A few days ago a man who could have caused my death died of cancer at the ripe age of 86. He never faced a War Crimes Tribunal. He should have, and in a just world he would have.
His name was Lord Aldington, and only now did I learn he was responsible for the sheer terror my decimated family of four - grandmother, mother, younger sister and I - experienced in the brutal summer of 1945 while trapped by the Red Army in the vicinity of Berlin.
We learned we were to be deported back to Russia.
"Repatriation" was the euphemism. It would have been an almost certain execution or death by starvation and cold. In those lawless, bloody, brutal postwar years, as Germany lay in the dust and rubble of its destroyed and burned-out cities, it happened to millions and millions.
My mother having been warned, in a desperate flight across the Russian-British border in what we called the "Harzgebirge", we managed to escape. I have described that flight in one of my novels and have often told about it in keynotes and seminars in subsequent years.
However, so weak was my own sense of history that as late as 1980 I never knew that the horror we escaped had a name.
It was called "Operation Keelhaul".
Herewith I run a three part ZGram on "Operation Keelhaul" and the man accused of having masterminded it. The essay below was written by one Srdja Trifkovic.
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December 19, 2000
LORD ALDINGTON: DEAD, BUT NO R.I.P.
by Srdja Trifkovic
Trifkovic:
Lord Aldington, 86, a former British trade minister and Conservative Party vice chairman who filed one of Britain's most famous libel cases against a man who labeled him a war criminal, died of cancer Dec. 8 at his home in Kent, southern England.
In 1989, Lord Aldington was awarded $2.2 million in damages after winning a libel suit against historian Count Nikolai Tolstoy, a distant relative of Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, who had written a pamphlet accusing Lord Aldington of war crimes.
Zundelsite:
Censoring history by way of libel actions is unfortunately the method the rich and well-connected use against their pesky critics.
Trifkovic:
As a British army officer in Austria at the end of World War II, Lord Aldington -- then known by his given name, Toby Low -- oversaw the repatriation of thousands of Cossack and Yugoslav refugees [ Ed. ... and, of course, the ethnic Germans from the Soviet Union and the Baltic states] . Many were subsequently killed or interned in prison camps.
At the libel trial, Lord Aldington agreed that the refugees' fate was "ghastly" but said he had not known that many faced execution if returned to their homelands (The Washington Post, December 9, 2000).
Zundelsite:
To assume that a high-ranking British Army officer in the field, whose unit daily interrogated refugees and prisoners-of-war, all of whom had either fled from, fought against, or at one time were part of Stalin's army, is stretching credulity a bit too far. Only a fellow Lodge or Club member sitting as judge on a bench in London could be hypocritical enough to seem to believe such an answer.
Trifkovic:
An obituary sometimes begs a thousand words - well worth doing in this case, especially since it's been over a decade since we wrote about Aldington, Tolstoy, and one of the greatest untold tragedies of World War II (cf. "Writing in the Tolstoy Tradition" by Sally Wright, Chronicles, April 1989).
Zundelsite:
The tragedy was not untold. There were millions of people affected by it, and detailed accounts have long been written about it. Only the British, and to a lesser degree, the American power elite suppressed it, because their clique had formulated and approved these vicious pro-Communist policies in Teheran and Yalta. They are co-guilty of what happened. They share in the responsibility for these atrocities.
Trifkovic:
This is a story of heinous crimes that went unpunished and of establishmentarian conspiracies to cover them up, of miscarriage of justice, of one man's quixotic efforts to tell the truth and another's quiet campaign to keep it suppressed.
Zundelsite:
Is it really "quixotic" to expose the deliberate murder of millions? At least there is now an admission that one man - not to mention his network of accomplices - tried to suppress this crime.
Trifkovic:
The story starts at Yalta in February 1945, when the return of all Soviet citizens who found themselves in the Allied zone was demanded by Stalin -- and was duly agreed to by Churchill and FDR. Accordingly, hundreds of thousands of Soviet POWs liberated by the Allies were sent back home, regardless of their wishes, and regardless of what Stalin had in store for them.
Zundelsite:
What does that make Churchill and Roosevelt? Knowing and willing accomplices who had for years been briefed about Soviet war aims and the policies of Stalin and the behavior of his secret police and murderous Red Army. Yet they agreed to hand these people over!
Trifkovic:
In addition, in May and June 1945 tens of thousands of refugees from Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union -- unarmed civilians escaping communism, as well as anticommunist resistance fighters and assorted collaborationists -- were rounded up by the British in Austria, and forcibly delivered to Stalin and Tito. Most of them were summarily executed, sometimes within earshot of the British.
Zundelsite:
Within earshot not only of the British! Also the Czechs, the Hungarians, the Yugoslavs, Tito's bunch of murderers, AND the Americans.
Trifkovic:
Forced repatriations were known as Operation Keelhaul -- the "last secret" of World War II, as Alexander Solzhenitsyn called it. Men, women, and children were forced into boxcars headed for the Soviet zone in the east, or for Slovenia in the south.
Zundelsite:
Once again: It is a lie that it was a secret! It was merely a non-event, at least to those who closed their eyes to deliberate, pre-planned, Churchill- and-Roosevelt-approved, forced repatriation - which only could end in the murder of millions!
Trifkovic:
Non-Soviet and non-Yugoslav citizens and Serbian royalists were supposedly exempt from the deportation order, but key military officials in the British chain of command surreptitiously included them, too. As a result émigré Russians waving French passports and British medals from the World War I were all rounded up and delivered to Stalin.
Zundelsite:
This illustrates one more time the callousness of the British and American ruling elite. Lives meant nothing - power meant everything.
Trifkovic:
There was panic in the camps when the inmates realized what was going on. The British lied to some that they were to be taken to Italy, or some other safe haven; if the subterfuge didn't work they used rifle butts and bayonets as prods. Some refugees committed suicide by sawing their throats with barbed wire. Mothers threw their babies from trains into the river. To its credit one British regiment, the London Irish, refused: they went to war to fight German soldiers, they said, not to club refugee women and children.
Zundelsite:
Where are the war criminal trials for the rest of those field commanders who "followed orders"? Thousands of Germans were tried, convicted, shot or hanged for "following orders". "Obeying orders" was not allowed as an excuse by the Allied judges in postwar trials of Germans - to this day!
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Tomorrow: Part II
Thought for the Day:
"Work is the scythe of time."
(Napoleon Bonaparte)