British POWs in Siberia?

Kyt · May 12, 2008

The Iron Cage: Are British Prisoners of War Abandoned in Soviet Hands Still Alive in Siberia? Nigel Cawthorne

Whilst looking for something else I came across this. It's a sample of what seems to be a very interesting book. Printed copies are available or an online download for £3.25.

Authors OnLine - The Iron Cage by Nigel Cawthorne
(click View Sample)

Brian S · May 13, 2008

Iron Cage

Kyt said: ↑

The Iron Cage: Are British Prisoners of War Abandoned in Soviet Hands Still Alive in Siberia? Nigel Cawthorne

Whilst looking for something else I came across this. It's a sample of what seems to be a very interesting book. Printed copies are available or an online download for £3.25.

Authors OnLine - The Iron Cage by Nigel Cawthorne
(click View Sample)
Click to expand...

I believe I have a copy hidden away somewhere. I wouldn't be surprised myself if the Russians hadn't held on to some of the many thousands of P.O.W. from the Camps they Liberated in 1945.
Many came home by ship through Odessa arranged by 30 Mission who were based in Moscow.

Kyt · May 17, 2008

I've just acquired a tatty copy.

One statement that intrugues me:

One man, Frank Kelly, a Lewisham lad captured by the Germans at Arnhem and ‘liberated’ from Stalag 4B, had been returned in 1953 after eight years in a Soviet prison. He was immediately arrested by the British authorities for being absent without leave and his story was quickly dropped.
Click to expand...

Does anyone have a list of POWs from Arnhem and/or Stalag 4B? Would be interesting to find out who he was.

David Layne · May 17, 2008

One man, Frank Kelly, a Lewisham lad captured by the Germans at Arnhem and ‘liberated’ from Stalag 4B, had been returned in 1953 after eight years in a Soviet prison. He was immediately arrested by the British authorities for being absent without leave and his story was quickly dropped.

I always view reports like this with a degree of skepticism. Surely after 55 years something would have come out, if nothing else a best selling book.

Kyt · May 17, 2008

Well the book is available - as posted in #1. What seems to be intriguing from what I've read so far is that the US Senate, and the Russians, has been taking this seriously for quite a long time, but the Brits still deny any knowledge.

And there is evidence that POWs remained. The author interviewed a French POW who was forced to stay after he was released from a gulag. He managed to get to the French embassy in the early 1980s but they didn't believe him. It wasn't until the early 90s that he finally managed to visit France again.

And the fact that most of the POWs, be they French, US or British (including Commonwealth) were listed as Missing meant that most families didn't chase this up. It was only after the Vietnam war ended and those families in the US started chasing up MIAs that information about possible cover ups from the Korean war and WW2 started appearing.

liverpool annie · Aug 7, 2008

Kyt said: ↑

Well the book is available - as posted in #1. What seems to be intriguing from what I've read so far is that the US Senate, and the Russians, has been taking this seriously for quite a long time, but the Brits still deny any knowledge.

And there is evidence that POWs remained. The author interviewed a French POW who was forced to stay after he was released from a gulag. He managed to get to the French embassy in the early 1980s but they didn't believe him. It wasn't until the early 90s that he finally managed to visit France again.

And the fact that most of the POWs, be they French, US or British (including Commonwealth) were listed as Missing meant that most families didn't chase this up. It was only after the Vietnam war ended and those families in the US started chasing up MIAs that information about possible cover ups from the Korean war and WW2 started appearing.
Click to expand...

This is interesting !! ..... wonder if there was anything else found ??

http://pages.prodigy.net/lynnpowmia/010728.htm

Annie

Brian S · Aug 8, 2008

Missing P.O.W.

liverpool annie said: ↑

This is interesting !! ..... wonder if there was anything else found ??

http://pages.prodigy.net/lynnpowmia/010728.htm

Annie
Click to expand...

In 1955 the Chinese released four American Airmen taken prisoner in Korea.

A file in T.N.A. dated 1959 is described as follows.- Possible return to UK from China of Marine Andrew *******,a defector,while a P.O.W. during war in Korea.

