BL-24 - Flipbook - Page 135
A TIME TO REMEMBER
On the day before Macmillan’s fateful visit to Austria,
15 Army Group in Italy reported that: “Eighth Army are
holding some 40,000 Germans and 50,000 Cossacks, of
which latter 20,000 are women and children, in their present
Zone of Action”. I fear Macmillan was as merciless as any
SS killer.
“I was smuggled by village priests and foresters
to the dreadful natural pit in the forest of
Kocevje, where thousands of victims had been
slaughtered.”
To this shameful action the two British war criminals
gratuitously arranged a parallel handover to the genocidal
dictator Tito of tens of thousands of Yugoslav refugees in
British hands. The betrayal of these troops and refugees
to certain death at the hands of Tito’s executioners was if
anything more appalling – certainly more immediate – than
the fate accorded the Cossacks.
While the 1944 Yalta Agreement provided for the
humanitarian return of Allied prisoners of war and refugees
to their own countries immediately following the cessation
of hostilities, it did not and could not legally transfer them
to a third party likely to treat them with extreme brutality.
The situation was further exacerbated by the fact that the
USSR had never acceded to the Geneva Convention, and
(as Macmillan explicitly acknowledged) was notoriously
cruel in its treatment of “class enemies”. Worse still from
the perspective of international law was the inclusion of
White Russians for “return”. This term covered people
like my father who had 昀氀ed Soviet rule, never held Soviet
citizenship, and had in consequence either acquired that
of the country where they had settled, or bore a League of
Nations “Nansen passport”.
Stalin was particularly concerned to lay hands on such
people, whom he correctly regarded as being inherently
hostile to Soviet oppression. It was in large part my
background which made me particularly alert to this
consideration. Previous English and American writers on
the forced repatriation assumed that the White Russians
prominent among the Cossacks were included “by mistake”,
and despite Macmillan’s inadvertent admission in his diary,
this pretext was eagerly adopted by subsequent defenders of
his callous policy.
Harold Macmillan
The great majority of Keightley’s chief-of-staff Brigadier
Toby Low (later Lord Aldington)’s victims were
slaughtered: most of them were thrown into great natural
chasms in the forest of Kocevje, where they were butchered
by shooting. High explosives were detonated among the
ever-increasing heap of victims.
Being of White Russian stock myself (my father escaped
from the Soviet Union as a boy in 1920) I was more struck
than might perhaps be others by Macmillan’s inadvertent
admissions. As the Cossacks were serving in the German
Army in German uniforms, they fell under the protection
of the 1929 Geneva Convention. They were accordingly
prisoners of the power to which they had surrendered: in the
case of the Cossacks, this was the British.
Over the years following publication of Victims of Yalta,
fresh evidence inevitably came to light, in particular
concerning the parallel secretive delivery to Tito of
thousands of fugitive Yugoslav royalists and others. At a
time when Communist rule in the former Yugoslavia was
still all-powerful, I was smuggled by village priests and
foresters to the dreadful natural pit in the forest of Kocevje,
where thousands of victims had been slaughtered. Their
piled bones remained as mute testimony to this abominable
policy.
In due course I published a fresh book, The Minister and
the Massacres, which included all the fresh evidence known
to me at the time of writing. The Minister was of course
Macmillan, which aroused frenzied rage on the part of the
Establishment. But this did not distress me unduly!
Macmillan died about this time without ever having
condescended to explain his responsibility for 昀氀agrant
violations of international law and its horri昀椀c consequences.
Keightley had died years earlier, before I could speak to
him. I had, however, interviewed British soldiers of all
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