Operation Keelhaul
Part of the aftermath of World War II | |
Date | 14 August 1946 – 9 May 1947 |
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Motive |
|
Perpetrator | United Kingdom, United States |
Operation Keelhaul was a forced repatriation of Soviet citizens and members of the Soviet Army in the West to the
The operation was carried out in Northern Italy and Germany by British and American forces between 14 August 1946 and 9 May 1947.[3] Anti-communist Yugoslavs and Hungarians, including members of the fascist Ustaše regime that ran the Jasenovac concentration camp,[4] were also forcibly repatriated to their respective governments.[5]
Three volumes of records, entitled "Forcible Repatriation of Displaced Soviet Citizens-Operation Keelhaul," were classified Top Secret by the U.S. Army on September 18, 1948, and bear the secret file number 383.7-14.1.[5]
Yalta Conference
One of the conclusions of the
Treatment of prisoners and refugees
The refugee columns fleeing the Soviet-occupied parts of Europe included
Soviet subjects who had volunteered for the German Army
The actual "Operation Keelhaul" was the last forced repatriation and involved the selection and subsequent transfer of approximately one thousand "Russians" from the camps of Bagnoli, Aversa, Pisa, and Riccione.[3] Applying the "McNarney-Clark Directive", subjects who had served in the German Army were selected for shipment, starting on 14 August 1946. The transfer was codenamed "East Wind" and took place at St. Valentin in Austria on 8 and 9 May 1947.[3] This operation marked the end of forced repatriations to the Soviet Union after World War II, and ran parallel to Operation Fling that helped Soviet defectors to escape from the Soviet Union.[3]
On the other side of the exchange, the Soviet leadership found out that despite the demands set forth by Stalin, British intelligence was retaining a number of anti-Communist prisoners under orders from Churchill, with the intention of reviving "anti-Soviet operations".[8] The 14th Waffen Grenadier Division, recruited from Ukrainians in Galicia, was not repatriated, ostensibly because Galicia had belonged to Poland prior to September 1939, but in reality because MI6 wished to use the prisoners in future operations.[9] The officer in charge of screening the 14th Division for war criminals, Fitzroy Maclean, admitted in an interview in 1989 that it was "fairly clear that there was every probability that there were war criminals amongst them", but argued that in the context of the Cold War, such men were needed to fight against the Soviet Union.[10] On 23 March 1947, the United Kingdom granted asylum to the entire 14th Division, whose men were subsequently settled in the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia.[11] The Soviet government protested against this decision, stating that most of the men in the division had previously served in German police units in Galicia and were deeply involved in perpetrating war crimes, but using a brief written by Pavlo Shandruk, an officer in the division as its basis, the Foreign Office issued a statement denying the 14th division had been involved in war crimes.[11]
Critics
British historian
Nigel Nicolson, a former British Army captain, was Tolstoy's chief witness in the libel action brought by Lord Aldington. In 1995, he wrote:
Fifty years ago I was a captain in the British Army, and with others I supervised the Jugoslav (Yugoslav) 'repatriation', as it was euphemistically called. We were told not to use force, and forbidden to inform them of their true destination. When they asked us where they were going, we replied that we were transferring them to another British camp in Italy, and they mounted the trains without suspicion. As soon as the sliding doors of the cattle-trucks were padlocked, our soldiers withdrew and Tito's partisans emerged from the station building where they had been hiding, and took over command of the train. The prisoners and refugees could see them through cracks in the boarding, and began hammering on the insides of the wagons, shouting abuse at us for having betrayed them, lied to them, and sentenced at least the men among them to a grotesque death. There is now no doubt about their hideous fate, and to those of us on the spot there was little doubt then. Shortly after the first trainloads had been despatched, we heard the stories of the few survivors who escaped back to Austria, and thousands of manacled skeletons have since been disinterred in Slovenian pits.[16]
Ghinghis Guirey, an American on one of the repatriation screening teams, reported:
The most unpleasant aspect of this unpleasant business was the fear these people displayed. Involuntarily one began to look over one's shoulder. I heard so many threats to commit suicide from people who feared repatriation that it became almost commonplace. And they were not fooling.[5]
See also
- Bleiburg repatriations
- Collaboration during World War II
- Repatriation of Cossacks after World War II
- Russian Liberation Army
- Soviet repressions against former prisoners of war
- Swedish extradition of Baltic soldiers
- Western betrayal
- XVth SS Cossack Cavalry Corps
References
- S2CID 145445428.
- ISBN 9780815964070.
- ^ ISBN 0-684-15635-0.
- ^ Goldstein, Ivo and Slavko (29 May 2019). "Ne, Jasenovac i Bleiburg nisu isto". Autograf.hr (in Croatian). Retrieved 15 June 2019.
- ^ a b c Hummel, Jeffrey Rogers (1974). "Operation Keelhaul—Exposed". San Jose State University ScholarWorks: 4–9. Retrieved 28 January 2020.
- ^ Sheehan, Paul (August 13, 2007). "Patriots ignore greatest brutality". The Sydney Morning Herald.
- ^ Sanders, James D; Sauter, Mark A; Kirkwood, R Cort (1992). Soldiers Of Misfortune: Washington's Secret Betrayal of American POWs in the Soviet Union. National Press Books.
- ISBN 9780688044831.
- ^ Dorril 2002, pp. 203–204.
- ^ Dorril 2002, p. 204.
- ^ a b Dorril 2002, p. 205.
- ^ Murray-Brown, Jeremy. "A footnote to Yalta". Boston University. Archived from the original on 2008-05-16.
- ISSN 0028-0038.
- .
- ^ Booker, 1997, Chapter 12. 2. "Bleiburg: The Massacre That Never Was", p. 188.
- ^ "Accounting For Britain's War Crime". spectator.co.uk. 20 May 1995. Retrieved 28 January 2020.
- Harper and Row. p. 85.
- ^ "Lord Aldington". The Guardian. London. 9 December 2000. Retrieved 25 May 2010.
Books
- Dorril, Stephen (2002). MI6: Inside the Covert World of Her Majesty's Secret Intelligence Service (reprint ed.). Simon and Schuster. ISBN 978-0-743-21778-1.
Further reading
- Tolstoy, Nikolai. ISBN 0-552-11030-2
- Epstein, Julius. Operation Keelhaul, Devin-Adair, 1973. ISBN 978-0-8159-6407-0
External links
- Return to the scene of the crime Archived 2017-01-09 at the Wayback Machine Rutland Herald Online.