Crimes and Mercies (13 page)

Allied support for the Soviets had still not been entirely cut off as late as 1948, for returned prisoners of war have reported that they were still building the BAM line with steel rails marked ‘Made in Canada’.

One or two of the camps, such as Krasnogorsk, west of Moscow, were re-education centres where likely candidates were sent during the war to be retrained into communist ideology. This was the brainwashing later made infamous in Korea. A famous German General ‘graduate’ from Krasnogorsk, Field Marshal Paulus, had fought hard for the Wehrmacht at Stalingrad. Another was a fighter pilot, Heinrich von Einsiedel, of a famous aristocratic German family. Men who later became leaders of East Germany were trained here. The camp was comfortable, well run, efficient, successful. Both Japanese and Germans were indoctrinated in communist ideology in these camps, then sent home to help bring about the communist revolution. (The British maintained similar camps in the UK after the war. Some primitive re-education was also done in Canada.)
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The labour of the prisoners not only cost the USSR a subsidy, the prisoners themselves endangered the USSR in the end, because they left the USSR with valuable information. Many Japanese and German prisoners were interviewed by officers of the United States Air Force, who were looking for information about the location, size, dispersal, importance and purpose of factories, bridges, airports, railways and so forth in the USSR. The prisoners in the end were converted into spies. Thousands of these reports, a monument to the Cold War, are stored to this day in American archives in Washington.

The full story of the Gulag for foreign prisoners has not yet been told, although Solzhenitsyn has told of the sufferings in the Gulag for Soviet citizens. The general impression in the Western mind is that life in the Gulag was one of unvaried suffering under a relentless cruelty, but that is not the full story. Let us add to our existing picture of the Gulag some stories of a kind we have not heard before.
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One of the happier Japanese prisoners rolling home to Japan in August 1945 was a young man named Makoto, native of a very old district of Tokyo, Eddoko. Makoto was drafted at the age of twenty in 1945, then sent with no military training at all to the Kwantung Army in Manchuria. Smart, cheerful, quiet, Makoto got on well, though he was absolutely bewildered by the soldier’s life. He was taken prisoner by the Russians along with about 640,000 others, and soon put in a locked car in a train their guards said was headed back to the Pacific and home. Makoto had the upper bunk of an ancient Tsarist prison car called a Stolypin car. There was a tiny window. He called out to the others what he could see as the train rumbled through the Russian forest. When they got to the edge of the ocean, they were permitted to run down to the water. Some tasted it, and found it was sweet, fresh water. Lake Baikal, thousands of kilometres from the sea. The Russians laughed and laughed.

Makoto was then shipped towards Karaganda far to the west, where he was put in a labour camp along with many Europeans. Makoto worked in the camp office, where he noticed that one of the Russian officers in charge of the camp’s books was illiterate. Makoto taught himself Russian and soon took over the officer’s duties for him. He was invited to the officer’s home for dinner. The officer told him he was having marital troubles and asked for advice. Makoto obliged. Later he said that life in that Russian camp was better than in his district of Tokyo during the war.

Makoto’s experience parallels that of a German soldier, Fred Pichler, who was kept in a remarkably open prison in Moscow after the war. Pichler, now of Grafton, Ontario, was walking along the street in Moscow one day in 1946 with his Soviet guard
and other prisoners, en route to build houses. He was accosted by a young Russian woman who asked him to come into her house nearby. He asked permission of the guard, who smiled and said yes.

Pichler went in and the woman showed him a framed photograph standing on a table of himself in Russian uniform. Astounded, he asked how she had gotten it. She said that it was her husband, who looked exactly like him. She asked him if he would visit her and her two-year-old son who constantly asked when Daddy was coming home. Pichler was to pretend to be the boy’s father. (They were by now speaking English to each other – she was an English teacher, and he had learned English in Germany before joining up.)

Fred Pichler did visit her many times, with permission, playing Daddy. This went on for over a year, until he was released. Pichler was eighteen years old, and very innocent, so there was no question of sex. Since leaving the USSR, he has made repeated efforts to find the young mother, without success. He has said, ‘I love those people,’ meaning the Russians. ‘I keep them close in my heart.’

