A postwar tragedy nearly lost to history
After WWII, the Western Allies repatriated thousands to the Soviet Union — and likely to death
At the end of World War II, grim rumors were spreading among many Eastern Europeans stranded in the West. The United States and Great Britain were forcibly repatriating their people back home to areas controlled by the Soviet Union, they heard. But that was only the start.
Once returned, they faced treason trials, mass lynching, labor camps, and executions. The word was that Soviet Leader Joseph Stalin now considered everyone highly suspect who’d ended up in lands the Germans had held during the war. Peasants, forced laborers, refugees, and even POWs. Anyone touched by the West at all was contaminated.
Why did the Western Allies go along with it? They had found themselves in a moral quagmire. In the Yalta Conference of February 1945, Roosevelt and Churchill agreed to repatriation as a way to appease their wartime ally, “Uncle Joe” Stalin.
A raw deal gone wrong
By early 1947, the Western Allies had returned nearly two and a half million refugees, forced laborers, and prisoners of war to the Soviet Union. They were sent back with no consideration of their individual wishes and genuine fears. Thousands of émigrés who fled Russia during the Bolshevik Revolution and the Russian Civil War — well before WWII — were also delivered to the very regime they had opposed. People of Russian descent who’d never set foot in Russia were sent east.
Many of the repatriated were tricked into going or outright lied to. When that didn’t work, they were forced at gunpoint. The bloody sellout intensified with the Unconditional Surrender of May 1945, when the so-called Soviet Repatriation Commissions started roaming Western Europe operated by agents of the NKVD and SMERSH. Sometimes Soviet officials promised those returning that Stalin would give them amnesty, appealing to a yearning to reunite with family and loved ones. Yet after hearing the grim rumors, many knew what would happen once Stalin's agents got to them — if they were lucky, they’d only end up in a Gulag.
A dead end for the Cossacks
Yet the Western Allies kept sending these people back to the Soviet Union. In one of the most horrific incidents, the British handed over 18,000 Cossack peoples to Soviet authorities in Austria in the summer of 1945. The tragedy has been called the “Betrayal of the Cossacks” and the “Massacre of Cossacks at Lienz.”
Roughly 50,000 Cossacks had ended up in Austria in May 1945, some of them tribes that had fought against the Soviets with the Germans and retreated westward, along with their families, as the Third Reich collapsed. With the war ending, they now had nowhere to go.
British army units intercepted many of the Cossacks near the town of Lienz and interned them, cramming them into a canyon on the banks of the Drave River. The Cossacks surrendered without a fight. The British fed them and led them to believe they would be protected from excessive retribution by the Soviet Army, which was advancing well into Austria, only a few miles to the east. The Cossacks trusted the promise.
In late May the British, still pledging protection, disarmed the Cossacks’ couple thousand officers and generals and trucked them to the town of Judenburg, just over the Soviet lines. There the British handed them over. Many of the older officers had emigrated many years before — during the Russian Civil War — and technically were not Soviet citizens, thus exempt.
The British operation had left thousands despairing in the canyon on the Drave, however — the women and children, the elderly, and lowly regular soldiers who were fathers, sons, brothers. And thousands of their beloved Cossack horses had come with them. Three days later, on June 1, British troops received orders to prod these helpless people at gunpoint into cattle cars and trucks.
In the ensuing panic, the overwhelmed British soldiers bayoneted some. Ghastly scenes emerged. Many Cossacks committed suicide or begged to be shot. The refugees started stabbing themselves, pounding themselves with rocks, whatever they could grab, leaping into the raging river if they could reach it.
When the trucks came for them, including huge throngs of children and old women, they tried to break the British troops’ barrier — but only so they could jump into the river or off bridges or find some way to kill themselves. Even after the trucks started off they leaped out, only to break their backs or be run over by other trucks. This played out over days, along with similar mayhem across Southern Austria involving Cossacks and other Eastern Europeans.
The only sliver of hope in this sordid tale was that some in Lienz did manage to escape, helped by British Tommies feeling the strain and looking the other way.
No matter what the Cossacks did as soldiers, whether fighting to stay alive or even committing atrocities, it’s inexcusable that innocent women and children should have suffered for it.
The US holds its end of the deal
The forced repatriations continued into 1946 and 1947. The Americans ran their own operations, notably at the former concentration camps at Dachau and at Plattling where thousands of Russians were brutally repatriated.
In one nighttime operation, American GIs rousted terrified Russians from their beds at gunpoint, shouting and wielding nightsticks and herding them into trucks. Hours later, the GIs handed over their prisoners to Soviet trains inside the Bavarian woods along the Czech border.
As Nikolai Tolstoy reports in The Secret Betrayal (1977), the American soldiers were left “visibly shamefaced” after realizing their operation was soon reaping suicide and murder: “Before their departure from the rendezvous in the forest, many [US soldiers] had seen rows of bodies already hanging from the branches of nearby trees. On their return, even the SS men in a neighboring compound lined the wire fence and railed at them for their behavior. The Americans were too ashamed to reply.”
My novel Lost Kin tells part of this tragic tale. In the story, long-estranged brothers Harry and Max Kaspar reunite in war-torn Munich and resolve to rescue a group of escaped Cossacks hiding from the Soviets.
Re-released last summer, Lost Kin is the previous book in the Kaspar Brothers series before Lines of Deception, coming March 12.
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“Lost Kin” is a good story built around a shocking reality — that American and British soldiers (and perhaps more of the “winners” in WWII Germany) were part of the repatriation of a million or more people to Soviet-held territory. An action that led to untold numbers of murders and indescribable suffering. It’s no wonder so many returning American soldiers refused to talk about what they’d seen and done in the war.
Buy this book, or borrow it somewhere, and read it. You’ll learn much more than this one horrific piece of history. Steve Anderson also gives us a good look at what post-war Germany, occupied by the Allied side’s Military Governments was like…for both sides.