What Truman Did When Stalin Refused to Return American Prisoners of War

Added: 2026-05-24

[00:00:00]It is May 1945. Germany has surrendered and the American prisoners of war that the Red Army liberated from German camps are not coming home. Not in the orderly documented, officially managed way that the Yaltta agreement said they would come home. Not through the collection points that the agreement specified, where American contact teams would meet them and verify their condition and arrange their transportation westward through the channels that the agreement established. not on the timeline that the agreement's language about as rapidly as possible suggested. Language that the American side understood to mean weeks and that the Soviet side is now implementing in a way that suggests their understanding of as rapidly as possible is considerably more flexible.

[00:00:42]They are not coming home because the Soviet Union has decided that the Yaltta agreement's provisions for the repatriation of liberated allied prisoners of war are provisions whose implementation the Soviet side will manage at its own pace through its own channels with its own definition of what the agreement requires. and that the American contact teams who are supposed to be at the collection points to manage the repatriation are going to have the same experience that every American institution has had when it has tried to hold the Soviet Union to specific commitments at specific times in the months since Yalta. They are going to find out that what was agreed in the room at the Levvada Palace and what happens on the ground in Soviet controlled territory are different things. Harry Truman has been president for three weeks when Germany surrenders.

[00:01:30]Three weeks. He took office on April 12th when Roosevelt died. And the scale of what he inherited is still becoming visible to him in ways that each new briefing and each new cable and each new communication from the theater commanders and the diplomats in the field is revealing incrementally rather than all at once. The prisoner repatriation problem is one of the things becoming visible. He learns about it through the cables from General John Dean, the head of the American military mission in Moscow, whose reports about the Soviet Union's management of the repatriation process have been consistent and specific and alarming for months. Dean has been dealing with the Soviet military bureaucracy since 1943, and he has developed through two years of direct experience with the specific way the Soviet system conducts its relationships with its partners and allies. the specific clarity of someone who has been watching a pattern long enough to know that the pattern is the policy. The pattern says that the Soviet Union does not meet its obligations to its allies when meeting those obligations costs anything that it prefers to keep. Truman receives Dean's cables and the reports from the American contact teams and the communications from the State Department's Moscow embassy and the information from the intelligence services about what is actually happening to the American prisoners in Soviet controlled territory. He receives all of it against the background of a relationship with the Soviet Union that Roosevelt managed on the premise that the wartime alliance could be extended into the post-war period through the combination of diplomatic patience and economic generosity and personal engagement that Roosevelt believed would eventually produce Soviet reciprocity. Truman is not certain that premise is correct. He is not certain yet that it is wrong. But the prisoner repatriation problem is one of the accumulating pieces of evidence that is moving his assessment of the Soviet relationship from Roosevelt's optimism towards something harder, more specific, more organized around what the Soviet Union actually does rather than what it says it will do. What he does about the prisoners is what this video is about. But first, you need to understand what the prisoner repatriation situation actually looks like on the ground in May 1945.

