Here’s a good starting point. Essentially the allies had decided at Yalta and Tehran to assist each other in the repatriation of their citizens after Germany was defeated. Most of those who were repatriated went straight to the Gulags.
Indeed. Nicholas Bethell and Count Nicolai Tolstoy both wrote books about the affair — although strongly opposed by the people they said were responsible.
The sad fact was that many of the people sent to Stalin, and the Gulag if lucky ( and even the Red Army were better than Tito’s mob were you to be delivered to them ) had not been allies to the Germans — not that that was an excuse, since Stalin was also sending Soviet POWs to the camps — and had sometimes never been citizens of the Soviet Union as emigres.
Thom Karremans came in at about #25 in our little worst military leaders elimination game. Pretty much a byword for ‘spineless.’
Yeah, and there’s a modest amount of discussion of why he earned that ranking in the thread, if you want to see armchair military history buffs bash him a bit. Well deserved, IMHO.
Thank you both, **lisiate **and Claverhouse.
A wiser man than I has a question and a solution to the problem of the Dutch, their “courage,” and the people who defend them after incidents like this.
http://archiver.rootsweb.ancestry.com/th/read/DUTCHER/2001-03/0985237532
Of course, National Lampoon said it better, or more completely, in 1973, but that’s copyrighted, and Dutcher was trolling RootsWeb, which is [del]pretty cool[/del] probably a violation of their rules.