Victims of Yalta

Last updated
Victims of Yalta
VictimsOfYalta.jpg
First UK edition
AuthorNikolai Tolstoy
LanguageEnglish
Publisher Hodder & Stoughton (UK)
Publication date
1977

Victims of Yalta (British title) or The Secret Betrayal (American title) is a 1977 book by Nikolai Tolstoy that chronicles the fate of Soviet citizens who had been under German control during World War II and at its end fallen into the hands of the Western Allies. According to the secret Moscow agreement from 1944 that was confirmed at the 1945 Yalta conference, all citizens of the Soviet Union were to be repatriated without choice—a death sentence for many by execution or extermination through labour.

Contents

Contents

Tolstoy describes the various groups of over five million Russians who had fallen into German hands. These include prisoners of war, forced laborers ( Ostarbeiter ), collaborators, refugees, émigrés, and anti-communists. Conditions in Germany for Soviet prisoners were appalling and their mortality rate high, making it attractive for many to join laborers, Russian auxiliary troops, or the Russian Liberation Army (ROA). The situation for Russian soldiers was complicated by the stance of the Soviet government that rejected efforts by the International Red Cross to intervene and considered anyone who had surrendered to the enemy a traitor. The Moscow conference of 1944 and the Yalta agreement laid the groundwork for the participation of the British and American governments to support the repatriation program of the Soviet government. Tolstoy was especially critical of Anthony Eden's role in trying to appease the Soviets.

In his book, Tolstoy describes the fate of various groups:

While Tolstoy primarily discusses the reaction of the British and Americans to the Soviet requests for repatriation, he also describes the actions of other governments. Repatriation programs were enacted in Belgium, Finland, France, Holland, Norway, Sweden, and Switzerland. The only country known to have resisted requests to force unwilling Russians to become repatriated was Liechtenstein. [7] He discusses reasons why governments were willing participants in the repatriation program, even when it was obvious that many Russians did not wish to return and that the fate of repatriates was death, torture, or forced labor. One issue for Western Allies was reciprocity, namely concern for their prisoners who had fallen into Soviet hands. While Tolstoy had access to British documents that were opened 30 years after World War II, he indicates Soviet documents remained sealed. Generally, on their side, agents from NKVD or SMERSH conducted the handling of the repatriates. Tolstoy, however, also obtained information from survivors and defectors. According to his estimate, based on data of a former NKVD officer, a total of 5.5 million Russians were repatriated from formerly occupied areas; of these 20% either received a death sentence or a 25-year labor camp sentence, 15–20% received sentences of 5 to 10 years, 10% were exiled for 6 years or more, 15% worked as conscripts in assigned areas and not allowed to return home subsequently, and 15–20% were allowed to return home but remained ostracized. [8] The remainder was "wastage", that is people who died in transit, got lost, or escaped.

Tolstoy estimates that overall, two or more million Soviet nationals were repatriated. [9] Repatriation efforts were most ardently followed by the British, while American forces were conciliatory with Soviet demands but Tolstoy noted increasing reluctance. While the Soviet government also attempted to "repatriate" people of countries it conquered in and after 1939, the Western Allies resisted returning possibly millions of people from Bessarabia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland.

Reactions

In the American edition that appeared after the British one, Tolstoy added a postscript that indicates some initial responses to the book and added some additional notes. Tolstoy followed his investigations with Stalin's Secret War (1981) and The Minister and the Massacres (1986). In these books, he deals more with the issue that in May 1945 British forces in Carinthia handed over emigres from Russia who were not Soviet citizens and, in the latter, chronicles also the British release of the anti-communist Slovenes and Croats to Josip Broz Tito's Yugoslav government. The last of the three books was particularly controversial, and it led to a 1989 libel suit in which Lord Aldington prevailed against Tolstoy’s charge that he was a "war criminal".

Alistair Horne, Macmillan's biographer, describes Victims of Yalta as "an honorable, and profoundly disturbing book which pulled no punches", but he was highly critical of Tolstoy's follow-up books, arguing that their increasing stridency and tendency to twist the evidence to fit a preconceived theory effectively vitiated them as serious works of history. Horne also notes that Macmillan, then 90, felt he was too old to initiate a suit to defend himself. Horne's final judgement is that fresh evidence, uncovered after the publication of Victims of Yalta, proves Tolstoy's notion of a conspiracy was not just wrong-headed, but outright wrong. [10]

See also

Related Research Articles

Yalta Conference World War II allies discussing postwar reorganization

The Yalta Conference, also known as the Crimea Conference and code-named Argonaut, held February 4–11, 1945, was the World War II meeting of the heads of government of the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union to discuss the postwar reorganization of Germany and Europe. The three states were represented by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Premier Joseph Stalin, respectively. The conference was held near Yalta in Crimea, Soviet Union, within the Livadia, Yusupov, and Vorontsov Palaces.

