Repatriation of Cossacks after WWII

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Operation Keelhaul/Cossack Repatriated
Part of the Aftermath of World War II
Date May 28, 1945 Location Lienz, Austria Result 45,000 - 50,000 repatriated Cossacks
Belligerents
Lienz Cossacks	Allied Forces
Strength
>50,000
Casualties and losses
45,000 - 50,000 repatriated

The Betrayal of the Cossacks, also known as the Tragedy of Drau and the Massacre of Cossacks at Lienz ^[1][2][3] denotes the forced repatriation to the USSR of the Cossacks and ethnic Russians who were allies of Nazi Germany during the Second World War.

The repatriations were agreed in the Yalta Conference; most of the repatriated people were Soviet citizens, although some claimed to have left Russia before the end of the Russian Civil War, or to have been born abroad.^[2][3] Those Cossacks and Russians were described as fascists who had fought the Allies in service to the Axis powers, yet the repatriations included their non-combatant folk (women, children, the aged). The Cossacks who fought the Allies did not see their war service as treason to the Russian motherland — but as an episode in the Russian Revolution of 1917, their continuing fight against the Communist Government in Moscow, especially, and against Bolshevism, in general. Nikolai Tolstoy describes this and other events resulting from the Yalta Conference, as the “Secret Betrayal”, for going unpublished in the West. In the history of the Cossack repatriations to the USSR, the British repatriation, at Lienz, Austria, is the most recognized and studied, because the Cossacks fought the British.

Contents 1 Background 2 The Second World War 3 Effect of Yalta and Tehran Conferences 4 Lienz 5 Other repatriations 5.1 Judenburg, Austria 5.2 Fort Dix, New Jersey, USA 6 Aftermath 6.1 Amnesty 6.2 Memorials 7 In cinema 8 See also 9 References 10 Further reading 11 External links

[edit] Background

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During the Russian Civil War (1917–23), thousands of Russians integral to the Volunteer Army and the White Movement fought the Bolshevik Red Army.^[2] Cossack Hosts (of which there were eleven at the start of the First World War, 1914–18), composed much of the White Movement, and so were the strongest counter-revolutionary force against the Bolshevik Government. For that, Trotsky imposed Decossackization, as collective punishment of the Cossacks, provoking many, especially the Don Cossacks and the Kuban Cossacks, to escape Russia for the Balkans, where they established the Russian All-Military Union, the ROVS.

The Cossacks who remained in Russia endured more than a decade of continual repression, i.e. the portioning of the lands of the Terek, Ural, and Semirechye hosts, and forced cultural assimilation, i.e. the Ukrainization of the Kuban Host,^{[citation needed]} and repression of the Russian Orthodox Church, deportation, and, ultimately, the Soviet famine of 1932-1933. The repressions ceased and some privileges were restored after publication of And Quiet Flows the Don (1934), by Mikhail Sholokhov.^[4]

[edit] The Second World War

On 22 June 1941, Nazi Germany attacked the USSR with Operation Barbarossa, thus including Russia to the Second World War. During the attack, some ROVS, especially the Cossack émigré generals Pyotr Krasnov and Andrei Shkuro asked Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels’s permission to fight besides Nazi Germany against Communist Russia. Goebbels welcomed their idea, and, by 1942, General Krasnov and General Shkuro had mustered a Cossack force — mostly from Red Army PoWs captured by the Wehrmacht — who would be under the command of General Helmuth von Pannwitz.^[5]

The Wehrmacht recognised the Cossacks as military units with their own uniforms and insignia; the 1st Cossack Division was established the next year. Although the Cossack units were formed to fight the Communists in Russia, by when they had been formed, the Red Army already had liberated most of the Nazi-occupied territory, so, they were deployed to the Balkans to fight the Communist Yugoslav Partisans commanded by Josip Broz Tito;^[6] by war’s end, the Waffen-SS controlled the Cossack units. Being imbued with extreme anti-Semitic ideology, Cossacks actively participated in the Holocaust, rounding up and executing local Jews at their area of operations and committing atrocities against civilians blamed for supporting partisans.

