The Bad
A reading of Count Nikolai Tolstoy’s book, Victims of Yalta (London: Hodder and Stoughton), 1977 is beyond disturbing, as many Forum members have no doubt already discovered. It is the stuff of nightmares. Former Russian POW’s and displaced persons who were repatriated to the Soviet Union from Germany between 1945 and 1947 numbered more than five million persons, of whom an estimated two and a half million persons were deployed in slave-labour gangs. [1] As for those who had fought under Vlasov, they were refused prisoners’ rights by all parties concerned. The numerous accounts of violent, brutal repatriation of Russians by Western powers and attempted mass suicide by Russian POW’s, DP’s, and former German allies to avoid this fate are shocking in the extreme.
For example, on February 24, 1946, under the cover of night, a large body of U.S. guards carrying special, reinforced riot clubs, stealthily entered the barracks of the camp at Plattling, which camp housed 3,000 Russians. Immediately thereafter:
Presumably no medals were struck for this and similar actions. Troops of Great Britain and other victor nations also participated in sending Vlasov’s men to their deaths.…The stillness of the camp was broken by the shrieking blast of a whistle. Startled, Meandrov’s men woke and looked about them. At once a ghastly cacophony of yells burst from all around. Without any warning, and with accompanying shrieks and curses, the Americans began to lash with the bludgeons at each recumbent figure. ‘Mak snell! Mak snell!’ they shouted in pidgin German, driving the bewildered figures out of their beds, through the doorways and across to the camp gates. Anyone slow in scrambling from his bed was beaten ferociously until he too fled in his underclothes out into the night. At the gates stood a row of trucks, their engines humming, into which the prisoners were driven by their screaming guards. Off along darkened roads the speeding convoy clattered and swayed. There followed a hasty transfer to a train, and the journey was continued some hours later. The train rattled on towards the east…. Near the Czech frontier, beyond Zwiesel, the train halted in the dripping stillness of the Bavarian forest. Blue-capped troops were waiting; officers exchanged brief words through an interpreter, and the bruised and terrified men of Mendrov’s Division were shepherded down beside the railway track. Dazed, they stood in little groups amongst the puddles. The American guards, silent and awkward, jumped back into their carriages and prepared to make off. There was a brief hissing and clanking of pistons, and then the blank gaze of the Vlasov men watched swaying lights disappear back along the line.
The Americans returned to Plattling visibly shamefaced. Before their departure from the rendezvous in the forest, many had seen rows of bodies already hanging from the branches of nearby trees. On their return, even the SS men in a neighbouring compound lined the wire fence and railed at them for their behaviour. The Americans were too ashamed to reply. [2]
The Good
Very few nations performed with honour over the question of Russian repatriation, including the victors and neutral states, such as Sweden and Switzerland. Only tiny Liechtenstein, which in 1945 was a small, pastoral backwater with cows frequently to be seen in the streets of Vaduz, appeared to show any backbone at all.
On May 10, 1945, 494 men, women and children under the command of Maj. Gen. Holmston-Smyslovsky, late of His [Russian] Majesty’s Imperial Guards and at that time commander of the 1st Russian National Army, requested asylum. Liechtenstein’s Prince Franz-Josef II granted that asylum, though in so doing he eventually faced the personal, retaliatory loss of his enormous holdings in Bohemia.
With a population of barely 12,000 in 1945 and an annual state budget of SF 2,000,000, the Liechtensteiners paid SF 30,000 per month to support the refugees, and, in 1947, paid SF 500,000 to send them to a new life in Argentina.
As for Soviet threats and bullying, Prince Franz-Josef later told Count Tolstoy that an attitude of meekness was wasted on the Soviets. As the Prince put it:
Best wishes,If you talk toughly with the Soviets they are quite happy. That, after all, is the language they understand. [3]
Tim
Toronto
[1] Tolstoy, p. 428
[2] Ibid., p. 357
[3] Ibid., p. 394