Alright, my friends, welcome back to Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's Chaos 92.7 in Austin.
We're streaming live worldwide on the internet at ChaosRadioAustin.org and at AntiWar.com slash radio and it's time to discuss the most evil murderers in the history of the world.
Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, and the great Winston Churchill, beloved by so many.
The guest is Jacob Hornberger.
He's the founder and president of the Future of Freedom Foundation.
It's repatriation, the dark side of World War II in seven parts.
Jacob wrote this thing back in February of 1995 and we're going to discuss the mass murder by the tyrants just listed, not during the war, but during the peace, when World War II was over.
Welcome back to the show, Jacob.
Hey, it's nice to be back, Scott.
Anybody ever heard of Operation Keelhaul?
That's what we're talking about today, in part at least, repatriation at the end of World War II.
Well, I guess the best way into this story is the way you do it.
That's telling the story of Andrei Vlasov, a member of the Russian Red Army, and really telling his personal story is the best way to get into the larger picture here.
So why don't you go ahead and tell us first, Jacob, who was Andrei Vlasov and what was his story?
Well, Vlasov is a very heroic figure in Russian history.
He was a general in the Russian army.
He was one of those that survived the mass murder of Russian officers that Stalin had committed after World War I and before World War II.
And he was a fairly young man, around 40 or so.
And when the Germans attacked the Soviet Union in the middle of World War II, Vlasov immediately rose to the top as one of the top generals for Stalin.
And in fact, when the Germans reached Moscow, Vlasov was given the duty of defending the city.
And he did that successfully.
Then he was assigned to the defense of Leningrad.
And unfortunately for him and the Soviets, the Germans surrounded Leningrad.
And he asked Stalin's permission to retreat, and Stalin refused to give him that permission.
And he ultimately was captured by the Germans and taken prisoner of war and taken back to Germany.
And then once he was in Germany, I guess, when you tell the story of what he'd seen, you actually have some extended quotations from him describing what he had seen back in Russia, living under the totalitarian monster Joseph Stalin.
And he actually went so far as to make an alliance, or attempt to make an alliance with the Germans and fight his group of prisoners as part of the German army against his own country, Jacob.
Yeah, this was the real tragedy of this heroic figure.
I mean, here he leads the Soviet army in the defense of the motherland, the defense of his country.
But as he's being surrounded by the German army, and Stalin will not let him retreat, he starts doing a bunch of soul-searching, and he starts thinking, you know, this system is really an evil system, this communist system that has taken over my country, that communism is a horrible type thing, it's a horrible system, it's brutal, it's tyrannical.
And then he started doing a lot of soul-searching about all his fellow officers that had been killed by Stalin in the communist regime.
So by the time he's taken captive and he's taken back to Germany, he's doing a lot of reflecting on this, and he says, you know, the future of my country does not lie with communism, it lies with a free and independent Russia.
So he makes an alliance with the Nazi regime, much as the US government made an alliance with the communist regime to defeat Hitler.
Well, Vlasov says, well, I'm going to make an alliance with all of these Russian soldiers that are here captive, and help them defeat this communist regime and the Soviet Union with the intent of establishing a free and independent Russia, or Soviet Union, at the end of this thing.
Now, he's perhaps a little naive, thinking that the Germans would let him do this at the end of this thing, but that's what his belief was, that he would make this alliance to defeat communism, much as the US had made the alliance with communism to defeat Nazism.
And you say in the article, I think, that he had organized, what, 50,000 POWs at his service kind of thing in the camps?
There was about 50,000 POWs, Russian POWs, that had been taken captive by the Nazis.
And so they put Vlasov in charge of this division within the German army to fight the Soviet communist regime.
And so it was Russian soldiers operating within the German army to defeat the Soviet Union, which was essentially fighting against the government of their home country.
The way the story goes, though, Hitler didn't use them until it was already way too late, and the Soviets were marching across Eastern Europe.
Well, that's right.
Hitler didn't trust Vlasov, because he was obviously this Soviet hero.
He had led the Soviet troops in the battle against the Germans, and so he didn't quite know what Vlasov's game was.
He could not really honestly believe that this was a man who was devoted to the welfare of his nation.
And so he didn't trust him.
But at the very end, he said, OK, we'll let you lead this division in the battle against the Soviet troops.
And Vlasov's men ended up seeing very little battle.
The irony of this is they helped liberate the Czech people from German tyranny.
In the midst of all the chaos, World War II was wrapping up, and then the Germans were getting ready to surrender.
But at the end of this thing, Germany surrenders.
