Macmillan's instructions, and who did so in contravention
of orders.
-
- Zundelsite:
-
- By this phrasing of the order - ". . . unless particularly
pressed" - it is clear Aldington knew exactly what he was doing.
It was premeditated. This was his "escape clause" to hypocritically
be able to claim, should anyone find out what he had done, "Well,
all they had to do was to press their claim!"
-
- From behind barbed wire? At bayonet point? While being
clubbed into submission by rifle butts?
-
- The British Establishment clearly recognized that all
of their wartime and postwar policies would one day become open to scrutiny
- if Revisionists like Tolstoy would gain broad acceptance. That would
have threatened their house of cards. No wonder they came to the rescue
of their own disgraceful policies!
-
- Trifkovic:
-
- The charges were serious, by British standards quite
scandalous in fact, but Aldington was reluctant to sue Tolstoy over the
book. He did sue one Nigel Watts instead, however, an obscure property
developer who distributed a pamphlet -- written by Tolstoy -- in which
Aldington was called a war criminal. The pamphlet included the following
statements:
-
- "As was anticipated by virtually everyone concerned,
the overwhelming majority of these defenceless people, who reposed implicit
trust in British honour, were either massacred in circumstances of unbelievable
horror immediately following their handover, or condemned to a lingering
death in Communist gaols and forced labour camps. These operations were
achieved by a combination of duplicity and brutality without parallel in
British history since the Massacre of Glencoe. . . The man who issued every
order and arranged every detail of the lying and brutality which resulted
in these massacres was Brigadier Toby Low, Chief of Staff to General Keightley's
5 Corps, subsequently ennobled by Harold Macmillan as the 1st Baron Aldington
. . . The evidence is overwhelming that he arranged the perpetration of
a major war crime in the full knowledge that the most barbarous and dishonourable
aspects of his operations were throughout disapproved and unauthorised
by the higher command, and in the full knowledge that a savage fate awaited
those he was repatriating... a major war criminal, whose activities merit
comparison with those of the worst butchers of Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia."
-
- Zundelsite:
-
- Where is the evidence for Nazi Germany turning over Russian
nationals or Soviet citizens whom they had captured by the thousands when
they took over Poland? Or Paris, where there was also a large, fiercely
anti-Communist Russian emigré population, numbering hundreds of
thousands that Stalin would have loved to lay his bloody hands on?
-
- Hitler was briefly allied with Stalin then in a non-aggression
pact for almost two years. It would have been easy to turn them all over.
Not a single case of a single ex-patriate Russian being delivered to Stalin's
henchmen during that period is recorded in history. Not one!
-
- Trifkovic:
-
- As the author of the text Tolstoy felt honor-bound to
include himself as Watts' co-defendant. At the trial Aldington freely acknowledged
signing the repatriation orders, but claimed that there was "no way"
he could have known the refugees would be killed: "We were told that
international law would be obeyed."
-
- Zundelsite:
-
- This man had no shame. This naive answer coming from
a British Army field officer about the Red Army in May and June of 1945
is really, really rich! To speak of "international law being obeyed"
in the blood bath that followed the Third Reich's defeat is adding insult
to inhuman injury!
-
- What the Allies did to a defeated foe is unworthy of
Western civilization - as history will one day know and acknowledge, thanks
to Revisionist research the world over.
-
-
- Part III of "Operation Keelhaul" - The Last
Secret (America's Shame - and Britain's!)
-
- Herewith, the conclusion of the "Keelhaul Operation"
feature written by Srdja Trifkovic describing the actions of Lord Aldington
(Brigadier Low) who sacrificed countless Eastern European civilians to
a gruesome fate in Stalin's clutches right after World War II to satisfy
his political ambitions - and the writer Tolstoy who, in a libel action,
tried to bring to light the truth about what happened:
-
-
- Trifkovic:
-
- His mission in Austria accomplished, Brigadier Low returned
to England on some unknown date in May 1945 to be selected as the Conservative
MP for Blackpool -- the beginning of the slow rise that would see him ennobled
(by Macmillan!) and ushered into the boardrooms and elite gentlemen's clubs
of Britain. The exact date of his return is highly significant: Tolstoy
argued that Low did not leave Austria until after the key order on indiscriminate
deportations was issued, and therefore it was he who -- contrary to the
orders issuing from Yalta -- was personally responsible for the crime.
-
- Zundelsite:
-
- Is there a flaw in this line of argument? The Western
Allies - to this day and for the last 56 years - have used exactly this
kind of "chain of command, chain of events" logic when going
after Germans and their allies, down to lowly camp guards like John Demjanjuk.
