Operation Keelbaul
Griffith, W.J. III
"Operation Keelbaul" From the Wilson Administration on, the United States has frequently appeased, condoned, and on numerous occasions, even encouraged and subsidized Soviet tyranny, while often displaying indifference...
...On the other hand, many of these same liberals have appeased and, by encouraging fifty years of East-West trade, indirectly subsidized Communist aggressions and atrocities...
...In the unkindest interpretation, deporting human beings back into Stalin's madhouse involved a conscious and vicious intent to decimate the Soviet anti-Communist movement...
...The Coast Guard offered to let Soviet officials board an American warship to beat and abduct Simas Kidurka, who was not even a Soviet citizen...
...The British continue to turn back untold multitudes of Chinese caught fleeing into Hong Kong from Mao's mainland dungeon...
...From the Wilson Administration on, the United States has frequently appeased, condoned, and on numerous occasions, even encouraged and subsidized Soviet tyranny, while often displaying indifference and sometimes hostility toward the victims of Communist aggression and suppression...
...officers even acknowledged that under international law, the 900,000 Soviet nationals fighting in German uniforms were German POWs and not subject to deportation to the USSR...
...one of Vlasov's closest German friends was Count von Stauffenberg, who tried to assassinate Hitler...
...Hitler gave Vlasov a command only in last-ditch desperation...
...While Kidurka was "only" a single case—at least, a single known case—undoubtedly his fate has discouraged others from trying to escape to this country...
...Vlasov turned to the Germans only because the United States was allied with the Soviet refugees' worst enemy, Stalin...
...Quite a few on the Left condemned the Germans collectively for Hitler's aggressions and atrocities...
...Soviet nationals fought with the Nazis in hopes of liberating their country from all forms of tyranny...
...In refutation of the revisionist myth that the United States started the Cold War, Lend-Lease and Operation Keelhaul continued up into 1947, long after Stalin had openly intensified the Kremlin's unceasing subversion of the non-Communist world...
...As Solzhenitsyn says, Roosevelt, often viewed as a champion of liberty in the West, is no hero to people behind the Iron Curtain...
...The courts have rejected his arguments by perverting the intent of the Freedom of Information Act of 1966...
...Through meticulous and persistent research Epstein convicts Western political leaders of complicity in a continuing and massive crime against humanity...
...The biggest question that Epstein, who researched the book as an associate at the Hoover Institution, fails to answer is: Who conceived Operation Keelhaul...
...Vietnam is but the latest example of leaky containment and bold rhetoric...
...During the Nuremberg trials and long afterward, many American liberals criticized, and wanted to punish, the German people for not having resisted Nazi tyranny more vigorously...
...Others who approved the deportations included Henry Stimson, Charles Bohlen, Cordell Hull, Admiral Leahy, and General Eisenhower, who was positively enthusiastic about speeding up the forced repatriation...
...The implication of Solzhenitsyn's observation seems obvious: If the West had befriended the anti-Soviet refugees, Communism might have collapsed from a lack of internal defenders...
...His reluctance was well-founded...
...George Marshall, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff...
...Furthermore, Epstein has unearthed official documents which prove conclusively that American civilian and military authorities realized that forced repatriation violated numerous agreements which both Moscow and Washington had previously endorsed...
...As a German captive, General Vlasov, the popularly proclaimed leader of the Soviet refugees, published a statement making it clear that he would accept any aid, American or German, to free his country...
...And through Operation Keelhaul, leftists betrayed Soviets who had the courage to resist Communist tyranny...
...The fault lies not with the scholar but with the American and British governments who are determined to conceal complicity in what Epstein describes as a crime against humanity...
...Regrettably, the multitude of liberals who praised the theft and publication of the Pentagon Papers have not clamored for the legal exposure of the Keelhaul papers...
...True, American political leaders have enunciated concern about Moscow's rapacious imperialism, but the historical record reveals that the United States almost always retreats when the Communists assault the free world, sometimes after the loss of thousands of lives and billions of dollars...
...Whatever the...
...Nevertheless, U.S...
...In choosing the codeword "keelhaul," American and British officials demonstrated apparent awareness of the fate of the 2 million refugees they intended to banish from the free world: few victims ever survived keelhauling in the Britishnavy...
...West Germany has turned back Hungarian refugees...
...To his credit, Ike did not repeat the mistake of Operation Keelhaul after the Korean War...
...Tragically for the cause of human freedom everywhere, Roosevelt and Churchill chose to shore up the Soviet regime by, disarming itsenemies and delivering them to torture, starvation, and genocide...
...In recent years Austria and Italy have deported thousands of refugees from Communist Yugoslavia, claiming their victims were economic, not political, escapees, and overlooking the obvious fact that Tito considers all escapes to be criminal offenses, a situation of which Austrian and Italian authorities are certainly aware...
...Epstein, a refugee from Hitler's tyranny, has gone to court in the United States to force the Pentagon to divulge the relevant papers...
...It was President Truman's genius to recognize the reality of the Cold War which the Communists had launched against the West, particularly the United States, soon after usurping power in 1917...
...Incredible, perhaps, but Epstein has discovered that symptoms of Operation Keelhaul continue to infect Western policy...
...Solzhenitsyn also notes that never before in history have so many people deserted their country and joined the enemy...
...Despite massive government secrecy, Epstein has managed to trace culpability for Operation Keelhaul right up to Secretary of State Edward Stettinius and to Gen...
...It illustrates again the double standard of the Left toward totalitarianism...
...In the kindest interpretation, British and American authorities engineered Operation Keelhaul, the forced repatriation of 2 million anti-Stalinist Soviet refugees, as a cynical means of buying the paranoid dictator's good will...
...Apparently none of the officials responsible for Operation Keelhaul ever wondered why 2 million people fled their homeland in its greatest peril...
...truth, Operation Keelhaul, along withbillions of dollars worth of Lend-Lease industrial machinery for postwar construction, signalled the Kremlin that Washington and London were not going to oppose its suppression of liberty in Eastern Europe...
...It is, then, almost a dead certainty that Roosevelt and Churchill also wanted to deport the refugees in violation of international law and the American principle of sanctuary...
...And even the United States has refused asylum to escapees from behind the Iron Curtain and treated shabbily some of those it has offered a sanctuary...
...Unfortunately, the victim, not the criminal, has been punished...
...On the British side, Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, Churchill's son-in-law, endorsed Operation Keelhaul...
...propaganda leaflets dropped behind enemy lines denied Nazi charges that the allies were forcibly repatriating Soviet nationals...
...The West's assistance in dragooning millions of refugees into Soviet death camps goes further than to demonstrate once more the twentieth century's cruelty and callousness toward human life...
...Both civilian and military refugees were railroaded back to Stalin's madhouse...
...He was recently released from a Soviet labor camp, but only after it was revealed that his mother was American...
...Julius Epstein's book, Operation Keelhaul, details numerous cases of free world hostility, with tragic consequences for the victims...
Vol. 8 • March 1975 • No. 6
