Group Cancels Memorial Planned for Russian Members of ‘vlasov Army’

The Jewish News of Newark reported today that Young Americans for Freedom has dropped plans to participate in memorial service scheduled for September 19, honoring three Russian prisoners-of-war who committed suicide rather than to be returned to the Soviet Union for trial as war criminals.

John Kirwan, acting New Jersey chairman of the YAF, and John LaMothe, YAF regional representative in Philadelphia, told the English-Jewish weekly that the organization had been asked by a Russian exile group to take part in the memorial service. The three Russians had killed themselves in a P. O. W. stockade at Fort Dix, N. J. in 1945. The memorial service was scheduled for Finn’s Point National Cemetery, in Fort Mott State Park, in New Jersey. Plans were made for participation of “American youth and patriotic organizations and representatives of peoples enslaved by Communism,” according to an announcement.

The three Russians had volunteered for service with the German Army, and were captured while fighting against American troops in France. They were members of the anti-Communist army of Russian Gen. Andrey Vlasov, who fought on the German side in the war. His army was reported to have committed atrodties against Jews and members of anti-Nazi resistance movements. The U.S. Army agreed to hand them over to Soviet authorities.

The two YAF officials said that YAF agreed to join in the service without knowing that the three were “Axis soldiers, much less that they had been captured by American forces on the Western front in World War II.” They added that, when YAF learned these facts, it officially withdrew from the plans.

The YAF is generally considered to consist mainly of young Republicans to the right of the official Young Republican Clubs. Kirwan and LaMothe described their organization as a “pro-capitalist, and anti-collectivist organization” of young people which “is completely opposed to fascism in all forms.”