Even one is too many: an examination of the Soviet refusal to repatriate liberated American World War II prisoners of war

Abstract

The subject of this dissertation is the Soviet refusal to repatriate Allied Prisoners of War liberated from German prison camps following the defeat of Nazi Germany. The Soviets had also done this following the Allied Intervention in Russia in 1918-1919. In both cases many U.S. POWs were never released. This information was accumulated from recently released documents, oral histories of former POWs, memoirs, correspondence with ex-POWs, and extensive interviews with Colonel James Dudley Wilmeth, who was the only American repatriation contact officer allowed behind Red Army lines in Poland to repatriate American POWs.