And Vlasov realizes that it is not in his interest, or in the interest of his men, to be taken captive by the Soviet side of the Allied forces, for obvious reasons.
So he decides that he's going to figure out a way to surrender to the Americans, figuring that the Americans are fair-minded people, they're not any communist lovers, that maybe they made this alliance out of necessity with the communists, but certainly they would not align themselves with communism in the final analysis.
So he does that.
He figures out a way to surrender to the Americans and the British, rather than the Soviets.
All right, now, basically what happened here was that as all this is going on, the politicians in the Soviet Union, in the United Kingdom, and in the United States, had already decided the fate of all these prisoners of war once the fighting had stopped.
Well, that's right.
And that gets us to the Yalta Agreement, where Roosevelt and Churchill essentially sold Eastern Europe and the Eastern Europeans down the river.
Because while – keep in mind that the reason that Great Britain had declared war on Germany in the first place was to free Poland and Czechoslovakia from Nazi tyranny.
Well, at Yalta, Roosevelt and Churchill agreed to turn over Eastern Europe to the Soviet communists at the end of the war.
So here you have this entire group of people who thought they were going to be free at the end of World War II, but while they were free from Nazi tyranny, they were not free from Soviet tyranny.
Well, as part of that deal at Yalta, Roosevelt and Churchill also agreed to the return of prisoners.
Now, that meant that any prisoners that the Soviets would be liberating that were in German hands, like Americans and British, should be returned to Great Britain and the United States.
Which is no problem, because those prisoners of war wanted to be returned to their home countries.
But they also agreed that any prisoners that – Russian prisoners that were liberated out of German hands would be repatriated to the Soviet Union.
That obviously created a huge problem for Vlasov and his men, because they did not want to be repatriated to this country, because they knew the fate that awaited them under Stalin and the communists.
Well, now, how could they have known that anything bad would happen to them under the authority of Joseph Stalin, Jacob?
Well, keep in mind that in Stalin's mind – now, Stalin's a brutal guy.
I mean, he was the guy that killed, I don't know, 40 million people and so forth.
So the communists were no better than the Nazis in terms of brutality and tyranny.
In Stalin's mind, Vlasov and these Soviets are traitors, because they have taken up arms against their own government.
Now, Vlasov would consider himself a patriot, because he's trying to overthrow an illegitimate, evil regime that has taken over in his country.
In other words, he's fighting for his country, and in the process, opposing his government.
So the whole tragedy here involves questions of what is patriotism, what is nationalism, what is treason?
So everybody knew that if these Russians were turned back over to Stalin, that he would have them executed or sent to the gulag as traitors.
How do we get from the 50,000 to 2 million, when we talk about the repatriation at the end of World War II?
You say in this article that 2 million people were turned back to the Soviet Union.
Well, the 50,000 were the men under Vlasov's command, but overall, there was 2 million Russians repatriated to the Soviet Union.
Now, some of us would argue that those people should have been given a choice.
That at the end of the war, at the end of hostilities, if they did not want to be repatriated, the U.S. government and the British government had absolutely no business, both morally and under international law, forcibly repatriating them into communist tyranny.
Especially when they knew the fate that would await them.
I mean, this was just, effectively, complicity and murder.
Okay, now, let me ask you, though, because Vlasov, clearly, from the point of view of Stalin, was a traitor, at least to the state, the Soviet state.
He was a traitor, allied with Hitler and tried to invade his own country, kind of thing like that.
But that was only the 50,000 men under Vlasov.
That's pretty horrible, but did Stalin consider all 2 million, anyone who surrendered to the Germans, were automatically considered traitors to be executed?
Yeah, or sent to the gulag, because his position was that nobody should ever surrender or be taken captive.
That the soldier's duty is to die in battle against the enemy.
And so he could not trust anyone who had been taken captive.
I mean, he might have been infected with pro-German sentiments or anti-Soviet sentiments and so forth.
So Stalin didn't like any of these people that were being repatriated, or at least most of the people.
And nobody was safe.
Anybody who was being repatriated, they didn't know what their fate was, and a lot of them found themselves either executed or in the gulag.
Yeah, but this was Uncle Joe Stalin, and that's probably, must be, because Churchill and FDR had no idea what a terrible guy Stalin was.
He may have murdered tens of millions of his own people, but it's hard to get a reporter into Russia, and nobody knew that, right?
Yeah, you know, that's the real perversity of, one of the real perversities of World War II, is that everybody knew about the brutality of the communists.
When the communist revolution had taken place during World War I, everybody had, especially Churchill, had said what a horrible thing this was.
They didn't even recognize the regime, because they were so opposed to this brutality and violence and tyranny, and of course the communist idea of taking from those who have to give to those who don't have.
