Bait for the Homesick

A few hundred meters east of the second boundary line between free and captive Berlin, at Behrenstrasse 65 (back door to the Soviet Embassy) is the headquarters of the “Committee for Return to the Homeland.” It is the center of an activity extending to all countries of the free world where refugees from Communism have found asylum; an activity which has been greatly intensified since the Summit conference at Geneva and reflects the meaning, to the Soviet participants, of the “Geneva spirit.” It is carried on by a network of Soviet propagandists, spies, agents provocateurs and assassins, and its aim is to secure the redefection of refugees from Communism through persuasion, terrorization and even physical coercion.

The man who directs this drive is Major General Nikolai F. Mikhailov, Soviet security officer and agent provocateur. His history is instructive. In 1944 he was captured by the Nazis and sent to a series of POW camps, including Dachau. While there he served his captors as an informer, and many Soviet Anti-Communists were executed by the Gestapo in consequence of his activity. Liberated by the U.S. Army in Bavaria, he assumed the halo of martyrdom, joined the Soviet security forces and promptly appeared in the U.S. zone of Germany. There he compiled thousands of dossiers on prominent anti-Communist refugees. Through UNRRA and other U.S. and UN agencies, he also attempted to intimidate refugees and displaced persons into returning to their former homes behind the Iron Curtain. In 1947 he appeared in Italy where he tried unsuccessfully, through the Italian Communists, to “repatriate” the Ukrainian Division (some 11,000 men) which had fought alongside the Germans on the Eastern front and had surrendered to the British Army in Austria.

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Walter Dushnyck

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A few hundred meters east of the second boundary line between free and captive Berlin, at Behrenstrasse 65 (back door to the Soviet Embassy) is the headquarters of the “Committee for Return to the Homeland.” It is the center of an activity extending to all countries of the free world where refugees from Communism have found asylum; an activity which has been greatly intensified since the Summit conference at Geneva and reflects the meaning, to the Soviet participants, of the “Geneva spirit.” It is carried on by a network of Soviet propagandists, spies, agents provocateurs and assassins, and its aim is to secure the redefection of refugees from Communism through persuasion, terrorization and even physical coercion.

The man who directs this drive is Major General Nikolai F. Mikhailov, Soviet security officer and agent provocateur. His history is instructive. In 1944 he was captured by the Nazis and sent to a series of POW camps, including Dachau. While there he served his captors as an informer, and many Soviet Anti-Communists were executed by the Gestapo in consequence of his activity. Liberated by the U.S. Army in Bavaria, he assumed the halo of martyrdom, joined the Soviet security forces and promptly appeared in the U.S. zone of Germany. There he compiled thousands of dossiers on prominent anti-Communist refugees. Through UNRRA and other U.S. and UN agencies, he also attempted to intimidate refugees and displaced persons into returning to their former homes behind the Iron Curtain. In 1947 he appeared in Italy where he tried unsuccessfully, through the Italian Communists, to “repatriate” the Ukrainian Division (some 11,000 men) which had fought alongside the Germans on the Eastern front and had surrendered to the British Army in Austria.