Toby Low Operation Keelhaul -- the "last secret" of World War II (Alexander Solzhenitsyn)
¦¦¦ DWH ® ¦¦¦
December 19, 2000
LORD ALDINGTON: DEAD, BUT NO R.I.P.
by Srdja Trifkovic
Lord Aldington, 86, a former British trade minister and Conservative Party
vice chairman who filed one of Britain's most famous libel cases against a
man who labeled him a war criminal, died of cancer Dec. 8 at his home in
Kent, southern England. In 1989, Lord Aldington was awarded $2.2 million in
damages after winning a libel suit against historian Count Nikolai Tolstoy,
a distant relative of Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, had written a pamphlet
accusing Lord Aldington of war crimes. As a British army officer in Austria
at the end of World War II, Lord Aldington -- then known by his given name,
Toby Low -- oversaw the repatriation of thousands of Cossack and Yugoslav
refugees. Many were subsequently killed or interned in prison camps. At the
libel trial, Lord Aldington agreed that the refugees' fate was 'ghastly' but
said he had not known that many faced execution if returned to their
homelands (The Washington Post, December 9, 2000).
An obituary sometimes begs a thousand words. Well worth doing in this case,
especially since it's been over a decade since we wrote about Aldington,
Tolstoy, and one of the greatest untold tragedies of World War II (cf.
"Writing in the Tolstoy Tradition" by Sally Wright, Chronicles, April 1989).
This is a story of heinous crimes that went unpunished and
establishmentarian conspiracies to cover them up, of miscarriage of justice,
of one man's quixotic efforts to tell the truth and another's quiet campaign
to keep it suppressed.
The story starts at Yalta in February 1945, when the return of all Soviet
citizens that may find themselves in the Allied zone was demanded by
Stalin -- and was duly agreed to by Churchill and FDR. Accordingly, hundreds
of thousands of Soviet POWs liberated by the Allies were sent back home,
regardless of their wishes, and regardless of what Stalin had in store for
them. In addition, in May and June 1945 tens of thousands of refugees from
Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union -- unarmed civilians escaping communism, as
well as anticommunist resistance fighters and assorted collaborationists --
were rounded up by the British in Austria, and forcibly delivered to Stalin
and Tito. Most of them were summarily executed, sometimes within earshot of
the British. Forced repatriations were known as Operation Keelhaul -- the
"last secret" of World War II, as Alexander Solzhenitsyn called it. Men,
women, and children were forced into boxcars headed for the Soviet zone in
the east, or for Slovenia in the south.
Non-Soviet and non-Yugoslav citizens and Serbian royalists were supposedly
exempt from the deportation order, but key military officials in the British
chain of command surreptitiously included them, too. As a result émigré
Russians waving French passports and British medals from the World War I
were all rounded up and delivered to Stalin.
There was panic in the camps when the inmates realized what was going on.
The British lied to some that they were to be taken to Italy, or some other
safe haven; if the subterfuge didn't work they used rifle butts and bayonets
as prods. Some refugees committed suicide by sawing their throats with
barbed wire. Mothers threw their babies from trains into the river. To its
credit one British regiment, the London Irish, refused: they went to war to
fight German soldiers, they said, not to club refugee women and children.
(Americans proved willing to open the gates of refugee camps and look the
other way as the desperate inmates fled.)
In late June 1945 the original policy of screening the would-be deportees
was reinstated, but it was too late: most of them were already dead, or in
the depths of the Gulag. The tragedy would have remained little known
outside obscure émigré circles were it not for British historian Count
Nikolai Tolstoy, who has dedicated his life to exposing the truth and
identifying those responsible. This great-grand-nephew of Russia's famous
novelist -- and heir to the senior line of the family -- has written three
books on forced repatriations, each more revealing than the previous one, as
more suppressed information came to light. In 1977 his Victims of Yalta was
published, followed by Stalin's Secret War in 1981, and then his most
controversial book, The Minister and the Massacres (1986).
In his books Tolstoy argued that refugees not covered by the Yalta
agreement -- émigré Russians and royalist Yugoslavs -- were forcibly
repatriated because Harold Macmillan, "minister resident" in the
Mediterranean and later prime minister, wanted to advance his political
career by appeasing Stalin. He persuaded a British general whose 5th Army
Corps occupied southern and eastern Austria to ignore a Foreign Office
telegram ordering that "any person who is not (repeat not) a Soviet citizen
under British law must not (repeat not) be sent back to the Soviet Union
unless he expressly desires."
