Julius Epstein (1901–1975) was a journalist and scholar, an Austrian Jewish émigré who fled

Europe Europe is a large peninsula conventionally considered a continent in its own right because of its great physical size and the weight of its history and traditions. Europe is also considered a Continent#Subcontinents, subcontinent of Eurasia ...

in 1938, worked during

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...

in the

Office of War Information The United States Office of War Information (OWI) was a United States government agency created during World War II. The OWI operated from June 1942 until September 1945. Through radio broadcasts, newspapers, posters, photographs, films and other ...

, and then a prominent American anti-communist researcher and critic of the

Soviet Union The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen national ...

. He was a research associate at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace for decades and authored a study of

Operation Keelhaul Operation Keelhaul was a forced repatriation of Russian civilians (non-Soviet citizens) and Soviet citizens to the Soviet Union. While forced repatriation focused on Soviet Armed Forces POWs of Germany and Russian Liberation Army members, it inclu ...

that was the first account of the forcible repatriation by the

Allies of World War II The Allies, formally referred to as the United Nations from 1942, were an international military coalition formed during the Second World War (1939–1945) to oppose the Axis powers, led by Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and Fascist Italy. ...

of several million persons to the Soviet Union and countries in its sphere of influence.

Life

Epstein was the son of Alice Epstein-Strauss grandson of Adele Strauss, and the third wife of "Waltzking"

Johann Strauss II Johann Baptist Strauss II (25 October 1825 – 3 June 1899), also known as Johann Strauss Jr., the Younger or the Son (german: links=no, Sohn), was an Austrian composer of light music, particularly dance music and operettas. He composed ov ...

. A native of Vienna, Epstein was educated at the Universities of

Jena Jena () is a German city and the second largest city in Thuringia. Together with the nearby cities of Erfurt and Weimar, it forms the central metropolitan area of Thuringia with approximately 500,000 inhabitants, while the city itself has a popu ...

and

Leipzig Leipzig ( , ; Upper Saxon: ) is the most populous city in the German state of Saxony. Leipzig's population of 605,407 inhabitants (1.1 million in the larger urban zone) as of 2021 places the city as Germany's eighth most populous, as wel ...

in Germany. He left Germany on March 17, 1933 and lived for a time in Prague, Czechoslovakia. When that country was threatened by Hitler in 1938, he fled with his wife and son to Zurich. In March 1939 the Epstein family arrived in New York City. Epstein was accredited to the United Nations as foreign correspondent for a number of Swiss newspapers and also contributed articles on the growing crisis in Europe to US magazines. In 1942, he joined the staff of the Office of War Information as language editor. After the war, he was named as New York correspondent for a group of newspapers in West Germany; he contributed articles to German magazines and US periodicals like ''

Plain Talk ''Plain Talk'' was an American monthly anticommunist magazine that lasted for 44 months (1946–1950). Its editor-in-chief was Isaac Don Levine. Description ''Plain Talk'' featured articles by many conservative writers of the time, including J ...

'', ''

Human Events ''Human Events'' is an American conservative political news and analysis website. Founded in 1944 as a print newspaper, ''Human Events'' became a digital-only publication in 2013. ''Human Events'' takes its name from the first sentence of the Un ...

'', and ''

National Review ''National Review'' is an American conservative editorial magazine, focusing on news and commentary pieces on political, social, and cultural affairs. The magazine was founded by the author William F. Buckley Jr. in 1955. Its editor-in-chief i ...

''. In 1963, he received an appointment to the Hoover Institution as an assistant to Dr.

Stefan Thomas Possony Stefan Thomas Possony (March 15, 1913 – April 26, 1995) was an Austrian-born US economist and military strategist and a Senior Fellow and director of International Studies at the Hoover Institution. He conceived the US Strategic Defense Ini ...

, who conceived the

Strategic Defense Initiative The Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), derisively nicknamed the "''Star Wars'' program", was a proposed missile defense system intended to protect the United States from attack by ballistic strategic nuclear weapons (intercontinental ballistic ...

. Three years later, he was named professor of international affairs by Lincoln University in San Francisco. Epstein died in Palo Alto, California. He was survived by his widow, Vally, and a son, Peter Stevens.

Work

Lost cosmonauts

In 1962, during the height of the Cold War, Epstein alleged that the Soviet Union had lost at least a dozen cosmonauts in undisclosed space disasters. Epstein claimed it was known to the US government, but the State Department did not want "to embarrass the Russians" by revealing it. He wrote, "Washington's silence appears to be motivated by the strong desire to hear no evil, see no evil and speak no evil about the U.S.S.R." Epstein called on the US government to disclose the extent of its knowledge of Soviet space losses: "Now is the time for the government to make the deaths public for the sake of accurate history." These claims are widely believed to be false.

Operation Keelhaul

In ''Operation Keelhaul'' (1973), Epstein revealed details of

, the forced repatriation at the end of World War II of four million Soviet citizens, expatriated White Russians who had emigrated from Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution, and other Eastern Europeans to the Soviet Union and countries within its

sphere of influence In the field of international relations, a sphere of influence (SOI) is a spatial region or concept division over which a state or organization has a level of cultural, economic, military or political exclusivity. While there may be a formal al ...

after 1945. The Soviets considered them as traitors and persecuted them: Red Army POWs and civilians captured by the Nazis as well as followers of

Andrei Vlasov Andrey Andreyevich Vlasov (russian: Андрéй Андрéевич Влáсов, – August 1, 1946) was a Soviet Red Army general and Nazi collaborator. During World War II, he fought in the Battle of Moscow and later was captured att ...

Russian Liberation Army The Russian Liberation Army; russian: Русская освободительная армия, ', abbreviated as (), also known as the Vlasov army after its commander Andrey Vlasov, was a collaborationist formation, primarily composed of Rus ...

. Most were condemned to lengthy prison terms, some in the

gulag The Gulag, an acronym for , , "chief administration of the camps". The original name given to the system of camps controlled by the GPU was the Main Administration of Corrective Labor Camps (, )., name=, group= was the government agency in ...

, and many were executed, including some who were summarily executed within earshot of British and American troops the moment that they were handed over to the Soviets. Described by

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn. (11 December 1918 – 3 August 2008) was a Russian novelist. One of the most famous Soviet dissidents, Solzhenitsyn was an outspoken critic of communism and helped to raise global awareness of political repress ...

as "the last secret of World War II," the forced repatriation was agreed upon in a secret codicil to the

Yalta Agreement The Yalta Conference (codenamed Argonaut), also known as the Crimea Conference, held 4–11 February 1945, was the World War II meeting of the heads of government of the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union to discuss the post ...

and was kept secret for decades after World War II. Epstein first became aware of Operation Keelhaul in 1954 while he was doing other research at a government archive. He was told the files notated in the card catalogue as "383.74: Forcible Repatriation of Soviet Citizens – Operation Keelhaul" were classified. He worked for 20 years to acquire the files necessary to write his comprehensive treatment on the subject. He had to sue the government to force them to declassify and release the files.

Bibliography

;Books * ''The Case Against Vera Micheles Dean and the Foreign Policy Association'', 1947. * ''The Mysteries of the Van Vliet Report: A Case History'', Chicago: Polish American Congress, Inc., 1951. * ''Operation Keelhaul: The Story of Forced Repatriation from 1944 to the Present'', Old Greenwich, Connecticut: Devin-Adair, 1973. Articles; * "The Bang-Jensen Tragedy: A Review Based on the Official Records," ''American Opinion'' (May 1960)

References

External links

Julius Epstein Papers
{{DEFAULTSORT:Epstein, Julius 1901 births 1975 deaths Jewish anti-communists Jewish emigrants from Austria after the Anschluss to the United States Writers from Vienna Jewish American historians American male non-fiction writers American anti-communists Austrian anti-communists Historians of World War II 20th-century American historians People of the United States Office of War Information