Massacre of Cossacks at Lienz (or The Tragedy of Drau !)
At Yalta, Churchill agreed to turn over to Stalin all captured Soviet Cossacks that had been on the German side. (see previous page - Operation Keelhaul )
https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/2016/06/22/britains-cossack-betrayal/
The Lienz Cossacks were ‘white Russians’ who’d fought bitterly against communism and the rise of the Soviet Union following the Russian Revolution. During the Second World War, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union, the Lienz Cossacks sided with the Nazis in order to try the topple the communist regime and bring ‘freedom’ to their country.
The Lienz Cossacks who’d fought with the Germans were rounded up by the British. It was up to the United Kingdom to decide what to do with them.
Because of the brutality of the Cossack soldiers, who had murdered and raped their way along with the SS and the German army, the British wanted nothing to do with them and ‘repatriated’ these ‘Russians’ to the Soviet Union, where they ‘belonged.’
Trains and trucks were pulled up and Cossack soldiers were forced into them. As were their wives, families and children – many of whom were not even Russian, having been born in the years after the Lienz Cossacks had left Russia.The Cossacks didn’t go willingly. British troops had to beat them into submission with billy clubs and rifle-butts. Eventually, almost 35,000 Cossacks were transported to their ‘mother country’ where the Soviets ‘welcomed’ them.
The vast majority of them were sent immediately to labor camps in Siberia, which were little better than the death camps the Nazis had built. Almost all of the Lienz Cossacks ‘repatriated’ back to Russia died in brutal suffering.
The ‘lucky’ ones didn’t even make it that far. Because many of the Cossacks weren’t born in Russia (their parents had left following the Russian Revolution) they were unable to be tried for treason as Soviet Citizens. Therefore the Red Army saved themselves the hassle of a military trial and executed them on the spot, with a bullet through the brains.
Background
During the Russian Revolution of 1917, thousands of Russians who were enlisted in the White Army, and who had defended the Tsar's government against the Bolsheviks fled to western European countries where they gained citizenship. Since they had fled Russia before it became the U.S.S.R they never claimed Soviet citizenship.cite|author=Chereshneff, Colonel W.V. |title= The History of Cossacks|date=1952 |publisher=Rodina Society Archives]
On June 22, 1941, Germany attacked the U.S.S.R., prompting its entrance to World War II. Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and Soviet occupation of Poland, Baltic States, etc., was de facto and de jure an entrance of the U.S.S.R. to the WWII. This created a conflict of interest among Cossacks in the Soviet Union: either fight with the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany or fight with Germany against the Soviet Union, which had abolished the Cossack Republics. The anti-Communist struggle of some Cossacks to liberate their homelands from the Bolsheviks prompted them to join the ranks of the German Army, with the aid of which they hoped to regain their lost countries.
The Cossacks were first recruited by German commanders in the field. In 1942 their military units received recognition and wore their own insignia, but by early 1943 the German High Command authorised the creation of the 1st Cossack Division which was trained in summer of 1943, to deploy to Yugoslavia to fight the Communist Tito partisans. [cite web|url=http://www.ww2germancavalry.info/cossackunits.htm|title=WW2 German Cavalry info] By war's end, the S.S. controlled the Cossack Division, despite General Helmuth von Pannwitz's refusal of its absorption to the S.S.; together with his division, enlarged as the XVth Cossack Cavalry Corps, it was administrated by the SS for replacements and supplies, though not organically part of the Waffen-SS.
Effect of Yalta and Tehran Conferences
The agreements of the Yalta and Tehran Conferences signed by President Roosevelt, Premier Joseph Stalin, and Prime Minister Churchill had a great impact upon the fates of the Cossacks who chose to not fight for the Soviet Union, because many of them were P.O.W.s in German military prisoner of war camps.
