14

Sunrise

Shortly before he took up his OSS post in Berlin, Allen Dulles guaranteed de facto asylum to SS Obergruppenführer Karl Wolff—the highest-ranking SS officer to survive the war—and to a collection of Wolff’s most senior aides. The details of Dulles’s deal with this particular Nazi have remained buried in classified U.S. government files for more than forty years.1 But the record is clear. Whether Dulles intended it or not, his strategy for exploiting former Nazi leaders to advance purported U.S. interests had sweeping implications for U.S.-Soviet relations, U.S.-German relations, for war crimes prosecutions and the UN War Crimes Commission, and even for world peace.

Allen Dulles’s pivotal role in this hidden but crucial phase of European politics is at the core of Operation Sunrise—the secret negotiations in 1945 for a German surrender in northern Italy. This stepping-stone for Dulles’s postwar intelligence career was his covert diplomacy bringing together Western intelligence agencies, fugitive Nazis, and certain leading Vatican officials of the day.

In late 1944, Pope Pius XII and Ildefonso Cardinal Schuster of Milan had contacted the SS, the German military command in Italy, and OSS agent Dulles in Switzerland, offering to serve as intermediaries in negotiations to ease the surrender of German forces in northern Italy. In a confidential memo, Cardinal Schuster stressed that the Italian Communist party would likely gain from continued fighting between the U.S. and the Germans on the Italian peninsula. “The Catholic Church regards the systematic destruction of public utility installations [gas and electric works, etc.] together with that of industrial plant [that would come from fighting in northern Italy], as a prerequisite of Bolshevik infiltration into Italy. This threat to living conditions on the one hand and industrial potential on the other is intended to create disorder and unemployment. This is the basis upon which [the Italian Communists’ hope] the masses are to be won, first for Communism and then for Bolshevism,” Schuster wrote. He stated that a negotiated German withdrawal, on the other hand, would stabilize the economic situation, undermine the popularity of the Communist resistance, and reduce the possibility that German military leaders would be tried for war crimes once the conflict was over.2 Schuster and his senior assistant, Monsignor Don Giuseppe Bicchierai, stood ready to help negotiate a suitable agreement between the Germans and the Americans, the note concluded.

There was more to the Vatican initiative, strategically speaking, than simply the rescue of factories in northern Italy. The Vatican proposal would give U.S. and British forces control of the important port city of Trieste on the border of Italy and Yugoslavia. This position would permit them to rapidly enter Yugoslavia, Hungary, and Austria in advance of the Red Army, which was then approaching from the east. These historically Catholic territories had been Axis strongholds for much of the war, but anticipating Germany’s defeat, many people in this heartland preferred to surrender to American or British troops rather than be overrun by the Red Army.

Dulles viewed Schuster’s proposals as a means to dramatically outflank both Germany and the USSR in Central Europe, reduce Western casualties in Italy, and begin what would later come to be known as the “dual containment” of both Germany and the USSR.³ Meanwhile, Axis leaders willing to surrender despite Hitler’s standing war-to-the-death orders saw the Vatican initiative as a means to head off a probable Soviet military occupation of Central Europe, reduce casualties among their own forces, dramatically split the U.S. and Britain from the USSR, and, not least, win asylum for themselves and their families.

Cardinal Schuster and Monsignor Bicchierai had long been among the most prominent clerical supporters of fascism in Italy, according to SS Colonel Eugen Dollmann, who handled negotiations with the Vatican for the SS during the last days of the war. “His Eminence [Schuster] had been very favorably inclined toward Fascism in general and Benito Mussolini in particular,” Dollmann noted. “Like Pope Pius XI, another native of the Milan area, he too had looked upon the Duce as a man sent by providence.”4 Dollmann, who had made his career as a liaison between Hitler and Mussolini on a number of sensitive issues, including the recurrent SS campaigns to deport Italian Jews to Auschwitz, had by 1945 lost his enthusiasm for the Führer, and preferred a role as an “interpreter and social butterfly,” as he put it, in the declining days of the Third Reich.⁵

The SS-Vatican initiative was joined by the prominent Milanese industrialist and playboy Baron Luigi Parrilli—a papal chamberlain, leading Knight of Malta, and a man with strong contacts in the banking and intelligence communities of Switzerland, just north of the Italian border, where Dulles made his headquarters.⁶

This unlikely foursome—the gaunt, severe cardinal in ceremonial robes and peaked hat; his aide, Bichierrai; the foppish SS man with a closet full of Italian suits of the latest cut; and the skirt-chasing industrialist with a charming smile and a manner “like a character in a late-nineteenth-century French novel,” as Dollmann put it⁷—became the core of a group determined to deliver Central Europe to the Western Allies before the Soviet troops arrived.

Dollmann’s superior, Karl Wolff—the highest-ranking SS officer in Italy—opened secret negotiations with Dulles during the early spring of 1945, talks that would have a destructive effect on sensitive U.S.-Soviet relations.⁸ SS Obergruppenführer Wolff was a tall, bulky man with thinning blond hair and the erect bearing characteristic of a career SS officer. He had big hands, expensive tastes, and a weakness for heavy gold and diamond rings, which he brandished so expressively that they became a standing joke among his SS rivals. Loyal and ideologically committed, Wolff had joined the Nazi party well before Hitler’s ascent to power. For more than a decade, he had served as SS chief Himmler’s most senior executive officer, adjutant, and chief of staff. He managed Himmler’s personal slush fund of gifts from German financiers; handled the sensitive contacts that arranged SS transfers of slave laborers to IG Farben, Kontinentale Öl, and other major companies; and became the chief sponsor and cheerleader within the Nazi bureaucracy for the mass extermination center at Treblinka.

It had been Wolff who lobbied the German transportation minister to ensure that the SS had an ample supply of railroad cars to ship Jews to the death camp at Treblinka, in spite of competing demands from the Wehrmacht, which wanted the freight cars to move military supplies to the front. Wolff was successful in that effort and wrote of his “special joy (besondere Freude) now that five thousand members of the Chosen People are going to Treblinka every day.”9

When Dulles opened contacts with Wolff in early 1945, the British military command in Italy notified the Soviets that new peace negotiations had begun for a rapid German surrender of northern Italy. The Soviets replied that they were glad to hear this; all that was required under standing Allied agreements on negotiations with the enemy was for a handful of senior Soviet military representatives to monitor the progress of the talks.

The U.S. ambassador to Moscow, Averell Harriman, vetoed that. Inviting the Soviets to the negotiations would make the Germans nervous, he contended, and would only encourage the Soviets to insist on participation in other upcoming decisions about the former Axis territories already held by U.S. and British troops. His was one of the most important voices on U.S.-Soviet relations, and his opinion carried the day.¹⁰

Roosevelt and Stalin exchanged increasingly bitter notes as negotiations continued in Switzerland among Dulles, the SS representatives, and a crew of senior U.S. military officers that included Major General Lyman Lemnitzer and General Hoyt Vandenberg. A week after the talks began, Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov sent a note to Harriman in Moscow expressing “complete surprise” that Soviet representatives were still barred from the talks. He said that the situation was “inexplicable in terms of the relations of alliance” between the U.S. and the USSR.¹¹ If the U.S. refused to permit Soviet representatives to participate, Molotov contended, the talks had to be abandoned.

Roosevelt wrote directly to Stalin a few days later. The USSR misunderstood what was taking place, he insisted. The talks in Italy were basically a local matter, comparable to that in which the Baltic coast cities of Konigsberg and Danzig had earlier surrendered to the Soviets. Roosevelt seemed to approve Soviet participation in the talks (“I will be pleased to have at any discussion of the details of surrender … the benefit of the experience and advice of any of your officers who can be present …”), but he insisted that the talks in Switzerland were an “investigation” of a local German commander’s surrender offer, not a “negotiation.”12 Time was of the essence, he continued, and the U.S. representatives could not be faulted for being eager to accept the surrender of the German troops they were facing on the battlefield.

Stalin escalated the argument. His foreign minister, Molotov, suddenly had new commitments in Moscow and would not attend the founding of Roosevelt’s most cherished postwar project, the United Nations Organization. This was a calculated slight, and both sides knew it. In a new note to FDR, Stalin replied that he was “all for profiting from cases of disintegration in the German armies,” but in this case, the Germans were using the talks to “maneuver” and to transfer troops from Italy to the Eastern Front.¹³ Roosevelt replied that Soviet actions in Poland and Romania had not lived up to the commitments made at the Yalta Conference less than two months previously. U.S.-Soviet relations had moved rapidly to an “atmosphere of regrettable apprehension and mistrust” owing to the confrontation over Dulles’s talks with the SS, Roosevelt commented, and again insisted to Stalin that the talks were for “the single purpose of arranging contact with competent German military officers and not for negotiations of any kind.”¹⁴ Meanwhile, FDR cabled Dulles in Switzerland and ordered him to present the SS representatives with a take-it-or-leave-it offer of an unconditional surrender. No further negotiation would be permitted, the President said.

Stalin seemed to know many of the details of the Dulles-SS talks even before Roosevelt did. When FDR tried to soothe Stalin with a declaration that the Swiss talks were without political significance, Stalin shot back that “apparently you are not fully informed.” Stalin’s military intelligence agents in Switzerland were “sure that negotiations did take place and that they ended in an agreement with the Germans, whereby the German commander on the Western Front, Marshal Kesselring, is to open the front to the Anglo-American troops and let them move east, while the British and Americans have promised, in exchange, to ease the armistice terms for the Germans. I think my colleagues are not very far from the truth,” he continued. If this perception was wrong, he asked, why were his men still being excluded from the talks?15

Stalin may have overstated his case, but he was not far off. These were in fact exactly the terms that Cardinal Schuster had proposed and that Dulles had discussed with Wolff. No final deal had been struck, though, and by early April both sides in Switzerland were once again seeking guidance from their respective home offices.¹⁶ By then, though, the German front had begun to collapse throughout Europe, the Red Army was at the gates of Berlin, and Dulles’s grand plan to take Central Europe by way of Trieste had failed. “The Bern incident,” as Roosevelt described it in a last letter to Stalin written only hours before his death, “… now appears [to have] faded into the past without having accomplished any useful purpose.”¹⁷

The talks had not been successful from either Allen Dulles’s or SS General Wolff’s points of view, largely because Roosevelt had ruled out any formal agreement with the Germans other than unconditional surrender. But FDR’s ban on a formal agreement did not preclude Dulles from making more limited “gentlemen’s agreements” with his SS counterparts for concessions that he saw as advantageous to the OSS or to U.S. geopolitical strategy. The SS delegation, the Swiss intelligence envoys who were serving as go-betweens, and the Soviet agents secretly monitoring the talks each came away from the talks convinced that Dulles had agreed to provide protection and assistance to General Wolff and his SS entourage in exchange for a quick surrender of German troops in Italy, although Dulles would deny this later.¹⁸

Wolff’s ultimately empty promises of a dramatic German surrender that would advance U.S. and British forces far to the east captivated Dulles and his OSS colleagues in Switzerland. Dulles intervened on a half-dozen occasions in an effort to keep the Operation Sunrise negotiations on track, even after the joint U.S.-British military command in Italy ordered him to desist. By the last week of April, senior U.S. and British military commanders in Italy concluded that the Sunrise project was little more than a desperate SS effort to fracture Allied unity, and told Dulles to cut off all contact with Wolff and his emissaries. Nevertheless, Dulles’s top aide Gero von Gaevernitz kept the negotiations open and acted with Dulles’s tacit cooperation to rescue Wolff from Italian partisans.19 The U.S.-British Combined Chiefs of Staff are known to have opened an investigation into Dulles’s alleged dereliction of duty and refusal to obey orders in connection with the Wolff rescue, but the records of this inquiry have disappeared from OSS and military files and have yet to be rediscovered.²⁰

The unofficial truce in Italy that took hold as the negotiations went on probably saved lives, if only because ground combat is so brutal that even a few hours’ respite can reduce casualties. But Roosevelt’s conclusion that the negotiations failed to achieve a genuine German surrender in Italy is accurate. As a practical matter, Operation Sunrise contributed considerably more to souring U.S.-Soviet relations, and to enhancing Allen Dulles’s carefully cultivated reputation as a spymaster, than it ever did to winning the war in Europe.

Making use of splits in the enemy camp is, of course, among the most basic military tactics, and fundamental to almost any effort to recruit spies. But Operation Sunrise was seriously counterproductive from strategic and political points of view. The U.S. and its allies had formally agreed to forgo use of separate peace negotiations with the Germans in order to more fully ensure the solidity of their coalition. That policy did not make relations with the Germans easier, obviously, but any other approach would likely have facilitated Hitler’s central strategy and last hope in the final years of the war, which was to conquer the Allies by dividing them. Roosevelt’s demand for an unconditional surrender had not sprung from naïveté or starry-eyed idealism, as some critics have argued, but rather from a tough-minded appraisal of just how much blood would be required to defeat the Axis. The unconditional-surrender policy did not “cost” U.S. lives; it saved them, perhaps by the hundreds of thousands, by guaranteeing that the Soviet Union would carry most of the weight in the war against Hitler.

While FDR was right about Sunrise, he was mistaken in his hope that a struggle for control of the strategically important city of Trieste would be defused. In May 1945, only days after FDR’s death, U.S. and British forces sought to consolidate control of Trieste as a beachhead for south-central Europe. But Josip Tito’s well-organized Yugoslav partisans regarded the city and its environs as part of liberated Yugoslavia, and they opposed the U.S.-British initiative. This inter-Allied clash over what might otherwise be an obscure seaport became one of the first, crystallizing conflicts in the cold war.

Stalin opposed Tito’s claim to Trieste and criticized his “adventurism” in backing left-wing nationalist guerrillas in Trieste and in Greece.21 But that was not how things appeared in Washington at the time. The chief U.S. political advisor on the scene, Alexander Kirk, had been U.S. chargé d’affaires in Moscow during the 1930s and an early and influential advocate of the “Riga” faction’s hard-line policy against the USSR. Kirk convinced himself and Washington that Tito’s forces were acting as the cat’s-paw of the Soviets, and that the Yugoslav claim to Trieste was an example of totalitarian aggression.

Winston Churchill and Joseph Grew, a Morgenthau opponent who was now acting U.S. secretary of state, strongly backed Kirk. Kirk’s dire reports only confirmed their long-standing analysis of Soviet policy. Grew regarded the Trieste crisis as nothing less than the first military confrontation in an unfolding U.S. war against the Soviets. World War II had thus far resulted in “the transfer of totalitarian dictatorship and power from Germany and Japan to Soviet Russia, which will constitute in future as grave a danger to us as did the Axis,” Grew wrote in a programmatic statement against the Soviets at the height of the crisis. The situation unfolding in Trieste illustrated “the future world pattern” that the USSR aimed to create throughout Europe and eventually throughout the world.²²

A new war between the U.S. and the USSR “is as certain as anything in this world can be certain,” the acting secretary of state told the newly installed President, Harry Truman. Writing on May 19, 1945, as ashes still smoldered in Berlin, Grew recommended that “our policy towards Soviet Russia should immediately stiffen, all along the line. It will be far better and safer to have the showdown before Russia can reconstruct herself and develop her tremendous potential military, economic and territorial power.” Above all, it would be the “most fatal thing,” Grew continued, “to place any confidence whatever in Russia’s sincerity,” because the USSR regards “our ethical behavior as a weakness to us and an asset to her.”²³

Truman had stepped into Roosevelt’s shoes only a few weeks earlier, and he remained cautious on the Trieste confrontation. But he had voiced suspicions of the Soviets comparable to Grew’s on several occasions, and the new President clearly accepted the thrust of his acting secretary of state’s analysis. Truman resolved to maintain U.S. and British control of Trieste. After a show of military force against Tito’s partisans, he succeeded in doing so.

Three points are worth stressing. First, senior U.S. officials, including the acting secretary of state, had concluded as early as May 1945 that a U.S. war with the USSR “is as certain as anything in this world can be certain” and that placing any confidence in Soviet intentions would be a “fatal mistake.” These were not offhand comments; they were the substance of the State Department’s policy recommendations to the President of the United States.24 Second, the ideologically driven U.S. conviction that Tito was simply a pawn of the USSR expanded what was in reality a local dispute with Tito into a more fundamental clash between the superpowers. The Soviets saw their actions during the Trieste crisis as a concession to the West and as an illustration of good faith; Churchill, Grew, and Truman read the situation in almost opposite terms. To them, the outcome at Trieste seemed to prove the value of getting tough with Moscow—despite the fact that the Soviets had conceded U.S. and British dominance of Trieste from the outset. U.S.-Soviet relations deteriorated across the board.

Third, and most relevant to the present discussion, the political crisis over Trieste had immediate and substantial impact on U.S. policy concerning war criminals, quislings, and suspected collaborators from Central and Eastern Europe. Allied war crimes policy remained for most decision-makers primarily a tactic in the deepening East-West political rivalry, and only secondarily an issue of justice in its own right. The showdown with Yugoslavia emerged as a disturbing example of how the intrinsic weakness of international law concerning crimes against humanity helped shape the cold war and was in turn shaped by it.

Tito’s government made repeated, detailed requests to the Western Allies to turn over scores of Yugoslav Nazis and collaborators who had fallen into U.S. and British hands. Most of these requests were straightforward and not particularly controversial: They sought the cabinet officers of the genocidal Croatian puppet government that the Germans had installed during the war, for example; leaders of the primitive clerical-fascist Ustashi organization; commanders and guards of the Jasenovac concentration camp; wartime security police officers; and similar suspects.25

But the defeated anti-Tito factions in Yugoslavia had powerful friends abroad, not the least of whom was Pope Pius XII. For the pope, the militantly Catholic Ustashis seemed to be a viable alternative to Tito’s Communists, and the pope and leading Croatian clerics provided repeated political and diplomatic support to the Ustashi state in Croatia throughout its rule. True, the Vatican had sought to distance itself from the Ustashis’ bloodier public atrocities, particularly during the final months of the regime. Nevertheless, by the time the Ustashi collapse came, the Croatian Catholic hierarchy had blood on its vestments from years of tacit cooperation with genocide in the Balkans.²⁶ Worse, the Vatican compounded its blunder by indiscriminately assisting thousands of Ustashi criminals to escape to Italy and South America; many of these men were, by any standard, among the most heinous criminals of the war.²⁷

When Tito’s government began seeking transfer of accused Croatian quislings and war criminals, the Vatican and Catholic prelates in the West repeatedly intervened to block Allied cooperation, notwithstanding the U.S. commitments in the Moscow Declaration, at Yalta, and in other international forums. Similarly, conservative-nationalist and monarchist Yugoslavs lobbied on behalf of the rightist Yugoslav leader Draja Mihailovich and his forces, who had vacillated during the war between an alliance with the West against Hitler and an alliance with the Nazis against Tito.*²⁸ Yugoslav minority leaders, notably Slovenes, pressured U.S. congressmen on behalf of old comrades whose records during the war had been at best mixed.

The U.S. government’s willingness to cooperate with Tito on war crimes matters broke down early in 1945 as these domestic pressures combined with the geopolitical confrontation with Tito over Trieste. The State Department suspended authorization for transfers of prisoners to the Yugoslavs on a bureaucratic pretext during the Trieste conflict, though State continued to publicly affirm U.S. commitments to the Moscow Declaration and other wartime agreements. By summer 1945, however, it had become “increasingly difficult to justify inaction on our part” in the face of Yugoslavian transfer requests, U.S. military commanders wired to the War Department in Washington. They requested permission from State to turn over “bona fide” criminal suspects.29

The U.S. State Department and British Foreign Office refused. They saw the Yugoslav transfer request as “so essentially political that it should continue to be dealt with through diplomatic channels” rather than through the procedures then used with all other Allied states, including the USSR. The prisoners sought by the Yugoslavs “are not war criminals in the proper sense” (that is, by a narrow definition), the British Foreign Office said. “Some of them are clearly collaborators of the blackest dye; but the Yugoslav request also covers others who may well be properly considered as political opponents of the present Yugoslav regime rather than as traitors to the Yugoslav state.” For that reason, the British memo concluded, Yugoslavia would henceforth be a “special case,” and Allied commanders were no longer authorized to hand over alleged traitors and renegades. Any Yugoslav requests for prisoners should instead be referred to the State Department and Foreign Office, where the matter had been “under active consideration … for some time.”30

The obstruction of transfers to the Yugoslavs grew so blatant that even the U.S. ambassador in Belgrade, John Cabot, formally protested to Washington. “It is crystal clear even on the basis of material available in this embassy’s files that we have flouted our own commitments and that by our attitude we are protecting not only Quislings but also [those who] have been guilty of terrible crimes committed in Yugoslavia,” Cabot wrote in a top-secret telegram.

“I presume we must protect our agents even though it disgusts me to think that we may be using the same men we so strongly criticized Fascists for using,” Cabot continued. “But so far as I can ascertain [the] record now is, despite our commitments and moral obligations: (1) we have failed to take effective action [to repatriate accused Yugoslav war criminals], (2) we have prevented [the] British from taking effective action, (3) we have not insisted that Italy take effective action, (4) we are apparently conniving with the Vatican and Argentina to get guilty people to haven in the latter country. I sincerely hope I am mistaken, particularly regarding [this] latter point. How can we defend this record?…”³¹

The State Department legal advisor’s office attached a note to Cabot’s message stating that he was misinformed; that he had “not received all the telegrams on the subject” and “not estimated the situation correctly.” The protest was buried in classified files, where it remained undisturbed for decades. Roughly similar treatment was accorded protests of U.S. unwillingness to transfer suspected war criminals to the Belgian, French, Polish, and Czechoslovak governments.³²

In a related development, the Yugoslavs formally requested the transfer of Nikola Rusinovic, a leading Ustashi ideologue and quisling, whom the wartime Croatian regime had appointed consul general and minister plenipotentiary with special responsibilities for organizing Croat-Italian fascist counterinsurgency operations against Tito’s rebels. Shortly after the request, the legal office of the U.S. Military Government in Europe denied the request without explanation.

The real reason for protecting Rusinovic has now come to light for the first time. “The basis of this decision which was not made known to the Yugoslav [War Crimes] Liaison Detachment was the fact that United States Military Intelligence authorities desired to exploit Rusinovic as a source of information,” according to a classified note to State Department European chief James Riddleberger found attached to the Rusinovic file. “The [US] Political Advisor [Robert Murphy] is informed that there is a strong possibility that he will be taken to the United States for this purpose. Under these circumstances … the case for the present may be considered closed.”33

By the spring of 1945, refugees from Eastern Europe found themselves mired in the deepening political rivalries among the Western Allies, the USSR, and the indigenous resistance movements in Yugoslavia, Greece, Italy, and other European countries. This problem became particularly acute for defectors from the USSR who had fought for the Germans during the war.

Hundreds of thousands of Red Army troops had surrendered to the Germans, particularly during the first weeks of the war. When service to the Germans became the only means of escape from starvation in German POW camps, many of these prisoners joined the German forces as laborers, soldiers, or concentration camp guards. Some became the executioners who carried out the horrifying day-to-day work of mass murder in the extermination camps. Tens of thousands of these defectors fell into Western hands as the Allies approached Berlin.

The Soviet government contended that under the Moscow Declaration of 1943, the West should immediately deliver any captured defectors to the USSR to face whatever justice was customary in Soviet society. No formal extradition was necessary, and there could be no review of individual prisoners’ cases by Western governments. By the same token, the Soviets pledged to return to the U.S. and Britain some 50,000 to 100,000 Western POWs the Soviets had recovered from the Germans, including many rescued fliers and some captured defectors.³⁴

During the war, U.S. psychological warfare strategists had favored offering amnesty to Soviet defectors still in German ranks as a means of encouraging rebellion behind German lines. Shortly before the D-Day invasion, for example, Great Britain’s ambassador to Moscow suggested to Stalin that Western intelligence had discovered that a substantial number of Soviet defectors in German uniform had been deployed in northern France in work details and as soldiers. Why not offer these troops amnesty if they surrendered? Stalin refused. “The number of such persons in the German forces is very insignificant,” Foreign Minister Molotov wrote back, “and a special appeal to them would not be of political interest.”35

Before the month was out, however, the British captured about 2,500 Soviet nationals serving in the German army in France. Shipped as POWs to England, the new prisoners precipitated a series of East-West political crises over delivery of POWs and alleged war criminals that was to sour international relations in the wake of the war.

The British War Cabinet voted to return them to the Soviet Union. “They were captured while serving in German military or para-military formations, the behavior of which in France has often been revolting,” Anthony Eden wrote during the debate. “We cannot afford to be sentimental about this.” Soviet cooperation would be needed to recover thousands of U.S. and British POWs who had once been held by the Germans, Eden continued, and if Britain refused to turn over the new prisoners, Stalin would be immediately suspicious. “It is no concern of ours what measures any Allied government, including the Soviet government, takes as regards their own nationals,” he said. In any case, “we surely do not wish to be permanently saddled with a number of these men.”³⁶ The U.S. government reached a similar conclusion about two months later.

But things did not go smoothly. The British decision sidestepped most of the trickier questions concerning what was to be done with captured Soviet defectors. What was to be done with those who had not volunteered for the Germans, such as the millions of Soviet civilians whom the Nazis had forced to labor at gunpoint in German factories? And what of prisoners from Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and parts of the western Ukraine? Since 1939, the USSR had claimed these territories as its own, but the Western Allies did not recognize them as such. Were prisoners from these regions to be considered Soviets?

British and U.S. clandestine activities compounded these problems. In September 1944, the USSR filed a formal protest charging that British intelligence had begun recruiting camp inmates for anti-Communist paramilitary units whose most obvious target was the USSR itself. The Soviets said the British were also shipping other Soviet POWs to new camps in the U.S. and Canada without Soviet government permission. Anti-Communist religious groups with special access to the British camps were bombarding the prisoners with propaganda, the Soviet ambassador to Great Britain, M. Gousev, complained, frightening the POWs from returning to the USSR.37

The Western intelligence agencies’ supposedly secret recruiting among POWs and suspected war criminals emerged as a surprisingly potent issue in East-West relations almost a year before the end of the war. To the Soviets, Western exploitation of these prisoners seemed to be part of the same pattern they had seen in the Darlan and Rudolf Hess affairs and in the West’s failure to open a second front early in the war. This time, the Soviets formally accused their allies of organizing an emigré army intended to fight the USSR, an obvious violation of the joint declarations signed only months earlier. This was well before Germany’s defeat and almost three years before the date at which most Western historians place the emergence of the cold war. The timing of Gousev’s complaint, its formality, and the high-level attention it required is a practical measure of the importance that Stalin attached to this issue.

By that autumn, tens of thousands of former Soviets had fallen into U.S. or British hands. The Americans captured at least 28,000 former Soviet troops in German uniform in northern France. British POW totals, though less certain, were comparable.³⁸

As the Western Allies’ repatriation program moved ahead, some prisoners bitterly protested, fearing they would be executed for treason if they returned to the USSR. Others volunteered to go back, believing that Moscow would view this demonstration of renewed loyalty with favor. The various factions among the POWs fought one another, and at least one such incident at a British POW camp threatened to erupt into a general rebellion.

That November the British returned the first shipment of 10,000 prisoners—almost all of them former Red Army soldiers who had defected to the Germans, been captured by the British, and then volunteered to be repatriated—in an ocean convoy to Murmansk. Only twelve of them clearly objected to repatriation; they were put aboard by force. The first U.S. shipment of 1,179 Russian prisoners left San Francisco on December 29 aboard the Soviet steamer SS Ural. Seventy of those prisoners protested repatriation. Three attempted suicide.³⁹

Little is known of the fate of those who returned to the USSR in these shipments. But rumors and intelligence reports drifted back to the West of execution of some prisoners minutes after they left the ships, of beatings, suicides, and forced marches to prison camps deep in the Soviet interior. The POWs still in Western hands became increasingly wary of returning, and some Western officials raised political and moral challenges to further cooperation with the prisoner transfers.

The Allied leaders discussed prisoner repatriations at least twice, once at Churchill’s October 1944 conference with Stalin shortly before the first British shipments, and again at the February 1945 Yalta Conference.40 They reached several simple agreements: Each of the powers retained authority to deal with its own nationals; the USSR would help repatriate 50,000 to 100,000 Western prisoners it had liberated from the Germans; and the West would return all Soviet nationals who had found their way into Western hands. Each of the powers stressed that compliance with these terms would be viewed as an important test of the commitment of the parties to Allied wartime agreements.

But the next three months brought Operation Sunrise, the Trieste crisis, and the breakdown of U.S.-Yugoslav cooperation in prosecuting alleged war criminals. By July 1945, Soviet suspicions that the Western Allies would not comply with agreements concerning POWs had reached center stage in East-West relations. Western powers had cooperated with the repatriations thus far, but they were now equivocating. The Soviets soon raised the issue in meetings with British officials and with U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, who was leading the U.S. negotiations toward establishment of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg.

The ongoing Nuremberg planning discussions had become “complicated by Russian insistence that we incorporate agreement concerning turnover of prisoners wanted in other countries for trial,” Jackson reported back to Washington. “I have taken the position [that] all except the international cases are beyond the terms of my authority and, except to advise my own Govt whether we have objections in any case, the question of surrender[ing] prisoners is not before us.”

Jackson was keenly aware of the political ramifications of the prisoner issue. “This is likely to become a very delicate problem as demands [are] probable for surrender [of] persons who are not war criminals but politically objectionable. You will heed to decide what terms to impose and what showing will be required of criminality.”41 The Czechs had already demanded the surrender for trial of Hans Frank and other Nazi occupation officials, Jackson noted, and the U.S. needed a uniform policy on the issue.

Jackson—who was soon to be the chief U.S. prosecutor at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg—favored abandoning the international trials altogether if the Soviets insisted on U.S. conformity with the Moscow Declaration on prisoner transfers. The only alternative if the Soviets insisted on a public reaffirmation of existing agreements, Jackson wrote, would be for each of the Allies to “set up [its] own tribunal and try prisoners by its own system of procedure.” That approach would be “easier for me and faster,” he noted, “but [it would be] desirable [to] give [an] example of unity on the crime problem if possible.”⁴²

* For example, a fraternal organization, the Serbian National Federation in the U.S., split over the issue of war crimes trials for Serbian leader Draja Mihailovich, an anti-Communist Serbian nationalist leader who controlled parts of Yugoslavia for most of the war. Mihailovich had attempted to maintain some ties to the Western Allies, but as a practical matter his troops had cooperated closely with German occupation troops and with the Gestapo in joint efforts to suppress Tito’s partisans. By 1944, the Western Allies had disavowed Mihailovich as a Nazi collaborator. When the war ended, Tito tried and executed Mihailovich and much of his high command as traitors.

The ethnic Serbian communities in the West became bitterly split over Tito’s revolution and over the Mihailovich trial. A substantial fraction of overseas Serbs embraced Tito’s government, but many emigré religious leaders and businessmen opposed it.

Pro-Tito Yugoslavs protested the presence in the U.S. of Konstanin Fotich, Mihailovich’s chief foreign policy advisor. Fotich and his comrades took control of the U.S. fraternal group Serbian National Federation’s national leadership committee and of its newspaper, American Srbobran. When the Yugoslav trials convicted the Mihailovich government as traitors, pro-Tito Serbs saw it as their opportunity to expel Fotich from the U.S. and resume control of the federation and its newspaper. They sent their protest concerning Fotich’s presence in the U.S. to the State Department, as protocol demanded.

The State Department’s response was instructive: It took no action against Fotich, who had enjoyed friendly relations with the department throughout most of the war. Instead, it turned over the names of the protesters and copies of their letter to the FBI, the Office of Naval Intelligence, and other U.S. military intelligence agencies, with a suggestion that the security agencies take a new look into the affairs of the pro-Tito Yugoslavs in the U.S.