[00:03:43]Because the official account of what the Yaltta agreement promised and the operational reality of what is happening in the Soviet controlled territories are separated by a gap whose dimensions the available evidence establishes with enough specificity to make the gap impossible to dismiss as the result of administrative difficulty or wartime logistics. The Yaltta agreement on prisoner repatriation is specific. The agreement says that liberated Allied prisoners of war will be immediately separated from enemy prisoners, will be gathered at designated collection points, will be provided with food and shelter and medical care, will be allowed to communicate with their home countries, and will be repatriated as rapidly as possible. The agreement is specific about the access rights of allied contact teams to the collection points. It is specific about the obligations of the detaining power to facilitate the contact team's work. It is specific about the timeline. The Soviet Union accepts all of this at Yalta. It accepts it in the room where the acceptance is made in the presence of Roosevelt and Churchill and their adviserss and in the formal record of the conference's proceedings. The acceptance is not qualified. It is not conditional on circumstances that subsequent events might render difficult. It is the straightforward acceptance of a set of obligations whose implementation the Soviet Union is now managing in a way that falls short of what the acceptance requires. The American prisoners and Soviet controlled territory are experiencing the shortfall directly. They are being held at collection points that the American contact teams cannot reach because the Soviet military authorities are not providing the access that the Yaltta agreement specifies. They are being held in conditions that range from uncomfortable to dangerous. Conditions that the fragmentaryary reporting reaching American headquarters describes in terms that the people doing the describing are choosing carefully because the full description would be more alarming than the diplomatic situation can accommodate without producing a confrontation that nobody is yet authorized to have. Some of them are being moved not westward toward repatriation eastward into Soviet controlled territory at greater depth into locations that are further from the American contact teams and further from the explanations that the Soviet military bureaucracy is providing about where the American prisoners are and when they will be available for repatriation. The movement eastward is the most alarming element of the reporting and it is the element whose significance Truman's advisers are most careful about in how they present it to a new president who is still establishing his bearings in a relationship that his predecessor managed with a specific set of assumptions about Soviet intentions that Truman has not yet decided whether to share. The movement eastward could be logistical, a function of the chaotic military situation in the final weeks of the German war and the immediate aftermath of the surrender. This is the interpretation that the diplomatic management of the situation prefers because it is the interpretation that keeps the option of cooperative resolution open. It could be deliberate, a function of a Soviet decision to use American prisoners as leverage in the negotiations about the post-war settlement that are beginning in the immediate aftermath of the German surrender. This is the interpretation that Dean's reporting consistently suggests and that Truman's instinct about the Soviet systems behavior is increasingly inclined toward. The distinction matters because it determines what kind of response is appropriate. A logistical problem gets diplomatic engagement and patience. A deliberate policy gets pressure and consequences. Truman is deciding which it is while simultaneously managing the Japanese war and the atomic bomb and the post-war settlement in Europe and the domestic transition from a wartime to a peacetime economy and the political reality of a democratic party that has just lost its most dominant figure and that is looking to its new president for signals about direction and intention that Truman is not yet fully positioned to provide. He is 33 days into the job when the full dimensions of the prisoner problem land on his desk in a form that requires a decision rather than a briefing. The decision is about how hard to push. The State Department's position is cautious. The relationship with the Soviet Union is the most important bilateral relationship in the post-war world. The negotiations about the occupation zones in Germany and the Polish government and the post-war settlement in Eastern Europe and the establishment of the United Nations are all dependent on a functional American Soviet relationship. The prisoner repatriation issue, as serious as it is, needs to be managed in a way that does not damage the broader relationship. The management should be diplomatic and patient and conducted through channels that preserve the Soviet Union's ability to comply without appearing to have yielded to American pressure. Dean's position is different. He has been telling Washington since late 1944 that the Soviet Union responds to pressure and not to patience. That the pattern of Soviet behavior in the military relationship reflects a deliberate calculation about what American accommodation will produce. and that continuing to accommodate Soviet non-compliance produces more non-compliance rather than the reciprocity that accommodation is supposed to generate. He wants harder pressure. He wants the pressure to be applied in ways that the Soviet side cannot dismiss as diplomatic routine.

[00:09:07]Truman is between these positions. He is between them not because he lacks convictions, but because he is a new president who is still building the factual foundation that convictions about the Soviet relationship require.

[00:09:19]And because the specific question of how hard to push on prisoner repatriation is entangled with every other question about the Soviet relationship in ways that make the prisoner question impossible to resolve in isolation from the larger questions that his presidency is going to have to answer. He decides to send a personal communication to Stalin. The communication is not a diplomatic note through normal channels.

[00:09:42]It is a direct presidential communication to the Soviet leader whose personal authority over Soviet policy Truman has identified as the relevant authority for the resolution of problems that the normal channels are not resolving. The communication makes clear that Truman regards the prisoner repatriation situation as a matter of personal concern and that he expects the Soviet Union to meet its Yaltta obligations in a time frame that the American side considers consistent with the as rapidly as possible language of the agreement. Stalin's response is the response of a man who has been dealing with American presidents for 5 years and who has developed a specific understanding of the gap between what American presidents say and what they are prepared to do. The response is formal and it is correct in its diplomatic register and it provides reassurances about Soviet intentions on prisoner repatriation that are specific enough to be taken seriously and vague enough to commit the Soviet Union to nothing that would require changing what it is actually doing. Truman receives the response and he does not find it satisfying. This is documented in his diary entries and in his private communications in a way that is consistent with the broader pattern of his developing assessment of the Soviet relationship. The assessment that is moving from Roosevelt's optimism towards something that will eventually produce the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan and the Berlin Airlift and the entire architecture of American Cold War policy. He does not yet have the architecture. He has the prisoner problem. The approach that produces results to the extent that anything produces results in the spring and summer of 1945 is the combination of Truman's personal communications to Stalin and the specific actions that American theater commanders take in the field to manage the repatriation in ways that the Soviet side finds harder to obstruct than the official contact team process. Patton is among the commanders who take action in the field that the official process does not authorize. His approach, the unauthorized missions into Soviet controlled territory to find American prisoners and move them westward. regardless of what the Soviet military bureaucracy says about the proper process is the approach that produces the most concrete results and the most Soviet complaints and the most uncomfortable position for Eisenhower who is managing the relationship with the Soviet military at the theater level and who is receiving the Soviet complaints and having to communicate them to Patton while simultaneously acknowledging that Patton's approach is producing results that the official approach is not. The results are incomplete. This is the reality that the historical accounting of the prisoner repatriation problem has to acknowledge honestly. The majority of the American prisoners liberated by Soviet forces are eventually returned to American control.

