Richard Rashke - Useful Enemies

The Fort Dix Vlasovites were the remnant of the American-held Soviet POWs captured in German uniforms. They were a tough, resourceful group who knew that either death or a gulag awaited them in the Soviet Union. Months before, U.S. Military Police had tried to deliver them to a Soviet ship anchored at Seattle. Prodded on board by bayonets and gun butts, they bided their time with patience and cunning.

When the Americans left the ship, the POWs attacked the Soviet sailors with bare fists and teeth and with such determination—one account said they also damaged the ship’s engines so badly that it couldn’t set sail—that the War Department called off the operation and escorted the jubilant POWs all the way across the country to New Jersey.

Colonel Treisch made a foolish mistake that pleasant June morning. He told the POWs that they were going home. Instead of cheering, they refused to budge. Angry and feeling betrayed by false promises, they demanded to be treated as German POWs under the Geneva Convention. They had good reason to feel betrayed.

Toward the end of the war, U.S. bombers dropped millions of leaflets across Europe from the shores of Brittany to the eastern front, promising Soviet POWs fighting with the Germans good treatment in accordance with the Hague and Geneva conventions if they surrendered. The leaflets also denounced as a lie German counter-leaflets stating that the Americans would forcibly repatriate those soldiers naïve enough to believe their promises.

As they stood their ground at Fort Dix surrounded by rifles and machine guns, the POWs taunted their guards, trying to provoke them into opening fire. When the soldiers refused to shoot, the POWs rushed back into their barracks on the command of their senior officer and set the building on fire. Better to quickly burn to death with honor in the shadow of Lady Liberty than to die a slow, shameful death under the Soviet hammer and sickle.

In response to the rebellion, Colonel Treisch ordered his men to lob tear gas grenades into the barracks. The rear door suddenly flew open and choking Soviet POWs charged out waving table legs and knives crafted from aluminum mess kits. They attacked the first guards they met, injuring three. Soldiers fired back, wounding seven. Two POWs tried to scale the barbed-wire fence. Soldiers pulled them down, lacerating their hands.

After thirty minutes of knives, clubs, and fists, Treisch’s men restored order. While one group guarded the POWs, another donned gas masks and entered the barracks. They found three Vlasovites hanging from the rafters by their belts and fifteen empty belts dangling next to them.

Early the next day, June 30, a convoy of trucks, each carrying four POWs and five MPs, and a cortege of eight ambulances with the wounded, arrived at Pier 51 in New York harbor. Waiting to welcome them were the media, three hundred spectators, eighty heavily armed MPs, and the U.S. Navy transport Monticello , the former Italian luxury liner Conte Grande.

The Vlasovites never got the chance to fight back this time. Like the ending of a Hollywood B movie, the escort commander received a last-minute reprieve order from Washington. The riot at Fort Dix the previous day had earned international headlines, and an embarrassed Moscow wasted no time responding. It accused the United States of trying to forcibly prevent eager Soviet prisoners from returning to their motherland. In response, Washington did what it does best. It ordered an official investigation.

Meanwhile, U.S. soldiers escorted the Soviet POWs back to Fort Dix, took away their belts and shoestrings, and imprisoned them in a barracks without a stick of furniture. They slept on bare mattresses on the wooden floor under a twenty-four-hour suicide watch.

When the official investigation concluded that the POWs had resisted out of fear of repatriation, the military took no chances. It doped the prisoners’ coffee on the morning of August 31, 1945, then transported them back to Pier 51 and a waiting ship that set sail for Germany under a cloak of such secrecy that even the media missed the bon voyage. The United States buried the three Soviet soldiers who had hanged themselves in the national cemetery on the left bank of the Delaware River near Fort Mott State Park, New Jersey.

As historian Mark Elliott put it: “Three tombstones there… constitute the sum total of physical evidence that the United States forcibly repatriated at least four thousand Soviet citizens from American soil.”

In yet another twist of post-World War II irony, the U.S. military in Germany designated Dachau as a holding pen for Vlasovites and former SS officers waiting denazification. Dachau… where the SS murdered more than forty thousand prisoners of all European nationalities and where Himmler had established an SS training school for new recruits. Where Dr. Sigmund Rascher and his fellow Nazi scientists conducted hypothermia, high-altitude, and saltwater experiments on humans. Where Iron Guardist war criminal Viorel Trifa enjoyed Nazi protection and hospitality after the failed coup he had instigated in Bucharest.

On January 19, 1946, American soldiers ordered 399 Soviet POWs imprisoned in Dachau to climb into trucks parked inside the camp. Like their fellow Vlasovites at Fort Dix, the Soviets refused. Baffled and confused, the guards marched the men back into the barracks and waited for further orders.

Two days later, a reinforcement of five hundred soldiers, mostly Americans, arrived at Dachau. Once again they ordered the POWs out of the barracks. Once again the POWs refused. In a replay of Fort Dix, soldiers lobbed tear gas grenades into the building, stormed the barracks in gas masks, and drove the men into the prison yard, where many stood naked and shivering in protest. Others, suffering from self-inflicted razor cuts and stab wounds, fell bleeding into the snow.

“The scene inside [the barracks] was one of human carnage,” an observer later reported. Men dangling from rafters in the throes of death, two disemboweled men, a man who had smashed his head through a window pane and ran his neck over the sharp edge. Men begging to be shot.

All in all, thirty-one Soviet POWs had attempted suicide. Eleven succeeded. Twenty were hospitalized with deep gashes, and many suffered cracked skulls. A soldier who cut the men down from the gallows observed: “It just wasn’t human.”

U.S. soldiers herded the remaining 368 Soviet POWs into a train waiting on the tracks. The convoy was destined for a holding pen in Plattling, Bavaria, near the Czech border. There the Dachau POWs would join the rest of the tattered Vlasovites (about sixteen hundred) still left in Germany. In spite of a “shoot to kill” order, six men escaped on the way to Plattling, which was the subject of the brief U.S. Army Signal Corps film that Demjanjuk’s defense had tried and failed to get entered into evidence at his deportation hearing.

In the predawn darkness on February 24, 1946, while the Soviet POWs were still asleep, a ghostlike column of U.S. tanks, leading a contingent of soldiers wearing rubber-soled shoes and armed with guns and riot clubs, crept down the road to the Plattling camp.

A whistle shrieked. Floodlights switched on. U.S. soldiers broke into the barracks. They beat and dragged the POWs into the prison yard, some clothed only in underwear. Soldiers searched them, tossing whatever they found into the snow and mud—watches, razor blades, crusts of bread, pencils. Then they ordered the POWs to lie facedown in trucks. If a prisoner dared to move, soldiers beat him with clubs.

Armored reconnaissance cars accompanied the convoy from the camp to the Plattling railroad station, where a chain of cattle cars stood empty. Once loaded and under heavy U.S. guard, the train took the POWs to a wooded rendezvous point just across the border in Soviet-occupied Czechoslovakia, where they were handed over to Soviet soldiers. The Americans left their cargo standing in groups along the tracks, half-naked in the February morning. Dangling from tree branches behind them were hundreds of bodies, the remains of previous batches of POWs executed by the Soviets.