Premier Stalin demanded the repatriation of every Soviet citizen held prisoner; neither the British nor the American governments contested that, largely due to concerns that the Soviets would delay or refuse to repatriate allied prisoners of war who were at that time starting to be liberated from German POW camps in Eastern Europe by the Red Army. After Yalta, Churchill questioned Stalin, asking: "Did they [cossacks and other minorities] fight against us?" Stalin replied: "they fought with ferocity, not to say savagery, for the Germans". That was true with respect to most Cossacks who fought against the Soviet Union, most notably Tatar Caucasian Division that boasted said description. However, those few Cossacks who fought the Western Allies usually did it reluctantly. cite book |last= Ure |first=John |authorlink= |coauthors= |title= The Cossacks: An Illustrated History|year=2002 |publisher=Gerald Duckworth |location= London |isbn=0-7156-3253-1 ]
Per the Yalta and Tehran agreements, the Allies (i.e. the British and the Americans) forcibly rendered the Cossacks to the Red Army for repatriation to the U.S.S.R. At war's end, General Krasnov and other Cossack leaders persuaded Hitler to allow civilians and non-combatant Cossacks to permanently settle in the sparsely settled Carnia, in the Italian Alps. The Cossacks moved there and established a refugee settlement, with several stanitzas and posts, their administration, churches, schools, and military units.
When the Allies progressed from central Italy to the Italian Alps, Italian partisans under General Contini ordered the Cossacks to leave Carnia and go to north to Austria. There, on the Drava River, near Lienz, the British army imprisoned the Cossacks in a hasty internment camp. For a few days the British fed them, creating the impression that they understood the political problem of this fascist group. The Red Army's advance units were only a few miles east, rapidly advancing to contact the Allies. Most Cossacks began believing that, under British protection, they were safe from repatriation to the Soviet Union.
On May 28, 1945, two thousand and forty six Cossack officers and generals, including the cavalry Generals Pyotr Krasnov, Andrei Shkuro, and Kelech-Giray, were disarmed and transported in British cars and trucks to a nearby Red Army-held town. There they were handed over to the commanding Red Army general, who ordered them tried for treason. Many Cossack leaders had never been Soviet citizens, having fled revolutionary Russia in 1920, hence they could not be guilty of treason. Some were executed immediately; the higher-ranking officers were tried in Moscow and then executed. Most notably, General Pyotr Krasnov was hanged in a public square. Von Pannwitz, a German, chose to accompany the Cossacks in their Soviet repatriation, and was executed with five Cossack generals and atamans in Moscow in 1947.
On June 1, 1945, the British forced an additional thirty-two thousand Cossacks, including women and children, into cattle rail cars and trucks, and rendered to the Red Army for Soviet repatriation. Similar repatriations occurred that year in the American zones of occupation in Austria and Germany. The majority of Cossacks were sent to labor camps in the far North and Siberia. Most died; however, some escaped or lived until they were given amnesty by Moscow (see below). Some two million people were repatriated to the Soviet Union following WWII.cite web|url=http://www.fff.org/freedom/0495a.asp|title=Jacob G. Hornberger "Repatriation — The Dark Side of World War II"|accessdate=2007-04-05] While the exact number of repatriated Cossacks is unknown, most modern historians estimate between 45,000-50,000; other estimates (usually not widely accepted) range between 15,000–150,000.
Lienz
On 28 May, 1945, the British Army arrived in Lienz, Austria, where there were more than two thousand seven hundred Cossacks. They arrived to invite the Cossacks to an important conference with British officials, and told them they would return to Lienz by six o'clock that evening. Some Cossacks worried, but the British assured them that everything was in order. One British officer told the Cossacks: "I assure you, on my word of honour as a British officer, that you are just going to a conference". This should be blank] As repatriations went, the Lienz Cossack repatriation was exceptional because the Cossacks forcefully resisted the repatriation, feeling that the British had committed crimes worse than those committed by the Gestapo or NKVD. In "Operation Keelhaul" (1973), by Julius Epstein, a Cossack noted:
"The NKVD or the Gestapo would have slain us with truncheons, the British did it with their word of honor". The first to commit suicide by hanging was the Cossack editor Evgenij Tarruski. The second was General Silkin who shot himself. . . . The Cossacks refused to board the trucks. British soldiers [armed] with pistols and clubs began using their clubs, aiming at the heads of the prisoners. They first dragged the men out of the crowd and threw them into the trucks. The men jumped out. They beat them again and threw them onto the floor of the trucks. Again, they jumped out. The British then hit them with rifle butts until they lay unconscious and threw them like sacks of potatoes in the trucks.
The British drove two thousand seven hundred forty-nine Cossacks (including 2,201 officers) to a prison where the Soviets took custody of them.In Lienz is a graveyard and memorial site in the Peggetz.There is a memorial commemorating General von Pannwitz and soldiers of the XVth Cossack Cavalry Corps Killed in action or died as POWs in Tristach.
https://en-academic.com/dic.nsf/enwiki/1661593