OPERATION KEELHAUL the Story of Forced Repatriation
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- $8.95 OPERATION KEELHAUL The Story of Forced Repatriation by JULIUS EPSTEIN illustrated Would freedom-loving Americans and their European allies deliberately con- demn millions of men, women and chil- dren to slavery or death behind the Iron Curtain? The answer must be no . but it isn’t, for that is exactly what happened when we and the Western Powers joined in one of the most horrifying-and the most secret-crimes in our history: Oper- ation Keelhaul. Julius Epstein tells the story in unfor- gettable detail, and for the first time. Pic- ture a shipload of World War II prisoners of war fighting so bitterly against repatria- tion that, at Fort Dix, New Jersey, we had to dope them to get them aboard, bound for their most dreaded destination, the Russian “homeland.” That is only one in- cident of the operation which we ourselves code-named “Keelhaul” (“to haul a per- son through water under the keel of a ship from side to side . a method of torture.“) How this appalling crime came about is an integral part of Epstein’s study. It is the story, too, of the author’s coura- geous, lone fight to pry loose Top Secret documents which no longer merit secrecy. “The People’s Right to Know” has be- come headline news today, and Julius Epstein is dedicated to this right, espe- OPE KEE The SI by JU illustral Would their I demn dren tc Curtai it isn’t when in one most : ation Jul gettal: ture 2 of wa tion t to dc for t Russ cider code son ship tort1 H is a is tl w dot con Ep: OperationKeelhaul OPERATION KEELHAUL The Story of Forced Repatriation from 1944 to the Present By Julius Epstein Introductionby BertramD. Wolfe THE DEVIN-ADAIR COMPANY 1 Old Greenwich Copyright @ 1973 by Julius Epstein Permission to reprint material from this book in any form whatsoever must be obtained in writing from the publishers. For information, address: The Devin-Adair Company, I Park Avenue, Old Greenwich, Conn. 06870 Library of Congress Catalogue No. 72-85336 Printed in U.S.A. Canadian Agent: Trans Canada Ltd., Toronto TO BLUMBI Introduction by Bertram D. Wolfe I met Julius Epstein for the first time in the nineteen forties. He was then engaged in solving a murder mystery of recent times, the disappear- ance of fifteen thousand Polish Army Officers who had been prisoners of war, and the finding of some four thousand of their corpses buried in the Katyn Forest. They had been hastily shot and carelessly buried in their winter uniforms, complete with identity cards and even letters from home in their pockets. They had been captured when Hitler and Stalin together attacked and divided Poland between them. The forest had been in Russian hands until Hitler attacked Stalin in June 1941, whereafter it was occupied by the Germans. The carelessly buried corpses were dug up by the German occupying army. Nazi propagandists charged Stalin with the crime, while Stalin answered by laying the murders at Hitler’s door. Our own government accepted Stalin’s version as true. But who had really murdered these four thousand officers, and presumably the rest of the officer prisoners of war who had disappeared? This was the mystery that Julius Epstein dedicated himself to unravel. With that r&e combirrat6ti %f deep moral concern, fearless.journalism, & tireleseship that I found&&tracterize him, Julius Epstein pushed his investigatiZi7untilat long last heliad XZXthe mystery com- pletely. His solution was unpopular with our government and press for we were then allied with Stalin, but Epstein made it inescapably clear that only the Russians could have shot them and buried them in their winter uniforms in order to leave Poland leaderless and helpless, since German troops could not have got to Katyn until after Hitler attacked in June and occupied the forest in the heat of midsummer. Epstein’s study, complete in every detail, eventually compelled our government to reverse itself, silenced the mendacious propaganda of the Soviet Government, and won the gratitude of the Polish people. While Poland’s government was still free of Russian-imposed Communist puppets, it showed its grati- tude by making Julius Epstein a Knight of the Order of Reborn Poland (Kawaler Orderu Odrodzenia Polski). Today, the present Communist Polish Government does not permit any mention of Katyn, for now, a viii OPERATION KEELHAUL quarter of a century later, no one can speak of the mass slaughter of so large a part of the natural Polish elite without invoking the name and unassailable solution of the mystery by Julius Epstein. Now this “knight” of a pen that is truly mightier than the sword has tackled a more complex enigma, one involving the honor of three powers far greater than Poland: the United States, England and Russia, and the fate not of fifteen thousand officers but of millions of Russian refugees, from