Abstract
period following the formal cessation of hostilities the young lions of the trenches frequently emerged into the packs of new paramilitary political movements: the Free Corps and the Einwohnerwehr in Germany; DAnnunzio's freebooters in Italy; the Hungarian officers who gathered at Szeged in 1919; the Austrian Heimatwehren; the Czech troops strung out along the Trans-Siberian Railroad; the forces of General Mannerheim in Finland, of Korfanty in Silesia, and of Mustafa Kemal Pasha in northern Anatolia. Civil war and revolution raged on in Central and Eastern Europe, finding ready recruits in the returning officers and men, many of whom were emerging not only from the front but from the prison camps of the belligerent powers. In Germany and Russia hundreds of thousands of former prisoners of war returning home added fuel to the fire. German and Austrian prisoners threatened to bring the bacillus of Bolshevism into their countries. They were said to have played a significant role in both Bela Kun's soviet republic in Budapest and its Bavarian counterpart in Munich in 1919. In Soviet Russia the danger was different. Hundreds of thousands of Russian prisoners still remained in Germany at the time of the Armistice, prisoners who might easily form a new army of counter-revolutionary intervention under Allied direction. In both countries the orderly repatriation of these men was desirable. The fate of approximately one million Russian war prisoners caught in Germany at the time of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in the spring of 1918 forms an important and little-known episode in early Soviet-
Published Version
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