-
- Trifkovic:
-
- When the trial came, it should have been possible, easy
even, to prove the order of events and name the man who had issued the
orders. The British are efficient administrators, and the Public Record
Office should have contained the answer. Some of the relevant documents
Tolstoy had copied when he researched his books, but when he went back
he found that the old boy network had done its work. All key documents
related to the case had been sent to various government ministries -- notably
to the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defence -- and duly "misplaced."
When Tolstoy's researcher asked for these documents, including reports
and signals relating to Aldington, she was told they were "not available."
Only after the trial had started was Tolstoy given a photocopy of the most
important of the files, but four-fifths of the contents were missing.
-
- Zundelsite:
-
- That is also the modus operandi in many of the Nuremberg
and subsequent proceedings where only incriminating documents and witnesses
were looked for and admitted. Exonerating documents, circumstances and
even witnesses known by the German defence lawyers to be in US or British
POW camps were not produced because ". . . they could not be located
in the camps".
-
- Trifkovic:
-
- Lord Aldington had no such problem: the files were not
only readily available to him, but delivered to his office by government
couriers. "Dear George," he wrote to George Younger, the (then)
Defence Secretary, on March 8, 1987, "you are a friend who will understand
my distress . . . if the files can be brought to the Westminster area in
a series of bundles, that would be very helpful." "Dear George"
duly obliged. Aldington's mind eventually clarified as to the date on which
he had finally left Austria - he gave three dates in three interviews --
but there were no records by which these could be confirmed.
-
- Zundelsite:
-
- You wonder how many helping hands were found in the Allied
occupation army hierarchy and in the vassal regimes they established all
over Europe, beginning with the three Germanys - that is, East and West
Germany and Austria. It's easy to get convictions against your enemies
in this way.
-
- Trifkovic:
-
- Heavily influenced by the trial judge, the jury found
against Tolstoy and awarded Lord Aldington astronomic damages -- a million
and a half pounds sterling -- in November 1990. Tolstoy, who declared bankruptcy,
was denied the right to appeal.
-
- Zundelsite:
-
- That, too, is the way it is done these days. By cutting
off appeals, you do not have to assassinate your enemies the way the Mossad
and Communist spy services do to their enemies in Palestine and elsewhere
- as in the case of Stephan Bandera, the emigré Ukrainian leader
in Munich in the 1950s.
-
- Trifkovic:
-
- Aware that Tolstoy was penniless after the libel verdict,
Britain's High Court ruled that he had no right to appeal unless he came
up with almost $200,000.00 in advance to cover Aldington's legal expenses.
The court further denied Tolstoy access to a $1m defense fund that had
been set up in his name, and to which Alexander Solzhenitsyn and the late
Graham Greene had contributed. The British establishment, and in particular
to the grandees who were friends of Aldington -- the man on first-name
terms with ministers in every Tory government since the war -- got the
desired verdict. As far as they were concerned, a crank -- and a foreign
crank at that -- had received his well-deserved comeuppance.
-
- Zundelsite:
-
- Like Irving two decades later!
-
- Trifkovic:
-
- L'affaire Tolstoy proved yet again that British libel
laws are flawed. The machinery of the British government seemed to tilt
the scales of justice, and the state apparently interfered in a private
court case. The Human Rights Court at Strasbourg ruled in a unanimous judgment
that the failure to permit an appeal was "unfitting for a democratic
society and "constituted a violation of the applicant's right . .
. to freedom of expression."
-
- Zundelsite:
-
- So what did that toothless tiger of a "Court"
do in Straßbourg? Did it force the British to overturn that verdict?
Ask for a new trial? No. It kept wringing its manicured hands.
-
- As the Zundelsite has pointed out so many times, the
courts of Western Civilizations have been captured and subverted by the
Fifth Column operatives in our midst.
-
- Trifkovic:
-
- A recent reminder of the travesty of justice perpetrated
under British libel laws concerned two ITN journalists who successfully
sued the LM Magazine (see "News & Views," April 20). Free
speech was damaged both times, and -- in the absence of the First Amendment
equivalent -- free speech is not so strong in Britain that it can take
such damage. But, as Cambridge historian Michael Stenton points out, for
as long as the rich have all the legal advantages, the chance of constitutional
reform is poor indeed: "When historical truth becomes intensely politicized
it is possible to get trapped on the wrong side of the factual fence by
sympathies and first impressions. All we can do, and must do, is promise
to climb over the fence if the evidence demands it."
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