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'Operation Keelhaul' was a programme carried out in Austria by British and American forces in May and June of 1945 that decided the fate of up to two millionJacob Hornberger ''Repatriation — The Dark Side of World War II''. The Future of Freedom Foundation, 1995. [1] post-war refugees fleeing eastern Europe.^[1]
One of the conclusions of the Yalta Conference was that the Allies would return all Soviet citizens that found themselves in the Allied zone to the Soviet Union. This immediately affected the Soviet prisoners of war liberated by the Allies, but was also extended to all refugees.
On March 31, 1945, Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt finalized their plans in a secret codilcil to the agreement. Outlining the plan to forcibly return the refugees to the Soviet Union, this codicil was kept secret from the American and British people for over fifty years.
The name of the operation comes from the practice of torture, keelhauling. In his book ''Operation Keelhaul'', Julius Epstein states: "That our Armed Forces should have adopted this term as its code name for deporting by brutal force to concentration camp, firing squad, or hangman's noose millions who were already in the lands of freedom, shows how little the high brass thought of their longing to be free. "
The refugee columns fleeing the Soviet-occupied eastern Europe numbered millions of people. They included assorted fascists, Nazi collaborationists, anti-communists and civilians, both from the Soviet Union and from Yugoslavia. The group included around 70,000 Cossacks from the Soviet Union and Ustaše from Yugoslavia, including about 11,000 women and children.
They were rounded up in Austria and forcibly repatriated. Most were headed for the Soviet zone of Germany in the east, or for Yugoslavia (Slovenia) in the south. Many of the refugees were summarily executed, sometimes within earshot of the British. The killings at the hand of the Yugoslav forces are known as the Bleiburg massacre. If not executed, they were sent to the gulags to die.
Among those handed over were White Russians who had never been Soviet citizens including the General Andrei Shkuro and the Ataman of the Don Cossack host Pyotr Krasnov, despite the British Foreign Office policy stated after the Yalta Conference that only Soviet citizens, after September 1, 1939, were to be compelled to return to the USSR.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn called this operation "the last secret of World War II." He contributed to a legal defence fund set up to help Nikolai Tolstoy, who was charged with libel in a 1989 case brought up by Lord Aldington over war crimes allegations made by Tolstoy related to this operation. Tolstoy lost the case.

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Further reading

See also

★ Russian Liberation Army

★ Andrey Vlasov

★ The Betrayal of Cossacks

★ Helmuth von Pannwitz

★ Bleiburg massacre

References

1. Operation Keelhaul: A Combined Allied Atrocity

Further reading

★ Tolstoy, Nikolai. ''Victims of Yalta'', originally published in London, 1977. Revised edition 1979. ISBN 0-552-11030-2

★ Epstein, Julius. ''Operation Keelhaul'', Devin-Adair, 1973. ISBN-13: 978-0815964070