Richard Rashke - Useful Enemies

Early in December 1944, the War Department ordered the military to sift from the POW population held in the United States those Soviets captured in German uniforms and to segregate them at Camp Rupert, Idaho. The War Department then ordered the military to winnow out from the Camp Rupert group those POWs who had admitted to Soviet citizenship. Of those, the military selected an initial group of eleven hundred to be escorted from Camp Rupert to Portland, Oregon, and placed on a Soviet ship anchored in the harbor.

Seventy POWs of that initial group refused to leave Camp Rupert. Three attempted suicide—one by hanging, one by stabbing, and the third by beating his head against a barracks beam. U.S. soldiers easily crushed the rebellion. The POW convoy arrived in Portland at the end of December 1944 and the prisoners were loaded onto the Soviet ship. In a last spasm of despair, at least three attempted suicide by jumping overboard into the winter sea before the ship set sail for the Siberian port of Vladivostok. Two drowned. One was forcibly rescued.

Judging from firsthand accounts of similar Soviet POW voyages, the “liberated” prisoners from America who claimed Soviet citizenship were received amicably by captain and crew in the hopes of avoiding a bloody mutiny. The POWs sang Russian folk songs, drank Russian vodka, and seemed truly happy to be returning home. Once they reached Soviet ports, however, the Red Army and the KGB greeted them with contempt, hostility, and brutality.

Two months after the first shipment of eleven hundred Soviet POWs had left America, and just days before the Yalta Conference in Crimea, the United States handed over to the Soviets another fifteen hundred Camp Rupert Soviet prisoners.

Upon disembarkation in Siberia, those Soviet POWs were immediately imprisoned, interrogated, and screened. Stalin temporarily tabled his vow to “do away with them” because he needed more soldiers on the western front. He redrafted them into the Red Army and they went on to help liberate Berlin. When Stalin no longer needed them, he sentenced the enlisted men among them to fifteen to twenty-five years of hard labor and executed their commanding officers.

Moscow, of course, wasn’t satisfied with just twenty-six hundred repatriated POWs. The bone from Washington had only served to sharpen its teeth and whet its appetite. When Stalin came to Yalta in February 1945 to meet with Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, he brought a unilateral repatriation agreement and a new fountain pen. In that agreement, he demanded the return of:

• All Soviet volunteers and conscripts in the Waffen SS. Of the thirty-eight Waffen SS divisions fighting mainly in the east, twenty-five (60 percent) were made up of non-Germans, including Volksdeutsche.

• All Soviet volunteers and conscripts in the Wehrmacht ( Osttruppen ). After the invasion of Normandy, the German army had deployed one hundred Osttruppen battalions (one thousand to twelve hundred men each) from Norway to France, from Yugoslavia to Crete, from Germany to Italy.

• All soldiers in the Vlasov and Ukrainian divisions.

• All Soviet POWs liberated from work camps and concentration camps.

• All Soviet civilian forced laborers ( Ostarbeiter ).

In a word, Stalin wanted all 2.2 million Soviet citizens—soldiers and civilians—back in the communist fold. There were three reasons for his uncompromising greed. He wanted to punish all of them as deserters and traitors. At the same time, he wanted to make sure there would be no sizable anticommunist bloc outside the Soviet Union to challenge his authority or plot against him. And he wanted to con the West into believing that all Soviets citizens were eager to go home.

As a pragmatist, however, Stalin really didn’t want every single Soviet back. He was too wily for that. He needed a manageable number of former Soviet citizens sprinkled across the West whom he could later recruit or blackmail into spying for the Soviet Union in the new Cold War.

Stalin was also too cagey to raise a delicate repatriation issue with Churchill and Roosevelt at Yalta: how to handle Soviet citizens who refused to go back. Stalin had a very good reason for his silence on the issue. He didn’t want even to acknowledge to Churchill or Roosevelt that there were Soviet citizens who did not want to return to the motherland. And he knew that if he didn’t bring up the issue, London and Washington wouldn’t have the guts to voice it, either.

As the Americans and British would soon find out, Stalin’s threat to imprison liberated Allied POWs if Washington and London didn’t give him what he demanded was a bluff. The Soviet leader had no intention of wasting time and squandering resources in a game of POW poker. To the contrary, all across Eastern Europe, the Red Army was opening the gates of POW camps, if they weren’t already open, and moving on. True, some Allied POWs ended up in gulags, more by accident than policy, but the vast majority were left to fend for themselves. They could head east to Moscow and knock on embassy doors. Or trail at a safe distance behind the Red Army until it bumped into Allied forces. Or head west on their own, dodging German units as Private Galione had done when searching for Camp Dora. Or wait for a U.S.-Soviet prisoner exchange of some kind.

For his part, Roosevelt was both uninterested and ignorant about the repatriation issue. It was no secret that he favored the military over the State Department. And repatriation was a military problem, not a diplomatic one. Let General John Deane, head of the U.S. military mission in Moscow, handle it.

General Deane’s hope was that Stalin would agree to a U.S. airlift to rescue the freed American servicemen and women behind the Soviet front line. When Stalin refused and wouldn’t budge on his own demands, Deane went ahead and signed a repatriation agreement at Yalta. So did the British and the French.

By May 1945, three months after General Deane signed the Yalta agreement, the new policy had made its way into the Guide to the Care of Displaced Persons in Germany , the official manual of the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force. “After identification by Soviet representatives,” the guide said, “Soviet displaced persons will be repatriated regardless of their individual wishes.”

No one doubts today that parts of the Yalta repatriation agreement were a violation of the Geneva Convention and international law. Nor would anyone deny that the United States and Great Britain—and France, to a much lesser degree—handed over Soviet citizens to the Red Army knowing full well that there would be no warm bear hug on the other side of the border. Some would even label the forced return of Soviet civilians and POWs who did not collaborate with the Germans as a crime against humanity.

How many Soviet citizens returned willingly? How many felt they had no realistic choice but to go back? How many were duped or blackmailed into returning? How many resisted with two-by-fours and bare knuckles? How many committed suicide?

No one on either side of the Red divide kept tally, and most historians would consider any estimates little more than guesses. A few examples, however, illustrate the fear and hatred, hope and despair, cruelty and deception that consumed more than 2.2 million Soviet citizens in the early years after World War II.

At nine o’clock in the morning on June 29, 1945, Lieutenant Colonel G. M. Treisch, commandant of the Fort Dix, New Jersey, stockade, ordered the 154 Vlasovites imprisoned on the post to gather in the yard outside their barracks. Treisch had received orders from Washington to escort them to an American ship anchored in New York harbor. The ship would take them to Germany, where they would be handed over to the Soviets.