The Russian prisoners
Sir: Mr Booker (Notebook, 18 March) accuses me of not having read 1-01.1 Bethell's and Count Tolstoy's books. might be forgiven if I had not, since together they require at least a couple of weeks to read and digest. But Mr Booker has he.t even bothered to read my 1,400-word aril; de or he would not have accused me °I saying the very opposite of what I actually did write. I did not say that Britain handed over two million Russian prisoners in 1944-7
,because most of them were 'war criminals'.
'What I did say was that over two million Soviet citizens, most of them slave labourers, returned of their own free will to their homeland because they were neither collaborators nor war criminals and therefore felt that they had nothing to fear if they went back. Only a relatively small number of Soviet citizens, who had betrayed their country and had committed or been involved in atrocious crimes against their own countrymen, Poles, Yugoslays, Italians, Slovaks, Frenchmen and others, were forcibly returned to the Russians. Many of them, in violation of the solemn declaration signed by Britain and the United States in 1943, were not returned to the countries where they had committed their crimes to be tried and punished there. A Labour government, which included Jewish ministers, actually offered the hosPitality of this country to some 8,000 survivors of the SS Galicia Division, many of Whom helped the Germans to exterminate the Jews of Poland, the Soviet Union, Slovakia and other European countries. Furthermore, far from me being grotesquely misinformed about the Cossacks, it is Mr Booker who displays an abysmal ignorance of the subject. His Cossack friends will not thank him for describing the Turkoman bivision as a Cossack formation. The two Cossack formations I wrote about were von Pannwitz's Corps and Staifon's Security Corps of Serbia, which repaid Yugoslav hospitality to Tsarist emigres by collaborating with the invaders of their adopted country. As for von Pannwitz's Cossacks, they were some 25,000 Don, Kuban and Terek Cossacks who together With their families numbered some 70,000 When they withdrew with the Germans from southern Russia in 1943. Mr Booker's claim that they did not take part in the war is ignorant rubbish.
Mr Booker wonders what my motives were in writing my article. They were, quite simply, to tell the truth in the name of the millions murdered by the Germans and their collaborators who cannot speak for themselves. This is obvious to the many who have written to the Sunday Times and me Personally to congratulate me on having written my article and the Sunday Times for having published it. Lettevs attacking me have come from former members of the Ukrainian SS division and their English wives who are pathetically unaware of what their husband did in the war, a Welsh Nazi who made it quite clear what he Mid his kind Would like to do to me and all the Jews in Britain, and a Greek gentleman writing from Brooks's in St James's, who concluded his letter to the editor of the Sunday Times as follows: 'I humbly suggest Mr Ainsztein Pursue the myth of the six million Jewish dead,.
A strange company for a British Liberal to land in, even if Mr Booker was not around when the greatest crimes in the his tory of mankind were committed just across the Channel. Had Hitler's armies occupied Britain in 1940 or later, it is unlikely that British Liberals, even though of perfect Nordic descent, would have been welcomed as volunteers in the Waffen SS. They would much more likely have finished up in concentration camps guarded by renegade Ukrainians or Cossacks.
Reuben Alnszteln The Cottage, Green Street, Little Hadham, Herts.
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