And so, all of a sudden, here you've got the US and Great Britain entering into a partnership with this monster regime.
A regime, by the way, which was then converted into a monster once again, which ultimately justified some 50 or 60 years of the Cold War.
So, Hitler recognized them as a monster regime.
Vlasov recognized them as a monster regime.
Churchill did.
Roosevelt did.
But Roosevelt and Churchill enter into a partnership with this monster regime, which they justified as a way to defeat Nazi Germany.
But at the end of the war, or in the midst of the war, they deliver, knowingly, the Eastern Europeans into the clutches of this monster regime, and then they take Vlasov and all these anti-communist Russians and force, at the point of a gun, they force these people into the clutches of the communists.
And how they did it is just a horror story in and of itself.
And that, of course, raises what you called Operation Keelhaul, and that was the name that the US officials gave to this operation, to this repatriation operation.
Operation Keelhaul.
Well, now, hold it there, Keelhaul, for a second, because I'm just trying to picture a map of Eastern Europe in my head, best I can tell.
Did Churchill and FDR, at that point, have any choice but to cede Eastern Europe to the Soviet Union?
I mean, the only other choice would have been to let Patton invade and conquer Moscow, right?
Well, there was another possibility here.
You know, we all grew up with the notion that the only option was unconditional surrender, and that was the demand that Roosevelt had just blithely come out with, we need an unconditional surrender.
Well, all that accomplished was that this fait accompli, essentially, where the Soviets were overrunning Eastern Europe.
There's absolutely no inherent reason why a deal could not have been struck with the Nazis, where you knock out Hitler, you knock out his regime, and you make a deal that essentially puts Eastern Europe under allied control before the Russians, the Soviets, had made it back across those lines.
By issuing that unconditional surrender, and by not negotiating with the Germans, or encouraging – they wouldn't even have negotiations with the anti-Hitler factions.
As you know, there was a considerable body of people within Germany that were trying to kill Hitler.
The US officials wouldn't even encourage them or negotiate with them, and that included, of course, Rommel, who later got executed for this.
With this unconditional surrender demand, they essentially made it to the point where they said they had no choice but to deliver Eastern Europe over to Stalin, because by that time, it was a fait accompli, with his forces overrunning Eastern Europe.
And FDR and Churchill, did they have learning disabilities, or was it that FDR primarily truly loved Joe Stalin, the world's greatest monster, up until that point?
Well, there was a lot of sympathy that Roosevelt had for Stalin.
He called him Uncle Joe, he thought that he could influence him through the force of his personality, he would joke around with him when they had these summit meetings at Tehran and in Yalta.
And obviously there was a sympathy toward the socialism that the communists had established.
Roosevelt was adopting as part of his New Deal many of the socialist programs, the philosophies, the idea of taking money from the rich and giving it to the poor, the regulatory schemes.
So there was some kind of sympathetic relationship between Stalin and Roosevelt that of course never arose between Hitler and Roosevelt.
But again, it's always difficult to compare evil, but it's difficult to say that either Hitler was more evil than Stalin, or Stalin was more evil than Hitler.
Surely Stalin killed many more millions of people than Hitler did.
Yeah, I think when it comes down to it, if you're trying to, you know, qualitatively I think I would probably even argue perhaps that the Nazis were worse just in having some guy in a white lab coat and a clipboard counting the corpses on the conveyor belt as they take the gold out of people's teeth and dump them in the incineration pit.
I mean, this is the most organized, mechanized system of mass murder.
Stalin just starved everybody to death in a crude, tamer, lame sort of way, you know.
But then again, if you want to measure it quantitatively, you've got to just count corpses.
And in that sense, Stalin, later Mao Zedong, take the cake.
I want to get into what's got to be the worst treason imaginable.
I mean, when you're counting corpses, you have tens of millions in China and in Russia, tens of millions, of course, victims of World War II and the Nazis.
But, you know, two million repatriated to the Soviet Union to be murdered by the United States and the United Kingdom at the end of World War II, that's the same as Pol Pot.
That's two million people right there murdered.
That makes Harry Truman Pol Pot, which makes him, what, fourth on the list?
Fifth?
Worse than Genghis Khan?
Worse than Tamerlane?
Worse than the worst criminals in the history of all humanity?
Well, and no one can argue that they didn't know what was going to happen to these people.
Again, Stalin viewed them as potential traitors, real traitors, unpatriotic, whatever.
And it was no secret as to why Stalin wanted them back.
And Stalin was demanding that they come back.
