Official says hundreds of U.S. citizens likely died in Russian gulags

[truthpusher]

http://www.billingsgazette.com/index.php?tl=1&display=rednews/2005/02/11/build/world/47-gulag.inc

Official says hundreds of U.S. citizens likely died in Russian gulags

By ROBERT BURNS
Associated Press

WASHINGTON -- The Pentagon is turning up the heat on the Russian government for ignoring pleas to cooperate in verifying an expanding body of anecdotal evidence that American servicemen from World War II and the Korean War were secretly held in prison camps in Siberia.

Russian inaction has made the effort to confirm information about the presence of Americans in the gulag -- the network of penal camps that stretched across the former Soviet Union -- "a distinctly unilateral U.S. pursuit," Norman Kass, a leader of the Pentagon project, wrote in the introduction to a new compendium of reported sightings of Americans in the camps.

"Americans, including American servicemen, were imprisoned in the former Soviet Union," the report says. But no "definitive, verifiable information" of their fate has been found.

The report, released Friday by the Defense POW/MIA Office, includes a reference to a Polish citizen who grew up in a village near the Russian city of Bulun, on the Lena River, and who said that her father had known an American named Stanley Warner while both were imprisoned at Bulun in the 1950s.

more:
http://www.billingsgazette.com/index.php?tl=1&display=rednews/2005/02/11/build/world/47-gulag.inc

[Igel]

1. Undoubtedly. They weren't all that discriminating back in

the '40s. When a lot of Soviet troops came back from being POWs outside of the home of "socialism in one country" they were promptly put into the GULags.

Edited to add: I think the title's a bit misleading. "Russian" wasn't the operative word, and not all the camps were placed in Russia, nor all the bigshots responsible for the GULag Russian. Most. Not all.

[DemoTex]

2. Kiss the boys goodbye ...

What about Vietnam MIAs? Anybody shot-down and captured flying crypto-missions ran a good chance of being shipped to the USSR. I flew crypto-missions over the Ho Chi Mihn trail in Laos and I was briefed on the "Manna from Lenin, Moscow bound" possibility.

[Crunchy Frog]

3. It wouldn't surprise me.

There were even alot of pro-Soviet types who went to the Soviet Union from other countries and were promptly arrested and pumped into the gulag system. In particular, I believe this happened to German Communists trying to escape the Nazis, but who were seen as getting in the way of the newfound cooperation between the two regimes.

Alot of ugly stuff in that history.

[barb162]

4. this reminds me of that Swedish diplomat who helped the Jews during WW2

and the Russians threw him in a prison.

Makes me wonder what the thought process was that US, Swedish and other foreign nationals were thrown in these gulags never to be seen nor heard from again. It's tragic, it's unnecessary, why the hell did they do that, especially in WW2 when we were on the SAME side?

[frankieT]

5. Stalin was a madman.

He killed thousands of his own people without reason. Russians imprisoned by Germans ended also in gulags. In these paranoid times, he was sending a lot of people to prison/death.

[jdj]

6. millions, not thousands. n/t

[barb162]

7. I can see why he put the Germans in prison as the Germans invaded

Russia. But all the other foreign nationals on Russia's side during WW2...DUH?

I agree, he was a real case and killed so many of his own people, tortured and imprisoned his own, but I still have this extra ???? about Americans, the Swedish diplomat and why he kept those people in prison when they were also fighting the Germans.

It is all so unimaginable, so horrible.

[rayofreason]

9. Soviet POW's too

Stalin had Soviet POWs who were returned after WW2 put into the camps as well. His view was that by not fighting to the death they were somehow disloyal, and that by being in contact with non-Soviet folks they were also potentially "politically corrupted."

[Rose Siding]

8. Sounds like the Pentagon is doing State's work

Timely.

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[democracyindanger]

10. Mystery prisoners in secret camps?

Gee, that sounds familiar.