Enter Lord Aldington, then a politically well-connected 30-year-old
brigadier called Toby Low, who was the Fifth Corps chief of staff. He was
also an aspiring Tory politician, hopeful of being nominated as a candidate
at the forthcoming general election in Britain. Low had no qualms about
acting upon Macmillan's suggestions. On May 21, 1945 he issued an order to
5th Corps officers as to how to define Soviet citizenship: "Individual cases
will NOT be considered unless particularly pressed . . . In all cases of
doubt, the individual will be treated as a SOVIET NATIONAL." The émigrés'
fate was thus sealed. Tolstoy named Aldington in his last book as the chief
executor of the policy of forced repatriation on the ground, the man who
went way beyond the call of duty in carrying out Macmillan's instructions,
and who did so in contravention of orders.
The charges were serious, by British standards quite scandalous in fact, but
Aldington was reluctant to sue Tolstoy over the book. He did sue one Nigel
Watts instead, however, an obscure property developer who distributed a
pamphlet -- written by Tolstoy -- in which Aldington was called a war
criminal. The pamphlet included the following statements:
As was anticipated by virtually everyone concerned, the overwhelming
majority of these defenceless people, who reposed implicit trust in British
honour, were either massacred in circumstances of unbelievable horror
immediately following their handover, or condemned to a lingering death in
Communist gaols and forced labour camps. These operations were achieved by a
combination of duplicity and brutality without parallel in British history
since the Massacre of Glencoe. . . The man who issued every order and
arranged every detail of the lying and brutality which resulted in these
massacres was Brigadier Toby Low, Chief of Staff to General Keightley's 5
Corps, subsequently ennobled by Harold Macmillan as the 1st Baron Aldington
. . . The evidence is overwhelming that he arranged the perpetration of a
major war crime in the full knowledge that the most barbarous and
dishonourable aspects of his operations were throughout disapproved and
unauthorised by the higher command, and in the full knowledge that a savage
fate awaited those he was repatriating. a major war criminal, whose
activities merit comparison with those of the worst butchers of Nazi Germany
or Soviet Russia.
As the author of the text Tolstoy felt honor-bound to include himself as
Watts' co-defendant. At the trial Aldington freely acknowledged signing the
repatriation orders, but claimed that there was "no way" he could have known
the refugees would be killed: "We were told that international law would be
obeyed."
His mission in Austria accomplished, Brigadier Low returned to England on
some unknown date in May 1945 to be selected as the Conservative MP for
Blackpool -- the beginning of the slow rise that would see him ennobled (by
Macmillan!) and ushered into the boardrooms and elite gentlemen's clubs of
Britain. The exact date of his return is highly significant: Tolstoy argued
that Low did not leave Austria until after the key order on indiscriminate
deportations was issued, and therefore it was he who -- contrary to the
orders issuing from Yalta -- was personally responsible for the crime.
When the trial came it should have been possible, easy even, to prove the
order of events and name the man who had issued the orders. The British are
efficient administrators, and the Public Record Office should have contained
the answer. Some of the relevant documents Tolstoy had copied when he
researched his books, but when he went back he found that the old boy
network had done its work. All key documents related to the case had been
sent to various government ministries -- notably to the Foreign Office and
the Ministry of Defence -- and duly "misplaced." When Tolstoy's researcher
asked for these documents, including reports and signals relating to
Aldington, she was told they were "not available." Only after the trial had
started was Tolstoy given a photocopy of the most important of the files,
but four-fifths of the contents were missing.
Lord Aldington had no such problem: the files were not only readily
available to him, but delivered to his office by government couriers. "Dear
George," he wrote to George Younger, the (then) Defence Secretary, on March
8, 1987, "you are a friend who will understand my distress . . . if the
files can be brought to the Westminster area in a series of bundles, that
would be very helpful." "Dear George" duly obliged. Aldington's mind
eventually clarified as to the date on which he had finally left Austria -
he gave three dates in three interviews -- but there were no records by
which these could be confirmed.
Heavily influenced by the trial judge, the jury found against Tolstoy and
awarded Lord Aldington astronomic damages -- a million and a half pounds
sterling -- in November 1990. Tolstoy, who declared bankruptcy, was denied
the right to appeal. Aware that Tolstoy was penniless after the libel
verdict, Britain's High Court ruled that he had no right to appeal unless he
came up with almost $200,000.00 in advance to cover Aldington's legal
expenses. The court further denied Tolstoy access to a $1m defense fund that
had been set up in his name, and to which Alexander Solzhenitsyn and the
late Graham Greene had contributed. The British establishment, and in
particular to the grandees who were friends of Aldinton -- the man on
first-name terms with ministers in every Tory government since the war --
got the desired verdict. As far as they were concerned, a crank -- and a
foreign crank at that -- had received his well-deserved comeuppance.
