Betrayal of the Cossacks
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Please see the discussion on the talk page. |
| Operation Keelhaul/Cossack Repatriated | |||||||
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| Part of Aftermath of WWII | |||||||
 Betrayal of Cossacks at Lienz Painting by S.G.Korolkoff |
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| Combatants | |||||||
| Lienz Cossacks | Allied Forces | ||||||
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| >50,000 | |||||||
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| 45,000 - 50,000 repatriated | |||||||
The Betrayal of Cossacks refers to the forced transfer of Cossacks who fought against Allied forces in World War Two to the Soviet Union after the war, including those who were never Soviet citizens (having left Russia before the end of the civil war).
This relatively little known event, as well as other events that are results of Yalta, is referred to by Nikolai Tolstoy as "The Secret Betrayal" because of its lack of exposure in the Western hemisphere. The most remembered of these events was that which took place in Lienz in Tyrol. It is the most remembered and studied because it is considered to be the bloodiest.
Contents |
[edit] Background
| Part of a series of articles on |
Cossacks |
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| Cossack hosts |
| Don · Ural · Terek · Kuban · Orenburg ·Astrakhan · Siberian · Baikal · Amur · Semirechye · Ussuri |
| Other groups |
| Azov · Black Sea · Bug · Caucasus Line · Danube· Hetmanate · Nekrasov · Persia · Turkey · Zaporozhia |
| History of the Cossacks |
| Treaty of Hadiach · Bulavin Rebellion · Betrayal of the Cossacks · XVth SS Cossack Cavalry Corps · 1st Cossack Division |
| Famous Cossacks |
| Semyon Budyonny · Pyotr Krasnov · Bohdan Khmelnytsky · Ivan Mazepa · Helmuth von Pannwitz · Stenka Razin · Ivan Sirko · Andrei Shkuro |
| Cossack terms |
| Ataman · Hetman · Papakhi · Plastun · Shashka · Stanitsa |
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During the Russian Revolution of 1917, thousands of Russians who had fought for the White Army and the Tsar against the Bolsheviks fled to western European countries and gained citizenship. Since they had fled Russia before it became the U.S.S.R they never claimed citizenship in Soviet Russia.
In June of 1941, the Soviet Union was attacked by Germany, prompting the Soviet Union's entrance into World War II. This created a conflict of interest among Cossacks in the Soviet Union. They could either fight with the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany or they could fight with Nazi Germany against the Soviet Union, which had liquidated the Cossack Republics and taken away many of their former freedoms.
The struggle of some Cossacks to liberate their homelands from the Bolsheviks brought them into the ranks of the German Army, with whose aid they hoped to regain their lost freedom. The Cossacks were first recruited by German commanders in the field. In 1942 their units received recognition and wore their own insignia. By early 1943 authorization was given to create the 1st Cossack Division which trained throughout the summer of 1943 to be sent to Yugoslavia to fight the Tito partisans. By the end of the war, the S.S. attempted to gain control of the Cossack Division and transfer the Cossacks under their structure. Despite the refusal of General Helmuth von Pannwith to enter the S.S. together with his division (from beginning 1945 enlarged to the XVth Cossack Cavalery Corps) the Corps was placed under SS administration in terms of replacements and supplies without actually making the Cossack units a part of the Waffen S.S. Von Pannwitz chose to accompany the Cossacks when they were repatriated by the British to the Soviet Union, and was executed with five other Cossack Generals and Atamans in Moscow in 1947. The Cossacks who wore German uniforms saw their service not as treason to the motherland, but as an episode in the Revolution of 1917, part of the ongoing struggle against Moscow and Communism.
[edit] Effect of Yalta and Tehran Conferences
The agreements of the Yalta and Tehran Conferences signed by President Roosevelt, Josef Stalin and Prime Minister Churchill had an enormous impact on the Cossacks who chose not to fight for the Soviet Union because many of them were P.O.W.s in German camps. Stalin demanded that all Russian and Soviet citizens held in prisons be handed over to the Soviet Union. This was not contested by the British or American governments because they felt that many of their citizens would be freed by the Soviet Union and they believed that nothing should delay that freedom. After Yalta, Churchill did question Stalin asking "Did they (cossacks and other minorities) fight against us?". Stalin replied "they fought with ferocity, not to say savagery, for the Germans." This was true to many Cossacks who had fought against the Soviet Union during the war, most notably a Tatar Caucasian Division who boasted of the description, than to the purely Cossack units, but few fought against the non-Soviet Allies. None the less, they were understood to be Nazi collaborators and treated accordingly.
