Shocked at the fate of Russia’s former allies, Benjamin Dodon began writing his memoirs. Like many survivors of the camps, he wrote with little expectation of ever being published, the manuscript destined only for the desk drawer. Although he did not realize it at the time, Dodon’s would prove to be one of a large number of eyewitness accounts documenting the existence of American servicemen held captive in the Gulag from the end of World War II through the course of the Cold War. Within the camps, the sightings of this “third generation” of American prisoners became relatively frequent and unambiguous. And as the Cold War threatened to escalate into all-out confrontation, it appeared that Stalin’s policy of hostage-taking had been quietly stepped up. The unacknowledged presence of these Americans would remain an official secret—guarded by both governments—until the fall of the Soviet Union.
WEEKS BEFORE HE DIED, Franklin Roosevelt made repeated personal requests to Stalin to allow the U.S. Army Air Forces permission to evacuate sick and wounded American prisoners of war from Poland. On March 17, 1945, Roosevelt telegrammed once again:
“I have information that I consider positive and reliable that there are a very considerable number of sick and injured Americans in hospitals in Poland . . . This government has done everything to meet each of your requests. I now request you to meet mine in this particular matter.”
Roosevelt’s appeals for the evacuation were consistently refused by Stalin; the Soviet dictator claiming, with cynical disingenuity, that he lacked sufficient authority:
“I must say that if that request concerned me personally I would readily agree even to the prejudice of my interests. But in this case the matter concerns the interest of the Soviet armies at the front and Soviet commanders who do not want to have extra officers with them.”
7
In the closing phases of the Second World War, Stalin’s well-documented suspicion was already starting to build. Five days before Roosevelt’s death, Stalin telegrammed the American president to complain of how the Germans on the Eastern Front “CONTINUE TO FIGHT SAVAGELY WITH THE RUSSIANS FOR SOME UNKNOWN JUNCTION ZEMLIANITSA—‘LITTLE STRAWBERRY’—IN CZECHOSLOVAKIA WHICH THEY NEED AS MUCH AS A DEAD MAN NEEDS POULTICES, BUT SURRENDER WITHOUT ANY RESISTANCE SUCH IMPORTANT TOWNS IN CENTRAL GERMANY AS OSNABRÜK, MANNHEIM, KAS-SEL. DON’T YOU AGREE THAT SUCH BEHAVIOUR OF THE GERMANS IS MORE THAN STRANGE AND INCOMPREHENSIBLE . . .”
8
In his memoirs, Major General John Deane, the head of the military mission in Moscow, wrote that American prisoners “are spoils of war, won by the Soviets. They may be robbed, starved and abused—and no one has the right to question such treatment.”
9
From the vantage point of the American embassy in Moscow, Elbridge Durbrow understood very well the dangers of the situation. In a letter, he expressed his misgivings following the failure of the American mission to Poland, and its subsequent return to Moscow:
“This quite naturally caused us to be deeply worried about the fate of the many thousands of American prisoners of war being liberated at that time. Because of the past record of the Soviets, we became particularly concerned that they might not allow our liberated prisoners of war to be repatriated immediately, might have tried to propagandize many of them before they were released, cause other completely unjustified delays, or even retain some without our knowledge.”
10
Elbridge Durbrow did not mention the past experience upon which his fears were based. The diplomatic class of 1937 had all seen firsthand the methods of the NKVD, and they realized also that the history of the Soviet Union was one of endless and very tragic repetition.
Using persistent negotiation and the lure of economic aid, the West German government had managed, by the mid-1950s, to secure the release of thousands of German prisoners of war, who remained in captivity in the Soviet Union. Almost a decade after the end of the Second World War, the survival rate of these veterans of the Eastern Front was very low, but those who did survive surely owed their lives to the fact that their existence had been officially acknowledged. The Soviets were obliged to present at least some notion of an accounting to a democratic government actively demanding the prisoners’ release. At one point, the German chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, issued a forthright statement that Soviet armies had captured 3.5 million Wehrmacht soldiers at the cessation of hostilities. According to TASS, the Soviets had repatriated, or accounted for, almost 2.0 million. What, asked Adenauer, had happened to the remaining 1.5 million?