[00:12:28]Most of them come back through the combination of official diplomatic pressure and the unauthorized field operations and the specific exhaustion of the issue that comes when the Soviet side has extracted whatever value from the leverage it provides and allows the repatriation to proceed. But not all of them come back through these channels and on the documented timeline. The question of what happened to American prisoners of war who were in Soviet controlled territory at the end of the Second World War and who did not appear in the official repatriation records is a question that American administrations from Truman to the present day have been trying to answer with the combination of diplomatic request and intelligence assessment and archival access that each period's relationship with Moscow allows. the Soviet archives that were briefly accessible after the Cold War's end and that subsequent Russian governments have re-restricted contained material about American prisoners of war whose significance the researchers who accessed them in the early 1990s described in terms that the limited time of access and the subsequent re-restriction have prevented from being fully analyzed. What the available evidence establishes is that the Soviet Union's management of the American prisoner repatriation problem in 1945 reflects a deliberate policy rather than an administrative failure. That the policy was visible to American officials who were paying attention. that Truman was told about it with enough specificity to understand what was happening and that the response he was able to produce in the specific political context of May and June 1945 was insufficient to fully address the problem. Truman does several things about the prisoner situation that the historical record documents. He sends personal communications to Stalin. He supports the field operations that Patton and other commanders conduct to recover American prisoners outside the official channels. He raises the prisoner repatriation issue in the negotiations at Potam in July 1945 where the big three meet to establish the post-war settlement and where Truman arrives with a specific preparation of a man who has spent 3 months learning that the Soviet Union does not meet its commitments when meeting them is inconvenient and who has decided that the personal diplomacy that works on the Senate floor might work in a different way on a Soviet leader who respects directness more than he respects American patience. Potam is where Truman's approach to the Soviet relationship begins to visibly diverge from Roosevelt's. The divergence is visible in the accounts of the people present, the British and the American advisers and the State Department officials who are watching Truman interact with Stalin and drawing conclusions about what the interaction reveals about the new president's intentions. Truman at Potdam is direct in a way that Roosevelt was not direct.

[00:15:13]He is specific about what the United States expects in ways that Roosevelt's diplomatic style which preferred the general principle to the specific demand did not produce. On the prisoner issue specifically, Truman raises it at Potdam in terms that are more direct than the diplomatic channels have allowed and that produce the specific Soviet response that direct engagement with Stalin tends to produce, which is the combination of formal acknowledgement and substantive management that allows the Soviet side to appear cooperative while continuing to manage the situation in the way it prefers. The prisoner repatriation issue is eventually resolved in the incomplete way that the available mechanisms allow. The Soviet Union allows the repatriation of the majority of the American prisoners it has been holding. The access that the contact teams are eventually given produces documentation of who has been repatriated and who has not. The numbers in the documentation do not fully account for all the Americans who were in Soviet controlled territory when the war ended. And the gap between the documented repatriations and the full accounting of who was where when Germany surrendered is a gap that the closed Soviet archives and the political sensitivities of the American Soviet relationship have prevented from being fully closed. Truman's response to the prisoner situation is the first specific instance of what becomes the pattern of his approach to Soviet non-compliance.