Operation Keelhaul was a forced repatriation of former Soviet Armed Forces POWs of Germany to the Soviet Union, carried out in Northern Italy by British and American forces between 14 August 1946 and 9 May 1947. Anti-communist Yugoslavs and Hungarians were also forcibly repatriated to their respective governments.

End of World War II in Europe Final battles as well as the surrender by Nazi Germany

The final battles of the European Theatre of World War II, as well as the overall surrender of Nazi Germany to the Allies, took place in late April and early May 1945.

Nikolai Tolstoy British-Russian nobleman, writer, and politician

Count Nikolai Dmitrievich Tolstoy-Miloslavsky is a Russo-British monarchist and historian who writes under the name Nikolai Tolstoy. He is a former parliamentary candidate of the UK Independence Party and is the current nominal head of the House of Tolstoy, a Russian noble family.

Disarmed Enemy Forces Redesignation of Prisoners of War to avoid Geneva Convention responsibilities

Disarmed Enemy Forces was a US designation for soldiers who surrendered to an adversary after hostilities ended, and for those POWs who had already surrendered and were held in camps in occupied German territory at the time. It was General Dwight D. Eisenhower's designation of German prisoners in post-World War II occupied Germany.

The Bleiburg repatriations occurred in May 1945, at the end of World War II in Europe. Tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians associated with the Axis powers fled Yugoslavia to Austria as the Soviet Union and Yugoslav Partisans took control. When they reached Austria, the British refused to accept their surrender and directed them to the Partisans instead. The prisoners of war were subjected to forced marches, together with columns captured by other Partisans in Yugoslavia. Tens of thousands were executed; others were taken to forced labor camps, where more died from harsh conditions. The events are named for the Carinthian border town of Bleiburg, where the initial repatriation was carried out.

Helmuth von Pannwitz

Helmuth von Pannwitz was a German general who was a cavalry officer during the First and the Second World Wars. Later he became a Lieutenant General of the Wehrmacht, a SS-Obergruppenführer of the Waffen-SS, and Feldataman of the XV SS Cossack Cavalry Corps. In 1947 he was tried for war crimes under Ukase 43 by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union, sentenced to death on 16 January 1947 and executed in Lefortovo Prison the same day. He was rehabilitated by a military prosecutor in Moscow in April 1996. In June 2001, however, the reversal of the conviction of Pannwitz was overturned and his conviction was reinstated.

Forced labor of Germans in the Soviet Union

Forced labor of Germans in the Soviet Union was considered by the Soviet Union to be part of German war reparations for the damage inflicted by Nazi Germany on the Soviet Union during the Axis-Soviet campaigns (1941-1945) of World War II. Soviet authorities deported German civilians from Germany and Eastern Europe to the USSR after World War II as forced laborers, while ethnic Germans living in the USSR were deported during World War II and conscripted for forced labor. German prisoners of war were also used as a source of forced labor during and after the war by the Soviet Union and by the Western Allies.

The Repatriation of Cossacks occurred when Cossacks, ethnic Russians and Ukrainians who were against the Soviet Union, were handed over by British and American forces to the Soviet Union after the Second World War. The repatriations were agreed to in the Yalta Conference; Joseph Stalin claimed the repatriated people were Soviet citizens as of 1939, although many of them had left Russia before or soon after the end of the Russian Civil War or had been born abroad.

Charles Keightley

General Sir Charles Frederic Keightley, was a British Army officer during and following the Second World War. After serving with distinction during the Second World War – becoming the army's youngest corps commander – he had a distinguished postwar career and was the Governor of Gibraltar from 1958 to 1962.

<i>Ostarbeiter</i>

Ostarbeiter was a Nazi German designation for foreign slave workers gathered from occupied Central and Eastern Europe to perform forced labor in Germany during World War II. The Germans started deporting civilians at the beginning of the war and began doing so at unprecedented levels following Operation Barbarossa in 1941. They apprehended Ostarbeiter from the newly-formed German districts of Reichskommissariat Ukraine, District of Galicia, and Reichskommissariat Ostland. These areas comprised German-occupied Poland and the conquered territories of the Soviet Union. According to Pavel Polian, over 50% of Ostarbeiters were formerly Soviet subjects originating from the territory of modern-day Ukraine, followed by Polish women workers. Eastern workers included ethnic Ukrainians, Poles, Belarusians, Russians, Tatars, and others. Estimates of the number of Ostarbeiter range between 3 million and 5.5 million.

