Free World War II Behind Closed Doors by Laurence Rees Page A

thousand Kalmyks. Descended from nomadic Mongols who had settled the steppes hundreds of years earlier, the Kalmyks lived south of Stalingrad in a bleak landscape stretching to the Caspian Sea. Like the Tatars, they were accused of collaborating with the Nazis; were deported en masse; and the deportation order encompassed people who could not by any logic be considered ‘collaborators’. Aleksey Badmaev, 59 for instance, had fought in the Red Army on the Stalingrad front and received awards for bravery. In January 1944 he was in a military hospital recovering from wounds received in battle when he was ordered to report at once to the railway station. He was then immediately sent north to a labour camp in the Ural Mountains. There he watched as other Kalmyk soldiers in the camp died of hunger and disease. It all seemed crazy. ‘Of all people’, he says, ‘I know very well that we were short of soldiers at the front, and to take these peopleaway was beyond stupidity. And secondly, the deportation of the whole nation was a crime. To punish one innocent person is enough of a crime, but to deport the whole of the people and to doom them to dying of extinction – well, I don't know what to compare it with’.
    The deportation of the Crimean Tatars was therefore part of an overall policy of punishment – one that removed entire ethnic groups from their homelands and banished them to labour camps and collective farms in the furthest reaches of the Soviet Union. The exact number deported in these various actions may never be known, but it certainly exceeds a million and may be closer to 2 million.
    And far from there being any Machiavellian reason behind the deportations, the motivation was a plain and simple desire to suppress dissent and take revenge. And in the process it was immaterial to Stalin and Beria whether the innocent suffered along with the guilty. ‘If Stalin had begun to sift things’, says Vladimir Semichastny, 60 a post-war head of the KGB, ‘and to discover who was guilty and who wasn't guilty, who fought at the front, who worked in the Communist Party organizations and so on, it would have taken twenty years. But the war was on, and if Stalin had begun to investigate he might not have finished until now. This was Stalin's way to tackle problems…. To send away a million people meant nothing to him’.
    It was impossible, of course, for the Soviet authorities to hide from the West these massive population shifts. But, just as with the Katyn massacres, this was not a subject that either the British or the Americans thought it fruitful to pursue. But there was one group of people who had been victims of Stalin's deportation policy but who were impossible for the West to ignore – not least because at the same time as the Crimean Tatars were being deported to Uzbekistan, they were helping to win for the Allies one of the fiercest and most brutal battles of the war.
    THE POLES AND MONTE CASSINO
    As we have already seen, Churchill was anxious about the progress of the Allied action in Italy at the time of the Tehran Conference. For this attack on the ‘soft underbelly’ of Axis Europe was not going to plan. The greatest problem the Allies faced was simple – geography. The harsh reality that the Allied troops had learnt in the months since the September 1943 landing at Salerno was that the terrain as they advanced north towards Rome was ill suited for an invading army. The combination of steep-sided mountains and swift-flowing rivers meant that progress was painfully slow. ‘Taking one mountain mass after another gains no tactical advantage’, wrote Major General Frederick Walker, commander of the American 36th Division, in his diary for 22 December that year. ‘There is always another mountain mass behind with Germans on it’. 61 The Allies were discovering the accuracy of Napoleon's judgement: ‘Italy is a boot. You have to enter it from the top’. 62
    A German propaganda leaflet of the time sums up