There are other files that contain reports on Communist indoctrination of British P.O.W. in North Korea.

All Wars have their Psychological casualties as well as physical ones.

Kyt · Aug 8, 2008

I did end up reading The Iron Cage and though he didn't find clear evidence, or actual surviving British POWs, he did find some who claimed to be French and from other nations. What was most interesting was the political reasons for the Soviet actions, expecially their use of US and Allied POWs as bargaining tools to get the allies to return those eastern Europeans who had been taken POW whilst serving with the Germans.

And i also found circumstantial evidence very convincing.

Coincidently this review has just appeared of another, similar, book:

Americans in the Gulag | Chained ghosts | Economist.com

Americans in the Gulag
Chained ghosts

Aug 7th 2008
From The Economist print edition

PARANOIA and exhibitionism, two of the defining characteristics of the Soviet system, make a nasty mix. It was the Soviet Union’s desire to crow over depression-stricken America that encouraged it to let hundreds of workers, desperate for jobs and a new start in life, immigrate there in the early 1930s. Exactly how many nobody knows; almost all ended up in mass graves. Initially lauded as welcome refugees from the miseries of capitalism (and as useful specialists who might help replicate the bits of it that worked, such as factories) from 1935 onwards they became enemies of the people, infiltrators and spies. A tiny handful, such as Paul Robeson, a singer, were tolerated as propaganda trophies. The rest sank into a living Hades of torture, rape, slave labour, starvation, frostbite and death, shared with millions of others.

The horrors of the Gulag ought to be as well known as Auschwitz, but they aren’t. Tim Tzouliadis includes many of them in his sprawling narrative. His statistics are sometimes sloppy and he seems barely aware that for most of its people the Soviet Union was already a hell-hole, even when the American workers were happily playing baseball in Gorky Park.

The real value of his book is in chronicling the extraordinarily supine behaviour of American bureaucrats and politicians towards the fate of their fellow-countrymen. Even before their arrest, most of the Americans were, in effect, prisoners: with their passports confiscated they were involuntary Soviet citizens. But the only people who might have helped saw no reason to do so. Diplomats in America’s newly established embassy in Moscow regarded all the migrants as communist sympathisers who had thrown in their lot with the system. Some were, but many were not. Yet the diplomats put every obstacle and delay in the way of desperate people who were risking instant arrest for even contacting the embassy, for example by demanding that fees for replacement passports be paid in dollars at a time when possession of hard currency was a criminal offence.

Equally astonishing was the lack of even a single squeak of protest. America’s ambassador, Joseph Davies, was an idle, gullible, Stalin-loving art collector. When the case of a missing American was half-heartedly raised by a subordinate, he promptly apologised to the Russians. Even when Americans working as locally hired staff at the embassy were arrested, nobody complained. George Kennan, a diplomat, eventually realised what was happening and wrote an eloquent memo. But nobody acted.

If the diplomats look bad, so too do the Moscow-based foreign journalists, who shunned the story as liable to risk their official accreditation; the debaucheries on offer nightly at the Hotel Metropol, courtesy of the NKVD secret police, may have led them to choose their own livelihoods over the lives of others.

The outbreak of war would have been a chance to ask for Stalin’s co-operation. Allied pressure brought a ragtag army of starving Poles from the depths of Siberia. But nobody cared about the Americans. President Franklin Roosevelt and his advisers emerge remarkably badly on this issue, seemingly determined not to bother Stalin with such trifles.

The most revolting and murky twist to the story is the treatment of another wave of American captives: prisoners-of-war in Germany who had the misfortune to be freed by Soviet troops and were deported to the Gulag. Clues abounded, chiefly from defectors and former Gulag inmates who reached the West. Yet the files remained secret. Neither their fate, nor that of Americans captured during the Korean War, received attention. The American Red Cross brushed aside a request to intervene, saying that inquiries about Americans “domiciled” (hardly the right word) in NKVD camps would be a source of “annoyance, if not embarrassment”.