In accordance with these agreements, the Cossacks were forcibly surrendered by the Allies to the Red Army and repatriated to the Soviet Union. Toward the end of the war General Krasnov and other Cossack leaders persuaded Hitler and his authorities to allow all civilians and non-fighting Cossacks to settle on a permanent basis in the sparsely settled foothills of the Italian Alps, more precisely in Carnia. The Cossacks moved there in numbers and established a refugee settlement, with several stanitzas and posts, their administration, churches, schools and defense units. When the victorious Allies moved from central Italy into the Italian Alps, Italian partisans under General Contini ordered the Cossacks to leave their new homes and to retreat northward, into Austria. There, on the banks of the Drava River, near Lienz, the British army units caught up with the Cossacks and interned them in a hastily arranged camp. For a few days the British fed these refugees and created the impression that they understood the unique problem of this group, and could see the reason for their fear and uneasiness. The advance units of the Red Army were only a few miles to the east, rapidly surging to establish contact with the Allies. Many of the Cossacks began to believe that, under the protection of the British, they were safe from being handed over to the Soviet Union.
On May 28, 1945, two thousand and forty six Cossack officers and generals, including the cavalry leaders, Generals Pyotr Krasnov, Andrei Shkuro and Kiletch-Girey, were disarmed and carried in British cars and trucks to a neighboring town held by the Red Army. There they were surrendered to the Red Army general, who ordered that they stand trial for treason. Many of these Cossack leaders had never been citizens of the Soviet Union, being the men who had left Russia in 1920 and therefore not guilty of any treason. Some of these men were executed immediately; the higher ranking officers were subjected to trials at Moscow and were also executed. Most notably, General Krasnov was hanged in a public square. The bulk of this group was sent to labor camps in the Far North and Siberia, most of whom died. However, some escaped or lived until they were given freedom from Moscow who, no longer under Stalin, declared a partial amnesty for inmates of slave camps on March 27, 1953, and again on September 17, 1955, some political crimes were specifically omitted. Section 58.1(c) of the Criminal Code, for example, was excluded. This section, 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. On June 1, 1945, the rank and file of this group of Cossacks, 32,000 men, women and children were similarly herded by the British into cattle cars and trucks, and delivered to the Bolsheviks to be taken back to the Soviet Union. There they were to work, and in many cases die, as prisoners convicted of treason.
Similar scenes were enacted in the same year in the American Zone of Occupation, in Austria and Germany. A total of two million people were repatriated to the Soviet Union following WWII.[1] While the exact number of Cossacks who were repatriated is not known, most modern historians estimate it to be 45,000-50,000. Some other estimates, although usually not as widely accepted, have ranged from 15,000 up to 150,000.
[edit] Lienz
The British arrived in Lienz, where over 2,700 Cossacks resided, on 28 May 1945. They arrived to tell the Cossacks that they were invited to an important British conference with British officials and would return to Lienz by 6 o'clock that evening. Some Cossacks began to worry but were assured by the British that everything would be fine. One British officer said to the Cossacks "I assure you on my word of honor as a British officer that you are just going to a conference."[1] The repatriation that happened in Lienz was an exceptional situation because the Cossacks put up resistance to the repatriation and felt that the British committed crimes worse than those by the Gestapo or NKVD. According to Julius Epstein in his 1973 book Operation Keelhaul, one 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 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.|Cossack officer|Operation Keelhaul (1973), Julius Epstein[1]
In total 2,749 Cossacks, including 2,201 officers, were driven to a prison and told by British officials that Soviet authorities would soon pick them up.
[edit] Other locations
[edit] Fort Dix, New Jersey, United States
While this event is often viewed as occurring only on European soil, it also occurred across the Atlantic Ocean at Fort Dix, New Jersey. Andrey Vlasov, a man who repeatedly voiced objections against Nazism and communism, was one of the men captured by American forces. His conversation with his American captor was described by Sven Steenberg in his book "Wlassow - Verräter oder Patriot?"
He began to speak, at first slowly and dispassionately, but then with growing intensity. For one last time, he spoke of all the prospects, hopes, and disappointments of his countrymen. He summed up everything for which countless Russians had fought and suffered. It was no longer really to the American that he was addressing himself — this was rather a confession, a review of his life, a last protest against the destiny that had brought him to a wretched end. . . . Vlasov stated that the leaders of the ROA were ready to appear before an international court, but that it would be a monumental injustice to turn them over to the Soviets and thereby to certain death. It was not a question of volunteers who had served the Germans, but of a political organization, of a broad opposition movement which, in any event, should not be dealt with under military law.
Andrey Vlasov was hanged August 2, 1946 for "treason as well as active espionage and terrorist activity against the Soviet Union."[1]
[edit] 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 their fate many escaped,some probably with the aid of their Allied captors,[2] some passively resisted, and hundreds of others committed suicide. Many of 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. Many of these people chose to conceal their identity until the fall of Communism in the Soviet Union in 1991.
[edit] 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.
[edit] See also
- Russian Liberation Army
- Andrey Vlasov
- Operation Keelhaul
- 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
[edit] References
- ^ a b c d Article on Operation Keelhaul by Jacob G. Hornberger
- ^ Ure, John (2002). The Cossacks: An Illustrated History. London: Gerald Duckworth. ISBN 0-7156-3253-1.
- Haines, Don Web Page from Combat Magazine
- "Motherland" (Rodina) Society Archives
