In 1945, General Dwight Eisenhower ordered that "Operation Keelhaul" be put into effect. This involved rounding up and shipping back to "their countries of origin" ALL the refugees from communism: men, women and children, soldier or civilian, male or female — even though many of them had been fighting on OUR side during the war. Since all of Eastern Europe was then under Communist domination, sending these people back was, quite literally, a sentence of death, some by immediate execution and the rest by slow extermination from overwork and malnutrition in the Soviet slave labor camps in Siberia. These people were rounded up at bayonet point, forced into freight cars and shipped off to a terrible fate. There was no accurate count kept but the MINIMUM figure was 2,000,000 people and a maximum of 5,000,000. The elimination of all these anti-Communist people made the Communist domination of Eastern Europe MUCH easier. And the American people were kept blissfully unaware of this action which Eisenhower enforced rigidly, even though it violated international law, the laws of his own country and laws of humanity. Germans were prosecuted at Nuremberg for similar crimes but control of the news ensured that Eisenhower, and those under his command who took part in this outrage, were never even officially accused of wrong doing.
-Eric