The KGB generated millions of pages of detailed records of these people, from captivity to release or death. The documents are all still stored in a tall gloomy building in Moscow called the Central State Special Archive, or CSSA. So secret that it was fronted by a different building, and accessible only to a very few scholars and apparatchiks, the CSSA contained millions and millions of documents recording everything significant that went on in the prisoner of war Gulag. After the Soviets fell, and the CSSA archives were opened under the new democratic regime, I visited them in 1992. I was allowed to walk up and down the gloomy aisles and to take down at random any box I liked, to read its contents through my Canadian interpreter, to photocopy the documents, which I did, and to take them to Canada, where I now have scores of them.

I found gifts to Stalin from the prisoners who were hoping to get home sooner by fawning on their tormentor. There were silk
banners with flattering poems to the great anti-fascist hero embroidered in red and gold, intricately carved boxes of mahogany, paintings, beautiful inlaid boxes, books of drawings, scrolls. On one shelf, it was rumoured, the Soviets preserved Hitler’s teeth. And there were carefully detailed records of the prisoners’ fate.

A personal dossier was kept for each prisoner, recording his unit, name, serial number, date of capture, medical and legal history. One dossier included an X-ray of a broken bone mended in hospital in 1946. The dossier of an Austrian prisoner, the famous biologist Konrad Lorenz, is particularly thick, including descriptions of some of the scientific work he was able to carry out in camp. The dossiers average around twenty pages per prisoner. Some are over 200 pages long.

Here also lies the proof of certain crimes committed by the Western powers beginning with their co-operation with Stalin in 1941. These are Western crimes which are being covered up even now, by the governments of France, the UK, the US and probably Canada, with the help of some TV producers, some academics, archivists, editors and writers.

Since a clear understanding of the Western leaders’ duplicity depends in part on the accuracy of certain documents in the Soviet archives, it is essential to compare their version of important events with what is known or believed in the West. Immediately, the reaction of most Westerners will be, ‘How can one trust Soviet records, knowing that the Soviet system normally depended on mass deception?’ This is a main reason that the Soviet archives are dependable. Virtually all the Soviet lying went on
outside
the archive. Soviet archives could safely record the truth because they were top secret, available only to the top members of the regime.

As General Dmitri Volkogonov has written, Lenin began the practice, enforced rigidly for seventy years, of storing most important documents recording Soviet actions and policies, no matter how brutal.
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Thus the paradox foreshadowed by George Orwell became reality: what the people knew was not true, what was true
was not known. This dizzying paradox was not unknown in the West at the time of Watergate, of the bombing of Cambodia, of the French atrocities in Indo-China and Africa, of the UK police actions in Northern Ireland, the arms sales to Iraq in the 1980s, of Canadian war crimes in Somalia, and so on.

Many of the statistics of the Gulag kept in the CSSA support both the picture of terrible suffering and of a strange but endurable prison-society whose major fault was captivity, much like the common picture of a Western jail.

What objective tests can we apply to the accuracy of these statistics? The most impressive evidence of the accuracy of the NKVD records is the story of the documents recording the Katyn massacre. In April 1940, the Red Army slaughtered many thousand Polish officers taken prisoner during the Soviet attack on Poland in 1939. This massacre was of course hidden from the local population, and from other units of the army and the NKVD. Records of the slaughter were routinely made and sent to Moscow.

After the Germans invaded Russia, the surviving Poles became the allies of their captors. Released from prison to help form a Polish army to fight the Germans, the Polish General Anders met Stalin in Moscow. Unaware of the fate of the missing officers, Anders asked Stalin face to face to return them. Stalin dissimulated. Anders pressed the point, sending one of his staff officers all over the USSR to search for the missing men.
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They found nothing definite, but vague, disquieting rumours. At first the Poles thought that some 3,000 had been massacred; later they suspected it was more, perhaps as many as 15,000.

