A Looking-Glass Tragedy

by Christopher Booker

This is the story behind a sensational historical controversy - the allegation that, in forcibly handing over 70,000 Cossacks and Yugoslavs to be massacred by the Communists in the summer of 1945, the British army in Austria, guided by a "conspiracy" involving Harold Macmillan, was party to a major "war crime". When these charges were first made they were widely accepted, not least by the BBC which broadcast no fewer than nine documentaries on the handovers. In 1989 the controversy culminated in a High Court action, in which Lord Aldington was awarded the highest libel damages in British legal history. This book also tells the extraordinary story of how an exhaustive investigation into the events of 1945 finally revealed just how all those previously-published accounts had turned history upside down. What happened in Austria was tragic. But there was no conspiracy. Macmillan's role was irrelevant. Many "massacres" described in lurid detail never took place. As Booker describes how the story of the repatriations came to be presented in such a distorted fashion, his book turns into a study of people's willingness to cling on to a "make believe" version of history, even when all the facts have proved it wrong.

478 pages, Hardcover

First published August 27, 2001

About the author

Christopher John Penrice Booker is an English journalist and author.

Reviews

[Ben Bergonzi · Rating 5 out of 5]

I enjoy books about little-known by ways of history, but I think there are few more obscure, and more complex, than this. Indeed I have seldom had a book in my hand for which it's harder to answer the common question, 'What's it about?' It is 450 pp of dense fact, counter fact and theory about the murky repatriations of Cossacks and Yugoslavs who had been serving in the German Army, and were in 1945 turned over by the British to the tender mercies of the Soviets, or Tito's Yugoslavs. The belief that these painful incidents happened because of a complex conspiracy by either Harold Macmillan or Brigadier Toby Low (later Lord Aldington), built up over many books and articles by Count Nikolai Tolstoy, is thoroughly and conscientiously demolished. After day by day descriptions of what happened in Austria in May 1945, the book recounts the famous 1989 court case, where Tolstoy was found guilty of libeling Aldington, and asked to pay a heavy fine - a responsibility he never met.
There was no conspiracy. There was a lot of suffering due to the repatriations, but it was not intentional. It was an inevitable outcome, like it or not, of the Yalta Agreement, that defeated Germans must surrender to the enemy they had been fighting. They were not supposed to trek miles to surrender to anyone other than the Russians. Of course they did and many successfully managed to become 'displaced persons' and thus have a reasonable chance of ending up in the West. But in Austria in May 1945, with Tito laying aggressive claim to great swathes of territory, the British Army had no choice but to rid themselves of thousands of would-be prisoners, for whom they had no food nor forces to guard them. Such is Booker's thesis, and he argues it well. The book is a fascinating lesson in the perils of looking at the past with modern eyes, and of the dangers in our natural human wish to retrospectively apply a story or pattern where none in fact existed.