canvas bags.
Mandolins, accordions, and folk singers waited for them at the transfer points. There were bright garlands, pictures of a beaming Joseph Stalin, and huge streamers bearing slogans like “Long live the Motherland” affixed to waiting railcars pointing east. It was all staged to keep the thousands calm and to provide footage for reporters from the West.
Most returning civilians entered the Soviet Union smiling. Some were truly happy to be going home, eager to rejoin what was left of their families. Others returned with frozen smiles, the only possible response to being abandoned and betrayed by both the Americans and the British to the terror of a vindictive regime.
All were duped.
There were no cushy jobs waiting. Only hard menial work without the possibility of promotion. There were no open classroom doors, no return to ancestral homes. Only stigma and isolation on the fringes of Soviet society, where they could not infect “good Russians” with poison from the West.
As historian Mark Elliott concluded in his aptly titled book,
Not all Soviet civilians returned. Some hid. Many lied on visa applications, saying they were born in Poland. Some attacked the Soviet repatriation teams who had the right to visit the DP camps under the terms of the Yalta agreement. A DP mob killed at least one. Some fought U.S. military police with sticks, stones, and fists. Whole groups refused to get into trucks. Two examples illustrate their despair.
On July 12, 1945, U.S. military police broke into a makeshift DP church, a former gymnasium, in Kempten, Bavaria. Huddled around the altar seeking sanctuary were four hundred Soviet civilians, weeping and begging for mercy. The American soldiers rushed at them with clubs, knocking some senseless, dragging the rest outside praying and screaming. The soldiers left behind smashed icons, torn sacred vestments, and pools of blood.
A team of Soviet soldiers was waiting outside the church to take them home. The Soviets smiled in amusement at the brutal scene—Americans beating helpless people about to be deported east, like the SS and Gestapo rounding up Jews for the extermination camps. The Soviets loaded the group into trucks and drove them to a nearby train station, where they spent the night. Some managed to escape before morning. The rest left for the Soviet Union the next day.
On the morning of June 1, 1945, several thousand Cossack civilians—mostly old men, women, and children —stood in frightened silence outside their transit-camp barracks near Lienz, Austria, a sleepy picture-postcard village in a mountain valley. Even the babies didn’t cry. They had good reason to be scared. Surrounded by British tanks, they were about to be pushed across a wooden bridge spanning the Draga River into Soviet-occupied Yugoslavia. From there, Red Army soldiers would escort them home to the Soviet Union.
A little to the east, closer to the Draga, the British were rounding up several thousand Cossack fighters whose families were waiting back at the Lienz camp. The Cossack soldiers were part of the 25th SS Cavalry Corps, a bitterly anticommunist force—forty to fifty thousand strong—made up of former POWs, Red Army defectors, and civilian volunteers from Cossack communities across Eastern Europe.
The Cossacks had begun collaborating with Germany as soon as it invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, naively hoping, like the Ukrainians, to topple Stalin and establish an independent state. Given the Cossacks’ historical reputation as fierce fighters, the Germans used them mainly to hunt partisans in the mountains of Eastern Europe.
The 25th Cavalry had surrendered to the British several weeks before that June morning believing that they could help the Allies fight communism in the new Cold War. The British detained them and their families, who had fled the Soviet Union with them, as well as other civilian refugees in transit camps in Austria and Italy. The Lienz compound was one of the largest. Like the Americans, the British promised the Cossacks that they would not be forcibly repatriated to the Soviet Union.
Like the Americans, the British lied.
All during the night of May 31 and well into the early morning hours of June 1, priests in the Lienz transit camp had heard the confessions of those who wanted to make peace with their God before the British or the Soviets murdered them. Hundreds begged God’s forgiveness for the terrible sin they were about to commit. Standing in that frightened, silent crowd was Eugenia Borisovna Polskaya, a former Cossack refugee camp nurse and a journalist who would later describe what she witnessed on that spring morning in a picturesque Alpine valley.
As they stood waiting, the crowd heard gunshots up ahead, near the Draga. Older children climbed on the shoulders of adults to look east, toward the wooden bridge and Yugoslavia on the other side. They called out what they saw: British soldiers throwing unarmed 25th Cavalry Cossack soldiers into trucks, beating them with iron clubs, shooting those who fought back with their fists, men trying to run across fields to safety, more gunshots, dead bodies strewn in the fields, mounted Cossack cavalrymen streaming across the bridge.
Soon the British tanks began to push the Cossack civilians gathered in the camp square toward the river. Priests led them in song, as if the combined sound of their voices raised in a last hopeful prayer would soften the hearts of the British soldiers, who seemed to be everywhere. As they pushed forward, the tanks crushed makeshift pulpit-altars erected in the square, grinding icons into the dirt. Soldiers beat the heads of resisters and laggards with riot clubs.
“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
Also they left behind a legacy of fear. Would Soviet agents hunt down and kidnap or murder those Soviet
