of And Quiet Flows the Don (1934) by Mikhail Sholokhov. The Second World War After Adolf Hitler launched the invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, several anticommunist Cossack leaders, including Kuban ataman Naumenko, Terek ataman Vdovenko, former Don ataman Pyotr Krasnov and the Cossack National Center chairman Vasily Glazkov, all publicly praised the German campaign. Despite this outpouring of support, Hitler and other top officials initially denied Cossack émigrés from having any military or political role in the war against the Soviets. It was not until 1942 when Ostministerium openly began employing Cossack émigrés for propaganda and administrative purposes. While top Nazi officials were slow to embrace anticommunist Cossacks, some Wehrmacht field commanders had utilized Cossack defectors from the Red Army since the summer of 1941. In early 1943, most of the Cossack units fighting with the German Army were consolidated into the First Cossack Cavalry Division under the command of General Helmuth von Pannwitz. Later that year, the Cossack cavalry division was deployed to Axis-occupied Yugoslavia to fight Tito's Partisans. In late 1944, the division was incorporated into the Waffen-SS and expanded into the XV SS Cossack Cavalry Corps. Another Cossack group whose fate became tied with the Germans consisted of approximately 25,000 Cossack refugees and irregulars who evacuated the North Caucasus alongside the Wehrmacht in 1943. This group, known as “Cossachi Stan” migrated between southern Ukraine, Novogrudek (Byelorussia), Tolmezzo (Italy) and was forced to withdraw to Lienz in Allied-occupied Austria, at the close of the war. Yalta and Tehran Conferences The agreements of the Yalta and Tehran Conferences, signed by US President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, determined the fates of the Cossacks who did not fight for the Soviets, because many were POWs of the Nazis. Stalin obtained Allied agreement to the repatriation of every so-called "Soviet" citizen held prisoner because the Allied leaders feared that the Soviets either might delay or refuse repatriation of the Allied POWs whom the Red Army had liberated from Nazi POW camps. It was in the context of the wish to remain on good terms with Stalin that, according to Edward Peterson, the US chose to hand over several hundred thousand German prisoners to the Soviet Union in May 1945 as a "gesture of friendship". Although the agreement for the deportation of all "Soviet" citizens did not include White Russian