162nd Turkestan Division

The 162nd Turkistan Division was a military division that was formed by the German Army during the Second World War. It drew its men from prisoners of war who came from the Caucasus and from Turkic lands further east.

German prisoners of war in the Soviet Union

Approximately three million German prisoners of war were captured by the Soviet Union during World War II, most of them during the great advances of the Red Army in the last year of the war. The POWs were employed as forced labor in the Soviet wartime economy and post-war reconstruction. By 1950 almost all surviving POWs had been released, with the last prisoner returning from the USSR in 1956. According to Soviet records 381,067 German Wehrmacht POWs died in NKVD camps.

Forced labor of Germans after World War II

In the years following World War II, large numbers of German civilians and captured soldiers were forced into labor by the Allied forces. The topic of using Germans as forced labor for reparations was first broached at the Tehran conference in 1943, where Soviet premier Joseph Stalin demanded 4,000,000 German workers.

<i>The Minister and the Massacres</i>

The Minister and the Massacres (1986) is a history written by Nikolai Tolstoy about the 1945 repatriations of Croatian soldiers and civilians and Cossacks, who had crossed into Austria seeking refuge from the Red Army and Partisans who had taken control in Yugoslavia. He criticized the British repatriation of collaborationist troops to Josip Broz Tito's Yugoslav government, attributing the decisions to Harold Macmillan, then UK minister of the Mediterranean, and Lord Aldington. Tolstoy is among historians who say numerous massacres of such soldiers took place after their repatriation. His conclusions about leading British officials were criticized in turn.

Some Soviet prisoners of war who survived German captivity during World War II were accused by the Soviet authorities of collaboration with the Nazis or branded as traitors under Order No. 270, which prohibited any soldier from surrendering.

NKVD screening and filtration camps, originally known as NKVD special-purpose camps / NKVD special camps, were camps for the screening of the Soviet soldiers returned from enemy imprisonment or encirclement. By the end of World War II they handled screening of all people from the Soviet territories occupied by Nazi Germany. The NKVD special-purpose camps were established by NKVD Order No. 001735 of December 28, 1941, titled "О создании специальных лагерей для бывших военнослужащих Красной Армии, находившихся в плену и в окружении противника". By NKVD Order No. 00100 of February 20, 1945, they were renamed to "проверочно-фильтрационные лагеря". Surviving POWs, about 1.5 million, repatriated Ostarbeiter, and other displaced persons, totally more than 4,000,000 people were sent to special NKVD filtration camps. By 1946, 80% civilians and 20% of PoWs were freed, 5% of civilians, and 43% of PoWs re-drafted, 10% of civilians and 22% of PoWs were sent to labor battalions, and 2% of civilians and 15% of the PoWs transferred to the NKVD, i.e. the Gulag.

<i>Twelve Responses to Tragedy</i>

Twelve Responses to Tragedy, or the Yalta Memorial, is a memorial located in the Yalta Memorial Garden on Cromwell Road in South Kensington in west London. The memorial commemorates people displaced as a result of the Yalta Conference at the conclusion of the Second World War. Created by the British sculptor Angela Conner, the work consists of twelve bronze busts atop a stone base. The memorial was dedicated in 1986 to replace a previous memorial from 1982 that had been repeatedly damaged by vandalism.

Anthony Wilson Cowgill was a British soldier, engineer and researcher. After a 30-year career in the Army he worked for Rolls-Royce and set up a company offering information and access to government. Past retirement age he initiated his own private inquiry into the Repatriation of Cossacks after World War II, and published the English texts of European Union treaties.

Vyacheslav Grigorievich Naumenko was a Kuban Cossack leader and historian.

References

  1. ↑ Tolstoy (1977) , pp. 42ff, 113ff
  2. ↑ Tolstoy (1977) , pp. 150ff, 176ff, 198ff
  3. ↑ Tolstoy (1977) , pp. 223ff
  4. ↑ Tolstoy (1977) , pp. 278ff
  5. ↑ Tolstoy (1977) , pp. 304ff
  6. ↑ Tolstoy (1977) , pp. 361ff
  7. ↑ Tolstoy (1977) , pp. 388ff
  8. ↑ Tolstoy (1977) , p. 409
  9. ↑ Tolstoy (1977) , p. 322
  10. ↑ Horne (1990)

Bibliography

  • Horne, Alistair (1990). "The unquiet graves of Yalta: forty-five years ago, seventy thousand Cossacks and Yugoslavs were "repatriated" to torture, slavery and death at the hands of Stalin and Tito. Was this a war crime?". National Review. 42 (2): 27–33.CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)
  • Tolstoy, Nikolai (1977). The Secret Betrayal. Charles Scribner's Sons. ISBN   0-684-15635-0.CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.