[00:16:38]The pattern that produces the harder line of the Truman doctrine two years later. He applies direct pressure through personal communication. He supports field operations that bypass the normal channels when the normal channels are not working. He raises the issue in the formal diplomatic negotiations where his specific authority as president gives him more leverage than the ambassador or the military mission commander have. and he manages the gap between what the pressure produces and what the full resolution of the problem requires with the specific combination of the acknowledgement that the gap exists and the political calculation that the available mechanisms cannot fully close it. The political calculation is not comfortable. The families of the men who are in Soviet custody in May and June 1945 are writing to the White House. The letters arrive at the rate that letters about missing loved ones arrive, which is to say with the urgency of people who are trying to find out where specific individuals are and whether they are safe and when they are coming home.

[00:17:38]Truman's staff responds to the letters with the language that government communications use when the honest answer to the question being asked is more complicated and less reassuring than the correspondent deserves. Truman reads some of the letters himself. He does this not as a performative gesture toward constituent relations, but in the direct and personal way that he reads letters throughout his presidency, the way of a man who believes that the people writing to him are people whose concerns deserve engagement rather than management. He reads letters from wives asking about husbands. He reads letters from parents asking about sons. He reads the letters and he knows that the answer to the question they are asking, the question of when is my person coming home, is an answer that the Soviet bureaucracy is preventing him from providing with the specificity that the question deserves. He is furious about this. The fury is documented in the diary entries and the private communications in the way that Truman's fury about things he considers wrong is always documented directly and in plain language. He writes about the Soviet treatment of American prisoners in terms that make his assessment of the Soviet systems character clear in ways that his public statements in the spring of 1945 are not yet making clear because the public diplomatic position has not yet moved to the place where his private assessment already is. The private assessment is that the Soviet Union is not a cooperative partner in the management of the postwar settlement. It is a competitor whose cooperation on specific issues reflects its calculation of specific interests rather than any general commitment to the collaborative framework that the wartime allianc's rhetoric described. The prisoner repatriation problem is evidence for this assessment and it is evidence that Truman takes personally in the way that the specific human dimension of missing soldiers and their waiting families makes it personal in a way that the abstract geopolitical questions do not.

[00:19:32]He does not change American policy toward the Soviet Union immediately on the basis of the prisoner problem. He is too careful a reader of the political situation to make a dramatic policy shift on the basis of a single issue, however personal its dimensions. But the prisoner problem contributes to the accumulation of specific evidence about Soviet behavior that eventually produces the policy shift. The shift from Roosevelt's assumption of Soviet good faith to Truman's assumption that Soviet behavior reflects Soviet interests rather than Soviet good faith and that American policy has to be organized around managing the interests rather than appealing to the faith. The men who come back from Soviet custody in the spring and summer of 1945 come back changed in the specific way that being held by an ally that is treating you as a bargaining chip changes a person. They come back with the knowledge that the country that was supposed to be on their side was using their captivity for purposes that had nothing to do with their welfare and that the power that was supposed to be able to get them out, the United States of America, was not powerful enough in the specific context of Soviet controlled territory to get them out on the timeline that the Yaltta agreement said they were entitled to expect. They come back with that knowledge and they carry it into the post-war world where it becomes one of the small but specific contributions to the American public's understanding of the Soviet Union that the post-war period produces. The understanding that the wartime ally is not the post-war partner that the wartime rhetoric suggested it would be.

[00:21:03]Truman is ahead of the public understanding on this. He reaches it earlier through the cables and the briefings and the prisoner reports and the pot stam negotiations and all the other specific contacts with the reality of Soviet behavior that the presidency provides. He reaches it and he begins to build the policy framework that reflects it. The framework whose architecture the prisoner problem is one of the first pieces of evidence for the men in Soviet custody in May 1945 deserve to be remembered as more than a footnote to the diplomacy of the early cold war.

[00:21:37]They are the human dimension of an abstract geopolitical argument. The people whose situation reveals what Soviet behavior looks like when it is applied to individuals rather than to national interests and historical forces. They are the people whose letters their families were writing to the White House in the summer of 1945.

[00:21:55]The people whose welfare Truman was furious about in his diary entries, while the diplomatic language of the public communications was managing the same situation in terms that the diplomacy required. He did what he could with what he had in the specific political context of May 1945. It was not enough to bring all of them home, but it brought most of them home. And the fury about the ones who did not come home became part of what the Cold War was built on. If you had been sitting where Truman was sitting in May 1945, receiving those cables about American prisoners in Soviet custody and knowing that the A's rapidly as possible language of the Yaltta agreement was not producing the result the language promised. What would you have done? Let me know in the comments and click the video on screen for the next