Synopsis

At the end of World War II over 30,000 British and Commonwealth soldiers ‘liberated’ from German prisoner of war camps in 1945 by the Red Army disappeared into the gulags. More prisoners joined them in the 1950s, taken from the battlefields of Korea. They never returned home.

In June 1992, President Boris Yeltsin admitted that Americans taken in the same way had been imprisoned in Soviet labour camps. ‘We don’t have complete data,” he said, “and can only surmise that some of them may be alive.”

If Americans have survived 47 years there, so could some British. After years in the camps, they would have been settled in remote ‘closed’ areas of the old Soviet Union. Their own government wrote them off long ago and their families believe they are dead.

The truth about the terrible fate of these British servicemen is now, at last, coming out. Moscow’s secret camp archives are being opened. Investigations in America are unearthing documents which show that the Western Allies cynically abandoned their own men in Soviet hands. Questions are being asked in Parliament, but the British government still refuses to come clean.

In The Iron Cage Nigel Cawthorne assembles the evidence for the first time and details the sequence of events that turned victory against Hitler into bitter humiliation at the hands of Stalin. The Iron Cage exposes Britain’s Cold War betrayal of its own men; perhaps, too, it will lead to the return of British prisoners of war from the wastes of Siberia some half a century after their capture.

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