Repatriation of Cossacks after World War II

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 refers to the forced repatriation of Cossacks and ethnic Russians, who were allied to Nazi Germany during the Second World War, to the Soviet Union as had been agreed to in the Yalta Conference. Many of the repatriated were never Soviet citizens (having left Russia before the end of the Russian Civil War) or were born abroad.

Ostensibly, the people to be repatriated were described as fascists who had fought the Allies in the service to the Axis powers. However, a significant portion of repatriates including non-combatants and civilians. The Cossacks who fought against the Allies did not see their war service as treason of the Russian motherland, but as an episode in the Russian Revolution of 1917, part of their continuing fight against the Communist government in Moscow in particular and Bolshevism in general. This event, and others resulting from Yalta, is referred to by Nikolai Tolstoy as the "Secret Betrayal," because it went unpublished in the West. The repatriation at Lienz, Austria, is the most recognized and studied of these events, because the Cossacks there used physical force to resist the Allies.

Background

File:Andrei Shkuro.jpg

Andrei Shkuro, a talented commander in Anton Denikin's Volunteer Army during the Russian Civil War, was famously quoted saying: With the devil, but against Bolshevism about allying the Cossack emigrants with Nazi Germany.

During the Russian Civil War, thousands of Russians who were part of the Volunteer Army and the White movement fought against the Bolshevik Red Army. A significant portion of the White movement was made from Cossack Hosts (of which there were 11 upon the start of the First World War), which formed the strongest base for the anti-Bolshevik resistance. For this Trotsky imposed collective punishment on the Cossacks (Decossackization), which caused many, in particular the Don and Kuban Cossacks to flee Russia and settle in the Balkans forming the ROVS.

For those Cossacks that remained in Russia, most had to endure more than a decade of constant repressions, examples of which include portioning of their land to newly-created autonomies (Terek, Ural and Semirechye hosts), forced cultural assimilation (Ukrainization of the Kuban Host) along with repressions against the Russian Orthodox Church, deportations, and ultimately famine in 1933. Only after the publishing of Mikhail Sholokhov's The Quiet Don did repressions cease, and in turn some of the previous privileges were re-instated for the Cossacks.

World War II

File:CossackWW2-03.jpg

Russian Cossacks in Wehrmacht

On June 22, 1941, Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union, prompting the Soviet entrance to World War II. During the attack, some members of the ROVS, in particular Cossack émigré Pyotr Krasnov and Andrei Shkuro requested permission from Goebbels to fight along with Nazi Germany. Goebbels welcomed the idea and by 1942, Krasnov and Shkuro had mustered a Cossack force, largely from Soviet POWs in German captivity. These forces fell under the overall command of Helmuth von Pannwitz.

The military units received recognition and wore their own insignia and uniforms. In the following year, the 1st Cossack Division was created. Although the Cossack units were formed to fight the Bolsheviks, by the time they were formed the Red Army had liberated most of the German-held territory, and they were instead sent to the Balkans to fight Yugoslav Partisans under command of Joseph Tito. By war's end, the Waffen-SS controlled the Cossack units.

Effect of Yalta and Tehran Conferences

The Big three of WWII at the Yalta conference.

The agreements of the Yalta and Tehran Conferences signed by President Roosevelt, Premier Joseph Stalin, and Prime Minister Churchill had a great impact upon the fates of the Cossacks who chose not to fight for the Soviet Union, because many of them were POWs in German military prisoner of war camps.

Premier Stalin demanded the repatriation of every Soviet citizen held prisoner; neither the British nor the American governments contested that, largely due to concerns that the Soviets would delay or refuse to repatriate Allied prisoners of war liberated from German POW camps by the Red Army. After Yalta, Churchill questioned Stalin, asking: Did they Cossacks and other minorities fight against us? Stalin replied: they fought with ferocity, not to say savagery, for the Germans. That was true with respect to most Cossacks who fought against the Soviet Union, most notably the Tatar Caucasian Division. However, those few Cossacks who fought the Western Allies usually did it reluctantly.

Per the Yalta and Tehran agreements, the Allies (i.e. the British and the Americans) forcibly rendered the Cossacks to the Red Army for repatriation to the U.S.S.R. 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 and posts, their administration, churches, schools, and military units.

When the Allies progressed from central Italy to the Italian Alps, Italian partisans under General Contini ordered the Cossacks to leave Carnia and go to north to Austria. There, on the Drava River, near Lienz, the British army imprisoned the Cossacks in a hasty internment camp. For a few days the British fed them, creating the impression that they understood the political problem of this fascist group. The Red Army's advance units were only a few miles east, rapidly advancing to contact the Allies. Most Cossacks began to believe that under British protection, they were safe from repatriation to the Soviet Union.