L'affaire Tolstoy proved yet again that British libel laws are flawed. The
machinery of the British government seemed to tilt the scales of justice,
and the state apparently interfered in a private court case. The Human
Rights Court at Strasbourg ruled in a unanimous judgment that the failure to
permit an appeal was "unfitting for a democratic society and "constituted a
violation of the applicant's right . . . to freedom of expression."
A recent reminder of the travesty of justice perpetrated under British libel
laws concerned two ITN journalists who successfully sued the LM Magazine
(see "News & Views," April 20). Free speech was damaged both times, and --
in the absence of the First Amendment equivalent -- free speech is not so
strong in Britain that it can take such damage. But, as Cambridge historian
Michael Stenton points out, for as long as the rich have all the legal
advantages, the chance of constitutional reform is poor indeed: "When
historical truth becomes intensely politicized it is possible to get trapped
on the wrong side of the factual fence by sympathies and first impressions.
All we can do, and must do, is promise to climb over the fence if the
evidence demands it."
Lord Aldington's remarkable claim that he had had absolutely no idea what
the fate of these people would be was a lie. Everyone knew, and Aldington's
awareness of the draconic nature of his orders was reflected in the official
name of the operation -- "Keelhaul." Keelhauling was a disciplinary measure
on English ships in the old days: a seaman guilty of some grave offence
would have a loop of a rope attached under his arms, to be thrown into the
water and dragged all the way from the stern to the bow of the ship before
being hauled out again. (This had the advantage that some of the barnacles
would be scraped from the ship's bottom, but few survived such treatment.)
After Tolstoy's trial his Minister and the Massacres was banned from British
libraries and universities. Although the British government would like to
silence Tolstoy and any reference to forced repatriation, the issue will
never go away. Ever the idealist, Tolstoy hopes that sooner or later it will
have to come clean and apologize for the crimes of its agents in occupied
Central Europe in that awful spring of 1945. He recalls that Prime Minister
Tony Blair recently issued an apology on behalf of Britain for the 19th
century potato blight in Ireland, "though many historians and members of the
public found it hard to envisage in what way that tragedy could be regarded
as a direct responsibility of the government of the day, let alone its late
20th century successor." He also points out that the British government
"pressed consistently and successfully" for German and Japanese governments
to compensate British victims of their wartime atrocities.
Lord Aldington won his court case thanks to the twisted British libel laws
and thanks to the Kafkaesque nature of Britain's power structure, but
wherever he is now he may be wondering if it was a victory worth having.
That flawed man, disdainful of the suffering of such lesser breeds as Slavs,
cynically manipulative and devoid of any capacity for moral distinctions, is
beyond human judgment now; but one hopes that a much higher court will take
a dim view of his life and times. May his name live in infamy.
Darko Peric
¦¦¦ DWH ® ¦¦¦ <Edw...@hushmail.com> wrote in message
news:V4956.608$86.1...@monolith.news.easynet.net...
> Toby Low
>
> December 19, 2000
>
> LORD ALDINGTON: DEAD, BUT NO R.I.P.
>
> by Srdja Trifkovic
>
> Lord Aldington, 86, a former British trade minister and Conservative Party
> vice chairman who filed one of Britain's most famous libel cases against a
> man who labeled him a war criminal, died of cancer Dec. 8 at his home in
> Kent, southern England. In 1989, Lord Aldington was awarded $2.2 million
in
> damages after winning a libel suit against historian Count Nikolai
Tolstoy,
> a distant relative of Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, had written a pamphlet
> accusing Lord Aldington of war crimes. As a British army officer in
Austria
> at the end of World War II, Lord Aldington -- then known by his given
name,
> Toby Low -- oversaw the repatriation of thousands of Cossack and Yugoslav
> refugees. Many were subsequently killed or interned in prison camps. At
the
> libel trial, Lord Aldington agreed that the refugees' fate was 'ghastly'
but
> said he had not known that many faced execution if returned to their
> homelands (The Washington Post, December 9, 2000).
<snip>
Typical of Dr. Srdja Trifkovic, Chetnik apologist. He's talking here
about the forced repatriation of anti-communists and their subsequent
massacre and not one mention of the overwhelming number of victims, the
Croats, of whom some several tens of thousands were murdered. This is equal
to talking about Auschwitz and leaving out the Jews.