Now, part of this deal was that Stalin was implicitly threatening them, that if they didn't return these Russians, Stalin would refuse to return American and British prisoners to Great Britain and the United States.
In fact, that's another little dark part of this whole story.
Let's save that one for the end.
That, to me, is sort of the, well, I can't think of a way to say it, not the cherry on top, but the, you know, kind of ultimate holy crap to seal the deal.
But now let's get to Kiel Hall here.
Tell me about, first of all, my word of honor and the way these men were millions, again, two million people, many of them tricked by promises and handshakes by gentlemen into being delivered into the clutches of the Soviet secret police.
Yeah, well, first of all, we ought to talk about what that word, Kiel Hall, means.
Oh, yeah, there you go.
Start there.
And why U.S. officials use that as the name, Operation Kiel Hall, for the repatriation of these Russian people.
That Kiel Hall is a process in the Navy where Navy ships to execute somebody would tie them up, truss them up, and throw them behind the boat on a rope where they would be going underwater back and forth behind the stern of the boat.
Of course, not able to swim because they were all trussed up with ropes.
And they would just haul them behind the boat until they drowned.
And that would be a punishment for whatever they had done.
And so that was called Kiel Hauling somebody.
Well, this repatriation operation, U.S. officials called Operation Kiel Hall for obvious reasons.
They were going to haul these Russians back over to the Communists and deliver them over for execution or the gulag, which was effective death for all practical purposes.
And there were different groups.
There were some in the United States, actually.
There were Soviet prisoners in the United States.
There was Vlasov's men over there, I think, in Germany.
And then there were just Russian prisoners over there in Germany.
And what you suggest is absolutely right as to how they did this.
One group of Russians, they were there with their families.
And they had been promised that everything is going to be fine and all.
And so one day they were told, these Russian officers, listen, just leave your jackets here.
We just need you to come over to this meeting.
And we need you to separate from your family.
It's just temporary.
And the Russian officers looked nervous.
And the British officials said, look, you have our word as British officials, our word of honor, that everything's fine.
You can count on our word of honor.
And they got them to this place.
And all of a sudden, up pops the Communist military and the Soviet military and starts to take these people into custody.
And of course, the Russians are sitting there saying, you know, it would have been better to just be shot than to lose your life, relying on a word of honor from a British who obviously had no word of honor at all.
So they tried to resist violently, getting on these Soviet trucks, military trucks and stuff.
And the British soldier started beating them and hitting them in the head with rifle butts and stuff.
They knocked them unconscious and then just threw like a pack of potatoes onto these trucks stacked on each other.
And of course, they woke up to find themselves back in the Soviet Union.
That was just one little, you know, anecdote as to what happened there with Vlasov.
They turned Vlasov over to to the Soviet officials, you know, against his will.
And Vlasov was not naive.
He knew what was going to happen to him.
And sure enough, there's no telling what kind of torture he was subjected to.
But he was executed and an announcement was made that he is a traitor of the Soviet people had been executed.
And as I recall, I could be mistaken on this, but I have a vague recollection that his body parts were posted around town on the polls for display.
So, yeah, he met the fate that he knew he was going to meet and that Roosevelt and Churchill and Stalin knew that he would meet once he got turned over.
And tell us about the guys at Fort Dix, New Jersey.
They were safe on the American side of the Atlantic Ocean.
Yeah, let me one more thing about Vlasov, which is kind of interesting, is that, you know, after the fall of the Soviet Union, the Russian people started to realize what had happened to Vlasov.
And since then, Vlasov has actually been rehabilitated as a hero of the Russian people.
And he's celebrated today now as a hero of the Russian people, because people realize that he was fighting for his country by opposing his government, which was an evil, tyrannical communist government.
And so while the government considered him a traitor, today the Russian people consider Vlasov a very big Russian hero.
And in my opinion, he's a very heroic figure, you know, the kind of man that stands for principle, fought for his country by opposing his government.
Yeah, yeah, he sure is the epitome of this tragedy, no doubt about that.
All right, now tell me about Fort Dix, New Jersey.
Yeah, at Fort Dix, there were some Russian prisoners and they were told that they were going to be repatriated and they just resisted violently.
They refused to go.
And so again, U.S. soldiers had to be used to bring them into submission, to board these Soviet ships.
And these guys were begging them, please just kill us, kill us now.
Don't send us back for what awaits us.
Just finish it right now.
And of course, the U.S. soldiers did not do that.
They said, no, you have to be returned.
And so they were put on this ship and they started to revolt on the ship, trying to disable the engines and so forth.
I mean, they knew that the communists are not nice people when it comes to things like torture and gulags and executions and things.
