BL-24 - Flipbook - Page 134
A TIME TO REMEMBER
A Cossack family
A PERILOUS QUEST
By Count Nikolai Tolstoy
Count Nikolai Tolstoy is a historian and author
of White Russian descent, known for exposing
Allied forced repatriations after World War II and
challenging of昀椀cial narratives.
On his return to Allied Headquarters at Naples, Macmillan
covertly pushed through his unexplained and brutal policy.
Most of the Cossacks were either slaughtered on being
handed over to SMERSH at Judenburg or died subsequently
in Gulag’s slave-labour camps.
A
t the beginning of 1978, I published my book
Victims of Yalta, which recounted the tragic and
shameful story of the forced repatriation of well
over two million Soviet citizens and others handed over
by the British and US governments following the close of
World War II.
At the Central Mediterranean Force, commanded by Field
Marshal Alexander, the Political Adviser was Harold
Macmillan. On 13 May 1945 he 昀氀ew to newly-occupied
Austria, where he issued a “verbal directive” to the local
Corps Commander, General Keightley.
In his diary compiled at the time, Macmillan noted of his
visit that “among the surrendered Germans are about 40,000
Cossacks and ‘White’ Russians, with their wives and
children. To hand them over to the Russians is condemning
them to slavery, torture and probably death. To refuse is
deeply to offend the Russians and incidentally break the
Yalta agreement. We [he and Keightley] have decided to
hand them over.”
Macmillan lied when he claimed that the Yalta Agreement
of 1944 covered these shameful operations: in reality, the
Agreement related to mutual repatriation of citizens in
enemy hands at the close of hostilities. Despatching them
to “slavery, torture and probably death” was naturally not
intended by the British and American negotiators at Yalta
(apart from Stalin, of course), requiring as it did the gravest
violation imaginable of the 1929 Geneva Convention and
the laws of humanity generally.
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