11
Of course, the question was only rhetorical. Of the 93,000 German soldiers marched through Moscow in a propaganda display after the surrender of the Sixth Army at Stalingrad in February 1943, only 6,000 returned home.
12
What had happened to the remaining German prisoners of war was clear. They had been subjected to the accelerated mortality of the “corrective labor camps.”
In a study made by the U.S. Army Headquarters, out of a sample of 2,658 Germans released from Soviet captivity in 1955, almost two thirds had no known affiliation with the Nazi Party.
13
Not that the mechanism of the Gulag was ever mindful of ideology or nationality. Among the millions in the camps were representatives of virtually every nation on earth: Germans, Austrians, Italians, French, Yugoslavs, Greeks, Romanians, British, Poles, Norwegians—the list was endless. Spanish soldiers from Franco’s fascist Blue Division were transported into the same system that imprisoned hundreds of Spanish communists who had fled to Russia in the wake of their country’s Civil War. The children of these Spanish refugees were consigned to the same fate.
14
In 1948, the Italian defense minister Luigi Gasparotto reported that “94 percent of Italian prisoners in Russian concentration camps have perished.” It was the remainder—the fortunate ones—who brought back news of the Americans.
15
BETWEEN 1947 AND 1956, the U.S. Air Force interviewed approximately three hundred thousand former German and Japanese prisoners of war who had returned from the Soviet camps. During this period, the air force sought to gather intelligence material for bombing targets in the USSR, in the event of the outbreak of World War III. But their interviewees, quite unexpectedly, volunteered firsthand accounts of American servicemen detained with them in the camps. For nine years, these so-called Wringer reports were meticulously logged, marked “secret,” and classified away in the military archives. From their pages emerged accounts of “silence camps,” in which the prisoners were forbidden to receive any contact with the outside world. Three quarters of the prisoners held in such camps had been sentenced to life terms, and the rest to twenty-five years. It was the legacy of a war that never came, and the last trace of the Americans who never returned.
16
Viewed at random, the Wringer files spoke of men such as “Gerhard Klueck,” a tall blond American with blue eyes and broad shoulders, who had been seen wearing an American major’s uniform in the camps at Vorkuta, approximately one hundred kilometers north of the Arctic Circle, after his kidnap from Berlin in April 1945.
17
From a camp near Petropavlovsk, on the Kamchatka peninsula, another survivor described an unnamed “brown-eyed, dark-haired” American from Fredericksburg, Virginia, who wore a pilot’s suit and had received a twenty-five-year sentence. The pilot spoke broken German with an American accent, and his gold teeth had been removed by the camp dentist. The interviewee then drew a sketch of the face of this Virginian held with him in the camp.
18
A thirty-eight-year-old German serviceman named Guenther Kloose returned from war and subsequent incarceration with his right eye missing, his left eye partially blind, and nearly every tooth lost from his upper jaw. From April 1943 until December 1947, Kloose was interned in a “silence camp” among prisoners of all nationalities, who were forced to work the mercury mines in the South Ural Mountains. Because of his poor physical condition, Kloose was assigned an office job, where he worked with the camp files listing the prisoners by nationality. In this particular camp, Kloose recalled there were 2,800 Germans, 460 Italian soldiers, 210 French, 24 British, and 6 Americans, the last two groups listed in the records as “intelligence officers.” The Americans had all arrived in the camp between the end of 1945 and the beginning of 1946.
“None of the prisoners are supposed to be discharged and they are not authorized any connection with the outside world,”
said Kloose.
“Mortality is very high.”
19
The information given by those interviewed was often scarcely more than a location and brief description of the American prisoner. Occasionally more details could be supplied. Thus Dr. Anton Petzold, a German civilian returnee who was “intelligent and cooperative,” according to his debriefer, brought news of a “Major Thompson” captured by the Soviets after a forced landing in 1944. This American major had been incarcerated in Budenskaya Prison until 1948, and was then sent to Tayshet camp on a twenty-five-year sentence for espionage. Major Thompson had told Dr. Petzold that he was from San Antonio, Texas. Dr. Petzold added the details that Thompson was thirty-eight years old, 1.85 meters tall, with fair hair and blue eyes. He was one of five Americans imprisoned in the USSR mentioned in that day’s report.