Well, I got to tell you, I think that sounds almost unbelievable.
You know, I know better, but it kind of reminds me in Tabby Cannon's new book, he talks about, I guess, Finland, Norway or somewhere like that, where they could hear the screams from the other side of the border from the Soviet Union.
And they were so frightened of what might happen to them if the Soviets came.
I mean, think about that.
Seriously, brave soldiers, right?
Soldiers telling their American captives, please, please murder us rather than turn us over to Stalin, please.
And we say, no, screw you, and put barbiturates in their drinks and drug them and then hand them over to the Czech.
Yeah, that's right.
That's how they got there.
They eliminated their resistance on that ship that somebody slipped barbiturates in their coffee, and they drank the coffee, fell asleep, and thus ended their resistance.
And they woke up, you know, duly tied up, I'm sure, on the way back to the Soviet Union.
And again, we cannot overstate the brutality of the Soviet communists.
I mean, we know the stories of what was happening when they reinvaded Germany.
Now, that's not to say the Nazis were any better.
But we know what the Soviet soldiers were doing when they reinvaded, when they came back into Germany.
They were raping German women just willy-nilly.
It was a horrible, horrible, brutal army.
And these were communists.
I mean, this was the whole idea of the Cold War, the brutality of communism and so forth.
And they were not any less brutal during World War II.
So, yeah, these soldiers knew what was going to happen to them.
The American soldiers knew what was going to happen to them, and were complicit in this crime.
And I consider it a crime.
I think it's a horrible crime.
Really, what the U.S. should have done is said, we're not going to force anybody to go anywhere that he doesn't want to go to, and especially not to a communist regime where they're certain to be executed.
Well, this must be why the American people got sick of the Democrats and elected Ike Eisenhower, right?
It was because they knew all about this and were ashamed, right?
Well, I'm not really sure.
I'm not really sure about that.
World War II has always been sold as the good war, you know, the gray war that, oh, the great generation fought this good war and stuff.
Well, there's these dark secrets of World War II that I think just now are starting to come out, or that have come out, but America's haven't wanted to face them.
You've got this new book by Pat Buchanan, as you mentioned, that said, look, this war turned over Eastern Europe, the East Germans, to the Soviet communists.
I mean, who wanted to die for that?
To die so that Hitler could be knocked out of control of Eastern Europe, just so that Joseph Stalin and the communists could take over for the next 60 years.
I mean, that's why it was kind of ironic when Bush and the rest of the U.S. officials were celebrating this big anniversary of winning World War II, and they went over to Eastern Europe, and they were kind of befuddled as to why the Poles and the Czechs and the people in the Baltics, Lithuania and so forth, were not celebrating this great victory.
And it finally hit them, oh, yeah, well, being under Soviet communist tyranny wasn't any great victory for them.
Yeah, but you know, here's my problem.
FDR was such a great man.
I can't understand.
You must be wrong, because he wouldn't be part of something like this.
Well, these are the things that we learn about our public officials, that, you know, we're all taught these things that, oh, yeah, a great man, and, you know, fighting for freedom and so forth.
And, you know, then we find out that, hey, they've done some really, really bad things.
I mean, here was Roosevelt promising the American people prior to his election in 1940 that, I give you my word, your boys are never, ever going to be sent into any foreign wars, because the American people wanted nothing to do with World War II after the fiasco of World War I, and then the rise of Adolf Hitler and so forth.
And yet here was Roosevelt lying.
He was doing everything he could to get the United States into that war, including provoking and manipulating, maneuvering the Japanese into firing the first shot.
But these are things that it's incumbent on us, Scott, as you well know, incumbent on us to share with the American people as part of a truth and reality campaign of, hey, this is the real stuff that goes on.
Yeah, well, you know, assuming you can get people to accept that these facts are true, it seems like the kind of thing that would, you know, have to change your context and understanding.
I mean, as you said, the whole narrative of World War II, which, face it, George Washington is dead, the Constitution is dead, the real founding father of America isn't even Abraham Lincoln, it's Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
And that is the myth, America as Superman, good enough to use force on you because of how great we are, it justifies itself.
It's okay for us to replace the British Empire, and more so, because of how great we are.
It's all based on this comic book version of primarily Franklin Delano Roosevelt as the greatest American ever, and the most wonderful man who never did anything evil, who in fact was right up there in mass murder and treachery, as you said, deliberately provoking Pearl Harbor and turning a blind eye, or I don't know, that wasn't your exact words, but close enough, I know you know that, and turning over two million helpless prisoners to Joe Stalin to be murdered.
