Repatriation of Cossacks after World War II
Their goal was to avoid capture and imprisonment by the Red Army for treason, and hoped for a better outcome by surrendering to the Western Allies, such as to the British and Americans.
As the Soviets emerged victorious in the civil war, many Cossack veterans, fearing reprisals and the Bolsheviks’ de-Cossackization policies, fled abroad to countries in Central and Western Europe.
[7] Despite this outpouring of support, Hitler and other top officials initially denied Cossack émigrés from having any military or political role in the war against the Soviets.
This group, known as "Cossachi Stan", migrated from southern Ukraine to Novogrudek (Byelorussia) and then to Tolmezzo (Italy), and was forced to withdraw to Lienz in Allied-occupied Austria, at the close of the war.
[11] It was in the context of the wish to remain on good terms with Stalin that, according to Edward Peterson, the US chose to hand over several hundred thousand German prisoners to the Soviet Union in May 1945 as a "gesture of friendship".
[12] Although the agreement for the deportation of all "Soviet" citizens did not include White Russian emigres who had fled during the Bolshevik Revolution before the establishment of the USSR, all Cossack prisoners of war were later demanded.
The Cossacks moved there and established garrisons and settlements, requisitioning houses by evicting the inhabitants, with several stanitsas and posts, their administration, churches, schools and military units.
[20] Brigadier Toby Low (later Lord Aldington), who was the chief of staff to the British forces, issued an order stating "individual cases will not be considered unless particularly pressed ...
In the town of Tristach, Austria, there was a memorial commemorating General von Pannwitz and the soldiers of the XV SS Cossack Cavalry Corps who were killed in action or died as POWs.
[25] Nikolai Tolstoy quotes a telegram by General Harold Alexander, sent to the Combined Chiefs of Staff, noting "50,000 Cossacks including 11,000 women, children and old men".
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.
[31] Thousands of Russians, many of them Cossacks, were transported at the height of armed hostilities in 1944 to Murmansk in an operation that also led to the sinking of the German battleship Tirpitz.
The cover of The East Came West featured an image taken from a Nazi propaganda poster showing a demonical ape dressed in a Red Army uniform surrounded by fire and brimstone reaching out towards Europe.
The subject of the repatriation was largely unknown in the English-speaking world until 1974 when Lord Bethell published his book The Last Secret, which was also turned into a BBC documentary that aired the same year.
[37] Bethell was critical of the repatriation, accusing the British government of "intentionally over-fulfilling" the Yalta agreement by handing over people who were not Soviet citizens, but was careful in his treatment of the evidence.
[42] Reflecting the increased popular interest in the subject of the repatriations, which had become by the early 1980s to be a symbol of western "pusillanimity" towards the Soviet Union, a monument was unveiled in London on 6 March 1982 to "all the victims of Yalta".
[43] John Joliffe, a conservative Catholic British intellectual whose fund-raising help build the monument accused "the British government and their advisors of merciless inhumanity", and ignoring the fact that Churchill was a Conservative went on to blame the repatriations on "the hypocrisy and feebleness of progressive leftists who turned a blind eye to the communist enslavement of Eastern Europe.
[44] In his article, Tolstoy alleged that on 13 May 1945 in a meeting in the Austrian city of Klagenfurt that Macmillan gave the orders to repatriate all Cossacks regardless if they were Soviet citizens or not.
[46] In 1986, Tolstoy followed up his 1983 article with the book The Minister and the Massacres alleging a conspiracy led by Macmillan to deliberately hand over refugees from the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia knowing full well they would be executed.
In November 1984, Macmillan gave a much publicized speech in which he called the privatization plans of the Thatcher government “selling off the family silver”, which made him into a hate figure for the "dry" Conservatives.
"[48] The question was rhetorical as the article accepted Tolstoy's charges against Macmillan and sought to link his "one nation conservatism" with a policy of weakness towards the Soviet Union.”[48] In 1985, a British businessman named Nigel Watts became involved in a lengthy and bitter dispute over an insurance claim for the previous ten years with the Sun Alliance insurance company, whose chairman was Lord Aldington.
accused Tolstoy of scholarly misconduct, writing that in May 1945 British policy in Austria was dictated by Operation Beehive, which entitled preparing for a possible war with Yugoslavia and perhaps the Soviet Union.
To help resolve the raging controversy, Brigadier Anthony Cowgill formed a committee consisting of himself; a former diplomat and "Russia hand" Lord Brimelow, and Christopher Booker, a journalist well known for his conservative views.
[36] Tolstoy retained a loyal set of defenders consisting of the Conservative MP Bernard Braine, the philosopher Roger Scruton, the journalist Chapman Pincher, the writer Nigel Nicolson, Lord Cranborne and from farther afield Solzhenitsyn, who was living in exile in the United States at the time.
[52] The Tolstoy vs. Aldington case attracted much publicity as the British journalist Hugo de Burgh wrote: "From 1989 to 1993 a historical investigation became news in tabloid and broadsheet media alike as argument raged over the merits of combatants in a struggle over who might have done what over a few days in 1945.
[54] In a column published in the Sunday Times on 21 October 1990, Robert Harris accused the Cowgill committee of a "whitewash", and maintained that Tolstoy's claims that Britain had willfully sent thousands of people to their deaths in the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia was still correct.
[54] By contrast, the journalist Daniel Johnson wrote on 19 October 1990: "As Cowgill shows, Macmillan was telling the truth; that he had merely advised officers on the ground that Allied policy under the Yalta agreement was to hand back the Cossacks and he had, like everybody else, had been unaware that a large number of them were Russian emigres.
In 1992, Sir Carol Mather, a veteran turned Conservative MP wrote in his memoirs Aftermath of War: Everyone Must Go Home that the overwhelming feeling shared by himself and other British Army officers in Austria in 1945 was that the Cossacks had willingly fought for Nazi Germany and had committed terrible atrocities against Italian civilians while fighting against Italian partisans in 1944–1945, meaning no-one had any sympathy for them.
"[59] Horne argued that the "absurd" sum awarded to Aldington had made Tolstoy into a "national martyr", and felt that the case showed a need for reforming English libel law.
[59] Booker noted that the BBC produced nine television or radio documentaries that largely accepted Tolstoy's allegations at face value, which he saw as an example of the "Cleverdick Culture".