On May 28, 1945, two thousand and forty six Cossack officers and generals, including the cavalry Generals Pyotr Krasnov, Andrei Shkuro, and Kelech-Giray, were disarmed and transported in British cars and trucks to a nearby Red Army-held town. There they were handed over to the commanding Red Army 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. Some were executed immediately; the higher-ranking officers were tried in Moscow and then executed. Most notably, General Pyotr Krasnov was hanged in a public square. Von Pannwitz, a German, chose to accompany the Cossacks in their Soviet repatriation, and was executed with five Cossack generals and atamans in Moscow in 1947.

On June 1, 1945, the British forced an additional thirty-two thousand Cossacks, including women and children, into cattle rail cars and trucks, and rendered to the Red Army for Soviet repatriation. Similar repatriations occurred that year in the American zones of occupation in Austria and Germany. The majority of Cossacks were sent to labor camps in the far North and Siberia. Most died; however, some escaped or lived until they were given amnesty by Moscow (see below). Some two million people were repatriated to the Soviet Union following WWII. While the exact number of repatriated Cossacks is unknown, most modern historians estimate between 45,000-50,000; other estimates (usually not widely accepted) range between 15,000–150,000.

Lienz

On 28 May, 1945, the British Army arrived in Lienz, Austria at camp Peggetz, where there were more than two thousand seven hundred Cossacks. They arrived to invite the Cossacks to an important conference with British officials, and told them they would return to Lienz by six o'clock that evening. Some Cossacks worried, but the British assured 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. As repatriations went, the Lienz Cossack repatriation was exceptional because the Cossacks forcefully resisted the repatriation, feeling that the British had committed crimes worse than those committed by the Gestapo or NKVD. In Operation Keelhaul (1973), by Julius Epstein, 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.

The British drove two thousand seven hundred forty-nine Cossacks (including 2,201 officers) to a prison where the Soviets took custody of them. There is a memorial commemorating General von Pannwitz and soldiers of the XVth Cossack Cavalry Corps Killed in action or died as POWs in Tristach.

Other locations

Judenburg

On June 1 and June 2, 18,000 Cosacks were handed over to the Soviets near the town of Judenburg in Austria. Of those handed, around 10 officers and 50 to 60 Cossacks survived by breaking the guards' cordon with the use of hand grenades, and hiding in the nearby woods.

Fort Dix

While this event is often viewed as occurring only on European soil, it also occurred across the Atlantic Ocean at Fort Dix, New Jersey. 154 people were deported to the Soviet Union from Fort Dix after World War II, 3 committed suicide on American soil and 7 people were injured. The events that took place were described by Julius Epstein:

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.

Aftermath

The Cossacks, and particularly their officers who were more politically aware, had never doubted that this would be the fate of those who were handed back to Soviet Russia. They believed that the British would have related to their fight against communism, not knowing that their fates had already been decided by the Yalta Conference. When they discovered that they would be repatriated, as according to the Yalta Conference, many escaped, some probably with the aid of their Allied captors, some passively resisted, and hundreds of others committed suicide. Of the many Cossacks that succeeded in fleeing these extraditions, most hid themselves in the forests and mountains; many were saved by the local German population; but the greatest number of the escapees found safety and salvation in changing their identity, disguising themselves as Ukrainians, Latvians, Poles, Yugoslavians, Turks, Armenians and Ethiopians. Eventually they were admitted into the camps for Displaced Persons. Under such assumed nationalities and names, a considerable number of them went to the United States under the Displaced Persons Act. Many others left the Displaced Person camps for any land which would open its doors to them. A great number of these people remained in Germany, Austria, France, and Italy under assumed identities. Thousands of Cossacks chose to conceal their identity until the fall of Communism in the Soviet Union in 1991.

Amnesty

After the death of Stalin and the resulting De-Stalinization efforts, a partial amnesty for inmates of the labour camps was declared on March 27, 1953, and further expanded on September 17, 1955. However some political crimes were specifically omitted. For example, those convicted of Section 58.1(c) of the Criminal Code, which stipulates that in the event of flight abroad by a person in military service, all adult members of his family who abetted him or knew about the contemplated flight are subject to imprisonment of 5 to 10 years; all dependents who did not know of the planned flight are subject to exile in Siberia for 5 years, were not given amnesty.

Memorials

File:Drau Graveyard.JPG

Photo of the Memorial in Lienz, Austria

A cemetery with 18 gravestones remains in Lienz as a memorial to the "Tragedy of the Drau."

In film

In the 1995 James Bond film GoldenEye, James Bond's fellow double-o agent, Alec Trevelyan, is a child of "Lienz Cossacks." His secret resentment of his parents' betrayal by the British (which resulted in his father killing himself and his mother) leads him to plot the total destruction of the United Kingdom.

See also

• Operation Keelhaul
• XVth 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, Vivien Leigh, Angela Lansbury, among others)

Further reading

• Catherine Andreyev (1987). Vlasov and the Russian Liberation Movement: Soviet Reality and Emigré 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)

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