At the end of World War II, hundreds of thousands of Allied prisoners of war were "liberated" from German camps by Stalin's Red Army. Many never made it home. British journalist Nigel Cawthorne traces what became of them: held back as bargaining counters, conscripted as slave labor, swallowed into the Gulag, and written out of the official record by governments on both sides.
Drawing on declassified diplomatic cables, military files, ministry records the British Foreign Office tried to keep closed, and firsthand reports of sightings inside the Soviet camp system, The Iron Cage follows the trail from postwar London to Vorkuta, the Arctic city ringed by sixty labor camps where millions perished. Cawthorne asks why Churchill and Roosevelt agreed to the forced repatriation of Soviet citizens without demanding the return of Allied POWs, what Stalin wanted with Western soldiers, and what reported sightings of British and American captives deep in Siberia decades later might reveal.
A history of one of the last unresolved questions of the Second World War, and an account of the Cold War secrecy that kept it buried.