generals of armies to intellectuals, Cossacks, peasants and workers, many of whom at peril to their lives had sought freedom in the West, and many more who, tossed by the storms of a great world war, found tbem- selves in the war prisons of Western countries and begged for refuge in lands of freedom, swearing to commit suicide, as many of them succeeded in doing, rather than be returned by force to the land of tyranny from which their daring, or the accidents of history, had helped them to escape. Thus, no sooner had Epstein completed the task of convincing the world that his solution of the Katyn Forest murder mystery was a true one than his attention was attracted to the fate of these millions of Rus- sian prisoners and escapees.Eo~thebe@ming -of rJss4Tke has devoted his unparalleled skill to unearthing carefully con; . cealed documents, striving to get the release of those that had been wrongfully classified as Top Secret, laboring to overcome the resistance of bureaucrats and highly placed officials of America and England inter- ested in concealing at all costs t+rtations by force-by force so brutal that American and British soldiers shed tears as Uley ceo msensi- b&hokd-tbem down at bayonet point, bind the cut arteries with which they had attempted to commit suicide rather than be returned to Stalin’s “justice,” shoot their feet so that they could not run, toss maimed and mangled bodies back into trucks after beating them into unconsciousness, or drugging them into insensibility. To reconstruct the shameful and pitiful story, Epstein has sought out participants, eyewitnesses, surviving victims; brought before the reader the actions and statements of personages high and low from the President of the United States and the Prime Minister of England, to the common rank and file soldier and lowliest victim. He has ferreted out military orders, communications between our State Department, the British For- eign Office, and Army Headquarters in the field. With grave impartiality he apportions praise and blame, but for the most part lets each actor speak for himself. In these pages we can find George Kennan in clear if restrained opposition, Charle Introduction iX orders from ’ u , Averell Harriman protesting courageously until he 1s.y---- sl enced, Dwight Eisenhower, then Commander-in-Chief, issuing his inv firmness, then years later, as President of e KoreanTar, making a forthright reversal of his error, as he considers the plight of the Chinese prisoners who do not want to return to their native land. Every episode is recounted with admirable restraint, a restraint which only heightens the intensity of our interest, our feelings, and our moral judgments. In all its bloody and shameful details the story of the fate of these millions is terribly painful to read, yet, once begun, impossible to put down. Nothing escapesJulius Epstein’s vigilance, and no historian of our era can afford to overlook his book. In it he will find solutions to many hith- erto puzzling problems. Here is fresh light on the behind-the-scenes and unreported agreements of the Yalta Conference; on the Nuremberg Laws and Nuremberg Trials; on Russia’s sudden agreement to withdraw her army of occupation from Austria after eight years of refusal; on the mal- functioning of the U.N. and the UNRRA Refugee Relief Organization; on the Vlasov -.moyement - --.. _and .----- t&e Ylasov Army (a story that has never ,b&n better or more clearly told); on the sad fate of the Cossack Divisions that trusted our and England’s word (“The NKVD would have slain us-- the British did it with thewonor”); on the talin’s hands by force of aged Russian refugees who had escaped from Russia around 1920 and were now seized and deported as if they were newly taken war prisoners; on the deportation with incred- ible brutality of refugees who had reached the apparent safety of our Fort Dix and our city of Seattle. In Seattle Harbor we watch American soldiers, some of them weeping, dumping Russian bodies into trucks, sub- duing them with blackjacks and bayonets, fishing them up when they leap into the water, dumping them on a Soviet ship where they fought with bare fists and disabled the engines, helping the Soviet captors to sub- due them and repair their engine, Our author is unduly modest about the completeness of his story be- cause the Department of the Army i xet certain of these doc~m~&.nowWathirdof mrv old, de&t&- ----i‘ fied. For it must be saifihat from other documents which are long un- classified, from the accounts of officers who are deeply ashamed of what they were compelled to do, and from unintended leaks that such an in- defatigable investigator was able to put together, the whole shameful story which British and American officials are trying still to conceal under X OPERATION KEELHAUL the cloak of secrecy, has been well spelled out and put together by this master historian-detective.