Western Armies, under Eisenhower's command, rounded up an estimated five million anti-communist refugees and delivered them to the Soviets who tortured them, sent them to slave camps, or murdered them.
All of this occurred because we refused to do what would have been easy for us to do–and what our top leaders had agreed just 17 months before that we must do: that is, take and hold Berlin and surrounding territory until postwar peace treaties were made.
Who made the decisions to pull our armies back in Europe and let the Soviets take over? General Eisenhower gave the orders; and, in his book, Crusade in Europe (published in 1948, before the awful consequences of those decisions were fully known to the public), Eisenhower took his share of credit for making the decisions. When he entered politics four years later, Eisenhower denied responsibility: he claimed that he was merely a soldier, obeying orders, implementing decisions which Presidents Roosevelt and Truman had made.
Memoirs of British military men indicate that Eisenhower went far beyond the call of military duty in his "co-operative" efforts to help the Soviets capture political prisoner's and enslave all of central Europe. Triumph in the West, by Arthur Bryant, published in 1959 by Doubleday & Company, as a "History of the War Years Based on the Diaries of Field-Marshal Lord Alanbrooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff," reveals that, in the closing days of the war, General Eisenhower was often in direct communication with Stalin, reporting his decisions and actions to the Soviet dictator before Eisenhower's own military superiors knew what was going on.
Regardless of what responsibility General Eisenhower may or may not have had for formulating the decisions which held our armies back from Eastern Europe, those decisions seem to have stemmed from the conferences which Roosevelt had with Stalin at Tehran in 1943 and at Yalta in 1945.
But who made the decision to isolate Berlin 110 miles deep inside communist-controlled territory without any agreements concerning access routes by which the Western Powers could get to the city? According to Arthur Krock, of the New York Times, George F. Kennan, (a member of the Council on Foreign Relations) persuaded Roosevelt to accept the Berlin zoning arrangement. Kennan, at the time, was political adviser to Ambassador John G. Winant, who was the United States Representative on the three-member European Advisory Commission.
Mr. Krock's account (in the New York Times, June 18, 1961 and July 2, 1961) is rather involved; but here is the essence of it:
President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill agreed to enclose Berlin 110 miles within the Soviet occupation zone. Winant submitted a recommendation, embracing this agreement. Winant felt that it would offend the Soviets if we asked for guaranteed access routes, and believed that guarantees were unnecessary anyway. When submitting his recommendation to Washington, however, Winant attached a map on which a specific allied corridor of access into the city was drawn.
Winant's proposal was never acted on in Washington. Therefore, the British submitted a recommendation. Roosevelt rejected the British plan, and made his own proposal. The British and Soviets disliked Roosevelt's plan; and negotiations over the zoning of Berlin were deadlocked.
George F. Kennan broke the deadlock by going directly to Roosevelt and persuading him to accept the Berlin zoning agreement, which Mr. Krock calls a "war-breeding monstrosity," and a "witless travesty on statecraft and military competence."