Operation Keelhaul - Allies Sent 2.5 Million Anti-Communists to Die

(Masonic Jews Churchill, FDR, and Stalin at Yalta. Missing is their partner, Adolf Hitler) 

PROOF THAT THE WEST IS DE FACTO COMMUNIST AND OUR

WARTIME LEADERS WERE WAR CRIMINALS WITH NO CONCERN

FOR INDIVIDUAL FREEDOM.

At Yalta, Churchill and FDR agreed to repatriate 2.5 million anti-Communists

Russians against their will. About a half had served in the Wehrmacht. Most were exterminated or imprisoned in the Gulag. This despicable act – codenamed Operation Keelhaul after a naval torture — was kept secret for 50 years. (To be fair, however, Americans treated German POWs as badly, and Germans their Russian POWs and vice versa.) But the Allies sent back anti-Communists from the Bolshevik Revolution who were no longer Russian citizens. In general, wars are genocides perpetrated by the Illuminati.   

From Feb 3, 2018

The Secret Betrayal, Nikolai Tolstoy, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1978. 503 pages. Hardcover. ISBN: 0-684-15635-0.

Reviewed by Charles Lutton

(Abridged by henrymakow.com)

From 1943 until early 1947 Western countries, led by Britain and the United States, returned nearly two and a half million prisoners of war and refugees to the Soviet Union, regardless of their individual wishes. Additional thousands of old émigrés (people who had fled Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution and the Civil War) were also forcibly sent to the USSR, along with other people of Russian descent who had never lived within the borders of Russia…

With the invasion of Western Europe in June 1944, thousands of Russian prisoners fell into the hands of the Allies. Many were forced laborers who had been working on the Atlantic Wall for the Todt Organization. Others were simply refugees. However, the Western Allies were surprised to discover that thousands had willingly joined the Wehrmacht. Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov asserted in May 1944 that the number of Russians serving in the German armed forces was “insignificant.” Actually, approximately one million of Stalin’s subjects had joined the other side.

By late June the British Foreign Office decided to repatriate all Russian POWs, callously disregarding the consequences of such a policy (early in the war Stalin had made it clear that any Soviet citizens who were even temporarily out of Communist control would be regarded as traitors. Official Orders threatened “deserters” and POWs with draconian measures). On June 24, 1944, Patrick Dean, the Assistant Legal Adviser of the Foreign Office, declared: “In due course all those with whom the Soviet authorities desire to deal must … be handed over to them, and we are not concerned with the fact that they may be shot or otherwise more harshly dealt with than they might be under English law.”

The War Office held a different view. Britain’s SOE (Special Operations Executive, an organization created in November 1940 to encourage, direct, and supply resistance groups in countries occupied by the Axis) had distributed leaflets to Russians in the German armed forces promising that Russians surrendering to the Allies could receive political asylum if they wished. Despite stiff protests, the military was unable to prevail upon the Foreign Office to reverse its unilateral decision to return all Russians to Soviet authorities.

British Foreign Minister Anthony Eden, left, who, Tolstoy reports, “was responsible for initiating the whole policy,” first reached an agreement with the Soviets on repatriation at the Moscow Conference in October 1944. The United States joined with Britain and the Soviet Union in reaffirming the program of repatriating Russians at the Yalta Conference. However, nothing in the agreement on POWs referred to the return of Soviet citizens who were unwilling to go back to the USSR. Nor did it provide that those who had never been citizens of the USSR should be delivered to Stalin.

During the summer of 1944, the British began to ship thousands of Russians from POW and refugee camps to the USSR. When informed of their destination, many of the prisoners committed suicide. The Foreign Office did what it could to suppress news of the suicides because, warned Patrick Dean, “these suicides might possibly cause political trouble [in Britain].”

British officers who delivered prisoners to Soviet ports, such as Murmansk and Odessa, witnessed NKVD execution squads murder Russians as they left ship. Responding to a plea that mercy be shown to those who did not wish to return to the Soviet Union, Eden wrote that the “provisions of the Crimean [Yalta] Agreement” had to be upheld, for “we cannot afford to be sentimental…”

SUNDRY ANTI COMMUNISTS INCLUDED 

The British resorted to various ruses in an effort to repatriate anti-Communist elements as easily as possible. For example, at the close of the war, around 50,000 Cossacks were in British-controlled parts of Austria. Along with about 100,000 Georgians, various Cossack tribes had fought with the Germans against the Soviets and, with their families, retreated westward as the Third Reich collapsed. When repatriating the members of the 15th Cossack Cavalry Corps, the British deceived them by telling them that they would first be sent to Italy and ultimately to Canada. In other instances it was necessary to set troops upon the unarmed men, women, children, forcing them into trucks or railroad cars. As they were being rounded up, many displayed documents proving that they were citizens of France, Italy, Yugoslavia, or registered stateless with Nansen passports issued by the League of Nations.

