The Splendid Blond Beast

by Simpson, Christopher; Miller, Mark Crispin;

  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.