Richard Rashke - Useful Enemies

It is a painful operation.

In staggering round numbers:

• 8.35 million Soviet POWs and forced laborers were taken prisoner by the Germans.

• One third of them (2.78 million) were either executed or died from starvation, disease, and overwork by the end of the war.

• About 5.6 million survived the war.

• Of those, 3.4 million ended up in the Soviet zone and were immediately transported back to the Soviet Union, whether they wanted to go or not.

• The rest (2.2 million) ended up in DP camps in Germany and Austria under the care of America and Great Britain.

What happened to those 2.2 million and why is a complicated story of cowardice and profound inhumanity.

Soon after the Normandy invasion in June 1944, American soldiers stumbled on a surprise package—enemy soldiers in German uniforms who couldn’t speak German. Who were they? And what was the U.S. Army supposed to do with them?

Privy to intelligence reports, the War Department and its upper military echelons were far from surprised. They had known for some time about the deployment of Soviet POWs in the Waffen SS, Ukrainian and Vlasov’s army divisions, and in the regular German army (Wehrmacht). Combined, these deployments totaled nearly one million non-German men in German uniforms, fighting the Soviets in the east and the Americans and British in the west. It was the largest military defection in history. Why these men chose to collaborate with the Germans was sometimes simple, sometimes as complex as the war itself.

Some volunteered in order to save themselves from death by starvation and overwork. Most Ukrainians, Balts, Belorussians, and Cossacks collaborated out of hatred for communism and a false hope of establishing independent states after the war. Loyal communists like General Vlasov fought against their own Red Army because they believed that Stalin was destroying their homeland. Some were conscripted into the SS Waffen and the regular German army.

What choice did Stalin leave his POWs? When he vowed to punish them as traitors, he betrayed them all.

The capture of these SS Waffen and Wehrmacht Soviet soldiers presented Washington with a pounding migraine. Simply put, the Soviet Union demanded its traitors back. If the United States refused to return them, then the Red Army might not hand over the more than sixty thousand American and British servicemen and women it was about to liberate from German stalags in the east.

It was pure blackmail.

For Great Britain, it was a quick, easy decision. Long before Britain signed a Yalta repatriation agreement, Prime Minister Anthony Eden announced an unequivocal repatriation policy—return all Soviet POWs captured in German uniforms. No exceptions. If they refuse or resist, force them at bayonet point or shoot them. England wants its boys back home safely at any cost.

Washington waffled for seven months. Contributing to its indecision was a fear that if the United States caved in to Moscow’s demand to hand over all Soviets captured in German uniforms, Germany might retaliate against the American POWs it was holding in the stalags still under its control in the west.

For Washington, it was a lose-lose situation.

For the most part, the U.S. departments of State, War, and Justice all opposed forced repatriation on either legal or humanitarian grounds. Legal… because the 1929 Geneva Convention made it clear that captured soldiers were to be treated as citizens of the country whose uniforms they were wearing at the time of capture. They were not required to divulge their true nationality. Although the convention did not explicitly condemn forced repatriation, the practice ran contrary to international legal tradition and the spirit of the convention.

Humanitarian… because the State Department knew what would happen to repatriated German collaborators once the Red Army and the KGB got their hands on them. The U.S. embassy in Moscow sent Washington daily reports about Soviet policies and the proclamations of Joseph Stalin. And Stalin’s public position was as clear as it was unforgiving.

“In Hitler’s camps there are no prisoners of war, only Russian traitors,” Stalin told the international press, “and we shall do away with them when the war is over.”

On the other hand, General George C. Marshall and General Dwight D. Eisenhower and most of their high-level brass favored caving in to the blackmail. The United States was at war, and war was an exercise in pragmatism. The definition of morality belonged to the victor. The task at hand was to get some sixty thousand American and British men and women back home safely. If the price was a million Soviets POW traitors, so be it. There was no room for compassion. Wouldn’t the United States demand the return of all American POWs captured in battle wearing German uniforms?

Besides the fate of American POWs, there was a second issue at stake, and it was just as chilling. Marshall and Eisenhower both saw a humanitarian problem looming large on the horizon the likes of which the world had never seen—millions of sick and starving refugees who were bound to end up in American hands after the war. The immediate return of the Soviet POWs among them would ease the problem. As Eisenhower advised Washington: “Russians [are] a considerable charge against the resources of this theater. The only complete solution to this problem, from all points of view, is the early repatriation of these Russians.”

The U.S. military knew that the Soviet Union would never be satisfied with the return of a few hundred thousand Soviet POWs captured in German uniforms. Like a good blackmailer, it would always demand more. And more meant all Soviet POWs, whether they wore a German uniform or not. Didn’t Stalin call them all traitors? And when the Soviets demanded the return of all Soviet POWs whether they collaborated or not, wore German uniforms or not, the U.S. military was prepared to round them up. For the Americans, compliance would mean a million fewer postwar mouths to feed, families to house, bodies to heal, background checks to make, and papers to shuffle.

It was a win-win.

By early December 1944, six months after the Normandy invasion, two things had become clear. Germany was caught in a death squeeze—the Americans pressing from the west, the Soviets from the east. The Reich had only months to live. That made the threat of German retaliation against Allied POWs unlikely. Secondly, as the German threat of retaliation faded, the Soviet threat grew stronger. The Red Army had already liberated the stalags in Poland that were holding Americans and was on the verge of doing the same in Hungary. In a matter of months, the Red Army would further liberate Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and Romania, each of which was known to hold Allied POWs.

It was time to toss the Soviets a bone.

The United States was holding nearly half a million German prisoners of war in America. Of those, between four and ten thousand turned out to be Soviet citizens captured in German uniforms. They were imprisoned in stockades on military bases in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Idaho, Alabama, and Arkansas. Most did not want to return to the Soviet Union.

The bone? Those POWs who had voluntarily admitted that they were Soviet citizens.

It was a safe decision. Since those POWs were “all claimants to Soviet nationality,” they probably wouldn’t resist repatriation. They might even welcome it. If they refused to return to the Soviet Union, however, U.S. soldiers would force them with fixed bayonets.

The pressure on Washington was mounting by the day. Moscow’s ambassador to the United States was breathing heavily on the White House, and the Red Army representatives who regularly visited U.S. stockades holding the Soviet POWs were growling like a Russian bear. Besides, Washington reasoned, when the POWs freely admitted being Soviet citizens, didn’t they give up their right to be treated as German POWs under the Geneva Convention?