If there's anything that could help to, you know, get rid of some of the black and white in that comic book and color in some details there, this has got to be it, or else just forget it, right?
Well, and also turning the Eastern Europeans over to the Soviet Communists.
I mean, some big victory that was.
You could argue, Jacob, that that was just because they're stupid, because they said, oh, Hitler's so evil we have to have an unconditional surrender, and didn't realize that, oh, jeez, I guess that's just going to give Stalin more time to conquer more land, huh?
I mean, I'm not arguing that, but that would be the excuse, wouldn't it?
Well, that would be the excuse, and I know this isn't the topic for today, but we also can't ignore the enormous effect that Roosevelt's economic policies have on us today.
I mean, all this stuff about the bailout and this is the so-called failure of free enterprise, we've heard all this nonsense under the Roosevelt regime, where they've taught us in these public schools that the stock market crash in 29 was the failure of free enterprise, and the Great Depression saved free enterprise.
It's the exact opposite.
It's been a lie from the very beginning.
It's the Federal Reserve that caused that stock market crash, and it was the New Deal that prolonged the Great Depression and aggravated and made it worse for more than 10 years, and we're living with the consequences of that on a domestic level now with all this financial crisis.
Well, and it's hilarious to listen to people in 2008 say that what's happened now proves the failure of laissez-faire free market capitalism, as though we hadn't all completely been brainwashed, all of us, even the people who don't care to pay attention at all.
So we all weren't brainwashed in third grade or whatever to understand that freedom and laissez-faire caused the Great Depression, and we created this gigantic post-constitutional government in D.C. in order to smooth out those booms and busts and take care of those problems back in the 1930s when our grandparents were little kids.
How could it possibly be that what happens now has anything to do with laissez-faire when we have the greatest, I mean in size, government in the history of all of the solar system?
Well, that's right, and the lies just continue, but that's the root of what we're going through today.
Oh, laissez-faire, deregulation, capitalism has failed.
It's the same nonsense.
I mean, we've lived under a socialist interventionist regime since Franklin Roosevelt's regime, but people have been taught that this is free enterprise, and so we repeat that old saying, you know, those who don't learn history are condemned to repeat it.
You know, I think there can be a lot of truth found in confusion, and I have to always be careful about this kind of thing, because you can kind of get in trouble for using these words too loosely, but, you know, I think if we go back in history, you know, this is the kind of thing Justin Raimondo writes about all the time, how the right wing used to be the liberals, and they were laissez-faire, individualist, capitalist types, and that's what liberals used to be before socialists stole the word from them, and it was the conservatives who were always the statists until the socialists became even more statists than them, and you go back and forth, and we have all these people of switched parties and switched ideologies.
It's almost always over war that the people trade back and forth and through these things, but if we rewind this to say, for example, oh, I don't know, the Wilson administration and the takeover of the Democratic Party by what they call the progressive faction, we see people like Colonel Edward Mandel House, who wrote a blueprint for a fascist state.
That's what he called it while later he bragged, I anticipated Mussolini by several years, and what he came up with in the book Philip Drew Administrator for how America ought to be if he was the dictator is the New Deal.
It's Social Security, it's, you know, vastly expanded regulatory powers, you know, the pension funds, Barack Obama's plan, put bureaucrats on every board of directors, make the national government the biggest stockholder and control enterprise, and then on with the League of Nations, and basically everything that Wilson didn't get accomplished in World War I or was repealed by the governments between the world wars here in America, FDR accomplished and sealed in the New Deal, and that progressivism and liberalism as practiced by the Democratic Party, I'm not, I'm leaving out the Republicans only to make the larger point, the Democratic Party platform of the 20th century is a fascist doctrine.
It should not be a surprise that a fascist like Franklin Roosevelt would be a monster and murder two million people.
You could call him a communist sympathizer or whatever and attack him from the right the same way or whatever and make the same point, but what we're talking about here, and this is the point that you make in your article, that despite all the finger-pointing and warring between these factions, the National Socialists and the International Communists and the New Dealers and the fascists in Italy, these people were all basically creatures of the same mind.
I mean, FDR didn't get away with it as far as the rest did, but they weren't too different from each other, these men, at all.
No, philosophically, they believed in the state supremacy over economic activity, and that was Roosevelt's philosophy, it was Hitler's philosophy, it was Mussolini's philosophy, it was Stalin's philosophy, and that the individual must be subservient to the state, and the individual was secondary, that what mattered was societal interests.
In fact, one of the amusing parts of all this from the economic standpoint is that Hitler actually sent Roosevelt a letter in the early years of the New Deal, commending Roosevelt on his economic policies, and he said in the letter that, I understand what you're going through and you understand the importance of just trampling over opposition in order to establish your plans and your directives and so forth, and he says, I can understand that fully.
And of course he could, because this was his mindset, the idea that government exists to control people's economic affairs, the idea of leaving ownership in private hands, but controlling it from the central apparatus of the state.
Yeah, philosophically, they shared the same commitment.
You can see this in Roosevelt's National Industrial Recovery Act, which ultimately was declared unconstitutional, but here were the roots of Social Security, which of course was a core element in National Socialist Germany, National Health Care, Medicare, Medicaid, the SEC, all these departments of agriculture and commerce and so forth, they all have their roots in Roosevelt's status philosophy.
And now I know people just cringe when they hear someone oppose Social Security, but as your fellow, or I'm not sure what title you give him, Anthony Gregory, has pointed out, when Bismarck invented Social Security in Germany, it had nothing to do with caring about anybody.
The purpose was to tie the individual to the central state, period.
Well, yeah, and Bismarck had taken Social Security, the idea, from the German Socialists.
I mean, he was essentially trying to co-opt them so that they wouldn't get too prominent in Germany.
So he simply adopted their Socialist principles, much as the Democrats and the Republicans did with the Progressives.
But there's no doubt that it's a Socialist program.
There's no pool, there's no fund, they didn't put your money away in a lockbox, it's a straight transfer program.
It takes money from young people, who are having a difficult time starting families and buying a house, and transfer it to old people.
It's a straight Socialist program.
It has its roots in German Socialism.
Yeah.
All right, now, Jacob, I made you save it till last, and to wrap up the interview here, can you please discuss the American and British POWs, who also were left behind in Russia, basically?
Or sent to Russia?
Yeah, this may be the biggest horror story of all about this thing.
You'll recall that I said that when the Russians were moving toward Germany in their invasion, they took over some German POW camps, that is, where the Germans kept American and British soldiers, POWs.
So the Russians took control of those POWs as they were moving toward Germany.
Now, the reason they were doing that, instead of just releasing them back to the Brits and the Americans, is that they needed the bargaining chips, because they wanted those anti-Communist Russians to be returned to them, Vlasov and the rest of that bunch.
So to make sure that Churchill and Roosevelt lived up to their promise that it made it Yalta to return these people, Stalin said, well, I'll just keep these Americans and Brits that I've taken over here in these German territories, I'll just hold them as bargaining chips.
So if they don't turn over their soldiers to us, the anti-Communists, we won't turn over the Americans and British soldiers to them.
Well, I think, probably as sad as it is, most Americans would say, two million Russians is worth 20,000 Americans, decent trade, they made a deal, so how come the Soviets got their two million back, but we didn't get our 20,000 back?
Well, that's another little interesting twist.
So here the Americans and the Brits forcibly repatriate these two million anti-Communist Russians that were almost certain to be killed or sent to the gulag, but then at this point in time, the Americans and the Brits start taking the same position that Hitler was taking, that the real threat is Communism, the Soviet Communism.
And so the official enemy at that point, as the war had ended with Hitler's suicide, the Americans and the Brits start shifting the official enemy from Germany over to the Soviet Union, their partner and ally.
And in this process, they decide that maybe they ought to keep some of these anti-Communist Russians to help them in the upcoming Cold War.
At the same time, they started enlisting the assistance of Nazis that had previously been trying to kill and who they had vilified as these horrible people.
Well, now the Nazis are becoming partners with the Americans and the Brits, and so are these anti-Communist Russians, who they're no longer forcibly repatriating.
In other words, they kept some, and we're now enlisting their assistance.
Well, Stalin learns about this, so he says, ah, well, then if you're not going to repatriate those Russians that are now working with you, we will just keep these Americans and these Brits.
And there was a total of 50,000 Allied soldiers, and Stalin took them back from Germany, from German POW camps, transported them back into the Soviet Union.
There was 20,000 American soldiers and 30,000 British soldiers.
Well, the American people must have known that the Russians had liberated some prisoner camps where Americans were.
Weren't they demanding that these men be brought home?
Nobody knew anything because the U.S. officials kept it secret.
In fact, to this day, they will not open up all the files on World War II, because they say that national security is at stake, you know, some 60 or 70 years after the war.
But there's a great book on this, it's called Soldiers of Misfortune, and it's an absolutely awesome book that tells this whole horror story, and even personal tidbits of where American soldiers were seen being taken back to the Soviet Union, and then rumors of conversations would leak out of Americans that had just been forgotten.
