At Yalta, General John R. Deane, the head of the U.S. military mission in Moscow, was assigned to work with the Soviet military on a proposal to deal with the exchange of liberated POWs and civilians. The general was not optimistic about Soviet cooperation, for he had waited a full six months to get a response to his request for a meeting. The Red Army, in the meantime, had prepared an agreement and presented it for Deane’s signature at Yalta. It formalized existing practices, according to which “the contracting parties shall, wherever necessary, use all practicable means to ensure” the evacuation of each country’s nationals and send them home.44
Although the agreement made no specific mention of compulsory repatriation, it was implied. And in practice, both the United States and Great Britain were already acting as if they were obliged to return all uniformed or civilian citizens of the Soviet Union—with the exception of important defectors. No thought was given to granting political asylum. The British outdid themselves by turning over “White Russian” émigrés—that is, anti-Bolsheviks who had fought Lenin and Co. and had never been Soviet citizens at all.45
Ambassador Averell Harriman recalled that at the time they were concerned about the estimated 75,000 British and American POWs whom the Soviets might soon liberate from German camps: “We had no idea that hundreds of thousands of the Soviet citizens would refuse because they had reason to suspect they would be sent to their deaths or to Beria’s prison camps. That knowledge came later.”46 In fact, the Americans and British knew what would likely happen, and Soviet POWs certainly suspected the worst. U.S. newspapers reported on their protests and suicides at the prospect of being sent back to the USSR.47
For all the cooperation Moscow received with the repatriation of the millions of Soviet POWs and civilians, it was both slow and disorganized in handling liberated American POWs. Some of them waited around in Poland, where ordinary people gave them “the kindest treatment” and shared the little food they had. Several miraculously hitchhiked all the way to Moscow and made it to the American embassy.48 Becoming ever more aware of the chaos facing the liberated POWs, General Deane and Ambassador Harriman asked the president to intervene. On March 3, FDR cabled Stalin asking permission for U.S. planes to fly in medical supplies to compatriots stranded east of Soviet lines and to evacuate the sick. He received a polite but firm no. Such flights were allegedly not needed; the men were in good care.49
The president was given contrary information and tried again on March 17. This time the Kremlin Boss noted that, whereas Americans in the care of the Red Army were being well looked after, the same could not be said of Soviet prisoners in American camps—they “were subjected to unfair treatment and unlawful inconveniences up to beating as it was reported to the American Government more than once.” The upshot was that the United States was not permitted to pick up its liberated prisoners, some of whom were shipped in boxcars hundreds of miles south to Odessa and generally neglected. General Deane asked for permission to visit Poland to see for himself but was refused.50
He observed that, when the two sides worked as allies, the Soviets were invariably mistrustful, bureaucratic, and uncooperative. “During the entire course of the reciprocal repatriation program,” Deane writes, “the Soviet authorities, including Stalin, Molotov, and others, poured forth a continuous stream of accusations regarding the treatment which Soviet citizens were receiving at the hands of the United States forces which had liberated them. In almost all cases these accusations were proved false and were admitted to be unfounded by Soviet representatives.”51
Stalin’s accusations bewildered and saddened FDR. Harriman realized that the Soviets were playing politics with the POW matter and on March 24 advised standing up to them. Stalin and Molotov, he said, were clearly lying about the good treatment accorded American servicemen, and something had to be done about it. Harriman urged the president and secretary of state to complain about the situation immediately.52 This time the president said nothing, though we should note that he was terribly weakened physically and had only a little over a week to live.
Between 1944 and 1949, a total of 5.45 million Soviet citizens from all countries—including POWs and civilians—were repatriated to the Soviet Union, whether they wanted to be or not. Some tried to travel home on their own, but the Kremlin’s aim was to process them all through “filtration camps” where specially trained NKVD personnel interrogated them.53 Having to endure the long and horrific process was bad, with the outcome uncertain.
Various figures are cited in the literature as to the fate of all these men and women, though without reference to archival or other reliable sources.54 However, a more thorough recent investigation concludes that three million, or 57 percent, of all repatriates suffered some form of additional “repression,” including being sent to the Gulag, subjected to forced labor, remobilized into the armed forces, or executed.55 We know more about the 1.8 million POWs who went through the harrowing experience of filtration camps, and in total only 300,000 (16.7 percent) were “sent home” and presumably spared further punishment. Another 300,000 or so were “given over to the NKVD,” while about the same number had to serve in a labor battalion. The remaining 900,000 had to reenlist in the army, and while being compelled to do so might not sound like “repression,” such soldiers were given the most dangerous duties and dirtiest jobs. They and the repatriates carried a stigma and were also subject to special police actions in the late 1940s and again in 1951.56 Moreover, “even those not mobilized or subjected to criminal penalties suffered discrimination thereafter, in many cases to the end of their lives.”57
TRANSFORMING MURDERED JEWS INTO ORDINARY NAZI VICTIMS
In the course of the postwar Soviet trials, mention of what the Germans had done to the Jews was sometimes made. The Krasnodar case involved members of SS Sonderkommando 10a. Charges included “executing arrests, going on military searches and expeditions against the partisans and peaceful Soviet citizens, and exterminating Soviet citizens by hanging, mass shootings, and use of poison gases.” The prosecution brought out the systematic nature of these murders but neglected to mention the cardinal fact that the overwhelming majority of the victims were Jews.58
Did Stalin suppress the news about the Holocaust? The dictator’s latent anti-Semitism seemed to emerge increasingly during the war. From the outset of the German invasion, he was aware that Jews were being singled out for murder, but he said nothing about it. In his lengthy message of November 6, 1941, on the twenty-fourth anniversary of the Russian Revolution, he quoted Hitler as saying that to establish the new German Reich they would “above all things force out and exterminate the Slavonic nations—the Russians, Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Bulgarians, Ukrainians, Byelorussians.” Stalin made no mention of the many dire threats Hitler issued against the Jews. The Soviet leader denounced the “Hitlerite party” as “a Party of medieval reaction and Black-Hundred pogroms.” Otherwise in this speech nothing more was said about what was happening to the Jews. Remarkably enough, this sparse mention of “pogroms” was the last time Stalin even came close to saying anything about the fate of the Jews publicly during the entire war, in spite of how well informed Soviet authorities were of what the Germans were doing.59