emigres who had fled during the Bolshevik Revolution before the establishment of the USSR, all Cossack prisoners of war were later demanded. After Yalta, Churchill questioned Stalin, asking, "Did the Cossacks and other minorities fight against us?" Stalin replied, "They fought with ferocity, not to say savagery, for the Germans". In 1944 Gen. Krasnov and other Cossack leaders had persuaded Hitler to allow Cossack troops, as well as civilians and non-combatant Cossacks, to permanently settle in the sparsely settled Carnia, in the Alps. The Cossacks moved there and established garrisons and settlements, requisitioning houses by evicting the inhabitants, with several stanitsas and posts, their administration, churches, schools and military units. There, they fought the partisans and persecuted the local population, committing numerous atrocities. The measures consisting of clearing the Italian inhabitants of the area from their homes and taking stern measures to not allow partisans from the hills to “pass through alive” in the area led the Italians to use the epithet “Barbarian Cossacks.” When the Allies progressed from central Italy to the Italian Alps, Italian partisans under Gen. Contini ordered the Cossacks to leave Carnia and go north to Austria. There, near Lienz, the British Army kept the Cossacks in a hastily established camp. For a few days the British supplied them with food; meanwhile, the Red Army's advance units approached to within a few miles east, rapidly advancing to meet the Allies. On 28 May 1945 the British transported 2,046 disarmed Cossack officers and generals—including the cavalry Generals Pyotr Krasnov and Andrei Shkuro—to a nearby Red Army-held town and handed them over to the Red Army commanding general, who ordered them tried for treason. Many Cossack leaders had never been citizens of the Soviet Union, having fled revolutionary Russia in 1920; hence they believed they could not be guilty of treason. Some were executed immediately. High-ranking officers were tried in Moscow, and then executed. On 17 January 1947 Krasnov and Shkuro were hanged in a public square. Gen. Helmuth von Pannwitz of the Wehrmacht, who was instrumental in the formation and leadership of the Cossacks taken from German POW camps to fight the Soviets, decided to share the Cossacks' Soviet repatriation and was executed for war crimes, along with five Cossack generals and atamans in Moscow in 1947. On 1 June 1945 the UK placed 32,000 Cossacks (with their women and children) into trains and trucks and delivered