Chapter eleven, entitled “An Unsolved Mystery,” attempts to unravel one of the most appalling incidents in the repatriation story, the handing over to Stalin of long-time opponents of the Soviet regime who technically were exempt from repatriation because of the fact that they had never been Soviet citizens. The agreed upon definition of a “Soviet citizen” was “a person born or resident within the pre-September 1, 1939, boundaries of Russia (who had not acquired another nationality – or a Nansen passport, which would render the subject Stateless) …” 

By this definition, thousands who had fled Russia during the Civil War and who found themselves under British control at the end of the Second World War should not have been sent to the USSR. Among the thousands delivered to Stalin was 76-year-old Czarist General Peter Krasnov; Andrei Shkuro, a cavalry leader who had fought for the Czar and had been decorated by the British in the First World War and who fought with the German 1st Cossack Cavalry Division in the Second World War: and Sultan Kelech Ghirey, leader of the Caucasians.

British officers informed these men that they were requested to attend a meeting with Field Marshal Alexander. They boarded trucks and were then turned over to Soviet authorities in Austria. As Tolstoy relates: “Even the Soviet authorities who received them were astonished that the British should have included these people in the consignment. At Judenberg (the delivery point in Austria) the Red Army General Dolmatov asked in surprise why the old émigrés had been handed over: to his knowledge the Soviet authorities had never demanded them. NKVD interrogators were frankly incredulous.”

WHITE RUSSIANS MURDERED

Most of the older émigrés had fought as Allies of the British in the First World War. On January 12, 1947, Generals Krasnov and Shkuro, along with the German commander of the 15th Cossack Cavalry Division, General Helmuth von Pannwitz, were executed, after having spent 19 months in the infamous Lubianka Prison. Most of the other Cossack and German officers of the Cossack units were also executed. “In this way,” the author explains, “the British Government had in essence sentenced to death without trial German officers who had been received by them as prisoners of war….”

Military officers ordered to enforce repatriation were often surprised at the alarm expressed by the refugees when they learned that they were to be shipped eastward. Lt. Michael Bayley related how Russian peasants who had been working as slave laborers on German farms begged to be allowed to stay in Germany. The perplexed British officer was told by members of the Polish Armored Division that “of course the Russian peasants were better off in Germany – why couldn’t we let well enough alone.”

Another officer explained that he and his fellow officers believed the Cossacks’ fears to be groundless. British wartime propaganda had portrayed the USSR as being “a kind of utopian socialist state … and that they would behave compassionately towards these people whom we were deputed to send back.” Throughout the war there had been a blackout of news unfavorable to the Soviet system, thus it was hardly surprising that the military men detailed to enforce repatriation felt that the USSR was governed by the “Four Freedoms,” and that Russian refugees consequently had little to fear from their own government.

OBJECTIONS

Protests against the repatriation policy were being raised by the summer of 1945. The Commander of the 2nd Polish Corps, General Anders, complained that the Soviets were trying to kidnap Polish citizens. On July 5, 1945, the Vatican sent a plea to the British Foreign Office and the U.S. State Department that thousands of Ukrainians in the West should not be sent back. John Galsworthy of the Foreign Office minuted: “We do not wish to attract attention to this aspect of the Agreement which is, of course, in opposition to our traditional attitude towards political refugees …”

Other objections were raised by Allied occupation commanders. In Italy, Field Marshal Alexander finally told a Soviet Repatriation Mission under General Basilov that he would not be allowed to bully unwilling Ukrainians into returning to Russia. General Eisenhower likewise viewed with distaste the use of force against helpless Russian refugees and POWs. He placed a temporary freeze on repatriation operations and asked his superiors in Washington for a definite ruling on the issue. 

Field Marshal Montgomery (LEFT) followed suit and in the Fall of 1945 ordered that force no longer be used for the repatriation of Soviet nationals. The American and British governments thus assumed the onus for continuing the repatriation policy. Galsworthy of the Foreign Office wrote, “We made up our minds long ago that we could not try to save Russians from their Government, however much we might wish to do so on purely humanitarian grounds.”

Apologists for the forced repatriation policy have claimed, without evidence, that “Stalin might have contemplated holding liberated British prisoners hostage.” Why then were hundreds of thousands of Russians forcibly repatriated after all the British and American prisoners liberated by the Red Army in eastern Germany were returned to the West? 

Tolstoy believed that the Allied diplomats wanted to continue to co-operate with the Soviets in building a new post-war world order. “Suggestions that the Soviet Union could represent a potential threat, however ably presented, were ridiculed … Foreign Office officials held that Stalin’s intentions towards the West were beneficent, and that to work in cooperation with him was … essential to British interests. The fate of the Russians whose return they enforced was an unfortunate but unavoidable sacrifice to the greater aim.”

Nikolai Tolstoy has proven that the British were guilty of flouting the principles of British law and the Geneva Convention. The one shortcoming of the book is Tolstoy’s lack of emphasis on the role played by the United States government in the repatriation policy. Despite this flaw, Tolstoy has written a book which sheds considerable new light on one of the most tragic episodes of the twentieth century.

From The Journal of Historical Review, Winter 1980 (Vol. 1, No. 4), pages 371-376.

