General Harold Alexander, sent to the Combined Chiefs of Staff, noting "50,000 Cossacks including 11,000 women, children and old men". At a location near Graz, British forces repatriated around 40,000 Cossacks to SMERSH. Fort Dix, New Jersey, United States Although repatriations mainly occurred in Europe, 154 Cossacks were repatriated to the Soviets from Fort Dix, New Jersey, in the United States; three committed suicide in the US and seven were injured. Epstein states that the prisoners put up considerable resistance: Marseilles, France Cossacks were included in the hundreds who were repatriated to the Soviet Union from Marseilles in 1946. Rimini and Bologna, Italy Several hundred Cossacks were repatriated to the Soviet Union from camps close to Venice in 1947. Some 100 Cossacks perished in resistance to forcible repatriations at Rimini and Bologna. Liverpool, United Kingdom Thousands of Russians, many of them Cossacks, were transported at the height of armed hostilities in 1944 to Murmansk in an operation that also led to the sinking of the German battleship Tirpitz. Aftermath The Cossack officers, more politically aware than the enlisted men, expected that repatriation to the USSR would be their ultimate fate. They believed that the British would have sympathised with their anti-Communism, but were unaware that their fates had been decided at the Yalta Conference. Upon discovering that they would be repatriated, many escaped, some probably aided by their Allied captors; some passively resisted, and others killed themselves. Of those Cossacks who escaped repatriation, many hid in forests and mountainsides, some were hidden by the local German populace, but most hid in different identities as Latvians, Poles, Yugoslavians, Turks, Armenians and even Ethiopians. Eventually they were admitted to displaced persons camps under assumed names and nationalities; many emigrated to the US per the Displaced Persons Act. Others went to any country that would admit them (e.g., Germany, Austria, France and Italy). Most Cossacks hid their true national identity until the dissolution of the USSR in late 1991. Amnesty After the death of Stalin, a mass partial amnesty (Amnesty of 1953) was granted for some labor camp inmates on 27 March 1953 with the end of the Gulag system. It was then extended on 17 September 1955. Some specific political crimes were omitted from amnesty: people convicted under Section 58.1(c) of the Criminal Code, stipulating that in the event of a military man escaping Russia, every adult member of his family who