Richard Rashke - Useful Enemies

“The soldiers scurried,” Polskaya wrote, “taking away dead bodies on stretchers. [They] were like wolves: they caught, caught, caught—and beat.”

As she got closer to the bridge, Polskaya saw men and women ahead of her pulling off their boots and leaping into the water. “Oh, my god, the river was full of splashes, rising hands, and heads, and bodies swirling in whirlpools,” she wrote. “They were dragged down stream…. Women jumping down with their children, having tied themselves [together] with horse reins.”

A medical doctor strapped her child to her body, wrote another survivor, and injected it, along with her mother, sister, and herself, with morphine. They all leaped from the bridge to “freedom” below.

On the Yugoslavian side of the river, along the edge of the forest, Cossack cavalrymen were hanging from trees by bridle reins, some still twitching in the last throes of suicide. Their riderless horses raced through the woods neighing, spooked by the cries and screams, the gunshots, the wailed prayers, and the smell of fear and death. British soldiers were cutting down the bodies.

Polskaya was lucky. She survived the trip back to the Soviet Union in a boxcar and was sentenced to only six years in prison for resisting repatriation.

The United States backed out of forced repatriation just as it had backed in. By November 1945—nine short months after America, Great Britain, and France had signed repatriation agreements—2 million out of 2.25 million Soviet citizens in the West had been repatriated. Because of bloody roundups like the one in Kempten, Bavaria, General Eisenhower, who had once supported forced repatriation, banned the practice in all areas under his command until Washington could review its policy. Military historians now doubt that he had the authority to make that decision.

A month later, in December 1945, Washington forbade the use of force in repatriating civilians who had not collaborated with the enemy. But it still sanctioned force in returning Soviet POWs. Other than the one civilian exemption, there was no decree, presidential or otherwise, formally ending forced repatriation. By then, of course, except for about 250,000 hard-core resisters who managed to escape the Soviet dragnet by luck, cunning, and deception, there was no one left to repatriate.

The last Soviet repatriation team left Germany for Moscow in March 1949, when it was clear that they couldn’t persuade the remaining hard core to go home and that the United States would never hand them over. Those left behind in the West were a small price to pay. With the help of America, Great Britain, and France, the Soviets had succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. They had repatriated ninety percent of the Soviet civilians and former Red Army POWs who ended up in the West after the war.

Also they left behind a legacy of fear. Would Soviet agents hunt down and kidnap or murder those Soviet civilians and former POWs who managed to elude the Americans and the British?

For years after it forced the last Soviet citizen to return to the communist Soviet Union, the United States denied it had ever sanctioned force. “To force those people to go back to a life of terror and persecution,” President Eisenhower proclaimed in a speech in May 1953, “is something that would violate every moral standard by which America lives. Therefore, it would be unacceptable in the American code, and it cannot be done.”

Eisenhower’s newfound sense of morality and fair play came nine years too late.

In 1977, a U.S. Army veteran who had been ordered to forcibly repatriate POWs during those baffling and hectic nine months in 1945 was still troubled. He asked a question President Eisenhower had artfully dodged.

“Who’s going to have to answer for all this suffering?”

If Soviet POWs suffered, so did American soldiers. Compliance with the dictates of the Yalta agreement took its toll on those men who, like the 102nd artillery officer, were ordered to do the dirty work. Some bent the rules. Others disobeyed orders at the risk of court-martial. Some helped POWs escape. Others looked the other way as POWs ran into the woods. On one occasion, twenty-one of the twenty-five soldiers assigned to deliver POWs to the Soviets reported sick.

Long after the war, U.S. veterans were still suffering from post-traumatic stress nightmares, anxieties, and even nervous breakdowns. “My part in the Plattling operation,” social activist William Sloane Coffin wrote in his memoir, “left me with a burden of guilt I am sure to carry for the rest of my life.”

Brigadier General Frank L. Howley echoed Coffin’s feeling. “The cries of these men, their attempt to escape, even kill themselves,” he wrote, “still plague my memory.”

The historical facts of forced repatriation impinge directly on the deportation hearing of John Demjanjuk, one of the hard core who managed to hide from the Soviets.

Did President Truman issue a presidential decree ending forced repatriation in 1948, as the government argued in both the denaturalization trial and the deportation hearing of Demjanjuk?

No.

Were displaced persons still afraid of forced repatriation as late as 1950, as Demjanjuk and his witnesses, Edward O’Connor, Michael Pap, and Jerome Brentar, argued?

Yes. The Soviets kidnapped and assassinated former citizens well into the 1970s.

Did Soviet citizens routinely lie about their country of origin to avoid forced repatriation?

Yes.

Did refugee agency employees routinely advise their clients to lie about their country of origin to avoid forced repatriation?

Yes.

Were eight out of ten POWs who returned to the Soviet Union, willingly or unwillingly, executed, as Demjanjuk argued?

No. For the most part, just officers and some Trawniki men were executed. Others like Danilchenko were sentenced to hard labor in Siberia.

OSI attorney Bruce Einhorn couldn’t wait to flay Jerome Brentar under cross-examination. By this time, the government knew that the Cleveland travel agent and Demjanjuk financial supporter was a Holocaust denier.

“Mr. Brentar,” he began, “you don’t consider yourself, do you, an expert on post-World War Two repatriation?”

“I don’t want to be an expert.”

“But do you consider yourself an expert?”

“Well, I know there was repatriation.”

“Mr. Brentar, do you consider yourself an expert on the subject?”

“Expert in what capacity? I know that it happened.”

“Did you do firsthand scholarly research on the subject?”

“Well, I read quite a bit about it. I read about the Yalta agreement and the—”

“Mr. Brentar, do you have firsthand knowledge on the subject of repatriation,” Einhorn pressed, “or is your knowledge secondhand ?”

“They didn’t sell, or give out ringside seats, to the forceful repatriation.”

Judge Angelilli intervened. “Please answer the question,” he said. “I don’t want arguments.”

“No,” Brentar admitted. He was not an expert on repatriation.

“Thank you,” Einhorn said.

Next, Einhorn read quotations from Brentar’s court testimony at Demjanjuk’s denaturalization trial, during which he admitted that he was not an expert on either the IRO or the KGB.

Having established that Brentar wasn’t an expert on any issue relevant to the deportation hearing, Einhorn tried to prove that Brentar was biased, suggesting that he was both an anti-Semite and a Holocaust denier. Einhorn read a transcript of Brentar’s recent trial testimony in another OSI case: