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distance, aimed his rifle at him, fired and saw him drop. Kennedy reported that, 'As the Cossack was
not seen to rise again it was assumed that he had been killed.' - The Last Secret. Lord Bethell
On June 16th, Captain Duncan Miller commanded a convoy of three British and sixteen German
trucks carrying 934 Cossacks. 'Strict precautions were taken to prevent any escapes. There were
soldiers ahead with Sten guns in each truck and scout cars at the end of the convoy with machine-guns
mounted. But no one tried to run away. Their will was broken and they were resigned to their fate.
They reached the border at Judenburg that evening and McMillan was asked by Soviet officers to take
the prisoners to Graz, deep inside the Soviet zone, where large numbers of Cossacks had already been
taken.
They drove through the night and arrived at Graz about dawn. Macmillan remembers being guided to
a small railway station where there was a barbed wire enclosure. We saw the Cossacks being
unloaded from the trucks. First they were searched. All personal valuables, especially money and
watches were taken from them, even the packets of food they had been give for the journey. Then
they were marched away. No British soldier saw them again, and, as McMillan says, 'It didn't take
much imagination to know what was going to happen to these people.'
Many British soldiers who were there have testified that they heard the rattle of machine-guns nearby
just a few moments after the prisoners were removed. 'We thought that machine-gunning must be the
finish of them. We thought they were just taken back there and slaughtered. That was our general
view."
AND AFTERWARDS, THE TOASTS
The soldiers described how the Russian soldiers then provided them with breakfast. "The meal was a
jolly occasion, with much talk of allied unity and many toasts were drunk in neat Vodka."
"A few were killed by the guards during the journey and many others died through disease and
general weakness brought about by terrible conditions. When anything like this happened it was the
British whom the prisoners blamed as 'those responsible for our misery'. One survivor had written; "I
never once heard anyone cursing the Americans or any other the other allies. All our fury, hatred and
threats were directed against the English."
In all, 50,000 Cossacks were handed over to the Soviets, another small tragedy in a series of far
greater tragedies sweeping across post-war defeated Europe.. The bitterness lives on in Yugoslavia
today.
FOOTNOTE: Many of the Cossacks handed over were not part of any agreement, some were foreign
nationals including at least one who had earned British decorations, were unwanted even by Stalin,
and their deportation was strictly illegal. These 50,000 civilians who had surrendered to the British
Army, were simply a problem to be disposed of. No less than eleven countries were similarly
disposed of:
HITLER'S PLAN TO LIBERATE EUROPE REJECTED
".... as the armies of the Third Reich pulled back, they desperately formed a line of resistance to hold
all points in the east to keep Asiatic Russia out of Europe proper.
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