the increasing racial segregation to foment anti-Polonism. Followers of Stepan Bandera (also called Banderovites) committed genocide on Poles in Volhynia at 1943. Lithuanian forces often clash with Polish forces throughout the World War II, and committed massacre on Poles with support from the Nazis. Bernard Montgomery often assigned blame to the failure of his operations, such as Operation Market Garden, to the Polish troops under his command. Poland's relationship with the USSR during World War II was complicated. The main western Allies, the United States and the United Kingdom, understood the importance of the Soviet Union in defeating Germany, to the point of refusing to condemn Soviet propaganda which vilified their Polish ally. The western Allies were even willing to help cover up the Soviet massacre at Katyn. Zofia Kossak-Szczucka, the Catholic co-founder of Zegota, the Polish resistance group which risked the German death penalty to save Jews, and who herself was sent to Auschwitz, stereotyped Jews as haters of Poles even as she characterized Poles who remained silent in the face of the Holocaust as complicit: Post-war Under Joseph Stalin, thousands of soldiers of Poland's underground eg. Home Army (Armia Krajowa) and returning veterans of the Polish Armed Forces that had served with the western Allies were imprisoned, tortured by Soviet NKVD agents (see: W. Pilecki, Ł. Ciepliński) and murdered following staged trials like the infamous Trial of the Sixteen in Moscow, Soviet Union. A similar fate awaited the "cursed soldiers". At least 40,000 members of Poland's Home Army were deported to Russia. In Britain after 1945, the British populace accepted the Polish servicemen who chose not to return to a Poland ruled by the communist regime in their decision to stay on in Britain. The Poles resident in Britain served under British command during the war, but as soon as the Soviets began to make gains on the Eastern Front both public opinion and the government turned increasingly pro-Soviet.<ref>The Poles in Britain 1940–2000: From Betrayal to Assimilation by Peter D. Stachura; Routledge, 200 pages, Page 50</ref> Socialist supporters of the Soviet Union made the Poles out to be "warmongers", "anti-Semites" and "fascists". After the war, the trade unions and Labour party played on the fears among the public of there not being enough jobs, food and housing to incite anti-Polish sentiments. The myth that Poland had been conducting a genocide against ethnic Germans was invented in 1940 by