Operation Keelhaul: Forced Repatriation after World War II.

• Author: Hummel, Jeffrey Rogers
• Position: Reflections

At 5:00 a.m. on Sunday, the sleeping prisoners of war were surprised by the glare from searchlights mounted on tanks surrounding their compound. Soldiers barged into the barracks, and the prisoners were dragged outside, lined up, searched, and eventually loaded onto waiting trucks. Well-armed guards beat prisoners who resisted. The trucks drove to the nearby railhead, where the prisoners were unloaded into cattle cars. The empty trucks returned and picked up load after load. When all 1,590 prisoners had been stulfed aboard the train, it carted them off for eventual transfer to slave-labor camps or to be executed. The date was February 24, 1946. The location was near Plattling, a town in Bavaria, Germany. The prisoners were Russian, but the soldiers were not German. They were Americans of the US Third Army, who were engaging in an action that had become commonplace in Europe at the close of World War II. For the Russian prisoners were refugees from Joseph Stalin's dictatorship, remnants of the Second KONR Division of Andrei Vlasov's anti-Communist army. They were being repatriated, by force, to the Soviet Union.

I use the term "Russian" throughout this essay the way it was used at the time and in nearly all sources to encompass both Ukrainians and Belorussians. What are today exclusively designated as Russians were then referred to as "Great Russians." During the war, around 5.2 million Soviet nationals, including all ethnicities, survived being held in German occupied territory, either as POWs, forced laborers, or simply refugees fleeing to the West from the successful advance of the Red armies. An estimated two million of these soldiers and civilians were located in the zones seized and controlled by the Western powers. Most were ultimately collected and repatriated, either voluntarily or forcibly, into the anxious arms of the Soviets as part of one of the most massive and yet still relatively little-known operations of the Allies during and after World War II. Of the many phases of this policy, only a later one got the official label "Operation Keelhaul," after one of the most severe forms of torture used aboard sailing ships. But until most of the official records were declassified in 1967, it was the code name that became known as a fitting term for the entire policy. (1)

Like the prisoners at Plattling, some of those forcibly repatriated had fought in German uniforms. When the German armies had first invaded the Soviet Union, some Soviet subjects considered the event an opportunity for overthrowing Stalin. Even after being disillusioned by Adolf Hitler's merciless and murderous occupation policies, there were still a few who felt that German oppression was the lesser of two evils. Furthermore, many German officers disagreed with Hitler's policies, and it wasn't long before they were silently tolerating the employment of Russian deserters and prisoners of war, first as support troops, in which capacity they became known as Hilfsfreiwillijje, and later as combat troops, who were called Osttruppen.

In July 1942, the Germans captured General Andrei A. Vlasov, a Soviet war hero who had been awarded the Order of the Red Banner for his successful defense of Moscow from the initial German onslaught. By the time of his capture, however, Vlasov had become so disenchanted with Stalin's rule that he proposed to the Germans that they help him recruit and lead a Russkaya Osvoboditelnaya Armia (ROA), Russian Army of Liberation. Vlasov's proposal did succeed in gaining a few concessions: the Osttruppen were given official sanction, recruited until they totaled nearly one million men, and even issued ROA insignia. However, the ROA was never allowed to organize above the battalion level and, for the most part, was subordinated and submerged within larger German units. Vlasov was given no real authority; instead, he was subjected to unceasing but mostly unsuccessful attempts to use him for propaganda purposes and to get him to glorify Hitler. Finally, most of the ROA units were transferred to the Western Front, where many never wanted to fight in the first place.

By 1944, however, the Germans had become desperate, and they were prepared to give Vlasov freer rein. A Komitet Osvobozhdenia Narodov Rossii (Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia) was formed, and three KONR divisions totaling fifty thousand troops were organized. They saw some action against Stalin's armies, but not before Germany was in the final stages of collapse. Vlasov, to save his men from annihilation, concentrated them toward Austria in order to surrender to the Americans. Admittedly not all of those serving in the ROA and KONR had been eager and courageous political defectors. Most were Russian soldiers who had been captured by the Germans. Given that the alternative they faced was being held in POW camps that implemented Hitler's policy of deliberate starvation of Russian prisoners, their decision to join German ranks was frequently motivated by dire expediency. And if they needed any further incentive, should they survive the POW camps, Soviet military doctrine branded any soldier captured alive as a traitor. (2)

The position the Allies should have taken toward Vlasov's men and the ROA generally was made clear by Undersecretary of State Joseph Grew in a note to the Soviet Attache in Washington just before the Yalta Conference opened on February 4, 1945:

In regard to the status of the Soviet nationals under discussion, I feel I must in all sincerity remind you that they were not captured by American forces while they were detained in German prisoners of war camps but were serving Germany in German military formations in German uniform.... Grew argued that to repatriate these people would be a violation of the Geneva Convention:

The clear intention of the Convention is that prisoners of war shall be treated on the basis of the uniforms they are wearing when captured and that the detaining power shall not look behind the uniforms to determine ultimate questions of citizenship or nationality.... There are numerous aliens in the United States Army, including citizens of enemy countries. The United States Government has taken the position that these persons are entitled to the full protection of the Geneva Convention and has informed the German Government over a year ago that all prisoners of war entitled to repatriation under the convention should be returned to the custody of the United States regardless of nationality.... (Grew 1945) (3)

But the British had already begun forcible repatriation of Russians captured in German uniforms in October 1944, four months...