Roughly 50,000 Cossacks had ended up in Austria in May 1945, some of them tribes that had fought against the Soviets with the Germans and, with their families, retreated westward as the Third Reich collapsed. With the war ending, they now had nowhere to go. British army units intercepted many of the Cossacks near Lienz and interned them, cramming them into a canyon on the banks of the Drave River. The Cossacks surrendered without a fight. The British fed them and led them to believe they would be protected from undue retribution inflicted by the Soviet Army advancing well into Austria, only a few miles to the east. The Cossacks believed the promise. They dared feel something like comfort, like safety.
In late May the British, still pledging protection, disarmed the Cossacks’ couple thousand officers and generals and trucked them to the town of Judenburg, just over the Soviet lines. There the British handed them over. Many of the older officers had emigrated years before — during the Russian Civil War — and were not even Soviet citizens, so they were technically exempt. But the British did it anyway — to appease their wartime ally, “Uncle Joe” Stalin.
Repatriating the Cossack officers was only the start. The British operation had left thousands despairing in the canyon on the Drave — the woman and children, the elderly, the poor regular soldiers who were fathers, sons, brothers. And thousands of their beloved Cossack horses had come with them. Three days later, on June 1, British troops received orders to prod these helpless people at gunpoint into cattle cars and trucks. In the ensuing panic, the British soldiers bayoneted some. Ghastly scenes emerged. Many Cossacks committed suicide, or begged to be shot. The refugees started stabbing themselves, pounding themselves with rocks, whatever they could grab, leaping into the fast river if they could reach it. When the trucks came, people tried to break the British troops’ barrier, great mobs of children and old women — but only so they could jump into the river, off bridges, find the tools to kill themselves. Even after the trucks carrying them started off they leapt out, breaking their backs, or were run over, the trucks not stopping. It was mass hysteria, but not a brief mass hysteria. This played out over days. Similar mayhem was occurring across Southern Austria, involving Cossacks and many other Eastern Europeans.
