Friends,
It begins in muddied black and white, no
voices over until about two minutes into the film. At first it may seem a bit
unclear what is happening. But soon, with the first interview of a British
officer, it becomes all too apparent—too graphic, too unsettling, too horrific
for our minds so accustomed to the cushy prosperity and relative peace of
contemporary America to fully grasp. And it is only the beginning. The online
Youtube is titled “Forgotten History of World War II: Operation Keelhaul,”
although the initial title in the film reads “Orders from Above.”
At
the end of it we find in the credits that it was originally produced with much
research by the BBC in 1975. To my knowledge it has never been screened on
American television, never released in a VHS or DVD format of any kind. But it
cries out, with the voices of millions of men, women and children cruelly and
barbarously murdered, for acknowledgement…and for justice, even if seventy-five
years too late.
It left a profound impression on me, as I think it will on you
as you watch it.
In
1974-1975 many of the sealed World War II records and archives of the British
Foreign Office were finally unsealed, and, in particular, the files of how our
English allies forcibly shipped back to the Soviet Union and to our supposed
friend in the war against Adolf Hitler, “Uncle” Joe Stalin (as he was
affectionately called in the Anglo-American press), some two million plus
Russians who existed within Western Europe at the end of the Second World War.
And
if other nationalities that were sent to the Soviets are counted the figures
mount to around five or six millions: all to become victims of Stalin’s
revenge.
Not
just the thousands Russians (mainly Cossacks) who had actually volunteered to
fight with the Germans against Communism and for their homeland (which was
their object, not really for Naziism), but hundreds of thousands of civilians,
who had been forced at gunpoint to work for the Nazis as part of their war
effort. And including thousands of innocent women and children, again many
inducted forcibly into labor battalions. Not only that, Stalin also
requested—and many times got—any Russians the Westerns powers could round up or
find who had taken refuge in Western Europeprior to 1939…in other
words, the many anti-Communist Russians who had left Russia after the
Revolution of 1918-1920 and had been living peaceably in the West since then.
For
Stalin there were no POWS: a Red Army soldier was either victorious or died for
Communism (either at the hands of the enemy or by his own suicide!). Capture by
the enemy was unacceptable, not acknowledged by the Soviet military. A Soviet
POW was already sentenced to death if he was captured alive or
surrendered. Almost certain execution, either immediately or in a gulag, lay
ahead for any returned comrade.
All
this—all of the forced and many times very brutal and inexpressibly horrific
repatriation at the point of a bayonet or facing British machine guns took
place in almost total secrecy. The English—Anthony Eden, Patrick Dean and, yes,
Winston Churchill (and Franklin D. Roosevelt)—were eager to placate “Uncle Joe”
and keep him happy, even if it meant the cruel death (or at the least a slow
death in a gulag in Siberia) for more than two million living, breathing men
and their families. “Collateral losses” was an antiseptic term used,
“unfortunate necessities” is another fancy word expression…an expression to
evoke just one aspect of official Allied policy at the end of the War, a policy
that continued for several years, and then details about which were locked away
for another thirty years.
For
three decades the policy of Britain and America was to keep a rigid silence
about these actions, mostly deny the existence of such incredible barbarity…at
least until 1974-1975. Then English journalist, Nicholas Bethel (in his riveting
volumeThe Last Secret: The Delivery to Stalin of Over Two
Million Russians) and Count Nikolai Tolstoy in The Secret Betrayal, 1944-1947 tore
back the curtain, employing the finally opened archives. And later
Tolstoy, a British citizen and distant cousin of the famous Russian novelist,
authored a shattering sequel, The Minister and the Massacres (1985),
which traces in a straight line who gave the orders, who were responsible for
what in many ways rivalled in barbarity the crimes of our enemies in the late
war.
Those
millions of Russian victims of the war do not take into account
approximately maybe ten to fifteen million Eastern European German civilians (Volksdeutsche)
living outside Germany forcibly moved back to the fatherland, with only clothes
on their backs, as many as 2.5 million of whom perished during the frigid
winter of 1945-1946, as Alfred de Zayas has documented in his scholarly yet
stunning volume Nemesis at Potsdam: The Anglo-Americans and the Expulsion
of the Germans: Background: Execution, Consequences (1979).
Nor
do they measure the actions of us Americans after the war—documented
by Canadian journalist, James Bacque in his book, Other Losses (1989). Bacque’s incredible,
nearly unbelievable findings:that U.S. General Dwight D. Eisenhower intentionally
caused the deaths by starvation or exposure of around a million German prisoners
of war held in Western internment
camps briefly after the Second
World War.
How
do victorious powers in a righteous war against an Evil Power responsible for
immense cruelty and criminality, then establish peace, justice, and liberty
after that war when they engage in similar practices of cruelty and criminality
against that Evil Power, or more specifically against millions of subjects in
occupied lands under that Power’s control forced into its service?
Do
we not still suffer the effects of our, in many ways, continuing dalliance with
Communism, and more so today, of its bastard step-children, the progressivist
“woke” post-Marxist Left that so defiles and despoils our culture, denies our
history, and despises and bans our heritage?
****
I
pass on to you the Youtube, “Forgotten History of World War II: Operation
Keelhaul.” It lasts for about one hour and a half, which I recognize is long
for such a video. When I first began watching I thought only to view bits and
small parts of it. But I could not stop—I could not stop listening to and
seeing the still-shaken British soldiers and officers recounting how they had
been ordered to bayonet soldiers and civilians and force them into blinded box
cars or herded into over-crowded ships to Odessa, only to watch them brutally
murdered dockside upon arrival. I could not stop viewing the searing images,
the reminiscences of the few Russians who somehow managed to escape or survive.
If
you don’t have a full hour and a half to watch this film immediately, just
begin with a few excerpts—at about 23:00 into the film, then at about 56:00 for
the next few minutes, and then finally at around 1:05:00 until the end when
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, from his monumental Gulag Archipelago is
quoted. Sadly, some of the books I’ve cited are now priced terribly high (and
one must wonder why that is?), but I recommend also purchasing some of them and
sharing them with your family and friends. In the scheme of eternity, it’s
important.
Like the British officers and the
clergyman interviewed, I too am haunted by all this, I am haunted by the
complicity of “civilized” nations, by people raised and annealed in the
principles of our Christian faith. This film makes it all too real.
If I had a time machine
for our society and culture, I would immediately send us all back prior to
the First World War (for that is where the Second originated)…and I would
frantically warn the Archduke Franz Ferdinand not to go to Sarajevo. I would
scream from the rooftops, as in Holy Writ, that irredentism and unbridled,
headless nationalism could only lead to devastation. And I would plead that all
men—English Victorians, the Russian tsarists, the French republicans, the
Serbian extremists—spend more time in Church asking for God’s grace and
forgiveness, than on the battlefield or hurtling blood-soaked threats at their
neighbors….
Here we are now in 2020,
after by far the bloodiest and most unimaginably vicious century—the 20th—in
human history. And in our insouciance and worldliness we pretend that the most
important things are material, and we act as if God does not exist. In fact,
most people probably believe in Satan more, at least in the way they act, than
in Our Heavenly Father.
It cannot
last…indefinitely. And we should begin, we should prepare by arming ourselves
with knowledge and Faith.