After the Germans took the Katyn region and discovered some of the mass graves, they held an investigation that showed that the Soviets were guilty. When the Polish refugee government in London asked the International Red Cross to investigate, the Soviets broke diplomatic relations with them. After the Red Army retook Katyn, the Soviets held their own commission which found the Soviets innocent and the Germans guilty. But the German evidence of Soviet guilt was so compelling that both
Churchill and Roosevelt covered it up as a matter of policy. Churchill told Roosevelt that the massacre had been committed by the Russians, and advised him to keep this secret. An American friend of President Roosevelt, Ambassador Earle, showed the President proof that the Soviets were guilty, but following Churchill’s advice, the President forbade him to publish it.
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And Katyn was a massacre of Poles, who were allies of the West.
It was to defend these people that Britain and France had gone to war
against Hitler
.

At the Nuremberg war crimes trials in 1945–46, the Soviets presented a case against the Germans so absurd, based on fumbling witnesses who muffed their rehearsed lines and a clumsy forgery of evidence, that the Americans and British were able to persuade them to withdraw it. For fifty years Soviets from the lowest to the highest positions lied, deceived, dissimulated, hypocritically accused others, offended friends, made new enemies, murdered those who told the truth and lost face while the world argued over, and suspected, who had killed the prisoners of Katyn. And for fifty years, the NKVD document ordering the death penalty for the Katyn prisoners lay on the shelves of the archives in Moscow, along with letters and memos ordering the subsequent cover-up.
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In the same archive were other papers showing that Molotov, Kaganovich and Stalin had ordered the execution of 38,679 army officers, poets, writers and apparatchiks in 1937 and 1938.
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Surely, if the Soviets were ever going to falsify documents, it would have been those ones. And they remained, intact, accurate, damning.

A war crime in which the British collaborated with the Soviets was hidden by both powers in 1945 and for long after. In fact, the British government and one senior officer, Lord Aldington, were still denying responsibility fifty years later. In 1945, the British delivered thousands of prisoners of Russian nationality, including women and children, into Soviet hands in the full knowledge that the Soviets would shoot the leaders and enslave the rest. These people were ethnic White Russians who had fought the Soviets as
allies of the British during the Russian Civil War. They fled Russia before the Soviets could catch them at the end of the war, so they had never been
Soviet
citizens.

Stalin had no legal rights to many of these people, and no moral right to any of them. But the British delivered them anyway, in scenes of dreadful suffering and protest so grotesque that very soon the British soldiers were rebellious and their officers feared they would not be able to deliver any more prisoners.
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All this was revealed a few years ago in several books and a pamphlet by the renowned British author Count Nikolai Tolstoy, to the amazement and fury of high officials of the British government. They immediately closed ranks against the author, who says that they committed or procured perjury and illegally sequestered documents in order to help Lord Aldington succeed in a libel action against Tolstoy.

Tolstoy, along with a few others in the West, was relieved when many of the Soviet archives were at last opened by first Mikhail Gorbachev and then Boris Yeltsin. With the opening of the Soviet Red Army archives, important elements proving his case were revealed. Tolstoy flew to Moscow and found there documents ‘of central importance’ to his case, proving that 5 Corps command, of which Lord Aldington (formerly Brigadier Toby Low) was Chief of Staff, entered into a secret agreement with the Soviets to hand over thousands of White Russian émigrés from Western Europe who had sought refuge in Austria. This action violated orders received from the Allied High Command, which under the terms of the Yalta Agreement restricted forced repatriation to Soviet nationals. The victims included a large number of women and children, and the operation was carried out in violation of the Geneva Convention.
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Records recently revealed in the Soviet archives

The Soviets captured on their European front 3,486,206 prisoners from seventeen countries, according to the vast Soviet
archive. The authoritative book on the subject, edited by G. F. Krivosheyev, shows that the Soviets captured 2,389,560 German soldiers between 22 June 1941 and 9 September 1945. Of these, 450,600 died. Of these, 356,687 died in rear camps run by the NKVD, and a further 93,900 died en route from the front to the rear camps.
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A further 271,672 civilians were rounded up and termed
internyrovannye
, of whom 66,481 died.
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