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Amazon Review by John Wear 

“Victims of Yalta” by Nikolai Tolstoy tells the story of over three million Russians stranded in Allied-controlled territory at the end of World War II. Some of these Russians were prisoners of war (POWs), while others were anti-Communist fighters who had fought on the side of Germany. In a secret agreement later confirmed by Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, and Joseph Stalin at Yalta, these Russian soldiers were condemned to be sent back without choice to the USSR. Knowing that torture and death lay ahead of them, many of these Russians chose to end their own lives before returning to the Soviet Union.

Soviet prisoners at German camps who were to be repatriated to the Soviet Union after the war often begged to be shot on the spot rather than be delivered into the hands of the Soviet NKVD. Other Soviet prisoners at German camps committed suicide so as not to be tortured and executed by the Soviets. A shock force of 500 American and Polish guards was required at Dachau to forcibly repatriate the first group of Soviet prisoners to the Soviet Union. What followed is described on page 355 of Tolstoy’s book in a report submitted to Robert Murphy:

Conforming to agreements with the Soviets, an attempt was made to entrain 399 former Russian soldiers who had been captured in German uniform, from the assembly center at Dachau on Saturday, January 19 [1946].

All of these men refused to entrain. They begged to be shot. They resisted entrainment by taking off their clothing and refusing to leave their quarters. It was necessary to use tear-gas and some force to drive them out. Tear-gas forced them out of the building into the snow where those who had cut and stabbed themselves fell exhausted and bleeding in the snow. Nine men hanged themselves and one had stabbed himself to death and one other who had stabbed himself subsequently died; while 20 others are still in the hospital from self-inflicted wounds. The entrainment was finally effected of 368 men who were set off accompanied by a Russian liaison officer on a train carrying American guards. Six men escaped en route.

The report ended: “The incident was shocking. There is considerable dissatisfaction on the part of the American officers and men that they are being required by the American Government to repatriate these Russians…” Thus, for most Soviet POWs, being shot in a German concentration camp was far preferable to being tortured and executed on their return to the Soviet Union.

“Victims of Yalta” also explains on pages 33-35 that Stalin abandoned all Soviet POWs during the war. The Soviet Union was not a party to The Hague Conventions. Nor was the Soviet Union a signatory of the Geneva Convention of 1929, which defined more precisely the conditions to be accorded POWs. Germany nevertheless approached the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) immediately after war broke out with the Soviet Union to attempt to regulate the conditions of prisoners on both sides. The ICRC contacted Soviet ambassadors in London and Sweden, but the Soviet leaders in Moscow refused to cooperate. Germany also sent lists of their Russian prisoners to the Soviet government until September 1941. The German government eventually stopped sending these lists in response to the Soviet Union’s refusal to reciprocate.

Over the winter Germany made further efforts to establish relations with the Soviets in an attempt to introduce the provisions of The Hague and Geneva Conventions concerning POWs. Germany was rebuffed again. Hitler himself made an appeal to Stalin for prisoners’ postal services and urged Red Cross inspection of the camps. Stalin responded: “There are no Russian prisoners of war. The Russian soldier fights on till death. If he chooses to become a prisoner, he is automatically excluded from the Russian community. We are not interested in a postal service only for Germans.”

The death of millions of Russian POWs in German captivity constitutes one of the major tragedies of the Second World War. However, much of the blame for the terrible fate of these Soviet soldiers was due to the inflexibly cruel policies of Joseph Stalin. A major portion of the Soviet POWs who died from hunger could have been saved had Stalin not called them traitors and denied them the right to live. By preventing the ICRC from distributing food to the Soviet POWs in German captivity, Stalin needlessly caused the death of a large percentage of these Soviet POWs.

A Red Army sergeant who was captured by the Germans when his unconscious body was dug out from the ruins of Odessa later joined Gen. Andrei Vlasov’s Russian Liberation Army. The sergeant bitterly complains on page 41 of the Soviet Union’s betrayal of its POWs:

Tell me, why did the Soviet Government forsake us? Why did it forsake millions of prisoners? We saw prisoners of all nationalities, and they were taken care of. Through the Red Cross they received parcels and letters from home; only the Russians received nothing. In Kassel I saw American Negro prisoners, and they shared their cakes and chocolates with us. Then why didn’t the Soviet Government, which we considered our own, send us at least some plain hard tack?… Hadn’t we fought? Hadn’t we defended the Government? Hadn’t we fought for our country? If Stalin refused to have anything to do with us, we didn’t want to have anything to do with Stalin!

Tolstoy in “Victims of Yalta” produces strong arguments that the repatriation of Soviet POWs was not necessary. Tolstoy states on page 410, “So strong was the European tradition of granting political asylum that no nation before 1939 appears even to have contemplated compelling the return home of citizens whose lives or liberty might be endangered.” Tragically, however, British and American leaders forced repatriation of Soviet POWs in order to maintain good relations with Stalin and the Soviet Union. The repatriation of the Soviet POWs can be seen as a policy of appeasement that at the time was thought to be in the best interests of the United States and Great Britain.

I recommend “Victims of Yalta” to anyone interested in the history of World War II and its aftermath. The story is tragic and disturbing, but historically important and frequently unreported by historians.