A handful of survivors returned to tell their story to an often disbelieving public. Mr Tzouliadis has unearthed scandalous nuggets from the American archives. In that sense, he is right in his comforting assertion that “the truth, although it may be initially disbelieved, will always surface eventually.” But in another sense he is wrong. Even if the Russian archives were to yield everything they contain about the American names that so tantalisingly surface in his book, other questions would remain unanswered. When the eyewitnesses, perpetrators and victims are all dead, the real story of a crime dies too.
Click to expand...

Amazon.co.uk: The Forsaken: From the Great Depression to the Gulags - Hope and Betrayal in Stalin's Russia: Tim Tzouliadis: Books

Brian S · Aug 9, 2008

Red Cross

I am surprised at the attitude of the American Red Cross considering their Magnificent efforts during WW2 which saved many thousands from starvation.

Kyt · Aug 10, 2008

There appear to be a number of issues about what National RC societies have been willing to do, and their ties with their nation's policies, compared to the IRCC. There seem to be a number of contoversies related to the activities of the ARC, ones not pertanent to this discussion. But I found this interesting (and a possible reason for non-intervention by the ARC in the above):

International humanitarianism in the contemporary world: forms and issues
http://www.du.edu/gsis/hrhw/working/2005/22-forsythe-2005.pdf

After World War One the large and influential American Red Cross, which had put into the field during that war seven times the number of American soldiers, tried to push aside the all- Swiss ICRC by creating a League of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. The ICRC was not able to block the creation of the League, now the Federation, as a union of all the National Societies. But the ICRC was able to limit the Federation's mandate to natural disasters and development of the National Societies, thus preserving for itself the realm of Red Cross humanitarianism in conflicts. After much organizational competition and some confusion during 1920-1990, the components of the Red Cross have reaffirmed and codified this basic division of labor.

In the Seville Agreement of 1997, the Movement again stipulated that the ICRC was the network's lead actor in armed conflict for the roles of detention visits, relief, and family reunification efforts. The ICRC also maintained its lead role concerning detainees and their families in situations of internal troubles and tensions. The Federation took on work with refugees and IDPs in countries not characterized by armed conflict, and well as continuing its coordination regarding the international response to natural and industrial/technological disasters. National Societies were to support both the ICRC and Federation internationally, as well as continuing a broad range of domestic social programs. A National Society might even become the lead agency for the Movement in an international action, but only with the "concurrence" of the two (separate) headquarters in Geneva. This Seville Agreement has reduced friction between the ICRC and Federation, or more accurately codified an improvement
in relations that was already occurring, as well as encouraging a more orderly relationship between the ICRC and its natural "local partners," the National Societies. Officials of the latter are now regularly seconded to the ICRC (and Federation) for short term contract work.

The significance of Seville is that the Red Cross network is relatively more integrated than in the past, with the ICRC better able to tap into the resources of the stronger National Societies without being undercut by the Federation. A division of labor has been clarified particularly regarding refugees and IDPs, where the ICRC has ceded some ground to the Federation. The ICRC, having too often ignored the National Societies in humanitarian field work between about
1914 and 1990, now is relatively more interested in a better integrated Red Cross network, at least for relief but not for detention visits.

The fact remains, however, that most National Societies are often more aligned with their national governments than with the ICRC. Like the American, British, or French Red Cross Societies, most of these National Societies are more nationalistic than cosmopolitan. They are more patriotic than neutral and impartial. For example, they followed their governments into Northern Iraq in 1991 without much coordination with the ICRC. They may enthusiastically
support some ICRC humanitarian operations when their governments do not object or interfere.

In the Darfur regions of the Sudan, for example, there is a loose coordination between the ICRC and various Western National Societies that have taken an interest in that conflicted country.
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Roxy · Aug 10, 2008

I read this book about 15 years ago and found it quite convincing. Much of the evidence was circumstantial - and I was much less cynical! Nevertheless, it is an interesting read. He wrote another book about American POW in Vietnam - The Bamboo Cage.

Roxy

David Layne · Aug 10, 2008

"Kiss The Boys Goodbye" is a book written that deals with P.O.W.'s left behind after the Vietnam War.

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