20
Another German witness, Dr. Geismann, described six Americans arrested by Soviet forces in Germany, two of whom were still being held in the Vorkuta camps in 1953. Dr. Geismann remembered that one of the men, called “Nielsen,” was a naturalized American born in Denmark who had won a gold medal for boxing in the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Although there was no medalist at the Berlin Olympics by that name, “Hans Jacob Nielsen” was listed as having won a boxing gold in the 1924 Paris Olympics.
21
Other survivors brought similar fragments of information to be entered into the files. They spoke of an American consular secretary from a Balkan country named “Peters” who had been kidnapped from a steamer after the war. An American civilian employee of the Moscow embassy named “Brown” who liked to talk about classical music and the operas he had seen in New York City. An American sergeant named “Henry P” who spoke “broken German” and had “three nearly destroyed chevrons” still recognizable on his uniform.”
22
Or a U.S. Army Air Forces bombardier named “Joe Miller,” from Chicago, shot down over Berlin in 1945, who a former German prisoner explained was a “staunch believer in democracy” and had been “severely beaten and starved by the Soviets” before being sent to the Karaganda Gulag, where he was “very weak physically and was suffering from malnutrition.”
23
AFTER THE FIRST Soviet atomic bomb was successfully tested, on August 29, 1949, a succession of events quickly unfolded that led the world to the brink of nuclear war. According to Gavril Korotkov, a former Soviet military intelligence officer, Kim Il-Sung secretly visited Moscow in February 1950 to inform Stalin that North Korea was not yet ready to launch an invasion of the South. Stalin’s response to the North Korean dictator was straightforward: “They were ready to start the fighting and couldn’t wait.” Kim Il-Sung was then sent out of Stalin’s Kremlin office to “think it over.” Four months later, on June 25, 1950, the North Korean armies, supplied with Soviet arms and air support, launched their invasion.
24
Over the course of the next three years, the Korean War took the lives of approximately two and a half million soldiers and civilians, including more than thirty-six thousand American servicemen and -women, with approximately eight thousand listed as missing in action or unaccounted for.
25
During the conflict, Americans fought Russians directly in combat for the first time since the Russian Civil War in 1919. Although neither side could admit this fact openly, the American pilots recognized the faces of Russian pilots wearing Chinese uniforms, flying MiG fighter planes in the skies over Korea. In the heat of combat, the instruction to issue commands only in Chinese was quickly forgotten, as Russian swearing could be clearly heard over the airwaves.
26
On November 15, 1951, Colonel James M. Hanley, the judge advocate general of the Eighth Army in Korea, accused both the Chinese and Korean communists of the murder of American prisoners of war. Colonel Hanley provided the names of 2,500 captured American soldiers. Nine months earlier, General Matthew Ridgway, the commander of U.S. forces in Korea, sent a film back to Washington that showed the recovered bodies of American prisoners of war shot in the back of the head and buried in mass graves with their hands still tied behind their backs. One decade after the Katyn Massacre, the method of their execution was identical.
27
In the United States, all the precursors to World War III were carefully being noted by intelligence agencies. The children of Soviet representatives in America had all been evacuated. The Soviet consulates in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York were closed, and the Amtorg offices in New York finally shut down. All Soviet bullion funds on deposit in the United States were withdrawn from the Federal Reserve and the cash balances run down. At the same time, a Soviet defector disclosed that there were four million Gulag prisoners in Far East Russia building the military infrastructure necessary for hostilities. On the Chukovsky peninsula, the Soviet Fourteenth Landing Army had gathered, with the strategic mission of landing in Alaska to launch a southerly offensive along the Pacific Coast in the event of an all-out nuclear war.
28
On May 7, 1951, President Truman publicly addressed this prospect in a speech at the Civil Defense Conference, in Washington, D.C. The president had already raised the specter of World War III to the American nation on national television, his round glasses reflecting back the camera lights aimed at his taut, lined face: