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- 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 refugeesí
fate was ëghastlyí but said he had not known that many faced
execution if returned to their homelands (The Washington Post, December
9, 2000).
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- An obituary sometimes begs a thousand words. Well worth
doing in this case, especially since itís 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 manís quixotic efforts to tell the
truth and anotherís quiet campaign to keep it suppressed.
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- 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.
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- 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 ÈmigrÈ Russians waving French passports and British
medals from the World War I were all rounded up and delivered to Stalin.
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- 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 didnít 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.)
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- 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 ÈmigrÈ 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 Russiaís 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 -- ÈmigrÈ 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."
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- 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 Macmillanís 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 ÈmigrÈsí 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 Macmillanís instructions,
and who did so in contravention of orders.
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- 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:
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- 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 Keightleyís
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 repatriatingÖ a major war criminal, whose activities
merit comparison with those of the worst butchers of Nazi Germany or Soviet
Russia.
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- As the author of the text Tolstoy felt honor-bound to
include himself as Wattsí 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."
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- 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 gentlemenís
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.
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- 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 Tolstoyís 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.
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- 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. Aldingtonís 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.
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- 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.
-
- Líaffaire 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."
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- 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."
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- Lord Aldingtonís remarkable claim that he had
had absolutely no idea what the fate of these people would be was a lie.
Everyone knew, and Aldingtonís 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 shipís
bottom, but few survived such treatment.)
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- After Tolstoyís 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 Britainís
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.
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