I mean, here is the government, the U.S. government is always saying, support the troops, support the troops.
Whenever a war breaks out, no matter how immoral the war may be, you gotta support the troops.
This was, these were 20,000 American troops that they didn't support, and they didn't make a big hullabaloo.
I mean, the probability is they couldn't have gotten them out anyway, you know, it would have meant war with the Soviet Union, but at least they could have publicized it.
Word could have gotten to these guys in the POW camps in the Soviet Union, and the gulag that Americans were praying for them, and protested, and publicized it, nothing.
Everything was kept secret.
Well, they must have just, what, lied to the parents and said that these 20,000 men were killed in action, or what?
I would assume so.
You know, I don't see any, or missing, or whatever.
I don't know what their explanation was for it, but it's an absolute horror story, and to this day, I mean, it just shocks the conscience that this would happen.
I mean, American men being liberated, quote, liberated, who had been taken, captured by the Germans, and now finding themselves living and dying in a Soviet gulag.
And this was, don't forget, this was Roosevelt's partner in World War II that did this.
Wow, absolutely incredible.
And like you said, this is a story that is almost unheard of anywhere.
You know, like you say, the contradiction between the support the troops mantra, which means you have to support the policy, or else you're betraying the troops and all that.
Boy, talk about ringing hollow.
These men, these 20,000, were among what are, I think, by our common definition now, the greatest men ever to live, ever.
The greatest generation, the American heroes that defeated the Nazis.
These are the men who, of all people, to not be stabbed in the back and left high and dry like this, to be sent off to Siberia to be worked to death, and the American people don't even know about it at all.
Boy, if that's the way they treat the greatest generation, how should I expect to be treated when they conscript me to fight in the next war?
Well, it's the standard stuff.
I mean, the soldiers are the pawns.
And that's what, you know, we learned how they were treated after Vietnam when they came back, and they weren't treated for the ancient orange stuff that had been sprayed on them and stuff.
They were told that their sicknesses were in their imaginations and so forth.
I mean, the average soldier, especially those that have gone through VA hospitals, they know how this government treats them.
But every new war, they get this, all this, oh, support the troops.
We care about them.
We really do.
They're pawns, Scott.
They're nothing but pawns.
And these 50,000 American and British soldiers were the ultimate pawns, and they just got sacrificed in the chess game that went from World War II to the Cold War without skipping a beat.
All right, everybody, that's Jacob Hornberger.
He's the founder and the president of the Future of Freedom Foundation.
The article is in seven parts.
It's called Repatriation.
The Dark Side of World War II.
And by the way, Jacob, can you tell us real quick how to get to the page with all the YouTubes of the great speeches from your Restoring the Republic conference last June?
Yeah, they can go to our website, the Future of Freedom Foundation, fff.org.
Go to Internet Classroom or Conference Classroom, and we've got 45 of the greatest speeches that have ever been delivered on giving the libertarian case on foreign policy.
I mean, they're just outstanding talks.
And then, of course, we've got all our articles.
If people want to find the Repatriation article, it's in our journal online, Freedom Daily, in 1995.
So they can just click into the 1995 archives, and they'll see it there.
But these speeches that were given at these two conferences were on foreign policy and civil liberties.
They were among the best speakers in the country, and I recommend them to everybody.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, you've got Anthony Gregory's speech, which converted a leftist right in front of my eyes.
A leftist, I'll leave him unnamed for this, turned to me and said, wow, this isn't like any libertarianism I've ever heard of before, after he heard Anthony speak about why it's wrong to drop high explosives on people out of the air.
And then Stephen Kinzer, I mean, boy, he almost shook that hotel down.
That was so good, that speech.
Jonathan Turley, Robert Higgs, Lou Rockwell, Karen Katowski, and on and on and on.
The lawyers, the Guantanamo lawyers, and that thing was absolutely incredible.
Well, that's good to hear, because that's all the feedback we're getting, and we are still selling DVDs and CDs of the talks.
I make great Christmas presents, by the way.
But they're all up there free for the viewing, because we're trying to move this country in a better, freer, more peaceful, prosperous direction.
As you know, Scott, this country's moving in a very bad direction, and I think people are finally figuring that out.
And that's what the Future of Freedom Foundation's about, trying to move this country in a better, freer, more peaceful, prosperous direction.
Yeah, that's right.
People who are just only now figuring out, hey, wait a minute, something's terribly wrong here.
Well, there's FFF.org for you.
They figured this out a while ago.
And the archives and the context and the principles that you can find there are unparalleled.
Thank you again very much for your time today, Jacob.
Oh, you're welcome.
Thank you, Scott.
