The Great Betrayal

The mass deportations of illegal immigrants currently under way in Trump's America - a process that seems both brutal and carelessly random in its execution - is highly likely to catch up in its broad sweep large numbers of innocent individuals, many of them actually born in the US, whose only crime is that their parents or grandparents originally came from foreign countries. It's hard to see how this could be otherwise in a country which for many generations has seen successive waves of immigration from all over the world. For very different reasons, Europe was also a massive melting pot at the end of the Second World War (WW2), with millions of displaced people separated from their homelands in German slave-labour or POW camps. At the Yalta conference of February 1945, Stalin had agreed with Roosevelt and Churchill that all Soviet citizens found outside the USSR at the end of the war should be repatriated in exchange for Allied servicemen (much fewer in number) caught up in previously German-occupied territory (i.e. most of eastern Europe) that was now held by the Red Army. The problem was that large numbers of former Soviet citizens (notably from Ukraine) had fought with the Germans against the USSR, most of them nationalists hoping to liberate their people from Stalinist oppression: they naturally had no desire to return to a regime which would likely execute them as traitors. Thus began a Trumpian wave of forced repatriations to the Soviet Union. In the post-war chaos, but mainly because of the heavy-handed determination of the Western Allies to do their duty by the letter of the Yalta agreement, these violent deportations led to the cruellest of tragic reckonings for tens of thousands of individuals. Among the worst cases, kept secret by the British and US authorities for decades after the war, was the fate of the Cossacks. Their communities had been brutally persecuted by Stalin, and many (some 250,000, it's estimated) fought alongside the Germans from 1943 onwards. At the war's end, they had retreated, with their women, children and old folk, to sectors of Austria and Germany held by the British and Americans. Technically, many Cossacks were not Soviet citizens, having left Russia after the 1917 revolution or the civil war that followed. Nevertheless, despite assurances from both their British and American hosts that they would not be sent back, thousands of men, women and children were placed under guard in trucks or locked in cattle wagons and delivered to the Soviet zones. No one, certainly not the British or Americans, had any doubt what fate awaited these people, and as word spread among the Cossacks, terrible scenes of suicide and attempted suicide took place (sometimes involving whole families together). These distressing scenes were replicated across Europe and even in America, in fact wherever 'Soviet' displaced persons were being held in detention before their forced repatriation to the USSR. Appeals to the Geneva Convention fell on deaf ears and Allied soldiers engaged in the deportations, many dismayed by what they had to do, were told to follow orders (in some cases at pistol point) and sworn to secrecy.

The Betrayal by the British of the Cossacks at Lienz, Austria, in 1945 (Private Collection)

If you think you know about WW2, it's time to think again.

www.unknownwarriorspod.co.uk

An Understanding History Podcast