[edit] Effect of Yalta and Tehran Conferences

The agreements of the Yalta and Tehran conferences, signed by President Roosevelt, Premier Joseph Stalin, and Prime Minister Churchill, determined the fates of the Cossacks who did not fight for the USSR, because many were PoWs of the Nazis. Premier Stalin obtained Allied (British and American) agreement to the repatriation of every Soviet citizen held prisoner — because of they feared that the Soviets either might delay or refuse repatriation of the Allied PoWs whom the Red Army had liberated from Nazi PoW camps.^[7] After Yalta, Churchill questioned Stalin, asking, “Did the Cossacks and other minorities fight against us?” Stalin replied, “They fought with ferocity, not to say savagery, for the Germans” — true of most Cossacks who fought against the USSR, notably the Tatar Caucasian Division; however, the Cossacks who fought against the Western Allies reluctantly did so.^[7]

At war's end, General Krasnov and other Cossack leaders persuaded Hitler to allow civilians and non-combatant Cossacks to permanently settle in the sparsely settled Carnia, in the Italian Alps. The Cossacks moved there and established a refugee settlement, with several stanitzas (villages that they acquired by evicting the inhabitants wholesale) and posts, their administration, churches, schools, and military units^[8]. There, they fought the partisans and persecuted the local population, committing numerous atrocities^[9]. When the Allies progressed from central Italy to the Italian Alps, Italian partisans under General Contini ordered the Cossacks to leave Carnia, and go north, to Austria. There, on the Drava River, near Lienz, the British army imprisoned the Cossacks in a hastily established internment camp. For a few days, the British fed them, giving the Cossacks the impression that they understood the their problem as political refugees. Meantime, the Red Army’s advance units a few miles east — rapidly advancing to meet the Allies. Most Cossacks began believing that, under British protection, they were safe from repatriation to the USSR.

On 28 May 1945, the British army transported 2,046 disarmed Cossack officers and generals — including the cavalry Generals Pyotr Krasnov, Andrei Shkuro, and Kelech-Giray — to a nearby Red Army-held town. There they were handed over to the Red Army commanding general, who ordered them tried for treason. Many Cossack leaders had never been Soviet citizens, having fled revolutionary Russia in 1920, hence they could not be guilty of treason, nonetheless, some were executed immediately; the high-rank officers were tried in Moscow, and then executed — most notably, General Pyotr Krasnov was hanged in a public square. General Helmuth von Pannwitz, of the Wehrmacht, who was instrumental to the formation and leadership of the Cossacks taken from Nazi PoW camps to fight the USSR, decided to share the Cossacks’ Soviet repatriation, and was executed with five Cossack generals and atamans in Moscow in 1947.

On 1 June 1945, the British placed 32,000 Cossacks (with their women and children) into trains and trucks, and delivered them to the Red Army for repatriation to the USSR;^{[citation needed]} like repatriations occurred that year in the American occupation zones in Austria and Germany. Most Cossacks were sent to labour camps in far northern Russia and in Siberia, most died; however, some escaped, and others lived until Nikita Khruschev’s amnesty in the course of de-Stalinizing the USSR, (see below). In total, some two million people were repatriated to the USSR at the end of the Second World War,^[10] but historians calculate that the number of repatriated Cossacks is 45,000-50,000; others calculate (without consensus) some 15,000–150,000.

[edit] Lienz

On 28 May 1945, the British Army arrived at Camp Peggetz, in Lienz, where there were 2,479 Cossacks, including 2,201 officers and soldiers.^[10] They went to invite the Cossacks to an important conference with British officials, informing them that they would return to Lienz by six o’clock that evening; some Cossacks worried, but the British reassured them that everything was in order. One British officer told the Cossacks: “I assure you, on my word of honour as a British officer, that you are just going to a conference”.^[10] The Lienz Cossack repatriation was exceptional, because the Cossacks forcefully resisted their British repatriation to the USSR; a Cossack noted: “The NKVD or the Gestapo would have slain us with truncheons, the British did it with their word of honor.”

The first to commit suicide, by hanging, was the Cossack editor Evgenij Tarruski. The second was General Silkin, who shot himself. . . . The Cossacks refused to board the trucks. British soldiers [armed] with pistols and clubs began using their clubs, aiming at the heads of the prisoners. They first dragged the men out of the crowd, and threw them into the trucks. The men jumped out. They beat them again, and threw them onto the floor of the trucks. Again, they jumped out. The British then hit them with rifle butts until they lay unconscious, and threw them, like sacks of potatoes, in the trucks. — Operation Keelhaul (1973), by Julius Epstein.

The British transported the Cossacks to a prison where the Soviets assumed their custody. In the town of Tristach, Austria, there is a memorial commemorating General Helmuth von Pannwitz and soldiers of the XVth SS Cossack Cavalry Corps who were killed in action or died as PoWs.

[edit] Other repatriations

[edit] Judenburg, Austria

On the 1st and 2nd of June, 18,000 Cossacks were handed over to the Soviets near the town of Judenburg, Austria; of those in custody, some 10 officers and 50–60 Cossacks escaped the guards’ cordon with hand grenades, and hid in a nearby wood.^[1]

[edit] Fort Dix, New Jersey, USA

Although repatriations are thought to have occurred only in Europe, it also occurred in the USA, at Fort Dix, New Jersey, where 154 people were repatriated to the USSR after the Second World War; 3 suicided in the US, and 7 were injured.^[11][12] Julius Epstein described the scene:

First, they refused to leave their barracks when ordered to do so. The military police then used tear gas, and, half-dazed, the prisoners were driven under heavy guard to the harbor where they were forced to board a Soviet vessel. Here the two hundred immediately started to fight. They fought with their bare hands. They started — with considerable success — to destroy the ship's engines. . . . A sergeant . . . mixed barbiturates into their coffee. Soon, all of the prisoners fell into a deep, coma-like sleep. It was in this condition that the prisoners were brought to another Soviet boat for a speedy return to Stalin's hangmen.^[10]

[edit] Aftermath

The Cossack officers, more politically aware than the enlisted men, expected that repatriation to the USSR would be their ultimate fate. In the event, they believed that the British would have sympathised with their anti-Communism — yet were ignorant that their fates had been decided at the Yalta Conference. Upon discovering that they would be repatriated, many escaped, some probably aided by their Allied captors,^[7] some passively resisted, and others committed suicide. Cossacks who escaped repatriation, most hid in the forests and mountains; some were hidden by the local German populace; but most hid in different identities as Ukrainians, Latvians, Poles, Yugoslavians, Turks, Armenians, and Ethiopians. Eventually, they were admitted to Displaced Persons camps, under assumed names and nationalities; many emigrated to the USA per the Displaced Persons Act; others went to any country that would admit them, e.g. Germany, Austria, France, and Italy; most Cossacks hid their true national identity until the dissolution of the USSR in late 1991.

[edit] Amnesty

After the death of Josef Stalin (5 March 1953), Nikita Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization of the USSR conferred a partial amnesty for some labour camp inmates on 27 March 1953, then extended it on 17 September 1955. Yet, some specific political crimes were omitted from amnesty; people convicted under Section 58.1(c) of the Criminal Code, stipulating that in the event of a military man escaping Russia, every adult member of his family who abetted the escape or who knew of it is subject to 5–10 years’ imprisonment; every dependant who did not know of the escape is subject to 5 years’ Siberian exile.^[13]

[edit] Memorials

In Lienz, Austria, there is an eighteen-gravestone cemetery commemorating the “Tragedy of the Drau”.

[edit] In cinema

The plot of the James Bond film GoldenEye (1995) is propelled by the secret resentment of 00 Agent Alec Trevelyan, son of “Lienz Cossacks”, to plot the financial destruction of the UK, because of the British betrayal that caused his Cossack father to kill himself and his wife, rather than be repatriated to the USSR.

[edit] See also

• Operation Keelhaul
• XVth SS Cossack Cavalry Corps
• Russian Liberation Army
• Andrey Vlasov
• Helmuth von Pannwitz
• GoldenEye, a James Bond film in which the villain, Alec Trevelyan, is a descendant of Lienz Cossacks who bears a grudge against the United Kingdom
• Collaboration during World War II
• The Red Danube, a 1949 movie about British repatriation of civilians to the Soviet Union (stars Clark Gable, Janet Leigh, Angela Lansbury, among others)

[edit] References

[edit] Further reading

• Catherine Andreyev (1987). Vlasov and the Russian Liberation Movement: Soviet Reality and Émigré Theories. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-30545-4.
• Nikolai Tolstoy (1978). The Secret Betrayal. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. ISBN 0-684-15635-0.
• Nikolai Tolstoy (1981). Stalin's Secret War. London: Jonathan Cape. ISBN 0-224-01665-2.
• John Ure (2002). The Cossacks: An Illustrated History. London: Gerald Duckworth. ISBN 0-7156-3253-1.
• Samuel J. Newland (1991). Cossacks in the German Army 1941–1945, London: Franc Cass. ISBN 0-7146-3351-8.
• Nikolai Tolstoy (1986). The Minister and the massacres. London: Century Hutchinson Ltd. ISBN 0-09-164010-5
• Ian Mitchell (1997). The cost of a reputation. Lagavulin: Topical Books. ISBN 0-9531581-0-1.
• Józef Mackiewicz (1993). Kontra. London: Kontra. ISBN 0-907652-30-1.
• Harald Stadler/Martin Kofler/Karl C.Berger (2005). Flucht in die Hoffnungslosigkeit-Die Kosaken in Osttirol.Innsbruck.ISBN 3-7065-4152-1 8(in German)

[edit] External links

• Return to the scene of the crime Rutland Herald Online
• A FOOTNOTE TO YALTA by Jeremy Murray-Brown (Describes the extradition event in great detail, focusing on a 7 minute film-clip of the event.)
• Massacre of Cossacks at Lienz Letter written by Major General of the General Staff POLIAKOV to Lt. General S. V. Denisov